Boundaries and Place: European Borderlands in Geographical Context
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Book Review Boundaries and Place: European Borderlands in Geographical Context David H. Kapland and Jouni Ha¨kli (eds.) Rowman & Littlefield, New York, NY, 2002. 296 pp. $80.00 hardcover, $34.95 softcover International Politics (2004) 41, 277–278. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800048
Boundaries and Place is an effort to examine border regions across Europe in the context of European integration. A case study approach is used, which is appropriate in view of the editors’ clear perspective that there are many ways to study border regions and that the developments in a given region will depend largely on local variables. Indeed, one of the strengths of the collection is the wide array of cases used, which allows the reader to achieve an understanding of how highly varied the nature of border interactions can be. In addition to three chapters providing conceptual and historical context, there are 11 cases that range from inter-community relations in Northern Ireland to interstate cooperation among the Basques and Catalans in Spain and France, to European ‘Regio TriRhena’ in the upper Rhine valley, to unrealized coexistence in Galicia on the Polish–Ukrainian border, to new cross-border relations in the former Yugoslavia, and other points beyond and between. In the opening chapter, the editors offer the general perspectives of this volume: boundaries are more than reflections of physical features or state borders, rather they are social constructions that may be studied from perspectives such as cultural identity, the politicization of identity, territoriality, geopolitics, or economics. The editors’ emphasis on the importance of locality reflects the concern that European integration studies largely focus on EU macroprocesses and neglect the interactions between local governments and individuals in increasingly integrated European regions. Another theme is the geographer’s concept of scale, which can refer to matters of physical distance, issues surrounding the negotiation and bargaining for alliances and power, or the efforts of people to make sense of their world relative to their geographical dividing lines. The authors recognize the ‘tensions’ among the various understandings of the concept, but, ‘instead of striving for a general theory of scales or borderlands’, they simply consider the concept useful, though of varying significance depending on perspective. This highlights the principal weakness of the volume as a whole. It lacks a cohesive theoretical foundation and, as acknowledged above, does little to synthesize varying theoretical strains or offer new theory. A concluding chapter that discussed issues arising from the cases may have helped this somewhat.
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At the least, a concluding chapter could have highlighted what the authors considered to be the most important similarities and differences among the cases — and the implications thereof. As it is, the reader is left with the impression that the editors cobbled together an interesting volume from a series of related papers, but there is no clea
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