New Euroregional Territories, Old Catalanist Dreams?

Abstract

This article analyses the history of the Euroregionalist idea of a so-called Mediterranean Arc. By tracing historical debates about the economic integration of neighbouring Catalan-speaking regions in the North-western Mediterranean, I explore how economic restructuring and cultural regionalism/ nationalism can be synthesized within the `New Regionalist' politics of the economic macroregion or Euroregion. Emerging European regions are at the centre of theoretical debates about state rescaling and new regionalism. Recent scholarship now points past structurally overdetermined interpretations of regionalization — focused exclusively on economic globalization, European integration, and state institutions — towards empirically rich, cultural-economic analyses exploring how economy and culture are dialectically co-constituted and articulated relationally. I offer such a case-study of the century-old Catalan national project of integrating Valencia with Catalunya as the core of a wider macroregion, now called the Euroregion of the Mediterranean Arc. Analysing writings by prominent Valencian Catalanists over a century reveals how the economic and cultural have long been dialectically synthesized and articulated relationally in a macroregion said to be economically competitive, Catalan-speaking, and linked more to the Mediterranean and Europe than Madrid.And it suggests neither Euroregionalism nor new regionalism is particularly new in places like Valencia and the Mediterranean Arc.