Progress in Human Geography 27,4 (2003) pp.

475–485

Progress reports

Region and place: regional identity

in question
Anssi Paasi
Department of Geography, Box 3000, 90014, University of Oulu, Finland

I Introduction

Identity, a term that was not yet included in Williams’ important Keywords: a vocabulary
of culture and society (1976), has become a major watchword since the 1980s. Traditional
territorialized battles over democracy, political status/citizenship and wealth have
been complicated by the struggle over ‘race’, ethnicity, multiculturalism, gender,
sexuality, recognition and a new symbolic economy characterized by the
production/marketing of images (Isin and Wood, 1999; du Gay et al., 2000; Lash and
Featherstone, 2002). The identity discourse has emerged concomitantly with such
arguments that the world, particularly the western world, is moving towards a ‘forced’
individualization: people’s lives are increasingly being left as their own responsibility,
so that people shape their lives and environments through personal identities rather
than through categorizations such as nationality, class, occupation or home region (Beck
and Beck-Gernsheim, 2001). Contrary to previous arguments, however, people’s
awareness of being part of the global space of flows seems to have generated a search
for new points of orientation, efforts to strengthen old boundaries and to create new
ones, often based on identities of resistance (Castells, 1997; Meyer and Geschiere, 1999;
Kellner, 2002). It is argued that collective action cannot occur without a distinction
between ‘us’ and the ‘other’ (Della Porta and Diani, 1999) but identity movements do
not always base their activities on difference as it may be strategically beneficial to
stress similarities (Bernstein, 1997).
This report will review one specific part of the complicated identity discourse, the
question of regional identity. Along with the tendencies depicted above, this old idea has
gained new importance not only in geography but also in such fields as
cultural/economic history, literature, anthropology, political science, sociology,
psychology and musicology. I will first reflect the premises that geographers and others
have associated with this mushrooming but rarely analytically discussed category, then
map the conceptual gaps, and, finally, suggest some possible avenues for further
research.

© Arnold 2003 10.1191/0309132503ph439pr

476 Region and place

II Geography and the question of identity

The idea of regional identity has been implicit in geography for a long time, since
traditional approaches to regions and regionalism often celebrated the primordial
nature of regions, accentuating their ‘personality’ and the harmony/unity between a
region and its inhabitants. Regional narratives were typically accompanied by idylls
and conservatism (Gilbert and Litt, 1960; Winks, 1983; Harvie, 1994). Regional
geographers were deeply involved in power-knowledge relations when creating
bounded ‘orders’ on the earth, fixed in apparently neutral maps and texts that
identified separate regions. While traditional exclusive, homogenizing regional
geography narratives have lost their validity in academic research (but not in geo-
graphical education), the respective ideological contexts of their production are now
being scrutinized by the historians of geographical ideas (Entrikin, 1991; 2002;
Livingstone, 1992; Claval, 1998).
Regional and place identity and their meanings for people were important for
humanistic geographers, and Relph (1976; see also Regional identitet, 1978) still
provides one of the best analytical accounts of place identity, even though current views
on region/place regard these as contested social constructs and processes (Paasi,
2002a). Critical and feminist geographers have reflected spatiality as part of identity
formation: the politics of place are seen as crucial for class, gender, religious and ethnic
relations and sexuality (Keith and Pile, 1993; Rose, 1995; Watts, 1996; Pile and Keith,
1997; McDowell, 1999), implying that people may have many contested identities – not
as separate spheres of identity politics but constitutive of each other. For political
geographers/IR scholars, identity is one key to understanding (ethno-)regionalism,
nationalism and citizenship (Herb and Kaplan, 1999; McSweeney, 1999; Albert et al.,
2001; Storey, 2001; Agnew, 2002; Painter, 2002).
Identities and differences are actualized in many ways on several (spatial) scales – not
just as neat divisions – so that one site of the construction of difference can act as the
unmarked background for another (Brah, 1996; Bell, 1999). Harvey (1993) suggests that
localized identities, especially when conflated with race, gender, religious and class dif-
ferentiation, are among the most dynamic bases for both progressive political mobi-
lization and reactionary, exclusionary politics (cf. Pratt, 1999; Harner, 2001; Mackenzie,
2002; Graham and Shirlow, 2002). Not only are places/place-based identities contested
but also current views on what place or identity mean (Casey, 2001; Schatzki, 2001;
Entrikin, 2001; Hooper, 2001; Staeheli, 2003).
Identity is a social process. Della Porta and Diani (1999) suggest that the notions that
actors develop of themselves are continuously being confronted with images which
other social actors (institutions, sympathetic/hostile groupings, public opinion and the
media) produce of them. As Hall (1993: 135) states, ‘identity is formed at the unstable
point where the “unspeakable” stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history, of
a culture’. The key question in understanding regional identity is not how the
individual and the social are integrated in space, but how can the sociospatial be con-
ceptualized in the ‘production’ of the individual/collective and vice versa (cf. Michael,
1996). This ‘dialectics’ introduces action that stems from two intertwined contexts: ‘from
above’ in the form of territorial control/governance and ‘from below’ in the form of
territorial identification and resistance.
 Anssi Paasi 477

III Re-invention of regional identity

Expressions of regional identity are currently found all around the world. Whether or
not regional ties motivate people into conflict with their respective state (often inter-
secting their affiliation to ‘nations’), belonging to a region may raise a sense of identity
that challenges the hegemonic identity narratives (cf. Radcliffe and Westwood, 1996:
109). Regional identity has been recognized as a key element in the making of regions
as social/political spaces, but it is difficult to elucidate what this identity consists of and
how it affects collective action/politics (Keating, 1998a; 1998b; 2001). The crucial
question is how political passions are regionalized, and here institutions constitutive of
region-building (economy, governance, language, media, literature) and inherent
power relations are significant.
The burgeoning literature, academic conferences and thousands of web pages testify
to the fact that regional identity is on the agenda in many ways. It can be a constitutive
element of localized resistance to globalization (Castells, 1997) but the view of regional
identities as constitutive/productive forces of economic and cultural/political practices
and discourses is becoming increasingly typical all around the world. Politics,
economics, culture and power come together in complicated ways, particularly in
regionalist practices/discourses (Giordano, 2000; Tomaney and Ward, 2001; Keating,
2001). Regional identity has become particularly visible in the rhetoric on the Europe of
Regions (Le Galés, 1998; Keating, 2001). Diverging regional development agencies and
chambers of commerce have adopted this idea as a self-evident positive. The ‘Europe of
Regions’ refers to several NUTS levels and to cross-border regions, to the extent that
‘regional identity’ seems not to be confined to any specific regional scale (Paasi, 2002b).
‘Region’ means many things in this connection, varying from the deeply historical
contexts of ethno-nationalism to the operation of economic institutions and adminis-
tration and the regionalization of ad hoc spatial units for the purposes of governance
(Gren, 2002). It is the task of critical research to reveal in each instance whether or not a
narrative of ‘regional identity’ means a conservative, fetished view of the ‘power of
regions’ as surpassing other forms of power in a regional context.
Narratives of regional identity lean on miscellaneous elements: ideas on nature,
landscape, the built environment, culture/ethnicity, dialects, economic success/
recession, periphery/centre relations, marginalizati on, stereotypic images of a
people/community, both of ‘us’ and ‘them’, actual/invented histories, utopias and
diverging arguments on the identification of people. These elements are used context-
ually in practices, rituals and discourses to construct narratives of more or less closed,
imagined identities. Scholars have recently referred to regional identities e.g. in folklore
studies (Allen and Schlereth, 1990; Wrobel and Steiner, 2001; Robbins, 2001), in the
analysis of political and/or governmental rhetoric (Tägil, 1999; Paasi, 2002b; Gren, 2002;
Painter, 2002), and in the memory and place promotion/heritage business (Crang, 1999;
Bialasiewicz, 2002; 2003). While many studies map the internal processes of regional
identity building, some have also analysed the ‘stretching’ of identities to several
spatial scales in response to the forces of globalization (Nijman, 1999; Sletto, 2002;
Clayton, 2002; Cartier, 2001). The contexts of narratives of identity thus vary from the
regimes of power and ideologies that come ‘from above’ to local actions of citizens and
forms of resistance. The role of regional identity has been noted as a precondition for
multilevel citizenship (Painter, 2002; Entrikin, 2002). Regional identity has also been
478 Region and place

seen as an important tool – laden with social and productive magic – in regional
planning and development (Amdam, 2002; Haartsen et al., 2000; Raagmaa, 2002).

IV Regional identity – the identity of a region: conceptual clarification

‘Regional identity’ is, in a way, an interpretation of the process through which a region
becomes institutionalized, a process consisting of the production of territorial
boundaries, symbolism and institutions. This process concomitantly gives rise to, and
is conditioned by, the discourses/practices/rituals that draw on boundaries, symbols
and institutional practices. While practice and discourse are the media by which the
structural and experiental dimensions of the process are brought together, it is useful to
distinguish analytically between the identity of a region and the regional identity (or
regional consciousness) of the people living in it or outside of it (Paasi, 1991). The
former points to those features of nature, culture and people that are used in the
discourses and classifications of science, politics, cultural activism, regional marketing,
governance and political or religious regionalization to distinguish one region from
others. These classifications are always acts of power performed in order to delimit,
name and symbolize space and groups of people. Regional consciousness points to the
multiscalar identification of people with those institutional practices, discourses and
symbolisms that are expressive of the ‘structures of expectations’ that become institu-
tionalized as parts of the process that we call a ‘region’.
Regional consciousness is an old idea (Morgan, 1939; Dickinson, 1970) that gained
new ground in the 1980s in German geography, drawing on both the rich German social
theory and conventional survey-based approaches (Pohl, 1993). Some German scholars
regarded it as an archaic, irrelevant phenomenon and noted that these studies would
only provide politicians with instruments for the manipulation of the citizenry (see the
review by Jordan, 1996). In fact, the latter comment reveals why it is crucial to study
critically the narratives of regional identity and their presuppositions with regard to
‘regional consciousness’, especially as this theme is currently gaining importance all
over the world.
The question of regional identification implies two intertwined contexts: cultural-
historical and political-economic. Political ideologies and regionalism/nationalism do
not themselves produce identification, for the latter comes – and here culture and
history enter the stage – only if ‘it interprets and provides an appropriate attitude for
an experienced reality’ (Bloom, 1990: 52). This experience, Bloom notes, may be
politically manipulated but any symbol/ideology without a relevant experience is
meaningless and impotent in terms of evoking identification. Social psychologists in
particular have emphasized the motivational dimensions of identity processes (Hogg,
2000). One basis for (regional) identities is that they exist as forms of social and cultural
practice, discourse and action, not as abstract slogans.
Regional identity as the ‘identity of a region’ or as a supposed combination of this
identity and ‘regional consciousness’ has become a very popular, clearly international
topic in cultural, political and economic geography. Scholars have traced cultural-
historical processes in specific regions (Brace, 1999; Crang, 1999; Oakes, 2000; Yorgason,
2002; Alvarez, 2002) and have at times been explicitly interested in the globalizing
economy and the regional ‘responses’ to it (Cartier, 2001; Sletto, 2002). Research has also
 Anssi Paasi 479

been carried out in urban and rural contexts (Haartsen et al., 2000; Van Houtum and
Lagendijk, 2001; van Langevelde and Pellenbarg, 2001). Studies on regional identity
have been rare in the UK (Brace, 1999; MacLeod and Jones, 2001) but, following the
devolution of power to the regional level, geographers have taken to studying
regionalism (Casey, 2002; Regional Studies, 2002), although predominantly from an
economic perspective. Hudson (2001) nevertheless shows how a territorial basis and
spatial identities are crucial for the organization of production, work and spatial
divisions of labour: not only are places provided with identities but they can also
provide a basis through which people form their own identities (cf. Allen et al., 1998).
Recent studies carried out in Scotland (Clayton, 2002) and Wales (Jones, 2000; 2001;
Harvey et al., 2002) have paid more attention to culture and to mapping combined
regional and national identities.
Martin (2000: 79) notes that, while institutionalist approaches are important in
economic geography, concepts such as institution, institutional thickness, social embed-
dedness or governance are still ‘under construction’ (cf. Mackinnon et al., 2002).
Regional identity is doubtless part of this conceptual apparatus. All these categories are
constitutive/expressive of what Bourdieu (1998) labels as the economy of symbolic
exchange, which implies a specific deference, a relation that converts power relations
into moral ones as it is through this transformation that power relations become
reproduced as systems of trust. Regional identity may also be used in the
rhetoric/activities of the business coalitions that constitute new governance
frameworks crossing political jurisdictions, even national borders (Kanter, 2000).
Representations of regional identity may also be used as symbolic/material
commodities for the purposes of regional marketing (Crang, 1999; Bialasiewicz, 2002).

V Who needs regional identity? Methodological problems

Collective identity is not out there, waiting to be discovered. What is ‘out there’ is identity discourse on the part
of political leaders, intellectuals and countless others, who engage in the process of constructing, negotiating,
manipulating or affirming a response to the demand – at times urgent, mostly absent – for a collective image.
(McSweeney, 1999: 77–78)

At a personal level regional identity/consciousness provides an answer to the question

‘where do I belong?’. This answer is based on a personal/family spatial history, which
is rarely bound to one specific region (Paasi, 2002b). The answer to the question of
where ‘we’ belong raises the problem depicted by McSweeney: classification and
power. As Bourdieu (1991: 221) has suggested: ‘Struggles over ethnic or regional
identity . . . are a particular case of different struggles over classifications, struggles over
the monopoly of the power to make people see and believe, to get them to know and
recognize, to impose the legitimate definition of the divisions of the social world . . . to
make and unmake groups.’
It is no surprise if politicians, entrepreneurs or journalists using regional identity for
their own purposes do not provide any systematic analysis of the political-ideological
or other meanings of the idea. Some geographers have conceptualized the dimensions
of regional identity (Weichhart, 1990; Dirven et al., 1993; Werlen, 1993; Wollersheim et
al., 1998; Le Bosse, 1999; Paasi, 2002b), but, to sum up much of recent work, region,
regional identity and the links between the two are rarely problematized in research.
480 Region and place

One major difficulty is that writing and talking about regional identity creates con-
comitantly a content and an agenda for understanding it: narratives on regional/’our’
identity become constituents of the interpretations of what identity is and what it
means. Bourdieu (1999: 31) aptly notes how ‘words produce things, create fancies, fears,
phobias or simply wrong images’, and ‘naming is showing, creating, bringing into
existence’. This emerges from the fact that human knowledge is based on classification,
and identification is basic to classification (Jenkins, 2000). Claims that one has defined
an identity are also claims that one has suggested a classification, established a set of
values and even made a moral judgment (Bourdieu, 1991). No wonder that language
and dialects are often key discursive ‘battlefields’ in national and regional identity
narratives and identities of resistance (Knox, 2001; Harvey et al., 2002). This means that,
as forms of classification, interpretations of ‘regions’ and regional identities are deeply
political categories.
Another problem is the often implicit supposition that regional identity is ultimately
an empirically existing phenomenon in a given region that can be adequately analysed
by using a specific body of research material, possibly survey data on identification (as
Euro-barometers do – but not on a regional or local scale; cf. Painter, 2002) or material
such as regional novels, paintings, poems, folklore, media texts, films, advertisements
or various elements of material or symbolic landscapes that ‘represent’ a region – either
separately or together. The result is often a narrow empirical analysis that becomes
equivalent to regional identity itself, and may even essentialize it.
One more problem is that regional identity, when understood as identification, often
implies the assumption of homology between a portion of space, a group of people and
a ‘culture’ to form a homogeneous community covering a particular bounded territory.
This harks back to the tendency to associate geographical concepts with a primordial
ethnos rather than a more cosmopolitan demos (Entrikin, 2002). The notion of demos
claims to reflect the ‘regional’ in a broader constellation of identifications and raises the
question of boundaries, since identity is often associated with boundaries and
narratives that imply an opposition to the Other. Claims to ‘anti-essentialize’ the
assumption regarding bounded identity spaces have been put forward (Pratt, 1999;
Rose, 1995; Massey, 1995; Entrikin, 2002), since identities are often imagined in terms of
boundedness and containment (Morley and Robbins, 1995), and this is a questionable
matter in the mobile world (Paasi, 2002a).
The idea of ‘borderlands’ has emerged in debates on identities that do not fit neatly
into the master narratives of ethnicity, ‘race’ or nation (Isin and Wood, 1999), particu-
larly in the case of the US-Mexican border (Andreas, 2000; Herzog, 2000; Vila, 2000), but
also in relation to European borderlands (Dürrschmidt, 2002; Kaplan and Häkli, 2002;
Space and Polity, 2002). Current cross-border regions are often units that have emerged
rapidly from the desks of planners, politicians and business coalitions (Kanter, 2000;
Gren, 2002), not from long historical regionalization processes and the daily struggles
of citizens. A fitting illustration is Midt-Norden, a ‘region’ extending from Norway to
Sweden and Finland, fairly unknown to ordinary people, and which does not have any
real political, cultural or economic meaning. A more realistic case is Öresund, a cross-
border area based on the ‘open space’ that emerged along with the new bridge between
Sweden and Denmark. Both ‘regions’ have raised the question of the future and
rescaling of regional identities (Lysgård, 2001; Bucken-Knapp, 2002; Berg et al., 2002; Ek,
2003).
 Anssi Paasi 481

In summary, instead of assigning automatically an explanatory role to this very

popular category, regional identity itself has to be ‘explained’. Thus it is important to
ask not what regional identities are but what people mean when they talk or write
about regional identities (cf. Billig, 1995). Our understanding of what this identity
means in each case should be a result of conceptualization and an actual research
process, rather than a point of departure for research.

VI Epilogue

Meyer and Geschiere (1999) describe how the tension between globalization and
identity forces social scientists to reflect critically upon how they construe their object
of investigation and to search for appropriate fields of investigation that take into
account people’s entanglement in wider processes. Regional identity is one such object.
Contrary to approaches that construct boundaries and distinguish ‘regions’ from each
other, it is challenging to make sense of regional identity discourses in the globalizing
world and to analyse how narratives of identities are constructed as part of the making
of regions, how they become part of a sociocultural practice/discourse and are used to
maintain divisions and exclusions. This forces us to reflect on the questions of who
places contested identity narratives and practices on the agenda as part of the
production and reproduction of ‘regions’, why and how they come there and what they
mean in terms of power-knowledge relations and the politics of categorization/repre-
sentation. Regions are historically contingent processes, related in different ways to
political, governmental, economic and cultural practices and discourses. These
processes are in a sense unique and this must also be the case with the always contested
narratives concerned with regional identities. Whatever their motives and morals may
be, social actors are in different positions when producing and reproducing spatial
representations and boundaries/social distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘the Other ’ – for
narratives on regional identities are inevitably expressions of ‘power geometries’
(Massey, 1993). It is increasingly becoming the case that the production and reproduc-
tion of these geometries does not take place in people’s native localities and regions but
in other regions, in other national contexts.

Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to Jacobo García Álvarez, Luiza Bialasiewicz, Paul Claval, Martin Jones,
Joe Painter, Benno Werlen and Peter Weichhart for informing me about the role of
regional identity as a research topic in their respective research contexts.

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