Transborder State Reterritorialization in Eastern Europe

This dissertation examines the relationships between the state and reterritorialization of social life by examining the role transborder regions, commonly known as Euroregions, play in the reterritorialization of the international state system. Europe is currently experiencing an unprecedented process of state reterritorialization in the context of European Union integration. In the territorial state system that has characterized Europe for the past four centuries, borders have been the central locus of state territoriality. Euroregions, created across state borders, are crucial to the European reterritorialization process aimed to redefine centralized state territoriality that has proven inadequate in a world of flows. This research investigates the ways in which traditional state territoriality is changing in Eastern Europe by the establishment of Euroregions. In the context of the European Union's enlargement it is as yet less evident how the State-Euroregions-European Union nexus will play out in Eastern Europe where EU membership has not yet been achieved by all states. I examine this process through an intensive case study of the Lower Danube Euroregion, created between Romania, Ukraine, and Moldova. Findings drawn from the experience of the Lower Danube Euroregion show that the capacity of Euroregions to reterritorialize social life in East European borderlands unfolds through a series of dimensions including institutional, political-territorial, legal, and cultural. However, state transborder reterritorialization in Euroregions is a highly contingent process that is imbued with power relations structured around supranational, national, and subnational scales. Transborder reterritorialization takes place at the juncture of these scales which generates a multiscalar geopolitics of Euroregions where Euroregions are used as tools in international politics to advance the interests of states, the European Union, and subnational actors. Under these circumstances, transborder reterritorialization in Eastern Europe remains a top-down enterprise that does not penetrate deep enough into the civil society to allow the emergence of sustainable transborder spaces of living. So far, the significance of Euroregions resides more in their territorial potential rather than in their achievements.