The Emerging Political Geography of Europe

The foundation period of European integration was characterised by a concentration of highly integrated, geographically proximate states and peoples. Successive enlargements of the EU dramatically altered the geographic reach of the Union. This was accompanied by a deepening of integration, in particular the single market programme and the creation of the Euro, which transformed the Union’s policy range and remit. These interconnected processes generated both ties and tensions which unsettled the Union’s socio-spatial dynamics and rendered the management of Europe’s deep diversity more challenging. These developments took place against a backdrop of shocks and shifts in global geo-politics and geo-economics. A series of crises, Eurozone, refugee and secession-led Brexit, have exposed core-periphery dynamics in the Union in ways that have stretched its cohesion and capacity for collective action. The 21st century Union struggles to reconcile the political and the economic, the market and the social. European integration has always been riven with conflict concerning its goal, the balance between the national and the European and the model of integration that could find support among its member states and their societies. That said, it was for a long time a ‘convergence machine’ in the words of Tsoukalis which worked to reduce the gap between the centre and periphery in Europe. The nominal convergence in the Eurozone up to 2008/09 was cruelly exposed with the onset of the financial crisis as a debtor/creditor cleavage emerged. This cleavage had a pronounced socio-spatial dynamic that pitted the GIIPS against the northern creditor states. The financial crisis also impacted on the convergence of the countries of East Central Europe with the western half of the continent. As the acute phase of the Eurozone crisis ended, the political cohesion of the Union was placed under considerable strain arising from a sharp increase in the numbers of refugees seeking sanctuary. This pitted the receiving states against the countries of Eastern and Central Europe what were reluctant to accept refugees. Both these crises were compounded by the shock of Brexit when a large and important member state set in train the processes to leave the Union. The Leave campaign in the UK was largely won on the issue of immigration or free movement from other EU states. The objective of this section is to explore the evolving political geography of the EU and the related socio-spatial dynamics during this unsettled period of European integration. The panel welcomes papers that analyse divergence and convergence in the Union and related cleavages, the tension between market integration and social cohesion, the role of public finance as an instrument of positive integration, and the politics of re-distribution and solidarity in the Union.