Chapter 5: State borders,border regions and the construction of European identity.

The article focuses on state borders, border regions and the construction of European identity. In the twentieth century Europe was a factory of state borders as its great multinational empires and many of its multinational states fragmented, often violently. The project of European integration may be seen partly as a response to this fragmentation and as an attempt to develop a more negotiated and consensual approach to border change in its geographical, functional and symbolic forms. The central argument of this article is that the study of what is happening to, and at, state borders is a "sine qua non" for an adequate understanding of the European Union (EU) as an emergent transnational polity. The article briefly outlines reasons why sociology has generally tended to either "normalize" or discount state borders thereby failing to problematize them for analytical purposes. The author further locates the EC-EU in the context of the historically volatile nature of European borders. The third section examines the development of trans-frontier regionalism as one indicator of the way borders are being reconfigured within the EU.