Liberal nationalism and the sovereign territorial ideal1

ABSTRACT. Even if most liberals nowadays recognise that liberalism depends on some nationalist justification of popular sovereignty and state boundaries, they still underestimate the consequences of the fact that the sovereign territorial ideal is at the heart of the modern state. Therefore, their normative stance either oscillates between fairness and stability requirements (Kymlicka) or is built on a distinction between self‐rule and self‐determination that contradicts the normative import of the modern idea of the nation (Tamir). However, there exist counter‐traditions that may be helpful in challenging the assumption on behalf of the sovereign territorial state. National cultural autonomy is one of these; it is used here to show how starting from different premises, one may escape the ‘statist assumption’ and work out a political framework which would be fairer to minorities.     

Regional Design in the Context of Fragmented Territorial Governance: South Wing Studio

In the Netherlands, the formation of governance arrangements around planning issues that cross administrative boundaries has been assisted frequently by a design approach that is often referred to as “regional design”. This is a distinctive method of policy argumentation that makes use of spatial representations of the plausible future of regions. Such representations are intended not only to indicate physical changes, but also to stimulate debate on sharing responsibilities and resources for planning tasks among planning actors. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the performance of regional design in the context of fragmented regional governance through a case study in the southern part of the Randstad in the Netherlands. We argue that regional design has contributed to institutional capacity in a complex polycentric and, looking at the governance structure, pluricentric region like the Randstad South Wing, largely by allowing for multiple interpretations.