The starting question “What is a region?” seems rather descriptive, if not banal. Yet, observing how differently it was addressed in the various regionalist debates and how this ambiguity penetrated the questions surrounding the ontology of the Black Sea makes a thorough investigation of the term region indispensable. “Region” emerged as a ubiquitous yet ambivalent concept in post-Cold War literature, with no standard definition and many different, if not opposing, connotations and interpretations in both scholarly and policy parlance. This overproduction of concepts brought about ontological and epistemological problems in the sense that, even now, there is no consensus on what to study (ontological) and how to study it (epistemological). Scholars have proposed many attributes of “region”, each one representing a different period of time and a different school of thought. As Wippel (2003, 26) points out:
[t]he ambiguity and change of regional terms, their vague and varying definition and geographical extension show that in fact no single, consistent conception of regions exists and that the conceptions vary in accordance with social contexts and issues. In contrast to (often strategically) communicated images, they rather constitute relatively recent, heterogeneous and disputed, continuously renegotiated constructs.
Most of the studies have relied on only one case and thus their definitions cannot be generalised. What makes, however, the following definitions similar is the fact that most of them approach regions as exogenously given, fixed objects that need to be examined. Regardless of the different criteria and lenses chosen (i.e. geography, interdependence, shared social features, etc.), the underlying assumption and overarching logic has been that regions are “waiting out there” to be discovered and examined.
Starting in a chronological fashion, one of the first scholars to deal with regions was Alfred Hettner. As a prominent geographer of his time, he argued in the 1920s that a region has a unique character and is created by a combination of different aspects (cultural, physical, economical, biological, and social). The Zusammensein (gathering) of all these aspects results in the Zusammenwirken (collaboration), which is responsible for the uniqueness of a region (Hettner 1927). A few decades later, in the 1960s, Bruce Russet (1968, 317–352) – in a similar manner to Hettner but adopting a more policy-oriented approach compared to his geography-oriented thinking – used social and cultural homogeneity, political attitudes, economic interdependence, and geographical proximity as the main criteria for the definition of a region. His contemporary Joseph Nye (1968, vi-vii) adopted a more simplified approach and defined a region using only two attributes: geography and interdependence.1 In 1970, Louis J. Cantori and Steven L. Spiegel (1970, 6) were the first to analyse regions comparatively and proposed the following definition:
A subordinate system consists of one state or two or more proximate and interacting states which have some common ethnic, linguistic, cultural, social, and historical bonds, and whose sense of identity is sometimes increased by the actions and attitudes of states external to the system.
Their attempt to devise a comparative framework for the study of regions grew too cumbersome and there was no significant follow-up in the IR discipline as in the context of the Cold War priority was given to neorealist and neoliberal explanations of world politics. In 1973, William Thompson (89–117) identified twenty-one features which are often used in the literature to describe regions, including elements such as geographical proximity, internal and external recognition as a distinctive area, number of members, and shared social features, among others. Although these geographical and interactive attributes helped scholars to narrow their understanding of a region, Thompson’s definition also led to inconsistencies. For instance, even if most regions consist only of states, others may consist of sub-state regions belonging to different states which engage in cooperative behaviour towards each other and towards other states. Furthermore, some regions consist of members which are not geographically contiguous, but which share other similarities (e.g. Francophonie).
Including security in his approach in the early 1980s, Karl Deutsch (1981, 51–93) highlighted interdependence over a broad range of dimensions. Even more importantly though, by including security, an intriguing coagulant that in the case of the Black Sea was both a source of legitimacy (security as a concern) and a root for suspicions (security as a field for antagonisms), the very perception and understanding of the region changed. From a Marxist perspective, Peter Taylor argued that “[r]egions are constructed and as such they contribute to the creation of the zones which in turn are part of the making of the whole world-system. This argument may be constructed through a range of regional scales to generate a hierarchy of regions” (1991, 185) thus placing regions within a three-zone division of core regions, periphery regions, and semi-periphery regions. However, by granting a core or a peripheral status to a region, Taylor was making a choice reflecting a particular understanding of the organisation of political space; one privileging centre over margins and peripheries. Barry Buzan’s definition stressed the “relations among a set of states whose fate is that they have been locked into geographical proximity with each other” (1991, 188) thus highlighting the importance of geography. Pierre Bourdieu (1991, 221) noted that the very etymology of the term “region” (from Latin regere: to rule) suggests that regions refer to a particular and different dimension of political and spatial power. Even more comprehensively, Andrew Hurrell (1995, 38) argued that regions can be differentiated in terms of social, economic, political, and organisational cohesiveness.
On the basis of the abovementioned definitions, it is clear that focusing on either interdependence or geography or any other aspect – be it cultural, political or economic – “the attempt to tackle region across the whole agenda of international relations, and to set up a detailed comparative framework, proved too complex and cumbersome to establish a generally followed understanding of region” (Buzan 1991, 189).
In the case of the Black Sea, the question of its definition was a product of that definitional diversity/ambiguity and revolved around four main distinct conceptualisations (i.e. regional security complex (RSC), geopolitical entity, a product of culture and geography, discursive construction). All these ontological debates stemmed from the considerable difficulty of applying a single theoretical notion to any empirical case, or more generally of using empirical referents in order to develop conceptual categories such as “region”. Even more importantly, as it will be shown throughout the book, the various definitions, based on different understandings had performative functions and produced policy implications.