A Cognitive Approach to Regionalism

The aim of the paper is to analyse how we can define a discursive and cognitive approach to regionalism. Drawing from a thorough fieldwork done on the social movements of the 1970s and their actors in Brittany, Galicia and Scotland, the presentation will aim to analyse the discursive use of the region in social interactions and political discourse, using the concepts of “banal nationalism” (Michael Billig) and collective action frames (David Snow & Robert Benford). The paper will show that the idea of region (i.e. the concept of “Brittany”, “Galicia” and “Scotland”) serves to territorialize the social analysis, to give a horizontal dimension to the traditional vertical dimension of class analysis, making it more concrete, creating spatial links between different localised issues. Thus, it will appear that the region is for those actors a perspective on the world and not a thing in the world (to paraphrase Rogers Brubaker).