The paper will explore how different statehood strategies shape the ways in which governments address bottom-up transnationalisation: whether as an inevitability, a threat to sovereignty or rather, as an opportunity to turn sovereignty into a positive sum game (see Kalev et al 2010). From this perspective we seek to bring together the sociological and IR tradition of transnationalism as well as mainstream state and citizenship studies.
As Smith and Guarnizo (1998) argue, transnationalisation can either be a top down or a bottom up process. This paper will explore the interconnections between the two, more specifically, how states regulate and utilise environments that have developed transnational characteristics – e.g. via migration, economic transnationalisation, meso-level trans-border cooperation, etc, hence arguing that states are still significant agents in a transnational environment.
I discuss various ways of governing bottom up transnationalism by state authorities using the empirical material collected during EC 7fp project TRANS-NET, and other sources. On this basis we develop a typology of state-driven transnational governance. This typology is discussed in juxtaposition to sovereignty as a multidimensional phenomenon (see Sorensen 2004).
