• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.57-74
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• 1998

The essay examines the development and characteristics of regionalism as new social-political conflicts in Western Europe since 1970's and explores theoretical approaches of regionalism in terms of modemization theory of social sciences. There are various types of regionalistic movements: separatism, regional equity development, federalism, autonomy, nationalism, and so on. These different orientations have already shown serious problems, theoretical and conceptional, conceming the analysis of regionalism. But in conceptualizing this phenomenon, five competitive theses could be distinguished: persistence thesis, differentiation thesis, political procedure thesis, convergence thesis, and counter-differentiation thesis. Although the heuristic theses are still elaborated on the base of empirical studies and actual data, they indicate that each thesis ontologises the region as one of the key concepts explaining regionalism very differently.