Regions – between History and Social Construction 1 Miklós BAKK Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania Department of International Relations and European Studies bakkmiklos@gmail.com Abstract. The study aims to give a comprehensive explanation on how regional construction took place in the European history related to the state-building processes and how the historical heritage of the European state-construction inluences today the social construction of the regions. With regard to the state-building processes, the study started from Hechter’s model of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ state and his interpretation on the relationship between core regions and peripheries. This model operates with the centralizing power of the state, but from the last decades of the 20 th century it was proved via the ‘new regionalism’ that social construction processes became more relevant in shaping new subnational regions. This last aspect is described by Paasi, and the study argues for a new concept of regional identity as a territorial ‘product’ of interacting governance and local society. Keywords: Europe of regions, obscured regions, core regions, peripheries, state building, regional identity, social construction The notion of ‘region’ came to the front after the 1970s, and it has become an important key concept both for political science and human geography or history (see Murphy 1991, Paasi 2001, and others). With it, a ‘new Europe’ seems to rise based on the transformation of capitalism, namely the altered relations between national economies and the international market, which simultaneously induced a radical reorganization of the geographical scale. This process gets new dynamism in the 1990s by the ‘new regionalism’, which transcended the classical territorial-administrative frameworks and shaped new, ‘transnational’ regional spaces (Keating 1998). On behalf of the historians and philosophers, important statements on the coming regionalism of Europe were made by Denis de Rougemont, Tom Nairn, Hans Mommsen, and others (see Applegate 1999: 1157–8). Important contributions were made by geographers as Anssi Paasi and many anthropologists. 1 The study is part of a larger paper, which is under elaboration. ActA Univ. SApientiAe, eUropeAn And regionAl StUdieS, 10 (2016) 25–37 DOI: 10.1515/auseur-2016-0018