3 The growth of regionalism and its causes

3.1 Introduction

Regionalism has grown remarkably since the high point of state centralism in the Second World War period. A succession of factors have come into play – uneven economic development, threats to regional cultures and languages, the decentralisation of some states, and more recently the impact of globalisation and European integration. The effects have been cumulative, with old factors continuing to operate while new ones were added, including, as we shall see in Section 5, the ideology that ‘small’ regions must be good in themselves and better than ‘big’ states or larger entities.