Systemic Approaches to the Phenomenon of Regionalization in World Society

Abstract

Since the mid-twentieth century, the sociological question of the specificity of social realities of non-European countries and nations has given rise to a wide variety of theories that have attempted to answer this matter from different traditions and perspectives. The recognition of divergences from “European” trajectories of modernity and capitalism, and thus concerning the self-descriptions of these processes, automatically led to the integration of regional dimensions into sociological analysis. The theories of modernization, development, imperialism, world system, and dependency, among others, attempted to fill this analytical void and for this reason, they have been, in one way or another, influential in the social sciences up to the present. Beyond the concrete explanations of the phenomenon of regional differentiation that these theories established, they shared the assumption that spatial or geographical limits are significant for the distinction of social relations. Thus, countries and regions, appear as unquestionable ontological criteria for the delimitation of “societies” with their own economic, historical, and cultural processes. In other words, there are regional differences, because we live in territorially separate spaces within which particular social dynamics unfold. The current contribution explores the sociological tensions, both theoretical and empirical, associated with this widely held assumption in regional analysis, and advances on an alternative analysis that arises from a strictly social treatment of the spatial phenomenon. For this task, we assume the framework of Social Systems Theory.