Politics, Identity, Territory: The "Strength" and "Value" of Nation-State, the Weakness of Regional Challenge

The post Cold War age reveals itself as being characterized mostly by the flourishing of “identity politics”. Identitary issues affect the public dimension of collective life and they often develop into economic, legal, political terms. There are many types of collective identity. We would clarify some of them in order to focus the analytical tools that are necessary to face the phenomena we are interested with: national and regional identities. Crucial in our argument are the concept of “political identity” and its “territorial” dimension. This concept and this dimension consent to compare Nation-State and (sub-national) region as space of collective life, and their “authoritative” degree. According to this subject this essay will treat the following points: the return of identity politics nowadays (section 1); the concept of collective identity (section 2); the many faces of collective identity (section 3); the relationship among politics, territory and identity, analyzed through the paradigmatic case of Nation-state and national identity (section 4); the structuring of political space between centre and peripheries, where we consider how the dominance of Nation-State model has to face persisting of territorial cleavages (section 5); the case of the regional issue (section 6); the “strength” and the “value” of Nation-State (sections 7 and 8).