In December 2013, the Council of Europe called for the preparation of a European Strategy for the Alpine Region (EUSALP). This latest macroregional strategy emerges in a context of high institutional density, where regional governance encompasses three separate but linked strands: a set of working communities created by subnational Alpine regions, the Alpine Convention, and the EU transnational Alpine Space Programme. Subnational regions have been the strongest promoters of a macroregional strategy. Each strand has generated its own vision for an Alpine strategy; however, an initially open process has increasingly centred on national and regional decision makers. While representatives of the Alpine Convention and Alpine Space Programme remained involved as observers, non-governmental organizations were excluded. Contentious issues such as the geographical perimeter of the macro region, the thematic alignment of EUSALP and the Alpine Convention, or the Strategy’s governance architecture are thus being decided behind closed doors, even though the public consultation calls for increased participation. Macroregionalisation is a novel manifestation of EU-promoted multi-level governance, yet this paper suggests that nascent forms of regional governance are not above the national state, but instantiated within it, thereby taking a critical political economy perspective. Hence, the drivers of macroregionalisation in the Alps are not to be sought in Brussels, but in the political ramifications of changing relations between Milan and Rome, Munich and Berlin, or Lyon and Paris. Debates over the definition of the Alpine perimeter, legitimacy to define the governance architecture, and the international status of subnational regions thus appear primarily as core features of modern state transformation.
