Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.2002, Page 40

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THE SIGNIFICANCE OF TRANSNATIONAL COOPERATION
IN NORDIC ATLANTIC REGIONS
terms of a workforce and individual entre-
preneurs, their history and social institu-
tions. In this respect, as a basis for territori-
ally integrated regionalisation, regions
should, to some extent, possess a common
background and regional identity. Foreign
Ministries cannot just invent regions year
after year, using historical parallels (e.g.
Pomor trade). The extraordinary features
that make regionalisation possible on such
grounds need to have been incorporated
into the recent history, experiences and so-
cialisation of people.
A feature common to many communities
in the Nordic Atlantic and parts of the Bar-
ents Region, is their commitment to fish-
eries, based on access to some of the same
cross-border/mobile marine resources; thus
developing certain shared experiences in
technologies related to fisheries, social
forms of integration related to the uncer-
tainty of fisheries, and relatively well-es-
tablished social networks across the sea,
which in practice has no borders. Fisheries
are therefore a fíeld of common interest,
‘marine’ rather than territorial, and region-
al integration could, at a more political lev-
el, have a basis for activity in this sector. It
is apparent that international and transna-
tional cooperation has concentrated its fo-
cus, and to a greater extent is founded, on
the problems of managing mobile marine
resources rather than managing land re-
sources or underground marine resources.
These particular problems of - and poten-
tial for - cooperation in fisheries manage-
ment were experienced by Norway during
membership negotiations with the EU: “No
foreigner pursued claims in the cutting
down of Finnish forests or laid claims to oil
quotas in the North Sea.” (translated from
Norwegian - Bolvág, 1995: 260)
In order to discuss the possibilities of re-
gionalisation in the context of North At-
lantic físhing communities, three issues
will be discussed in the following sections:
a. What does the legal position of a region
mean with regard to its power to act as a
participant in regional cooperation? This
discussion has special reference to the
self-governing Faroe Islands, which are
neither an autonomous nation-state (as
Iceland) nor a fully recognised region of
a nation-state (as Northern Norway).
b. What are the potentials for, and barriers
to, regionalisation of fisheries - the
prime economic sector of the North At-
lantic - within resource management,
processing and marketing?
c. How do innovative regions emerge -
what are the factors behind regionalisa-
tion as a territorial concentration of dis-
tinct forms of entrepreneurship and tech-
nological development?
Addressing these questions, the paper
moves from a macro general-political and
political- economic level (a.), via a meso
level of sector-specific characteristics of
politics and economy (b.), to a micro - but
still important - level of learning processes
in economic and social forms of organisa-
tion (c.).