Competing Geographies of Sovereignty, Regionality and Globalisation: The Politics of EU Resistance in Finland 1991–1994.

European integration is often naturalised, so that the movement of a particular state towards integration, or away from it, is understood as being underpinned by eternal and everlasting national forces. The political struggles within the EU applicant states have not inspired scholars to produce sensitive studies of the “national debates” carried on in applicant states, even though this is exactly the field of political action where politico-geographical categories such as national identity, sovereignty and security come to be enthusiastically articulated. This paper both seeks to explain the struggle over Finland's decision to join the EU by focusing on the argumentation of those actors who “lost” the political struggle, and introduces the geographies that the opponents of Finnish EU membership produced. It is therefore aimed at illustrating the politics that underlay the geographical articulations which referred to either “national identity” or “sovereignty”. The purpose of doing this is to trace the competing geographies involved in the Finnish EU struggle and to point out that they were indeed based on long historical traditions which competing political actors used as a source of legitimation in their political action. Most of the themes highlighted by the No-EU camp are prominent in contemporary EU debates, too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]