by Gabriele Casano and Marco Del Fiore
On 26 February 2026, the conference “Frontier, Border and Limit: The Contemporary Relevance of Claude Raffestin’s Thought. A Dialogue between Political Geography and Federalist Thinking” was held in Turin at the Luigi Einaudi Campus. It was organized by the Einstein Center for International Studies and the Department of Cultures, Politics and Society of the University of Turin, with the patronage of the Department of Political and International Sciences of the University of Genoa, the Italian Geographical Society, the Association of Italian Geographers, the Society of Geographical Studies, the European Federalist Movement (Piedmont Regional Center and Turin Section), the Young European Federalists – Italy, and the Piedmont Regional Coordination of the European Movement.
This meeting of academic debate and exchange was probably one of the first attempts to foster dialogue between political geographers and federalists on shared themes of reflection. It did so by recalling the figure of one of the most important geographers of the post-war period and the contents of his first volume, “Géographie des frontières”, published in 1974 and written with Paul Guichonnet.
It was an opportunity to reaffirm, once again, the fundamental role of reflection on borders both in geography and in federalist thought.
It is no coincidence that the federalist movement—whose primary objective is to overcome the division of humanity into nation-states—quickly recognized the relevance of Raffestin’s work, incorporating it into its reflection on overcoming national borders within the context of European integration.
This line of thought was developed during the first panel by Domenico Moro and Gabriele Casano, who retraced not only some historical developments related to the overcoming of national borders in the United States and in Europe, but also discussed the ideological function of national borders, which translates into political and cultural behavior.
The border creates separation—rarely absolute and concrete, but often apparent and ideal—establishing a distinction between “us” and “them” that too often becomes a tool for legitimizing conflict rather than one for exchange and peaceful interaction.
Federalism, as an active political doctrine, advocates overcoming borders through the construction of shared institutions capable of neutralizing national limits by promoting sharing, cooperation, solidarity, and unity in diversity.
The second panel, involving Elena dell’Agnese and Alessandro Vitale, focused instead on the academic legacy of Professor Raffestin and his pioneering role, especially in political geography. In her contribution, Elena dell’Agnese retraced some biographical episodes of the French geographer that led him to Switzerland and brought him closer to Italian geography, as well as significant anecdotes related to the development of the theory of limits and the process of translating these reflections into languages other than French. Both speakers highlighted the heterodox nature of the reflection initiated by Raffestin as early as the 1970s, which finds its fullest expression in “Pour une Géographie du Pouvoir” (1980). Raffestin was in fact the first to bring Foucault’s reflections on power into dialogue with geography, paving the way for the development of a new political geography that places forms of power as a central object of study.
It is precisely this emerging new geography that Alessandro Vitale highlighted in his intervention, starting from the 1974 book on borders and reconstructing the intellectual path that led Raffestin from a theory of limits to questioning the very foundations of political geography of his time.
This critical process remains fertile and highly relevant today, especially in the context of new forms of power exercised by an increasing plurality of actors within an ever more complex system of trans-scalar relationships.
The study day dedicated to Claude Raffestin concluded with a roundtable that brought together academic research, institutional experience, and federalist perspectives around a crucial issue: the future of cross-border regions and their role in the European architecture. Participants included Mercedes Bresso, Raffaella Coletti, Antonio Longo, and Sergio Zilli.
The common thread was Raffestin’s distinction between the border as a line and the border as a zone: the former is the barrier of the sovereign state, the latter a space of articulation, encounter, and shared development. Fifty years later, this distinction has lost none of its relevance—indeed, the tension between these two conceptions is more alive than ever.
The picture that emerged from the debate is contradictory. On the one hand, the European Union has gradually developed a range of instruments for cross-border cooperation: Interreg, EGTCs, macro-regional strategies, Euroregions. On the other hand, these instruments have systematically clashed with the resistance of nation-states to devolve powers downward. Mercedes Bresso, who experienced this resistance firsthand—recalling the difficulties with the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs over the approval of an EGTC statute—described how the EGTC, originally conceived to create true Euroregions, has been reduced to a tool for specific projects, and how macro-regional strategies have been weakened through the so-called “three noes strategy”: no new institutions, no new funds, no new legislation. The result is that cross-border cooperation has largely remained without real power.
This is compounded by a trend—accelerated by recent crises—toward the renewed visibility of states even in the governance of internal borders: not only in processes of securitization—emblematically, the prolonged suspension of Schengen at Italy’s eastern border, discussed by Sergio Zilli—but also in institutional cooperation itself, with foreign ministries re-entering a field that had seemed delegated to regions. As Raffaella Coletti observed, this recentralization concerns not only cross-border cooperation but cohesion policy as a whole, and is expected to intensify in the Commission’s proposals for the post-2027 period, which are oriented toward a model reminiscent of the Recovery Plan and grant increasing discretion to states. Mercedes Bresso stressed the need to counter this renationalization, recalling that the policies promoted by Jacques Delors were designed precisely to establish a direct relationship between the Union and territories, bypassing state mediation, and that the struggle for an EU budget with own resources is a prerequisite for any further reform.
The underlying political issue, on which Bresso, Coletti, Longo, and Zilli fully agreed, is fiscal capacity. Without own resources at each level of government, no real autonomy exists—not for municipalities, not for regions, not for cross-border areas. Regions that claim to want autonomy but depend entirely on state transfers are unable to engage in effective cooperative relationships with neighboring regions, nor to manage cross-border common goods. This is a structural contradiction that no technical adjustment can resolve.
The response emerging from the debate is that of a multilevel federalism—from neighborhoods to municipalities, larger territorial units, regions, and up to Europe—in which each level is endowed with elected institutions and genuine fiscal autonomy. Not a hierarchy of levels in which one supersedes another, but a series of coordinated concentric circles, each sovereign within its own sphere. This is what Antonio Longo called an “open Federation”: a system of open federations capable of aggregating communities and functions at different scales without dissolving them into a single center.
Longo also gave this vision a symbolic dimension, drawing on Raffestin: the Latin limes is the border as a rigid barrier, representing the immobility of the nation-state; limen is the threshold—something that can be crossed and, in being crossed, produces change. Cross-border regions acquire political meaning insofar as they function as thresholds—places where different realities meet and transform each other—rather than merely renamed barriers.
The question of who can initiate this process remains open. As Sergio Zilli noted, we are in a phase of rupture with the order established after World War II, marked by a democratic crisis reflected also in declining electoral participation, which makes it difficult to sustain ambitious projects with genuine popular support. Geography, Zilli concluded—recalling Giuseppe Dematteis—must not only describe the world but also help imagine a different one: a function that requires geographers, urban planners, jurists, and federalists to move beyond isolated silos and build concrete convergence between territorial reflection and institutional action.