Merging regions in contemporary France: a policy perspective
Résumé
The merging of regions initiated in France in 2016 makes it possible to observe the processes of reinvention of a regional identity after thirty years dedicated to strengthening two different ones. The analysis of this territorial recomposition therefore gives us the opportunity to better understand what makes a region and what it does, two questions to which the answers were still not quite stabilized in France. They are now raised again in an explicit and clear way and allow us to better define the contemporary outlines of the state and current modes of government. To that end, we will examine the merger of two former French regions, Languedoc-Roussillon and Midi-Pyrénées, which have been grouped into a new region called Occitanie.