National identity and regional development: Cornwall and the campaign for Objective 1 funding

The politics of identity is important within regional and governance policy debates, becoming a mechanism for ‘filling in’ the democratic gaps left by the hollowing out of the state, with much discourse about constructing identities for governance purposes. This raises questions about the feasibility of processes of identity construction, and whether it starts from new, or builds on existing identities. We use the case study of the Cornish campaign for Objective 1 EU structural funding, engaging directly with modernist versus ethnosymbolist accounts of nationalism, to explore the binary between instrumental, constructed identities and more phenomenological accounts.