The EU's profound crisis has drawn into sharp relief the challenges of reconfiguring national democratic processes around regional political communities. Over the same period for which the EU has fractured, however, other regional organizations have intensified integration. These divergent trends raise urgent questions regarding how regional organizations seek to legitimate integration and associated measures to regionalize decision‐making, and how these legitimation processes can be compared across regional organizations. This article focuses not on specifying how regional organizations should legitimate their activities, but instead on explaining how and why legitimation processes have been crafted in particular ways. Drawing on recent contributions in state theory and political geography, as well as political participation and de‐politicisation, the article advances an innovative approach to understanding how regional integration is (de)legitimated by, first, analysing state‐making and regionalism as ongoing and mutually constituted processes, and second, examining the design and function of participatory innovations.

中文翻译：

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重塑区域：区域一体化中的合法性和政治参与

欧盟的深刻危机极大地缓解了围绕区域政治共同体重新组建国家民主进程的挑战。然而，在欧盟破裂的同一时期，其他区域组织也加强了一体化。这些不同的趋势提出了紧迫的问题，这些问题涉及区域组织如何寻求合法整合和相关措施以将决策区域化，以及如何在各个区域组织之间比较这些合法化过程。本文的重点不是在指定区域组织应如何使其活动合法化，而是在解释如何以及为何以特定方式制定合法化程序。借鉴国家理论和政治地理学的最新成果，