MICRO-REGIONS
"We are more and more Tuscans, Sicilians, Walloons and Welshmen, and less and less Italians, Frenchmen and Englishmen, or in other words we are becoming more and more Europeans." 
A micro-region can be defined as a territorial area that is smaller than a state to which it belongs, but larger than a municipality. Typical examples of such micro-regions are provinces, districts, departments or even mega-cities. A special case of a micro-region is one that spreads across different states (cross-border region).
Micro-regionalism is related to macro-regionalism in the way that the larger regionalisation (and globalisation) processes create possibilities for smaller economically dynamic sub-national or transnational regions to get a direct access to the larger regional economic system, often bypassing the nation-state and the national capital, sometimes even as an alternative or in opposition to the challenged state and formal state-led regionalisms.
An example of where the typology of micro-regions are commonly used is the Assembly of European Regions (AER).
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