Nowadays Europe is unfamiliar territory: pan-European spaces coexist with national territories, borderlands soften the sharp outer edges of the EU, and networks are indifferent to borders as they connect Europeans to each other and to the wider world. Borders have undergone dramatic changes, not only in terms of their extent and range: enlargement has massively lengthened the EU's borders and projected them beyond the former Iron Curtain. On some accounts, Europe has been rebordered; the external borders of the EU protect a borderless single market within which internal space mobility is greatly enhanced. On other accounts, borders are themselves networked, mobile and diffused throughout society. These changes have also impacted upon structures of pan-European governance, which combine the management of genuinely European spaces and Commission-sponsored Euro-regions with more traditional levels of national governance. These shifts point to important transformations in the relationship between European spaces, borders, and governance. The EU can no longer simply be viewed as a Europe of nationstates or a putative supra-state. It is also a multi-levelled or networked polity, a borderless internal market, or a 'Europe of the regions'. The spaces of European governance -and particularly the relationship between spaces, borders, and governance -have never been so complex, nor in need of thorough academic reappraisal.The spatial novelty of Europe, and attempts to apprehend and understand this novelty, can be seen very clearly in the terms and concepts with which contemporary Europe is described and analysed. In the past few years, a whole new lexicon of spatial politics has been incorporated into EU studies: polycentricity (multiple centres and diffused growth rather than core-periphery distinctions); 'network Europe' (an EU characterized by connectivity and mobility); territorial cohesion (the balanced distribution of economic activities across the Union); multi-level governance (partnerships between EU