All over the world formal education is the responsibility of the modern state setting constitutional and legal provisions as well as executing the mechanisms of planning, administration, and control. In principle, this responsibility has not changed since the modern state emerged in Europe at the beginning of the 18th century, regardless of the transformations from the absolute and constitutional monarchy to the democratic commonwealth, and from the "subject" to the "citizen" as the addressee of its educational efforts (Heyneman 2002, pp. 16-18). These transformations, considered as a whole, coincided with the amalgamation of "state" and "nation" in the "nation-state" and, consequently, the establishment of "national education systems" as the dominant pattern of the superordinate category of "state education system." Making this classifying distinction, however, should not obscure the view that the continuity of this dominant trend has been frequently restricted by authoritarian or totalitarian regimes and their hegemonic policies. In this article, the author discusses a special issue, "regionalization," which signalizes the emergence of the "region" as a counterforce to the nation-state aimed at complementing or, as its radical option, substituting it in this context as the principal provider of formal education. How and to what extent regions may succeed in asserting their competences in competition with nation-states depend on the alliance of regionalization with comparable forces aimed at limiting the historical preponderance of the nation-state.