Beyond State Centrism1999brenner

8/7/2019 Beyond State Centrism1999brenner

1/40

Beyond state-centrism? Space, territoriality, andgeographical scale in globalization studies

NEIL BRENNERUniversity of Chicago

An argument can be made that social science has

been too geographical and not suciently historical,in the sense that geographical assumptions havetrapped consideration of social and political-eco-nomic processes in geographical structures andcontainers that defy historical change.

John Agnew1

Since the early 1970s, debates have raged throughout the social sciences

concerning the process of ``globalization'' ^ an essentially contestedterm whose meaning is as much a source of controversy today as it wasover two decades ago, when systematic research rst began on thetopic. Contemporary globalization research encompasses an immensely

broad range of themes, from the new international division of labor,changing forms of industrial organization, and processes of urban-regional restructuring to transformations in the nature of state power,civil society, citizenship, democracy, public spheres, nationalism,politico-cultural identities, localities, and architectural forms, among

many others.

2

Yet despite this proliferation of globalization research,little theoretical consensus has been established in the social sciencesconcerning the interpretation of even the most rudimentary elementsof the globalization process ^ e.g., its historical periodization, itscausal determinants, and its socio-political implications.3

Nevertheless, within this whirlwind of opposing perspectives, a re-markably broad range of studies of globalization have devoted detailedattention to the problematic of space, its social production, and its

historical transformation. Major strands of contemporary globaliza-tion research have been permeated by geographical concepts ^ e.g.,``space-time compression,'' ``space of ows,'' ``space of places,'' ``de-territorialization,'' ``glocalization,'' the ``global-local nexus,'' ``supra-

Theory and Society 28: 39^78, 1999. 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.


2/40

territoriality,'' ` diasporas,'' ``translocalities,'' and ` scapes,'' amongmany other terms. Meanwhile globalization researchers have begun todeploy a barrage of distinctively geographical prexes ^ e.g. ``sub-,''

` supra-,'' ``trans-,'' ``meso-,'' and `ìnter-,'' ^ to describe various emergentsocial processes that appear to operate below, above, beyond, or be-tween entrenched geopolitical boundaries. The recognition that socialrelations are becoming increasingly interconnected on a global scalenecessarily problematizes the spatial parameters of those relations,and therefore, the geographical context in which they occur. Underthese circumstances, space no longer appears as a static platform ofsocial relations, but rather as one of their constitutive dimensions,itself historically produced, recongured, and transformed.

The key methodological link between these major reorientations in thecontemporary social sciences ^ the explosion of interest in globaliza-tion studies; and the recent ``reassertion of space in critical socialtheory''4 ^ has been the pervasive questioning of the territorial nation-

state as a preconstituted geographical unit of analysis for socialresearch. As various authors have recently argued, signicant strandsof the social sciences have long been locked into a state-centric ``terri-torial trap'' in which states are viewed as the self-enclosed geographicalcontainers of socioeconomic and politico-cultural relations.5 However,

to the extent that the current round of globalization has signicantlyrecongured, and at least partially undermined, the container-likequalities of states, this inherited model of territorially self-enclosed,state-dened societies, economies, or cultures has become highlyproblematic. Thus arises the need for new modes of analysis that donot naturalize state territoriality and its associated, Cartesian imageof space as a static, bounded block. Particularly since the early 1980s,

globalization researchers have constructed a variety of heterodox,interdisciplinary, and even post-disciplinary methodologies that havebegun to challenge the `ìron grip of the nation-state on the socialimagination.'' 6 I view this wide-ranging eort to transcend state-centric epistemologies as the unifying theme of contemporary global-ization research.

Against the background of the apparent ``spatial turn'' in contemporary

globalization studies, the present article examines critically the eorts

of globalization researchers to achieve their goal of `ùnthinking'' (toborrow Immanuel Wallerstein's terminology)7 state-centric modes ofsociological inquiry.8 I believe that one of the central intellectual bar-riers to a more adequate understanding of globalization is that we

40


3/40

currently lack appropriately historicalconceptualizations of social andpolitical space. Indeed, despite the eorts of critical human geographers

in recent decades to critique such assumptions, space is still commonly

understood throughout the social sciences as a realm of stasis, as apregiven, unchanging territorial platform upon which social actionoccurs.9 Even within contemporary globalization studies, I shall argue,major strands of research are grounded upon implicit, relatively unhis-torical geographical assumptions that are derived from an earlier, nowlargely superseded state-centric conguration of capitalist development.

Meanwhile, those globalization researchers who have moved beyondsuch state-centric geographical assumptions have generally done so byarguing that state territoriality and even geography itself are shrinking,

contracting, or dissolving as a consequence of processes of ``deterri-torialization.'' A break with state-centrism is thus secured through thestate's conceptual negation, a move that sidesteps the analysis of newlyemergent, reterritorialized forms of state power and their associatedpolitical geographies.

In contrast to these positions, I argue that the current wave of global-ization is leading to: 1) the transcendence of the state-centric cong-uration of capitalist territorial organization that prevailed throughoutmuch of the twentieth century; and 2) the production of new cong-urations of territoriality on both sub- and supra-national geographicalscales. A crucial if apparently paradoxical corollary of this thesis isthat state-centric mappings of spatiality severely limit our understand-ing of the territorial state's own major role at once as a site, medium,and agent of globalization, as well as the ways in which this role iscurrently triggering a reterritorialization of the state itself. Therefore,the eort to escape the ``territorial trap'' of state-centrism does not entail

a denial of the state's continued relevance as a major geographical locusof social power, but rather a rethinking of the meaning of both stateterritoriality and political space in an era of intensied globalization.

My argument proceeds as follows. First, I summarize the conceptual-ization of globalization that will be deployed in this discussion. On thisbasis, I analyze the epistemology of state-centrism and its basic geo-graphical assumptions. In the main part of the essay, I indicate variousways in which the contemporary round of globalization has under-

mined state-centric modes of analysis. Through an immanent critiqueof two major strands of globalization research ^ labeled, respectively,``global territorialist'' approaches and ``deterritorialization'' approaches

^ I elaborate an alternative analysis of the contemporary round of

41


4/40

globalization as a multi-scalar process of reterritorialization in whichstates play crucial roles. A brief concluding section outlines three cen-tral methodological challenges for future research on the geographies

of globalization.

Globalization and the production of space

As already noted, ``globalization'' is a highly contested term. Someresearchers privilege shifts in the world economy such as the growingrole of transnational corporations, the deregulation of nance capital,the expansion of foreign direct investment, the intensied deployment

of information technologies, and the dissolution of the Bretton Woodsmonetary regime since the early 1970s.10 Others emphasize variousnewly emergent forms of collective identity, political consciousness,and diaspora that appear to have unsettled the principle of nationalityas a locus of everyday social relations, as well as new forms of techno-logically mediated sociocultural interaction that seem oblivious tonational territorial boundaries.11 Finally, some authors have denedglobalization more abstractly, as a process through which interdepen-dencies among geographically distant localities, places, and territoriesare at once extended, deepened, and intensied.12 Clearly the relativemerits of these and other denitions of globalization hinge upon theirusefulness as tools of analysis with reference to particular researchquestions. In what follows I am concerned to explore the implicationsof the current round of globalization for the geographicalorganizationof world capitalism. Consequently, globalization is theorized here asa reconguration of superimposed social spaces that unfolds simulta-neously upon multiple geographical scales.

I view the contemporary round of globalization as the most recenthistorical expression of a longue duree dynamic of continual deterritori-

alization and reterritorialization that has underpinned the productionof capitalist spatiality since the rst industrial revolution of the earlynineteenth century. On the one hand, capitalism is under the impulsionto eliminate all geographical barriers to the accumulation process insearch of cheaper raw materials, fresh sources of labor-power, newmarkets for its products, and new investment opportunities. This ex-

pansionary, deterritorializing tendency within capitalism was clearlyrecognized by Marx, who famously described capital's globalizing dy-namic as a drive to ` annihilate space by time'' and analyzed the worldmarket at once as its historical product and its geographical expres-

42


5/40

sion.13 On the other hand, as David Harvey has argued at length, theresultant processes of ``space-time compression'' must be viewed as one

moment within a contradictory sociospatial dialectic that continually

molds, dierentiates, deconstructs, and reworks capitalism's geo-graphical landscape.14 According to Harvey, it is only through theproduction of relatively xed and immobile congurations of territo-rial organization ^ including urban built environments, industrialagglomerations, regional production complexes, large-scale transpor-tation infrastructures, long-distance communications networks, andstate regulatory institutions ^ that capital's circulation process canbe continually accelerated temporally and expanded spatially. Eachsuccessive round of capitalist industrialization has therefore been

premised upon socially produced geographical infrastructures thatenable the accelerated circulation of capital through global space. Inthis sense, as Harvey notes, ` spatial organisation is necessary to over-come space.''15

This theoretical insight enables Harvey to interpret the historical geog-raphy of capitalism as a ``restless formation and re-formation of geo-graphical landscapes'' in which congurations of capitalist territorialorganization are incessantly created, destroyed, and reconstituted asprovisionally stabilized ``spatial xes'' for each successive regime ofaccumulation.16 From this perspective, social space operates at onceas a presupposition, medium, and outcome of capitalism's globalizingdevelopmental dynamic. Space is not merely a physical container within

which capitalist development unfolds, but one of its constitutive socialdimensions, continually constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed

through an historically specic, multi-scalar dialectic of de- and re-territorialization.

Building upon this theorization, I understand globalization as a double-

edged, dialectical process through which: 1) the movement of com-modities, capital, money, people, images, and information throughgeographical space is continually expanded and accelerated; and 2)relatively xed and immobile socioterritorial infrastructures are pro-duced, recongured, redierentiated, and transformed to enable suchexpanded, accelerated movement. Globalization therefore entails adialectical interplay between the endemic drive towards space-time

compression under capitalism (the moment ofdeterritorialization) andthe continual production of relatively xed, provisionally stabilizedcongurations of territorial organization on multiple geographicalscales (the moment ofreterritorialization).

43


6/40

Thus conceived, globalization is an ongoing, conictual and dialecticalprocess rather than a static situation or a terminal condition. More-over, globalization is both spatial (based upon the continual extension,

reconguration, and restructuring of capitalist territorial organiza-tion) and temporal (based upon the continual acceleration of capital'ssocially average turnover time). Finally, globalization unfolds simulta-neously upon multiple, intertwined geographical scales ^ not onlywithin global space, but through the production, dierentiation, recon-guration, and transformation of sub-global spaces such as territorialstates, regions, cities, and localities.

Two key implications of this theorization deserve particular emphasis.

First, as dened here, globalization does not occur simply through thegeographical extension of capitalism to encompass progressively largerzones of the globe. Though a capitalist world economy has existedsince the earliest round of capitalist growth during the long sixteenthcentury, it was not until the shift from mercantile to industrial capitalism

during the nineteenth century that capital accumulation became in-trinsically premised upon large-scale, socially produced territorial in-frastructures for production, exchange, distribution, consumption,transportation, communication, and the like. As Henri Lefebvre argues,

it is only in the wake of this epochal transformation ` from the produc-tion of things in space to the production of space'' that the geograph-ical foundations for each successive wave of capitalist industrializationhave been themselves continually produced, reorganized, and trans-formed through capital's own contradictory developmental dynamic.17

The resultant, incessantly changing ` second nature'' of capitalist terri-torial organization must therefore be viewed at once as a presupposi-tion, medium, and outcome of the globalization process. 18

Second, against conceptions of globalization as a process of statedemise or erosion, territorial states are conceived here as essentialgeographical components of the globalization process. Much like urban-

regional agglomerations, territorial states have operated as provision-ally stabilized forms of territorialization for successive rounds of cap-ital accumulation, particularly since the second industrial revolutionof the late nineteenth century. With the consolidation of national-developmentalist political regimes during this period, states became

ever more central to the promotion, regulation, and nancing ofcapitalist industrial development ^ above all through their role inthe construction of large-scale territorial infrastructures for industrialproduction, collective consumption, transportation, and communica-

44


7/40

tion.19 According to Lefebvre, the state's increasing role in the terri-torialization of capital since the late nineteenth century signaled theemergence of a new, globally articulated state form, the ``state mode of

production'' (le mode de production etatique), oriented simultaneouslytoward: 1) the intensication of nationally specic patterns of capi-talist industrialization; and 2) the institutional regulation of the newforms of uneven geographical development induced through this rst,state-centric round of globalization.20 From this perspective, the waveof globalization that unfolded during the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries actually entailed the consolidation of the state'srole at once as a territorialized scaolding for accelerated capitalistexpansion and as an institutional interface between sub- and supra-national scales. Throughout this period, globalization and nationaliza-

tion proceeded in tandem as mutually constitutive processes of socio-spatial restructuring.21 Below I argue that contemporary states continue

to operate as key forms of territorialization for capital, but that thepolitical geography of this state-organized territorialization process isbeing recongured in ways that undermine state-centric conceptionsof capitalist territorial organization.

The epistemology of state-centrism

John Agnew has recently questioned whether discussions of space,territory, and place in the contemporary social sciences amount to afully-edged ``sociospatial turn.'' Insofar as social science has alwaysbeen permeated by historically specic geographical assumptions,Agnew argues, the notion of a ``resurgence'' or ``reassertion'' of spatialinuences makes little sense.22 Although I believe that contemporary

studies of globalization have indeed confronted the problematic ofspatiality with a renewed intensity, this section provides support forAgnew's argument. State-centric approaches do not exclude geograph-ical considerations to constitute a ` despatialized'' or ``spaceless'' socialscience: a distinctively ahistorical spatial ontology, the notion of``space-as-container,'' lies at their very heart. State-centrism can bedened in terms of its two most essential, if implicit, geographicalassumptions: 1) the conception of space as a static platform of socialaction that is not itself constituted or modied socially; and 2) the

conception of state territoriality as a preconstituted, naturalized, orunchanging scale of analysis.23 The rst assumption results in a spatialfetishism in which space is seen as being timeless, and therefore,immune to historical change. The second assumption results in a

45


8/40

methodological territorialism that analyzes all spatial forms and scalesas being self-enclosed and territorially bounded geographical units.Taken together, these assumptions produce an internalist model of

societal development in which territoriality operates as the static, time-less container of historicity.

Dened in this manner, a state-centric epistemology has dominatedthe modern social sciences since their inception during the late nine-teenth century.24 Not surprisingly, political science has been the mostexplicitly state-centric among the social sciences. States have beenviewed as politically sovereign and economically self-propelled entities,

with state territoriality understood as the basic reference point in terms

of which all sub- and supra-state processes are to be classied. On thisbasis, the state is viewed as the container of society, while the interstatesystem is mapped in terms of a distinction between ` domestic'' politicsand ``foreign'' relations that reinforces the state's container-like char-acter as the boundary separating ``inside'' from ``outside.''25 However,the above denition extends the problematic of state-centrism wellbeyond those elds of inquiry that are focused directly upon state-levelprocesses (e.g., international relations theory; political sociology; com-

parative politics; development studies) to various modes of anthropo-logical, sociological, and economic analysis in which the concept ofthe state is not explicitly deployed. As dened above, it can be arguedthat a state-centric epistemology has underpinned signicant strandsof sociology (with its focus on geographically xed societies and com-munities), anthropology (with its focus on bounded, territorializedcultures) and macro-economics (with its focus on purportedly self-contained national economies).

First, as it has traditionally been deployed, the concept of society hasimplied that the boundaries of social relations are spatially congruentwith those of the territorial nation-state.26 Even when society has notbeen dened explicitly in terms of the state's territorial boundaries, ithas still been widely understood as a territorially self-enclosed entity,essentially as a sub-national replication of the state-dened society, itsgeographical analog on a smaller spatial scale.27 Although anthro-pology avoided this explicit form of state-centrism prior to the adventof area studies during the postwar era, throughout its history most of

the discipline has still presupposed a territorialized concept of cultureas a localized, spatially xed ``community.''28 Finally, from Smith andRicardo to List, Keynes, and the contemporary monetarists, macro-economic theory has conceived the territorialized national economy as

46


9/40

its most basic unit of analysis, the preconstituted container of produc-tion, exchange, and consumption that is likewise said to be spatiallycoextensive with the state's territorial boundaries.29 Trade theory has

long contained an explicitly international dimension, but this too hasremained state-centric insofar as states have been viewed as the pri-mary geographical blocks between which the factors of production aremoved and in terms of which comparative advantage is measured.30

This unhistorical conception of spatiality can be usefully characterizedas a state-centric epistemology because its widespread intellectualplausibility has been premised upon a naturalization of the modernstate's specically territorial form. Among the most rudimentary fea-

tures of territoriality in social life is its role as a strategy groundedupon the parcelization and enclosure of space.31 However, in themodern interstate system, territoriality has assumed an historicallyspecic geographical signicance that Peter Taylor has concisely char-acterized in terms of ``exhaustive multiplicity.''32 With the dissolutionof feudal hierarchies in late medieval Europe, political space came tobe organized in terms of exclusive state control over self-enclosed terri-torial domains. This development was institutionalized in the Treaty ofWestphalia of 1648, which recognized the existence of an interstatesystem composed of contiguous, bounded territories ruled by sovereign

states committed to the principle of noninterference in each other'sinternal aairs. The consequence of this transformation has been thelong-term enclosure of political, economic, and military power withina global patchwork of mutually exclusive yet contiguous state territo-ries. This bundling of territoriality to state sovereignty is the essentialcharacteristic of the modern interstate system.33 ``Exhaustive multi-plicity'' refers to: 1) the territorialization of state power, through which

each state strives to exercise exclusive sovereignty over a delineated,self-enclosed geographical space; and 2) the globalization of the stateform, through which the entire globe is subdivided into a single geo-political grid composed of multiple, contiguous state territories.34

The notion of territoriality is a polysemic category and not all of itsmeanings refer to this statist global geography. However, since the latenineteenth century the social sciences have come to presuppose aterritorialist image of social space derived from the form of territory-

sovereignty nexus produced and continually reinscribed within themodern interstate system. By the mid-twentieth century, each of theconceptual building blocks of the modern social sciences ^ in particular

the notions of state, society, economy, culture, and community ^ had

47


10/40

come to presuppose this territorialization of social relations withina parcelized, xed, and essentially timeless geographical space. Theresultant territorialist epistemology has entailed the transposition of

the historically unique territorial structure of the modern interstatesystem into a generalized model of sociospatial organization, whetherwith reference to political, societal, economic, or cultural processes.35

Within this framework, socio-historical change is said to occur withinthe xed territorial boundaries of a state, society, culture, or economyrather than through the continual production, reconstitution, ortransformation of those boundaries and the spatial practices theyenclose.

Particularly from a late twentieth-century vantage point, it is crucialto recognize that the epistemology of state-centrism was not merefantasy. Its widespread intellectual plausibility was derived from thelate nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historical-geographicalcontext in which the social sciences rst emerged, during which theterritorial state's role in ` encaging'' socioeconomic and politico-cultural

relations within its boundaries dramatically intensied.36 Although thelineages of this statist developmental conguration can be traced to thelate eighteenth century, when England's ``territorial economy'' super-seded the ``city-centered economy'' of Amsterdam, it was above allduring the twentieth century that the interstate system came to operateincreasingly like `à vortex sucking in social relations to mould themthrough its territoriality.''37 As Karl Polanyi famously argued, Britain'sattempt to institutionalize a ` self-regulating'' world market duringthe nineteenth century by combining imperialist expansion with tradeliberalization eventually resulted in a countervailing ` great trans-formation'' in which increasingly autarkic, protectionist regulatory

frameworks were constructed throughout western Europe and NorthAmerica.38 Lash and Urry interpret the nationally organized forms ofstate regulation that were subsequently introduced as the socio-institu-tional basis for `òrganized capitalism,'' the global regime of accumu-lation that prevailed from the early twentieth century until the worldeconomic crises of the early 1970s.39 During the postwar period, underthe rubric of U.S. global hegemony and the Bretton Woods globalmonetary regime, national-developmentalist practices and ideologieswere further consolidated throughout the world economy, grounded

upon the notion that each state would guide its society through alinear, internally-dened, and self-propelled process of ``moderniza-tion.'' Samir Amin describes the resultant, national-developmentalistconguration of capitalist globalization as a form of `àutocentrism''

48


11/40

oriented toward a nationally scaled spatial congruence between politi-cal and economic structures.40

This intensied territorialization of social relations on the nationalscale suggests that ``the state-centric nature of social science faithfullyreected the power containers that dominated the social world it wasstudying.''41 However, the theorization of globalization outlined pre-viously points toward a somewhat dierent interpretation: the episte-mology of state-centrism is to be viewed less as a ``faithful reection''of its historical-geographical context than as a state-induced misrecog-nition of that context. In our terms, the epistemology of state-centrismwas tightly enmeshed within the national-developmentalist round of

globalization that unfolded during the late nineteenth and early twen-tieth centuries. On the one hand, processes of space-time compressionintensied in conjunction with the second industrial revolution, theglobalizing expansion of the world economy, and the era of highimperialism. On the other hand, this simultaneous extension andacceleration of capitalism was premised upon the construction oflarge-scale territorial congurations, above all the production, trans-portation, and communications infrastructures of major industrialcities and the highly bureaucratized institutional-regulatory systems ofterritorial states. However, state-centric modes of analysis focus upononly one pole of this dialectic of de- and reterritorialization, that ofterritorial xity, as embodied in the state's bounded, territorializedform.

Henri Lefebvre's analysis of the modern state as a form of ``violencedirected towards a space'' sheds light upon this territorialist misrecog-nition.42 In Lefebvre's view, the modern state is grounded intrinsically

on the drive to rationalize, unify, and homogenize social relationswithin its territorial space: ``Each state claims to produce a spacewherein something is accomplished, a space, even, where somethingis brought to perfection: namely, a unied and hence homogenoussociety.''43 But as Lefebvre is quick to add: ``The space that ho-mogenizes ... has nothing homogenous about it.''44 One of the basicfeatures of state-centric modes of analysis is to conate the historicaltendency toward the territorialization of social relations on a nationalscale ^ which has undoubtedly intensied during much of the twentieth

century ^ with its historical realization. Territorialization is thus rep-resented as a natural precondition of social and political existencerather than being seen as a product of historically determinate strat-egies of parcelization, centralization, enclosure, and encaging. As

49


12/40

Lefebvre elaborates with reference to the ``abstract space'' of moderncapitalism:

Abstract space is not homogenous; it simply has homogeneity as its goal, itsorientation, its ``lens.''And, indeed, it renders homogenous. But in itself it ismultiform.... Thus to look upon abstract space as homogeneous is to em-brace a representation that takes the eect for the cause, and the goal for thereason why the goal was pursued. A representation which passes itself o as aconcept, when it is merely an image, a mirror and a mirage; and which insteadof challenging, instead of refusing, merely reects. And what does such aspecular representation reect? It reects the result sought.45

Only in this specic sense, then, did the epistemology of state-centrism

``reect'' its historical-geographical context ^ not through an act ofmimesis, but through a form of reication in which the ``result sought,''the ``fetishization of space in the service of the state,'' is treated as anactualized reality rather than as a tendency within an ongoing dialec-tic.46

The crucial point in the present context, therefore, is that territoriali-zation ^ whether on national, sub-national, or supra-national scales ^must be viewed as an historically specic, contradictory, and conic-tual process rather than as a pregiven, xed, or natural condition. Bycontrast, state-centric epistemologies freeze the image of state territor-iality into a generalized ontological feature of social life, and therebyneglect the ways in which the latter has been continually produced,recongured, and transformed as a key geographical infrastructure forcapital's developmental dynamic.

Conceptualizing globalization: The re-scaling of territoriality

Since the early 1970s, the geographies of capitalism have been trans-formed in ways that directly underscore the socially produced, histor-ical character of space. As Neil Smith indicates, the entrenched geo-political and geoeconomic structures of twentieth-century capitalismhave been radically recongured at once on global, national, regional,and urban scales.47 On the globalscale, a ``new international division oflabor'' has been consolidated in conjunction with the globalization of

productive capital and the concomitant industrialization of variouserstwhile Third World countries. By 1989, with the dismantling of theSecond World, the postwar geopolitical division of the globe had beenthoroughly redierentiated, fragmented, and rearranged. On the na-

50


13/40

tional scale, territorial borders have become increasingly porous tointernational capital, particularly in its nancial and monetary forms;and since the dissolution of the Bretton Woods currency system in the

early 1970s, the viability of nationally organized monetary policies hasbeen decisively undermined. At the same time, however, the nation-state form has been further entrenched through a burst of resurgentnationalisms and the proliferation of ethnic warfare among popula-tions struggling to redraw national territorial boundaries. On regionalscales, the industrial heartlands of North Atlantic Fordism have expe-rienced dramatic deindustrialization, while an array of new industrialspaces have sprouted up in urbanized regions from Silicon Valley andOrange County to southern England, Baden-Wu rttemberg, and the

Third Italy. Inherited patterns of urban-rural polarization are beingsuperimposed upon a distinctively post-Fordist landscape of geo-graphical unevenness in which regional industrial cores throughoutthe world economy compete ever more directly with one another.Finally, on the urban scale, processes of urban redevelopment andgentrication have redened the map of metropolitan and surburbangrowth that underpinned the postwar wave of urbanization. In thiscontext, new forms of local and regional state regulation are beingmobilized at once to promote this geographical reconcentration ofcapital and to exercise control over the urban spaces in which it occurs.In the face of this kaleidoscope of intertwined geographical transfor-mations, Neil Smith concludes:

The solidity of the geography of twentieth century capitalism at various scales

has melted; habitual spatial assumptions about the world have evaporated....

It is as if the world map as jig-saw puzzle had been tossed in the air these lasttwo decades, leaving us to reconstruct a viable map of everything from bodilyand local change to global identity. Under these circumstances, the taken-for-

grantedness of space is impossible to sustain. Space is increasingly revealedas a richly political and social product, and putting the jig-saw puzzle backtogether ^ in practice as well as in theory ^ is a highly contested aair.48

Smith's formulation puts into relief one of the central methodologicalchallenges of contemporary globalization research: to map the geogra-phies of contemporary capitalism in ways that transcend the ``habitualspatial assumptions'' of state-centric epistemologies. As the geograph-ical foundations of twentieth-century capitalism are profoundly unset-

tled, deconstructed, and reworked, an urgent need arises for analyticalframeworks that do not imprison the social sciences within timeless,territorialist, and unhistorical representations of social space.

51


14/40

To date, however, most globalization researchers have confronted thismethodological challenge in one of two ways ^ either through an analy-

sis of the global scale in implicitly state-centric terms, as a globally

stretched territorial grid; or through an emphasis on processes of``deterritorialization,'' which purportedly trigger the demise, erosion,or contraction of state territoriality. The former approach transposesstate-centric mappings of space onto the global scale, and thus remainstrapped within a narrowly territorialist understanding of contempo-rary capitalism. The latter approach transcends the territorialist epis-temology of state-centrism on the basis of two equally problematicassumptions: 1) the notion that globalization is an essentially non-territorial, borderless, supra-territorial, or territorially disembedded

process; and 2) the notion that globalization entails the erosion of thestate. My goal throughout the rest of this article is to indicate whyneither of these methodological strategies can provide an adequatemapping of the contemporary round of globalization, and to begin tooutline the basic elements of an alternative methodology for global-ization studies.

The core of my argument is the claim that the contemporary roundof globalization has radically recongured the scalar organization ofterritorialization processes under capitalism, relativizing the signicance

of the national scale while simultaneously intensifying the role of bothsub- and supra-national forms of territorial organization. On the onehand, the contemporary round of globalization must be viewed as yetanother wave of de- and reterritorialization through which globalsocioeconomic interdependencies are being intensied, deepened, andexpanded in conjunction with the production, reconguration, andtransformation of relatively xed forms of territorial organization on

sub-global geographical scales. On the other hand, however, the social,economic, and political geographies of this dynamic of de- and reterri-torialization are being radically reorganized relative to the entrenched,state-centric patterns that have prevailed since the late nineteenthcentury. Whereas previous rounds of de- and reterritorialization oc-curred largely within the geographical framework of state territoriality,contemporary processes of globalization have signicantly decenteredthe role of the national scale both as a self-enclosed container of socio-economic relations and as an organizational interface between sub-

and supra-national scales. As this ``denationalization of the state'' hasproceeded apace, a wide range of sub- and supra-national forms ofterritorial organization ^ from global city-regions, industrial districts,and regional state institutions to transnational economic blocks and

52


15/40

regulatory systems such as NAFTA, ASEAN, and the EU ^ haveacquired increasingly crucial roles as geographical infrastructures forcapitalism.49

These shifts in the scalar organization of capitalism have been variously

described as processes of ``re-scaling'' or ``jumping scales.'' 50 Theircentral consequence has been to thrust the apparently ossied, en-trenched xity of state territoriality abruptly and dramatically intohistorical motion, radically redening its geographical signicance, itsorganizational structures, and its interconnections to both sub- andsupra-national scales. Processes of territorialization remain endemicto capitalism, but today they are jumping at once above, below, and

around the national scale upon which they converged throughoutmuch of the last century. Consequently, state territoriality currentlyoperates less as an isomorphic, self-enclosed block of absolute spacethan as a polymorphic institutional mosaic composed of multiple,partially overlapping levels that are neither congruent, contiguous,nor coextensive with one another.51 I view this re-scaling of terri-toriality as the dierentia specica of the currently unfolding round ofglobalization. Crucially, this re-scaling of territoriality does not entailthe state's erosion but rather its reterritorialization onto both sub- andsupra-national scales. States continue to operate as essential sites ofterritorialization for social, political, and economic relations, even ifthe political geography of this territorialization process no longer con-verges predominantly or exclusively upon any single, self-enclosed geo-graphical scale.

A detailed empirical-historical account of these ongoing geographicaltransformations lies beyond the scope of this article.52 My concern

here is to elaborate the notion of a re-scaling of territoriality throughan immanent critique of the two major strands of globalization researchmentioned above. Because so much of contemporary globalization re-search remains grounded upon state-centric or otherwise problematicgeographical assumptions, I consider this type of epistemological cri-tique to be a crucial prerequisite for the task of analyzing the currentlyemergent geographies of globalization.

Global territorialism: State-centrism on a world scale

All accounts of globalization entail some version of the claim that theglobal scale has become increasingly important as an organizing locus

53


16/40

of social relations. However, this emphasis on the global scale has beenintertwined with extremely diverse conceptualizations of global socialspace. This section considers approaches to globalization research that

conceive global space in essentially state-centric terms, either as apregiven geographical container or as a form of territoriality stretchedonto the global scale.

The deployment of this type of ``global territorialist'' methodology isfrequently quite explicit, as in Albrow's denition of globalization as``those processes by which the peoples of the world are incorporatedinto a single world society, a global society.'' 53 Indeed, the concept of``world society'' has played a dening role within a major strand of

globalization research, according to which globalization entails notonly the growing interconnectedness of distinct parts of the globe, butin Waters's characteristic formulation, the construction of ``a singlesociety and culture occupying the planet.'' 54 Other globalization re-searchers have elaborated analogous accounts of ``global culture'' and``transnational civil society.''55

In each case the modier ``global'' is positioned before a traditionallystate-centric term ^ ``society,'' ``civil society,'' or ``culture'' ^ to demar-cate a realm of sociocultural interaction that transcends the borders ofany single state territory. Whether this sphere of interaction is under-stood in normative terms (e.g., as a site of universalistic values such ashuman rights, equality, peace, and democracy), institutionally (e.g., asa framework of globally standardized economic, political, educational,and scientic practices) or experientially (e.g., as a worldwide diusionof American, European, or Western cultural inuences), these ``worldsociety'' approaches share a conception of global space as a structural

analog to state territoriality. Insofar as the interpretation of globalspace is derived directly from an understanding of the territoriallycongured, national spaces of ` societies'' and ` cultures,'' the questionof the qualitative sociospatial organization of world-scale processes isessentially foreclosed through a choice of conceptual grammar. Thedierence between global and national congurations of social space isthereby reduced to a matter of geographical size. Meanwhile, becauseglobalization is understood primarily as a world-scale process, the roleof national and sub-national territorial transformations in the global-

ization process cannot be explicitly analyzed. In this sense, even astheir unit of analysis is extended beyond national territorial boundaries,``world society'' approaches remain deeply embedded within a state-centric epistemology that conceives space ^ on both global and national

54


17/40

scales ^ as a timeless, territorial container of social relations. Thepreconstituted geographical space of the globe is presumed to be simply

lled by the sociocultural practices associated with the globalization

process rather than being produced, recongured, or transformedthrough the latter.

Roland Robertson's neo-Parsonsian cultural sociology of globalization

instantiates a somewhat less explicit version of this global territorialistapproach.56 Here global space is not dened in directly state-centricterms such as ``society'' or ``culture,'' but rather through the more geo-graphically ambiguous categories of ``place'' and ` eld.'' For Robertson,

globalization is a multi-faceted process that has led to the formation of

what he terms a situation of ``global unicity'' ^ the development of theworld ` as a single place,''or ``the concrete structuration of the world asa whole.''57 Robertson's analysis of globalization consists of a synchronic

aspect (a ``dimensional model'' of the ``global eld'') and a diachronicaspect (a ``sequential phase model of globalization''). According toRobertson, the ``global eld'' is an invariant structural matrix uponwhich sociocultural conceptions of the world are organized; its com-ponents are the ``quintessential features of the terms in which it ispossible to conceive of the world.'' 58 Robertson classies the latteraccording to four basic dimensions, ` societies, individuals, the systemof societies and mankind,'' which are together said to constitute the` global-human condition.''59 Globalization is then dened as a height-ened ``self-consciousness'' of the relations among these dimensions,which leads in turn to an increasing ` dierentiation of the mainspheres of globality.''60 Robertson elaborates a ve-stage periodizationto describe this world-historical trend towards intensied ``global unic-ity'': the ``germinal'' phase (fteenth to eighteenth centuries); the ``in-

cipient'' phase (mid-eighteenth century to 1870s) the ``take-o'' phase(1870s^1920s); the ``struggle-for-hegemony'' phase (1920s^1960s); andthe `uncertainty'' phase (1960s^present).61

However, despite his concern to analyze world-scale processes,Robertson's analysis reproduces a state-centric image of global spaceas a timeless, territorial framework that contains historicity withoutitself evolving historically. First, Robertson conceives the global scaleas a self-enclosed territorial container in which the structural dier-

entiation of individuals, societies, inter-societal relations, and humanityoccurs: ``globality'' is viewed as a macro-geographical form of stateterritoriality. Thus conceived, as in the ``world society'' approachesdiscussed above, globalization entails an intermeshing of preconsti-

55


18/40

tuted Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft structures on the scale of the``world-as-a-whole'' rather than a qualitative restructuring of theseinherited, statist forms of territorial organization. Second, Robertson's

conception of global space is essentially unhistorical. Robertson ana-lyzes the changing interdependencies among individuals, states, soci-eties, and the ` global-human condition'' in orthodox Parsonsian terms,as a unilinear, evolutionary process of structural dierentiation amongpreconstituted spatial scales.62 This dierentiation is said to occurwithin the pregiven space of ` globality''; yet this global space is not said

to be constituted, modied, or transformed historically. Instead the``global eld'' is viewed as an invariant, systemic hierarchy, stretchingfrom the individual and society to the interstate system and the ``global

human condition.'' In Robertson's theorization, the globalizationprocess passes through each of these components without qualitativelytransforming them or the hierarchy in which they are embedded. Bysubsuming currently unfolding global transformations within thisuniversal, historically invariant process of structural dierentiation,Robertson's analysis excludes a priori the possibility of qualitativesociospatial transformations on any geographical scale. Robertson'scultural sociology of globalization therefore entails the transpositionof state-centrism onto a world scale rather than its transcendence.

One further instance of a global territorialist approach to globalizationresearch can be excavated from Immanuel Wallerstein's approach toworld-system analysis, which is otherwise among the most powerful,sustained critiques of explicitly state-centric frameworks yet to bedeveloped in the social sciences. By demonstrating the long-run andmacro-geographical parameters of capitalism,Wallerstein's pioneeringstudies have also served as a useful corrective to excessively presentist

interpretations of the post-1970s wave of globalization that exaggerateits discontinuity with earlier historical congurations of capitalist de-velopment.63 Nonetheless, despite these substantial achievements, Ibelieve that Wallerstein's theoretical framework replicates on a globalscale the methodological territorialism of the very state-centric episte-mologies he has otherwise criticized so eectively. To elaborate thisclaim, the intersection of global space and state territoriality inWallerstein's approach to world-system analysis must be examinedmore closely.

Wallerstein conceptualizes capitalism as a geographically integratedhistorical system grounded upon a single division of labor. Globalspace is conceived neither as ``society,'' ``culture,'' nor as ``place,'' but

56


19/40

rather in terms of the more geographically and historically specicnotion of the ``modern world-system.'' Although Wallerstein denesthis capitalist world-system on multiple levels ^ e.g. in terms of the

drive toward ceaseless accumulation; the commodication of produc-tion, distribution, and investment processes; and the antagonistic classrelation between capitalists and wage-laborers ^ he argues repeatedlythat its unique scalar form is one of its constitutive features.64 Incontradistinction to previous historical systems (``world-empires''), inwhich the division of labor, state power, and cultural forms overlappedmore or less congruently within the same territorial domains, capitalism

is composed of ``a single division of labor but multiple polities andcultures.''65 It is through this abstract contrast between two geometri-

cal images ^ world-empires in which the economic division of labor isspatially congruent with structures of politico-cultural organization;and world-economies in which a single division of labor encompassesmultiple states and multiple cultural formations ^ that Wallersteindelineates the geographical foundations of capitalism. In essence,Wallerstein grasps the specicity of capitalist spatiality in terms of theterritorial non-congruence of economic structures (``singular'') withpolitico-institutional and cultural forms (``multiple''). According toWallerstein, the long-run reproduction of capitalism has hinged cru-cially upon the durability of this sociospatial arrangement, which hasprovided capital with ` a freedom of maneuver that is structurally based[and thereby] made possible the constant economic expansion of theworld-system.''66 On this basis, Wallerstein outlines the long-run his-tory of world capitalism with reference to three intersecting spatio-temporal processes ^ rst, the Kondratie cycles, secular trends, andsystemic crises of the world-scale accumulation process; second, thecycles of hegemonic ascension and decline among the core states; and

third, the geographical incorporation of ``external areas'' until, by thelate 19th century, the international division of labor had become co-extensive with most of the planet's physical-geographical surface.67

However, considering Wallerstein's avowed concern to transcend state-centric models of modernity, states occupy a surprisingly pivotal theo-retical position within his conceptual framework. Although the division

of labor in the capitalist world-economy is said to be stratied intothree supra-state zones (core, semi-periphery, and periphery), Waller-

stein argues that its most elemental geographical units are neverthelessstates, or more precisely, the bounded territories over which statesexercise sovereignty. To be sure,Wallerstein maintains that the economic

division of labor within the world-system transcends the territorial

57


20/40

boundaries of each individual state; yet he consistently describes thehistorical dynamics of the world economy in terms of the dierentialpositions of the states within its stratied core-periphery structure,

rather than, for instance, with reference to rms, industries, circuits ofcapital, or urban systems. For Wallerstein, the economic division oflabor is intrinsically composed of states; capitalist enterprises are inturn said to be ` domiciled'' within their associated national state struc-tures.68 Wallerstein's conception of global space is thus most preciselydescribed as an inter-state division of labor: state territoriality servesas the basic geographical unit of the world economy; meanwhile globalspace is parcelized among three zonal patterns (core, semi-periphery,periphery), which are in turn composed of nationally scaled territorial

economies. State territoriality and global space are thereby fused to-gether into a seamless national-global topography in which the inter-state system and the world economy operate as a single, integratedsystem.69

In this sense, it can be argued that Wallerstein's concern to analyzethe global scale as a distinctive unit of analysis does not lead to anyqualitative modication in the way in which this space is conceptual-ized. In Wallerstein's framework, the primary geographical units ofglobal space are dened by the territorial boundaries of states, whichin turn constitute a single, encompassing macro-territoriality, the world

interstate system. The national scale is thereby blended into the globalscale while the global scale is attened into its national components.As in the tale of the traveler Gulliver who encounters identical micro-and macro-scopic replications of human society, a ` society of midgets''and a ` society of giants,'' the global and the national scales are viewed as

structural analogs of a single spatial form ^ territoriality.70 The global

merely multiplies national territoriality without modifying its essentialfeatures. Thus Wallerstein's approach to world-system analysis entailsthe replication of a territorialist model of space not only on the national

scale of the territorial state but on the global scale of the world system.

Wallerstein's methodological fusion of the global and the nationalscales also leads to an interpretation of globalization primarily as aphysical-geographical expansion of capitalism rather than as a recon-stitution or transformation of the social and political spaces upon

which it is based. To be sure, Wallerstein conceives global space as ahistorical product of capitalist expansion, but he acknowledges its his-toricity only in a limited sense, in contrast to previous historical systems

such as world-empires. For within the capitalist historical system, space

58


21/40

appears to be frozen into a single geometric crystallization ^ ``oneeconomy, multiple states'' ^ that cannot change qualitatively withoutexploding capitalism's identity as a distinctive type of historical system.

Each long wave of capitalist expansion reproduces the structurallyinvariant geographical pattern upon which capitalism is grounded, agrid of nationally organized state territories linked through a core-periphery structure to a single, global division of labor. Paradoxically,Wallerstein's denition of the modern world-system as a global amalga-

mation of national spaces generates the state-centric methodologicalconsequence that a specically capitalist form of globalization canunfold only among nationally scaledforms of political and economicorganization. The possibility that the globalization process might un-

hinge itself from this entrenched national-global couplet to privilegeother sub- or supra-national forms of capitalist territorial organizationis thereby excluded by denitional at.71

Two general methodological conclusions can be derived from thiscritical analysis of global territorialist approaches. First, the emphasison global space does not necessarily lead to an overcoming of state-centric epistemologies. Global territorialist approaches represent global

space in a state-centric manner, as a pregiven territorial containerwithin which globalization unfolds, rather than analyzing the histori-cal production, reconguration, and transformation of this space. Asnoted, one of the major deciencies of state-centric modes of analysisis to conceive territorialization as a static condition rather than as anongoing, dialectical process. Global territorialist approaches transposethis state-centric misrecognition from the national to the global scale.The current round of globalization does indeed appear to be intensify-ing globally scaled forms of interaction and interdependence. How-

ever, global territorialist approaches reify this emergent tendency intoan actualized, globally scaled territoriality and thus circumvent themethodological task of analyzing global space as an historically con-stituted arena of multiple, superimposed spatial forms.

Second, state-centric conceptions of global space mask the territorialstate's own crucial role as a site and agent of the globalization process.The global territorialist approaches discussed above treat state terri-toriality as a static institutional framework over and above which the

globalization process occurs, and thereby bracket the massive trans-formations of state territorial organization that have played a cruciallyenabling role in the contemporary round of globalization. The per-sistence of state-centric epistemologies in globalization studies thus

59


22/40

presents a major intellectual barrier to a more adequate understandingof currently emergent forms of state territoriality and political space.

As noted, I conceive the contemporary round of globalization as aconictual reconguration of social space that unfolds simultaneouslyupon multiple, superimposed geographical scales. I now return to these

ongoing re-scalings through a critical discussion of ``deterritorializa-tion'' approaches to globalization studies.

Jumping scales: Deterritorialization as re-scaling

In contrast to global territorialist approaches, analyses of deterritori-alization confront explicitly the task of analyzing spatiality in a histor-ically specic manner. From this perspective, territoriality is viewed asan historically specic form of sociospatial organization that is being

undermined in the contemporary round of globalization. New geogra-phies of networks and ows are said to be supplanting the inheritedgeography of state territories that has long preoccupied the sociological

imagination. Deterritorialization researchers have analyzed these emer-

gent, purportedly ``post-territorial'' geographies as expressions of vari-ous factors, including the deployment of new informational, military,and transportation technologies; the internationalization of capitaland nancial markets; the virtualization of economic activity throughelectronically mediated monetary transactions; the global crisis of terri-

torialized denitions of citizenship; the intensied role of electronicmedia in organizing socio-cultural identities; and the increasing den-sity and velocity of transnational diasporic population movements.

Most deterritorialization research has represented the spaces of glob-alization (based upon circulation, ows, and geographical mobility)and the spaces of territorialization (based upon enclosure, borders,and geographical xity) as mutually opposed systems of interaction.In Scholte's characteristic formulation:

Global space is placeless, distanceless and borderless ^ and in this sense``supraterritorial.'' In global relations, people are connected with one anotherpretty much irrespective of their territorial position. To that extent they eec-tively do not have a territorial location, apart from the broad sense of being

situated on the planet earth. Global relations thus form a non-, extra-, post-,supra-territorial aspect of the world system. In the global domain, territorialboundaries present no particular impediment and distance is covered ineectively no time.72

60


23/40

This image of global space as a ``placeless, distanceless, and borderless''

realm is the geographical essence of deterritorialization approaches.From Castells's account of the ` space of ows,'' Jameson's theorization

of ``postmodern hyperspace,'' Ruggie's interpretation of the EU as theworld's ``rst postmodern political form'' and Appadurai's concept of` ethnoscapes'' to Ohmae's notion of a ``borderless world'' and O'Brien's

still more radical thesis of an ``end of geography,'' analyses of deterri-torialization have generally been premised upon this basic conceptualopposition between the ` supra-territorial''or ``deterritorialized'' spacesin which globalization occurs and sub-global territories, localities, andplaces.73

The logical corrollary of this conceptualization is the assertion thatglobalization signals the decline, erosion, or disempowerment of theterritorial state. Whereas global territorialist approaches map globalspace essentially as a territorial state writ-large, studies of deterritori-alization invert this image to emphasize the increasing permeability oreven total negation of state territoriality. The decline of state territorialpower is viewed at once as the medium and the result of processes ofdeterritorialization. On the one hand, the erosion of nationally scaledforms of territorial enclosure is said to open up a space for increasinglynon-territorial forms of social interaction and interdependence on aglobal scale. On the other hand, these globally scaled processes ofdeterritorialization are in turn said to accelerate the state's loss ofcontrol over its national borders and thus further undermine its terri-toriality. In this sense, the state decline thesis and the notion of deter-ritorialization entail cumulative, mutually reinforcing rather thanmerely additive, externally related conceptions of global spatial trans-formation. Global space can be viewed as non-territorial in form

precisely because it is dened through the trope of an eroding ordisappearing national scale; meanwhile the thesis of state decline iselaborated not through an account of the national scale but of variousglobally scaled, purportedly supra-territorial spatial forms associatedwith processes of deterritorialization.

By emphasizing the historicity of territoriality, deterritorializationapproaches have begun to articulate an important challenge to theepistemology of state-centrism. This methodological denaturalization

of territoriality has also enabled deterritorialization researchers toconstruct alternative geographical categories for describing currentlyemergent spatial forms that no longer presuppose their enclosurewithin territorially bounded geographical spaces. Nevertheless, viewed

61


24/40

through the lens of the conception of globalization outlined above,deterritorialization approaches contain three major deciencies.

First, the historicity of territoriality is reduced to an either-or choicebetween two options, its presence or its absence. Consequently, thepossibility that territoriality is being recongured and re-scaled ratherthan eroded cannot be adequately explored. Second, the relation be-tween global space and territoriality is viewed as a zero-sum game inwhich the growing importance of the former necessarily entails thedecline of the latter. By conceiving geographical scales as mutuallyexclusive rather than mutually constitutive levels of social interaction,this dualistic conceptualization cannot explore the essential role of

sub-global transformations ^ of state territories, regions, cities, local-ities, and places ^ in the globalization process. Third, and most cru-cially, deterritorialization approaches bracket the various forms ofspatial xity, localization, and (re)territorialization upon which globalows are necessarily premised. Processes of deterritorialization are notdelinked from territoriality, for their very existence presupposes theproduction of xed socioterritorial infrastructures within, upon, andthrough which global ows can circulate. Thus the deterritorializationof social relations on a global scale hinges intrinsically upon theirsimultaneous reterritorialization on sub-global scales within relativelyxed and immobile congurations of territorial organization.

These arguments can be concretized through a critical reinterpretationof two commonly invoked forms of deterritorialization ^ the deterri-torialization of capital, and the deterritorialization of the state. Asnoted, I conceive the contemporary round of globalization as a re-scaling of the nationally organized forms of territoriality that have long

served as the basic geographical scaolding for capitalist expansion. Inthe context of this ongoing scalar shift, processes of deterritorializa-tion can be coherently reinterpreted as concerted yet uncoordinatedstrategies ofdenationalization through which the national scale of stateterritorial organization is being at once decentered, relativized, andrecongured. If territoriality operates as a strategy grounded upon theenclosure of social relations within a bounded space, deterritorializa-tion can be reinterpreted as a countervailing strategy to ``jump scales,''i.e., to circumvent or dismantle historically entrenched forms of terri-

torial organization and their associated scalar morphologies. Currentlyunfolding processes of deterritorialization are reshuing the entrenched,

nationally scaled congurations of territorial organization upon whichcapitalist industrialization has been grounded since the late nineteenth

62


25/40

century. This denationalizing strategy of ``jumping scales'' has alsobeen tightly intertwined with various, highly conictual forms of reterri-

torialization through which new sub- and supra-national forms of state

territorial organization are being constructed. As in the previous state-centric round of globalization, however, it can be argued that theterritorial state remains a crucial geographical infrastructure upon,within, and through which this multi-scalar dialectic of de- and reterri-torialization is currently unfolding.

1. The re-scaling of capital. The concept of deterritorialization was rstdeveloped in the early 1970s to describe the apparently footloose activ-ities of transnational corporations in coordinating globally dispersed

production networks. Since this period, the notion of deterritorializa-tion has acquired a broader meaning to encompass as well the roleof new information and communications technologies in linkinggeographically dispersed parts of the globe to create a temporallyintegrated world economy. The massive expansion in the role of trans-national nance capital since the demise of the Bretton Woods currency

controls in the early 1970s presents a further indication of capital'sincreasing velocity and geographical mobility in the world economy.Under these circumstances, the worldwide circulation of capital cannot

be adequately conceived in terms of strictly territorial representationsof space, with reference to autocentric national economies or theimage of a world economy parcelized into distinct, self-enclosed na-tional-territorial spaces.

However, despite its rapidly accelerating turnover times, capital remains

as dependent as ever upon relatively xed, localized, and territoriallyembedded technological-institutional ensembles in which technology,

the means of production, forms of industrial organization and labor-power are productively combined to create and extract surplus-value.The processes of deterritorialization associated with the current roundof economic globalization are therefore only one moment of a broaderrestructuring process in which the reindustrialization of urban-regional

agglomerations ^ e.g., global cities, industrial districts, technopoles,oshore nancial centers, and other exible production complexes ^has played a constitutive role.74 In this context Swyngedouw has ana-lyzed the proliferation of new `glocal'' accumulation strategies through

which key forms of industrial, nancial, and service capital attempt tosecure competitive advantages within global production lie res pre-cisely through the promotion and exploitation of locally and regionallyspecic conditions of production.75 Although the growth of these

63


26/40

densely networked regional industrial production complexes has beencrucially conditioned by the national political-economic frameworksin which they are embedded, it can be argued that urbanized regions

are currently superseding national economies as the most rudimentarygeographical units of world capitalism.76 In this sense, capital's driveto diminish its place-dependency does not entail the construction of aquasi-autonomous, placeless ` space of ows,'' as writers such as Castells

have argued, but rather a complex re-scaling and reterritorialization ofthe historically entrenched, state-centric geographical infrastructuresthat have underpinned the last century of capitalist industrialization.As Neil Smith notes:

Capital ... may entertain the fantasy of spacelessness and act accordingly, but

in practice, every strategy to avoid and supersede ``historically establishedmechanisms'' [i.e., places] and territories of social control involves not theextinction of place per se but the reinvention of place at a dierent scale ^ acapital-centered jumping of scale. Indeed, the perpetuation of control bythese organizations (and classes) depends precisely on this reinvention ofdiscrete places where power over and through the space of ows is rooted.77

Deterritorialization, in other words, must be viewed as a distinctivelygeographical accumulation strategy, a mechanism of ``global localiza-tion,'' through which globally oriented capitalist rms are attemptingto circumvent and restructure the nationally organized systems ofsocial, monetary, and labor regulation that prevailed throughout theFordist-Keynesian regime of accumulation. To be sure, capitalist strat-egies of deterritorialization may well succeed in circumventing theconstraints imposed by national territorial boundaries but this hardlytranslates into hypermobility or placelessness. As capital strives to``jump scale,'' it is forced simultaneously, on other geographical scales,

to reconstitute or create anew viable territorial infrastructures for itscirculation process ^ whether through the reindustrialization and re-territorialization of existent scales or through the construction of qual-itatively new scales. In this sense, capital's apparent transcendence ofnationally scaled regulatory systems in recent decades has been boundinextricably to the production of new sub- and supranational spaces ofaccumulation and state regulation. The drive toward deterritoriali-zation incessantly reinscribes the role of places and territories oncapitalism's geographical landscape while, at the same time, radically

reconguring this landscape to enhance its locationally specic pro-ductive capacities.

64


27/40

2. Re-scaling the state. As noted, most accounts of deterritorializationconceptualize the emergence of global space through the trope of adeclining or eroding state territoriality. Although the current round of

globalization has indeed rendered states increasingly permeable totransnational ows of various types, this development has not triggered

the state's demise but rather its reterritorialization onto both sub- andsupra-national geographical scales. As traditional Keynesian macro-economic policy instruments proved increasingly ineectual duringthe global economic crisis of the 1970s, a wide range of supply-sideregulatory strategies were deployed at once to enhance the globalcompetitive advantage of nationally based rms and to promote socialand industrial restructuring within each state's major growth poles.

Since this period, the older industrial states of the OECD zone haveactively facilitated globalization not only by dismantling major elements

of the postwar Fordist-Keynesian regulatory order (e.g., national wel-fare regimes; nationally organized collective bargaining arrangements),

which are increasingly viewed as a hindrance to global economic com-petitiveness, but through the creation of a wide range of new policyinstruments and institutional forms to attract capital investment andto encourage exibility and technological innovation. Robert Cox hasdescribed these ongoing shifts as an ``internationalization of the state''through which ``adjustment to global competitiveness [becomes] thenew categorical imperative.''78 In this sense, the neoliberal project ofderegulation and liberalization, which has been pursued since the1980s, has been closely intertwined with various forms ofreregulationthrough which states have actively promoted the globalization process.These internationalizing, reregulatory strategies have included thedeployment of new forms of industrial, technology, and urban-regional

policy; the construction of new legal regimes and nancial regulations;

and the establishment of new entrepreneurial institutional forms toenhance the productive force of selected urban-regional growth poleswithin each state's territory.79 Thus emerges, as Cerny argues, a newtype of ``competition state'' whose central priority is to create a favor-able investment climate for transnational capital; consequently, ``thestate itself becomes an agent for the commodication of the collective,situated in a wider, market-dominated playing eld.'' 80

This qualitative reorientation of state policies toward the promotion of

global economic competition has been closely intertwined with a re-territorialization and re-scaling of the state itself ^ a process that hasbeen described as a ``hollowing out''or ` glocalization'' of state territor-iality.81 This re-scaling of the state is not merely a defensive response

65


28/40

to intensied global economic competition, but a concerted strategy tocreate new scales of state regulation to facilitate and coordinate theglobalization process. On one scale, states have promoted economic

globalization by forming supra-national economic blocs such as theEU, NAFTA, ASEAN, and the like, which operate at once to enforceregional structural competitiveness and as protective barriers to globalcompetition. Supra-national agencies such as the IMF and the WorldBank have likewise acquired an expanding role in enforcing market-ledstrategies of socioeconomic restructuring. On sub-state scales, mean-while, states have devolved substantial aspects of their governancecapacities to regional and local institutions, which are better positioned

to restructure major urban regions.82 This downward devolution of

state power has also frequently served as a centrally organized strategyto promote ecient capital investment on urban and regional scales,whether through large-scale infrastructural projects, locally organized``workfare'' policies, or through other entrepreneurial initiatives suchas public-private partnerships. The current wave of state re-scaling cantherefore be interpreted as a strategy of political restructuring thataims to enhance the locationally specic productive forces of each levelof state territorial organization.

Cerny has vividly described this simultaneous institutional fragmenta-tion and re-scaling of state power as a ``whipsaw eect'' through whicheach level of the state attempts to react to an overwhelming range ofpressures, forces, and constraints.83 A central geographical consequence

of this ``whipsaw eect'' has been the construction of ``pluri-lateral''forms of state power that no longer converge upon any one optimalscale or coalesce together within a nationally scaled bureaucratichierarchy.84 As John Ruggie has argued, the rise of these new, ``multi-

perspectival'' institutional forms also appears to signal an ``unbundling''of the isomorphic link between territory and sovereignty that has longunderpinned the modern interstate system.85 Crucially, however, thisunbundling of territory and sovereignty does not herald the end ofstate territoriality, as Ruggie's analysis of the ``postmodern space ofows'' implies, but rather the consolidation of increasingly poly-morphic political geographies in which territoriality is redierentiatedand reparcelized among multiple institutional forms that are not clus-tered around a single predominant center of gravity. If the traditional

Westphalian image of political space as a self-enclosed geographicalcontainer is today becoming increasingly obsolete, territoriality remainsa fundamental component of state power and an essential geographicalscaolding for the globalization process. Territoriality is no longer

66


29/40

organized predominantly or exclusively on the national scale, but sub-and supra-national congurations of state territorial organization con-

tinue to play crucial roles as xed geographical infrastructures upon,

within, and through which global ows circulate. Consequently, asJames Anderson has argued, new geographical metaphors and con-cepts are needed to grasp these emergent, post-Westphalian politicalgeographies:

The contemporary world is not a ladder up or down which processes movefrom one rung to the next in an orderly fashion, the central state mediatingall links between the external or higher levels and the internal or lower ones.That was never the case, but it is even less true today. Not only are there nowmore rungs but qualitatively they are more heterogenous; and direct move-ments between high and low levels, missing out or bypassing ``intermediate''rungs, are now a dening characteristic of contemporary life. A complex setof climbing frames, slides, swings, ropes and rope ladders, complete withweak or broken parts ... might be nearer the mark. The metaphor of adven-ture playgrounds, with their mixture of constructions, multiple levels andencouragement of movement ^ up, down, sideways, diagonally, directly from

high to low, or low to high ^ captures the contemporary mixture of formsand processes much better than the ladder metaphor.86

By indicating the ways in which a historically entrenched form ofstate territoriality is currently being superseded, deterritorializationresearchers have made an important contribution to the project oftheorizing social space in an explicitly historical manner. However,because they recognize the historicity of territoriality primarily interms of its disappearance, obsolesence, or demise, deterritorializationapproaches to globalization research cannot analyze the types of qual-itative recongurations and re-scalings of territoriality that have beenbriey sketched above. If the role of the national scale as an auto-

centric socioeconomic container has been undermined during the lastthree decades, the importance of territoriality has actually intensied:for it is only through the construction of xed geographical infrastruc-tures that the global circulation of capital, money, commodities, andpeople can be continually accelerated and expanded. The reterritorial-ization and re-scaling of nationally organized congurations of statepower has proved to be a major strategy for securing this moment ofterritorialization under contemporary global conditions.

67


30/40

The challenges of globalization

Like the forms of state-centrism that have dominated the social sciences

for much of the last century, the methodological opposition betweenglobal territorialist and deterritorialization approaches to globalization

studies can be viewed as a real abstraction of contemporary socialrelations. Throughout the preceding discussion I have argued that each

of these approaches grasps real dimensions of contemporary socialreality. As noted, capital has long presupposed a moment of territorialxity or place-boundedness as a basic prerequisite for its circulationprocess. Whereas state-centric epistemologies fetishize this territorial-ist moment of capitalism, deterritorialization approaches embrace an

inverse position, in which territoriality is said to erode in the face ofglobalization. The bifurcation of contemporary globalization studiesinto these opposed methodological approaches reects these contra-dictory aspects of contemporary spatial practices without criticallyexplaining them.

The theorization of globalization developed here suggests that bothterritorialization and deterritorialization are constitutive moments ofan ongoing dialectic through which social space is continually produced,

recongured, and transformed under capitalism. Thus conceived, thecontemporary round of globalization entails neither the absolute terri-torialization of societies, economies, or cultures on a global scale northeir complete deterritorialization into a supra-territorial, distanceless,

borderless space of ows, but rather a multi-scalar restructuring ofcapitalist territorial organization. In my view, a crucial challenge forfuture globalization research is to develop an epistemology of socialspace that can grasp both these dimensions of contemporary spatial

practices. The present article has attempted to outline some broadmethodological guidelines for this task. In particular, three centralmethodological challenges can be emphasized.

1) The historicity of social space. Globalization has put into relief thehistoricity of state territoriality as a form of sociospatial organization.As the role of state territoriality as an organizational framework forsocial relations is decentered, relativized, and transformed, the histor-ical, dynamic character of social space becomes manifest both in every-

day life and in sociological analysis. The overarching methodologicalchallenge that ows from this circumstance is to analyze globalizationas an ongoing historical process in which the spatiality of social rela-tions is continually recongured and transformed.

68


31/40

2) The historical geography of spatial scales. Globalization has de-centered the national scale of social relations and intensied theimportance of both sub- and supra-national scales of territorial organ-

ization. These transformations undermine conceptions of geographicalscale as a static, xed platform and reveal its socially produced andpolitically contested character. Geographical scales are not only aproduct of political-economic processes but serve at once as theirpresupposition and their medium. As the territorial organization ofscales is transformed, new scalar congurations emerge that in turnprovide relatively stabilized, territorial frameworks for social relationsuntil the next round of re-scaling and reterritorialization. The resultantmethodological challenge, therefore, is to conceive congurations of

geographical scales at once as the territorial scaolding within whichthe dialectic of de- and reterritorialization unfolds and as the histor-ically produced, incessantly changing medium of that dialectic.

3) Territorial organization, territoriality, and sociospatial form. Todaystate territoriality is increasingly intertwined with and superimposedupon various emergent spatial forms ^ from the institutional structures

of the EU and NAFTA to global nancial ows, post-Fordist forms ofindustrial organization, global urban hierarchies, and transnationaldiasporic networks ^ that cannot be described adequately as contiguous,

mutually exclusive, and self-enclosed blocks of space. Meanwhile stateinstitutions are themselves being radically re-scaled at once upward,downward, and outward to create polymorphic layers of state territo-rial organization that no longer overlap evenly with one another orconverge upon a single, dominant geographical scale. Under thesecircumstances, the image of global social space as a complex mosaicof superimposed and interpenetrating nodes, levels, scales, and mor-

phologies has become more appropriate than the traditional Cartesianmodel of homogenous, interlinked blocks of territory associated withthe modern interstate system.87 New representations of sociospatialform are needed to analyze these emergent pluri-territorial, polycentric,

and multi-scalar geographies of globalization. A crucial methodolog-ical challenge for globalization studies is therefore to analyze currentlyemergent geographies in ways that transcend the imperative to choosebetween purely territorialist and non-territorialist or deterritorializedmappings of social and political space.

69


32/40

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Manu Goswami for helpful discussions and comments.

For incisive criticisms and suggestions on earlier drafts, I am also grate-ful to Beate Fietze, Julian Go, Victoria S. Johnson, Moishe Postone,Bill Sewell, and the Editors ofTheory and Society. Finally, I would liketo thank the participants in the Social Theory Workshop at the Univer-

sity of Chicago for their critical engagement with this project. The usual

disclaimers apply.

Notes

1. John Agnew, ``The hidden geographies of social science and the myth of the `geo-graphic turn,''' Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13 (1995): 379.

2. The social-scientic literatures on globalization have grown immensely during thelast two decades. For recent general overviews, see e.g., Ulrich Beck, Was istGlobalisierung?(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997); Joseph Camilleri and JimFalk, The End of Sovereignty? The Politics of a Shrinking and Fragmenting World(Brookeld, Vt.: Edward Elgar, 1992); David Held, Democracy and the GlobalOrder (London: Polity, 1995); Culture, Globalization and the World-System, ed.Anthony King (London: Macmillan, 1991); Globalization: Theory and Practice, ed.

Eleonore Kofman and Gillian Youngs (London: Pinter, 1996); Globalization andTerritorial Identities, ed. Zdravko Mlinar (Brookeld: Averbury, 1992); Globaliza-tion: Critical Reections, ed. James Mittelman (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1997);Leslie Sklair, Sociology of the Global System (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf,1991); and Malcom Waters, Globalization (New York: Routledge, 1995).

3. On these and other controversies among globalization researchers, see, e.g., AshAmin, ``Placing globalization,'' Theory, Culture & Society 14/2 (1997): 123^137;Samir Amin, ``The challenge of globalization,'' Review of International PoliticalEconomy 3/2 (1996): 216^259; Jenseits der Nationalokonomie? Weltwirtschaft undNationalstaat zwischen Globalisierung und Regionalisierung, ed. Steen Becker et

al. (Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 1997); David Harvey, ``Globalization in question,''Rethinking Marxism 8/4 (1995): 1^17; Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Global-

ization in Question (London: Polity, 1996); Michael Mann, ``Has globalization ended

the rise and rise of the nation-state?'' Review of International Political Economy 4/3

(1997): 472^496; Jan Aart Scholte, ``Global capitalism and the state,'' International

Aairs 73/3 (1997): 427^452; The Limits to Globalization, ed. Alan Scott (London:

Routledge, 1997); Robert Wade, ``Globalization and its limits: reports of the death of

the national economy are greatly exaggerated,'' in National Diversity and Global

Capitalism, ed. Susanne Berger and Robert Dore (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

1996).

4. This phrase is the subtitle of Edward Soja's Postmodern Geographies (New York:

Verso, 1989).5. See e.g., John Agnew, ``The territorial trap: the geographical assumptions of inter-

national relations theory,'' Review of International Political Economy 1/1 (1994):53^80; Peter J. Taylor,

Documents

Beyond State Centrism1999brenner