Restructuring Territoriality: Europe and the United States Compared
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Restructuring Territoriality: Europe and the United States Compared
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780521532624 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/12/2004 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 316 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.98(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.91(d) |
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Cambridge University Press
0521825555 - Restructuring Territoriality - Europe and the United States Compared - Edited by Christopher K. Ansell, Giuseppe Di Palma
Excerpt
PART I
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS
I
Restructuring Authority and Territoriality
Christopher K. Ansell
This book represents the fruits of a collective inquiry begun in 1997 with the support of the Institute for European Studies and the Institute for Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the European University Institute in Florence. Our inquiry was initially prompted by John Gerard Ruggie's provocative analysis about the "unbundling of territoriality" (Ruggie 1993).1 Beginning with an analysis of authority relations in medieval Europe, Ruggie argues that the "medieval system of rule was structured by a non-exclusive form of territoriality, in which authority was both personalized and parcelized within and across territorial formations." In contrast, the distinctive feature of the modern system of rule is that it "differentiated its subject collectivity into territorially defined, fixed, and mutually exclusive enclaves of legitimate domination." Ruggie argues that, as exemplified by the project of European integration, contemporary trends represent an "unbundling of territoriality." As the foundational principle of modern politics, territoriality is receding in favor of a nonterritorial, functional organization of political authority. While some have seen this development as a return to the medieval pattern of "overlapping authorities," Ruggie interprets these developments as a postmodern turn.
In many respects, Ruggie's argument is simply one of the more subtle and provocative examples of an emerging genre arguing that the modern state and the modern state system are being challenged, and perhaps eroded, by a variety of forces ranging from domestic privatization to economic and cultural globalization. The conventional argument runs roughly as follows. After steady expansion of the size and scope of states in the postwar era, a variety of social forces have sought to curtail and reverse this expansion. Waves of privatization of public services, deregulation of utilities and markets, and deconcentration or decentralization of service and authority to lower levels of government appear to have reversed the trend toward expansion of the state's role in the economy and the provision of social welfare. This "retreat of the state" has coincided with a trend toward the internationalization of markets and the development of new information technologies that appear to "shrink" space by allowing denser communication across national borders. As a result, control over territorial borders has decreased as the crossborder mobility of people, goods, information, capital, and social bads like crime, drugs, and pollution have increased. This "globalization" occurs at a time when the collapse of the Soviet Union (not to mention the earlier collapse of European colonialism) has left in its wake a series of weak "quasistates" or "semisovereign" states whose territorial borders only weakly coincide with societal interests and identities. When combined, these various factors have encouraged an internationalization of governance - an expansion in the scope and role of international organizations and the creation of new "transnational" societal interests and identities. In short, just as the internal and external authority of the state seems to be entering a phase of decline, the demands of interests and identities transcending the territorial state appear to be on the rise.
As a group, we neither endorse nor reject this description of the world. Instead, we see it more as a description of the current terms of debate about the nature of political change. At the center of this debate is often the claim that what is being challenged is state sovereignty (e.g., Boon-Thong and Shamsul Bahrin 1998; Camilleri and Falk 1992; Cusimano 2000; Elkins 1995; and Ohmae 1991). The critical issue, however, is not fundamentally about the various infringements to sovereignty perpetrated or suffered by this or that country. As Stephen Krasner points out, infringements to sovereignty are nothing particularly new - they have been a continuous and ever-present dynamic in modern states and the modern state system (Krasner 1999). Rather, sovereignty is interesting precisely to the extent that it acts as the constitutive principle in organizing the territoriality referred to by Ruggie - the "fixed and mutually exclusive enclaves of legitimate domination." Sovereignty is a powerful concept because it connects the organization of "domestic" authority to claims about the autonomy and authority of one territorial state vis-à-vis others. Conceptually, and in practice, it connects the organization of modern democracy with the organization of the international system.2
What is important and novel about the chapters in this book is that they are all concerned with challenges or changes to this basic constitutive feature of modern political order - and ultimately, to this nexus between the organization of domestic politics and international politics. Taking the "unbundling of territoriality" or "challenges to sovereignty" as our starting point, we asked ourselves what this portends for the basic organization of modern political order. As with most such projects, however, we found it necessary to spend much of our time grappling with the theoretical and empirical meaning of our basic analytical framework. Quite soon, we became uncomfortable with the "unbundling of territoriality" as a statement of what was happening in the world. The European Union (EU), for instance, might be better described as a "rebundling" of territorialities than an "unbundling." While neofunctionalist scholars have long interpreted the EU as a space of "functional" organization, it also appears in much recent work as a space of multiple functional and territorial jurisdictions cast on a larger scale. Our group has also noted a trend toward the increasing prominence of subnational regions in national, European, and international affairs - a territorial rebundling that arguably results from the very factors seen as making territoriality increasingly irrelevant. Gradually, we have come to believe that asking how the relationship between territory and governance is changing is more useful that asking how it is coming unglued.
From the beginning, the concept of sovereignty also posed problems for our collective inquiry. Sovereignty has been called an "essentially contested concept" - a place where scholars fear to tread. In recent years, a number of scholars have sought to "deconstruct" the concept or to demonstrate the way in which it operates as a "social construction" (Bartelson 1993; Biersteker and Weber 1996; Shinoda 2000; Weber 1995). While provocative and important, these discussions have tended to make the analytical value of the concept more obscure to us. Perhaps of all the current discussions of sovereignty, we found Krasner's distinction between four different types of sovereignty (international legal, Westphalian, domestic, and interdependence) as offering the most analytical clarity. He argues persuasively that it is useful to treat each of these types as independent on the grounds that they have different logics and may even contradict one another. Ultimately, however, we have adopted a somewhat different strategy. We have found it useful to focus on two common denominators in Krasner's definitions (as well as in nearly all definitions of sovereignty of which we are aware). First, all four types of sovereignty commonly presume "territoriality" - that the state is a "discrete" (and for the most part, spatially contiguous) territorial unit demarcated by boundaries, and that the world is carved up politically into discrete, territorially demarcated political units. Second, all four types of sovereignty described by Krasner concern claims about public authority over territory.3 As Cynthia Weber puts it, "Generally, sovereignty is taken to mean the absolute authority a state holds over a territory and people as well as independence internationally and recognition by other sovereign states as a sovereign state" (Weber 1995: 1). As Christopher McMahon's recent analysis of authority suggests, the state itself can be defined "simply as an entity that claims to have supreme authority in a given territory" (McMahon 1994: 40). As will be further explicated in this introduction, territoriality and authority are more fundamental terms than sovereignty and hence more useful in examining the basic constitutive features of modern political order.
At the core of the modern conception of state sovereignty is the ontology that a region of physical space - usually though not always contiguous - can be conceived of as a corporate personality (which includes the weak sense of an association).4 As constructivist analyses of sovereignty have shown, this ontology was something that had to be conceived and constructed (Wendt 1992). It was not simply a fact of nature, though in many cases it has come to be conceived as such. As a corporate personality, the sovereign state was also a legal personality that could be assigned rights and duties, and more generally, authority. The legal character of this territorial corporation could vary greatly, as could the organization of offices that every corporate body must organize to execute these rights and duties. So too could the precise content and character of the rights and duties attributed to these offices.5 The unity of this public authority, however, has generally been regarded as a hallmark of the so-called Westphalian states. As James A. Caporaso and Joseph Jupille succinctly put it in their contribution to this book, the creation of the Westphalian state required a movement "from parcellization to consolidation [of authority], from personalization to institutionalization [of authority], and from a nonspatial ontology to a territorial one."6
One important reason for focusing on authority rather than sovereignty is that sovereignty is almost inextricably linked to territoriality.7 It is therefore difficult to examine their covariation. Arguably, it is a better formulation of Ruggie's original problem to say that what has become "unbundled" is authority rather than territoriality. In some cases, authority is being unbundled within the territorial state - as when public authority is being privatized or deconcentrated - or new forms of authority are being created beyond the state. These new forms of authority may ultimately derive their authority from the territorial state or may be constituted along nonterritorial lines.8 In still other cases, it is useful to think of authority as being "rebundled" - when discrete bundles of functional or territorial authority are joined together in new combinations (themselves territorial or functional). To examine whether and how authority is becoming unbundled and rebundled, we must first expand our analysis of authority.
While sovereignty may be claimed to be the ultimate, supreme, or final binding authority within a territory, it is necessary to recall that this never has meant complete, comprehensive, or unlimited authority over activities and behaviors taking place within a territory. Other authorities have always existed within and beyond the territorial state. It is true that these authorities may have been subject to the state's claim of being the highest authority, yet modern democratic states have never held unlimited authority over these "private" authorities. Nor do these private authorities necessarily derive their authority from the sovereign state.9 The American Medical Association, the German Lutheran Church, British firms, and Italian parents have always been bearers of "private" (and sometimes quasipublic) authority.10 While this authority has certainly come in conflict with the "public" authority of the state (and the boundaries between public and private authority have been continuously negotiated), these authority claims have for the most part either reinforced the territorial basis of public authority or else posed no challenge to it.
This last point ultimately helps to clarify what is distinctive about current changes in the state system. The principle of territoriality, as described by Ruggie, has meant that public authority has been demarcated by discrete boundaries of national territory. But so too has the articulation of societal interests and identities that both buttress and make demands upon this authority. Nationalism is the most important and salient example of the coincidence of societal identities and territorial authority (Berezin, in press). Yet this coincidence has always been imperfect. There have always been group identities and interests that fit uncomfortably within the boundaries of the territorial state (particularly religious and ethnic identities). The Catholic Church or the international labor movement are good examples. Yet to a large degree, the evolution of forms of interest intermediation in the last century has largely conformed with national territorial boundaries. For example, while labor movements have always had a strong inclination toward internationalism, they have been predominantly organized around and oriented toward national authority. It is true, of course, that interests and identities within national boundaries have been predominantly, though not exclusively, organized along functional rather than territorial lines. They have sought to represent certain statuses or classes of actors within the territorial state. But as Stefano Bartolini argues in his contribution to this book, this is precisely because the state itself has largely monopolized territorial forms of representation.
Thus, the consolidation of territoriality, the organization of public and private authority, and the articulation of societal interests and identities have for the most part been coincident over the last century. In a sense, they have "coevolved" together in a mutually reinforcing way that makes it difficult to consider the existence of one without the other. The individual contributions to this book, which we can now introduce, all explore the political implications of a world in which the mutually reinforcing relations among territory, authority, and societal interests and identities can no longer be taken for granted.
THE CONTRIBUTION OF INDIVIDUAL CHAPTERS
In bringing these individual contributions together, this book suggests different theoretical logics for understanding the changing relationship between territory, authority, and societal interests and identities. While all the chapters of this book explore this new terrain, Chapters 2 and 3, by Bartolini and Sidney Tarrow respectively, explicitly seek to formulate broad theoretical models for understanding this evolving relationship. Though they share certain observations about the nature of political change, these authors' theoretical differences lead them to different conclusions about the scope and extent of this change. For these reasons, a comparison of their contributions is a very useful place to begin our discussion.
Drawing on Stein Rokkan's pioneering work on the territorial structuring of modern European states, Bartolini's chapter attempts to establish a baseline for understanding the contemporary changes wrought by economic internationalization and European integration. From this Rokkanian perspective, the territorial structuring of states was a difficult and uneven historical process in which the consolidation of the external borders of the state vis-à-vis other states was interdependent with the ability of a territorial "center" to hierarchically subordinate or subdue the territorial "periphery." The development of centralized administrative organization (the "modern bureaucratic state") allowed the center both to defend its territorial claims externally and control the periphery internally. The consequences for the subsequent evolution of political authority, interests, and identities were manifold. Drawing on Albert Hirschman's well-known "exit-voice" framework, Bartolini argues that successful state-building sharply reduced the options for "exit" and consequently created a demand for the internal structuring of "voice." The organization of interests and identities along functional and national lines was one critical consequence of the internal demands to exercise voice; democratic institutions and national citizenship were others.
In Bartolini's view, it is precisely the "coincidence of cultural, economic, and politico-administrative boundaries" achieved by this territorial structuring that economic internationalization and European integration now challenge. By increasing the "exit" options for cultural, economic, and political interests and identities, internationalization and European integration pose two fundamental challenges to the territorial dispensation achieved by modern state building. First, exit options challenge the state's domestic authority and its capacity to order domestic affairs authoritatively; second, and simultaneously, expanding exit options reduce the incentives to exercise voice in lieu of exit.
Bartolini suggests a number of important consequences that may follow from this state of affairs. One of the most important is the reemergence of the old "center-periphery" territorial cleavages and the increasing assertiveness of subnational identities and interests. The second - driven by the mobility of capital - is the appearance of a new form of "subnational" territorial competition to attract capital and to develop resources endogenously. Third, by fragmenting the sites of power and decision making, European integration challenges the functional organization of interests and identities premised on the territorial organization of nation-states. Thus, while subnational regionalization disorganizes functional interests and identities from below, European integration disorganizes them from above. The conclusion reached by Bartolini departs significantly from the expectations of neofunctionalist theory: We should expect the European political landscape to be increasingly dominated by a form of "stratarchic territorial representation" rather than national or continental functional representation.
Whereas Bartolini draws on Rokkan and Hirshman to conceptualize the current change in the relationship of territoriality, authority, and interests and identities, Tarrow approaches the issue from a quite different analytical perspective. To Bartolini's marriage of Rokkan's structural perspective with the individualist perspective of Hirschman, Tarrow proposes a different connubial arrangement: the combination of a dynamic "political exchange" model inspired by Alessandro Pizzorno with a relational approach to political contention in the tradition of Charles Tilly. In earlier work examining claims about the emerging transnational nature of contentious politics, Tarrow found examples of both transnational and supranational political mobilization (Imig and Tarrow 2001). However, he also found that evidence for this form of protest was limited and that national mobilization remained by far the dominant form of political contention. From Bartolini's perspective, this limited "Europeanization" of protest makes sense because European integration and economic internationalization have accentuated a transition from functional to "stratarchal territorial representation." But Tarrow suggests that a relational political exchange model offers a particular interpretation of the new forms of European subnational territorial mobilization pointed to by Bartolini. Subnational territories, he argues, are really behaving fundamentally like functional interests ("lobbies") because the logic of political exchange in the EU converts territorial interests into sectoral interests.
The differences between Bartolini and Tarrow are subtle, but ultimately point to different ways of conceptualizing political change. For Bartolini, territorial boundaries are the critical structural feature of modern states; political change depends on the relative ease of exit from these territorial boundaries. For Tarrow, the boundary per se is less important than examining strategies of political exchange, and ease of exit is less important than focusing on the relationships of actors within and across territorial boundaries. Ultimately, these conceptual differences lead to different judgments about whether the political change we are now witnessing is foundational or not. For Bartolini, current events may be seen as a "critical juncture" (to draw on Rokkanian language) in which one mode of interest intermediation is being disorganized and replaced with another. But for Tarrow, national and functional modes of interest intermediation are not being disorganized; rather, the process is one of layering new modes of authority and new opportunities for political coalition on top of existing ones. He sees increasing complexity as authority and coalition building become "composite" in nature, but no fundamental break with the status quo.
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