Sociological Forum, Vol. 12, No. 1, 1997

Review Essay

New Frontiers: Territory, Social Spaces, andthe State

David Jacobson1

INTRODUCTION

A growing literature has recognized the increasing importance of cross-border and transnational flows in the realm of economics, politics, the me-dia, and in culture. This process of "globalization" concerns the emergenceof a global production process and financial markets, the emergence ofnew regional and transnational political entities like NAFTA, the EuropeanUnion, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (to-gether with the erosion in the sovereignty of nation-states), and in culturalterms, "the compression of the world and the intensification of conscious-ness of the world as a whole" (Robertson, 1992:8). People increasingly per-ceive themselves as belonging to a "global unit" (positively or negatively),a process aided by a transnational media, such as CNN or MTV Globali-zation thus has, it has been noted, profound implications for the shape ofpolitics and democracy, citizenship, personal loyalties, the nature of com-munal ties, and the migratory patterns of people across borders and withincountries and regions.

One theme that globalization has stimulated in a part of this literatureis what all this means for the idea and institution of "territoriality"—abounded area, a territory, thought of as homogeneous and often constitu-tive of a community of some kind (Grosby, 1995:145). The association ofnations and states with fixed, clearly demarcated territories has been pre-sumed to be so "given" or even natural that until recently, scholars leftthe issue of territoriality as implicit, a constant like the weather that didnot need to be discussed. Political sociologist Gianfranco Poggi in his TheDevelopment of the Modem State (1978), and the international relationstheorist Kenneth Waltz in his Theory of International Politics (1979), to cite

1Department of Sociology, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287-2101.

121

0884-8971/97/0300-0121$12.50/0 c 1997 Plenum Publishing Corporation

two prominent cases, explicitly or implicitly noted in different ways the ter-ritorial dimension of the state, but territoriality was viewed, so to speak,as an intrinsic element of the state and of politics. Territoriality, as such,was not the object of study. Territoriality as a problematique was at bestleft to the sociobiologists who reinforced the notion of territoriality as natu-ral, even genetic and given, as in the case of Robert Ardrey's The TerritorialImperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Na-tions (1966).

Roughly in the last decade, and under the visible impact of globalizingforces, interest developed in the idea of territoriality as something morefragile than previously thought, together with conceptions of politics andeven nationhood as being analytically and increasingly empirically distinctfrom territoriality per se.

Roland Robertson's seminal work in, among other places, Globaliza-tion: Social Theory and Global Culture (1992) does not put the issue ofterritoriality at its center, but in stressing the increasing "global interde-pendence and the consciousness of the global whole" (8), there are clearimplications for territorial units. Implicit in this perspective, globalizationdoes not negate local "place" or territoriality as such, but it does relativizeit; challenges are presented to the stability and sui generis quality of interalia, territory, space, and place. In the realm of politic; and political econ-omy, David J. Elkins has argued in Beyond Sovereignty: Territory and PoliticalEconomy in the Twenty-First Century (1995) that developments in technol-ogy, especially in electronics and the media, have "shifted the balance"from solely territorially defined politics to nonterritorial forms of organi-zation and identity. This change constitutes a new "logic" that conjures upthe possibility of new notions of citizenship, democracy, community, gov-ernment, and of the place of the individual in society. John Agnew andStuart Corbridge challenge, in Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory, and In-ternational Political Economy (1995), the perspective that stresses "fixityover fluidity, stasis over change." They argue that there is a growing de-territorialization of economic power, and that in this context, the nation-state is losing its "geographic primacy."

Particularly striking is the fading role of a territory in defining a people(as in the nation-state), at least in the West, and the subsequent "deterri-torialization of identity." This follows the massive transnational migrationof people into Western Europe and the United States from Third Worldcountries and the growing diasporas—permanent foreign populations, suchas "guestworkers," refugees, illegal immigrants, and other foreigners whoshowed little interest in naturalizing or assimilating. Clearly, the idea thatland and people were tightly bound together in a unitary state was becom-ing more tenuous. Tomas Hammar, in his Democracy and the Nation State

122 Jacobson

(1990), suggested in this context that membership of a nation and mem-bership of the state was becoming bifurcated; implicitly, the premise thata territory constitutes or defines a people, as in the nation-state, becameat least in question. Yasemin Soysal, in Limits of Citizenship: Migrants andPostnational Membership in Europe (1994), noted how guestworkers "vio-lated the presumed congruence between membership and territory," andthat the growing phenomenon of dual citizenship added to the geographicfluidity of membership.

In Rights Across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship(1996), I noted that transnational migrations have had the effect of do-mesticating global, North-South divisions in the United States and WesternEurope and, furthermore, living in a diaspora is becoming a common ex-perience rather than being marginal. For Turks in Germany or Mexicansin the United States, "home" metaphorically and even literally was some-where else. Even "nationals" begin to feel removed from "their homelands"as a once homogeneous landscape—in political beliefs or ethnically—be-comes a roughly stitched quilt of often competing ethnicities and beliefs.Under the impact of transnational migrations, the nation-state is being "un-packed." Community, polity, and territory are becoming, rather than coex-tensive, discrete if overlapping spheres. Regional and transnational politicalinstitutions, transnational, subnational, and diasporic communities, and thestate itself, now more an administrative entity that is increasingly beingstripped of its primordial quality, occupy different (if linked and partlyshared) spaces. Identities are being deterritorialized.

Focusing on the interplay of geographies—moral, social, and physical—Iask in this essay, then, what happens, as is happening now, when peoples andtheir lands become uncoupled and when communities increasingly live out-side their imputed homelands, in diasporas? What does such an "uncoupling"bode for the boundaries of community and the shape of politics?

THE MODERN STATE AND TERRITORIALITY

It is difficult, for those in the West, to understand the multilayerednature of "place": its geographic, social, moral, and economic qualities; itspromise of order, functional and metaphysical ("to know one's place"); andits designation not only of a location but a state of being. One's place isone's home. Home is a refuge and a point of departure, it is an orientationto the world. Home is existentially where one feels secure.

Place, home, soil. These allusions are often biblical with the world-to-come portrayed as the "eternal home" after life's journey. "Then shall thedust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who

New Frontiers 123

gave it."2 In contrast to being in one's place, travel is portrayed in termsof its root meaning, a travail. In the words of one poet, "Half to forgetthe wandering and the pain/... And dream and dream that I am homeagain!"3

The difficulty in understanding the different nuances of place is dueto the way the idea of the nation-state has blended and made indistinguish-able, its geographic, communal, and political dimensions. Nation-statesfrom their beginnings in 17th-century Europe knitted the territorial, na-tional (and religious), and political strands of collective identity into wholecloth. The Dutch Republic from its independence in 1648 represented ter-ritorial integrity, a new (republican) politics, and a newly expressed senseof (religiously based) nationhood at one and the same time. The AmericanRevolution in 1776 demarcated a territory, established a new people, anddeclared a new form of government in, so to speak, a single act. The FrenchRevolution did the same in 1789. The political systems in each case weredistinctly different, though all republican in the broad sense. Nevertheless,nation and state, the people and the land, came to be conceptualized asan integral whole, singular in their unity. The marriage of nation, state,and territory has often led social and political analysts to reduce the stateto a single dimension: the territorial. But as peoples' moral associationswith geography change (for example, living as diasporic peoples, or imag-ining themselves as such, with their symbolic centers lying elsewhere), thevery nature of "politics" and community changes.

The moral connection to a territory was not only religious or nation-alist but was inherent in the political culture of civic or republican politicswhich emerges in 17th-century Europe and blossoms with the Americanand French Revolutions. The extensive and ongoing discussion on civic poli-tics or civil society—particularly now when it is perceived to be in de-cline—omits one aspect of civil society, namely, the territorial dimension.Civic societies are, as they are presented at least, made up not only ofactive citizens but also of persons bound together on the basis of voluntaryassociations, such as churches, political parties, unions, sororities, parent-teacher associations and the like, and by relatively abstract ideas and beliefsof a political, social, or religious character.

When we consider western countries today, and the United States inparticular, we do in fact witness declining "civic engagement." Political par-ticipation and measures of "social trust," and membership in specific or-ganizations, have been in decline for two decades in the United States.Even simple social engagement is down. Membership of "nationality" clubs,on the other hand, is up (Putnam, 1995: 664-683). In both the general me-

2Ecclesiastes 12:1.3James Elroy Flecker 1884-1915.

124 Jacobson

dia and in academia, this decline in civic membership and voluntarism andits causes have been extensively discussed; television has been blamed asa major force in this decline (Putnam, 1995: 677-681).4

Curiously, this debate has been almost completely detached from dis-cussions on changing conditions associated with immigration, foreignpopulations, and growing transnational associations. Over a period ofthirty years in the United States and, more recently, in Europe, interestin naturalization has been declining, and the value attached to citizenship(in terms of the affiliations it demands) is evolving in new directions.5Dual citizenship is becoming more common. With the fading of the tra-ditional conception of citizenship as a singular loyalty (these processes im-plicate natives as well as foreign-born residents) so the moral tie betweenland and people becomes attenuated or, at least, conceptualized in lessexclusive, felt ways. In other words, the decline of civil society and theweakening of territorial identities may well be intricately tied to eachother.6

Social and communal boundaries are consequently becoming quite dis-tinct from territorial boundaries. Political models associated with the nation-state—of the state embodying the "general will" and the will of thepeople—are becoming less able to accommodate recent social developments.

MORAL TERRITORIES

Borders and boundaries designate moral proximity and moral distance,inclusion and exclusion.7 Boundaries, be they geographic or nongeographic,are forms of "markers"—visible signs, as Erving Goffman (1971) described

4Putnam's findings were at first even more dramatic, suggesting that membership across as-sociations, from boy scouts to rotary clubs, had declined on average 25% in the period1974-1994. But a subsequent correction said that there had been only a slight decline in thisperiod in group memberships, though other indicators of civic disengagement remain valid.(See correction on Netscape http://epn.org/prospect/putn-cor.html [November 1996].) Put-nam's argument has been critiqued. See, for example, Greeley (1996).

5See Jacobson (1996). From 1995 there was a massive increase in requests for naturalizationin the U.S. The different factors that account for the increase in naturalization requests havebeen presumed to be Proposition 187 in California, which would limit benefits available toillegal immigrants, the presumption that Mexico would legalize dual citizenship (affecting thesingle largest body of immigrants in the United States), the effects of a large cohort of personseligible for citizenship under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, bureaucraticstreamlining and changes at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the new welfarelaw enacted in 1996. Still, the differential impact of these factors has yet to be clarified andwe do not yet know to what extent we are witnessing cohort effects (which would not affectrates of naturalization) and to what extent we are seeing changing rates, rather than increasedabsolute numbers, of naturalization.

6This not to say, of course, that other factors do not play a role as well.7See discussion in Lyman (1995).

New Frontiers 125

them, of a "territory" of some kind. Markers can delineate physical bordersbut so can clothes, architectural designs, an umbrella on a beach, dietarylaws like kashrut or vegetarianism, and so on. Markers can be fixed (likestate boundaries), transient (space on a beach), or transportable (likeclothes).8 "Space" and "social distance" become the elements that, in asense, define social and political forms (Lyman, 1995:126). Marriage,friendship, comradeship, kinship, conflict, work, play., and notions of privateand public indicate varying forms of association and social spacing. The"social order" is implicitly about spacing, about maintaining the "proper"patterns of interaction. This characteristic of social order is apparent inthe most pedestrian of human circumstances:

A condition of order at the junction of crowded city thoroughfares implies primarilyan absence of collisions between men or vehicles that interfere with one another...[Order] does not exist when people are constantly colliding with one another. Butwhen all meet or overtake one another in crowded ways [and] take the time and painsneeded to avoid collision, the throng is orderly. Now, at the bottom of the notion ofsocial order lies the same idea. The members of an orderly community do not go outof their way to aggress upon one another. Moreover, whenever their pursuits interfere,they make the adjustments necessary to escape collision and make them according tosome conventional rule.9

What is striking about social distance on the most personal level isthat it is intricately related to the shape and form of society as a whole.For example, a society that prides itself on the rights of privacy and theindividual will conversely limit the public reach of government. As the Ger-man sociologist Georg Simmel wrote,

[A] sort of circle . . . surrounds man [and] is filled out by his affairs and by hischaracteristics. To penetrate this circle by taking notice, constitutes a violation ofhis personality .... The question where this boundary lies [around the individual]cannot be answered in terms of a simple principle; it leads into the finestramifications of societal formation. (Simmel, 1950:322)

Thus moral distancing and closeness are the very warp-and-woof of thesocial fabric:

Concord, harmony, coefficacy, which are unquestionably held to be socializingforces, must nevertheless be interspersed with distance, competition, repulsion, inorder to yield the actual configuration of society. (Simmel, 1950:315)

Conversely, in Maoist China, for example, the self was subsumed underthe collective interest. "Comradeship" became the mode of personal rela-tions in place of friendship.10 Comradeship implies a universal moralitywherein all are equal. Friendships imply the presence of a "particularistic"universe closed to outsiders and thus purportedly threaten the collective

8See Goffman (1971). Goffman explains the notion of "marker" on p. 41.9See Ross (1908:1). Ross is cited in Goffman (1971:6). Emphasis in original.10See Vogel (1969).

126 Jacobson

communal interest. Instead, a norm of universal civility and helpfulness isto be encouraged.11

"Moral territories" exist, almost by definition, in any social order. Butthese moral cartographies or maps do not, by any means, have to be co-extensive with physical territories, as in the nation-state. As Stanford Lymanwrites, "interactional territories may be spatial but [may not be] necessarilycartographed on a geopolitical map." In a world of massive migrant andrefugee flows, global productive processes, transnational ethnicities, and theinternet, this point becomes abundantly clear (Lyman, 1995:132).

IB the nation-state, we noted, territory has served as a "social space"(in the form of the national community) as well as a geographic demarca-tion; or, to put it a another way, territory has served to define the nation,its history and memory, its place and location in the metaphorical as wellas in the literal sense. With the erosion of territory as the preeminentmarker of political and national community, we need to ask ourselves whatnongeographic forms of "social space," of community, are, in a piecemealfashion, replacing or supplementing geographic markers? And, what is themeaning of "politics" in this context, given the inherently geographic char-acter of the republican, civic polity associated with the nation-state?

NEW SOCIAL MARKINGS

Michael Walzer once warned that if national borders were not main-tained as markers of a national community, internal distinctions and de-marcations would become more pronounced. The admission andexclusion of immigrants, he suggested, was at the very core of "communalindependence." The sense of a common life, of an historically stable, on-going association, and of a community with a special and mutual com-mitment could not be maintained without such markers. If these nationalmarkers weakened, internal boundaries would come to the fore to thepoint of insular "fortresses" emerging (Walzer, 1983:62-63). Walzer hasproved to be at least partly correct, though the darker side of this pictureappears true for only, say, parts of Los Angeles and some other urbancenters.

As national borders become less significant as markers of identity, internaldomestic boundaries and markers (not necessarily of a geographic kind) havebecome more pronounced. The idiom of "multiculturalism" may be in conten-tion, but there is increasing recognition the melting-pot ideal cannot be resur-

nln Emile Durkheim's terms, the individual "depends upon [others] to the very extent he isdistinguished from them" and these set of relationships are inherently moral. See Durkheim(1984:172).

New Frontiers 127

reeted12 (Curiously, in the United States it appears from surveys that there isat one and the same time unease over increasing ethnic and racial divisions andyet a positive view of a multiethnic society.)13 In other words, internal commu-nal distinctions have been increasingly politicized (and even internationalized;these communal identities often cut across national borders). Patterns of asso-ciation and dissociation, and of moral linkages and breaks, are thus shifting inways that cannot easily be fitted onto a political map. This development reflectsa world where diasporic communities are increasingly common, and where onceinternational divisions of North and South, of developed and developing coun-tries, have been internalized within states.14

Thus something akin, yet obviously different, to the medieval skein ofborders and boundaries may be emerging, with interlocking and overlap-ping sociolegal and political entities an emerging norm. In this regard, in-ternational relations cannot be viewed as something distinctly political (or,at best, political and economic), as the discipline of international relations(as well as diplomats) has traditionally viewed its domain free of cross-na-tional communal and social "complications."15 Like the medieval prince(but in a different way), the state finds today that social and political issuescannot easily be untangled from matters concerning, for example, the en-vironment, human rights, and immigration. Domestic, even local, initiativeson, for example, illegal aliens in California produce riots in Mexico City.Thus, as social boundaries come to cut across geographic borders, so socialand communal ties are more and more implicated in international politics.

Territoriality is translocal by its promotion of national or regional iden-tities in place of or to supplement local, village, feudal, or kinship identities.Conversely, as territoriality becomes less significant in marking and defining

12See Joppke (1996).13Recent polls indicate an overwhelming sense among Americans that racial and ethnic ten-

sions have increased and yet, "on balance," Americans believe that increasing numbers ofpeople from many different ethnic groups, races, and nationalities make the United States"a better place to live." Similarly, only 28% of survey respondents say they are "Americanfirst and a member of an ethnic group second." They are more likely to call themselves a"hyphenated" American if those are the only alternatives suggested. See respectively Wash-ington Post poll for survey ended October 6,1995, of 684 respondents (with oversample of279 blacks but with results weighted to represent national adult population); Princeton Sur-vey Research Associates for survey ended January 15, 1996, with sample of 1206 nationalregistered voters; and Gallup Organization, World Values Study Group 1990-1993 (surveyended June 30,1990), with national adult sample of 1839.

14See chapter 7 in Jacobson (1996).l5With the emergence of national states, communal and social issues were, formally at least,

"domesticated." This mirrors internal developments in the modern state: the realm of the"domestic" and of kinship is categorized as part of "private life," and the public arena—ul-timately the state itself—is reserved for politics, unencumbered, so to speak, by kinship,family issues. Civic polities, after all, were in large part a revolt against kinship as a basisfor governance.

128 Jacobson

(national) communities, so local and transnational communal identities areasserted or reasserted.

NEW POLITICAL LANDSCAPES

How are these new social and communal groupings marked, if not ingeographic terms? They can be marked through language, ethnic insignias(clothes, speech, associations), body language, disciplinary distinctions inuniversities, church, and organizational affiliations—what Goffman aptlycalls the "territories of the self (28-61). What is striking about this formof boundedness is that it is fluid, portable—a constantly shifting, yet de-fined, road map. It can be group based, and it can be individual; in a so-called multicultural world, it is predicated on the discourse of "rights," andthis is important for its political configuration. Rights accentuate differ-ences in contrast to collective nations of nationhood (which assume a com-monality), and rights—as in human rights—are portable and are notpredicated, as traditionally is nationhood, on territoriality.

What shape, then, does "politics" take?The "judicialization" of politics in both the U.S. and Western Europe

is inherently tied with, it is argued here, the growing stress on "social space"and personal or group distance (as expressed in, for example, multicultu-ralism) on the one hand and the "deterritorialization" of political and socialrelations on the other. Judicialization is the growing ability of courts inmany parts of the world, particularly in Europe where in many cases par-liaments traditionally have been the supreme branches of government, tovoid legislative acts when they have been deemed to violate constitutionalnorms (Shapiro and Stone, 1994:397). Even in the United States, wheretraditionally the courts have wielded formidable sway over the federal andstate legislatures, the growing importance of human rights in law and rheto-ric has added to the courts' significance. The judiciary places bounds onthe actions of government vis-a-vis the individual; it delineates personaldistance between state and individual or groups, and between individualsand groups themselves. The idiom of judicial (or constitutional) politics isone of "rights."

Conversely, legislative politics is about the collective, public interest,where commonalities (or at least majorities) are stressed. In stressing the"common," the notion of personal space is delimited. This was carried toan extreme in Maoist China where any form of personal space was viewedwith suspicion. In a collective concept of self (such as in the nation-state),there is less a notion of rights (though obviously central to self-governmentand expressions of national self-determination—the relative dimension is

New Frontiers 129

being stressed here), as one is part of a collective whole. Again, to take agraphic example, millions have sacrificed themselves for their nation in war-time. The judicial process is about marking boundaries, not defining com-munal and national goals. Thus, traditionally in nation-states, courts havedeferred to the other branches of government in foreign affairs and otherissues, like immigration, that involve international and cross-border rela-tions. Such judicial intervention was construed as threatening the unitaryand sovereign character of the nation, whereas the legislative and executivebranches imputedly embodied that unitary, national quality.16

The judiciary also serves as a "traffic cop," imposing social order ona world of potentially conflicting spaces; the question becomes all the morecritical as space, no longer territorial per se (in the sense of fixed geo-graphic territories, permanently delimited from one another) has to be con-stantly negotiated. The judiciary reinforces (or seeks to create) a set ofrituals that "respects" social spaces and thus creates or maintains socialorder. The everyday rules that govern "street traffic"—neutral and demand-ing no sense of felt commonality—are, when taken to a higher level, a wayof adjudicating a society where an overarching sense of community is fad-ing. Goffman writes, using the street example:

Take, for example, techniques that pedestrians employ in order to avoid bumpinginto one another. They seem of little significance. However, they are constantly inuse and they cast a pattern on street behavior. Street traffic would be a shambleswithout them. (Goffman, 1971:6)

Needless to say, this serves as an analogy for the social order as a whole.What is interesting is that in societies with a strong collective sense ofself—a common culture, a rooted collective conscience—personal spacemay be more contracted, the public squares more lively, the neighborhoodsless closed and insular, suburbanization less marked. Speech is more vi-brant, less constrained—everything is akin to a family picnic, or squabble.Conversely, where personal space (and group space) is accentuated, so therules of etiquette governing exchanges need to be (for an orderly society)more elaborate, and markers need to be defined. Politeness is the markof distance. This is all the more significant in multicultural environments.(In this context the recent rise of so-termed hate-speech codes and theinternational prohibition of anti-Semitic or racist speech—for example, un-der the European national and regional human rights legal codes—makesociological "sense," though open to debate, of course, on normativegrounds.)

16Another element here is what Durkheim termed the growing importance (with the growingdivision of labor) of restitutive sanctions (civil law) and the concomitant diminution of re-pressive sanctions (criminal law) as the "collective conscience" itself contracts. Restitutivesanctions are about personal space—of character, of property. See Durkheim (1984).

130 Jacobson

Thus with social space no longer being fixed and geographic (and nolonger being coextensive with community), other boundary markers come tothe fore. This is all the more important in a world where international distinc-tions have been internalized within states, and internal (domestic) divisionshave become all the more marked. Furthermore social "markers," being fluidand undefined by fixed geographic space, will necessarily involve more "cross-ings" than geographic borders; in other words, there are many more "borders,"and those borders are constantly shifting about. As Mircea Eliade put it,

The multiplicity, or even the infinity, of centers of the world raises no difficulty forreligious [or communal] thought. For it is not a matter of geometrical space, butof an existential and sacred space that has entirely different structure, that admitsof an infinite number of breaks and hence is capable of an infinite number ofcommunications . . . . (Eliade, 1957:57)

"Self-determination" remains important in this context but, again, itis not geographically defined. Rather, individual and group criteria comeinto play in terms of social space ("the territoriality of the self):

Self-determination turns the whole possibility of using territories of the self in adual way, with comings-into-touch avoided as a means of maintaining respect andengaged in as a means of establishing regard. And on this duality rests the possibilityof according meaning to territorial events and the practicality of doing so. It is nowonder that felt self-determination is crucial to one's sense of what it means to bea fully-fledged person. (Goffman, 1971:60-61)

By extension, this can apply to ethnic, social, religious, and other such groups.In relation to "territorial" claims, individuals (and groups) have "the right andduty to call attention to offenses, demanding that something be done to set mat-ters right"—highlighting once more the judicial element (Goffman, 1971:122).

The growing international salience of international human rights ispart of this: human rights delineate personal and group rights, and"spaces," and are central to the international, regional and national judi-cialization of politics. In delineating social space, human rights contributeto the ordering of society in the sense of the pedestrian analogy describedearlier. (The "hate-speech" laws and prohibitions described earlier are no-table in this regard.)17

In this playing field, the classic model of civil society and the pub-lic-private distinction is turned around: Public space is imbued with socialdistance and avoidance, not community, as in the nation-state and the clas-sic civil society model.18 Community, ironically, is privatized; only in the private

17This is true within judicial forums (such as national courts using international human rights,or the regional organizations, particularly the European Court of Human Rights and theOrganization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) and, internationally, through thepredicating of aid, of recognition, and even active military intervention becoming a functionof a country's human rights practices. All this most valid, of course, in the Euro-Atlanticarena.

18See Arendt (1957).

New Frontiers 131

realm can social distance be "relaxed." Ethnic, social, and religious com-munity is segmented, apart, private.

A FINAL WORD

The future, or lack thereof, of the nation-state is the subject of muchdebate. Many argue, witnessing the continuing importance of "national"and ethnic identities, or the continuing importance of the state, that pro-nouncements of the nation-state's demise are premature. But a certain nu-ance is being lost in this debate: the nation is, indeed alive and well; thestate is, similarly, still centrally important; the nation-state, however, is introuble. It is less and less the case, in the West, that territory constitutesa people in the sense that the land and people are "inextricably" linked inan exclusive relationship or that, more importantly, such a claim can beconvincingly made. The state as a bureaucratic entity remains important,even critical. For example, in the area of international human rights law,it is primarily the state (and its judicial organs) that is the mechanism thatenforces human rights norms. The state is the node, the mediating mecha-nism, of a variety of international institutions and global processes. Yet thestate is less the embodiment of the "general will" but rather the locus of"competing wills" (often of global character). National, ethnic, and socialidentities are increasingly independent of national borders, and are eithertransnational or "localized" in character. "Nation" and "state" are nolonger wedded together. The marriage may well be over.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am deeply grateful to Yosef Lapid, who asked the questions that ledto this essay. I am also indebted to Stephen Cornell, Suzanne Keller,George Thomas, Friedrich Kratochwil, Jamie Goodwin-White, and CarolynForbes for their comments and thoughts.

Agnew, John, and Stuart Corbridge1995 Mastering Space: Hegemony, Terri-

tory, and International Political Econ-omy. London: Routledge.

Ardrey, Robert1966 The Territorial Imperative: A Personal

Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Prop-erty and Nations. New York Atheneum.

Arendt, Hannah1957 The Human Condition. Chicago: The

University of Chicago Press.

132 Jacobson

REFERENCES

Durkheim, Entile1984 The Division of Labor in Society. Trans-

lated by WD. Halls. New York: Free Press.Eliade, Miicea1957 The Sacred and the Profane: The Na-

ture of Religion. New York: Harcourt,Brace and World.

Elkins, David J.1995 Beyond Sovereignty: Territory and Politi-

cal Economy in the Twenty-First Century.Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

New Frontiers 133

Goffman, Erving1971 Relations in Public: Microstudies of the

Public Order. New York: Basic Books.Greeley, Andrew19% "The strange reappearance of civic

America: Religion and volunteering"(Third Draft). Netscape http://www.agreeley.com/civic.html.

Grosby, Steven1995 "Territoriality: The transcendental,

primordial feature of modern socie-ties." Nations and Nationalism 1:143-162.

Hammar, Tomas1990 Democracy and the Nation State.

Aldershot, England: Avebury.Jacobson, David1996 Rights Across Borders: Immigration

and the Decline of Citizenship. Balti-more, MD: The Johns Hopkins Uni-versity Press.

Joppke, Christian1996 "Multiculturalism and immigration: A

comparison of the United States, Ger-many and Britain," Theory and Society25:449-500.

Lyman, Stanford M.1995 "Interstate relations and the sociologi-

cal imagination revisited: From socialdistance to territoriality." SociologicalInquiry 65:125-142.

Poggi, Gianfranco1978 The Development of the Modern

State. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-sity Press.

Putnam, Robert D.1995 "Tuning in, tuning out: The strange

disappearance of social capital." Politi-cal Science and Politics xxvii:664-683.

Robertson, Roland1992 Globalization: Social Theory and

Global Culture. London: Sage.Ross, Edward Alsworth1908 Social Control. New York: Macmillan.Shapiro, Martin, and Alec Stone1994 "The new constitutional politics of

Europe." Comparative Political Stud-ies 26:397-419.

Simmel, Georg1950 The Sociology of Georg Simmel.

Translated by Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe,IL: Free Press.

Soysal, Yasemin1994 Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and

Postnational Membership in Europe.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Vogel, Ezra1969 Canton under Communism: Programs

and Politics in a Provincial Capital,1949-1968. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press.

Waltz, Kenneth1979 Theory of International Politics. Read-

ing, MA: Addison-Welsley.Walzer, Michael1983 Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Plu-

ralism and Equality. New York: BasicBooks.