the scale of political geography - an historic introduction - paul claval

Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie – 2006, Vol. 97, No. 3, pp. 209–221.© 2006 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAGPublished by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

THE SCALE OF POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY: AN HISTORIC INTRODUCTION

PAUL CLAVAL

29 Rue de Solsy, 95600 Eaubonne. France. E-mail: [email protected]

Received in final version: November 2005

ABSTRACTPolitical geography and geopolitics were built on the same basic postulate as political sciencesand the theory of international relations: the nation-state was the relevant scale for all types ofanalysis. This postulate was a reasonable one at the time of the Treaties of Westphalia. This typeof polity triumphed on the international scene at the time when Hobbes wrote the

Leviathan.

The basis of the social contract implicit in the perspective was simple: in order to achievepersonal security, everybody gave up the parcel of freedom (and the associated use of violence)he was naturally endowed with, and delegated it to the

Leviathan

,

the State. The only field wherecompetition between human beings was legitimate at the most elementary level was that ofeconomy. The evolution of the international scene does not only result from the evolution ofweaponry or communication and transport technologies. For many persons today, renouncing anyparcel of their individual freedom appears as a mutilation of their egos. There was a generalagreement in the past on the scale where the analysis of political action had to be developed: ithas disappeared. For a growing part of modern societies, inter-individual or local competitionmay take a political form and rely on the use of violence at all the levels, including the micro-scale. It means that political geography and geopolitics have increasingly to allow for the varietyof scales of political action and the changing relations between the competition for power, wealthand status which are present in every society.

Key words: Scale, State, polity, power, freedom of thought, economic initiative, enterprise,

liberalism, absolutism, totalitarianism, social contract, status

INTRODUCTION

Political geography (which in this paper in-cludes ‘geopolitics’) developed as a disciplinedealing with states rather than with the waypower works in space. For a long time it ignoredthe effects of domination, influence or exploi-tation within civil society and concentrated onthe way the central state or its local subsidiariescontrolled it. As a result, political geography wasmore eager to explore the role of pure powerand the use of legal violence than to evaluatethe influence of ideologies, the legitimising ofpower and the way it created conditions forgovernance with an authority welcomed by themajority of populations.

Today there is a growing interest in thedeconstruction of the social sciences as theywere conceived at the end of the nineteenthand the first decades of the twentieth centuries:the particular interests of their authors wereoften hidden (O’Tuathail 1996); many of theirbasic hypotheses were not explicit, which isindeed an even more serious problem. As aresult, there were biases in the scientific expla-nations they proposed. In order to promote amore reflexive practice of social sciences, it isimportant to go deeper into the foundationsof scientific methods and concepts of the past.

Until twenty-five years ago nobody in poli-tical geography questioned seriously the pro-minence given to a particular scale, that of

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© 2006 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG

the State. Geographers obviously studied whathappened locally, but they generally consideredpower as expressed at this scale as a subsidiaryof the power of the central state, or as a divisionof this power over different regional communi-ties in the case of federal states. They did notreally take into consideration the nature of con-federal states. Above the state scale, inter-national politics was mainly conceived as ascene where states tried to develop their powerbases in alliances against the aggressive policiesof some other states or in enlarging their terri-tories. As a consequence, more attention wasdevoted to the geopolitics of power than to thatof equilibrium and peace (Parker 1985; Claval1992).

The first geographers interested in politicswere certainly responsible for this orientation.When Friedrich Ratzel spoke about the ‘senseof space’ which gave the most advanced peoplestheir superiority, he conceived it as a capacityto develop geostrategies and implement themfor a nation and at the national scale. AdmiralMahan as well as Mackinder reflected on therespective role of armies and navies in shap-ing the world equilibrium (Mahan 1890; Mac-kinder 1904). It was only during the interwarperiod that geographers such as Albert Deman-geon, Georges Ancel or Yves-Marie Gobletbegan to analyse the conditions required inorder to balance the power of states and achievepeaceful conditions (Demangeon 1920; Ancel1936; Goblet 1955). Geographers were not,however, the main actors responsible for theoveremphasis given to the State and the exer-cise of military power. The bias was older. Itcame from the conceptions of political organis-ation that developed from the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries.

THE IDEA OF SOVEREIGNTY AND THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN STATE

The reflection on sovereignty as the centralcharacter of polities is best exemplified by JeanGottmann’s

The Significance of Territory

(1973).We shall follow his book in this section and dwelladditionally on the scales at which sovereignstates worked.

There were states during the Middle Ages,but their structures were complex. Today weconsider it normal that the political map of the

world is made up only of independent states.Since all of them are fully sovereign, they arein a legal sense equivalent, even if they differ insize, population, income and armed forces. Inthe Middle Ages, political structures were muchmore imbricate: the Romano-Germanic Empirewas made of a variety of polities, bishoprics,dukedoms, counties, autonomous cities, etc.,loosely tied by a common but rather formal alle-giance to the emperor. The situation in a king-dom like France was simpler, but the relationsbetween its king and subjects differed accord-ing to the progress of territorial consolidation.The ideas upon which such systems were basedstressed more the role of personal links thanthe authority of the prince over a territory. Asa result, dukes, counts, bishops could be at thesame time powerful rulers in their personal pos-sessions and subordinated to a king elsewhere.Within the same area persons with differentrelations to the king, different rights and differ-ent obligations could coexist.

There were two developments that embodiedthe transformation to sovereign states: RomanLaw with its rationalist impact and the evolutionof weaponry. In the Middle Ages, the law madea difference between a thing and its possibleuses. Either the lord was the official owner ofthe land and his tenants could have the rightto cut some species of trees, collect dead woodand feed their cattle on the fallows, or the ten-ants were seen as holding the lands but werenevertheless obliged to pay a rent or provide apart of their crops to the lord or to other author-ities. Under Roman Law the owner of a landhad the right to use – and misuse – it in the wayhe chose. He was the only owner of the wood,game or crops the land bears. Each thing wasfrom now on considered as a unit; all its possibleuses were attributed to only one person. A sim-ilar simplification transformed the very basis ofpolitical relations: just as an owner was now con-sidered the only legal user of the things belong-ing to him, the king was considered as the onlymaster of the kingdom and its population.Intermediaries (the aristocracy) faced powerreductions. This is the situation called ‘sover-eignty’ which, in the shape of ‘absolutism’, wastheoretically phrased for the first time byJean Bodin in

La République

(1576) and whichallegedly was consolidated with the 1648 Peaceof Westphalia, hence ‘the Westphalian State’


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(Badie 1994). However some authors havepointed out that even after 1648 differentpolities continued to exist: dynastic states thatwere based on personal authority (with territo-rial change as a consequence of inheritanceand marriage) and more truly sovereign statesthat centred on territorial identification such asEngland (Spruyt 1994; Teschke 2003). Whatwas new was the fact that the different types ofstates enjoyed the same status in internationalrelations.

What was the geographical meaning of abso-lute sovereignty? Did it mean that rulers had toeliminate all forms of diffuse power, dominanceand influence, which were at work in the civilsociety they governed? In society, people arenot motivated primarily by the search for power.Social life consists of economic exchanges,shared beliefs and identities. The aims of itsmembers are diverse: they seek wealth, acknowl-edgement, status and intellectual influence.Political power is only one of their objectives.The largest part of social reality escapes govern-mental control. Systems of institutionalisedrelations (family, class age or other forms ofassociations, market relations, caste and privatebureaucracies) organise social life and settle theconflicts they generate. They are based ontraditional values, beliefs and institutions. TheState only needs to provide its subjects with lawsthat reinforce the mechanisms at work in thecivil society. It means that there is a scale for pol-itics and a scale for social life. Is such a systemof relations between the political sphere andcivil society compatible with absolute sover-eignty? Do not the rulers need to control effec-tively what occurs at any scale in their territory?Are not they responsible for the institution-alised relations working in their state?

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,at the time when absolutism was fully theorised,problems states had to cope with were limited:they had still to curb the influence of theirhigh nobility; they had to maintain armies andnavies to defend their boundaries and to buildfortifications to withstand the action of artillery(Parker 1988). In most cases, the pursuit ofwealth did not appear as a potential threat tothe practice of sovereignty. Most economicflows remained local. The fortunes they wereallowed to build were also local. The successfullocal traders or tax collectors were proud to

achieve a high status in the city where theylived, or tried to convert their wealth intonational status by providing their children withhigher forms of education and marrying theirdaughters to impoverished aristocrats (Elias1939, 1969).

The situation was different for long distancetrade. For rulers, its significance was dispropor-tionate to its real share in the GNP for tworeasons: (i) at that time, a good part of econ-omic transactions did not involve monetarypayments, since barter prevailed. It meant thatcollecting taxes was difficult: hence the signifi-cance of international trade – that was totallymonetarised – for the chancellor of theexchequer; (ii) because of the lack of currency,exportation played a vital role in the nationaleconomies of the time. It was through a positiveforeign balance of payments that the Statecould increase the mass of gold or silver in thecountry and prepare a war treasure chest with-out inducing a deflationary trend in its nationaleconomy. Kings had an evident interest indeveloping and controlling international trade,since the merchants engaged in overseas ven-tures played such an important role for theirnational economies, specially in providing themeans for waging war: hence the multiplicationof chartered companies, first in NorthwesternEurope, and later all over Western Europe. Butthese companies had to conform to strict rules:they had no right to trade with the direct com-petitors of their kings and to enrich them.

For the absolutist monarchs of the seven-teenth and early eighteenth centuries, sover-eignty meant some involvement in the economicfield: the full sovereignty of a kingdom couldonly be achieved through overseas expansionand participation in inter-European and Medi-terranean trade; governments mainly control-led the harbours to facilitate this.

THE IDEA OF A SOCIAL CONTRACT AND THE PASSAGE FROM ABSOLUTIST TO DEMOCRATIC STATES: A NEW SCALE FOR POLITICS

While the idea of sovereignty as absolutism inthe sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wasaccepted by most learned people, some dis-agreed. When they displayed critical attitudes tothe new conception of absolutism, it was mainly

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for religious reasons. Had a king the right toimpose his religious convictions on all his sub-jects? At the same time, the problem was howto prevent civil war of which the memory wasstill so vivid in the shape of the sixteenth centuryreligious wars. The ideas of absolutism andabsolute sovereignty fitted better the convic-tions of the time: hence the significance of the

Leviathan

of Hobbes (1651). Its political philoso-phy, avoiding the state of nature in which manis a wolf to men, is quite in agreement with theprevailing idea of an absolutist state. For themajority of thinkers, absolutism was justified bythe fact that kings had received their powerfrom God. The genius of thinkers building onHobbes was to provide a new justification forabsolutism through the idea of the social con-tract by which everyone abandoned his right touse violence to the Leviathan, i.e., to an abso-lute state, the only entity able to ensure securityfor everyone and the prosperity for the com-monwealth. From this point of view even thedemocratic state continues the absolute state,with which it shares many features: the totalsovereignty over the national territory, the sig-nificance of centralisation, the prevalence ofthe collective will over local or individualaspirations, etc. Yet modernisation introduceddifficulties. Status and prestige, intellectualinfluence and the pursuit of wealth becamestronger as competitors to the authority ofthe State. Modern governments had to inventpolicies that avoided the threats they couldpresent. We shall cover the problems linked tostatus and intellectual influence in this sectionand those rooted in economic activity in thenext one.

The continued control of the pursuit of rank–

In more affluent societies, the pursuit of rankand status was more competitive than ever inthe past. Western democratic states did not altermuch the race for rank organised by the earlymodern monarchies. The career of honours, inthe Roman sense, still gave a predominant roleto achievements in terms of the civilisationprocess (Elias 1939, 1969): urbanity, artistictaste, interest in scientific research. In France,for instance, sociologists and historians speak ofthe ‘republican monarchy’ when they wish todefine the social system that developed at thetime of the French Revolution and Napoleon

and is still partly alive. Because of this channell-ing of the quest for status by official institutions,the political system had nothing to fear fromindividuals. Modern democracies differed inthis way from their forerunners in Ancient orMedieval Times: they never tried to curb therace for prestige and status through sumptuarylaws.

Sovereignty, public opinion and the freedom ofconscience –

The main source of moral andintellectual authority shifted from the clerics tothe intellectuals during the seventeenth cen-tury: the publication of

The Leviathan

by Hobbes(1651), the impact of Descartes’ or Spinoza’sphilosophies, the success of the ideas of JohnLocke after the Glorious Revolution of 1688in Britain, bore witness to this new situation(Locke 1689–1690). What should the attitudesof the central governments towards the newelites be? In the Northwestern European statesthe diversification of Protestantism had alreadyproduced a tolerance for difference of thought.The Roman Catholic states were interested inthe progress of science, since it allowed for bet-ter navigating techniques, the drawing of moreaccurate maps, the improvement of artilleryand weaponry, but they disliked at the sametime the sense of freedom associated withphilosophy. At best, they tolerated it since theystill lacked an efficient repressive system in adomain that was new for them.

The situation began to change at the begin-ning of the eighteenth century: clerics werealready losing a part of the monopoly they hadfor long enjoyed in the field of ideas. Monarchsdiscovered that it paid for them to support theintellectuals who were increasingly leaders ofpublic opinion: hence the success of Enlight-ened Despotism. Some rulers, Catherine theGreat or Frederic of Prussia, tried – often suc-cessfully – to manipulate philosophers, as theywere called at the time. Until the French Revo-lution, however, no absolute monarch tried toseverely control intellectual life in their coun-try: for them it was the responsibility of theestablished Church, not their own. Totalitarian-ism, as a doctrine, was not yet born. The roleof civil society changed: as soon as public opinionwas expressed in newspapers, it became a politi-cal force at the national scale. Because of thepress, the problems modern states encounter


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in particular places often took a nationalsignificance.

MODERN STATES, STATUS AND ECONOMIC LIFE: LIBERALISM VERSUS CENTRAL PLANNING

The sovereignty of democratic states which wasinherited from the

Ancien Régime

absolutistmonarchies could be threatened by anotherpower mechanism working in civil society: thepursuit of wealth.

The rise of economic liberalism –

The mainthreat to the sovereignty of a state originatingfrom its citizens was certainly the economic one:as soon as trade was a long distance one, it gavemerchants the possibility to escape control bythe government of their own country. It waspossible for them to accommodate their profitsin another independent state; it provided themwith the means to exert a strong influence onthe domestic scene. Absolute monarchs werenot liberal at all in that field: they strictly con-trolled their chartered companies and orientedtheir activities in order to enhance their econ-omic independence and their possibilities oftaxation.

Just as for the freedom of conscience, it wasmainly for ideological reasons that most of the‘Westphalian’ states in the eighteenth and nine-teenth centuries chose not to interfere with theeconomic activities of their citizens. John Lockewas responsible for the first step of this evolu-tion (Locke 1689–1690), Adam Smith for thesecond step (Smith 1776). Locke formulated itin a convincing way: things that men producedwere not alien to them, since they incorporatedtheir work. He was the first to see in labour thesource of wealth. He contributed in this way tothe construction of classical economics and thesanctification of private property: no govern-ment had the right to deprive individuals of theriches they owned, since they were in a way apart of themselves.

Economic liberalism was one of the mainfeatures of Western states since the nineteenthcentury. They were sovereign states, and jealousof all the forms of dominance or influencewhich could develop within them and threatentheir monopoly of power. Since they believedin the superiority of the free market process,

they refused, however, to interfere in the econ-omic field. Meanwhile, economic progress, theIndustrial Revolution and the development ofnew means of transport had deeply modifiedthe scale at which economic life was organised.The share of economic transactions concludedat the local scale declined rapidly. An increasingpart of economic relations was developed atthe national or international scales. It gave astronger economic power to businessmen. Mostliberal governments accepted this situation. Ina period when states had sometimes to refrainfrom intervening in the domestic affairs offoreign countries because they were sovereign,the activity of their traders gave them a powerfulmeans to penetrate deeply into foreign econo-mies and interfere in their political life. Thepower of entrepreneurs was greater than in thepast, but most of them used it mainly to achievea higher status through the sponsoring of muse-ums or charity institutions. Normally, they didnot spend it to buy politicians: the only author-ised way to mobilise it in the political field wasthrough financing electoral campaigns orlobbying for more favourable laws.

The contestation of economic liberalism andthe rise of socialism –

The critique of moderncapitalism was coeval with its development:from the beginning of the second quarter of thenineteenth century, the number of people whodenounced the increasing gap between thewealth of the big landowners, industrialists ortraders and the misery of workers kept increas-ing. There were also many persons to denouncethe negative impact of the new forms of capital-ist activities in foreign countries. How to reformthe economic system? It was one of the greatdebates of the time. Since the dynamism of thenew economy relied on specific institutions, itwas clear that the solution was not to be soughtfor in individual morality.

Many critics were ready to accept that moder-nisation had to be accelerated. They did notfight against it, since it would provide the meansfor a better social organisation: this was the caseof Marx (Marx 1867) among others. Progresswould not be enough, however, to shape agood society. A substantial part of the problemresulted from the very nature of economic insti-tutions, which were responsible for the develop-ment of inequalities and injustice. Socialist

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programmes relied on state intervention. Thefundamental error of the capitalist system wasseen to rely on the pursuit of profits by individ-uals, at a time when machines and corporateenterprise gave them fantastic power. The onlysolution was to limit the liberty of initiative inthe economic field. A part of the wealth had tobe nationalised: the new railroads, the banks,since they played such an important role in thedevelopment of big corporations, a part at leastof industrial activities. Quite obviously the controlof economic activities found its main supportersin societies in which the State refused to allowthe freedom of thought and expression – butnot all the totalitarian states of the twentiethcentury would break with capitalism, as shownby the fascist and nazi systems.

The idea of sovereignty and the prevailingconception of polities in early political geo-graphy –

When the political sciences – andpolitical geography and geopolitics – developedin the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-tury, they were centred on the kind of politywhich was prevalent at that time, at least in thedeveloped countries of Northwestern Europeand North America. They focused on states (fora general view about the theories of the Statesee Vincent 1987). They explored the powerrelation between political systems and civilsocieties, and ignored almost completely theway power mechanisms functioned in the latter.They were unable to conceive the internationalscene otherwise than as a collection of nations.When President Wilson tried to moralise aboutinternational relations, he proposed to create aSociety of Nations: it was not a super-state, butan institutionalised system of regulation betweenstates.

An inbuilt philosophical anthropology –

Theset of ideas associated with the developmentof the sovereign – or Westphalian – state per-meated the whole field of political geography.It explained the privilege given to a particularscale, that of the nation-state. It conveyed a spe-cific conception of what socialised man is.

Early Modern man was not denied the rightto develop initiatives in the field of economy, tolook for a bright career of honour and to enjoynew ideas except in the religious field. The onlyrestriction that the idea of sovereignty had

introduced was the ban on the use of violencein private relations. The absolute state gave birthto the modern state, either democratic or total-itarian, through an intellectual revolution whichsubstituted the nation for God as the ultimatesource of political power. Since the sovereignceased to be a monarch who had received hispower through divine right from God, but fromthe people itself, the elaboration of modernphilosophical anthropology went a step further.Individuals had really to renounce all the pow-ers they were naturally endowed with at the timewhen they signed the social contract: the use ofviolence in private relations, the possibility todevelop harsh forms of intellectual or religiousproselytism, the use of rank as a factor of influ-ence or wealth as a means of winning the sup-port of others.

As we have seen, people were never as com-pletely deprived of their natural attributes asthe theory of the social contract implied. Free-dom of thought was restored to individuals forreligious reasons and became central to politi-cal institutions in liberal democracies. The free-dom to compete for rank never appeared aserious threat for the political system: it wasmanipulated by the central government, butnot denied to individuals. The right of individ-uals to develop initiatives in the economic fieldwas suspected, but was finally accepted in liberaldemocracies since private ownership appearedas a natural outcome of the labour incorporatedinto products. Markets were judged as wonder-ful devices to reach the economic optimum.

Summing up the restrictions set to man inthe modern state: (i) they were deprived of theright to resort to violence; (ii) they coulddevelop economic initiatives, but the result waswelcomed only in so far as it was not used fordeveloping a counter-power in the politicalfield – yes to the sponsoring of painting, music,opera, yes to charity organisations, no to the sys-tematic use of economic means for developingpolitical assets; (iii) men could compete forstatus, but only in so far as the rank order wascontrolled and organised by the government.

The lack of curiosity about governance

–

Theconception of man as implied in the prevalentconception of sovereign societies and statesresulted in an impoverished view of whatsociety was. Most of the power was effectively


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concentrated in the hands of the political sys-tem. It was not necessary to explore the powerrelations within the civil society itself, since theyhad been eliminated. There was no reason tostudy governance problems, since the submis-sion of civil society to the political sphere wasinbuilt into the social contract model.

A generation ago, political geographers stillconsidered that in order to understand thepolitical geography of a state, they had only tofocus on its territorial divisions, analyse the hier-archies of its administrative centres, map theconstituencies built in order to offer a fair rep-resentative system to its citizens and establishthe resources it got from the civil societythrough the taxes it levied. Political geogra-phers ignored the way civil societies functioned.They were not interested in the activities of thecitizens, their motivations, the aims they strivedfor.

The apparent similarity of all states –

Accord-ing to the logic of the absolute or national state,all polities shared the same feature: the absolutedomination over a territory of a state able tocontrol the activities of its citizens prevented thedevelopment of tensions between them andinsured their security both at home and on theinternational scene. In order to perform suchtasks, states needed the same basic organisation:a system of territorial divisions in order to col-lect information, control the local populationand implement the decisions of the govern-ment; a hierarchical communication system toinsure the upward and downward movement ofinformation, news and orders between civil soci-ety and the political system; specialised servicesfor defence, police, justice. New public goodswere progressively added to the list providedfrom the start: education, health care, welfare.According to the political geographers of thefirst half of the twentieth century, the main dif-ferences between states came from the level ofcentralisation they achieved: very high in thecountries in which the global state was consid-ered as the only expression of the people’swill; lower in federal states, where a division ofresponsibilities existed between the federalstate and its components. Because of the empha-sis on the sovereignty of every state, politicalgeography and geopolitics did not reallyexplore the ways polities were structured and

functioned (Lijphert 1975): they both ignoredmost of what happened within the states, andthe role of private agents and non-governmentalorganisations in international life.

THE POST-WESTPHALIAN WORLD SCENE

Why the time of the Westphalian territory isover –

The change in the way politics was con-ceived which occurred during the Renaissanceand early Modern Times was both ideological(a new conception of what is infinite and abso-lute) and material (the emergence of new andmuch more expensive weapons). People arenow conscious that the time of the WestphalianState is over (Badie 1994). There are both ideo-logical and material reasons for this change.Material reasons are as important as the ideo-logical ones: with increasing scale economies,most polities have become too small to capital-ise on the advantages of modern technologies;with the new facilities of transportation andtelecommunications, transnational corporationsplay an increasing role in economic life: stateshave lost most of the means they still had halfa century ago to control their activities (Claval2003; Dicken 2003). There was another mater-ial reason: the evolution of armaments becauseof nuclear weapons. Only superpowers wereable to pay for the fabrication of nuclear bombs.Material reasons always combine with ideo-logical interpretations to explain institutionalchange.

The new scales of political life –

With the endof the European colonial empires and theimplosion of the former Soviet Union, the onlyform of polity which exists today is the nation-state. It covers the earth’s entire surface, exceptfor China, the only surviving empire. The grow-ing role of economies of scales in productionand distribution had made most nations toosmall to take advantage of them: hence the cre-ation of a new kind of polity, best exemplifiedby the European Union. It is not a state, sinceit rules mainly on economic life. With the sup-pression of tariff barriers and the free circula-tion of goods, persons and capital, nation-stateshave ceased to be significant actors in the econ-omic field.

With the revolutions of rapid transportationand telecommunications, it is increasingly easy

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for people to travel, meet partners in farawaylocations and develop or maintain closerelations with them. Diplomacy has lost thedominant role it played in many sectors ofinternational life: private enterprises and non-governmental organisations are more activethan ever. The scale of political life has changed,first because of the intervention of new formsof polities (Free Trade Areas or EconomicUnions), the institutionalisation of inter-national life, and the growing significance ofcorporate and private actors in internationalrelations. Second, a good part of the initiativeswhich were monopolised by the states haveshifted to big cities and regions. Governmentshave lost the possibilities they had to enforceregulations on large enterprises and to controltheir location policies. In order to attract invest-ment and jobs, local states have to seduce themby offering economic advantages, improvingtheir environments and developing culturalactivities.

Sovereignty as a commodity –

The main featureof the revolution of the Westphalian Statewas to give politics a higher status than thoseof economics and social ranking. The sovereignstates were strong enough not to be bought bytheir neighbours or by private firms. Today thesituation is different (Milliken 2003). It is partlythe result of the proliferation of micro-statesduring the last fifty years. For many of them, theonly resource they can sell off is their sover-eignty: Kiribati lives partly on the stamps it pro-duces! But there are many other ways to sellsovereignty.

Big corporations discovered in the late 1950sand early 1960s the utility of fiscal paradises: itis good to settle the head office of the companyin a small country were taxes are low, exchangecontrol absent, and social security systems veryslight: hence the success of Monaco, Andorra,Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, Virgin Islands orBermuda. Big ship owning companies registertheir ships in Greece, Malta, Cyprus, Panama,etc.

The next step is to harbour illegal activities –drug trafficking for instance – and launder dirtymoney. Terrorists use the same means in orderto secure safe bases for their operations. Insteadof being a central element in the organisationof the world political order, sovereignty has

become in this way one of the main factors ofits vulnerability.

THE NEW SCALE OF POLITICAL LIFE AS A THEME FOR GEOGRAPHICAL REFLECTION

At the end of the nineteenth century and thebeginning of the twentieth, anthropologiesbased on the social contract were accepted asnatural by democratic societies. Geography – aswell as the other social sciences – developedin this particular context. Political geographyappeared thus as an almost autonomous sub-discipline: ordinary people were committed topolitics only when voting; the field of economicor social life which was their main concern wasfor all intents and purposes disconnected frompolitics. This situation came to an end duringthe last generation: the conception of men andwomen as social beings ceased to be modelledon the social contract idea. As a result, geo-graphers felt free to explore more freely thepolitical scene as it results from contemporaryevolution.

The end of the political anthropologies basedon the social contract –

During the twentiethcentury, the bases institutionalised relations withincivil societies relied upon have been progres-sively eroded. At a time when states lose a goodpart of their former power, they are compelledto intervene in domains which are alien to it:personal relations, security, and welfare.

The loss of some natural attributes thatpeople had to undergo when becoming a socialbeing have been increasingly criticised since thelate nineteenth century: by Nietzsche, since itprevented men to act really as supermen, whichthey were in fact able to do; by Freud, since animpoverished sexuality was one of the results ofthe prevailing conventions in the societies builton the idea of the social contract. Foucault’scriticism of Western civilisation owed much toNietzsche and Freud (Foucault 1966; Dreyfus &Rabinow 1982; Miller 1993).

Hence the new emphasis on governance: themain responsibility for governments, i.e. to rulefrom above over societies which were up to apoint self-controlled systems, has ceased. Theynow have to develop governance; i.e. to reachagreements with the different components of


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societies in order to obtain their active co-operation in the public tasks they have theresponsibility to assume. Hence, a fundamentalchange in the scale on which geographers studypolitical life.

The rise of new curiosities and the explorationof other scales in the 1980s –

From the early1980s, efforts have been made to develop theanalysis of small or large-scale political proc-esses in political geography and geopolitics.They took several forms: an increased interestin the Weberian distinctions between purepower and legitimate power (with its varieties,traditional, charismatic, rational) and betweendomination and influence (Claval 1978), a curi-osity for semantics and the role of narratives inthe building of power relations (Raffestin1980).

There was, in fact, a chapter of political geo-graphy which covered a local dimension sincethe early twentieth century: electoral geogra-phy. Born in 1913 with the pioneering work ofAndré Siegfried, it thrived but did not mergefor nearly seventy years with the mainstreamorientations of the discipline (Siegfried 1913).As a result, it often became a chapter of politicalsociology rather than of political geography.Electoral geography accepted the views accord-ing to which citizens had only an episodic rolein the political process: at the time of elections.As a result, the determinants of voting behaviourwere conceived in terms of social conditioningor local traditions. Yves Lacoste introduced anew perspective in the approach of elections:he analysed the local strategies of political par-ties and stressed the ways politicians tried todevelop their local influence and the methodsthey used to gain support: hence the monumen-tal

Géopolitiques des Régions Françaises

he edited(Lacoste 1986).

In the English-speaking world Agnew reliedon a structurationist perspective and lookedfor possible mediations between structure andagency. Instead of focusing on

habitus

likePierre Bourdieu, or on systems and institutionslike Anthony Giddens, he explored the geo-graphical mediation of state and society throughplace (Agnew 1987). Out of this initial reflec-tion, he later developed original ideas aboutthe way to analyse political processes at theinternational scale and stressed the role of

the territorial trap (Agnew 1994): by focusingalmost exclusively on the national scale, politi-cal geography had missed a part of power real-ities, the development for instance of politicalidentities at an infra-state scale or across bor-ders. In his later studies, Agnew always analysedpolitical processes within and beyond stateboundaries (Agnew & Corbridge 1995; Agnew1999, 2001). Many geographers became inter-ested in the relations between what happenedat the national, regional and local scales(MacLeod & Goodwin 1999; Amin & Thrift2002).

Radical geographers had many reasons toparticipate in this broadening of geographicaland geopolitical curiosities since for them,there were no clear-cut limits between theeconomic, social, political and ideologicalaspects of reality at the same time, many ofthem had heavily invested on the idea that theState had become the most important spatialfix of modern capitalism (Harvey 1982). Theyexplored the spatial dimensions of state( Jessop 1990; Yeung 1998) and looked forthe new types of spatial fix linked to globalisa-tion and flexible capitalism ( Jessop 2000).Feminist geography was responsible for theintroduction of another dimension of politicalprocess: the domestic one, which had beencompletely neglected in the past (Frye 1983;Rose 1993).

Since the early 1990s: debates are deepening –

In the 1990s, the debates over the consequencesof globalisation gathered momentum. Becauseof the publication of some essays on the end ofgeography and the parallel end of the nation-states (O’Brien 1992; Ohmae 1995), all socialsciences became concerned: urban studies (Sas-sen 1996), sociology (Hirst & Thompson 1995).Castells stressed the role of networks in anunbounded society (Castells 1996). Geogra-phers generally reacted in showing that theweakening of the State was more apparent thanreal since the new powers of regions were devel-oped in co-operation with the central govern-ments as an answer to globalisation (Brenner1997; MacLeod & Goodwin 1999): globalisationwas conducive at the same time to deterritori-alisation and reterritorialisation (O’Thuatail1999). Geographers also gave more attentionto places: for many of them, they were the locus

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of resistance to globalisation (Routledge 1996;Cox 1997); for others, they escaped the territo-rial trap in which their study had been heldbecause of their porosity and the role globalnetworks played in their life (Massey 1993,1997; Massey & Jess 1995). Swyngedouw stronglyexpresses this idea through the notion of glo-calisation (Swyngedouw 1997). The nationalidentities of the past were up to a point replacedby nested identities (Herb & Kaplan 1999).Boundaries ceased to appear mainly as materiallimits: in a world of flows, they are built onsocial processes (Paasi 1998). Globalisationwas conducive to new forms of spatiality (Amin2002).

On a more general level, it is the significanceof scale in political geography which was re-examined: scale ceased to be considered as apermanent geometric property of the earth’ssurface (Marston 2000). Relying on the ideas ofHenri Lefebvre, it was increasingly consideredas a social construct (Smith 1984). Paul Allièshad already used this theme when analysingthe genesis of the notion of territory from theeighteenth century: he showed that it grew atthe same time as the nation-state because of thenecessity for it to control more efficiently theareas upon which it ruled (Alliès 1980).

Because of globalisation, geographers thinkthat a wider variety of scales has been taken intoconsideration (Amin 2002). At the same time,they have increasingly blurred (Yeung 1998;Brenner 1999, 2001; Jessop 2000). For NeilSmith, what is important is to understand atwhat scales are built the spatial fix associated tothe logic of capital (Smith 2000, 2001).

Concerning what happened on the inter-national scene, the specialists of internationalrelations played a decisive role in the discus-sions and debates. They introduced the notionof the Westphalian State and analysed itsdecline and the rise of a confusion of sovereign-ties which they compared to the medieval one(Albert 1998; Albert & Kopp-Malek 2002). Ber-trand Badie provided a thorough reflection onthe end of the sovereign state (Badie 1994) andthe ensuing change in the way the internationalscene functions. In the contemporary world,sovereignty has ceased to be the essential toolfor regulating international relations: numer-ous actors try to negotiate solutions to thediverse problems confronting the world (or

some of its parts) by developing structures ofsolidarities and endorsing an ethic of responsi-bility, which contrasts with the ruse of states(Badie 1999). In order to give coherence tothese decentralised actions and control them,the transcendency which was expressed throughthe idea of sovereignty has ceased to work.Hence the growing significance of anotherform of transcendency, that of humankind asexpressed through the idea of human rights.Thanks to the modern media, it is expressedthrough a global public opinion, the role ofwhich is growing, as proved by the wave of solid-arity after the South Asian tsunami at the endof 2004. These new processes are, however, un-able, to build something like an internationalorder (Badie 2002).

CONCLUSION

Sovereignty and national-states have played adominant role on the political scene from theseventeenth century to the present. We areundergoing the end of this period. We brieflysketched the main features of the previoussituation and the contemporary evolution inorder to understand the way political geogra-phy was conceived at the time it appeared at theend of the nineteenth century, and the reasonsfor its contemporary evolution. What are ourconclusions?

Geographers are not the only social scientistsinvolved in the process of defining new appro-aches to political life and power relations: in thisfield, there is a growing co-operation betweensociologists, historians, political scientists andspecialists of international relations. Geogra-phers take advantage of the results of their col-leagues. Because their discipline is the only oneto be interested in all spatial phenomena what-ever their scale, they are the only ones to offera general view of the recent transformations.

The building of a new political geographywhere power relations are analysed at differentscales, from home or localities to the world, andunder all their guises (coercive power, econ-omic domination, intellectual influence), is onits way: it better fits situations where governanceplays an essential role than the older oneswhere constraint was more significant thanresponsibility in political processes. It is possibleto get an idea of the new orientations of the


219


discipline through recent publications: itsdifferent streams and components (Howitt &Agnew 2003; Cox 2005) the reconstructionof geopolitics (O’Tuathail & Dalby 2000), thegeographies of war and peace (Flint 2004).

The new political geography differs from thoseof the past: its scope is wider and its methodsare more diverse. It lacks the unifying conceptsthat allowed for a simple presentation of theState as the main actor of political life. It is morea discipline of complexity: it is the main sourceof its value. Political geography provides newinsights into the problems of today while avoid-ing caricature, hence its value for the citizensof our world and its political leaders.

What prospects for the world of tomorrow?Societies have renounced the very imperfectorder that sovereignty and the theory of thesocial contract had provided to the Westernworld for three centuries and relapsed into theuse of violence. Many people refuse to limittheir freedom. There is a risk to see individualsecurity disappearing from the societies of thefuture. Inequalities could become stronger.Some people could develop their power throughterrorist actions. Nobody yearns for such a sce-nario, but it depicts some of the trends observedover recent decades. Since they offer a preciseview of the forces at work, political geography– and the other political sciences – providescitizens and rulers with the tools they need tobuild a better world.

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