State / Space : A Reader

This groundbreaking, interdisciplinary volume brings together diverse analyses of state space in historical and contemporary capitalism. The first volume to present an accessible yet challenging overview of the changing geographies of state power under capitalism. A unique, interdisciplinary collection of contributions by major theorists and analysts of state spatial restructuring in the current era. Investigates some of the new political spaces that are emerging under contemporary conditions of 'globalization'. Explores state restructuring on multiple spatial scales, and from a range of theoretical, methodological and empirical perspectives. Covers a range of topical issues in contemporary geographical political economy. Contains case study material on Western Europe, North America and East Asia, as well as parts of Africa and South America. State/Space: A Reader......Page 5 Contents......Page 7 Acknowledgments......Page 9 Introduction: State Space in Question......Page 12 Part I Theoretical Foundations......Page 38 1 Exploration, Cartography and the Modernization of State Power......Page 40 2 The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results......Page 64 3 The Nation......Page 76 4 Space and the State......Page 95 5 The State as Container: Territoriality in the Modern World-System......Page 112 Part II Remaking State Territorialities......Page 126 6 The State of Globalization: Towards a Theory of State Transformation......Page 128 7 The Rise of East Asia and the Withering Away of the Interstate System......Page 142 8 The Struggle over European Order: Transnational Class Agency in the Making of “Embedded Neo-Liberalism”......Page 158 9 The Imagined Economy: Mapping Transformations in the Contemporary State......Page 176 10 Debordering the World of States: Toward a Multi-Level System in Europe and a Multi-Polity System in North America? Insights from Border Regions......Page 196 11 Rethinking Globalisation: Re-articulating the Spatial Scale and Temporal Horizons of Trans-Border Spaces......Page 219 Part III Reshaping Political Spaces......Page 236 12 Remaking Scale: Competition and Cooperation in Pre-National and Post-National Europe......Page 238 13 The National and the Regional: Their Autonomy Vis-à-vis the Capitalist World Crisis......Page 250 14 The Invention of Regions: Political Restructuring and Territorial Government in Western Europe......Page 267 15 Globalization Makes States: Perspectives on Local Governance in the Age of the World City......Page 289 16 Cities and Citizenship......Page 307 17 Citizenship, Territoriality and the Gendered Construction of Difference......Page 320 18 Shadows and Sovereigns......Page 337 Subject Index......Page 355 Name Index......Page 365 During the last three decades, inherited geographies of state power have been significantly unsettled. The primacy of forms of government organized along traditional, Westphalian lines has been undermined by the unprecedented rise of supranational and subnational levels of state power and by the proliferation of new forms of governance. This groundbreaking, interdisciplinary volume brings together diverse analyses of these ongoing transformations of state space. The contributions explore state restructuring on multiple spatial scales, and from a wide range of theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives. They provide innovative analyses of key theoretical and topical issues, including:The nature of state space under modern capitalismThe historical geographies of the Westphalian interstate systemThe transformation of state territoriality under conditions of 'globalization'The changing roles of national states in socioeconomic regulationThe governance of cross-border regions, global cities, and offshore financial centersThe consolidation of new supranational regulatory arrangementsThe geographical rearticulating of struggles over citizenship and democracyAnalyses are supported by case study material covering Western Europe, North America, and East Asia, as well as parts of Africa and South America. The volume will be welcomed by students seeking an overview of this new field of inquiry, and by scholars concerned to decode contemporary patterns of state restructuring The absolute states which began to develop in Western Europe during the Late Middle Ages and which were consolidated during the Renaissance laid the political and institutional foundations of the different types of representative democratic states which evolved after the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The major focus of this reader is the restructuring of state spatiality in the contemporary period of global capitalism. It demonstrates that processes of state re-scaling represent merely one dimension of an multifaceted reconfiguration of state spatiality in the contemporary period