The Confines of Territory

John Agnew, John Agnew

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000261134
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Geopolitik

The word 'territory' has taken on renewed significance in a world where its close association with state sovereignty has made a serious comeback, invoked alike by proponents of Brexit in the UK, 'Making America Great Again' in the USA, and myriad populists from India to Brazil by way of Italy and Hungary. The word has had a contentious history in social science and political theory. In its first seven years, the journal Territory, Politics, Governance has published numerous articles examining the ways in which territory figures into contemporary political debates and its limits as a concept when applied to a world in which sovereignty never has simply pooled up within self-evidently distinctive blocs of space named as 'territories.' Among other things, the limits of territory are apparent in terms of the history of a global capitalism that always bursts beyond established boundaries, the fact that some states are much more powerful and exercise much more spatial reach than do others, and that the political uses of territory in its current usage date back predominantly to seventeenth century Europe rather than being historically transcendental or worldwide.

The articles in this book are selected from Territory, Politics, Governance to survey many of the dilemmas and questions that haunt the concept of territory even as its current efflorescence in political discourse ignores them.

Introduction

John Agnew

The environmentalist government of Norway (led by the fictional Prime Minister Jesper Berg of the Norwegian Green Party) has decided to shutter its oil and gas industry. In response, the European Union — Norway is not a member — recruits the Russian government to surreptitiously intervene to keep the oil and gas flowing. From this beginning, the television series Occupied (Okkupert and premiered in Norway in October 2015) considers the ramifications of the ties of mutual dependence that bind states together, notwithstanding their claims to the mutually exclusive occupation of spaces of territorial sovereignty (on Occupied as a speculative-fantastical television serial, see Saunders 2019). Territory thus appears more contingent in its significance for political life than much orthodox political practice and most political theory have ever imagined.

The word “territory” does not just signify the state or politicized occupation of a carefully demarcated space (Elden 2009). In the English language, this usage is far and away the most common but space beyond the immediate confines of a given territory, geopolitical space, is also often territorialized into blocs such as spheres of influence (Chiantera-Stutte 2014; Agnew 2015). All political space is, then, turned into territory. Interestingly, and indicating its early association with private-property rights in land, territory’s application to the sea has been inconsistent and often ignored even as the power of “landed territories” is projected over it (e.g. Steinberg 2018; Foley and Mather 2019). In many languages, territory can be synonymous with place or smaller blocs of space irrespective of any connection to politics or administration. In this context, it is equivalent to such terms as “region” and implies some sort of spatial discontinuity irrespective of whether or not it has any sort of political significance (e.g. Gay 2004; Tomasch and Gilles 1998). Even in English the word crops up in usage such as “sales territory” and “fishing territory,” just to limit consideration to its geographical uses. Since the seventeenth century — and reflecting the particular influence of English, Scottish, German, French and, later, American politicians and political theorists — territory, however, has become closely associated with the bloc of space occupied by a polity whose claim to legitimacy lies in its very command and control over that territory and the people who occupy it. As such, it is often naturalized and taken for granted. It is the background condition for other debates about sovereignty, security, macroeconomic administration, and political identity (see, e.g., Kadercan 2015; Rosenboim 2019).

The word “territory” in this expanded sense has taken on renewed significance in the past few years. Its close association with state sovereignty has made a serious comeback, invoked alike by proponents of “Brexit” in the UK, “Make America Great Again” in the USA, and myriad populist-nationalists from India to Brazil by way of Italy and Hungary. In the face of the “Great Pandemic” of 2020 there has been much speculation about a future world in which state territories may be increasingly walled off from one another and the sort of networked links and flows that had produced a more globalized world will be in retreat. Whether this turns out to be the case is another thing entirely. Global capitalism will not readily be redirected into the limited territories of contemporary statehood. Geographic expansion following territorial restriction due to war, disease, and disaster has long been its modus operandi, as global economic history tells us (e.g. Wood 2003). Still, we are living in a politically unstable time and, as Machiavelli advised (Boucheron 2018, 5), it is in such circumstances that established political lexicons and the practices they signify or label are reworked. It is never just about putting up walls or knocking them down. Scenarios like the one laid out in Occupied are not at all beyond the realm of plausibilit y despite their speculative-fantastical qualities (Saunders 2019).

In its first seven years, the journal Territory, Politics, Governance, of which I was editor-in-chief from 2011 until 2019, published numerous articles examining the ways in which territory informs and enriches contemporary political debates and its limits as a concept when applied to a world in which sovereignty never has simply pooled up within self-evidently distinctive blocs of space named as “territories.” Among other things, the limits of territory are apparent in the history of global capitalism, which always bursts beyond established boundaries; the fact that some states are much more powerful and exercise much more spatial reach militarily, culturally, and economically than do others; and the way that political “territory” in its current usage dates predominantly from seventeenth-century Europe rather than being historically transcendental or global. The chapters in this book are selected from Territory, Politics, Governance to survey many of the dilemmas and questions that haunt the concept of territory even as its current efflorescence in popular political discourse and practice typically ignores them.

Thinking Politically with Territory

There are a number of important historical-philosophical problems raised by invoking the word territory. Before outlining the three main themes of the chapters in this book and how they push us beyond them, I want to say something about the six main historical-philosophical problems with using territory down the years. This discussion provides something of a datum of existing thinking and controversy against which to compare the precise contributions of the individual chapters in the book.

The first problem concerns the nexus between modern states and territory. The territorial state is a highly specific historical entity. It first arose in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Since that time political power has often been seen as inherently territorial, which I have long thought of as mistaken (Agnew 1994, Allen 2003; Agne w 2018, Chapter 2). It is also far from clear that this original European conception of territory travels elsewhere without being challenged or adapted in distinctive ways (e.g. Wolkin and Nevins 2018; Halvorsen 2019). From the conventional perspective, politics take place only within ‘the institutions and the spatial envelope of the state as the exclusive governor of a definite territory. We also identify political territory with social space, perceiving countries as “state-societies”’ Hirst, 2005, p. 27). Much interstate conflict is then about competing territorial claims and establishing legible and enforceable borders (e.g. Branch 2014; Maier 2016). Broader geopolitical competition is likewise understood to be about claiming and demarcating large dependent territories. In this way all terrestrial space is territorialized. The spatial ontology of classical geopolitics (e.g. land and sea powers) and its reiteration by writers like Carl Schmitt reflects this reasoning (e.g. Legg 2011). More specifically, the process of modern state formation itself has always had two crucial attributes that underpin the central mediating role of territory without which it would never have become a worldwide phenomenon. One is exclusivity. All of the political entities (the Roman Catholic Church, city-states, etc.) that could not achieve or retain a reasonable semblance of sovereignty over a contiguous territory have been steadily de-legitimized as major political actors. The second is mutual recognition. The power of states has rested to a considerable extent on the recognition each state receives from the others (particularly geopolitically powerful ones) by means of the shared claim to non-interference in its “internal” affairs. Together these attributes have created a world in which there can be no territory without a state. In this way, territory has come to underpin both nationalism and representative democracy, both of which depend critically on restricting political membership by homeland and address, respectively (e.g. Espejo 2013; Meine 2019).

The second problem is that territory, usually associated with a polity, particularly a state, can also be applied to any portion of space referred to otherwise as a region, locality or place (Lévy 2011). Sometimes a territory is an area awaiting formal incorporation into an adjacent state, as in Alaska (purchased from Russia in 1867) before becoming one of the US states in 1958. In general, however, territory is particularly if not exclusively associated with the spatial organization of the modern state with its claim to absolute control or sovereignty over a population within carefully defined external borders (Gottmann 1973; Paasi 2003; Elden 2013; Ferraz de Oliveira 2020). Indeed, until Sack (1986) extended the understanding of human territoriality as a political-organizational strategy to individuals and organizations in general, usage of the term territory was largely confined to the spatial organization of states. In the social sciences such as sociology and political science this is still usually the case, such that the challenge posed to territory by networked forms of organization (typically associated with globalization) is invariably characterized in totalistic terms as “the end of geography.” This signifies the extent to which territory has become the dominant geographical term (and imagination) in the social sciences and in popular imagination (Badie, 1995). It is closely allied to state sovereignty. As sovereignty is seen to “erode” or “unbundle,” so goes territory (Agnew 1994). From this viewpoint territory takes on an epistemological centrality in that it is understood as an absolutely fundamental sign of modernity. Societies without states are by definition not modern. Who refuses modernity?

The third problem is that this centrality makes sense because in political theory, and through the influence it has had on political practitioners, control over a relatively modest territory has been seen as the primary solution to the “security dilemma:” to offer protection to populations from the threats of anarchy (disorder), on the one hand, and hierarchy (distant rule and subordination), on the other. One problem has been to define what is meant by “modest” size. To Montesquieu (1949, p. 122), the Enlightenment philosopher, different size territories inevitably have different political forms: ‘It is, therefore, the natural property of small states to be governed as a republic, of middling ones to be subject to a monarch, and of large empires to be swayed by a despotic prince.’ Early modern Europe offered propitious circumstances for the emergence of a fragmented political system primarily because of its topographical divisions. Montesquieu (1949, pp. 151–62) further notes, however, that popular representation allows for the territorial extension of republican government. The founders of the United States added to this by trying to balance between centralizing certain security functions, on one side, and retaining local controls over many other functions, on the other. Multi-tier governance of partitioned territories is the outcome (Detterbeck and Hepburn 2018). The recent history of the European Union (especially following the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht and then later 2009 Treaty of Lisbon) can be thought of in similar terms. Historically, in fact, a wide range of polities of differing sizes have co-existed worldwide depending on the relative roles of capital and coercion in the origins and maintenance (e.g. Tilly 1975; Rokkan 1980; Stasavage 2011; Abramson 2017). But the territorial state as a response to the security dilemma, irrespective of the size of the state, is still the centre-piece of much of what goes for the fields of international history and international relations (Agnew 1994; Atzili and Kadercan 2017; Kadercan 2019).

As a side commentary on this problem, an ancillary but crucial issue with contemporary territorial statehood, though, is the sense of how much states actually fail in providing security (in human as well as military terms) and at the same time are not up to fulfilling most of the many promises they make to their citizenries. They are no longer just “protector states” but “providential states” in which the principles of solidarity and redistribution that underlie their legitimacy are increasingly cynically applied but also widely questioned (e.g. Rosanvallon 1992). A massive breakdown in the level of trust between citizens and states has become the leitmotif of the era. Instead of shielding people from threats and disasters, states seem incapable of providing even a minimum of security, or guilty of being selective in terms of how they tackle inequalities and vulnerabilities (e.g. Elden 2009). Some of this goes back to the fiscal crisis of states competing for capital by lowering taxes, reducing investment in public infrastructure including emergency planning and some to new challenges from immigration, diseases, and the global redistribution of political-economic power as a result of post-1970s globalization (e.g. Harvey 1999; Barkan 2013). But much of the failure is down to an inability to ever match the over-claims that states and their politicians make as to what they alone can do in a complex and difficult world. The Covid-19 Pandemic of 2020 is a salutary reminder (Agnew 2020).

Fourthly, human activities the world over have never conformed entirely to containment by the spaces defined by the proximity or adjacency implicit in territory (Gottmann 1973; Sassen 2006; Agnew 2018). Indeed, and increasingly, as physical distance proves less of a barrier to movement, spatial interaction between separated nodes across networks is an important mechanism of geographical sorting and differentiation. Sometimes posed today in terms of a world of flows versus a world of territories, this is better thought of in terms of territories and/or networks of flows rather than one versus the other. Territories and networks exist relationally rather than mutually exclusively (Painter 2010). If territorial regulation is all about tying flows to places, territories have never been zero-sum entities in which the sharing of power or the existence of external linkages totally undermines their capacity to regulate (e.g. Banister et al. 2015). If at one time territorial states did severely limit the local powers of trans-territorial and local agencies, that this is no longer the case does not signify that the states have lost all of their powers: ‘Territory still matters. States remain the most effective governors of populations. ... The powers to exclude, to tax, and to define political rights are those over which states acquired a monopoly in the seventeenth century. They remain the essentials of state power and explain why state sovereignty survives today and why it is indispensable to the international order’ (Hirst, 2005, p. 45).

Fifthly, territoriality is the strategic use of territory in either the organization and exercise of power, legitimate or otherwise, over blocs of space or the organization of people and things into discrete areas through the use of boundarie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• SECTION 1 Territorial Perspectives
• SECTION 2 Interrogating Territory
• SECTION 3 Confines of Territory
• Index