Organizing European Space

Christer Jonsson,Sven Tagil,Gunnar Tornqvist

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781473903869
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book combines perspectives from political science, history and geography to provide a comprehensive introduction to `Europe? or European space as we understand it today. Central to the book is the phenomenon of the sovereign state and the question of alternative ways of organizing Europe politically and economically.

The book explores four different ways of organizing space: state, union, region and network. By tracing the origins of the sovereign state in Europe, the book first reviews the resilience and adaptability of the sovereign state historically, and then looks at the implications of the contradictory processes of integration and fragmentation, or globalization and regionalization, present today.

A key concept developed throughout the book is that of networks, especially with respect to the European Union, and the relationship between regions, networks and cities, a relationship long traditional to Europe?s political organization.

The authors review critically popular notions of a ?Europe of regions? or ?the end of the sovereign state? and instead serve to combine their different disciplinary conceptual tools and perspectives to provide new insights into the future organization of European space.

Organizing European Space will be essential reading for all students of contemporary Europe seeking a deeper understanding of the modern state and the complexity of changing notions of identity, political organization and territoriality inherent in Europe in the past, present and future.

1

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State of Mind

All human perception is selective. We all process information through pre-existing ‘knowledge structures’ – systems of schematized and abstracted knowledge which scientists tend to label ‘belief systems’ or ‘schemata’ when referring to people they study, ‘theories’ when referring to their own scientific activity and ‘prejudices’ when referring to their rivals and enemies. Without these knowledge structures, ‘life would be a buzzing confusion’; at the same time, ‘a price is paid for this mental economy’ – knowledge structures ‘are not infallible guides to the nature of physical or social reality’.¹ Our preconceptions help us structure, but may also distort, what we see, understand and remember.

To a great extent, we are prisoners of our own preconceptions. Cognitive scientists have shown that knowledge structures are resistant to change. Rather than abandoning cherished theories, beliefs or prejudices, we tend to reinterpret contradictory information to fit pre-existing knowledge structures. This is no less true of social science theorists than of ‘the man in the street’. The main difference between scientific and intuitive theories is that the former are formalized and available for public scrutiny, whereas the latter are implicit and lie below the level of awareness.

Human perception, in short, is theory-driven, whether or not the ‘theories’ are conscious and formalized. ‘There is nothing as practical as a good theory’ is an often-used quote, attributed to the German psychologist Kurt Lewin. Theories represent good cognitive economy, insofar as they allow us to sort out what to pay attention to in the overwhelming flow of stimuli and data. Theories are like floodlights that illuminate one part of the stage but, by the same token, leave other parts in the shade or in the dark. They sensitize us to certain aspects of a phenomenon or problem while desensitizing us to others. To use another metaphor, ‘conceptual models not only fix the mesh of the nets that the analyst drags through the material in order to explain a particular action, they also direct him to cast his nets in selected ponds, at certain depths, in order to catch the fish he is after’.²

The state in focus

It is this dark side of theories that is our principal concern. Have our floodlights illuminated the wrong part of the stage, and/or have we cast our nets in the wrong ponds? The state has long had a privileged position in historical research and social science theories. The division of the world into sovereign states with mutually exclusive territories is a fundamental premise of social, economic and political life. In our understanding of the current world, ‘states have become (second) nature, and come to seem inevitable’.³ Most disciplines have upheld a clear distinction between what goes on inside the state, on the one hand, and activities that cross state boundaries and are referred to as international relations, on the other.

The predominance of the state in social science thinking is, for example, reflected in the German (and Scandinavian) labels for political science (Staatswissenschaft) and economics (Nationalökonomie). Similarly, state boundaries are prevalent in the maps of geographers, and a majority of historians write national histories. Moreover, the statistics that social scientists use are normally collected on a national basis. In fact, the etymology of the word ‘statistics’ reveals its close relation to ‘state’. The state, in short, has become the ordering principle of several disciplines, all of which take the state for granted. State boundaries have come to represent intellectual boundaries as well.

It should be noted that the words ‘state’ and ‘nation’ are often used interchangeably in contemporary political and analytical language – in fact, you need go no further than to the previous paragraph to find an example. For instance, we speak of international relations when referring to interstate phenomena; the United Nations is a misnomer for an association of states; and we often allude to states acting ‘in the national interest’. We shall return to the subject of nationalism and nation-states in Chapter 5. At this point, suffice it to say that the tendency to confound state and nation is another sign of the expansive nature of the state concept.

The prominence of the state constitutes the obvious common denominator of the disciplinary knowledge structures of the three co-authors, and the idea of this book has grown out of a shared conviction that this theoretical foundation needs to be reconsidered and that past, present and future efforts at organizing European space provide a fertile ground for such reconceptualizations. We are drawing on the growing realization within our respective disciplines that the structural basis of territorial states is, if not disappearing, then at least changing in character. In this sense, present-day scholars may find themselves in a situation similar to that of

the late medieval political theorists who thought the choice was between the papacy and the empire as the primary unit of political organization. The best of these theorists realized that something new was emerging – the modern state; but they lacked the categories for understanding the new reality. We now are in a similar position.⁴

At the same time, we are sceptical of the tendency to overemphasize the newness of recent developments in Europe. We don’t subscribe to proclamations of ‘the end of history’⁵ and ‘the end of geography’⁶ – or, for that matter, ‘the end of the nation-state’⁷ and ‘the end of sovereignty’.⁸ If anything, the end of the Cold War (here it is more legitimate to speak of an ‘end’, although there are sceptics on that score as well) taught us the dangers of theorizing on the basis of a narrow time frame. Theorists of international relations who used the Cold War as a yardstick of normality now face what Susan Strange has labelled ‘Pinocchio’s problem’. The strings that were attached to Pinocchio made him a puppet of forces he could neither control nor influence. His problem at the end of the story, when he was magically transformed into a real boy, was that he had no strings to guide him. Similarly, students of international relations in the post-Cold War era have been shorn of the intellectual strings that tied them to existing power structures, and are groping for orientation in the new world.⁹

The obvious lesson is that a longer historical perspective is warranted, if we want to avoid that our knowledge structures make us prisoners of the unique features of present realities. Thus, when we explore alternative ways of organizing European space, we rely to a great extent on historical experiences and structures. To be sure, history does not repeat itself, but we pay a heavy price if we ignore its lessons. And recent developments in Europe have involved the return, not the end, of history.¹⁰

More than half a century ago, E.H. Carr concluded: ‘Few things are permanent in history; and it would be rash to assume that the territorial unit of power is one of them’.¹¹ Similarly, our enquiry proceeds from the assumption that the system of territorial states, which was formed in Europe with the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and which eventually spread to cover the entire globe, is contingent. The state does not represent the only way of organizing European space, nor is it the inevitable conclusion of an evolutionary process. By problematizing the state and putting it into historical context rather than taking it for granted, we aim to remove the blindfolds that state-centric theories have furnished to our respective disciplines.

A constructivist approach

Our focus on perceptions and theories puts us in the ‘constructivist’ camp. We adhere to the view that what we refer to as political, social, economic and historical ‘realities’ are to a significant extent socially constructed by cognitive structures that give meaning to the material world. However, we do not subscribe to the extreme relativism of ‘postmodernism’ which holds that material reality cannot be known outside human language; thus, everything is reduced to ‘discourses’ or ‘texts’, and science is but one among these discourses with no privileged position. Rather, we agree with the emerging view of constructivism as occupying the ‘middle ground’ between rationalist, positivist approaches and interpretive, postmodern approaches.¹² On the one hand, constructivists, like positivists, believe in the existence of a material world which is independent of our accounts and which provides opportunities for, and puts restraints on, human action. On the other hand, constructivists, like postmodernists, hold that the material reality does not fully determine human action and thought and that social reality emerges from the attachment of meaning to physical objects. International relations, to constructivists, are based primarily on social facts, which are facts only by agreement. A metaphor may help to illustrate the constructivist position:

Suppose you toss a rock into the air. It can make only a simple response to the external physical forces that act on it. But if you throw a bird into the air, it may fly off into a tree. Even though the same physical forces act on the bird as on the rock, a massive amount of internal information processing takes place inside the bird and affects its behavior. Finally, take a group of people, a nation or various nations and metaphorically toss them in the air. Where they go, how, when and why, is not entirely determined by physical forces and constraints; but neither does it depend solely on individual preferences and rational choices. It is also a matter of their shared knowledge, the collective meaning they attach to their situation, their authority and legitimacy, the rules, institutions and material resources they use to find their way, and their practices, or even, sometimes their joint creativity.¹³

Our enquiry into the organization of European space will focus on what Emanuel Adler calls ‘cognitive evolution’, the adoption by policy-makers – and scholars – of new interpretations of reality. This means trying to understand ‘how institutional facts become taken for granted’, how ‘as certain ideas or practices become reified, competing ideas and practices are delegitimized’.¹⁴

Symbols and metaphors of statehood

The use of symbols and metaphors is central to processes of cognitive evolution in international relations. The term ‘metaphor’ comes from the Greek verb metapherein, ‘to carry from one place to another’, to transfer. ‘The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another’.¹⁵ Metaphors are not merely figures of speech or ornaments; they are ‘pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action’.¹⁶ We typically conceptualize the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar, the non-physical in terms of the physical, the less clearly delineated in terms of the more clearly delineated. We tend to structure the less concrete and inherently vaguer concepts (like those for mental processes) in terms of more concrete concepts (like those for physical processes) with a clearer experiential basis. For instance, many of the terms used to characterize intellectual activity are based on the metaphor of seeing with the eye – ‘observe’, ‘see’, ‘view’, ‘point of view’, ‘outlook’, ‘focus’, ‘perspective’, etc.¹⁷

By the same token, abstract political phenomena are strikingly often treated in metaphorical terms by practitioners and theoreticians alike. ‘Since metaphor is transference of meaning from the familiar to the unfamiliar, the pervasiveness of metaphor in political speech is a sign that political things are somehow less familiar or accessible than the things from which political metaphors are taken’.¹⁸ We have already pointed to the prevalence of mechanical and organic metaphors in descriptions of organizations. Other examples include the frequent use of spatial metaphors in political language. Ordering political parties and groupings along a left-right axis is a metaphor that dates back to the seating of the various fractions in the French National Assembly at the time of the French Revolution. Another equally common – but less conscious – spatial metaphor concerns our use of ‘up’ to denote power and high status and ‘down’ to denote powerlessness and low status (we speak of leaders being at the height of their power, of high command and of climbing the social ladder; conversely, you fall from power, and are at the bottom of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 State of Mind
• 2 Mapping Space
• 3 Historical Space
• 4 The Emergent State
• 5 The Resilient State
• 6 Transcending Space
• 7 Towards an Ever Closer Union?
• 8 Spatial Fragmentation
• 9 Places in Networks
• 10 Towards a New State of Mind
• Bibliography
• Index