Uneven Development and Regionalism

State, Territory and Class in Southern Europe

Costis Hadjimichalis

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135785482
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Categoría: Politik

Published in the year 1986, Uneven Development and Regionalism is a valuable contribution to the field of Geography.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

The socialist political struggles currently taking place in southern Europe are creating profound challenges to traditional Marxist dogma and discourse.

How can one continue to speak, for example, of a dichotomy between base and superstructure, when the reorganization and survival of capitalism at the regional and international scale increasingly depend on forms of political and ideological mediation (as in the educational and regional policies of the State and the Mediterranean policy of the EEC) which directly affect the supposed ‘laws of motion’ that are traditionally considered to determine superstructural events and patterns? And, to come closer to our subject, how can traditional Marxist discourse contend with old and new forms of social movements focusing on urban and regional issues of a clearly anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian character, but not neatly constructed around specific ‘class interests’ and purely proletarian initiatives?

The old certainties, the famous ‘guarantees of history’ and the ‘iron laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production’ are being strongly questioned and the resultant political uncertainty is accompanied by growing theoretical reappraisal. This is what led Poulantzas, in one of his last interviews before his death, to speak of a ‘crisis in traditional Marxism’, and Lefebvre to write about ‘Marxism exploded’. It should be emphasized, however, that this identity crisis of Marxism is not simply the result of a strengthening of bourgeois dominance. In contrast to the reinvigoration of the Right in other countries, socialist rhetoric is still in good currency in southern Europe. While capitalism itself is undergoing a deep economic crisis, its form of representation and legitimization, as evidenced in recent changes of government in France, Greece and Spain, is being modernized and changed through the growing power of Socialist parties.

How long parliamentary socialism will last and how effective it will be, however, is another question.¹ The rise of socialist political power in southern Europe has not been accompanied by a mass popular movement able to present itself as a hegemonic alternative to the bourgeois establishment. As Poulantzas observed:

…it is as though the form of existence of the latter (an alternative socialist movement) had been determined by their function of opposition within a certain capitalist order, and they could not survive the dissolution of that order.

I believe that there exists a series of political, ideological and theoretical obstacles which the socialist forces in southern Europe must overcome if a successful solution is to be found to the present crisis. Furthermore, amidst other important problems, such as the extension of democracy and popular control over politics and the economy, I wish to focus attention on those arising from the existence, significance and consciousness of regional differentiation. In this book, my aim is to contribute to a reinterpretation of uneven regional development in southern Europe through an analysis of the relationship between regionalization (a process designed ‘from above’ by the state and/or by capital, aiming at restructuring the spatial division of labour according to the changing needs of profitable accumulation) and regionalism (a reaction ‘from below’ of a specific local social group or a certain social alliance, whose local interests are against such a regionalization).

The relationship between regionalization and regionalism is a trans-historical one, i.e. it is not restricted only to the capitalist mode of production. It takes, however, distinct forms and particular importance in specific capitalist-social formations, when uneven regional development is combined with political and cultural/ideological issues (Hadjimichalis, 1983). Such a case seems to be the current situation in southern Europe, and particularly in Spain, Italy and Greece, which are the concrete frame of reference for this study.²

The relationship between regionalization and regionalism and its roots in uneven regional development is viewed as a social confrontation over the spatiality of contemporary capitalism (Soja, 1981). My argument builds upon a conceptualization of spatiality as the material form of the social relations of production, as the concrete historical and territorial framework for accumulation, and hence as the terrain for new forms of class struggle and political mobilization. In this conceptualization, the state, territory and social classes are implanted directly in the analysis of spatiality, not as peripheral categories but as its essential problematic (Tsoukalas, 1981; Cooke, 1983).

Within this general interpretive framework, four more specific objectives can be identified.

First, through an historical and political analysis I will trace the origins and development of regional unevenness in southern Europe, arguing that regional differentiation is the outcome of a spatially differentiated accumulation process and is not due to supposed localized inadequacies of particular regions and people, as it is sometimes claimed. My basic thesis is that uneven regional development is not just the result of the social processes of capitalist development but rather it is also an active moment, in them (to use Harvey’s [1982] formulation) helping to shape those processes. Close to this is the need to locate analysis of uneven regional development, not merely within the context and territorial boundaries of a particular national state but rather to make the starting point of such analysis the global character of the world capitalist system.

Secondly, I will try to develop an alternative explanation of uneven regional development by challenging the current understanding of the relationship between the Marxian theory of value, development and space.³ More specifically, I will try to go beyond immediate appearances of geographical phenomena, by investigating their underlying mechanisms and tendencies. To begin the analysis with such issues as capital mobility, agglomeration in space, spatial divison of labour, development of productive forces, etc., is a necessary, but too elementary an approach. Instead, I will try to use the labour theory of value (LTV) in geographical terms, in a framework dominated until recently by a-spatial categories and processes. In so doing, I propose an alternative framework for possible future research in the field, based on the notion of the geographical transfer of value (GTV). My attention is not restricted to structural forces only (the internal logic of the capitalist mode of production), but equivalent attention is given to the role of social agents in producing and reproducing structures and vice versa. For an illustration of this dual focus, the case of southern European agriculture is analysed in depth.

Thirdly, the development of the previous two points will provide the necessary framework to analyze the relationship between regionalization and regionalism. The particular focus will be on the role of old and new forms of regional social movements, arguing about the political implications of uneven regional development and the possible tactical objectives for planning. In this respect, I will try to avoid the hopeless feeling that nothing can be done, since the iron logic of capitalism destroys any popular initiative. Instead, a more politically optimistic analysis is presented, in which regional planning—together with other aspects of a state intervention—is conceived as an object and arena of struggle.

And fourthly, an attempt will be made to overcome the typical fragmentation and divisive specialization which exists within the relatively small field of regional analysis, in order to reintegrate regional planning with political practice. In doing so, the arguments presented will be critical of both mainstream regional development theories and certain Marxist views and formulations on the ‘regional question’.

1.1 REGIONS AND POLITICS IN SOUTHERN EUROPE

Since the middle of the 1960s there has been a growing interest in regional problems throughout Europe, especially in the countries along its southern fringe (Hudson and Lewis, 1984). Mass media and direct state intervention, followed by capital pressures and social reactions from various groups in ‘regional peripheries’ have introduced regional planning issues alongside other important welfare policies. By the end of the 1970s, regional development became a well established element in corporate, national and supranational policies (e.g. EEC), while graduate regional studies were booming.

The economic and political circumstances of this period were important in helping to shape the character and content of these new planning initiatives. The 1950s and 1960s were generally marked by high rates of national economic growth, by ‘economic miracles’ following the long post-war boom. During this period, France, Italy, Spain, Greece and, to a lesser degree, Portugal had the highest annual growth rate in GDP in western Europe, aside from Ireland. In the 1980s, however, such high rates seem to have gone for good. It is not only the international economic crisis, however, which badly affected the economies of southern Europe. More important were the changes in their internal social structure.

The political situation at the beginning of the 1980s was dramatically different from that of the early 1970s. Ten years ago, anti-democratic, largely military, regimes of the reactionary Right, long established (as in Portugal and Spain) or more recent (as in Greece), were in power over much of southern Europe. Except for the reversion to dictatorial military rule in Turkey, this is no longer the case today. Furthermore, PASOK in Greece, PSE in Spain and socialist-led coalition governments in Italy and Portugal soon followed Mitterrand’s 1981 election victory in France. For the first time since World War II and the civil wars, ‘socialist’ governments achieved power throughout southern Europe.

Could we speak then—as Papandreou and Mitterrand declared in 1981—of a two-tiered Europe, geopolitics conservative in the northern ‘core’ and socialist in its southern ‘periphery’? While this was a popular slogan among these ‘socialist’ governments, it remained highly problematic, and was not justified in practice. In fact, neither all of the so-called socialist governments, nor their policies were alike. In terms of international relations, there are very diverse attitudes, from Spain and Italy favouring NATO’s euro-missile decisions, to France’s intervention in Chad, and to Greece’s neutralist-tinged anti-Americanism. In terms of domestic policies, with the exception of PSI, all other parties have mobilized sufficient support for electoral victory on the basis of a radical left-looking programme and appealing rhetoric about regional development issues.⁴

But after two or three years in office their programme seems to lack cohesion, and their popular support has started to fluctuate rapidly. Their effort towards modernization and restructuring (especially in the industrial sector) was confronted with popular unrest in spring 1984, when the governments of France and Spain declared thousands of job losses and when the socialist-led Italian government decided to abandon the ‘scala mobile’ (the automatic adjustment of wages to price indices).⁵ The leadership of these neo-socialist governments thus appeared to many to have no real domestic policy other than getting into office (see also, Petras, 1984).

It is perhaps a little unfair to be so critical about each of these parties, especially as the work and attitudes of all of them have collectively helped to develop a new balance of forces in southern Europe. Nevertheless, my criticism is based on the fact that their radical rhetoric about regional development has not yet been translated into an alternative and effective regional practice, especially in the mode of thinking, in institutional reforms and in implementation.⁶ What is lacking is a coherent political view of the regional problem. This is not only a failure of socialist parties but also of certain communist parties which, in their avoidance of confrontation, have failed to draw strength from the present crisis of capitalism in southern Europe. In a large part, this failure can be traced back to the impact of state intervention during the last period of ‘rightist rule’. Despite their authoritarian character, these earlier interventions changed not only policy instruments and content, but, under the pressure of the masses, they acknowledged regional and local needs in a very direct and concrete way.

At first, this acknowledgment consisted primarily of assistance to ‘poor’ regions, directly through the improvement of social services and means of collective consumption, as well as indirectly through incentives to capital and labour. But this type of assistance by the end of the 1970s tended to develop—with the help of the rhetoric of the socialist parties—into a much more universal policy statement of what each citizen in each region was entitled to. Thus, the subsequent legitimation of needs has today turned assistance into an obligation, which the state, local authorities and the new ‘socialist’ leadership have to meet. Virtually all spatial issues have thus become open political questions.

The latter has two effects. Either state obligations generate a popular apathy, with the majority of people ‘waiting for solutions’ from the state or from short-lived, issue-oriented regional advocacy groups (as in the Greek case). Or, when political conflicts at the local and regional levels do take place, they are substantially convoluted and shunted aside by the inability of the mass-integrative apparatuses (applied as they are in the centralized decisions regarding restructuring) to react to concrete and goal-directed regional interests which are not related to the centralized processes of bargaining and compromise (as in the case of Spain and Italy). Thus, the present ‘regional crisis’ in southern Europe is not only an acute manifestation of the general pattern of capital restructuring and uneven development in the area but also the manifestation of (a) the concrete antithesis between central state and local community; and (b) of class conflicts which assume a spatial form, when class interests are territorialized.

These observations help to clarify why I am concerned here with ‘regions’, a term burdened with ambiguity. Regions have become the concrete political arenas in which the effects of both social and spatial marginalization and of state intervention culminate in contemporary southern Europe. Such a view must be differentiated from the ‘spatial separatist theme’ as has been characterized by Sack (1974) and Gore (1984), that is, the possibility to separate and evaluate the spatial as an independent phenomenon. My extended focus on agriculture, on local social structures and regional social movements will help to clarify that ‘regions’ do matter in southern Europe. As such, they provide important opportunities for political mobilization and for radical social change.

1.2 THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

The book is structured in two parts. The first is primarily theoretical, although it derives directly from the research presented in the second part. In this respect the theoretical arguments presented here have not been first conceived in abstracto and then tested in reality. On the contrary, they are a synthesis of current debates in southern Europe (and elsewhere) and the outcome of a concrete analysis. The challenge, if you like, of this book is to understand the general underlying causes of capitalist unevenness, while at the same time recognizing and appreciating the importance of the specific and the unique.

Thus Chapter 2 criticizes mainstream regional development theories, arguing about their method, their concept of development and their connection with the capitalist state. These theories reproduced themselves in two waves: one carried the pragmatist/conservative view, highlighting free enterprise, free trade and the least possible state intervention; the other carried the liberal/ interventionist view, which stressed the necessity of intervention by the welfare state. The chapter ends with a short review of some current regional development approaches, including a critique of neo-liberal theories, promoting ‘adjustment’ and self-reliance’.

In Chapter 3 an attempt is made to move beyond some...

Índice

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• Part I: Theoretical Formulations; The Political Economy of Uneven Regional Development
• Part II: Empirical Investigations: Agriculture and Uneven Regional Development in Southern Europe
• References
• Index