Territory, Migration and the Evolution of the International System

D. Vigneswaran

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780230391291
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Political History & Theory

This book deconstructs territoriality in the context of current and past European politics to advance international relations scholars' understanding of the uses and limits of territory in European history as well as the origin of an international system. It looks to the future of migration regimes beyond the territorially exclusive state.

1

Introduction

International migration is transforming political space. Since 1980, the number of international migrants has more than doubled, reaching an estimated 214 million in 2010. Enabled by revolutions in transport and communications and encouraged by global patterns of crisis, inequality and opportunity, more people are now on the move. These movements run against the grain of the state system. Migrants challenge sovereign borders, reshape political identities and make it difficult to sustain the idea of discrete national homelands. In these several ways, international migration calls into question state territoriality, a fundamental – perhaps the fundamental – principle of the international system.¹

The impact of migration extends beyond sheer numbers. Migration issues – whether they take the form of the ongoing questioning of President Barrack Obama’s birthplace, the ban on headscarves in French schools or the moral panic about trafficked sex workers during South Africa’s 2010 World Cup Football – feed into an increasingly diverse range of contemporary political debates. As the migration agenda widens in scope, immigration and social welfare departments have struggled to develop adequate responses to the many facets and effects of increased human mobility. As a result, other realms of government have begun to play a role in migration management: ‘mainstreaming’ migration in government policies on security, environmental protection, disease management and economic development. As international migration patterns diversify further, we can expect the scope of the migration agenda to continue to expand.²

Given the growing importance of migration, it is rather sobering to reflect on the fact that our territorially structured international system seems inherently incapable of coping with human mobility. Many governments simply assume that their basic goal should be to protect their unitary jurisdictions against incursions of foreign nationals. While international principles regarding asylum, family reunification and remittances tackle some of the more glaring limitations of this system, territorial exclusion remains the core principle of national immigration policy and law. The main policy mechanisms of contemporary immigration policy are border controls, national identification systems, limitations on the right to work and, of course, deportations. These regulatory instruments are specifically designed to marginalize and exclude migrants, providing few lasting measures to incorporate and integrate – let alone promote and profit from – cross-border migration.

There is mounting evidence to suggest that this exclusionary system is becoming anachronistic. A growing number and a diverse range of migrant populations languish in various states of limbo, informality and danger because the current system of migration governance simply has no place for them to go. These include the several million people who now live illegally in the United States in defiance of immigration law; the thousands who have died in the Mediterranean and Aegean seas en route to a better life in Europe; the 2.5 million asylum seekers and refugees who seem permanently settled in ‘temporary’ camps across the developing world; and the growing population of people in prisons and detention centres, waiting to be deported home. It is increasingly difficult to see these various populations as evidence of mere ‘inefficiencies’ or ‘gaps’ in the international system. Contemporary migration appears, instead, to have exposed significant limitations in the basic structure and design of the modern territorial state.

While these problems inherent in the territorial state system seem increasingly evident, the task of imagining alternatives is far from straightforward. What would a new system look like? How would governments divide up space amongst themselves? Who would belong where? How else can migration be regulated, if at all?

At present, there is a rather vague sense that we may be witnessing momentous changes in the way states respond to these questions, both individually and collectively. Experiments in European integration, the emergence of global cities as independent sources of power and the invention of the ‘virtual’ border may each herald major shifts in the way governments seek to control migration. However, we still lack a conceptual vocabulary with which to depict, describe and theorize this alternative order. A good example of this problem can be found in the literature that seeks to motivate for an end to the current way of doing things. Authors who write in favour of ‘open borders’ have usefully exposed the limitations in contemporary immigration controls, telling us why borders are ineffective, immoral and irrational.³ Yet, they have also failed to explain what sort of regulatory system might replace a border control regime. How would we begin to re-channel the tremendous amount of political energy and material resources that successive generations have invested in keeping migrants out? Would the end of border controls signal an end for the nation state? If we removed borders, would new and perhaps more deeply problematic forms of social differentiation and distancing arise in their place? This gap in our understanding – the lack of an adequate sense of how an alternative order might be built – only helps to make the prospect of change seem more remote. In this respect, radical prophecies of territorial change have often been as dissatisfying as conservative defences of the territorial status quo; neither gives us the theoretical tools to discuss and debate the future of state territoriality and migration governance.

This inadequacy in the theoretical language that we use to describe state territoriality will not be easily or readily overcome. It is some 40 years since John Gerard Ruggie, the International Relations (IR) theorist most noted for his attempts to think through these questions of state territoriality and systems change, noted that we were ‘beginning to develop an adequate conceptual vocabulary with which to describe [a new international order].’⁴ However, by the turn of the twentyfirst century many appeared to have despaired at the prospects for genuine breakthroughs. Political geographer Alexander Murphy then noted that ‘there is an inertia to the spatial ontologies of traditional IR theory that lives on even among many who are explicitly critical of that theory.’⁵

In order to break these conceptual shackles, and develop new ways of thinking about systemic change, this book asks whether there are alternative forms of territoriality to the contemporary system of exclusion, and, if so, how do they work? Answers to this very broad question can be found in the study of international history. As many theorists have told us, territorial exclusivity is deeply embedded in the basic institutions of the international system: sovereignty, nationhood and citizenship.⁶ Territoriality is ingrained not only in the political landscape, but in the way we understand politics itself. Recognizing this fact, this book searches for answers in some unfamiliar places. I make important leaps across the longue durée of international history to periods and regions where political statesmen and scholars understood the relationship between migration, territory and governance in fundamentally different ways. I examine moments of transformation in international politics that closely mirror our contemporary predicament: scenarios where the underlying principles and logic of human mobility and sovereignty were unstable and in doubt. The book uses history, not to develop a new story of how we came to the present, but to discover what it was like to think about migration politics under fundamentally different conditions and constraints. How did the rulers of city-states and empires problematize migration, and what spatial strategies did they deploy to harness, manage or regulate the productive power of human mobility? Do the efforts of past rulers tell us anything about our current system of territorial controls and the various alternatives on offer? Can we begin to see whether fundamental shifts are already taking place?

When we begin to pay closer and more critical attention to the historical record, it becomes easier to conceptualize the potential for variation and change. The central lesson that I draw out from the historical excursions in this book is that if we want to understand how the current system of migration governance might change, we need to pay more attention to the concepts of ‘space’ and ‘place’. For too long, IR scholars have tended to discuss territoriality as if it were merely a projection of the institution of sovereignty onto a map: a political artefact, but not a geopolitical tool. This study shows – to the contrary – that territoriality is an actively discussed and debated political strategy, which rulers and thinkers have deliberately and selectively designed to control specific places and the people who live within them. Moreover, at key moments in the past, states and international societies have reconsidered and reconstituted the political landscape, generating new answers to the fundamental questions of migration governance: Which institution should be responsible for what jurisdiction? Who belongs to what community? And how can political institutions more effectively control migration and settlement patterns?

The book shows that territorial exclusion is but one of four territorial strategies that rulers have experimented with during the evolution of our international system. The three additional strategies that this book brings to the fore are centralization, expansion and integration. Each of these strategies has its own internal logic and design. Previous work has discussed the relative merits and limits of these alternatives to the sovereign state, particularly in the era of Westphalia, but has failed to discuss the crucial role that each strategy has played in the ongoing development of the contemporary state, its spatial contours and migration policies. Centralization, expansion and integration are not the failed experiments of the past, but ‘immanent trajectories’, which continue to shape how contemporary rulers respond to migration patterns and problems. By revealing and narrating this alternative history of state territoriality and migration, the book creates a very different image of the contemporary order: one that is open to the latent potential inherent in the multiple territorial projects that have brought us to where we are.

Of course, it is not sufficient to simply imagine possibilities. So, the book goes further, to develop ways of better understanding why political actors make decisions to use the various alternatives on offer. My central argument here is that political communities use historically constituted ‘mental maps’ to design their migration policies and develop strategies to control space. These maps are not like satellite images that reflect the earth’s surface in all of its intricacy and detail, but more like workbook sketches: radical simplifications that divide the earth’s surface into manageable portions and imbue different places with material values, social purposes and emotive resonances. Mental maps might identify differences between the city and the countryside or between an imperial metropole and its periphery and might help political actors understand how to interpret what movement between these different places means and how ‘the state’ ought to respond. I show that if we can better understand the maps which rulers and thinkers have used to make sense of their landscape then we can begin to understand why they may have adopted particular territorial strategies rather than others, and why they might have changed their strategy at specific moments in time.

By reading history in this way, I create new openings in the way we understand both the past and the future of the international system. Looking backwards, the study significantly challenges the conventional chronology of a ‘modern’ international system. The dominant historical narrative of our international system tells us about the rise of the sovereign territorial state. This schematic history consists broadly of three key moments: the origin of the system in Europe at or around the Peace of Westphalia when feudal variations on statehood were eliminated; the expansion of this system to the rest of the world at the end of the Second World War when European empires collapsed; and a hypothesized shift to a ‘post-modern’ system in the present signalled by the creation of the European Union (EU). Even those authors who have critiqued the idea that the Peace of Westphalia was the fundamental turning point have usually gone on to tell a story about the rise of territorial exclusivity as a political model and form.⁷

This book challenges this linear version of history. I aim to replace it with a narrative that emphasizes persistent variation in territorial forms and state capacity to simultaneously deploy multiple territorial strategies. Using this formula, I argue that a new series of turning points ought to inform our understanding of the history of territoriality: (a) the turn to pacifying centralization in late medieval Italy; (b) the discovery of a developmental model of imperial expansion in the eighteenth-century British Empire; and (c) the proposal to establish a post-national model of integration in the EU. From this perspective, we can move away from the idea that territorial exclusivity has dominated international politics for the last three centuries, finally accepting that the twentieth century has been a relatively brief and geographically contained zenith for this particular territorial form.

Armed with this more nuanced assessment of the state’s historical pedigree, and a richer understanding of the alternatives on offer, I argue that fundamental transformation in the way we govern migration is not some distant ideal, but a process that we can more easily identify, monitor and trace through to the present and chart into the future. At a minimum, we can observe change in the way states and other political institutions experiment with, and devote additional resources to, the strategies of territorial centralization, expansion and integration. These are immanent political processes, reshaping the international system as we speak. By drawing attention to this wider range of spatial practices, the book seeks to forge new paths in the study of international migration and state territoriality.

The chapters of this book develop my argument about territoriality, migration and the evolution of the international system in five steps. Chapter 2 develops a series of analytical tools to analyse the historical record. I argue in favour of more dynamic definitions of our key concepts of ‘migration’ and ‘territoriality’, helping the reader to appreciate the capacity of powerful actors to reshape their political landscape. The discussion then develops the concept of ‘mental maps’, explaining how this interpretative tool can be used to identify the way past actors developed their territorial strategies and justified important changes in their approach to migration. This chapter draws heavily on the field of Human Geography to explain how societies and polities collectively construct places to serve as sites for their activities, objects for their projects and repositories of emotive feeling. I explain how these three elements of ‘place’ help us to understand the way questions of authority, movement and belonging have been decided in migration policy and law.

The next three chapters are not only concerned with the empirical substantiation of theory, but also gradually develop an alternative historical narrative of state territoriality and migration control. Chapter 3 opens the inquiry with a study of the Italian city-states in the age of Dante. The city-states are usually regarded as a competitor to the early modern territorial state, but they are usually also seen as a historical dead end, disappearing from view in the seventeenth century. Diverging from this path, my discussion emphasizes how the city-states developed and refined a strategy of migration control that would remain at the core of the modern state-building project: territorial centralization. The main concern of late medieval Italian rulers was to manage the movement of landed aristocrats to the city. While these elites brought great wealth and influence to town, they also brought a fighting spirit with them, generating a cycle of urban gang warfare, which Shakespeare would later satirize in Romeo and Juliet. Territorial centralization was urban governors’ strategy of limiting this violence by banishing lords from the city, burning down their castles and making urban patriotism the basis of citizenship. The temporary success of this strategy explains why the city-states lasted for so long and why centralization did not disappear with the demise of Milan, Florence and Venice as independent states. Rather, this strategy became a central instrument of modern politics. The continuing tradition of centralization is exemplified not only by the growth and spread of capital cities as a vibrant component of the modern nation state but by the continuing strength of sanctuary cities as bulwarks against central state immigration control.

Chapter 4 reconsiders another spatial strategy that we have prematurely dumped in the dustbin of history: territorial expansion. The chapter develops this theme through an in-depth case study of the early modern British Empire in India. In the eighteenth century, when Britain’s greatest imperial ventures were getting underway, the East India Company began to send out its servants to trade on the fringes of the South Asian subcontinent. Again, for this company and its London benefactors, migration issues lay at the core of questions of state development and territorial strategy. The key issues revolved around who could travel to and settle in India and what sort of prerogatives these settlers would wield. In its earliest phase, the Indian conquest teetered on the edge of disaster as a corrupt diaspora of officials used company coffers to build up personal fiefdoms and tithes. I show how the British Parliament sought to end these problems by developing a model of imperial expansion that would serve as a template for all their subsequent imperial adventures. Parliament ousted the Company’s cliques by professionalizing the bureaucracy and introducing a market-oriented developmental model of expansion. This account helps us understand not only the enduring strengths of the imperial project and its capacity for renovation and reform, but also how imperial projects remain the underlying template for current efforts to control migration beyond state borders, as is evident in the current global initiative on ‘migration and development’.

Having looked backwards into history in order to revive a narrative of enduring variation in state territoriality and migration controls, Chapter 5 begins to look forwards. More specifically, the chapter discusses the EU, which many have regarded as a potential harbinger of the modern state’s demise. On the one hand, I use this discussion of the EU to illustrate the central point of the book, that is, political institutions commonly deploy several territorial strategies simultaneously. Hence, the EU features elements of expansion, centralization and exclusion. Each of these strategies has its own internal logic and history within EU migration policy and law. On the other hand, the EU’s strategy of integration also represents a substantial departure from previous territorial forms. The chapter attempts to tease out the unique character of this approach to migration while also charting its long historical pedigree. I show how, in the 1960s and 1970s, European integration created the template for a post-national approach to migration. This chapter concludes with a suggestion that integration may constitute a third immanent alternative territorial form – albeit one that may already be on the wane.

The final chapter summarizes the argument and reflects on the theoretical significance of the historical narratives, seeking to further broaden our perspective on the evolution of state territoriality. Looking back across these three moments of evolution of the modern international system, I ask whether our current chronology of the modern state makes any sense. I argue in favour of separating the chronology of territoriality from its exclusive association with sovereignty and for further efforts to chart the evolution of, and competition between, territorial forms. The work then discusses several ways in which we can move beyond sterile discussions of the origins and future of territorial exclusion, and towards a political theory centred upon a choice between multiple forms of territorial power.

2

Migration and Mental Maps

How can we better understand fundamental change in state territoriality and migration control? Answering this question requires a dynamic understanding of political space and geopolitical decision-making. Unfortunately, we have often treated political space as if it were natural and unchangeable: a brute fact which rulers and political institutions simply have to accept. Space has been the stage on which politics plays out, but rarely does it feature as an integral part of the stories we tell about politics itself, its nature and evolution.¹ In order to develop a more nuanced and critical understanding of the politics of human mobility, this chapter will seek to refine the theoretical vocabulary we use to to describe the relationships between ‘territoriality’, ‘migration’ and ‘space’.

The phenomenon of ‘territoriality’ is particularly problematic. Ethnologists used to treat territorial behaviour as if it were an animal instinc...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Migration and Mental Maps
• 3. Centralization in the City-State
• 4. Expansion of the British Empire
• 5. Integrating Europe
• 6. Forecasting Territorial Change
• Epilogue: Theory from the South
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index