State territoriality and beyond: an introduction

STATE TERRITORIALITY AND BEYOND: AN INTRODUCTION HANS KNIPPENBERG & VIRGINIE MAMADOUH University of Amsterdam, Department of Geography and Planning, Nieuwe Prinsengracht 130, 1018 VZ Amsterdam, The Netherlands. E-mails: [email protected] / [email protected] Received: May 2001 In March 2001 the Taliban regime in Afghanistan deliberately destroyed centuries-old Buddha statues, which, according to experts, were considered to be unique and most valuable examples of the cultural heritage of mankind. Efforts from around the world of all kinds of representatives, including those from other neighbouring Muslim countries, failed in preventing this cultural disaster. The fundamentalist ideas of these Afghan Muslims did not allow them to tolerate these prominent symbols of Buddhist religion. It may be an extreme case, but it illustrates very well two familiar phenomena of our time: globalisation and state territoriality. On the one hand, it shows that something that happened in an isolated and peripheral Asian country could provoke reactions from very different parts of the world, and could awake a worldwide sense of abhorrence. After all, these Afghan statues were part of ‘our’ common heritage. That is the globalisation side. On the other hand, by resisting immense world pressure, the Taliban showed that they, and only they, had the sovereignty over the territory of Afghanistan. That is the state territoriality side. In his classic text The Significance of Territory Gottmann (1973) described the development and importance of territory from ancient Greece onwards. The main functions of territory proved to be providing safety and prosperity. Others, such as Sack (1986) and Mann (1984) have focused on a third function: territory as a strategy to affect or control people. State territoriality enabled states to regulate social relationships in a bureaucratic way, and to build a national society, a nation, which is crucial for legitimising the authority of the state in modern times. Despite pressures from above and below, there is no real alternative for the territorial state yet. On the contrary, even in the strongly globalised economic sphere, the world-market needs well-functioning territorial states that provide the necessary infrastructure and legal frameworks. ‘Without the territorial states there would be no capitalist system’ (Taylor & Flint 2000, p. 191). State and market are dependent ordering powers (Van der Wusten 1997, p. 11). Although many states did not perform very well on this point, there is no institution other than the territorial state that can fulfil better the basic needs of safety and prosperity. Still, there is a widespread belief that globalisation will undermine state territoriality. As a geographic strategy of control (Sack 1986), state territoriality has been challenged by what has been called the unbundling of territoriality (Ruggie 1993; Dijkink & Knippenberg 2001). Fewer activities than before can be traced back to one ultimate territorial authority: the state. Multinational firms and non-governmental organisations have successfully withdrawn from state control. The same applies to movements of goods, money and information, whereas the control over the movement of people increasingly becomes difficult, as immense refugee movements testify every day. Environmental hazards, nuclear threats, BSE and foot-and-mouth disease do not stop at state borders. State competences have been transferred to supra-national institutions, such as the European Union, or decentralised to sub-state (regional or local) territorial units. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie – 2001, Vol. 92, No. 4, pp. 391–393. # 2001 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA 392 HANS KNIPPENBERG & VIRGINIE MAMADOUH International institutions, such as the United Nations, the IMF and the World Bank, play an increasing role, whereas defence and military organisations such as NATO took over one of the basic functions of the state: the defence of territory (Storey 2001, pp. 107–115; Held 1989). The global network society (Castells 1996) seems to be a post-modern substitute for the national society. Taylor (2001) even argues for a new ‘metageography’ in which states have been replaced by (world-)cities, the nodes of the network society. On the inside, state territoriality has been challenged by a decline of the state’s legitimacy. Both regional/local and global identities have been developed, defying national identities, which are crucial for legitimising the authority of the state. Internal pressures forced the breaking apart of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia; a process, that has not stopped yet. State power is itself put into question. The African state system is crumbling: some states have actually ceased to exist, others have lost control of part of their territory, while in some 15 countries, rebelling groups challenge the authority of the state (Dietz & Foeken 2001). Muir (1997) reintroduced the notion of ‘effective national territory’ referring to the observation that states may not have full or effective control over (parts of) their territory (Storey 2001, p. 99); Kolossov & O’Loughlin (1999) label them pseudostates. Warlords, drug barons or guerrilla armies, for instance, control these so-called holes in the states. Kosovo, where NATO controls more or less Yugoslav territory, is another example of a faulty state. All three papers in this dossier deal with challenges to state territoriality and more generally with multiple territorialities. Karppi deals with the confrontation of state territoriality with the territoriality of the Sami, a nomadic people of Northern Europe. The fragmentation of their homeland between four modern states has been resisted through mobilisation and the creation of an imagined homeland Sápmi. The paper presents three cases in which state territoriality and Sami territoriality confront each other: the 1751 Lapp Codicil, the Norwegian assimilation policies of the mid 1800s and the recent cross-border co-operation in the light of # 2001 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG European integration. It shows that both types of territorialities evolve over time and that state territoriality in the Nordic countries has often tolerated Sami territoriality and negotiated conflicts arising from these differences. This was true in the eighteenth century when the territorial states were still emerging, and true again in the twenty-first century when these states are engaged in European integration, but it was not the case in the nineteenth century, when ethnic nationalism was at its zenith and assimilation policies justified by the drive towards one homogeneous national identity resulted in the oppression of ethnic minorities. Boudreau explores the clashes of state territoriality and the strategic territoriality of social movements. Her study deals with the territorial identification of Anglo-Montrealers, Montrealers of Anglophone descent. She explores the multiple facets of territoriality, not only state versus social movements but also the many scales at which territoriality is operated. While Canadian politics have been dominated for the past decades by the failed attempts of Franco-Québécois to achieve independence for the province of Quebec, Boudreau deals with the agglomeration of Montreal, which features a large minority of Anglophones. She shows how the provincial plans for amalgamation of local municipalities into one francophone Montreal Metropolitan Community has been (unsuccessfully) resisted by AngloMontrealers through localism and partitionism, revealing their poly-scalar political strategies against the outdated state territoriality of Franco-Québécois that aim at an independent state. Mamadouh examines European integration in the light of state territoriality. Jacques Delors, when president of the European Commission, once described the European Union as a UPO, an unidentified political object. Interpretations in political and academic debates diverge: some present the European Union as a federal state in formation, others assess it as the ‘rescue’ of the nation-states to maintain their capacity to act in a globalising world, and still others see it as a new system of governance. The paper shows that EU territoriality differs from state territoriality, which is typically fixed and exclusive. It analyses how this is STATE TERRITORIALITY AND BEYOND: AN INTRODUCTION expressed in the characteristics of the territory under EU control itself and in the political landscapes of state territoriality: state borders and capital cities. All papers point to the continuing importance of territoriality, both as a strategy of control, and as a source of identity formation. However, they also illustrate a changing territorial order, in which state territoriality is still important, but not as dominant as it was in the past, meaning that characteristic features of the territoriality of the modern state (fixedness, exclusiveness) have withered. A territorial order is emerging in which global, transnational, national, regional and local territorialities are interwoven in a new complex way that has not yet been crystallised. Therefore the challenge to geographers to understand territoriality is greater than ever. REFERENCES CASTELLS, M. (1996), The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. 1: The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. DIETZ, T. & D. FOEKEN (2001), The Crumbling of the African State System. In: G. DIJKINK & H. KNIPPENBERG, eds., The Territorial Factor: Political Geography in a Globalising World, pp. 177–200. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. DIJKINK, G. & H. KNIPPENBERG (2001), The Territorial Factor: An Introduction. 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