Political geography: thinking globally and locally

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1992 16: 393Prog Hum GeogrDavid R. Reynolds

Political geography: thinking globally and locally

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Political geography: thinking globallyand locallyDavid R. ReynoldsDepartment of Geography, The University of lowa, lowa City, IA 52242, USA

It was with some trepidation that I agreed to assume responsibility for writing the annualprogress reports on political geography for this journal. In his six reports, my predecessor,John O’Loughlin, attempted to review recent research in two political geographies:political geography (work by human geographers on political topics) and political geography(work by those in other disciplines on topics arguably falling within the scope of politicalgeography). His frustration with the apparent diversity, fragmentation, and lack of focus inboth ’fields’ shone through with increasing clarity in each of his yearly reviews. To furthercomplicate matters, the field grew rapidly as more and more political geographers with asmall ’p’ proclaimed themselves political geographers with a big ’P’. In the 1960s, it wasdifficult to find anyone who admitted to being a political geographer. Quite the opposite isnow the case. With the growing importance of political economy perspectives in humangeography (Peet and Thrift, 1989), theorizing about politics, civil society and space at alllevels has come to absorb the attention of the entire discipline.

In this piece I abandon any pretence at writing a comprehensive report on the progressmade in either political geographies during the course of the past few years. That simplycannot be accomplished within the few pages I have been allotted. Rather, I risk the wrathof readers by evaluating recent progress in political geography on only a few fronts. I focuson two topics which have attracted substantial attention from geographers over the pasttwo or three years: geopolitics and the politics of place. As O’Loughlin (1991) provides arecent review of work in geopolitics and international conflicts, I direct more attention tothe politics of place and the closely related issues of the local state and state formation.

Progress cannot be evaluated in the abstract; it must be measured with respect to clearlyspecified goals. Those towards which I choose to assess progress are: the internaltheoretical coherence of the field and the creation of a substantial body of empirical/historical work informed by, and informing, existing theory.

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I Emergence of a critical geopolitics

After almost a half-century hiatus, geopolitics is back on the agenda of political geography.Gone from academic geography, if not from practical politics, is realpolitik - a concernwith geographical ’imperatives’ and the identification of spatial models to help guide theforeign policy of particular states (O’Loughlin, 1991). What seems to be emerging is acritical geopolitics concerned with how geopolitical reasoning is integrated into politicaldiscourse to maintain social and political relations of dominance within contemporaryinternational politics. This work is important because it helps articulate the linkagesbetween changing material conditions in the world economy and the creation of a globalgeopolitics to preserve, maintain, or enhance existing structures of material advantage.Evidence for this is found in two recent books and several journal articles.Although the intellectual roots of critical geopolitics are to be found in Gramsci ( 1971 )

and the world-systems analysis of Wallerstein (1980), its key concepts were developed byAgnew and O’Tuathail (1987) and elaborated upon further in Agnew and Corbridge(1989). Agnew and Corbridge argue for a dynamic conception of geopolitics whichrecognizes that throughout modem history there have been distinctive geopolitical orders,characterized by specific patterns of geopolitical rivalries between world powers, punc-tuated by transitional periods of geopolitical disorder. Associated with each geopoliticalorder is a dominant discourse about the spatial division of the world and its geographicalorientation and a set of geopolitical practices to maintain the viability of that discourse.During periods of transition, it is quite unclear what new geopolitical order will emerge;hence, the dominant discourse of the previous geopolitical order tends to persist. Theprincipal difference is that there are now rival discourses. Agnew and Corbridge argue thata period of geopolitical disorder began to emerge in the early 1970s and that this is linkedto the emergence of flexible production and global Fordism. What is so different about thisperiod, they argue, is that now no single national economy has a dominating role in theworld economy and that key capitalist actors, including banks, are genuinely global inoutlook and orientation. This weakens the effectiveness of national macroeconomic policyand severely undermines the possibility of any return to a geopolitics wedded to rivalriesbetween particular states and hegemony by a single state.The task of providing a detailed analysis of a dominant geopolitical discourse of the

postsecond world war period is taken up by Dalby (1990a). He provides a brilliant analysisof how a group of high profile foreign policy experts in the new right political movement inthe USA of the mid-1970s attempted to render their particular set of security discourseshegemonic. Following Foucault (1977), Dalby argues that discourses organize particularways of knowing and understanding reality and, hence, provide the necessary intellectualconditions for the existence and legitimacy of particular institutional and politicalarrangements. While the focus of his attention is on the structure and practices ofdiscourses as revealed in the writings of this group, he does see these discourses emergingfrom, and continuing postsecond world war, USA global hegemony, economically,politically and militarily. Drawing theoretical inspiration from Agnew and O’Tuathail(1987), he focuses on how the discursive practices of four security discourses - Soviet-ology, ’realist’ power politics, geopolitics, and nuclear strategy - were used ideologically todefine security and ’otherness’ in geopolitical terms, while at the same time creating astructural interpretation of the former USSR’s history. Each of these discourses reinforcedthe others and served to perpetuate support for existing institutional arrangements and thefurther militarization of politics in the late 1970s and early 1980s (see also, Dalby, 1990b).



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Dalby’s book is essential reading for political geographers and for anyone interested inexploring postmodernist methodology in geographic research.While Dalby emphasizes and illuminates the ’smoke and mirrors’ of geopolitics, Taylor

(1990a) is more concerned with its material grounding in the world economy. Taylor’sfocus is on explicating the concept of geopolitical transition, especially that occurringbetween late 1944 and early 1946 which set the framework for the cold war. Althoughprovocative, he eschews polemic for careful scholarship. His concern is with assessing themerits of the little investigated, yet plausible, contention that the UK played a major role increating the geopolitical world order characterizing the cold war. Based on formerly secretdocuments held by the UK Foreign Office, Taylor argues that at the end of the war the UKfaced a crisis of power in the world economy; one characterized by three interlinkeddilemmas (geoeconomic, geopolitical, and geostrategic). The resolution of these di-

lemmas, according to Taylor, involved the UK undermining all international relationsbased on the big three except for that aligning the USA and the UK in a senior-juniorpartnership against the USSR. This involved negotiating a loan from the USA to preservethe UK welfare state, opening up the British Empire to USA capital, fanning the flames ofanti-communist sentiments in the USA to help ensure the loan agreement’s passage inCongress, and the acquisition of nuclear weapons for the UK as a symbol of her vestigialworld power status. The election of a socialist (Labour) government midway through thetransition proved no hindrance to continuity in UK foreign policy in these regards. Taylorargues that a combination of hard-headed realist politics on the part of the new ForeignSecretary and his subscription to geopolitical determinism precluded the articulation of a’socialist’ foreign policy. This volume succeeds in providing a powerful, thought-provoking explanation of the rapid transition from the vision of a world of united nations tothe bipolarity of the cold war. It also succeeds in helping to ensure that the revival ofpolitical geography is built on sound empirical and social theoretic foundations. These twopath-breaking books leave the reader wanting more. They bode well for future progress incritical geopolitics. In as much as each argues that geopolitics is ideologically constructed,they are also sure to provoke controversy, particularly among those who maintain that thegeography of politics bestows a certain autonomy to politics. This too could represent aform of progress: a critical geopolitics is necessarily open to criticism.

Other work contributing to the development of critical geopolitics also deservesmention. Drawing on Wallerstein’s (1988) concepts of TimeSpace, Taylor (1991) arguesthat Atlantic Europe as a distinctive region was the geopolitical reification of two politicaldiscourses emerging after 1945: corporate liberalism (leading to a system of free-tradebetween countries all of whose currencies were convertible to dollars) and anti-commu-nism. With the disappearance of its eastern boundary, the end of the cold war, and theemergence of Japan as the other ’US-reconstructed core-region’, he suggests that AtlanticEurope no longer exists. Instead, he speculates that a new Europe will be sociallyconstructed and figure prominently in whatever new geopolitical world order emerges.O’Loughlin and Grant (1990) present an analysis of the State of the Union Addresses ofUSA presidents between 1946 and 1987. It is interesting primarily because it contains nosurprises. Geographically, the USSR was consistently the focus of attention in presidentialspeeches; most of the rest of the globe received no mention except when it was unavoidablein building support for USA foreign policy.Nijman (1991), while writing in a behavioural as opposed to critical geopolitical

tradition, nonetheless presents evidence which can be interpreted as demonstrating whythe USA strategy of containment in the postsecond world war period was completely



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consistent with a USSR security discourse directed at preventing USA expansion.O’Loughlin and Van der Wusten (1990) examine the concept of panregion developed byGerman geopoliticians in the 1930s as a geopolitical solution to economic rivalry betweenthe principal powers in the core of the world economy. Focusing specifically on thesupposed panregion to be dominated by Germany, Eurafrica, they find it almost

completely lacking in economic cohesion either in the 1930s or now - further demonstra-tion that geopolitical discourse need not have material grounding. This latter pointbecomes even clearer in Corbridge and Agnew’s ( 1991 ) analysis of ’Reaganomics’ as aneconomic and geopolitical discourse. They argue the mounting trade and budget deficitsof the 1980s can be explained in part by the Reagan administration’s belief in its ownsupply-side economic discourse coupled with its geopolitical commitment to the electorateto ’make America great again’. Their analysis of the spatial and temporal unevenness of theimpacts of the growing USA deficits both domestically and internationally leads them toconclude that the legacy of Reaganomics could be quite contrary to the open internationaleconomy it set out to achieve. They suggest that the task for political geographers is torecognize the complex interdependencies ’between finance and accumulation, economyand geopolity ... and to interrogate the possibilities they hold for world order and/ordisorder’ (Corbridge and Agnew, 1991: 87).

II Global Fordism and world-systems analysis ’

. ’ ’

,~ y.

The emergence of a revitalized political geography in recent years owes much to thegrowth and elaboration of world-systems analysis (see e.g., Taylor, 1989). Despite someattempts to employ world-systems concepts to interpret concrete political events in

particular places, the approach is as open to the charges of functionalism and reductionismas any other structural social theory (see e.g., Corbridge, 1991). The world-systemsperspective maintains that the world-economy is structured territorially into core andperiphery by interclass and intraclass conflict between capitalists and propertyless workersconstrained to unfold within a territorial system of multiple states (Chase-Dunn, 1989).Such competition produces an interstate division of labour in which capital-intensiveproduction tends to be concentrated in economically dominant core states and labour-intensive production in the economically dominated states. In Wallerstein’s version of thetheory (1979), it is also argued that there is a semi-periphery, consisting of statescontaining a balance of corelike and peripherylike production. Class relationships and thecore/periphery relationship are viewed as necessary in the capitalist world economy.Change is accounted for by the complex, dynamic interactions between ceaseless,deepening, and geographically expansive processes of capitalist accumulation (as com-modity chains) within a multistate political system. Dominant elites attempt to gainaccumulation advantages for themselves vis-a-vis the elites of other states by implementingpolitical-economic strategies through their respective state apparatuses; but, none of themcan be successful to the point of transforming the structures of either exploitation ordomination. It is maintained that the core exploits both the periphery and the semi-periphery, while the semi-periphery exploits the periphery. The semi-periphery is thoughtto provide the system with much of its dynamics both economically and geopolitically(Taylor, 1989). Herein lies one of the principal problems with the world-systems approachas it has been developed to date. While historically it may be true that semi-peripheralstates have been the more innovative politically and economically, the rise of flexible



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production and global Fordism over the past two decades have seriously undermined theability of core states to regulate the capital-wage labour relationship within theirboundaries and, as a result have also begun to undermine the core/periphery relationshipitself. Recent studies of industrialization and economic growth in South Korea and Taiwanalso call into question whether world-systems proponents have appropriately identified themechanisms of change within the world economy. Amsden (1989) and Wade (1990)present strong evidence that in South Korea and Taiwan, respectively, the key to rapideconomic growth has been aggressive state intervention in their national economies

through subsidies linked to performance standards, high tariffs to protect the domesticmarket from competitive imports, and state control of banking. World-systems analysis hasargued that strong state intervention of this sort is confined to the semi-periphery. Could itbe that research conducted under the rubric of world-systems theory is too core- and semi-periphery-state centred (see Taylor’s (1990b) review of Wallerstein, 1989)? Does theapparent demise of Fordism in the core, coupled with the rise of state corporatism in partsof the periphery, spell the swan song for the world-systems approach itself? One thingappears clear, the answers can only be found in detailed analyses of the state and capitalaccumulation in the periphery.

III l The politics of place and the local state

How does space matter in social life? This question has ranked among the principalconcerns of human geography for more than a decade (Peet and Thrift, 1989). Inattempting to frame answers to it, human geographers have advanced three generalcontentions (Buck, 1990). First, it is claimed that people have ideas about place and placeswhich have significant social consequences. Secondly, it is asserted that social processesare constituted differently in different places. Thirdly, it is argued that the costs ofovercoming distance ensure that social life takes place in relatively circumscribed spatialcontexts and that this is what forms the basis for the first two claims. Recently politicalgeographers have made considerable progress in making a successful case for the firstclaim; critical geopolitics is nothing if it is not a demonstration of this. The secondcontention is potentially much more radical, both ontologically and epistemologically. Thethird claim, probably the one of longest standing in geography, is attracting less attentionbecause it is not worth making if the first two claims cannot be substantiated and becauseof what Harvey (1990a) has recently referred to as ’time-space compression’ - thedramatic changes in the dimensionality of space and time wrought in late capitalism.Attention here will focus on the second claim, examining the various forms it has taken inrecent research in political geography, particularly in theorizing local politics and the localstate - what Reynolds and Knight (1989) have called the ’politics of place’.

Before examining the specific nature of recent attempts at theorizing politics, it is

important to indicate those issues on which there is general agreement and those on whichthere is much debate. There is general agreement that space per se can have no generaleffects and that it cannot be viewed as a container somehow separate from material objects.Spatial arrangements, it is agreed, make a difference in how social processes operate inparticular places. Where debate exists it is on whether spatial arrangements make adifference on how general social processes operate, whether there can be any general socialtheory, or whether it must be contextual spatially. Cox and Mair (1989) argue that thedebate is essentially misguided because of its failure to recognize different levels of



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abstraction in theorizing - the lower the level of abstraction, the more important spacebecomes. Warf (1990: 591 ), arguing from a postmodernist position, rejects any attempt atexplanation based on ’general laws’ or ’generalized processes’ as a positivist form ofexplanation, maintaining that there are no general theories of places and no theories ’ofhistory or geography independent of history and geography’. Postmodernist epistemology,however, has as yet amassed few adherents in political geography. The predominant viewis that effects of social processes stem from the internal structure of the necessary relations

constituting such processes rather than from their spatial constitution. However, spatialarrangements and relations along with other contingencies are crucial in determining theextent to which potential effects are actually realized. It is in this sense that most humangeographers claim that space matters. To identify spatial relations as contingent is not todenigrate their importance. In the context of state theory, for example, Duncan andGoodwin (1988) have argued that they are so important as to have led to the creation oflocal state institutions to deal specifically with them.

In their review of the emergence of a new political geography in the 1980s, Reynolds andKnight (1989) argued that Harvey’s (1985) analysis of the formation of regional classalliances provided an appropriate theoretical foundation for the subsequent elaboration ofa more place-based theory of politics - one centrally concerned with the production andreproduction of places. Fincher (1989) has made a similar point, stressing the importanceof Harvey’s analysis in embedding the local state in local class relations. What progress hasbeen made recently in adding to, modifying, or replacing the foundation laid by Harvey?While a voluminous literature on the local state, economic restructuring, local politics,

growth machines, neighbourhood conflict, and urban social movements now exists, recenttheoretical advances have been modest. Rather than undertaking the requisite historical/empirical work necessary for identifying weaknesses in Harvey’s formulation, some of therecent literature has been concerned with restatements of its more ’structural’ aspectswhile losing sight of its politics. Much of the attraction of Harvey’s formulation lies in itsinsistence that the nature of local politics in a region cannot be ’read off’ very

straightforwardly from a knowledge of its class structure - its insistence that local politics isrelatively autonomous. Instead, local politics derives from contested attempts to maintain,enhance, or create a new ’structured coherence’ in the region, one characterized by aparticular mix of technologies and a dominant set of social relations in both productionand reproduction. Cox and Mair (1988), for example, ignore this aspect of Harvey’sformulation and adopt an essentially functionalist view of local politics wherein localpolitics are seen as little more than class conflicts thinly shrouded in the bourgeois ideologyof economic growth. There are three ’classes’ of actors in their model: firms, people, andlocal states. According to Cox and Mair, the key to understanding local politics in a localityis the degree to which the reproduction of firms, people and local states are tied to thatlocality. Local states are completely ’locally dependent’, firms are least locally dependentand people (presumably labour) fall somewhere in between. As a result of these variationsin local dependence, business coalitions (dominated by those firms which are more locallydependent than others) supposedly form and chart the future economic and social courseof the locality. What is so interesting about Cox and Mair’s argument is that it is

economistic precisely because of the particular ways in which they view local politics to beplace-bound through their concept of local dependence. A more recent paper by Cox(1990) recognizes the contested nature of social relations under capitalism and hence isless subject to this criticism, but it is still primarily a restatement of Harvey’s formulation ata lower level of abstraction, and a more economistic one at that. Its principal virtue lies in



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the convincing case it makes for the necessary territoriality of the state (cf. Johnston,1990).Logan and Molotch (1987), building on Molotch’s seminal essay of 1976, provide

numerous, pertinent examples which enrich and lend more substance to the originalargument. It also examines whether the growth machine metaphor continues to remain apowerful one now that the internationalization of capital is much more clearly recognizedthan it was a decade ago. As a theory of local politics, the work is not a significant advanceover the original essay and is certainly no improvement over Harvey’s (1985) formulation.Its importance lies more in its textured, dialectical attempt to demonstrate that the

oppositions of structure-agency and global-local are false while the opposition betweenpursuit of exchange values and use values in the urban built environment is not. It

succeeds splendidly in collapsing global-local duality; after all, the resolution of this issue isthe raison d’être of local progrowth coalitions. The structure-agency opposition disappearsin their analysis because it is replaced by that of exchange value/use value, but one suspectsthat this comes at the cost of ignoring that which cannot easily be loaded into the exchangevalue/use value opposition. More serious is Logan and Molotch’s lack of any theorizationof the local state. As Clarke (1990) puts it ’Without some systematic conceptualization ofthe local state, there is no way to work out how or why the local state would use itsautonomy - see its interests, if you will - in challenging growth interests’ (Clarke,1990: 190). Logan and Molotch’s contribution then is methodological, not theoretical.The more significant advances over Harvey’s (1985) formulation are those of Duncan

and Goodwin (1988) and those of Harvey himself (1989a; 1989b; 1990a; 1990b). Duncanand Goodwin (1988) attempt to extend Harvey’s theory to account for the formation ofboth the state and local states. They argue that the concept of ’structured coherence’ needsto be expanded and broadened to include nature and the development of regional andlocal cultures and consciousness and that the latter are only partly structured by socialpractices rooted in localized expressions of capital accumulation. The pioneering work ofCooke (1985) on the emergence of South Wales as a ’radical region’ is drawn upon to

support their argument. They maintain that the ’effects of spatially distinct patterns ofproduction will always be combined with, and mediated through, spatially distinct socialpractices arising in local civil society and sustained culturally through an &dquo;imaginedcommunity&dquo;’ (Duncan and Goodwin, 1988: 77). The principal means of maintaining thestructured coherences of an existing set of places, creating new ones, and dismantling oldones is through the state which itself needs to be articulated into different territorial levelsand institutions each with some autonomy in formulating and implementing policy. Thestate, however, is interested in maintaining and enhancing the structured coherence of thefull set of places (localities and regions) within its territory. Since places are complex socialentities rather than mere reflections of uneven development, the state must intervenebetween capitalist production and civil society. State policies then have an interest incapital accumulation and in the development of civil society. Duncan and Goodwin arguethat the practices of civil society - relations of kinship, household, gender, or ’imaginedcommunities’ of nation, region or locality - become linked to, but not determined by,capitalist accumulation and class relations. The major social mechanism involved in suchcoupling is the state. The novelty of this extension of Harvey’s formulation lies not just inits recognition of this mediating role of the state but also that mediation necessarily takes aterritorial form. But, herein lies the rub. While the nature of uneven development ensuresthat the state must be articulated into levels, it also ensures that there will be local-centralstate conflict. This is probably the most significant advance in the development of a spatial



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theory of the state to date and, hence, remains an important extension of Harvey’s originalinsights, but, Duncan and Goodwin’s ideas are wanting in terms of empirical and historicalgrounding. Their empirical analysis of recent struggles over central-local governmentrelations in the UK (Duncan and Goodwin, 1988) is interesting and informative, but itmakes no effort to assess the historical veracity of their theoretical speculations.

Beginning in his influential The condition of postmodernity (1989a) and continuing in aseries of three additional papers ( 1989b; 1990a; 1990b), Harvey picks up where he left offin his 1985 formulation. What is new is that he now more clearly spies a ’postmodern’phase of capitalist development, characterized by a qualitative change in the nature, and aquantitative increase in the number and frequency, of change in urban restructurings - thedestruction and creation of new structured coherences - on a global scale. This new stateof affairs has been brought about by a general speeding up in the turnover time for capitalaccumulation (’time-space compression’) made possible by changes in technologies oftransportation and communication. The security formerly provided places by the relativelylong-term persistence of their structured coherences has been undermined as capitalincreasingly roams the globe seeking locations for profitable investment. This in turn hasled to unprecedented levels of competition between places for investment and a trans-formation in local governance from managerialism (of the form anticipated by Duncan andGoodwin (1988)) to entrepreneurialism (Harvey, 1989b). The irony of the situation,according to Harvey (1990a; 1990b), is that the elimination of spatial barriers and the’annihilation of space by time’, always a prerequisite for the expansion of capitalaccumulation globally, has rendered capital more and more sensitive to the specificcharacteristics and nuances of place (see also Cooke, 1990). He argues that in response tooveraccumulation in many sectors of the global economy, a maelstrom of place-basedcultural, political, production and consumption innovations has led to increased levels of’speculative place construction’ - massive, high-risk investments in the social and physicalinfrastructure of particular places (Harvey, 1990: 10).

Following the lead of those writing on flexible accumulation (e.g., Schoenberger, 1988;Scott, 1988 and Swyngedouw, 1989), Harvey (1989b) argues that the process he describeshas also entailed a radical reconstruction of central-local state relations and a cutting freeof local state activities from those of the central state. The upshot of all this is a politics ofplace production and reproduction which on the one hand is more subservient to anddependent on capital accumulation at the global scale than ever before, but on the other iseven more open to the local formation and survival of all kinds of different ’othemesses’, atleast some of which can entail authentic place-bound identities. While capital exploitsthese differences in ’otherness’ in its search for new and more profitable forms ofinvestment, it does not control their construction spatially. These spatially constructed’othernesses’ become part of the material basis for social and political struggles. To theextent that otherness is predicated on the existence of an authentic place-bound identity orconsciousness, it can be expected that these struggles will be counterhegemonic or anti-systemic, to at least some degree. This leads Harvey to conclude that, contrary to thegrinding economism of some writing in a Marxist tradition, the rise of a progressive urbancorporatism, while by no means assured, is more possible now than at any time in thehistory of capitalism. Here there is a significant convergence between Harvey’s recent workand Duncan and Goodwin (1988). There is, however, a significant divergence as well.While Duncan and Goodwin see the local state as necessary for the central state to managea national set of regionally based structured coherences at least historically, Harvey



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suggests that the local states of the advanced capitalist countries are rapidly eclipsing theimportance of the state in this regard.A few others have also contributed to the theoretical debate surrounding the politics of

place and the local state and many more have contributed indirectly. Leitner (1990)provides a good summary of the recent literature theorizing on the entrepreneurialactivities of local state. Beauregard (1989) focuses on the economic restructuring of majormetropolitan areas in the USA and sees its spatial unevenness within cities as fracturing theresistance of labour to place destruction. Knopp (1991) argues effectively that Harvey’srecent work must be extended to incorporate gender and sexual relations as importantconstituent elements in the structuration of place and links recent empirical work tobolster his case. Hoggart (1991), probably the first fully fledged textbook in politicalgeography focusing on urban politics, is essential reading for those unfamiliar with therecent literature. It is a masterful review of the recent empirical literature and provides aninteresting perspective on the major theoretical debates. Its penchant for seeing theoreticaldebates as narrow discourses of either the left or right and using this as an excuse for notengaging in rigorous criticism, however, detracts from its usefulness as a basis for furthertheoretical development of the field.While the so-called ’localities debate’ has served to inform the theoretical developments

reviewed here, most locality studies have not. Of the studies included in Cooke (1989a),only Meegan’s (1989) addresses issues involving local political struggles. The Harloe et al.(1990) volume, which specifically sought to assess whether a place-based politics matteredin the economic restructuring that took place in the UK during the 1970s and 1980s faresbetter. Bassett and Harloe (1990) find the creation of a Labour-dominated growthcoalition important in accounting for Swindon’s significant, yet largely conflict-free,expansion. Meegan (1990) provides important insights into the conditions under which aradical local politics does or does not develop in opposition to rather massive localeconomic decline. In particular, he demonstrates that the spatial structure of socialrelations linked to the local reproduction of a ’collectivist ethos’ can actively conditionpolitical action.

Following on from her earlier work with Fincher (Chouinard and Fincher, 1987),Chouinard (1990) makes an important contribution by demonstrating how attempts toextend and deepen the dominant state forms of social control and regulation can influencethe politics of place by shaping peoples’ subjective experiences of the state and political lifein general. She does so in an empirical study of recent struggles over state regulation ofcommunity legal aid clinics in Ontario and how these have helped shape possibilities foroppositional legal relations in Ontario localities. She argues that these struggles, althoughunsuccessful in attaining their immediate goals, nonetheless represent a significantdemocratic effort to shift the locus of regulatory control to the locality. While there is meritin her argument, it would be prudent to heed Molotch and Logan’s (1990) warning thatlocal collective action against the state can be reactionary as well as progressive.

Explaining changes in the form of the state apparatus and how these are linked to thechanging nature of state-society relations is Kirby’s (1990) concern. Focusing on theUSA, he argues that the state apparatus is a historical system and that a central theme in itsdevelopment since the closing of the frontier has been the political resistance of localities tothe centralization of state power. While localities have never been able to act with impunityin the playing out of ordinances and enactments, they have always tried to do so and havemet with considerable success except in those instances when these are counter to the



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accumulation process in general or threaten power already ceded to the central state. Heillustrates his argument empirically with an analysis of the changing terrain of conflict overhandgun control in the USA.

Chouinard’s and Kirby’s papers also serve as a reminder that no amount of abstractionand theorizing is a substitute for careful historical/empirical analysis. The key is that thelatter be theoretically informed and informing, a point recently made forcefully in thecontext of the politics of place by Clarke and Kirby (1990) and Orum (1991). Clarke andKirby argue for a focus on the collective discourse and ’communal sense’ forged withinlocalities. Orum argues along similar lines urging a concern with the development of ahegemonic system of meaning that builds up around struggles to control the city as asovereign territorial system. Borrowing a term from the anthropologist Geertz (1973), herefers to this as the necessity of writing ’thick history’. Cox ( 1991 ) also urges a moreexplicit concern with territory in this regard and Murphy (1991) does likewise, but in themuch broader context of the nationalism and nationalist movements. Murphy’s treatmentdeserves scrutiny as a possible corrective to the tendency of those studying the politics ofplace to ignore territorial discourses not focused on the locality or state.To date research on the politics of place and the local state has been long on theory and

short on historical/empirical analysis. Good examples of empirical/historical studiesinformed by place-based theory are the exception rather than the rule. Some do exist. Theyinclude Gilbert’s (1991) study of municipalism and the social construction of collectiveidentities in several mining towns in late nineteenth-century Britain; Griffiths and

Johnston’s ( 1991 ) study of a divergent local culture in the mining villages of the Dukeriescoalfield in Britain; Herod’s (1991) study of how the historical legacy of Manhattan’sgarment centre district has shaped the politics of contemporary urban restructuring in thispart of New York City; Markusen’s (1989) study of the emergence of a regional politicsinduced by industrial restructuring in the USA during the 1970s; Marston and Saint-Germain’s ( 1991 ) study of the recent emergence of a gendered neighbourhood activism inTucson, Arizona; and Ward’s (1988) study of how state intervention in interwar UKreinforced the capitalist tendency towards uneven spatial development. Much more suchwork is needed.

IV Other work on the state

Theories of the state were among the topics of central interest in political geography in theearly to mid 1980s (Reynolds and Knight, 1989; Johnston, 1989). Concern was with theextent to which the state could or could not be construed as an autonomous entity, withunderstanding the concrete institutional forms the state takes under capitalism, and howthese have changed over time. The concrete forms states take under capitalism and howthey have developed historically and spatially are questions which have clearly becomesubsumed under what I have referred to above as the politics of place. While the issue ofautonomy remains, it seems to have faded in importance, at least temporarily, as

structurationist and geographical historical materialist perspectives have gained ascend-ency. Work on theories of the state has continued unabated in other disciplines andpolitical geographers would do well to keep an eye on some of the more recent work.Gilbert and Howe (1991), for example, challenge state-centred theories of the state andargue for the convergence of state institutional capacity and class capacity in theirhistorical analysis of the development of new deal agricultural policy. They show that



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policy in this context can best be understood by a region-specific class analysis of USAagriculture.

Tilly (1990) argues that the European system of national states can best be explained bythe dual, but geographically uneven, emergence of a city-forming process based on capitalaccumulation and a state-building process predicated on physical coercion and warfareand a working-out of the contradictions between the two processes in different ways indifferent parts of Europe. What he refers to as the national state became the hegemonicform because only it could command the resources to wage war successfully. It is a skilfullydeveloped historical analysis combining some of the best features of the world-systemsapproach while also taking the politics of place creation seriously. Kirby and Ward ( 1991 )have begun to apply some of Tilly’s ideas in a preliminary analysis of state formation inAfrica between 1960 and 1985, but the approach deserves much wider attention frompolitical geographers (see also, Tilly, 1989).

V Concluding comments ,

Unlike O’Loughlin (1991) I have no difficulty in identifying the core subject matter ofpolitical geography. That core subject matter is the ’politics of place’ of which animportant subset is geopolitical discourse. While this politics is not self-evident empiri-cally, this should be no cause for alarm. What is theory for, if not to aid us in thinkingabout the world? As a colleague of mine reminds her students ’Theory is what you thinkwith. If you don’t know theory, you probably aren’t thinking’. While the subject matter ofpolitical geography is the politics of place from the global to the local that subject matter iscontested. If it were not, there would be no politics about which one would need totheorize at all. It is in theorizing how and why place matters in politics that a considerableamount of progress has been made in recent years. For additional progress to be made,however, it is essential that more detailed empirical analysis be undertaken to determinehow existing theory needs to be reformulated and extended in analysing the historicalgeography of politics. This work is just beginning.

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Political geography: thinking globally and locally