THE SCALE OF POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY: AN HISTORIC INTRODUCTION

PAUL CLAVAL
29 Rue de Solsy, 95600 Eaubonne. France. E-mail: p.claval@wanadoo.fr Received in nal version: November 2005 ABSTRACT Political geography and geopolitics were built on the same basic postulate as political sciences and the theory of international relations: the nation-state was the relevant scale for all types of analysis. This postulate was a reasonable one at the time of the Treaties of Westphalia. This type of polity triumphed on the international scene at the time when Hobbes wrote the Leviathan. The basis of the social contract implicit in the perspective was simple: in order to achieve personal security, everybody gave up the parcel of freedom (and the associated use of violence) he was naturally endowed with, and delegated it to the Leviathan, the State. The only eld where competition between human beings was legitimate at the most elementary level was that of economy. The evolution of the international scene does not only result from the evolution of weaponry or communication and transport technologies. For many persons today, renouncing any parcel of their individual freedom appears as a mutilation of their egos. There was a general agreement in the past on the scale where the analysis of political action had to be developed: it has disappeared. For a growing part of modern societies, inter-individual or local competition may take a political form and rely on the use of violence at all the levels, including the microscale. It means that political geography and geopolitics have increasingly to allow for the variety of scales of political action and the changing relations between the competition for power, wealth and status which are present in every society. Key words: Scale, State, polity, power, freedom of thought, economic initiative, enterprise, liberalism, absolutism, totalitarianism, social contract, status

INTRODUCTION Political geography (which in this paper includes geopolitics) developed as a discipline dealing with states rather than with the way power works in space. For a long time it ignored the effects of domination, inuence or exploitation within civil society and concentrated on the way the central state or its local subsidiaries controlled it. As a result, political geography was more eager to explore the role of pure power and the use of legal violence than to evaluate the inuence of ideologies, the legitimising of power and the way it created conditions for governance with an authority welcomed by the majority of populations.

Today there is a growing interest in the deconstruction of the social sciences as they were conceived at the end of the nineteenth and the rst decades of the twentieth centuries: the particular interests of their authors were often hidden (OTuathail 1996); many of their basic hypotheses were not explicit, which is indeed an even more serious problem. As a result, there were biases in the scientic explanations they proposed. In order to promote a more reexive practice of social sciences, it is important to go deeper into the foundations of scientic methods and concepts of the past. Until twenty-ve years ago nobody in political geography questioned seriously the prominence given to a particular scale, that of

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210 the State. Geographers obviously studied what happened locally, but they generally considered power as expressed at this scale as a subsidiary of the power of the central state, or as a division of this power over different regional communities in the case of federal states. They did not really take into consideration the nature of confederal states. Above the state scale, international politics was mainly conceived as a scene where states tried to develop their power bases in alliances against the aggressive policies of some other states or in enlarging their territories. As a consequence, more attention was devoted to the geopolitics of power than to that of equilibrium and peace (Parker 1985; Claval 1992). The rst geographers interested in politics were certainly responsible for this orientation. When Friedrich Ratzel spoke about the sense of space which gave the most advanced peoples their superiority, he conceived it as a capacity to develop geostrategies and implement them for a nation and at the national scale. Admiral Mahan as well as Mackinder reected on the respective role of armies and navies in shaping the world equilibrium (Mahan 1890; Mackinder 1904). It was only during the interwar period that geographers such as Albert Demangeon, Georges Ancel or Yves-Marie Goblet began to analyse the conditions required in order to balance the power of states and achieve peaceful conditions (Demangeon 1920; Ancel 1936; Goblet 1955). Geographers were not, however, the main actors responsible for the overemphasis given to the State and the exercise of military power. The bias was older. It came from the conceptions of political organisation that developed from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. THE IDEA OF SOVEREIGNTY AND THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN STATE The reection on sovereignty as the central character of polities is best exemplied by Jean Gottmanns The Signicance of Territory (1973). We shall follow his book in this section and dwell additionally on the scales at which sovereign states worked. There were states during the Middle Ages, but their structures were complex. Today we consider it normal that the political map of the
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PAUL CLAVAL world is made up only of independent states. Since all of them are fully sovereign, they are in a legal sense equivalent, even if they differ in size, population, income and armed forces. In the Middle Ages, political structures were much more imbricate: the Romano-Germanic Empire was made of a variety of polities, bishoprics, dukedoms, counties, autonomous cities, etc., loosely tied by a common but rather formal allegiance to the emperor. The situation in a kingdom like France was simpler, but the relations between its king and subjects differed according to the progress of territorial consolidation. The ideas upon which such systems were based stressed more the role of personal links than the authority of the prince over a territory. As a result, dukes, counts, bishops could be at the same time powerful rulers in their personal possessions and subordinated to a king elsewhere. Within the same area persons with different relations to the king, different rights and different obligations could coexist. There were two developments that embodied the transformation to sovereign states: Roman Law with its rationalist impact and the evolution of weaponry. In the Middle Ages, the law made a difference between a thing and its possible uses. Either the lord was the ofcial owner of the land and his tenants could have the right to cut some species of trees, collect dead wood and feed their cattle on the fallows, or the tenants were seen as holding the lands but were nevertheless obliged to pay a rent or provide a part of their crops to the lord or to other authorities. Under Roman Law the owner of a land had the right to use and misuse it in the way he chose. He was the only owner of the wood, game or crops the land bears. Each thing was from now on considered as a unit; all its possible uses were attributed to only one person. A similar simplication transformed the very basis of political relations: just as an owner was now considered the only legal user of the things belonging to him, the king was considered as the only master of the kingdom and its population. Intermediaries (the aristocracy) faced power reductions. This is the situation called sovereignty which, in the shape of absolutism, was theoretically phrased for the rst time by Jean Bodin in La Rpublique (1576) and which allegedly was consolidated with the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, hence the Westphalian State

THE SCALE OF POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY: AN HISTORIC INTRODUCTION (Badie 1994). However some authors have pointed out that even after 1648 different polities continued to exist: dynastic states that were based on personal authority (with territorial change as a consequence of inheritance and marriage) and more truly sovereign states that centred on territorial identication such as England (Spruyt 1994; Teschke 2003). What was new was the fact that the different types of states enjoyed the same status in international relations. What was the geographical meaning of absolute sovereignty? Did it mean that rulers had to eliminate all forms of diffuse power, dominance and inuence, which were at work in the civil society they governed? In society, people are not motivated primarily by the search for power. Social life consists of economic exchanges, shared beliefs and identities. The aims of its members are diverse: they seek wealth, acknowledgement, status and intellectual inuence. Political power is only one of their objectives. The largest part of social reality escapes governmental control. Systems of institutionalised relations (family, class age or other forms of associations, market relations, caste and private bureaucracies) organise social life and settle the conicts they generate. They are based on traditional values, beliefs and institutions. The State only needs to provide its subjects with laws that reinforce the mechanisms at work in the civil society. It means that there is a scale for politics and a scale for social life. Is such a system of relations between the political sphere and civil society compatible with absolute sovereignty? Do not the rulers need to control effectively what occurs at any scale in their territory? Are not they responsible for the institutionalised relations working in their state? In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at the time when absolutism was fully theorised, problems states had to cope with were limited: they had still to curb the inuence of their high nobility; they had to maintain armies and navies to defend their boundaries and to build fortications to withstand the action of artillery (Parker 1988). In most cases, the pursuit of wealth did not appear as a potential threat to the practice of sovereignty. Most economic ows remained local. The fortunes they were allowed to build were also local. The successful local traders or tax collectors were proud to

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achieve a high status in the city where they lived, or tried to convert their wealth into national status by providing their children with higher forms of education and marrying their daughters to impoverished aristocrats (Elias 1939, 1969). The situation was different for long distance trade. For rulers, its signicance was disproportionate to its real share in the GNP for two reasons: (i) at that time, a good part of economic transactions did not involve monetary payments, since barter prevailed. It meant that collecting taxes was difcult: hence the signicance of international trade that was totally monetarised for the chancellor of the exchequer; (ii) because of the lack of currency, exportation played a vital role in the national economies of the time. It was through a positive foreign balance of payments that the State could increase the mass of gold or silver in the country and prepare a war treasure chest without inducing a deationary trend in its national economy. Kings had an evident interest in developing and controlling international trade, since the merchants engaged in overseas ventures played such an important role for their national economies, specially in providing the means for waging war: hence the multiplication of chartered companies, rst in Northwestern Europe, and later all over Western Europe. But these companies had to conform to strict rules: they had no right to trade with the direct competitors of their kings and to enrich them. For the absolutist monarchs of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, sovereignty meant some involvement in the economic eld: the full sovereignty of a kingdom could only be achieved through overseas expansion and participation in inter-European and Mediterranean trade; governments mainly controlled the harbours to facilitate this. THE IDEA OF A SOCIAL CONTRACT AND THE PASSAGE FROM ABSOLUTIST TO DEMOCRATIC STATES: A NEW SCALE FOR POLITICS While the idea of sovereignty as absolutism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was accepted by most learned people, some disagreed. When they displayed critical attitudes to the new conception of absolutism, it was mainly
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212 for religious reasons. Had a king the right to impose his religious convictions on all his subjects? At the same time, the problem was how to prevent civil war of which the memory was still so vivid in the shape of the sixteenth century religious wars. The ideas of absolutism and absolute sovereignty tted better the convictions of the time: hence the signicance of the Leviathan of Hobbes (1651). Its political philosophy, avoiding the state of nature in which man is a wolf to men, is quite in agreement with the prevailing idea of an absolutist state. For the majority of thinkers, absolutism was justied by the fact that kings had received their power from God. The genius of thinkers building on Hobbes was to provide a new justication for absolutism through the idea of the social contract by which everyone abandoned his right to use violence to the Leviathan, i.e., to an absolute state, the only entity able to ensure security for everyone and the prosperity for the commonwealth. From this point of view even the democratic state continues the absolute state, with which it shares many features: the total sovereignty over the national territory, the signicance of centralisation, the prevalence of the collective will over local or individual aspirations, etc. Yet modernisation introduced difculties. Status and prestige, intellectual inuence and the pursuit of wealth became stronger as competitors to the authority of the State. Modern governments had to invent policies that avoided the threats they could present. We shall cover the problems linked to status and intellectual inuence in this section and those rooted in economic activity in the next one. The continued control of the pursuit of rank In more afuent societies, the pursuit of rank and status was more competitive than ever in the past. Western democratic states did not alter much the race for rank organised by the early modern monarchies. The career of honours, in the Roman sense, still gave a predominant role to achievements in terms of the civilisation process (Elias 1939, 1969): urbanity, artistic taste, interest in scientic research. In France, for instance, sociologists and historians speak of the republican monarchy when they wish to dene the social system that developed at the time of the French Revolution and Napoleon
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PAUL CLAVAL and is still partly alive. Because of this channelling of the quest for status by ofcial institutions, the political system had nothing to fear from individuals. Modern democracies differed in this way from their forerunners in Ancient or Medieval Times: they never tried to curb the race for prestige and status through sumptuary laws. Sovereignty, public opinion and the freedom of conscience The main source of moral and intellectual authority shifted from the clerics to the intellectuals during the seventeenth century: the publication of The Leviathan by Hobbes (1651), the impact of Descartes or Spinozas philosophies, the success of the ideas of John Locke after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in Britain, bore witness to this new situation (Locke 16891690). What should the attitudes of the central governments towards the new elites be? In the Northwestern European states the diversication of Protestantism had already produced a tolerance for difference of thought. The Roman Catholic states were interested in the progress of science, since it allowed for better navigating techniques, the drawing of more accurate maps, the improvement of artillery and weaponry, but they disliked at the same time the sense of freedom associated with philosophy. At best, they tolerated it since they still lacked an efcient repressive system in a domain that was new for them. The situation began to change at the beginning of the eighteenth century: clerics were already losing a part of the monopoly they had for long enjoyed in the eld of ideas. Monarchs discovered that it paid for them to support the intellectuals who were increasingly leaders of public opinion: hence the success of Enlightened Despotism. Some rulers, Catherine the Great or Frederic of Prussia, tried often successfully to manipulate philosophers, as they were called at the time. Until the French Revolution, however, no absolute monarch tried to severely control intellectual life in their country: for them it was the responsibility of the established Church, not their own. Totalitarianism, as a doctrine, was not yet born. The role of civil society changed: as soon as public opinion was expressed in newspapers, it became a political force at the national scale. Because of the press, the problems modern states encounter

THE SCALE OF POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY: AN HISTORIC INTRODUCTION in particular places often took a national signicance. MODERN STATES, STATUS AND ECONOMIC LIFE: LIBERALISM VERSUS CENTRAL PLANNING The sovereignty of democratic states which was inherited from the Ancien Rgime absolutist monarchies could be threatened by another power mechanism working in civil society: the pursuit of wealth. The rise of economic liberalism The main threat to the sovereignty of a state originating from its citizens was certainly the economic one: as soon as trade was a long distance one, it gave merchants the possibility to escape control by the government of their own country. It was possible for them to accommodate their prots in another independent state; it provided them with the means to exert a strong inuence on the domestic scene. Absolute monarchs were not liberal at all in that eld: they strictly controlled their chartered companies and oriented their activities in order to enhance their economic independence and their possibilities of taxation. Just as for the freedom of conscience, it was mainly for ideological reasons that most of the Westphalian states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries chose not to interfere with the economic activities of their citizens. John Locke was responsible for the rst step of this evolution (Locke 16891690), Adam Smith for the second step (Smith 1776). Locke formulated it in a convincing way: things that men produced were not alien to them, since they incorporated their work. He was the rst to see in labour the source of wealth. He contributed in this way to the construction of classical economics and the sanctication of private property: no government had the right to deprive individuals of the riches they owned, since they were in a way a part of themselves. Economic liberalism was one of the main features of Western states since the nineteenth century. They were sovereign states, and jealous of all the forms of dominance or inuence which could develop within them and threaten their monopoly of power. Since they believed in the superiority of the free market process,

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they refused, however, to interfere in the economic eld. Meanwhile, economic progress, the Industrial Revolution and the development of new means of transport had deeply modied the scale at which economic life was organised. The share of economic transactions concluded at the local scale declined rapidly. An increasing part of economic relations was developed at the national or international scales. It gave a stronger economic power to businessmen. Most liberal governments accepted this situation. In a period when states had sometimes to refrain from intervening in the domestic affairs of foreign countries because they were sovereign, the activity of their traders gave them a powerful means to penetrate deeply into foreign economies and interfere in their political life. The power of entrepreneurs was greater than in the past, but most of them used it mainly to achieve a higher status through the sponsoring of museums or charity institutions. Normally, they did not spend it to buy politicians: the only authorised way to mobilise it in the political eld was through nancing electoral campaigns or lobbying for more favourable laws. The contestation of economic liberalism and the rise of socialism The critique of modern capitalism was coeval with its development: from the beginning of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the number of people who denounced the increasing gap between the wealth of the big landowners, industrialists or traders and the misery of workers kept increasing. There were also many persons to denounce the negative impact of the new forms of capitalist activities in foreign countries. How to reform the economic system? It was one of the great debates of the time. Since the dynamism of the new economy relied on specic institutions, it was clear that the solution was not to be sought for in individual morality. Many critics were ready to accept that modernisation had to be accelerated. They did not ght against it, since it would provide the means for a better social organisation: this was the case of Marx (Marx 1867) among others. Progress would not be enough, however, to shape a good society. A substantial part of the problem resulted from the very nature of economic institutions, which were responsible for the development of inequalities and injustice. Socialist
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214 programmes relied on state intervention. The fundamental error of the capitalist system was seen to rely on the pursuit of prots by individuals, at a time when machines and corporate enterprise gave them fantastic power. The only solution was to limit the liberty of initiative in the economic eld. A part of the wealth had to be nationalised: the new railroads, the banks, since they played such an important role in the development of big corporations, a part at least of industrial activities. Quite obviously the control of economic activities found its main supporters in societies in which the State refused to allow the freedom of thought and expression but not all the totalitarian states of the twentieth century would break with capitalism, as shown by the fascist and nazi systems. The idea of sovereignty and the prevailing conception of polities in early political geography When the political sciences and political geography and geopolitics developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, they were centred on the kind of polity which was prevalent at that time, at least in the developed countries of Northwestern Europe and North America. They focused on states (for a general view about the theories of the State see Vincent 1987). They explored the power relation between political systems and civil societies, and ignored almost completely the way power mechanisms functioned in the latter. They were unable to conceive the international scene otherwise than as a collection of nations. When President Wilson tried to moralise about international relations, he proposed to create a Society of Nations: it was not a super-state, but an institutionalised system of regulation between states. An inbuilt philosophical anthropology The set of ideas associated with the development of the sovereign or Westphalian state permeated the whole eld of political geography. It explained the privilege given to a particular scale, that of the nation-state. It conveyed a specic conception of what socialised man is. Early Modern man was not denied the right to develop initiatives in the eld of economy, to look for a bright career of honour and to enjoy new ideas except in the religious eld. The only restriction that the idea of sovereignty had
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PAUL CLAVAL introduced was the ban on the use of violence in private relations. The absolute state gave birth to the modern state, either democratic or totalitarian, through an intellectual revolution which substituted the nation for God as the ultimate source of political power. Since the sovereign ceased to be a monarch who had received his power through divine right from God, but from the people itself, the elaboration of modern philosophical anthropology went a step further. Individuals had really to renounce all the powers they were naturally endowed with at the time when they signed the social contract: the use of violence in private relations, the possibility to develop harsh forms of intellectual or religious proselytism, the use of rank as a factor of inuence or wealth as a means of winning the support of others. As we have seen, people were never as completely deprived of their natural attributes as the theory of the social contract implied. Freedom of thought was restored to individuals for religious reasons and became central to political institutions in liberal democracies. The freedom to compete for rank never appeared a serious threat for the political system: it was manipulated by the central government, but not denied to individuals. The right of individuals to develop initiatives in the economic eld was suspected, but was nally accepted in liberal democracies since private ownership appeared as a natural outcome of the labour incorporated into products. Markets were judged as wonderful devices to reach the economic optimum. Summing up the restrictions set to man in the modern state: (i) they were deprived of the right to resort to violence; (ii) they could develop economic initiatives, but the result was welcomed only in so far as it was not used for developing a counter-power in the political eld yes to the sponsoring of painting, music, opera, yes to charity organisations, no to the systematic use of economic means for developing political assets; (iii) men could compete for status, but only in so far as the rank order was controlled and organised by the government. The lack of curiosity about governance The conception of man as implied in the prevalent conception of sovereign societies and states resulted in an impoverished view of what society was. Most of the power was effectively

THE SCALE OF POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY: AN HISTORIC INTRODUCTION concentrated in the hands of the political system. It was not necessary to explore the power relations within the civil society itself, since they had been eliminated. There was no reason to study governance problems, since the submission of civil society to the political sphere was inbuilt into the social contract model. A generation ago, political geographers still considered that in order to understand the political geography of a state, they had only to focus on its territorial divisions, analyse the hierarchies of its administrative centres, map the constituencies built in order to offer a fair representative system to its citizens and establish the resources it got from the civil society through the taxes it levied. Political geographers ignored the way civil societies functioned. They were not interested in the activities of the citizens, their motivations, the aims they strived for. The apparent similarity of all states According to the logic of the absolute or national state, all polities shared the same feature: the absolute domination over a territory of a state able to control the activities of its citizens prevented the development of tensions between them and insured their security both at home and on the international scene. In order to perform such tasks, states needed the same basic organisation: a system of territorial divisions in order to collect information, control the local population and implement the decisions of the government; a hierarchical communication system to insure the upward and downward movement of information, news and orders between civil society and the political system; specialised services for defence, police, justice. New public goods were progressively added to the list provided from the start: education, health care, welfare. According to the political geographers of the rst half of the twentieth century, the main differences between states came from the level of centralisation they achieved: very high in the countries in which the global state was considered as the only expression of the peoples will; lower in federal states, where a division of responsibilities existed between the federal state and its components. Because of the emphasis on the sovereignty of every state, political geography and geopolitics did not really explore the ways polities were structured and

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functioned (Lijphert 1975): they both ignored most of what happened within the states, and the role of private agents and non-governmental organisations in international life. THE POST-WESTPHALIAN WORLD SCENE Why the time of the Westphalian territory is over The change in the way politics was conceived which occurred during the Renaissance and early Modern Times was both ideological (a new conception of what is innite and absolute) and material (the emergence of new and much more expensive weapons). People are now conscious that the time of the Westphalian State is over (Badie 1994). There are both ideological and material reasons for this change. Material reasons are as important as the ideological ones: with increasing scale economies, most polities have become too small to capitalise on the advantages of modern technologies; with the new facilities of transportation and telecommunications, transnational corporations play an increasing role in economic life: states have lost most of the means they still had half a century ago to control their activities (Claval 2003; Dicken 2003). There was another material reason: the evolution of armaments because of nuclear weapons. Only superpowers were able to pay for the fabrication of nuclear bombs. Material reasons always combine with ideological interpretations to explain institutional change. The new scales of political life With the end of the European colonial empires and the implosion of the former Soviet Union, the only form of polity which exists today is the nationstate. It covers the earths entire surface, except for China, the only surviving empire. The growing role of economies of scales in production and distribution had made most nations too small to take advantage of them: hence the creation of a new kind of polity, best exemplied by the European Union. It is not a state, since it rules mainly on economic life. With the suppression of tariff barriers and the free circulation of goods, persons and capital, nation-states have ceased to be signicant actors in the economic eld. With the revolutions of rapid transportation and telecommunications, it is increasingly easy
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216 for people to travel, meet partners in faraway locations and develop or maintain close relations with them. Diplomacy has lost the dominant role it played in many sectors of international life: private enterprises and nongovernmental organisations are more active than ever. The scale of political life has changed, rst because of the intervention of new forms of polities (Free Trade Areas or Economic Unions), the institutionalisation of international life, and the growing signicance of corporate and private actors in international relations. Second, a good part of the initiatives which were monopolised by the states have shifted to big cities and regions. Governments have lost the possibilities they had to enforce regulations on large enterprises and to control their location policies. In order to attract investment and jobs, local states have to seduce them by offering economic advantages, improving their environments and developing cultural activities. Sovereignty as a commodity The main feature of the revolution of the Westphalian State was to give politics a higher status than those of economics and social ranking. The sovereign states were strong enough not to be bought by their neighbours or by private rms. Today the situation is different (Milliken 2003). It is partly the result of the proliferation of micro-states during the last fty years. For many of them, the only resource they can sell off is their sovereignty: Kiribati lives partly on the stamps it produces! But there are many other ways to sell sovereignty. Big corporations discovered in the late 1950s and early 1960s the utility of scal paradises: it is good to settle the head ofce of the company in a small country were taxes are low, exchange control absent, and social security systems very slight: hence the success of Monaco, Andorra, Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, Virgin Islands or Bermuda. Big ship owning companies register their ships in Greece, Malta, Cyprus, Panama, etc. The next step is to harbour illegal activities drug trafcking for instance and launder dirty money. Terrorists use the same means in order to secure safe bases for their operations. Instead of being a central element in the organisation of the world political order, sovereignty has
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PAUL CLAVAL become in this way one of the main factors of its vulnerability. THE NEW SCALE OF POLITICAL LIFE AS A THEME FOR GEOGRAPHICAL REFLECTION At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, anthropologies based on the social contract were accepted as natural by democratic societies. Geography as well as the other social sciences developed in this particular context. Political geography appeared thus as an almost autonomous subdiscipline: ordinary people were committed to politics only when voting; the eld of economic or social life which was their main concern was for all intents and purposes disconnected from politics. This situation came to an end during the last generation: the conception of men and women as social beings ceased to be modelled on the social contract idea. As a result, geographers felt free to explore more freely the political scene as it results from contemporary evolution. The end of the political anthropologies based on the social contract During the twentieth century, the bases institutionalised relations within civil societies relied upon have been progressively eroded. At a time when states lose a good part of their former power, they are compelled to intervene in domains which are alien to it: personal relations, security, and welfare. The loss of some natural attributes that people had to undergo when becoming a social being have been increasingly criticised since the late nineteenth century: by Nietzsche, since it prevented men to act really as supermen, which they were in fact able to do; by Freud, since an impoverished sexuality was one of the results of the prevailing conventions in the societies built on the idea of the social contract. Foucaults criticism of Western civilisation owed much to Nietzsche and Freud (Foucault 1966; Dreyfus & Rabinow 1982; Miller 1993). Hence the new emphasis on governance: the main responsibility for governments, i.e. to rule from above over societies which were up to a point self-controlled systems, has ceased. They now have to develop governance; i.e. to reach agreements with the different components of

THE SCALE OF POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY: AN HISTORIC INTRODUCTION societies in order to obtain their active cooperation in the public tasks they have the responsibility to assume. Hence, a fundamental change in the scale on which geographers study political life. The rise of new curiosities and the exploration of other scales in the 1980s From the early 1980s, efforts have been made to develop the analysis of small or large-scale political processes in political geography and geopolitics. They took several forms: an increased interest in the Weberian distinctions between pure power and legitimate power (with its varieties, traditional, charismatic, rational) and between domination and inuence (Claval 1978), a curiosity for semantics and the role of narratives in the building of power relations (Raffestin 1980). There was, in fact, a chapter of political geography which covered a local dimension since the early twentieth century: electoral geography. Born in 1913 with the pioneering work of Andr Siegfried, it thrived but did not merge for nearly seventy years with the mainstream orientations of the discipline (Siegfried 1913). As a result, it often became a chapter of political sociology rather than of political geography. Electoral geography accepted the views according to which citizens had only an episodic role in the political process: at the time of elections. As a result, the determinants of voting behaviour were conceived in terms of social conditioning or local traditions. Yves Lacoste introduced a new perspective in the approach of elections: he analysed the local strategies of political parties and stressed the ways politicians tried to develop their local inuence and the methods they used to gain support: hence the monumental Gopolitiques des Rgions Franaises he edited (Lacoste 1986). In the English-speaking world Agnew relied on a structurationist perspective and looked for possible mediations between structure and agency. Instead of focusing on habitus like Pierre Bourdieu, or on systems and institutions like Anthony Giddens, he explored the geographical mediation of state and society through place (Agnew 1987). Out of this initial reection, he later developed original ideas about the way to analyse political processes at the international scale and stressed the role of

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the territorial trap (Agnew 1994): by focusing almost exclusively on the national scale, political geography had missed a part of power realities, the development for instance of political identities at an infra-state scale or across borders. In his later studies, Agnew always analysed political processes within and beyond state boundaries (Agnew & Corbridge 1995; Agnew 1999, 2001). Many geographers became interested in the relations between what happened at the national, regional and local scales (MacLeod & Goodwin 1999; Amin & Thrift 2002). Radical geographers had many reasons to participate in this broadening of geographical and geopolitical curiosities since for them, there were no clear-cut limits between the economic, social, political and ideological aspects of reality at the same time, many of them had heavily invested on the idea that the State had become the most important spatial x of modern capitalism (Harvey 1982). They explored the spatial dimensions of state ( Jessop 1990; Yeung 1998) and looked for the new types of spatial x linked to globalisation and exible capitalism ( Jessop 2000). Feminist geography was responsible for the introduction of another dimension of political process: the domestic one, which had been completely neglected in the past (Frye 1983; Rose 1993). Since the early 1990s: debates are deepening In the 1990s, the debates over the consequences of globalisation gathered momentum. Because of the publication of some essays on the end of geography and the parallel end of the nationstates (OBrien 1992; Ohmae 1995), all social sciences became concerned: urban studies (Sassen 1996), sociology (Hirst & Thompson 1995). Castells stressed the role of networks in an unbounded society (Castells 1996). Geographers generally reacted in showing that the weakening of the State was more apparent than real since the new powers of regions were developed in co-operation with the central governments as an answer to globalisation (Brenner 1997; MacLeod & Goodwin 1999): globalisation was conducive at the same time to deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation (OThuatail 1999). Geographers also gave more attention to places: for many of them, they were the locus
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218 of resistance to globalisation (Routledge 1996; Cox 1997); for others, they escaped the territorial trap in which their study had been held because of their porosity and the role global networks played in their life (Massey 1993, 1997; Massey & Jess 1995). Swyngedouw strongly expresses this idea through the notion of glocalisation (Swyngedouw 1997). The national identities of the past were up to a point replaced by nested identities (Herb & Kaplan 1999). Boundaries ceased to appear mainly as material limits: in a world of ows, they are built on social processes (Paasi 1998). Globalisation was conducive to new forms of spatiality (Amin 2002). On a more general level, it is the signicance of scale in political geography which was reexamined: scale ceased to be considered as a permanent geometric property of the earths surface (Marston 2000). Relying on the ideas of Henri Lefebvre, it was increasingly considered as a social construct (Smith 1984). Paul Allis had already used this theme when analysing the genesis of the notion of territory from the eighteenth century: he showed that it grew at the same time as the nation-state because of the necessity for it to control more efciently the areas upon which it ruled (Allis 1980). Because of globalisation, geographers think that a wider variety of scales has been taken into consideration (Amin 2002). At the same time, they have increasingly blurred (Yeung 1998; Brenner 1999, 2001; Jessop 2000). For Neil Smith, what is important is to understand at what scales are built the spatial x associated to the logic of capital (Smith 2000, 2001). Concerning what happened on the international scene, the specialists of international relations played a decisive role in the discussions and debates. They introduced the notion of the Westphalian State and analysed its decline and the rise of a confusion of sovereignties which they compared to the medieval one (Albert 1998; Albert & Kopp-Malek 2002). Bertrand Badie provided a thorough reection on the end of the sovereign state (Badie 1994) and the ensuing change in the way the international scene functions. In the contemporary world, sovereignty has ceased to be the essential tool for regulating international relations: numerous actors try to negotiate solutions to the diverse problems confronting the world (or
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PAUL CLAVAL some of its parts) by developing structures of solidarities and endorsing an ethic of responsibility, which contrasts with the ruse of states (Badie 1999). In order to give coherence to these decentralised actions and control them, the transcendency which was expressed through the idea of sovereignty has ceased to work. Hence the growing signicance of another form of transcendency, that of humankind as expressed through the idea of human rights. Thanks to the modern media, it is expressed through a global public opinion, the role of which is growing, as proved by the wave of solidarity after the South Asian tsunami at the end of 2004. These new processes are, however, unable, to build something like an international order (Badie 2002). CONCLUSION Sovereignty and national-states have played a dominant role on the political scene from the seventeenth century to the present. We are undergoing the end of this period. We briey sketched the main features of the previous situation and the contemporary evolution in order to understand the way political geography was conceived at the time it appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, and the reasons for its contemporary evolution. What are our conclusions? Geographers are not the only social scientists involved in the process of dening new approaches to political life and power relations: in this eld, there is a growing co-operation between sociologists, historians, political scientists and specialists of international relations. Geographers take advantage of the results of their colleagues. Because their discipline is the only one to be interested in all spatial phenomena whatever their scale, they are the only ones to offer a general view of the recent transformations. The building of a new political geography where power relations are analysed at different scales, from home or localities to the world, and under all their guises (coercive power, economic domination, intellectual inuence), is on its way: it better ts situations where governance plays an essential role than the older ones where constraint was more signicant than responsibility in political processes. It is possible to get an idea of the new orientations of the

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