Thirty Years of Territorial Politics

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Thirty Years of Territorial

Politics
Michael Keating
Published online: 05 Jun 2008.
To cite this article: Michael Keating (2008) Thirty Years of Territorial Politics, West
European Politics, 31:1-2, 60-81, DOI: 10.1080/01402380701833723
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West European Politics,
Vol. 31, Nos. 1–2, 60 – 81, January–March 2008
Thirty Years of Territorial Politics

MICHAEL KEATING
For many years, territorial politics was neglected in political science under the influence
of a modernist paradigm according to which territory gives way to function as a
principle of social and political organisation. In the last 30 years it has received more
attention as territorial political movements have made an impact. This has provoked a
reconsideration not just of the present but also of the past, as scholars have identified
the persistence of territorial politics even within unitary states. There is a continuing
separation of the study of local and urban from regional politics, although the respective
literatures address similar issues and use similar concepts. The ‘new regionalism’
literature examines the emergence of territorial systems of action under the impact of
state transformation and transnational integration. There are marked differences in
territorial politics in western and east-central Europe, not because of primordial ethnic
characteristics, but because of the evolution of the state in the post-war era.
In 1974, when West European Politics was perhaps a glimmer in the eye of
its founding editors, there appeared the paperback edition of Samuel Finer’s
Comparative Government in which the author asserted that ‘Britain too has
had its ‘‘nationalities’’ problem, its ‘‘language’’ problem, its ‘‘religious’’
problem, not to speak of its ‘‘constitutional’’ problem. These are problems
no more’ (Finer 1974: 137).1 In retrospect, we can see this work, and similar
ones from other parts of Europe, as the culmination of a literature on
national integration that had been developing since the nineteenth century
and which, as so often happens, reached its peak just as the conditions were
changing. Our understanding of territorial politics has indeed been radically
transformed in the 30 years of WEP’s existence.
For much of the twentieth century, the dominant paradigm for the
understanding of territory and politics was provided by theories of national
integration and assimilation, closely associated with a particular view of
modernity. This was seen as replacing old social roles, norms and forms of
community with a new division of labour so that territorial divisions would
Correspondence Address: Michael.Keating@eui.eu
ISSN 0140-2382 Print/1743-9655 Online ª 2008 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/01402380701833723
Thirty Years of Territorial Politics 61
give way to functional ones. As Emil Durkheim (1964: 187) asserted ‘we can
almost say that a people is as much advanced as territorial divisions are
superficial’. After the Second World War, national integration linked with
diffusionist theories, notably in the work of Karl Deutsch, who saw national
states as being formed around centres, which gradually extended their reach
into peripheries, absorbing them economically, culturally and politically.
Centres, being ‘modern’, have history on their side and the result is ‘sovereign
governments which have no critical regional or community cleavages’
(Deutsch 1966: 80). The mechanisms, for Deutsch, are social rather than
political so that ‘it is communities which make governments’ rather than the
other way around. The process is limited at the point at which state-building
projects meet each other, or where there are deep-rooted cleavages, in which
case there will be secession and the creation of an independent state, so
leaving the principle of the homogeneous state intact. It is striking, in
retrospect, how much this has in common with neo-functionalist theories of
European integration, which also emphasised the role of economic and social
exchange and diffusion, with political structures following.
The neglect of territory, especially in the English-language literature, was
exacerbated by the behaviourist revolution from the 1950s and the attempt
to establish a universal science of politics and arrive at explanations while, in
the famous formulation of Przeworski and Teune (1970), eliminating proper
names. The reaction to the political culture studies of the 1960s with their
ethnocentric biases reinforced this tendency, as did the rise of rational choice
with its resolutely individualistic ontology. From this perspective, any
territorial variation in political behaviour could be reduced to universal
variables which just happened to have an uneven incidence across territories
and could have nothing to do with territory itself. At best, territories could
be included in analyses as dummy variables, pending their resolution into
proper variables.
Historians were equally tied to a vision of national integration and an
often teleological view of the formation of the national state. In the
nineteenth century they were often nationalistic, emphasising ‘natural’
boundaries, and celebrating the unity of the people against internal and
external foes, but even the more scientific historians would write of the
‘unification’ of Germany or Italy as though these were a mere fulfilment of
national destiny. The nineteenth century saw the making of the Westphalian
myth, the idea that the treaties of Münster and Osnabruck in 1648 had
established independent, sovereign states (Osiander 1994, 2001). It is hard to
know which has caused more confusion, the idea of the Westphalian state
during the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, or the large literature
on its supposed replacement since then.
Social scientists are often victims of their data as well as their theoretical
frameworks and most social and political data have appeared in national
sets. Thus the nation-state has become the default unit of analysis of social
and political change, of the advance of liberalism and democracy and of
62 M. Keating
modernity itself. Yet this is not all. A strong normative element permeated
many of these interpretations and this has by no means disappeared. The
creation of the unified national state was identified with ‘modernity’ in a
very broad sense and resistance to it thus logically qualified as anti-modern.
Seymour Martin Lipset (1985) included peripheral nationalisms among his
‘revolts against modernity’, while in France a long tradition associated
regionalism with anti-revolutionary reaction and clericalism. An underlying
theme of much work in the field has been that territorial resistance to the
state is a problem and that sustaining national unity is self-evidently a good
thing. J.S. Mill in the nineteenth century, insisting on the superiority of
large, consolidated states, has his counterpart in the late twentieth century in
Ralph Dahrendorf (1995, 2000) extolling the virtues of large nations while
dismissing small nations aspiring to statehood (or even measures falling
short of this) as backward. Taking these various disciplinary contributions
together, it is hard to resist the conclusion that social scientists have been the
organic intellectuals of the consolidated nation-state as much as they have
been impartial analysts of it.
Perhaps the most revealing example of the implicit priority given to the
nation-state is the lack of serious analysis of the term itself. In some European
cultures the identification of the two is so strong that the compound term is not
necessary. In French, for example, Etat and nation are two expressions of the
same community, one institutional and the other more social and political.2 In
English, the linking of the two may refer to cases where the state and the nation
are indeed co-terminous, as opposed to the multinational state, in which they
are not. In fact, however, it usually refers to states that are sovereign, which is a
different matter altogether. Yet this does not stop political scientists using the
term as though it were unproblematic.
Bringing Territory Back In

Finer wrote just as a new wave of territorial politics was about to hit the
United Kingdom. In the elections of 1974, a clutch of nationalist (and
unionist) MPs was elected from the peripheral nations of the United
Kingdom. The regional–national question became a major preoccupation
for Spain’s post-Francoist democracy. Revived movements in Brittany,
Corsica and Languedoc put the myth of the indivisible French Republic in
question, while Belgium moved towards a complex system of community
and regional politics. For a while, such movements could be dismissed yet
again as evidence of retarded modernity or, in the case of Scotland, evidence
of opportunism and greed (North Sea oil was just beginning to flow). As the
phenomenon persisted and spread, however, this standard response was
increasingly inadequate and a search began for new ways of understanding.
When social scientists start to talk of a phenomenon in a new way, it is
often difficult to know whether the phenomenon has changed, whether they
have just noticed something, or whether they have merely found new
analytical tools and a new vocabulary. In recent years political science has
been gripped by a tendency to insist both that the world has changed
radically and that we need new concepts to understand it. This is often
accompanied by a rather simplified and stylised view of the world as it was
before, in order to emphasise the contrast. Territorial politics has not been
immune to this, with an outburst of writing about multilevel governance,
spatial rescaling, post-Westphalian orders, post-nationalism, the end of
territory and the borderless world. This is contrasted with the old world, as
though the myths of the unitary and integrated nation-state represented a
concrete reality. These new concepts do not always travel well across space;
they travel hardly at all across time. It thus becomes very difficult indeed to
tell what has actually changed and what has not. A good understanding of
territorial politics in the last 30 years demands that we have concepts that do
travel and a sound grasp of the history of the territorial state and the
different ways of telling that history.
Among the earliest efforts to readdress the territorial state and confront
the simply assimilationist theories was the work of Stein Rokkan in the
1960s and 1970s (Flora et al. 1999). Among Rokkan’s contributions two
stand out: he problematised the question of state formation and integration
and showed that it was often partial; and he addressed the problem on a
European scale, refusing to be trapped in pre-given national categories.
Lipset and Rokkan (1967) started off in a rather traditional modernist
mode, but noted that the integration process was often incomplete, leaving
territorial cleavages, which however are a subordinate element in politics. In
his later writings Rokkan more fully incorporated the territorial dimension.
Rokkan and Urwin (1983) note that the processes of military–adminis-
trative, of economic and of cultural system-building in the state may not
coincide, creating complex patterns of territorial politics. So one region may
be politically subordinate but economically powerful and culturally strong
(as for example Catalonia in Spain). Peripheral territories were not
necessarily assimilated but could survive within the national state, either
at the edge of the state system or at the interface between state-building
projects.
Charles Tilly’s (1990, 1994) work also problematises the formation of the
national state and discards the teleological bias of earlier accounts. He sees
state formation based on two principles, coercion and capital. Large states
emerged where rulers could coerce populations; where they encountered
economically strong cities they had to bargain with them, allowing
territorial autonomy. Spruyt (1994) argues that the emergence of the
consolidated nation-state was not historically inevitable and that city-states
and urban leagues might have won out. These works are valuable not only
for their reinterpretation of history but in drawing attention to the way in
which the diverse elements of the territorial polity might be separated. The
nineteenth century, with its emphasis on security, did see the triumph of the
nation-state but in changed circumstances we can imagine a re-separation of
64 M. Keating
the various elements of territorial politics and their reconfiguration in new

forms.
From the 1970s there was some work on regional political economy
(Tarrow et al. 1978) which was to blossom in the 1990s (see below). The
main contribution of this was to show that territorial distinctiveness was not
merely the legacy of a pre-modern or pre-industrial past but was reproduced
in industrial societies. A stream of Italian literature on the questione
meridionale (southern question) sought to show how the conditions of
Italian unification had systematically disadvantaged the south and sustained
a territorial cleavage within the unified state (Salvadori 1976; Galasso 1978;
Lo Curto 1978; Mori 1981). What was not anticipated at this time was that
the next challenge to Italian unity would come from the developed north but
from the 1990s a literature did develop to account for this revolt of the
wealthy (Mannheimer 1991; Diamanti 1993; Biorcio 1997; Cento Bull and
Gilbert 2001).
Another challenge to the modernist story of national integration and
progress came in the 1970s from the left. Many of the territorial movements of
that time were radical in their politics, protesting against exploitation by big
states and big capital. Since the left in the mid-twentieth century had been
rather centralist, an ideological rationalisation was required and this was
provided in the form of uneven development theory. Capitalism, in this view,
does not destroy territorial differences but rather reinforces them, favouring
some territories over others. With anti-colonial struggles having rehabilitated
nationalism on the left in the 1960s, it was incorporated in the form of ‘internal
colonialism’, a process by which the state in collusion with big capital
exploited workers in the peripheral parts of the state, reducing them to a
position of dependence. The idea had its origins in the work of Gramsci
(1978a, b) and his analysis of Italian unification but was reintroduced in
France by Occitan activist Robert Lafont (1967) in the aftermath of the
Algerian independence war. It was also reintroduced, via Latin America and
dependencia theory this time, by Michael Hechter (1975), in a thoroughly
confused account of the making of the United Kingdom. Scottish Marxist
Tom Nairn (1977, 1997) also drew heavily on theories of under- and over-
development to explain the rise of nationalism in the European periphery.
Internal colonialism did not survive as a theory. It relied on an unconvincing
analogy between European state formation and colonialism in Africa and
Asia, and was a product of its times, the aftermath of de-colonisation. Uneven
development, however, remained as a central element in the understanding of
territorial politics, its persistence and change, to be strengthened by new
theories of economic development from the 1990s.
Territorial Management
The approaches discussed above still tended in some cases to view territory
as the legacy of the past, evidence of failed or incomplete integration, with
the underlying assumption that the integrated national state is the normal
state of affairs and that it is the deviation from this that needs to be
explained. Others suffered from a certain determinism in which deep social
and economic structures dictated integration or disintegration of the
political superstructure. The next phase of the study of territorial politics
gave a more central place to politics itself and to the strategic actions of state
elites and territorial actors.
The French school of sociology of organisations produced a series of
studies in the 1960s and 1970s on local systems and central–local dynamics
in the supposedly monolithic Napoleonic state. The main insight is that
centralisation, far from destroying territorial politics, merely recreates it in

new forms. The key figures are the notable, a politician with local roots
operating in national politics, and the territorial administrators of the
central state, particularly the prefects. These serve as territorial inter-
mediaries, conveying local demands to the centre and bending central
decrees in their local application. This is not merely a legacy of the past but
reproduces and modernises itself over successive regimes. So the old
notables of nineteenth century France, rooted in traditional society, gave
way to a new class of notables under the Third Republic from 1870, with a
different class basis and drawing their power precisely from their relation-
ship with the central state. The Fifth Republic after 1958 gradually pushed
aside many of the notables of the Fourth Republic as the Gaullists
established local roots; but these in turn developed similar practices of
mediation in new conditions. Successive efforts by the French state to
decentralise are, from this perspective, evidence not of a will to give power
to the localities but of the desire of the centre to emancipate itself from local
influence and regain its own autonomy. The most elaborate account of the
French system from this perspective is Pierre Grémion’s (1976) Le pouvoir
pe´riphe´rique. By the mid-1980s some members of this school had taken the
analysis so far as almost to destroy the idea of the central state altogether,
presenting a highly pluralistic world of local adaptation and discretion (for
example Dupuy and Thoenig 1985). Tarrow (1977) compared the role of
politicians as territorial intermediaries in France and Italy.
Jim Bulpitt’s (1983) account of the United Kingdom also addresses the
issue of central autonomy, with his concept of the ‘dual polity’, in which the
centre would look after high politics, while leaving the management of local
affairs to trusted collaborators, the condition being that the ‘right chaps’
were in charge. This strategy of ‘territorial management’ ensured the
integrity of the state while avoiding entanglement in local politics. Rokkan
and Urwin (1983) pursued the theme of territorial accommodation in a
comparative context, showing how states responded to territorial pressures
with party political responses, economic policy responses, and institutional
concessions. They also produced a typology of territorial state forms to
replace the conventional unitary–federal dichotomy. These were the unitary
state; the union state, formed from an amalgam of territories some of which
66 M. Keating
keep their distinctive features; mechanical federalism, with similar decen-

tralised structures across the state and a strong centre; and organic
federalism, built from below with limited central power. Although this
typology has been cited repeatedly since, and the union state has become a
standard term in the British debate, nobody has ever really elaborated on it
or developed it theoretically and operationally.
State and Regional Nationalism (Keating 1988) placed territorial manage-
ment at the centre of an analysis of the United Kingdom, France, Italy
and Spain. The central questions were how states come together and how
they stay together. Socio-economic disparities among territories are not
enough to explain territorial politics, since at that time Italy had no

significant regionalist movements; rather politics must be central to the
explanation. States pursue territorial management strategies through
party-political incorporation; centre–periphery intermediation through
political and bureaucratic channels including clientelistic networks; policy
concessions, notably but not exclusively in economic policy; and
institutional decentralisation. Peripheral actors do not always favour
regional autonomy, since this may prejudice their privileged access to the
centre. Changing internal and external conditions alter the strategic
interests and calculations of centres and peripheries. For example the
creation and closing of national markets in the late nineteenth century
made centres into peripheries and vice versa, as did the opening of
European and global markets 100 years later. Tariff policy was thus a key
issue in territorial politics in the first era of globalisation, creating new
constellations of territorial and sectoral interests. Territorial distinctiveness
is thus not something overcome once and for all, but creates and recreates
itself in each generation. Penetration of the state into territories as it
extends its reach threatens the old system of intermediation, creating a
crisis of territorial representation, a challenge to the state and a
reconfiguration of territorial politics. Such crises occurred in the late
nineteenth century, a time of great territorial mobilisation and again in the
late 1960s and early 1970s. In the latter case, one cause was the new phase
of territorial management represented by modernising regional policies,
intended to integrate declining and under-developed territories into
national economies within the overall Keynesian strategy of macro-
economic management. These were presented as essentially technical, and
of benefit to all by maximising national output. Yet, delivered by the
central state, they disrupted existing patterns of territorial intermediation.
Indeed, governments explicitly sought new territorial interlocutors among
the dynamic and modernising elements, what the French called the forces
vives. This produced reactions within the regions and a new wave of
territorial mobilisation, itself taking various forms, from a defence of old
modes of production to alternative policies for development. Work with
Barry Jones and others (Keating and Jones 1985; Jones and Keating 1995)
showed how European integration was similarly destabilising existing
modes of territorial management, depriving states of key instruments of

accommodation and creating new alliances of winners and losers.
The 1980s also saw a re-reading of some of the old evidence for territorial
integration. For example, the nationalisation of politics in the form of the
spread of party systems through national territories might be evidence for
social and political homogenisation and thus for homogenisation of
electoral preferences. Alternatively, it might be evidence that parties were
able to adapt to different territorial contexts, absorbing local interests. The
Italian Communists were able to penetrate the south after abandoning their
old prejudices and adopting land reform (Tarrow 1977), while the Christian
Democrats assumed different images from one part of the country to

another. French notables working within national parties could bend policy
to local interests, while in the United Kingdom a state-wide party system did
not suppress territorial politics, merely channelled it in particular ways
(Keating 1975; Miller 1983). In Germany, the Social Democrats were never
able to penetrate Bavaria, but from 1966 built up a formidable presence in
North Rhine-Westphalia, an area previously hostile to them despite the
presence of a large Protestant working class (Rohe 1990b). The Christian
Democrats were built from the bottom as a coalition of local forces, adapted
to their local environments (Rohe 1990a). Scottish Conservatism, previously
weak, flourished in the mid-twentieth century, a fact that was at one time
taken as evidence of territorial homogenisation; but then it collapsed. These
trends, it must be emphasised, cannot be explained merely by the uneven
distribution of socio-economic groups across state territories. There is a
territorial factor at work. It is striking that electoral studies in English have
tended since their inception to concentrate on socio-economic status
together with religion and ethnicity, leaving territorial effects as a residual
to explain any remaining anomalies, so filtering territory out of the analysis.
In France, on the other hand, accounts of election results tend to start with
territorial differentiation, reflecting the strong tradition of political
geography and the later development of survey research. Only recently
have political scientists begun to put the two types of approach together.
Historians also escaped from their national frameworks during the 1980s
and 1990s, with a revival of regional history and questioning of the statist
teleologies (Applegate 1999). This coincides with a strengthening of
comparative history and of the history of Europe. Norman Davies’ (1997)
Europe consciously breaks with the national categories as well as the western
European focus of previous accounts of state-building, while his later The
Isles (1999) is one of a number of books tackling the English and state-
centric teleological bias of earlier accounts of the United Kingdom. Fernand
Braudel’s (1986) last book is an iconoclastic analysis of the myths of the
natural emergence of the French nation-state.
Braudel and others of the Annales school, who started with territorial
communities and studied the emergence and working of local societies in
their entirety, rather than extrapolating downwards from the nation-state,
68 M. Keating
have had some influence beyond history and beyond France. Marc Abélès
(1989) Jours tranquilles en ’89 is an ethnographic account of the building of
power on a local basis in a French region, from someone who deliberately
avoided informing himself about the formal structures of government in
advance. These ethnographic approaches have gradually made an impact in
political science, modifying its universalist assumptions and efforts to
eliminate territory.
The Regional and the Local

‘Territorial politics’ in Europe has come to refer to the territorial

construction of the state, national integration and disintegration and the
‘regional’ level. Yet a separate tradition exists, of local government and
urban studies, also focused on territory but using different theoretical and
methodological tools. Only recently have the two begun to come together.
Local government studies, in contrast to the study of territorial politics,
have tended to be national. There are very few comparative accounts, as
opposed to edited collections of country studies and there is a continued
insistence on national exceptionalism. It has been linked to public
administration, with a certain tendency to depoliticisation and the search
for efficiency. During the 1960s and 1970s there was something of an
obsession with structures, reflecting the frenzied reform activity of that era as
governments sought to modernise administration. From the 1970s questions
of power came back, often framed by organisation theory. This reflected the
evolution of public administration as well as the influence of the French
school, brought into the United Kingdom notably in the work of Rod
Rhodes (1999). Some works have spanned the regional and the local using
the general frame of intergovernmental relations (an idea originating in US
federalism). Indeed the special issue of West European Politics in 1987
devoted to territorial politics is largely about this (Rhodes and Wright 1987);
Cole and John (1995) adopt a similar perspective for comparing France and
Britain. From the 1980s, public choice approaches from the United States
came in, posing a series of critical questions about the assumptions of the
structural reformers of the 1960s. While the latter had largely favoured big
structures and consolidation of municipalities in the interests of planning and
efficiency, public choice emphasised the benefits of fragmentation and
competition, inspired by the earlier work of Tiebout (1956). Meanwhile,
urban sociology was alive and well but made surprisingly little impact on
political science until later (with exceptions such as Saunders 1980).
The 1990s saw the import of urban political economy approaches from
the United States. The central insight of this school is that local
governments are dependent on private business for investment and that
this constrains their ability to make autonomous policy decisions. Paul
Peterson’s City Limits (1981) is the classic statement of the structural
necessity to defer to investors at the cost of restraining social expenditures.
Logan and Molotch (1987) are less deterministic and coined the phrase
‘growth coalition’ to refer to the constellation of interests within cities who
promote the idea that the city has a unified interest in growth and property
development. Clarence Stone’s (1989) concept of urban regime is a more
subtle way of grasping the balance of public authority and business power
that governs American cities. Paul Kantor (1988) identified the central
dilemma of American local government, which is pressured by the need to
attract and retain investment on the one hand, implying pro-business
policies, low taxes and low social expenditure; and the existence of
pluralistic social movements on the other, demanding spending and
redistribution. These structural theories of power replaced the earlier

‘community power studies’ pitching pluralists against elitists. The commu-
nity power debate collapsed amid methodological arguments and had made
rather little impact in Europe. Urban political economy was to be a more
influential export.
There was some reluctance among Europeans to accepting the importance
of private power in urban politics, given the concern of political scientists
with the state and local government, and of sociologists with urban social
movements. Yet the private sector has indeed been important, in the form of
the development industry and in arrangements like the French socie´te´s
d’ećonomie mixte. Many European countries have compulsory membership
of Chambers of Commerce, which in turn have important responsibilities in
planning and infrastructure provision. There are, of course, significant
differences from the United States, notably the role of the central state,
which not only regulates and constrains local governments, but also protects
them from market pressures. The application of the American model of the
urban regime to Europe is discussed in Keating (1991), Harding (1999) and
Stoker and Mossberger (1994) and US–Europe comparisons in urban
political economy are presented in Savitch and Kantor (2002). Perhaps the
most important effect of this import, however, was to bring together urban
political analysis and regional studies, which had also been moving in the
same direction.
The New Regionalism

The 1990s saw a strong revival of regional studies across a range of
disciplines and talk of a ‘new regionalism’ (for overviews see Balme 1996;
Keating 1998; Caciagli 2003). This was a response both to the events and
trends of the times and to new intellectual approaches. The broad context is
the transformation of the state and government, the loss of some capacities
and the search for others, and the demystification of the state with the end of
the Cold War and a more sophisticated understanding of its historical
contingency. One result has been a literature on the end of territory (Badie
1995), the borderless world and the network society (Castells 1997). Indeed
it would appear that trends in economic development (globalisation),
70 M. Keating
technology (instant communication) and society (individualism) are break-

ing the territorial frame for both society and politics. Yet another literature
stresses both de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation, at new spatial
scales, below, above and across the state.
One explanation is functional. The classic modernist notion that function
and territory are alternative principles of social organisation and behaviour,
with the former destined to triumph, was already questioned by the work of
the 1970s and 1980s showing the persistence and reinvention of territorial
frames alongside functional differentiation. Politics is always both
functional and territorial, although the dominant (and therefore unpro-
blematised) territorial frame of the nation state sometimes caused us to

forget it. By the 1990s observers were noting a spatial rescaling (Brenner
2004; Brenner et al. 2003) in which functions were changing their territorial
scale (Balme 1995). One perhaps surprising example concerns culture and
language. It might appear that modern communications technology, by
facilitating contact across space, would sunder the link between territory
and language, allowing minority cultures to survive in the virtual world. Yet
we see that minority languages are increasingly territorialised, strengthening
in their core areas and retreating elsewhere. The reason is that living culture
requires face-to-face casual contact, and needs institutions such as schools,
social services and administration, which are themselves territorial.
By far the best-documented example, however, concerns economic
development. A large literature has developed on the increased importance
of space for economic development and change. Previously, space was
usually conceptualised as distance – from raw materials and markets – and a
matter of cost, which could be compensated by subsidies for producers in
disadvantaged areas. There was, it is true, an older tradition of industrial
districts, in which the proximity of suppliers and producers gave a mutual
advantage and Alfred Marshall had even suggested that there may be some
cultural factor at work or, as he put it, ‘something in the air’. The new
approaches build on this, stressing the social construction of territories and
productive systems. They draw on economic sociology and the new
literature on varieties of capitalism to show how local societies provide
the conditions for successful development (Bagnasco and Trigilia 1993;
Amin and Thrift 1994; Storper 1997; Cooke and Morgan 1998; Scott 1998;
Crouch et al. 2001). Key concepts are social capital, trust and networks.
Most of this literature comes from sociology and geography and the
political angle is not always well addressed. It has had a substantial influence
on governments and the European Commission. The old top-down regional
policies, based on direction of industry, subsidies, tax incentives and
infrastructure, has given way to a decentralised model in which the emphasis
is on what regions can do for themselves. This is combined with an emphasis
on inter-regional competition so that instead of occupying complementary
roles in a national division of labour, regions compete (for investment,
technology and markets) in a national, European and global frame.
This has obvious affinities with the literature on urban political economy
and should lend itself to a political analysis of who runs these new regional
spaces, what policies are pursued and who wins and loses. There are some
occasional analyses on these lines (Keating et al. 2003) but by and large the
field is left to sociologists, whose main interest is co-operation, rather than
to political scientists, who specialise in conflict and distribution. There is
also a tendency in some of the new regionalist literature to concentrate on
success stories, themselves often idealised and, indeed to wishful thinking
about the possibility, given the right spatial scale, to achieve the perfect
balance between economic competitiveness and social integration. A severe
criticism is given by Lovering (1999).

There is a longstanding literature on stateless nations and national
minorities in Europe, including many case studies and some comparative
work. For a long time this stood apart from the literature on regionalism,
based rather in the general literature on nationalism, emphasising cultural
issues and occasionally betraying rather primordialist assumptions (Connor
1994). There are now points of contact between these literatures, encouraged
by the interlinking of the movements themselves and stateless nations and
national minorities have used new regionalist themes to stake out a claim for
functional autonomy without necessarily demanding independence (Keating
2004).
Comparative work on regionalism and political parties did not really start
until the late 1990s, but there is now a growing literature (De Winter and
Tursan 1998; Hough and Jeffery 2006). This emphasises both the role of the
party competition in articulating territorial interests and forcing govern-
ments to respond, and the effects of institutional decentralisation on party
alignments.
Globalisation and European Integration

An important part of the new regionalism concerns the external context, of
globalisation and European integration. This underpins the paradigm of the
competitive region, an idea that has much analytical value but which risks
reifying the territory unless we engage in a systematic analysis of its social
and political composition. As in other fields, there is an argument over
whether European integration represents an accentuation of globalisation;
whether it serves to modify its impact; or indeed whether it is a bit of both.
There has been a huge literature on territorial politics and European
integration, most of it concerning regions since the 1980s (Keating and
Jones 1985; Petschen 1993; Bullman 1994; Jones and Keating 1995; Krämer
1998).
One unfortunate but persistent tendency has been to concentrate on the
EU’s own regional policy through the Structural Funds and to assume that
the Commission is engaged in a strategy to by-pass the nation-state and
refashion the political geography of Europe. The temptation is obvious.
72 M. Keating
Structural Funds have ‘regional’ written all over them, and they appear to
be a discreet policy instrument amenable to analysis; this makes them
particularly inviting as a PhD topic. It is true that the Structural Funds have
been the subject of contestation among regions, member states and the
Commission since the 1980s (Hooghe and Keating 1994) but the polity-
building aspects of the policy should not be exaggerated. The funds flow
largely through national governments, the policy is managed between them
and the Commission, and they operate at a variety of scales involving a
multiplicity of actors. They are symbolically used by regional entrepreneurs
to claim success in attracting resources, but their substantive impact is
impossible to disentangle from other funding flows. Experience among

member states has varied (Hooghe 1996). Where states already have strong
regional policy instruments, the Structural Funds have been incorporated
into them. States with weak regional policy instruments have often used the
Structural Fund programmes as the basis for their own programmes, as in
Spain or Italy (Fargion et al. 2006) but this is a matter of state discretion,
not European imposition. As for the Commission, no evidence has ever been
produced of a plan to by-pass nation-states and create a Europe of the
Regions. More important has been their role in diffusing the new ideas of
regional development, emphasising local initiative, networks and ‘soft’
factors such as research and development rather than the ‘hard’
infrastructure that characterised regional policy in the Keynesian era.
Another area that has attracted great interest is cross-border co-operation,
again, perhaps, because there is an EU programme. It is true that European
integration has transformed borders but the assumption that the removal of
the economic and even the physical border will lead to political restructuring
and the emergence of cross-border spaces is misleading. Indeed it is curious
that, after neo-functionalism has been largely rejected as a way of
understanding European integration in general, it has come back into work
on the regions. Work in this field also suffers from a lack of comparative
analysis and a theoretical basis, tending to descriptive case studies and to
taking the promoters’ intentions as evidence of what has actually happened.
There is now a second generation of studies, at a more sophisticated level,
showing how border and boundaries are constantly renegotiated in daily life
(Scott 1999; Bray 2004). National borders are still in place and indeed the
European project guarantees that they will not be moved as happened so
often in the past. Yet they do not enclose the totality of social, economic and
political systems as (at least in theory) they once did. This links with new
conceptions of space in social geography in which territories are not seen as
bounded and fixed but as open-ended and often indeterminate (Paasi 2002).
Territory does matter, but it is not to be reified.
In a broader perspective, the conjuncture of state transformation from
above through European integration and from below through the new
regionalism has created a stimulating research agenda. It has reminded
scholars of the historical contingency of the nation-state form and
stimulated the search for precedents. It has raised a series of important

normative questions about sovereignty and legitimacy once the nation-state
ceases to be their unique source. Parties representing stateless nations and
national minorities have taken advantage of the reshaping of political space
by the European project, often abandoning traditional notions of
sovereignty and adapting to the new dispensation (Lynch 1996; De Winter
and Gomez-Reino 2002; Keating 2004). Sometimes this involves nothing
more than the aspiration to become another member state of the EU but
more often it has implied a rethinking of the whole concept of independence
and a move to a post-sovereign stance (MacCormick 1999; Keating 2001).
There is a literature, notably in Spain, exploring the new meanings for self-
determination and multinational accommodation in the emerging complex
order (Jáuregui 1997; Requejo 1998).
Bartolini (2004), from a Rokkanian perspective, has shown how the partial
unpacking of territory under the impact of Europe has separated systems
previously bounded by the nation-state, allowing partial exit from national
politics for selected groups. There is a literature on the complex patterns of
intergovernmental relations where three levels are involved (Bullman 1994;
Hooghe 1995) and studies of policy making in sectoral fields (Borzel 2002).
Since the Europe of the Regions movement (both politically and in academic
discussion) peaked in the mid-1990s, there has been a more realistic approach
to all of this, accepting that European integration has affected territorial
politics but that the state is still very much there. Scholarship has also de-
emphasised the radically new element in all of this, seeing the conjunction of
Europe and the regions as the latest phase in a story of territorial politics that
has run throughout the history of the nation-state, rather than contrasting it
with an idealised unitary polity that never really existed.
The impact of globalisation and European integration is reflected also in
urban studies, notably in the concept of the global city (Sassen 2000; Scott
2001). This shows how cities are integrated into global networks, reducing
their dependence on national support systems and sustaining a division of
labour which is itself global in scope. Trade flows, technology and migration
link these cities to the global order, but impose new patterns of social
segregation and inequality. Critics have complained that this is a general-
isation from a very few cities, and Le Galès (2002) has argued that the
European city has its own characteristics, notably the domination of small
and medium-sized urban settlements, often with deep historical roots, in
contrast to the continuous rise and fall of American cities.
Regional Government
In the last 30 years, all the large European states and some of the smaller
ones have put in place systems of regional or ‘meso’ government (Mény
1982; Sharpe 1993); the exception being Germany which already had it. This
responds to the functional restructuring discussed above and the needs of
74 M. Keating
the state for new instruments for territorial management. In the 1970s the
emphasis was on planning, co-ordination and public investment. Since the
1990s it is more on competitive regionalism and self-help. Regional
government has also become the preferred response to the demands of
cultural and nationality movements. The new century has also seen a revival
of the idea of metropolitan government for city-regions.
Regional government is such a heterogeneous phenomenon that some
have doubted the utility of the general term (Le Galès and Lesquene 1997).
Yet it provides an obvious object for study. There are numerous accounts
of its origins and development, but many fewer on its actual workings.
Studies have also tended to be bounded by national traditions. In Italy there

is still a domination by constitutional lawyers (for example the annual
reports of the Istituto di Studi sui Sistemi Regionali Federali e sulle
Autonomie ‘‘Massimo Severo Giannini’’ (ISSiFRA)) while Spanish scholars
have broken free of this (Moreno 1997; Aja 2003). French scholars continue
in the organisational analysis tradition. Germans use theories of co-
operative federalism. There is a lack of comparative work, with a few
exceptions (Négrier and Jouve 1998; Thorlakson 2003). There is also a lack
of research on the impact of regional government on public policy. Where
policy is considered, the focus is usually on intergovernmental relations, an
important part of the federal tradition, but not the whole story. This may be
a legacy of the old state-bound framework of political science, in which
regional government is assessed as a contribution to the working of the state
rather than a system in its own right and of the regional planning origins of
regional studies. There is some work on devolution in the United Kingdom
(Adams 2001; Adams and Schmueker 2005; Keating 2005), a growing
literature on Spain (Subirats and Gallego 2002), very little on Italy and
almost nothing on Belgium (but see de Rynck 2002). There is a literature on
regional economic development but so far little on the impact of regionalism
on the welfare state (but see Ferrera 2005; McEwen and Moreno 2005;
Keating and McEwen 2006). Nor is there much work on regional interest
articulation or on how changing spatial scales shifts the power balance
among groups and sectors.
The Other Europe

The study of territorial politics and the evolution of the state has been
dominated by the example of western Europe. There is a general acceptance
that the history of the state in eastern and central Europe is different, states
there being formed from the break-up of empire rather than the
consolidation of territory. Yet this distinction is not perfect, since there
are secession states in western Europe, while Poland was formed as a large
consolidated state at a rather early stage of history, before being partitioned
and reappearing in the twentieth century. There are few over-arching
accounts of state development and territory in central-eastern Europe,
although Caramani (2003) has produced a Rokkanian historical analysis.

Since the fall of Communism, regionalism in the other Europe has attracted
a certain amount of attention and the following general findings. State
history since the Second World War has differed from that in western
Europe, so that we do not see the emergence of territories and territorial
management through regional policy and gradual institutionalisation of
regions. Nationality politics tends to take the form of national minorities,
that is groups who have an external homeland somewhere else (such as
Hungarians in Slovakia) rather than of minority nations seeking self-
government within the state (as in Scotland or Catalonia). There has not
therefore been a convergence of new regionalism and nationality politics. In

the early period of accession negotiations, the European Commission
appeared to suggest that the candidate countries should have regional
structures in place in order to meet membership requirements and to
manage Structural Funds. This was taken up by interests within the
candidate countries pushing for regionalisation, although it was never clear
whether the Commission was pressing for regional government or just
regional administration. In 2000 there was a sharp change in policy and the
Commission told candidate countries that the Structural Funds would have
to be managed centrally (Keating 2003; Hughes et al. 2004; Agh 2005).
Europe has thus become a force for centralisation. Regional government
was nonetheless established in Poland and the Czech Republic while in
Hungary non-elected regional machinery was put in place with a promise
eventually to move to elected government. Yet national governments are
jealous of their recently recovered sovereignty and power and talk of
federalism or radical decentralisation is taboo. It is likely, therefore, that the
new member states will remain distinct in their territorial structures and that
it is not valid to extrapolate experience of the old member states to them.
Where Are We Now?

The study of territorial politics has come a long way in the last 30 years.
Territory has been reintegrated into political analysis rather than system-
atically reduced to the residual. There has been learning and cross-
fertilisation across social science disciplines and the literatures on the
different spatial scales and different facets of the phenomenon are talking to
each other. Over-determinate theories, whether of national integration,
disintegration or Europe of the Regions, have been moderated. Yet have we
arrived at a new shared understanding, a paradigm or set of common
analytical tools? This is much less certain.
The term multilevel governance has been much in vogue as a way of
capturing the new dynamic (Hooghe and Marks 2001; Bache and Flinders
2004). I have never been happy with this term and the more debate
continues the less enlightening it becomes. ‘Governance’ itself has multiple
meanings and is notoriously difficult to operationalise. For some it is a
76 M. Keating
broad term for social regulation and collective action, including ‘govern-
ment’ as one of its forms. For others it is narrower than government,
referring to a specific mode of policy making through negotiation rather
than hierarchy; it is thus one form that government might take. For others
again, it is an alternative to government; indeed some people insist that we
are moving away from government towards governance. Obviously, it is
impossible for us to get to grips with multilevel governance (MLG) unless
we first specify in which sense we are using governance itself (see Goetz this
volume). The sense in which the term is used by the MLG theorists seems to
be the third, that is a move away from government to governance. This
raises the old problem of how to use a new concept to analyse a new
phenomenon and compare it to what went before. If there is no conceptual
continuity between past and present, how can we compare them?
Governance analysts customarily resolve this problem by devising a
fictional world before governance in which there was a unitary, centralised
state autonomous of social interests, and comparing it with a world of
governance in which policy is negotiated and bargained. Yet this is nothing
new, since we have had decades of debate about the role of interests, about
corporatism and the interlinking of public and private interests. There may
indeed have been changes in the power and role of the state and organised
interests over time, but this would require us to retain common concepts and
variables so as to study these changes.
Much the same can be said about multilevel governance. It is almost
invariably defined as a new state of affairs by reference to a stylised account
of the centralised and unitary nation state. Yet everything in this paper so
far suggests that territorial politics has always been present. It has changed
its form over time, but tracking these changes requires common concepts,
not a conceptual break from one era to another. If the concept of
governance in MLG is unclear, that of levels is even more so. They seem
variously to be spatial, organisational or even individual so that any
complex organisation can be described as an example of MLG. Our concern
in this paper has not been about organisational complexity but about the
role of territory in political analysis and the way in which it shapes politics,
institutions and policy. Political science, sociology and geography have
gradually been developing concepts that travel across time and space that
enable us to grasp the elusive factor of territory and its changing
manifestations. We have made a lot of progress but we are not there yet.
Notes
1. This not only contradicted my upbringing from childhood, it also provided a foil for a
doctoral thesis that I was then completing on politics in Scotland demonstrating the
continued resilience of territorial politics within the unitary state.
2. Some ten years ago I published a book called Nations against the State. It translated well into
Spanish but for the French translation the title had to be changed, since Nations contre l’Etat
was considered an oxymoron.
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West European Politics

Thirty Years of Territorial

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Thirty Years of Territorial Politics

Correspondence Address: Michael.Keating@eui.eu

ISSN 0140-2382 Print/1743-9655 Online ª 2008 Taylor & Francis

Bringing Territory Back In

the various elements of territorial politics and their reconﬁguration in new

centralisation, far from destroying territorial politics, merely recreates it in

keep their distinctive features; mechanical federalism, with similar decen-

enough to explain territorial politics, since at that time Italy had no

modes of territorial management, depriving states of key instruments of

Democrats assumed diﬀerent images from one part of the country to

The Regional and the Local

‘Territorial politics’ in Europe has come to refer to the territorial

redistribution. These structural theories of power replaced the earlier

The New Regionalism

technology (instant communication) and society (individualism) are break-

blematised) territorial frame of the nation state sometimes caused us to

criticism is given by Lovering (1999).

Globalisation and European Integration

impossible to disentangle from other funding ﬂows. Experience among

stimulated the search for precedents. It has raised a series of important

Studies have also tended to be bounded by national traditions. In Italy there

The Other Europe

although Caramani (2003) has produced a Rokkanian historical analysis.

therefore been a convergence of new regionalism and nationality politics. In

Where Are We Now?

Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Davies, Norman (1999). The Isles. A History. London: Macmillan.

Technology and CNAA.

Regionalism’, Regional Studies, 33:7, 605–17.

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