neil brenner, new state spaces

chapter one, introduction (1-27)

(2): important--"this book is intended to broaden and deepen the geographical imagination of contemporary state theory by investigating the major role of urban regions as key sites of contemporary state institutional and spatial restructuring. rather than treating cities and city-regions as mere subunits of national administrative systems, i suggest that urban policy--broadly defined to encompas all state activities oriented towards the regulation of capitalist urbanization--has become an essential political mechanism through which a profound institutional and geographical transformation of national states has been occurring. my claim is not simply that the institutional infrastructure of urban governance is being re-defined but, more generally, that transformations of urban policy have figured crucially within a fundamental reworking of national statehood since the early 1970s. a geographically attuned and scale-sensitive approach to state theory is required in order to decipher the new state spaces that are being produced under contemporary capitalism."

(2): we are talking about the last three decades, of course, following the decline of "spatial keynesianism." (faced with challenges of urban industrial decline, welfare state retrenchment, european integration, and economic globalization). "as of the early 1980s, national states began to introduce new, post-Keynesian spatial policies intended to reconcentrate productive capacities and specialized, high-performance infrastructural investments into the most globally competitivve city-regions within their territories." -- the need to (a) enhance global competitive advantages and (b) attract mobile capital.

(3): to what extent, though, will we be romanticizing the postwar period, here? "the postwar project of national territorial equalization and sociospatial redistribution has thus been superseded..."

(3): two arguments outlined here:

1. that city-regions "have become key institutional sites in which a major rescaling of national state power has been unfolding."
   
2. that "national state institutions continue to play key roles in formulating, implementing, coordinating, and supervising urban policy initiatives, even as the primacy of the national scale of political-economic life is decentered."
   

(4): let's try and think about this a bit more, particularly wrt to other ways in which the state has been theorized; surely we're not abandoning schematics that do use the state, singular?--"i believe that the generic concept of the state has become increasingly problematic. the notion of statehood seems to me a more precise basis for describing modern political institutions, because it does not ontologically prejudge..."

(5-7): three trends

1. global economic integration--"national territorial economies are becoming more permeable to supranational, continental, and global flows of investment."
   
2. urban and regional resurgence--"a renewed importance for major fractions of industrial, financial, and service capital..." (citing the global city, industrial districts, learning regions, offshore centers, etc.)
3. the consolidation of new supranational and cross border-institutions--EU, NAFTA, APEC, ASEAN, MERCOSUR, IMF, World Bank, G8, etc., etc.
   

(8): three methodological challenges

1. scale as a proccess, rather than fixed thing
2. intrinsic relationality of all scales, and their embeddedness within broader hierarchies (this is emphasized again in box 1.2)
   
3. postdisciplinary challenge

(12-13): definition of uneven geographic development--"the circumstance that social political, and economic processes under capitalism are not distributed uniformly or homogenously across the earth's surface, but are always organized within distinct sociospatial configurations--such as urban agglomeration regional clusters, rural zones, national territories, supranational economic blocs, and so forth--that are characterized by divergent socioeconomic conditions, developmental capacities, and institutional arrangements..."--outlniing the contradictory interplay of equalization and differentiation...

(14-15): important--we will clearly need an account of the interests that move states, for here, so far, we are seeing the state as a hammer--it can be wielded to alleviate or exacerbate uneven geographic development. turning point was the late-1970s.

(16): KEY--"during the fordist-keynesian period, the problem of uneven geographical development was generally construed as a matter of redressing 'insufficient' or 'imbalanced' industrialization on a national scale. the task of state spatial intervention, under these conditions, was to mold the geography of capital investment into a more balanced, cohesive, and integrated locational pattern throughout the national territory. by contrast, with the rescaling of state space and the proliferation of urban locational policies during the post-1970s period, this project of national territorial equalizaiton has been fundamentally inverted. it is no longer capital that is to be molded into the geogrphay of state space, but state space that is to be molded into the geography of capital." [again, though, this formulation sets us up as keynesians, when we would really like to break the chains]

(16-17): why, with post-keynesian, we can expect crises [well, but what about keynesianism?]

(18): state rescaling as 'ideal-type', or 'real abstraction'? setting the theoretical stage.

(18-21): three levels of abstraction (see box on page 19)

1. abstract--capital accumulation, class struggle
   
2. meso--keynesianism, neoliberalism
   
3. concrete--actual policies
   

(21): in this book, mainly concerned with meso level (but of course, involves other levels, too)

(24): citing jessop as postdisciplinary take on the State

chapter two, the globalization debates (27-

(28-29): globalization as an opportunity to bring space back in to analyses of capitalism--and, obviously, an opportunity to dispose of the 'cartesian' notion of the fixed, nation-state--"to challenge the iron-grip of the nation-state on the social imagination'"

(29): KEY--"thus, one of the central intellectual barriers to a more adequate understanding of contemporary global transformations is that we currently lack appropriately historical and dynamic conceptualizations of social space..."

(30): not 'deterritorialization', but 'reterritorialization'

(30): important, the crux of the contention: we need to transcend the imaginary of the nation-state, and move toward an understanding of the new sociospatial configurations. importantly, "the effort to transcend state-centric modes of analysis does not entail a denial of the national state's continued relevance as a major locus of political-economic regulation."

(30): this chapter sets out its stall to critique the 'global territorialist' approach, and the 'deterritorialization' approach

(31): "the notion of globalization is first and foremost a descriptive category denoting, at the most general level, the spatial extension of social interdependencies on a worldwide scale."

(32): "in other words, all aspects of social space under modern capitalism must be understood as presuppositions, arenas, and outcomes of dynamic processes of continual social contestation and transformation." [bringing the 'social' in, but, like harvey, it seems ever-so-abstract...]

(33): important--insofar as we will be thinking about 'causes' behind global transformation, the dynamics seem to be located in capitalism's inherent tendency to see 'every limit... as a barrier to be overcome'. in other words, we need to think carefully about how this will dovetail with the question of shifting state strategy (if the keynesian and then post-keynesian paradigms were indeed driven, in his argument, by the notion that this was what was (a) best for national ecomonic growth, and/or (b) best for labor). how, in other words, to bring the State into a capital-centric account?

(33): we have a deterritorialization-reterritorialization chronology--first, capital annihilates barriers; then, second, it fixes itself in space as a means to extending its orbit.

(34): these spatial configuration as 'forces of production' (now we are wading into knotty theoretical formulations--though this begins with harvey, of course.)

(35): this particular deterritorialization-reterritorialization is part of the "longue duree dynamic of deterritorialization, reterritorializaiton, and uneven geographic development that has underpinned the production of capitliast spatiality throughout the modern era."

(35-36): six implications of this broad theorization

1. global restructuring as a conflictual, uneven, dialectical process
2. global restructuring as both spatial and temporal
3. global restructuring unfolding upon multiple spatial scales
4. not involving total obliteration of sociospatial scales (i.e., the state), but their reconfiguration
5. stems from a diverse range of political-economic causes (reogranization of capital accumulation, consolidation of neoliberalism, financial deregulation, accelerated technological change, new population movements, geopolitical shifts, transformation of global labor force...) [how do we move to a coherent account of what actually happened, as the capital-centric account initially implied? or is this very much a case of overdetermination by all of this?]
6. states as essential geographical arenas

(37-38): important--here begins the section on the epistemology of state-centrism, which has three most essential spatial assumptions (see box 2.1)

1. space as static platform, not social (spatial fetishism)
   
2. social relations organized within containers (methodological territorialism)
   
3. assumption that social relations are organized at a national scale (methodological nationalism)
   

(41): the intellectual plausibility of this frame, he's arguing, was contingent--it can be traced to "the late nineteenth and early twentieth century historical-geographical context in which the social sciences first emerged, during which the territorial state's role in encaging socioeconomic and politicocultural relations within its boundaries dramatically intensified."

(43): and even then, there was a tendency to see what you expected to see, through it--reify it, rather than see a tendency in operation ("to conflate the historical tendency toward the territorialization of social relations on a national scale--which has undoubtedly intensified during much of the twentieth century--with its full historical realization")

(44): important--the two (mistaken) assumptions of the deterritorialization thesis

1. that globalization is non-territorial, borderless, supraterritorial.
2. that globalization entails the contraction of state power, or its erosion.

(45): first mention of 'glocalization' (swyngedouw)

(45): the relativization of scales (jessop)

(47-48): the (nonsense) notion of integration into 'global society'

(48-49): more profound critique of those who see globalization as preconstituted structures, rather than qualitative re-structuring...

(49-52): important, critique of wallerstein as 'state-centric'--"however, considering wallerstein's avowed concern to transcend state-centric models of capitalist modernity, national state territories occupy a surprisingly pivotal theoretical position within his conceptual framework... wallerstein's conceptuion of global space is.. most precisely described as an inter-state division of labor... in this sense, wallerstein's concern to analyze the global scale as a distinctive unit of analysis does not lead to any qualitative modification in the way in which this space is conceptualized... the global and the national scales are viewed as structural analogs of a single spatial form--territoriality... to be sure, wallerstein conceives global space as a complex historical product of capitalist expansion, but he acknowledges its historicity only in a limited sense, in contrast to previous historical systems such as world-empires. for within the cpaitalist historical system, space appears to be frozen into a single geometric crystallization."

(52-53): two general methodological conclusions:

1. emphasis on the global spatial scale does not necessarily lead to the overcoming of state-centrism
2. state-centric conceptions of global space mask the national state's own crucial role as a site and agent of global restructuring.
   

(55): the prospect of 'placelessness' (!)

(56): important--three serious deficiences of deterritorialization approaches

1. historicity of territoriality is an either/or, presence or absence (?)
2. telationship btw global space and national territoriality is a zero-sum game
3. most crucially, "deterritorialization approaches bracket the various forms of spatial fixity, spatial embedding, rescaling, and reterritorialization upon which global flows are premised."
   

(57): important--"a major agenda of this book is to advance an interpretation of contemporary global restructuring as a rescaling of the nationally organized sociospatial configurations that have long served as the underlying geographical scaffolding for capitalist development."

(57): important--remember, two types of deterritorialization under discusssion: of capitalism, and of the state.

1. of capital (57-60): more-or-less asserting that a territorialization moment is unavoidable, still. "we are witnessing, rather, a profoundly uneven rescaling and reterritorialization of the historically entrenched, state-centric geographical infrastructures that underpinned the last century of capitalist industrialization." capital cannot ever enjoy pure placelessness.
   
2. of the state (60-64): the state, also, is most definitely not dead. "national states began actively to facilitate the process of geoeconomic integration through a variety of policy strategies..." as panitch writes, "capitalist globalization... takes place in, through, and under the aegis of states."

(63): and why the urban? well, "as we shall see, large-scale urban regions represent crucial geographical, institutional, and political arenas in which the rescaled geographies of statehood under contemporary capitalism are being forged and contested."

(66-67): in sum, four methodological challenges:

1. historicity of social space--"historically specific character of national state territoriality as a form of sociospatial organization."
   
2. polymorphic geographies--"national state territoriality is today being intertwined with... an immense variety of emergent forms (supranational institutions, etc.)"
   
3. the new political economy of scale--decentering of the national scale of political-economic life
   
4. the remaking of state space--key role of national states in promoting sociospatial transformations.

chapter three, the state spatial process under capitalism (69-113)

(70): "just as a fish is unlikely to discover water, most postwar social scientists viewed national state territories as pregiven natural environments for sociopolitical life." -- the 'territorial trap'

(70): fordist-keynesian period as a period of historically unprecedented attempt at closure [we can interrogate this, since it ought to give us some clue what 'closed' and 'open' denote; not absence of world trade, certainly]

(70): at times, though, there seems to be a simplified periodization (more simplified, in other words, than the harvey narrative)--we have moved from westphalian, to post-westphalian [if we wanted to draw the periodization out, i am worried that it, as abstract narrative, doesn't match the concrete level] -- this is emphatically misleading, though, for he does also went to stress its indeterminacy during the modern period (see 76)

(72): critical--"of particular importance, in this context, is a sustained inquiry into the conditions under which inherited geographies of state space may be transformed from relatively fixed, stabilized settings in which state regulatory operations occur into potentially malleable stakes of sociopolitical contestation. concomitantly, there is an equally urgent need for a more explicit theoretical conceptualization of the determinate social, political, and economic processes through which transformations of state space unfold."

(72): KEY--"i argue that state space is best conceptualized as an arena, medium and outcome of spatially selective political strategies" [how does this work, then, with the argument that it is potentially malleable and open to political contestation? because it is difficult to argue that its rescaling in the neoliberal period was a response to political contestation--it was in the service of capital. so a kind of political influence, but there is no role for understanding it as a tool to be wielded, in this account, correct? in other words, the question is: is it that capital has captured the state, in the neoliberal period? or is it that the state has decided to go with capital?]

(75): citing Ollman on the dialectic, in order to emphasize process over fixity

(76): "while Weber was highly sensitive to the historical specificity of modern state territoriality relative to premodern political geogrphies, he was considerably less interested in its evolution within the modern interstate system."

(77): five functions of the modern state

1. war-making and military defense
2. the containment and enhancement of national wealth
3. the promotion of national identities
4. institutionalization of democratic forms of legitimation
5. the provision of social welfare

(77): spatial scales are tied to "regulatory strategies"

(78-80): important, state space:

1. in the narrow sense--changing configuration of state border, boundaries, frontiers
   
2. in the integral sense--changing substantive ways in which institutions are mobilized to regulate social relations (state inverventions into economic process, etc.)

(81): critical--"the crucial point, therefore, is that the question of which scale of regulatory activity is primary within a given configuration of state power is essentially an empirical-historical one, and not a matter that can be settled on an a priori basis."

(84): important--summarizing his understanding of jessop's notion of strategic-relational theory of the state--"most crucially, neither the state's spatial form nor historically specific forms of state spatiality are ever structurally pregiven; rather, they represent arenas and outcomes of spatially selective political strategies. this conceptualization forms a theoretical linchpin [of this book]" [see also 89]

(84): underdetermined nature of the value form

(85): the state form as analagous

(85): KEY--according to jessop, "the separation of the state from the circuit of capital may seriously constrain its ability to function as an agent of capitalist interests." (the state, then, as a site of contestation). "the state form is an undeteremined condensation of continual strategic interactions regarding the nature of state inteverention, political representation, and ideological hegeony within capitalist society. accordingly, 'there can be no inherent substantive unity to the staet...; its always relative unity must be created...' for jessop, the funcitonal unity and organization coherence of the state are never pregiven, but must be viewed as emergent, contingent, contested... it is only through the mobilization and consolidation of state projects... that the image of the state as a unified organizationl entity can be projected into civil society." (SEE FIGURE 3.4, pg. 86)

(87): state as site of strategies, as generator of strategies, and as product of strategies.

(91-93): important:

1. state spatial form (defined with reference to the principle of territoriality--it is territoriality that underpins the potential autonomy of state institutions from other social forces within civil society)
2. state spatial projects (oriented toward state's institutional structure--initiatives to differentiate state territoriality into a functionally coordinated, coherent regulatory geography)
   
3. and state spatial strategies (oriented towards circuit of capital--influence the geographies of development, reshape geographies of capital accumulation)

(95): two dimensions

1. a scalar dimension (a hierarchy among a variety of scales)
   
2. a territorial dimension (jurisdictional units)

(96): "the relation of state institutions to patterns of uneven spatial development is frequently an object of intense sociopolitical contestation." [but, and i think we would all agree, it is possible to push this to lengths that would be absurd--we are still talking about a state that is in the broad interests of capital, perhaps more in the way althusser specified...]

(104): all of this is becoming frustratingly formal!

chapter four, urban governance and the nationalization of state space ()

(114-115): ok--"state rescaling has emerged as an important political strategy through which diverse governmental coalitions have attempted to manage the disruptive consequences of a deeply rooted socioeconomic crisis." [again, question of response to politics and contestation, or in line with capital's broad interests]

(115): definition of spatial keynesianism--"spatial keynesianism was a multifaceted, multiscalar, and contradictory amalgamation of staet spatial projects and state spatial strategies that were constructed in response to some of the major regulatory dilemmas associated with postwar fordist urban-entrenched patterns of uneven spatial development by spreading urban growth as evenly as possible across the entire surface of each national territory.."

(116): in this chapter, wants to 'get at' the state by looking at the way in which it strove to regulate urban development/urbanization.

(117): key--"I argue that spatial Keynesianism was composed of a variety of spatially selective political strategies through which wester European antional states attempted to manage the distinctive patterns of urbanization and uneven spatial development that crystallized across western Europe during the Fordist-Keynesian period..."

(120): urban development in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, evolution of capitalism from liberal-competitive to state-managed; a new industrial geography of the second industrial revolution

(122): fordist period as the high-water mark of national capitalism

(128): see box, "key axes of regulation under fordist-keynesian capitalism"

(130): here, a point at which to ask the question of the place of labor in pushing the State--"the goal of state action, in this context, was less to enhance the productive force of capitalist sociospatial configurations than to spread the industrialization process as evenly as possible across the entire surface of the national territory."

(133): compensatory mechanisms, myrdal -- targeting of peripheralized spaces (136)

(171): "spatial keynesianism was not dismantled through a single, catastrophic rupture. rather, its constitutive elemnts were eroded due to a confluence of distinct processes of restructuring, leading in turn to path dependent, politically contested regulatory realignments and institutional modifications within each national state apparatus."

chapter five, interlocality competition as a state project

(172-173): "in contrast to the redistributive agenda associated with the Kenesian welfare national state, the competition state attempts to promote economic regeneration by enhancing the global competitive advantages of its territory..."

(176): we have seen--

1. state spatial projects--establish customized, place-specific regulatory capacities in major cities, city-regions, and industrial districts and more generally, to decentralize key aspects of economic regulation to subnatinoal institutional levels.
   
2. state spatial strategies--reconcentration of socioeconomic assets and advanced infrastructural investments within globally competitive city-regions.
   

chapter six, alternative rescaling strategies

(257-261): SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT

1. ABSTRACT: A. curret round of global restructuring represents an intensification and re-workign of uneven spatial development / B. state influences this through diverse political strategies / C. towards a processual concpetualization of state spatiality, which calcify into distinct sociospatial configurations
2. MESO-LEVEL: A. post-1980s western europe, which has facilitated transnational corporate accumulation strategies... has produced intense economic dynamism within a select group of powerful, globally interlinked cities... / B. an inverstion of state appraoches to the regulation of uneven development; redistribution abandoned, competetiveness prioritized. / C. patterns of state spatial selectivity have been transformed; new projects and strateiges designed to make major cities competitive. (towards RCSR--rescaled competition state regime)

(261): this configuration, it is argued, is permeated by crisis-tendencies.

(304): from second-cut, to third-cut RCSR?