Abstract
This chapter reviews the reconfiguration of the political geography of the anthropospace in the past century and the rise of world-rhizomes as a new hegemonic category for understanding economy and power relations in the twenty-second Century. In particular, the dialectic between the neo-wallersteinian school and their critiques is described in its centrality for the theoretical development of current anthropospace political studies. The current intellectual landscape has resulted from the progressive merging of International Relation Theory, Political Geography, Software Studies, Design Sciences, Historical Materialism, and Poststructuralism. The chapter further investigates the hypothesis that, after a half-century hiatus of, so-called “international” relations might have morphed into embryonic inter-rhizomic relations. This hypothesis is still subject to a lively academic debate and has not yet been codified into political practices or regulatory frameworks. The case study of the shifting geographical scale of Europe, and its peculiar relation between its subscribers and the rest of the world-rhizomes, is considered as a possible testbed for the emergence of inter-rhizomic relations.
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- 1.
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), provided a network that enabled financial institutions worldwide to send and receive information about financial transactions in a secure, standardized and reliable environment. SWIFT had become the industry standard for syntax in financial messages until its dissolution under the pressure of the then United States of America in 2022. The date marked the first split of financial markets.
- 2.
For a complete history of the European Civil War see Vassilikou A. ⟨Ψ 2121⟩, The European Civil War and the Breaking of Nation-States, Blackwell, Hoboken.
- 3.
See Zhang and Coppola ⟨Ψ 2097⟩, for an extensive overview of the evolution of China as a unique example of continuity from mini-system to world-empire, from periphery to centre of the capitalist world-economy, to a world-rhizome.
- 4.
The study of the various economies within the world-rhizomes developed a rich literature on the subject. For an overview see The Handbook of Rhizomes’ Economies ⟨Horn and Batista Ψ 2120⟩.
- 5.
The very essence of the functioning of a rhizome is its capacity to be a self-contained economy. Therefore, an almost-global reach is a prerequisite for a system to be considered an autonomous rhizome. Many quasi-rhizomes can also be detected, whose services depend on those of the five world-rhizomes.
- 6.
During the 2050s the notion of citizenship became less and less popular and the subscription systems matched the services delivered by companies and polity alike. The only rhizome that residually kept some references to “citizens” in official documentation has been the European Union™. However, even in that case it has never been used in common language or media.
- 7.
Google’s Workers League (GWL) has the mission to ensure workers do not get any support or subsidy to participate in the free market of labour. Often, they are mistakenly confused with the role that trade unions played back in the 20th Century, because they are also a membership-based association composed by workers. However, unions used to advocate for worker’s protection and for positive discrimination that would distort the market, while the GWL is operating completely on the opposite side of the spectrum.
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Porcaro, G. (2023). World-Systems and the Rescaling Geography of Europe. In: Horn, L., Mert, A., Müller, F. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Global Politics in the 22nd Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13722-8_11
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