Keywords

The starting point of any territory-oriented approach is the recognition of the political relevance of territorial challenges. However, this relevance is far from taken for granted in current political research on European democratic politics. In general, contemporary political sociology focuses on the dialectic between society and politics and does not always ascribe a specific role to territory in this dialectic. Political science is mainly concerned with the role of political systems and the state, while often territory is assumed to be merely a proxy for an area of jurisdiction. More broadly, with a few exceptions, a reflective notion of territory is not an integral part of the prevailing approaches to the study of contemporary politics. On the contrary, in social and political sciences, there is an influential but heterogeneous stream arguing that territory is irrelevant (e.g., Keating, 2018; Kolers, 2009: 68). In this chapter, we discuss some influential academic narratives underpinning dominant trends in unterritorial approaches. We will discuss some of these narratives before addressing some territorial issues challenging unterritorial perspectives in contemporary democracies.

Methodological Nationalism and Mass Society

There are two important academic narratives underscoring research on democratic politics in the twentieth century. The first is represented by so-called methodological nationalism, which is a viewpoint that takes for granted national boundaries, understood as spaces “naturally” delimited by the nation-state. According to this theoretical perspective, which is often used implicitly, political action is framed in a nation-wide perspective. The assumption is that the nation, the state and society are conflated into the same entity and that the latter would constitute the “natural” foundation for the investigation of political and social sciences (Chernilo, 2007). Methodological nationalism is not concerned with the point of view of political actors; rather, it is an epistemological assumption. Territorial state is implicitly understood as a taken-for-granted nation-state with undisputed borders and seen as a neutral substratum or as a mere container of national political processes (Taylor, 1994).

Methodological nationalism entails significant consequences. The first is the belief that the national space represents the only way to organise and delimit modern society. The second is the strong tendency to detach social and political sciences from the study of international relations. According to this interpretation, scholarships would be concerned exclusively with what happens within the territorial nation-state, while international relations would focus solely on relations between states, thereby excluding or marginalising hybrid phenomena like cross-border or transnational relations (Agnew, 1994). Third, society is seen as an area coinciding with the boundaries of the nation-state without examining the premises and consequences of this delimitation (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002). According to the sociologist Ulrich Beck, this axiom is shared not only by classics of sociology such as Emile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons but also by contemporary philosophers such as John Rawls. Rawls’s theory of justice does not take into account the relations between societies or the porosity of national borders. Implicit in this is “the principle of mutual determination between state and society: the territorial nation-state is both creator and guarantor of individual civil rights and citizens organize themselves with the help of national political parties to influence and legitimize state actions” (Beck, 2006: 27).

The pervasiveness of methodological nationalism reflects the persistent stability of institutional borders of Western European states after the Second World War and the absence of war on and between territories for decades (Strandbjerg, 2010: 49). However, there is also an underlying Western Eurocentrism. After the Second World War, Western Europe saw a trend towards resolving territorial disputes between states, breaking away from centuries of conquests and conflicts. But this trend is certainly not common in other regions of the world, including Central and Eastern Europe. Thus, methodological nationalism represents an a-geographical and unhistorical assumption, but it also predictably attaches greater importance to political phenomena that have a national spread or prominence than to what happens in certain subnational areas, thereby underestimating micro-regional and local dynamics while overestimating a nation-state’s role in unifying and homogenising territories under its jurisdiction (Keating, 2018).

The second narrative that contributes to avoiding relevance to the territorial dimensions of democratic politics is inspired by the notion of “mass society“. Although the concept dates back to the American political sociology of the 1950s (Kornhauser, 1960) and this label has almost been lost in recent times, its contents substantiate one of the most widespread and widely shared narratives today in contemporary social and political science: Bureaucratisation, secularisation and consumer society would have contributed to shaping an atomised and homogenised individuality, dissolving or sidelining the communitarian ties of individuals with the territory and places they belong to. Two academic trends have contributed to reinforcing the importance of such as narrative: The first is the importance of the economic paradigm of the rational choice, which assumes as its unit of analysis a de-territorialised individual whose belonging, networks and collective mentalities are not considered relevant to their choices and behaviours. The second trend is the split between territory and space. “Massification” has not necessarily erased the notion of space, as it has given it a purely physical or abstract connotation of a more or less neutral container, or, again, of a background on which social and political facts are grafted. Although it is difficult to find statements denying the relevance of the spatiality of social and political phenomena as such, it is also true that an “unterritorial“ spatiality is often assumed to be a notion situated upstream or downstream from political practices and representations.

Globalism and the Decline of the Nation-State

The third powerful narrative that ignores the relevance of the concept of territory in contemporary democracy research is linked to the emergence and consolidation of the concept of globalisation and its ideological assumption as “globalism” (Steger, 2002). The concept of globalisation has had a variety of uses and interpretations. For instance, some scholars believe the process of globalisation dates back several centuries. However, it seems well established that the most recent phase of globalisation accompanied the consolidation of the financial market economy, neoliberalism and the digital revolution. During the historical period that the historian Eric Hobsbawm calls the “short century” (1994), there was a certain alignment between state, nation, society and economy. The economy was international, but its regulation for the large part of the twentieth century was strongly managed within the nation-states that set boundaries between the domestic economy and external trade. Recently, the transnational mobility of capital has greatly increased. Acting as both a cause and an effect of the diminished regulatory capacities of nation-states, their welfare regimes and the pacts between capital and labour that had characterised the post–Second World War era were strongly challenged by global forces, both from a material and an ideological point of view. In becoming the key narrative of the past few decades, globalism, that is the ideology of world’s free market, has brought with it its own interpretations, which have further contributed to legitimising unterritorial approaches to democratic politics (Steger & James, 2019: 114). Moulded in economic, social, cultural or technological transformations, globalisation is seen as a challenge to the historical role of the nation-state as an institutional construct capable of shaping societies and territories. The narrative of the market-oriented global world also fits with the “peaceful” geopolitical period that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the development of European integration: All of those processes would have produced a profound break in the role of states and national borders and implies the rise of a supranational power, that is, the institution of the European Union and the decline of nation-states.

Not all narratives emphasising the impact of global transformations contend a marginalisation of the nation-state. According to a “moderate” version, the globalisation of the past few decades has brought about a real global and transnational shift with the weakening of the national territorial state’s sovereign power, although it has not lost its relevance and continues to exercise many of its traditional powers (see, for example, Hirst & Thompson, 1996). Instead, a more “radical” or globalist narrative sees the decline of states and the borders between them as a prelude to their irrelevance. The current globalisation would have replaced a “supposed territorial order of the world” with a “world of flows and absent borders” (Agnew, 2018: VIII). This thesis is supported by “Borderless World”, a bestseller published in 1990 in which American essayist Kenichi Ohmae argues that economic transformations have made analyses of contemporary societies based on national borders unnecessary. Transnational corporations, the real actors of today’s capitalism, act more and more freely in a set of different locations and compete with each other in a rising global market. In a globally interconnected economy, businesses and consumers are more closely intertwined than ever before, while politicians, bureaucrats and the military structure are losing their relevance. All of this has happened because of the opening up of the world economy and the increase in trade between nations, which in turn has been driven by rapid developments in communication technologies. In 2005, the influential American journalist Thomas Friedman published “The World is Flat”, in which this narrative is taken up and deepened. Friedman’s book, which was also a bestseller, was a harsh and radical public critique of contemporary geographical thinking. His argument was that the current evolution of society has rendered geographical divisions and borders between different areas of the world meaningless, as the digital revolution, economic exchanges and increased mobility have led to an unprecedented circulation of goods, information, services and people. The irrelevance of territorial space and the overcoming of distances are also consequences of processes of homogenisation of cultures and lifestyles in a context of convergence of economic policies based on the primacy of the market economy and competitiveness. In this way, globalisation represents a radicalisation of mass society, where flows and interconnections replace any territorial roots for individuals and collective bodies.

The End of the Ideologies and the Rise of Audience Democracy

A fourth narrative is also key to understanding the marginality of territory-oriented approaches in political sociology. This narrative is strongly connected to mass society and influenced by the thesis of the “end of ideologies”, that is the humanistic ideologies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were becoming irrelevant in contemporary politics (Bell, 1960). Meanwhile, in the 1950s and 1960s, an influential strand of electoral studies highlighted how support for political parties in the first part of the twentieth century in Europe was marked by deep cultural and social rifts, a consequence of the conflicts that had marked the rise and consolidation of “mass” democracies (Lipset & Rokkan, 1967). The clash between state and church, along with the industrial revolution, contributed to the development of territorially connected political cultures, as part of belonging to different ideological families capable of securing voting loyalty. This narrative had been adopted to interpret the persistence of party systems between the 1920s and 1960s in many Western European democracies. By contrast, in the 1990s and 2000s with the spread of the narrative of globalisation and individualism, as well as a renewed interest in the idea of the “end of ideologies” (corresponding to the collapse of Soviet communism), there was scepticism towards the salience of collective identities and ideological belonging in explaining current trends in political behaviour and the evolution of party systems. In studies of elections, parties and political organisations, there is a growing consensus that candidates, leaders and individual issues prevail over ideological attachments. One of the main explanations for the decline of “party democracy” has been framed around the concept of “audience democracy” (Manin, 1997), which emphasises issue voting and political personalisation, with a decreasing role of party loyalties but also social and cultural identities. This shift has diminished the influence of ideological traditions, as well as regional or local roots in politics.

However, even in recent years, there have been numerous studies focused on territorial components: In many areas of social and political science, a prominent wisdom of the relationship between society and politics has imposed itself based on social fluidity and the changeability of opinions attracted by a shifting and (to some extent) ephemeral political supply. This wisdom is based on the distinction between social ties and territorial ties, between spaces and flows, on the one hand, and territory and places, on the other. This distinction renews a traditional dichotomy between community and society that has been present since the classical sociology of the early twentieth century. This perspective might suggest that society lacks places, has individuals without community ties and flows weaken communities, memberships and traditions to the point of making them insignificant in the explanation of contemporary phenomena. Implicit in this juxtaposition between places and flows is the idea that place is the expression of a deep-rooted attachment, while flows have been regarded as contingent, characteristic of a “liquid” modernity (Bauman, 2000) that has imposed itself on contemporary society. In this sense, there is a strong convergence between narratives related to nationalist methodology, mass society, globalism and audience democracy, although they do have not the same concern about the relevance of the nation-state in shaping democratic politics.

Territorial Challenges

In the scientific narratives mentioned above, the territory is often an implicitly neutral geographical area defined by institutional jurisdiction. It is given a passive role and viewed as a “natural resource”, a substratum available to individuals and groups with “floating” belongings. However, the lack of relevance of territorial dimension within scientific realm seems paradoxical regarding socio-political realities: to some extent, for ordinary people and political actors, territory—as form of spatial belonging or proximity and place where they live and do political activities—is part of their experience and discourse. Of course, those advocating for unterritorial narratives might argue that territorial dimensions have not disappeared but are losing relevance given the major historical transformations that have occurred in the past few decades in contemporary democracies. However, this is precisely the point: current democracies are confronted with some crucial territorial challenges. Thus, without denying the transformation that the nation-state model has inherited from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the relevance of historical shifts that have taken place, especially in terms of the deconstruction of the relations between territories, society and politics, one might question the heuristic capacity of unterritorial perspectives to deal with key transformations of liberal democracies.

Let us go back to the early 1990s, not long after the break-up of the Soviet Union, with the experience of the first war in Iraq and the rise of an apparent American unilateralism. This time was marked by the advent of the e-economy and increasing volatility in the world economy when financial flows and forms of trade seemed to become increasingly fluid and dominant over the “material” economy. At that juncture, the celebrated book “The End of History” by American essayist Francis Fukuyama, which came out in 1992, was representative of a widely held belief. The author argued that the last stage of historical evolution involved the global success of liberal democracy, which had rid itself of its antagonists. Liberal democracy was an ideal that had finally been achieved, in line with the technological progress driven by advanced capitalism. However, Fukuyama later revised this view in light of the tensions and crises that have continued to emerge. One of his last books is entitled “Identity”, a notion that was introduced as early as the 1970s and that has become increasingly popular in sociological and political publications in recent years (Fukuyama, 2018). This notion emphasises collective belongings and emotional concerns, as well as tensions in which the free-floating and full-mobile individual and “peaceful” nation-states are moulded. The main consequence is the challenge of the dominant narratives of the 1990s in Western countries.

Neo-Nationalism and War

In unilateral globalist narratives, the challenge of the centrality of the nation-state as the (only) legitimate space for political action went along the naïve (or optimistic) assumption that this trend does not imply resistance and conflict in the name of the nation. In fact, unlike what happened with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the weakening of nation-states’ capacity to engender belonging and loyalty does not always imply peaceful or democratic outcomes. These narratives included the re-emergence of nationalisms even in the heart of Europe, which highlighted the extent to which the processes of consolidating liberal democracy had to come to terms with the appeal to tradition, identities and territorial boundaries. Of course, there are different forms of nationalist ideology, and some of them take an openly violent form such as civil war and genocide.

The comforting visions of a European continent on the road to a radiant destiny have been disrupted by ongoing territorial conflicts in recent decades. Just when the end of the Cold War seemed to give way to a pacified world, the war in Yugoslavia, a state with a multinational, multi-ethnic and multi-religious character whose gradual dissolution was marked by the resurgence of nationalist parties, independence referendums and a bloody civil war (e.g. Baker, 2015), provides an obvious counterpoint. Faced with a passive, powerless Western Europe, repression and genocide aimed at redrawing territorial power and collective identities unfolded in the former Yugoslav lands. Outside Europe, in 1994, two years after the end of the Yugoslav state, one of the most ferocious acts of bloodshed in twentieth-century African history took place in Rwanda: The genocide of the Tutsis, which was fuelled by ethnic hatred, claimed over half a million lives in a few months and led to a change in government. More recently, Russia’s attacks on Ukraine showed that traditional war among nation-states in the name of seizing territory is still part of European history. While some conflicts have a local or regional impact, others, such as the recent evolution of the Ukrainian war after the invasion by the Russian army, have a transnational and global impact.

However, nationalism and ethnic conflict also follow more peaceful paths. In northern Italy, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the emerging Northern League contributed to a re-politicisation of territorial issues, also as an effect of the geopolitical changes of those years on the Western party system. In the vacuum left by the major parties that had previously marked the country’s history, the Northern League made a breakthrough and has been one of the longest-lived regionalist parties in the West. Although it is no longer its warhorse, the strategy implemented around the mid-1990s was defined around the idea of a Padania as the basis of a new state to be founded by seceding from the Italian state. In many parts of the world, various independence movements have fought and continue to fight in the name of common interests and identity roots. Catalonia and Scotland are the best-known examples in Europe. Despite their ideological differences, they both want to reclaim sovereignty for themselves in the name of a nation with little or no recognition, based on the right of self-determination for peoples. In some cases (e.g. Scotland in the 1990s), the central state has acquiesced to at least some of the demands by allowing for the establishment of the Scottish Parliament as part of devolution and greater regional powers. In other cases, as in Catalonia, the recognition of certain rights and autonomies risks clashing with the prerogatives of the central state, as happened with the political-institutional clash, the condemnations of Catalan leaders and the social and institutional crisis that followed the 2017 independence referendum. Thus, nationalism is a kind of offensive ideology but also a defensive one, as in the case of traditional wars among two nation-states (e.g. the Russo-Ukrainian War), but also within an institutional framework, as in the struggle for national self-determination in Scotland or Catalonia. Nationalism, including the recent upsurge of nationalistic sentiment in Europe, is always embedded in conflict over territorial conquest and control.

Walls and Security

The securitisation of borders and the assertion of territorial defence are reflected in the “return” of borders and wars. Although border issues have never stopped being relevant, global changes after the end of the Cold War led to a decrease in attention on them. However, “The Obsession of Borders”, published in 2017 by geographer Michel Foucher, reminds us that the world has some 250,000 kilometres of fences between nation-states, including about 30,000 kilometres that were drawn between the 1980s and 2000s. After 9/11, terrorism was the main reason for this acceleration, but increasing (legal and illegal) flows of people and goods have also played also a crucial role (e.g. Schain, 2019).

The European Union has followed only slightly a different path. In the 1990s and early 2000s, during a period of significant expansion of foreign trade, the EU took unprecedented steps on the continent by concluding agreements that allowed for the free movement of people, capital and goods between member states, as well as the abolition or near-abolition of customs controls between the Schengen treaty states. At the same time, however, there was also a reverse process that put border controls back, reinforcing bordering policies concerning non-EU territories and people. While military and economic borders lost their relevance without disappearing entirely, the traditional function of police control was reaffirmed (Andreas & Snyder, 2000: 219). The territorial space—no longer only national also but international or rather transnational—continues to be protected from those who consider themselves unfit for access. Despite the free movement between member states, a process of re-nationalisation of migration policy has taken hold, this time towards flows of people from the world’s poorest countries, based on the principle that global openness must imply a strengthening of the nation-state’s internal cultural cohesion through an effective system of filters and exclusions that redraws its borders (Sassen, 1996; 2015).

The years following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany and the end of the Soviet Union and its influence over states behind the Iron Curtain shifted the geopolitical balance of power in favour of the United States, which seized the opportunity to consolidate a phase of détente in international relations that had already begun in the second half of the 1980s. The Start agreements, the most important of which was signed between the United States and the Soviet Union just before the latter’s collapse in 1991, were aimed at reducing weapons of mass destruction and nuclear weapons in particular. After the arms race of the Cold War, détente was happening on a global level. In Western Europe, the increase in European integration (i.e. the enlargement of the union) consolidated the pacification process in relations between the member states. That phase was significantly disrupted by the 11 September 2001 attack on the Twin Towers in New York City. For the first time, the greatest military and economic power on the planet had been attacked on its own territory. Moreover, the enemy to fear was not a traditional state but a terrorist network capable of overcoming the defences of the world's greatest superpower. The response was a reconfiguration of territorial security policies inside and outside state borders. The trauma of 9/11 marked the start of a vast programme of reinforcing land and air borders, including the construction of a 1,100-kilometre border with Mexico: The fight against illegal immigration, crime and terrorism converged in the name of national security.

Although an emerging new Cold War era seems to shape geopolitical trends as a consequence of the Ukraine-Russia war, this does not imply a unilateral confirmation of the monopoly of force in the hands of the state. Moulded by neo-liberal ideologies, which assume that the private sector is more effective and efficient than the state apparatus, the private sector has been given parts of security policies that were once the prerogative of state bureaucracies (e.g. Hall & Biersteker, 2002). While the state is not reducing its commitment to security, taking into account the increase in military spending worldwide, what is happening is a redefinition of the state’s monopoly in the management of ground-level coercion. Security policies have been partially privatised or transferred to supranational structures (Nalla & Gurinskaya, 2020). In recent decades, we have observed the rise on the international scene of global security multinationals and private military agencies that have played a crucial role in the “war against terror” in many parts of the world. In parallel, local communities that are denied access to satisfactory levels of public policing have developed forms of self-defence on their territory, demonstrating how public security and territorial control confirm the role of territorial spaces, albeit in a new form (Wood & Dupont, 2006).

Environmental Issues

Territorial issues also take on new relevance through the emergence of environmental challenges and their influence on local, national and international political agendas. The issue of environmental pollution and, more generally, the ecological challenge have had mixed political fortunes since the 1960s when the first warnings of environmental risks linked to the development model of industrial and post-industrial societies emerged. Nowadays, climate change tends to shape the governance agenda across the world (Bulkeley & Newell, 2023).

Environmental issues in a broad sense highlight the importance of territory and the need for a territorial approach to policy from several points of view. Firstly, it shows how there is no clear-cut boundary but rather a strong interweaving between human action and the natural environment, i.e. the living territory; the survival and reproduction of human action also depend on the latter. Environmental issues revolve around the preservation of natural resources. Secondly, it highlights how economic activities have obvious environmental impacts, confirming the close links between economic production and its location. The environmental issue shows the variability and interdependence of the impact of climate change with respect to different social, economic and political contexts. The consequences of climate change are transnational—that is, they affect different territorial spaces simultaneously. What happens in the European Alps (e.g. the melting of glaciers) does not have the same geopolitical influence as the destruction of the Amazon rainforest or the retreat of Antarctic ice, even though these changes both affect the climate of a wide range of territories around the globe. At the same time, we note that it is first and foremost the nation-states that are called upon as the main actors responsible for action against climate change, although this is also done through difficult international and supranational collaboration. Unsurprisingly, local and national governments, as well as supranational institutions, play crucial roles in environmental issues. Meanwhile, as the Kyoto Accords of 2007 and the Paris Agreement of 2015 have shown, institutional concerns about global warming tend to conflict with economic interests, and that is reflected in many political arenas, including where NGO and environmental movements stressing spatial inequality and justice (Almeida, 2019; Carmin & Agyeman, 2011).

Environment and climate are inherent to territory as a space of life and as a political space. On the one hand, Avery Kolers (2009: 8) underlines the strong connection between land, terra and territory:

First, we live on land – we, our homes, our belongings, and things we build individually and collectively, take up space. Hence the physical extension of terra firma is a good whose distribution matters to everyone. Second, land is composed of resources that we need in order to survive, prosper, and express ourselves; literally, the land constitutes both our physical bodies and virtually every material good we can find or fashion. Hence secure access to good land, land we can use to do the things we care about, is essential to our capacity to make our way in the world. Third, land and its properties – its location, its material composition, who or what lives on it – are essential to a vast array of world systems, such as nitrogen and carbon cycles, water purification and storage, ecosystems, and the production of oxygen, without which we would not exist. All the value of territory is built on these three foundations.

This perspective can be articulated, on the other hand, in a further rethinking of the relationship between nature and human activity, particularly with the debate over the advent of the Anthropocene as a new historical epoch capable of shaping not only territorial but also geological processes on Earth, which takes on new meaning in today’s climate regime, but also new kind of social and political struggles (Latour, 2018; Latour & Schultz, 2022).

Beyond Unterritorial Thinking?

In sum, some narratives relating to nationalism methodology, mass society, globalism and the decline of nation-states, as well as the crisis of political ideologies, the rise of audience democracy and the weakening of political cleavages, have marginalised territory-oriented approaches. All these narratives tend to assume territory is not relevant. Of course, as we have seen, these narratives reflect partially the structure and transformations of the European democracies since the end of the Second World War: the growth of consumerism, individualism, secularisation, the stability of Western European nation-state borders, the acceleration of European integration and the increasing mobility of capital, goods and people after the end of the Cold War. However, this is only one side of the story, as a series of anomalies have challenged the unterritorial paradigm. In the past few decades, various kinds of evidence have emerged to bring territorial issues back into the limelight, such as the return of nationalist ideologies and ethnic mobilisation, the re-emergence of walls on the European continent, war and security concerns, environmental issues and the ecological challenge. In fact, avoiding territorial belonging and roots and considering territorial borders as past episodes do not allow for a full understanding of emerging challenges in liberal democracies.

Although territorial issues have never been marginal, the increasing relevance of territorial issues suggests a re-evaluation of the research agenda in political sociology. More crucially, the question arises of how research into democratic politics can take advantage of this opportunity to consider the concept of territory more seriously and to develop conceptual tools that are more oriented around territorial issues. This means going beyond unterritorial approaches, as the notion of territory is relevant not only when nationalism, ethnic conflict and war are at stake but also more generally in understanding how individuals and groups shape their common belonging or how nation-states are transforming in a global and multi-scalar government arena.