Abstract
The geography of Europe only two decades ago was broadly conceived as a stable hierarchy of places at different spatial scales: Eastern and Western blocs, discrete nations, subnational regions, and local and urban communities. The disruption of this “given” postwar geography in the intervening two decades and of the political, economic and cultural assumptions that went with it could barely have been predicted in the early 1970s (but see Mandel 1975, 310–42 for a prescient discussion; Rowthorn 1971; Murray 1971). Certainly the development of a “European Economic Community”, equalizing conditions of trade in several commodities between six countries beginning in the early 1950s, and the steady growth of a more fully fledged “Common Market” served notice that some disruption of the traditional economic geography (at least at the national scale) was afoot. Nonetheless, the reconstruction of Europe at all spatial scales that would follow the 1970s economic depressions in the West and the post-1989 implosion of official Communist Party rule in the East were quite unforeseeable. Thereby, the largely economic evolution of the Common Market into the European Community in the 1970s and 1980s and now into the more politically inspired European Union was bound up with a much more complex and halting entanglement of social, cultural and political as well as economic restructurings.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Anderson, B. (1983), Imagined Communities, Verso, London.
Appadurai, A. (1993), ‘Patriotism and its futures’, Public Culture 5, 411–430.
Froebel, F., J. Heinrichs, and Kreye, O. (1980), The New International Division of Labour, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Gupta, A. (1992), ‘The Song of the Nonaligned World: Transnational Identities and the Reinscription of Space in Late Capitalism’, Cultural Anthropology 7, 63–79.
Herod, A. (1991), ‘The Production of Scale in US Labour Relations’, Area 23, 82–8.
Herod, A. (1992), Towards a Labor Geography: The Production of Space and the Politics of Scale in the East Coast Longshore Industry, 1953–1990, Unpublished Dissertation, Department of Geography, Rutgers University.
Hobsbawm, E. (1990), Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Jonas, A. (1994), ‘The Scale Politics of Spatiality’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12, 257–64.
Mandel, E. (1975), Late Capitalism, New Left Books, London.
Marquand, D. (1994) ‘Reinventing Federalism: Europe and the Left’, New Left Review 203, 17–26.
Marston, S. (1990), “Who are the People’?: Gender, Citizenship and the Remaking of the American Nation’, Environment and Planning D; Society and Space 8, 449–58.
Marx, K. (1867), Capital vol. 1., International Publishers (1967 edn.), New York.
Murray, R. (1971), ‘Internationalization of Capital and the Nation State’, New Left Review 67.
Nairn, T. (1977), The Break-Up of Britain, New Left Books, London.
Paasi, A. (1991), ‘Deconstructing Regions: Notes on the Scales of Spatial Life’, Environment and Planning A 23, 239–56.
Piore, M and Sabel, C. (1984), The Second Industrial Divide, Basic Books, New York.
Rowthorn, R. (1971), ‘Imperialism: Unity or Rivalry?’ New Left Review 69.
Saegert, S. and Leavitt, J. (1990), From Abandonment to Hope, Columbia University Press, New York.
Smith, N. (1984), Uneven Development: Nature Capital and the Production of Space, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
Smith, N. (1992) ‘Geography, Difference and the Politics of Scale’, in J. Doherty, E. Graham and M. Malek (eds.) Postmodernism and the Social Sciences, Macmillan, Houndsmills, 57–79.
Taylor, P. (1981) ‘Geographical Scales in the World Systems Approach’, Review 5, 3–11
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1995 Springer-Verlag Berlin · Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Smith, N. (1995). Remaking Scale: Competition and Cooperation in Prenational and Postnational Europe. In: Eskelinen, H., Snickars, F. (eds) Competitive European Peripheries. Advances in Spatial Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-79955-6_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-79955-6_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-79957-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-79955-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive