GEO 220 NOTES FINAL JOHN AGNEW- TERRITORIALITY AND POLITICAL IDENTITY IN EUROPE National Identities are seen

en as both prior to and in opposition to political identities associated with other territorial scales, such as the local or the regional. Two critical assumptions of conventional views of the relationship between territory and identity - There is a homology that is drawn between individual persons and territorial states such that states are treated as moral equivalents to individual persons o The assumption priveleges the scale of the territorial state and its primordial role in political-identity formation by associating it with the character and moral agency of an individual - There is a dyadic (person-person, person-state, state-state) definition of the nature of social relationships upon which the territory-political identity relationship rests o This reduction abstracts political identity from its diverse sociological contexts in which it originates and operates into a set of isolated individual relationships Thus, political identities are taken as given categories associated with mutually exclusive group memberships (bounded by specific territories) without examining the processes that actually produce the categorizations

Orthodox Assumptions Exalting the state as the primary notion of political identity has involved the equating the state with the autonomous identity of an individual - This is a desocialized view of the person or the state o It implies an essentially transcendental persona making itself - It also turns sovereign states into naturalized individuals that can be inscribed with their own moral authority o Thus modern statehood is underwritten by modern personal individualism - The moral argument about the equating of the state is masked by the natural claim that is made on behalf of the state as an equivalent individual - The appeal of this strategy is twofold o First, it allows an identification of a historical State of nature (Hobbesian argument) in which a set of individuals can compare their natural conditions with that offered by the specific set of socio -poltical conditions of the state Actual power relations can thus be ascribed to the need for security and wealth in a world that is not the independent creation of any one individual

This separation and isolation of individuals (states and persons) then produces a logical case for a pooling of power in the hands of a single sovereign o Second, the unrelenting suspicion with which humans regard one another (in Hobbesian thought) and the humanistic tendency to raise oneself onto an intellectual and moral pedestal in much Western thought (Adam Smith) underpin the projection of the qualities of personhood onto statehood At the same time, the state embodies two sides of a moral coing 1. The state represents the territorial solution to human aggression by displacing human aggression into the realm of inter-state relations, transposing Hobbes anarchic state of nature into the international sphere 2. The state is also constructed as a primitive individual such as a person with unique abilities, particularly its ability to specialize (Division of labor) which offers a means to maximize output and increase wealth These two moves boost the state into a position of historical preminence (in relation to political identity) irresepective of its empirical veracity This can be critiqued on both empirical and theoretical grounds o There exists a lack of unity in the formation of foreign policies of states With distinctive positions adopted by different sectoral and geographical interests within states Different social and economic groups, lower-tier governments and sectional lobbies all bring different identities and interests with them o The idea of statehood is also dependent on the mutual recognition it receives among other states and not the result of isolated states achieving statehood separately and then engaging with one another as abstract autonomous individuals

Historical Basis of Statehood Treaty of Westphalia In its initial conception, the state had no distinct and separate personality. Only the visible wielders of power was recognized as having authority and their personality dictated state actions - In this era, people were merely the sum of all persons and not a collective entity in their own right - In such a world, no single territorial scale monopolized the production of political identity

With the rise of the modern territorial state came about the processes of political identity formation - The state began to have an increased centrality in peoples everday lives by providing infrastructure, regulating social and economic affairs, defining citizenship National identities are also relaint on the priviledged status accorded to the modern territorial state equivalent to a moral individual

Geosociology of Political Identities If the moral geography of statehood subordinates the individual to the personhood of the state then the individuation of persons makes them available for subordination Personal political identities and their associated territorial scales are not natural - They are formed out of flows of events and actions in social and political life - Example: British identity emerged in the 18th Century, strengthened in the next two and is now regressing in the 21st Century in the face of increasing assertiveness of Scottish, Welsh, Irish and English political identities A large geographically encompassing social context is required for the development of political identities - An identity is recognized as such only within a set of social relationships that establish rules for what is and what is not acceptable: the process of identification - An identity is formed out of these social rules and norms working on more local and also broader territorial scales - The labels used to identify territorial scales are intellectual constructs o In practice: each scale (localm regional, national, international, global) implies the existence and impact of the others o It is not so much these separate scales as the supposed relations between them that help define the social contexts for the formation of political identities The balance between social processes (of power, status) operating from sites with distinct geographies determine the ways in which identities come about Political identities also emerge within networks of subjectivity as a result of both conventional power and power in the sense an ability to bing others into a network of assent - Historically hard power emphasized the same, today there is a greater more pervasive use of soft power, in which assent has become more significant than coercion Social networks in which political identities are embedded have historically defined geographical settings through the use of material-manufacturing linkages, print

media, and centralized apparatuses that produced a territorialized set of relationships between local nodes of networks with denser connectivity within state boundaries - In the contemporary world, the character of political-identity formation os being transformed o A relatively deterritorialized network system has emerged with nodes widely scattered across the world Identity in Contemporary Europe In contrast to the previous era of political identities wherein nation-states were the primary producers of political identities, in recent years, as a result of: - increased communication, - the development of integrated Europe, - the strengthening of regional economic disparities, - and the flowering of regionalist movements; the states role central role in political identities has diminished - Social cleavages and economic dependence cut across territorial differences in complex ways to create multiple identities that have a range of intrinsic geographical definitions o A whole new cultural configuration is under construction in Europe, which is more like that of India since 1947 than France after 1870 - It must be noted that identities can only form if there are stories or narratives about them available for popular use Conventional narratives about territory ad identity is that the acknowledgeable local and other non-national difference are seen as products of the long past rather than potentially new creations - Example: Lega Nord in Italy speaks of the distinctions between the North and the South: o The forms of government they had they had in the Middle Ages o The historical amoral familism in the south as opposed to the north One geographical scale that is emergent and threatening to the hegemony of the nations is the local - Under globalization, as localities are inserted directly into netweoks of global capitalism with diminished national regulation, the local is seen as replacing the national in the reproduction of uneven development

Northern League and Political Identity in Contemporary Italy Demands Padania, new state in the North The success of the League gives forth three important lessons that can be used to comprehend a developing aspect of politics in Europe and North America

The explicit and self-concious design of new territorial entities where none had existed before The malleability of political identies after a period in which these had seemed to take on a permanent cast, where the national superseded all other The coexistence of multiple political identities, no one necessarily replacing the rest

Designing Padania The deliberate nature of forming a regional unity out of previously non-existent entities showcases a remarked departure from the last ground of nation-formations wherein nations were not so much designed as customized of minimal ethnic distinctions Thus, Lega Nord is the first authentic postmodernist territorial political movement The region and its history have had to be made from scratch - Thus a geographical entity provides a basis for making a set of historical claims than a set of historical claims providing the basis for making a geographical entity The League has felt the need to reify its cultural claims about northern cultural distinctiveness by giving the region definite borders They have also had to create a common Northern identity that is distinct from the South - Thus creating an identity on the basis of othering, not what we are but what we are not! - Padanian culture does not dictate Padanian territory, Padania was invented first and the cultural strands that five it expression are being selected and interwove after This idea of Padania particularly appeals to those who claim to have been marginalized by organized politics and alientated from the established political parties Two dimensions exist in this discourse between the distinction of the North and the South - In its strongest, the distinction becomes Europe v/s Africa - And it also includes the ordinary folk v/s the southerners and non-European foreigners

Malleable Political Identities The Leagues manipulation of territorial symbolism suggests that identities are more malleable and subject to revision than historians and social scientists have tended to think, particularly in the presence of powerful aversions to existing institutions and fear that these institutions no longer defend or further local interests

Multiplicity of Identities

Two aspects of the Padanian case exist: - There is an ease with which people maintain multiple political identities even as they shift them in order of priority - The Leagues leaders too seem conflicted about its primary territorial orientation

BRUCE GRANT: WE ARE ALL EURASIAN In the present context Eurasia signifies the non-Russian former Soviet Republics minus the Baltics, or Moldova and Belarus, and Ukraine The US State Department identifies Eurasia as a body stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific which, which includes familiar faces like Turkey but excludes Central Asia, which is conjoined to South Asia Steve Koktins Eurasia: Stretches from Eastern Europe to China, encompassing Turkey, Persia, Central and the northern portions of South Asia or in other words the post Mongol Space These varied attempts to define the region distract us from embracing the reasons behind why we should embrace this term - The idea of Eurasia, at its core, enables us to move past the same kind of stockin-trade assumptions about metropoles and hinterlands that have long bedeviled studies of Europe and its colonies - Dipesh Chakrabarthy, an advocate for the renewal of the term, states that Europes mythical status as the founder of all things good degines all other regions through their relative remoteness, lack and absence Remote here entails removed more than distant Case Study of Sakhalin Island in the Russian East - The Stalinist Era was understood quite differently in the autonomous Buryat Republic, where a number of Buddhists pronounced Stalin to be the third and final reincarnation of a famous blue elephant who once lived in India and had vowed to destroy Buddhism three times through his returns Mark Von Hagen: Eurasia is an anti-paradigm - It is the newness of the Eurasian category that opens up fresh terrain by challenging sedimented wisdoms increasingly being shaken by new archival discoveries - Being Eurasian in this context is to be aware of the multiplicity of flows of sense, sensibilities and contexts that would constitute a better understanding of the world Being Eurasia does not have to to mean that one is gratituously all things to all people but it does suggest a flexibility of experience that leaves all of us open to the rest of the world around us