Place, Politics and ‘Scale Dependence’

Abstract

In analyzing the contemporary ‘recomposition of political space’ some researchers are drawing an inference between a putative ‘hollowing out’ of the state or ‘multi-level’ governance, and the growth of integrated economic development programmes enacted through closer articulation between local and regional political coalitions and the European Commission. This coupling of urban and regional analysis with state restructuring and re-scaling represents a welcome direction. There is, nevertheless, a real danger that such analysis simply ‘reads off’ emergent associationalist trends between EU institutions and regional alliances, or Euro-regionalism, as some inevitable outcome of a hastening trajectory towards a globalizing and Europeanizing economy and ‘hollowed out’ national states. Such an approach would fail to uncover the key social processes and ‘constituent relationships’ (Sayer, 1989) that activate these trends in particular places.