Scalar Concepts of State Hackl Alegrett

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SE State and Economics Daniel Alegrett (1300822)

ao. Univ. Prof. Dr. Thomas Fillitz Veronika Hackl (0708780)

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Scalar Concepts of the StateState-making in globalized spaces

Seminar Paper by

Daniel Alegrett (1300822) and Veronika Hackl (0708780)

15.1.2014


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Table of contents:

1. Introduction (Daniel Alegrett and Veronika Hackl)

The epistemology of state-centrism

2. The dislocation of state-centrism, the rescaling of the state (Daniel Alegrett)

State as the spatial fix of capital

Scale-jumping states

3. The Localization of the State: global, local, urban (Veronika Hackl)

4. Politics and Agency in glocal cities and states (Veronika Hackl)

5. New representations of the state, new practices of state making (Daniel Alegrett)

Making the transnational state

6. Conclusion (Veronika Hackl and Daniel Alegrett)

Bibliography


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1. Introduction (Daniel Alegrett and Veronika Hackl)

There has been a renewed interest in the anthropology of the state in recent decades, in the midst of

globalization processes. The increasing anthropological interest and understanding of large scale

economic and political processes was one of the factors leading to a break with a long-standing idea

of boundedness of discrete cultures and the emergence of the transnational in a globalized

capitalist economy. This break contests a naturalization of the relationship between people and

territory, society and space, shaped under a very particular historical form of sociality and spatiality:

The territorial or national state.

At present, while neoliberal market policies appear to erode national boundaries and penetrate and

overtake competences previously accorded to the state, with an apparent disembedding of social,

economic and political relations from local-territorial preconditions, the study of the process of so-

called globalization has led to the problematization of space in the social sciences, especially in

relation to the territorial view of the state.

Space is no longer a static (pun intended) platform of social relations, but one of the historically

produced dimensions in which social relations constitute and deploy themselves.

Research is loaded with geographical concepts, dealing, among other issues, with the permeation of

territoriality, movements and flows, the compression of space and time, and notably, issues related

to scale: the opposition or collusion of the global and the local, and social processes that operate

below, above, beyond, between and across geopolitical boundaries. These had been long grounded

in the territorialities of sovereign nations or states and their vertical encompassment.

Earlier1political anthropology had an interest in the origins of the state and in state formation, but

besides (neo) evolutionary models, research usually focused in the institutions securing cohesion,

and typologies and distinctions among individual political formations.

1 Among the typically functionalist, one could count: Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes, John Middleton, David Tait,etc.; and among the evolutionists: Leslie A. White, Morton H. Fried, Lawrence Krader, Elman R. Service, Timothy

Earle, and others.


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Anthropological affinity for the study of social relations in small-scale societies precluded going far

beyond the description of local institutions of government, favoring those that did not have a

distinct, allegedly autonomous one, as the state was defined. The accomplishment of the state as a

reified entity above society was seen displayed in an evolutionary path towards its separation of

other institutions, or towards its totalitarian encompassments of all.

Anthropology and much of the social sciences emerging in the late 19th-Century were also

informed of a territorial concept of the state that actually only crystallized around the time of the

Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which defined inter-state relations delimited by boundaries of

territorial sovereignty. Superseding the localization of states in cities (thepolis), the identification of

delimited territories with political communities, of nations with polities, also defined state

sovereignty as some sort of amplified local, closed community. The state was an entity defined

within a self-enclosed national territory.

A dehistoricization of the Westphalian concept of the state ensued, and readily informed in the

social sciences, anthropology in particular, a naturalized equation of local bounded cultures with

territorially delimited polities. Even when the state remained largely unexamined, as in

anthropology, social sciences became locked on a territorial trap of state-centrism.

The epistemology of state-centrism

State-centrism is regarded by Neil Brenner (1999a) as a form of spatial fetishism. According to it,

space is seen as an abstract, timeless, static platform outside of history, which contains social action

and it is not constituted or modified by it. In its specific statistform, state territoriality is taken as

the naturalized scale of analysis or frame for action, a methodological territorialismin which all

spatial forms and scales are self-enclosed and territorially bounded geographical units (Brenner,

1999a: 46).

Yet this fetishistic spatialization of the state goes beyond a flawed epistemology and methodology

of analysts. State-centrism has become a common sense ideology, a matrix of cultural practices,

highly effective in its deployment. Vertical encompassment is the metaphor that Gupta andFerguson (2002) use to describe the spatial practices and representations that the state enforces to


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legitimize and naturalize its authority, and also how it is imagined, how it is construed and made

socially effective.

The territorial nation-state as the defining geographical unit of social analysis is being contested.

The inherited view of territorially self-enclosed, state-defined societies, economies, or cultures

(Brenner 1999a: 40) in a Cartesian absolute space has been undermined. Some see this late

realization as showing the demise of the state under globalization. Yet others, while calling for

unthinking state-centric modes of research, see in the process a reconfiguration of the state as a

set of social relations and its spatial restructuration.

As research on globalization and transnationalism had already prompted, breaking with state-

centrism necessitates breaking with the also bounded, territorialized delimitation of sovereign

analytical competences among different social sciences, but without dismissing their

accomplishments in the move into inter-, multi-, and post-disciplinary methodologies.

New modes of social analysis are necessary to think the new state spaces. In the present essay, we

take issue with the reconfiguration of the spatialization of the state under conditions of

globalization. Drawing from research by urban theorist Neil Brenner and the anthropologists

Brenda Chalfin, James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta, we follow their lead of how transformations in

state power and institutions should be addressed, among other points of departure, from its scalar

reorganization, that is, how the state is restructured shifting from the national-territorial level of

socio-spatial relations, embedded in state-centrism, into other scales of governmentality.

Briefly, this essays deals with how the state, far from disappearing, is denationalized and rescaled,

especially at the urban level of social relations and the supranational level of state-supervising

institutions. Furthermore, state-territoriality does not recede, but is cross-cut by a transnational

governmentality that operates along multiple scales, colluding the locality of the grassroots

action with the global intensification and extension of capitalism, apparently in its financial,

Schumpeterian entrepreneurial, post-Fordist, neo-liberal form. We assist here to an epochal re-

localization of state strategies and projects, institutions and exercise of power.

The essay begins with how the process of polymorphic scalar restructuration of the state may be


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described. We then focus on its urbanization.

2. The dislocation of state-centrism, the rescaling of the state (Daniel Alegrett)

Transformations of capitalism as the currently universal dominant form of social relationships

necessarily entail changes in the state and in its spatiality. Sometimes clearly seen as complicit with

capital in certain periods of history, as the state plays a major role as a regulatory institution, and

markets at times demand capital to be given free reins (deregulation) for its movement, the state

apparently becomes a barrier to be surmounted. An age has come where large-scale infrastructure

for capital movement and shorter turnover times have connected the entire space of the inhabited

world, i.e., globalization, bringing with it what turns out to be a prematurely announced demise of

the state. Neil Brenner is among those who see call for the break with state-centrism without

throwing away the realization of the major role of the territorial state as a site, medium, and agent

of globalization (Brenner 1999a: 41).

The social sciences face the challenge of thinking beyond state-centrism and methodological

territorialism. The usual critique frequently is limited to claims of state-erosion in transnational

perspectives, at the same time neglecting the forms of relatively fixed and immobile territorial

organization such as urban-regional agglomeration and state regulatory institutions (Brenner

1999b: 432) which ground the accelerated movement taken as characteristic of globalization. Neil

Brenner finds French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre to be one of the most deep thinkers of the

importance of state in the latest globalized forms of capitalism.

As Lefebvre realized, only the state can take on the task of managing space on a grand scale

(Brenner 1999b: 434). The shift towards a transnational governmentality (Gupta and Ferguson

2002) calls into question the vertical encompassment metaphor of state spatiality, yet the state has a

continued relevance as a major geographical locus of social power (Brenner 1999a: 41). What

emerges with globalization is a new political geography of state: reterritorialized forms of state

power in new configurations of the national, subnational and supranational scales, that is, a multi-

scalar process of reterritorialization of the state and political space in the geographical organization

of world capitalism.


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Globalization would be the most recent historical expression of a longue dure dynamic of

continual deterritorialization and reterritorialization in the production of capitalist spatiality

(Brenner, 1997a: 42). The annihilation of space by time or space-time compression of

expansionary, deterritorializing capitalism is the elimination of geographical barriers to the flow of

capital and the accumulation process. But if this aspect of the socio-spatial dialectic is the one

emphasized in the processes of globalization, it sidesteps the fact that the mobilization in

accelerated circulation and expansion of capital occurs through the production of spatial fixes,

apparent stable and immobile configurations of territorial organization.

Globalization has a moment of deterritorialization for space-time compression, but also a moment

of reterritorialization for the production of territorial organization in multiple and intertwined

geographical scales: localities, cities, regions, the national, the international and the global. Brenner

comes to understand globalization as a double-edged dialectical process of accelerated movement in

expanded space, and relatively fixed and stabilized socio-territorial infrastructures which are

continuously produced, reconfigured and transformed to enable the movement.

The mostly state-managed second nature of large-scale infrastructure for transportation and

communication, urbanization and industrial agglomeration, and the regulatory institutions of state

are manifested in uneven development in the diversity of state spatialities. The continued uneven

development in the international division of labour is related to the diversity of state socio-

territorialities, as the process is path-dependent: environmental, historical, cultural trajectories that

allow for different actualizations of the state.

It could be said that it is the differentiation and contradiction between the stabilized spatial fixities

what springs the overcoming of space and the contraction of return times in globalization, that is,

the multi-scalar dialectic of de- and re-territorialization. The state has a major role in the formation

of different regimes of accumulation that work as such provisionally stabilized spatial and scalar

fixes. Globalization is not a terminal condition, but another ongoing process within a capitalist

world economy that has evolved from the production of things in spaceduring a mercantile phase to

the production of spaceitself since industrialization. Territorial state formations prove to be an

essential geographical component as stabilizers of territorialisation of capitalist accumulation inspace.


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State as the spatial fix of capital

Since the 19th-century, states established the political regimes of national development where

industrial production was promoted, regulated and financed along the infrastructures for transport

and communication and the regulation of populations and markets, that is, the control of the labour

force and production, distribution and consumption (mostly achieved through the urbanization of

spaces, populations and capitals). States provided the interphase between sub-national and supra-

national processes, which were treated in the distinction between domestic politics and foreign

relations.

Culminating in the close relationship between Fordism and Keynesianism, the state was readily

seen as the container of society, reinforcing the state-centric epistemology. This has not been a

mere fantasy (Brenner 1999a: 48) to be negated as globalization becomes more evident. The

market-regulating Keynesian-Fordist, national-developmentalist state was itself a result of a

previous moment of imperialist expansion and the global appropriation of extra-national resources.

State-centrist epistemology was itself a state-induced misrecognition of the world economy. It is

itself a globalized form of representation of the social, the spatial and the historical. The ultimate

end of Reason, for Hegel, with its vertical encompassment of society, as Gupta and Ferguson

describe. The enduring role of states in the social imagination and in social action result of how

intensive and extensive was their penetration and diffusion. It must be not forgotten then that the

state as political form is itself globalized for political consumption.

The entire globe is still increasingly subdivided in state territories; all claimants for nationhood still

strive for statehood, all regional blocks and supranational bodies presuppose the recognition of

territorial sovereignty even if borders are opened for the flows of capital, and regulatory instances

are resituated at the urban or supranational level. The direction of global capitalism is still marked

by the teleology of the state as territorial fixity. But if, according to Lefebvre, the modern state is

violence directed towards space with the drive to rationalize and homogenize social relations in

space, there is nothing homogenous and uniform in the naturalized, abstracted space of state action.

It is constantly produced in historically determinate strategies of parcelization, centralization,

enclosure, and encaging (Brenner 1999a: 50). State is deployed in this multiform,multidimensional, socially produced open space (formerly) imagined as bounded, static,


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homogenous and sovereign territory.

The question becomes how to think the major role of the state in the socio-spatial dialectic as an

enduring set of social relations, strategies and projects, persisting in post-Fordism and in the new

cultural economy of globalization, if the salient features seem to be deterritorialization and de-

nationalization of the economy (losing/loosening what the state encompasses, changing the

extremes of its verticality, and in the end, the de- and re- regulation of markets and legislation by a

supervised state). Globalization indeed disjoints the spatial and scalar orders that the state

encompassed and hovered. The notion of state decline is the premature conclusion to the apparent

demise of the vertical encompassment of the state, as transnational organizations unbundle its

competences and sovereignty from below (grassroots movements and NGOs) and above

(multinational corporations, IMF, WTO, etc.).

Global socioeconomic interdependences are intensified and expanded while the forms of territorial

organization that act as relative fixities are newly produced, reconfigured and transformed on sub-

global geographical scales still relative to enduring state-centric patterns (Brenner 1999a: 52). The

national scale of the state as container of socio-economic relations is decentred. State is strategically

denationalized but its fixes are placed elsewhere, jumping scales, as capital is also shifting scales

in its movements.

If state-centrism underpinned social thought to methodological territorialism, caution must be raised

against a methodological globalism that is blind to the pervasiveness of spatialized state power and

state-making ---complicit to global capital at scales far below the national, like the local, the

household or the body, or above it in the supranational and international regulatory regimes to

which states have to comply to facilitate the flows of capital and formalize the apparent shift from

government to governance.

Deterritorialization is manifest in the porosity of national borders to international capital, where

financial and monetary forms have displaced the industrial ones, while the proliferation of

nationalisms with claims of exclusive sovereignty aim to secure or redraw national territorial

borders. Supranational entities monitor and regulate intra-national policies and internationalrelations, and macro-regional blocks of alliances are formed to compete with others. But is this


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actually de-territorialisation? Governance is resituated at the supranational and subnational levels.

Cities become a prime location for investment of capital, the urban being a major site of collective

consumption that attracts their development as markets.

Scale-jumping states

These geographical transformations show how multiple scales are intertwined in the restructuration

of state spatiality. State sovereignty, regulatory action and monopoly of power are only redistributed

along these cross-cutting scales, accommodating the transformations of capitalism for transnational

governmentality and a world economy.

Following Brenners readings of human geographer Neil Smith, these changes in scale may make

more transparent how space is a social and political product, transcending the habitual

assumptions of state-centric epistemologies. The spatiality of 20th-Century capitalism is being

deconstructed and reworked, but it also should warn analysts against new assumptions about social

forms under globalization, as that of the apparent demise of the state.

Thus, the relation of the state to globalization is to be found in the radical reconfiguration of the

scalar organization of the processes of how capital, as the determinant form of social relation, is

spatialized. In the global dialectic of deterritorialization and reterritorialization of social relations,

the national scale is relativized while the sub- and supra-national territorial forms of organization

are intensified.

According to readings based on international political economy, as that of Brenner, the answer to

the apparent paradox of overcoming state-centrism without implying that the state form is in demise

may be found examining the rescaling processes undergone by the territoriality of state spaces,

correspondent to the changing geographies of capitalism. Its uneven development has globally led

to a changing international division of labour and fluctuating poles of power with the rise and decay

of sites of development and investment, a process that also occurs regionally, as urban regions

become the major localities or spatial fixes of capital accumulation, competing to attract

investment. We may now turn to these forms of urban rescaling of the state.


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3. The Localization of the State: global, local, urban (Veronika Hackl)

Thinking about the localization of the state, we must consider where, when, how and by whom

states are made. It is not enough to think state as a legal entity within a certain territory nor is it

correct to think state as equal to nation. State building happens on different levels, and in times of

globalization it might seem even harder to think about contemporary concepts of state. If it is not

just a certain territory which confines a state, we have to think in scalar concepts of state.

The recognition that social relations are becoming increasingly interconnected on a global scale

necessarily problematizes the spatial parameters of those relations, and therefore, the

geographical context in which they occur. (Brenner 1999a: 40)

The usual places where states are mainly made reside in urban areas. In our time, cities become

more and more important whereas the rural areas play a secondary role in economic as well as in

legal matters.

But it is not just any cities which play distinct roles in the process of state making, we rather face

the fact that some cities get more and more important in the global market, whereas others loose

more and more of their former (trade-based) power. Those cities, which control the worlds

financial and trading systems are called Global Cities. Saskia Sassen coined this term while

writing about the globalization of economy and the geography of globalization, considering the

economic as well as the social order of the Global City (Sassen 1991). She explicitly dissociates this

therm from other naming like Word Cities (Freidmann und Wolff), Super-Villes (Braudel) and

the Informational City (Castells). The term Global City is based on the attempt to name thedifference: The specificity of the global as it gets structured in the contemporary period (Sassen

2004/2007: 171). World cities, in contrary, are known already from different centuries and

associated with colonial powers, trade centers etc. But Global Cities replace those old centers of

power. Important harbor cities, trading points and industrial centers are now overtaken by

international financial centers:

Global cities are centers for servicing and financing international trade, investment, and

headquarters operations. That is to say, the multiplicity of specialized activities present in global

cities are crucial in the valorization, indeed over-valorization of leading sectors of capital today.


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And in this sense, global cities are strategic production sites for todays leading economic

sectors (Sassen 2004/2007: 171)

Also, Global Cities must not be confused with World Cities as used in day to day language.

Whereas the latter usually refers to a highly evolved cultural live and a political center, Global

Cities are the financial and industrial hubs of the world. Those cities are very well interconnected

and basically refer to each other. That means, for example that prizes and the cost of living depend

more on the level of other global cities than they do in relation to their region and other cities of the

same state. It also means, that there is a great mobility and liquidity of capital as well as flows of

labor and goods in between these cities. In earlier days, those flows took place within the inter-state

system, where the key articulators were national states and the international economic system was

based on this inter-state system. But this has now changed as a result of privatization and

deregulation. When Sassen claims that (i)t is in this context that we see a rescaling of the strategic

territories that articulate the new system (Sassen 2004/2007: 170) she basically refers to the

weakening of the national as a spatial unit and strengthening of globalization, hence conditions for

the ascendance of other spatial units or scales. Among these are the sub-national, notably cities and

regions, cross-border regions and supra-national entities, that is, global digitized markets and free-

trade blocs. Diverse scales are in principle regional, national or global and the emergence of global

cities are located in this contexts and against this range of spatial units. So, the city works as a

postmodern frontier zone (Sassen 2004/2007: 168) and Global Cities build a geography, that cuts

across national borders and the North-South divide. According to Sassen, there are about forty

Global Cities worldwide today which on the one hand cause a denationalizing of urban places but

on the other hand stay in strict hierarchy to one another.

Sassen emphasizes that the national as container of social process is cracked and asks the question

whether a formation of new types of informal transnational politics is developing. Not just

international organizations play a role in this new politics but also immigrants and their

transnational networks (which are mostly maintained by new media and the internet). These global

networks and personal connections are important factors of agency. Not only do immigrants

frequently transfer money to their home country which means that it gets spent or invested in a

different country, but also do they rely on their personal, trans-national networks in private as wellas in official matters. The same counts for organizations and companies. Many or even all of the

international companies today count on a broad global network of head offices and are therefore


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becoming multinational companies. Decisions are made outside of the nation-state and concern all

of the organizations partners. This counts for franchise corporations as well as outsourced

production plans. Circuits of power inside the nation-state are therefore overcome. The new types of

politics are not (yet) formalized and their rules of engagement have not quite been shaped. (Sassen

2007: 191)

This is where Brenner points to the fact, that these transnational organizations do in fact rely on

state infrastructure and depend on them on many different levels. So, the global capitalism

described by Sassen cannot mean that states become obsolete. Decisions about where multinational

companies open a new head office, where they produce and where they have their general

headquarter do have a lot to do with the states in which those Global Cities are located. It is in fact

part of this globalization described by Sassen, to consider each and every detail which differs from

one state to another. Tax systems, cost of labor, working standards and workers rights are all to be

considered before settling in a certain city, which means within a certain state. Multinational

Companies count on all this differences in between states and capitalize the advantages of each and

every city/state.

According to Brenner, urban research on globalization has often been based upon a zero-sum

conception of state power in relation to the world economy and urbanists, as well as other

globalization researchers often suppose that intensified economic globalization is leading to a

reduction of state territoriality. In the meantime, territoriality is frequently understood as a

relatively static and unchanging geographical container that is not qualitatively modified by the

globalization process. But Brenner refuses both of these positions and claims that the states role as

a form of (re)territorialisation for capital differs from the structural significance of the national

spatial scale in circumscribing capital flows, economic transactions, urban hierarchies and social

relations. (Brenner 1999b: 438) Space is, for Brenner, not just a physical container within which

capitalist development unfolds, but one of its constitutive social dimensions, continually

constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed through an historically specific, multi-scalar dialectic

of de- and re-territorialisation. (Brenner 1999a: 43)

As an example of the re-territorialisation of the state, he mentions massive state investment in theurban infrastructure as the construction of financial and industrial districts (e.g. the Docklands in


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London) where state-financed mega-projects mostly aim to improve the productive capacity of

urban places within the global economic system rather than to improve living and working

conditions. Also, (t)he capital valorization within global cities does not necessarily translate into

national economic growth (Brenner 1999b: 437). He argues, that contemporary states still work as

key forms of territorialisation for capital, but that the political geography of this state-organized

territorialisation process is undergoing a rearrangement where state-centric conceptions of capitalist

territorial organization are weakened. (Brenner 1999a: 45)

This is why it is appropriate to talk about a glocalstate instead. When the local and the global get

interwoven, a glocal hyperspace comes into being, which combines those processes of globalization

with local-territorial reconfiguration. (Swyngedouw 1997: 139) Both, cities as well as territorial

states are currently being re-scaled because of the increasingly glocal geographies of capital. An

Analysis of the changing linkages between differential spatial scales is therefore indispensable. To

sum up, (...) state territoriality currently retains a critical role as a geographical precondition for

contemporary forms of capital accumulation, but this role is no longer premised upon an isomorphic

territorial correspondence between state institutions, urban systems and circuits of capital

accumulation centered around the national scale. (Brenner 1999b: 440)

4. Politics and Agency in glocal cities and states (Veronika Hackl)

The localization of state is, as we have seen, multi-sited. Even in times of globalization and an

increasing importance of cities within the global (economic) networks, there are many spaces left

where state-making processes occur. Considering, that the concept of state is not bound to national

territories and boundaries, its agents may and do operate in multiple ways too.

When it comes to politics, new scalars of state mean new forms of possible political engagement.

Gupta und Fergusson speak about the verticality of state making and exemplify encompassment as

spatial metaphors for state making. It is not useful to think state as a detached institution above

society to which people stand in opposition (and have to fight against). We should rather imagine

state as encompassing its localities. Different spaces of agency are environed by other, bigger

dimensioned spaces. In this picture, localities are encompassed by regions, which are encompassedby the nation-state, which on its part is encompassed by the international community. All of these


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layers are part of the same. This concept underlines the relations between state and society as well

as everyday practices of state making. The Hobbesian image of the social contract to which every

single member of society is bound to, is nowadays outdated. Gupta and Ferguson show how states

are continuously formed and reformed by society and reject the notion of state as being opposed to

civil society. Further on, they develop an idea of transnational governmentality by using and

extending Foucaults idea of governmentality. They stress that (g)overnmentality does not name a

negative relationship of power, one characterized entirely by discipline and regulation; rather, the

emphasis is on its productive dimension (Gupta and Ferguson 2002: 989). Broadening this concept

means to consider the taken-for granted spatial and scalar frames of sovereign states. Gupta and

Ferguson consciously refuse to rethink spatial and scalar images as a whole but instead lead to the

already explained concept of encompassment. Taking into account the vertical topography of power

thus also means to question commonsense ideas of notions of the local, community, as well as terms

like grassroots organizations to overcome the division of above and below:

The confusion evident in the understanding both of important agencies of globalization and of

the activist groups that oppose them (as well as those who report on them and study them) is at

least in part about how states are spatialized and what relations exist between space and

government. (Gupta and Ferguson 2002: 990).

They hereby show that many agents like NGOs or so-called grassroots organizations may be

opposing globalization but are themselves at the same time highly networked on an international

level. This clearly shows that there is no dichotomy between the state above and the society

below. It rather proofs that state itself is a spatialized cultural construction.

To assure the functioning of this transnational governmentality, broad networks are needed which

are mainly kept alive with the help of new technologies and media. Not only the fast and easy

exchange of information via internet-based communication and social networks helps international

organizations, e.g. NGOs, to stay in contact but new technologies facilitate even real-time

communication (during events). Sassen sees that kind of communication and global networks as

part of an empowerment for the disadvantaged, which is mainly situated in cities: The partial loss

of power at the national level produces the possibility of new forms of power and politics at the sub-

national level, especially global cities (Sassen 2004/2007: 174). She hereby refers to street-level

politics that make possible the creation of new types of political subjects that do not have to go


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each of those levels, other levels can be seen. In a globalized world, customs are getting a new

importance which implies new forms of state power and sovereignty. Its sites like that where state

is newly produced and governance is getting restructured.

A multi-sited state and multiple possibilities of localities of agency in globalization processes need

for a certain stability at some points. When Brenner talks about the need of a spatial fix within the

process of globalization, he bears in mind Lefebvres concept of the trialectics of space, namely

everyday practices and perceptions, representations and theories of space and the spatial imaginary

of the time, who all intertwine and together lead to a complex social construction. (Lefebvre:

1974/84) This spatial fix is provided by the state. We can see the role of the state in times of

globalization as equally social produced space which needs to get retrerritorialized, rescaled and

restructured continuously.

We will now see how this (re-) territorialisation takes place and how new representations of the

state culminate in new practices of state making. Also, it is yet to show how these practices show in

everyday life.

5. New representations of the state, new practices of state making (Daniel Alegrett)

The concept of the glocal was developed as an expression of these cross-cutting and intertwined

scales. This is the metaphor concurrent to the times: What is ongoing is a glocalisation of the

state, complicating the vertical encompassment metaphor with one, if we dare name it, of a

diffusingpenetration: it expands and spreads as much as it comes into the most minuscule localities.

State territoriality is no longer sustained in an isomorphic, self-contained absolute space but in a

polymorphic institutional mosaic in multiple and partially overlapping levels (Brenner 1999a: 53).

It participates of the ubiquity and multiple constitutions ofEmpirein the sense that Hardt and Negri

(2000) give to the term.

State-making nowadays seems dominated by entrepreneurship and corporate culture, as policy-

making seems, and often is, the result of market-research. Governmentality is transformed. New

legal regimes and financial regulations shift the institution of government policies into the practiceof governance, where the boundaries between government, markets and civil society are blurred,


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commodifying the social and the collective at all scales.

But the unbundling of sovereignty and the national territory for market penetration does not entail

that the states territorial spatiality is coming to an end, as it remains a fundamental component of

its power and essential to global localization of capital. The rescaling of the state is the rescaling

of the regulation of capital accumulation and circulation under globalization, and not simply a

protective response to global competition that would instigate state erosion.

Supra-national economic blocs enforce the competitiveness of regions and raise barriers against the

competition by extra-bloc entrepreneurs/states. Supra-national regulatory agencies as the

International Monetary Fund and the World Bank lead the way in which national states will regulate

internally and engage with the international community.

State power sees a downward devolution of governance to the urban and regional scales, the main

scales of consumption and production, and the nodes of distribution. This is a centrally organized

state strategy promoting efficient capital investment in its most substantial fixes in space (Brenner

1999a: 66, 1999b).

Even when businesses operate trans-locally and trans-nationally, how they accumulate capital

depends on the uneven development of nationally organized regulations enforced by the state. Their

seats are registered where legislation is favorable to their practices and to optimal forms collection

of revenue affecting profit. The extraction of resources and the manufacturing of commodities are

often dislocated in the production processes due to uneven development, availability and other

differentiations in favorable conditions for their capitalization. The labour force will be locally

contracted or outsourced according to where and how it best turns over surplus value. Market-

research identifies (and creates) national and international patterns of consumption, local strategies

of promotion, and even internal markets greatly shaped by the sovereign regulatory regimes of still

territorially organized states, however unbundled state sovereignty and state territory have become

in post-Westphalian political geographies.

The state still has power to shape the territorialisation moment of the double-edged process ofglobalization, even if it lacks the state-centrist epistemology and methodological territorialism that


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would in turn construe space as an ahistorical dimension and state as a transcendental entity. It

cannot longer proceed as if there was an absolute territorialisation of societies, economies, or

cultures.

Globalization actually puts into relief the historicity of state territoriality as a form of sociospatial

organization (Brenner, 1999a: 68, cf. Gupta and Ferguson 2002: 995) which is quite polymorphic.

The state institutions are accommodated in different layers instead of converging in a single,

dominant geographical scale (Brenner, 1999a: 69; cf. Gupta and Ferguson 2002: 996).

In the decentring, relativization, transformation, reconfiguration and restructuration from the

national scale into the added intensification sub- and supra-national scales of organization and

emerging spatial forms, it is also made manifest how states, spaces, scales are historically and

collectively produced social relations (the whole point of departure for Brenner 1999a, 1999b and

both departure and arrival for Gupta and Ferguson 2002).

Human geography, international political economy and the cultural anthropology of the state are

quite convergent as Brenner, Gupta and Ferguson show. The latter invite to a more close

consideration of Foucaults concept of governmentality as the government of populations. If

translated into this discursive horizon, Brenners concern was largely to expose the shifts in the

territorialisation of state governmentality fixed in a privileged national scale that persists but is now

spread across other scales, eminently the supra-national and the sub-national, but intertwining all.

Gupta and Ferguson clearly illustrate the ongoing rescaling and multi-scaling of state and

governmentality with their discussion of the alleged bottom-up opposition of civil society and

grassroots movements to the top-down and high above verticality of the state. Multi-scalarity

complicates the metaphor of vertical encompassment, as they show how grassroots and civil society

initiatives as the NGOs are greatly dependent and enmeshed in inter-, multi- and supra-national

economic and political agencies, resulting in a trans-nationalization of governmentality.

The spatialization of state realized by Gupta in India through everyday bureaucratic practices by

minor state officers serves to critique the top-down verticality of state-making. It is in the banalityof these routines that state is made. Arriving in Vienna from outside requires the ordeal of passing


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through uninterested but tense security officers checking bags and passports, bored and tired

immigration officers whose only task is to stamp a passport, as electronic devices perform the rest

of the collection of information that will approve or refuse the entrance. Then it involves making a

line and taking a number to fill a Meldezettel form and choose a Health Insurance company that

both will transform a person into a statistical entry in the population-centred regime of

governmentality. The shift of government to governance is evident when the surveillance of

populations becomes competence of enterprises: Opening a bank account, contracting an internet or

phone provider, all involve demonstrating funds and showing the legality of ones stay in the

national territory of the Austrian Federation and the inner-borderless international Schengen Zone.

That these companies are multinational and cross seas and oceans signal their participation in

processes of globalization, as much as grassroots action proves to be transnational in Zambia,

relevating weak states from their task and burden to encompass the protection of their population,

while leaving intact the privileges of their elites to attract investments that certainly capitalize in the

involved risks behind the most uneven ends of development.

Making the transnational state

As much as ethnography has an inclination for the grassroots, the local, and what historical

anthropologist Bernard S. Cohn called the proctological approach of the bottom-up, it is also able

to prove the transformations of the spatiality of the state in the transnational moment as one of

rescaling with a top-down approach that does not take for granted or privileged the national scale of

the territorial state.

Brenda Chalfin is among the anthropologists who are sceptical about the announced demise of the

state in late modernity. As ethnographic research usually carried from below still seems to give

salience to distinctive and particularistic forms of state formation and nation building with its

inferences and extrapolations, Chalfin proposes an anthropology of state-making from above,

investigating widely shared features of nation-states in those modalities of late modern statehood.

For this task, Chalfin focuses on the character of national customs regimes, which she sees asengines of state formation which transcend the political and economic histories of particular


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polities and regions. Chalfin asserts that states configure and are configured by a relationship to the

global market, defined by the ordering of trade in customs regimes, as they deal with the control of

the flow of goods and services and fix the terms in which this flow is possible.

In the past, there was a clear relation of customs with the origin of the state through the collection of

tributes, taxes and revenue from trade, and with the delimitation of territorial borders of nation-

states and their sovereignty marked by customs border outposts and policing of the contained

populations and the flows of goods and persons. If the nationalized economy of the territorial

state with is protectionist policies of autarchy had rendered this notion invisible, customs are again

made relevant and have renewed importance because of the increasing dependence of all states on

cross-border transactions while other forms of state administration atrophy in the face of

neoliberal reform (Chalfin 2006: 244).

This does not mean a reduction of the state, not even its retreat into becoming mere customs

regimes, but that these are key sites where governance is restructured, producing new criteria of

statehood and new forms of sovereignty. State power is made more effective and even kept more

masked from governed populations. Extranational agendas and entities related to customs endow

national governments with new tools and objects of operation (Chalfin 2006: 243-244). The World

Trade Organization and the World Customs Organization strive for standards of value that national

states must implement to allow the unbarred flow of global capital.

This is transnational governmentality. The ascendance of supranational bodies, transnational

commerce, and national security threats calls for defined customs policies and shared standards of

regulation resulting in increasingly abstract exercises of governmentality and sovereignty, entailing

the depersonalization and depolitization of transactions which seem far removed from the agency

and representations of people, including providers, importers, and acting government and customs

officers. This can only serve to reinforce state power and autonomy over what it encompasses, even

if it is a denationalization of the state, an unbundling of its sovereignty, and an apparent

deterritorialization of the state for the penetration of capital that is now perfectly transferable (by

the common standard of transaction value) but also a paradoxically strong marking and

enforcement of its borders that actually regulates markets, allowing the state to take its stakes on it.Indeed, when markets and finances fail and the business cycle falls into a crisis, it is the task of the


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state to rescue its entrepreneurial partners, regardless of the governed populations. Markets are

nationalized at the same time that they are globalized in this rescaling of the state.

Although a view from above in the axis of verticality, Chalfins ethnography of customs regimes is

a decidedly multi-scalar approach to the anthropology of the state, still involving ethnographic

research on the ground about the routinized bureaucratic operations of a very specialized and not

necessarily privileged set of actors, custom officers that sometimes barely grasp the reach of their

market-regulating actions. Their ethnography does not fall into the territorial trap of the

anthropology of organizations, one that supposed the view of culture as bounded, the old view

generated in state-centric epistemology. They configure the state locally in very abstract gestures of

state power, giving a spatial fix for the flow of capital through the globe.

6. Conclusion (Veronika Hackl and Daniel Alegrett)

It is safe to say, that we have overcome the image of state as being bound to national territories. We

should rather see state as a social produced space which is continuously rearranged. Scalar concepts

of state capture moments of this state-making processes where they come into being.

We have seen how Brenner emphasizes the constant construction, deconstruction and reconstruction

of space through a historically specific, multi-scalar dialectic of de- and reterritorialisation.

Transnational motions and a globalized capitalized economy may have influenced the notion of

territory on sub-global geographical scales but (anthropological) research of these processes must

not forget that there are still relatively fixed and immobile territorial organizations, such as urban-

regional agglomerations and state regulatory institutions. Also, there are many ways in which the

current round of neo-liberal globalisation has been intrinsically dependent upon, intertwined with

and expressed through major transformations of territorial organisation on multiple scales (Brenner

1999b: 432) In the processes of globalization, different states play particular roles and function as a

spatial fix which pin them down.

The spatialization of states may assume different shapes. Gupta and Ferguson use Vertical

Encompassmentas a metaphor to visualize how multiple localities are embraced by their following.The verticality places the state separate and high above society, establishing its position in the


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political hierarchy. The graces and favors of the state emanate on a top-down direction towards its

subjects-citizens. Furthermore, the state encompasses society, that is, the state bounds the social

relations that are stretched out and scaled in space. The scale of this encompassment, as state-

centrism and methodological territorialism pose, is the territory of the nation as a container of

bodies, families, households, villages, communities, cities, urban centers and sprawls, regions, etc.

The national scale becomes the measure against which all others compare in the hierarchy of actual

political geographies: sub-national, supra-national, inter-national, multinational, and so on. Chalfin

leans further to the concept of scalesas layers which can be seen from below and above.

Nonetheless, the social produced space takes its place in state practices of everyday life.

Bureaucratic controls and administrative barriers show how governmentality exists outside of

nation-state power and how state making is made on a daily basis. Also, the myth of the Global

City, as independent entity outside of the power of states could be deconstructed.

Our conclusions could stem from the realization that as socio-cultural processes are always

spatialized, anthropology in a globalized world, during a transnational moment, must have a

multiscalar, polymorphic imagination of the socio-spatial dialectic. Any form of place-making (or

unmaking) and (multi-)sitedness recognized in ethnographic research must take into account its own

metaphors of the social production of spaces, their interconnectedness and interpenetration, as well

as their disjunctions and delimitations, their scaffolding fixities and flows. Any anthropological

concerns with power, state institutions, neoliberalization and globalization processes, or even its

traditional territorially bounded cultural objects of inquiry must be raised from an understanding

of the variegated spatial production of differences.


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Bibliography

Brenner, Neil (1997): Global, Fragmented, Hierarchical: Henri Lefebvre's Geographies of

Globalization. Public Culture10 (1): 135-167.

Brenner, Neil (1999a): Beyond state-centrism? Space, territoriality, and geographical scale in

globalization studies. Theory and Society28 (2): 39-78.

Brenner, Neil (1999b): Globalisation as Reterritorialisation: The Re-scaling of Urban Governance in

the European Union. Urban Studies 36 (3): 431-451.

Brenner, Neil, Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore (2010): Variegated neoliberalization: geographies,

modalities, pathways.Antipode34: 349-379.

Chalfin, Brenda (2006): Global Customs Regimes and the Traffic in Sovereignty: Enlarging the

Anthropology of the State. Current Anthropology47 (2): 243-276.

Ferguson, James and Akhil Gupta (2002): Spatializing States: Towards an Ethnography of

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Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2000):Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Sassen, Saskia (1991): The Global City. New York, London, Tokyo. New Jersey: Princeton

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Sassen, Saskia (2007):A Sociology of Globalization. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company.

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