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Territory, Politics, Governance and Multispatial Metagovernance
Bob Jessop
Pre-copy-edited version of a paper with the same title in Territory, Politics,
Governance, 4 (1), 8-32. DOI: 10.1080/21622671.2015.1123173
Please cite the published version if you refer to this paper
Abstract
This article interrogates the concepts in this journal’s title and, drawing on the
strategic-relational approach in social theory, explores their interconnections. This
conceptual re-articulation is then contextualized in regard to the European Union as a
political regime that serves as a real-time laboratory for experiments in government
and governance with implications for redesigning polities, politics, and policies,
especially in response to symptoms of political and policy failures and other crises.
Mobilizing the territory-place-network-scale schema, and drawing on critical
governance studies, this article offers an alternative account of these developments
based on (1) their sociospatial and temporal complexities, (2) recognition that socio-
spatial relations are objects and means of government and governance and not just
sites where such practices occur, and (3) extension of this approach to multispatial
meta-governance, i.e., attempts to govern the government and governance of socio-
spatial relations. The article ends with suggestions for future research on the state and
state power, governance of the European Union, and the role of Territory, Politics,
Governance as a major forum for future discussion on multispatial metagovernance.
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Territory, Politics, Governance and Multispatial Metagovernance
Bob Jessop
This article addresses some theoretical and empirical connections among the terms,
Territory, Politics, Governance, in the light of the strategic-relational approach to
structure-agency dialectics as developed in sociology and political science and applied
by some geographers. In the inaugural issue, its editor described the journal’s remit
as ‘territorial politics, spaces of governance, and the political organization of space’
(AGNEW 2013, p. 1). Yet, on my reading, these three themes are rarely investigated
together in TPG and their mutual implications are neglected. I suggest ways to remedy
these deficits below. First, for territorial politics, I supplement the Continental European
traditions of general state theory and classical geopolitics by noting the non-territorial
aspects of state power and adding the role of state projects and political imaginaries.
Second, I consider the kind of politics, whether territorial or non-territorial, at stake in
these areas. Specifically, I use the polity, politics, and policy triplet to explore how state
power reorders the polity, which is the strategically-selective terrain on which politics
occurs as well as a crucial site for contesting policies. Third, for governance, inspired
by Antonio GRAMSCI (1975) and Michel FOUCAULT (2007, 2008), I redefine state
power as ‘government + governance in the shadow of hierarchy’. The conjunction of
the first two terms in this redefinition signifies that spaces of governance are not
exclusively territorial and reference to hierarchy indicates the key role of state power
in metagovernance, that is, the governance of governance. This has various forms,
including, notably, what, after Andrew DUNSIRE (1996), I term collibration.
In developing these arguments and exploring their interconnections, I suggest that the
socio-spatial arrangements of the state and state power (as redefined above) involve
more than the capacity to territorialize, and hence to ‘contain’, political authority and
thereby define the terrain within which state powers are exercised and from and
among which inter-state relations are conducted. For the ‘political organization of
space’ is by no means confined to territory but extends, almost by definition, to all
dimensions of sociospatial relations. This points not only beyond ‘territorial politics’ to
the complex politics of place, scale, and networks considered individually but also to
their variable articulation with territory in sociospatial imaginaries, spatial strategies,
and spatiotemporal fixes (see LEFEBVRE, 1991, 2009; BRENNER and ELDEN,
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2009). In short, several sociospatial dimensions can serve as ‘spaces of governance’
and be targeted as an object of spatial strategies and/or mobilized as the medium
through which these strategies are pursued. I relate these arguments to the socio-
spatio-temporal dynamics of the European Union as a still emerging state or state-like
body in a continuing and contested process of formation as well as an important site
for experimentation with forms of governance. Specifically, I revisit accounts of
multilevel government and multilevel governance in the EU and argue that ‘multispatial
metagovernance’ would provide a better heuristic and guide to the search for solutions
to the current economic and political crisis. A further dimension is added by introducing
the concepts of institutional and spatio-temporal fixes as crucial aspects of governance
and metagovernance. I conclude with comments for future research on these topics.
The Terrestrial, the Territorial and Statehood
Space comprises socially produced grids and horizons of social action that divide and
organize the material, social, and imaginary world(s) and also orient actions in the light
of such divisions. Space can be a site, object, and means of governance and, in terms
of orienting action, is associated with various spatial imaginaries. First, inherited
spatial configurations and their opportunity structures are sites where governance may
be established, contested, and modified. Second, it is an object of governance insofar
as it results from the fixing, manipulation, reordering, and lifting of material, social, and
symbolic borders, boundaries, frontiers, and liminal spaces. These arrangements are
not limited to those established through territorialization. Third, space can be a means
of governance when it defines horizons of action in terms of ‘inside’, ‘outside’, ‘cross’,
and ‘liminal’ spaces and when it configures possible connections among actors,
actions, and events via various spatio-temporal technologies. And, fourth, because no
actors can grasp geo-socio-spatial relations in all their complexity, this forces them to
view space through spatial imaginaries that frame their understandings, orientations,
directly spatial projects, or other projects with spatial aspects (on enforced sense- and
meaning-making as a condition of going on in the world, SUM and JESSOP, 2013).
One form of organizing space is territorialization. In analysing states and state power
as well as empires and imperial governance, it is crucial to distinguish territory from
the wider, generic notion of terra or the terrestrial. The latter encompasses ‘land’ in its
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broadest sense, i.e., land and the subterranean, the sea, its depths and seabed, the
air above, and, where relevant, outer space, and, as such, it provides the variable
geophysical and socially appropriated ‘raw material’ or substratum for territorialization
as one mode of organizing space, politically or otherwise. Among other spatial turns,
a recent one is the ‘return to earth’ (CLARK, 2011: ix), including the resurgence of
geopolitics (DEPLEDGE, 2015). As it gets appropriated and altered through
territorialization, the landmass is divided into more or less clearly delimited areas
governed by a political authority (especially a state, see below) that can make binding
decisions on their residents and defend its sovereignty against internal and external
threats (DELANEY, 2005; WEBER, 1978). This kind of demarcation does not generally
apply to the ‘high seas’ that lie beyond territorial waters and this, in turn, affects
maritime flows of goods, technologies, people, ideas and other transformative forces.
Both kinds of organization of space are nonetheless contested and may lead to
alternating or conjoint processes of de- and re-territorialization, cycles of state and
empire formation, or the co-existence and even intermeshing of maritime and land
empires, with variable implications for the state as a ‘power container’ or connector.
Land without centralized political authority is sometimes termed terra nullius – that is,
land without a sovereign (the Antarctic land-mass is a rare current example); its
maritime parallel, as noted, is ‘the high seas’ (on the contrasting political dynamics of
land and sea, see SCHMITT, 1997; DERMAN, 2011; MÜNKLER, 2007; PHILLIPS and
SHARMAN, 2015). This raw material shapes claims to sovereignty (contrast, for
example, continental and archipelagic states), underpins different kinds of territorial
organization and political imaginaries and strategies (on the social construction of the
ocean, see STEINBERG, 2010), prompts different kinds of territorial dispute (e.g.,
navigation rights through straits), influences the variegated forms of land-based and
maritime empires, and shapes the evolution of international law (MOUNTZ, 2013,
2015). The distinction between territorial rule and space of flows is more relevant to
early stages of land and sea empires than it is at their peak. For MÜNKLER, ‘the former
arose through a consolidation of the spaces under rule, whereas the latter expanded
by making their trade relations both more intensive and more extensive’ (2007, p. 48).
The territorial organization of political authority is the essential feature of premodern
as well as modern statehood (e.g. LUHMANN, 1989). It has different forms, rests on
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specific political and calculative technologies that support territorialization, and can be
combined with other forms of political authority and broader patterns of spatial
organization, resulting in different kinds of state and polity (ELDEN, 2010). We can
relate this to Continental European constitutional, juridical, and state theory (for
example, JELLINEK, 1905; HELLER, 1983). These traditions identify three
components of the state: (1) a politically organized coercive, administrative, and
symbolic apparatus endowed with both general and specific powers; (2) a clearly
demarcated core territory under more or less uncontested and continuous control of
the state apparatus; and, equally important, (3) a permanent or stable population, on
which the state’s political authority and decisions are binding. For modern states, this
implies that no state should be formally subordinate to external authority: it should be
sovereign in its territory and over its own population. To this one can add a fourth
component: (4) the state idea, i.e., political imaginaries that provide a reference point
for efforts to integrate the state and define the nature and purposes of the state for the
wider society in specific types of state, regime or conjuncture (JESSOP, 2015; cf.
MACLEAVY and HARRISON, 2010). Inter alia, these imaginaries and associated state
projects typically include significant socio-spatial features and aspirations.
Many forms of political authority that predate the modern state fit the three-component
definition, starting with groups of hunter-gatherers or herders that tend to roam within
a space that has porous borders but also crucial nodes (such as oases, ritual sites)
that these groups seek to defend; and then developing through simple and complex
chiefdoms to early forms of state and empire, where nomadic empires may co-exist
with sedentary ones (MÜNKLER, 2007; VAN DER PIJL, 2007; CUNLIFFE, 2015).
Chiefdoms and states often formed networks based on competitive alliances and, in
the case of states, these sometimes crystallized into a single political unit, which
incorporated several states and polities to form land-based ‘empires’ ruling larger
areas and bigger populations (EISENSTADT, 1963; FINER, 1997b; MÜNKLER, 2007;
REDMOND and SPENCER, 2012; WRIGHT, 1977, 2006). Limits on administrative
control over such bigger political units and the dialectics of expansion and overreach
produced cycles of expansion and contraction, (de-) or (re-)territorialization. A similar
logic is reflected in maritime empires, albeit with different kinds of economic and
political bases that reflect their emergence from controlling flows of goods, capital, and
