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. This paper argues for added sensitivity towards the ‘politics of place’, and towards the contingent and the contextual when analyzing the recomposition and re-scaling of European urban and regional governance. Not that this is to advocate the drift towards a morass of descriptive and empirical ‘mapping’ of Euro-regional partnerships. Rather, the author argues for appropriating suitable middle-range concepts with which to abstract from empirical forms and engage in explanation. He draws variously on Jessop’s regulation-theoretic approach to state restructuring, Lipietz’s work on the social relations of space, and Cox and Mair’s writings on ‘local dependence’ and the politics of scale, to analyze the political structuration of one particular instance of Euro-regionalism in the Objective 2 region of West Central Scotland. Here, a general appetite on the part of the European Commission to promote integrated, programmed regional initiatives met with the embedded scale dependencies and structurally situated strategic endeavor of a political alliance operating within a declining industrial space. The paper concludes with a call for European urban and regional analysis to increasingly uncover these ‘meeting places’ of the general and the particular.