Municipalizing geo-economic statecraft: Crisis and transition in Europe

Abstract

This article investigates how geographical capital switching, precipitated by the 2007–08 economic crisis, has altered the strategic territorial organization of European city-regions. The dislocation of capital accumulation to (emerging) foreign markets has undermined the purported capacity for city-regions to regulate the contradictions of uneven development in the European Union. The argument is that, in southern Spain, city-regions have increasingly responded to the crisis by shifting spatial development away from conventional neoliberal locational initiatives towards an assertion of geo-economic statecraft at the municipal level. Drawing primarily upon the case study of Málaga, Spain the article contributes to theories of new state space in three ways. First, geo-economic statecraft is both embedded within, and is a response to, the historically inherited geographies of neoliberal urbanization. Second, intensified growth imperatives amid recessionary decline belie the importance of gatekeeping activities that municipalize political control over cross-border investment flows that parallel more traditional, selective targeting of state territory. Third, the strategic externalization of economic space has helped to reshape the variegated cartographies of local state territory and sovereignty between the EU and non-member states. Together, these dynamics situate the spatial regulation of urban crises as central to explaining the patterns and processes of European territoriality in the 21st-century.