On territory, the nation-state and the crisis of the hyphen

Abstract

In an epoch of networks, flows and global mobility, the notion of territory as a politico-institutional bounded space needs further investigation. Besides studying territory as a symbolic resource in nationalist discourses, a control device in the hands of the state or a ‘spatial fix’ in the process of capital accumulation and reproduction, geographers should also explore how territory remains implicated in and implicates discourses and practices of societal integration, belonging and loyalty beyond the national rhetoric of ‘one territory, one people’. The article illustrates this argument by focusing on the case of Western Europe.