Would the world have become flat and empty of all sovereignty ? This common place, repeated to the envy by the exegetes of globalization, is simply false, according to the geographer John Agnew. Sovereignty is deterritorializes but does not disappear: this is the conclusion of its last book.
“” Many of what is written on globalization seems to be based on the principle that we rarely achieve celebrity by the virtue of Litote ». This sentence, taken from the preface to John Agnew’s most recent contribution to the political geography of globalization, says a lot about the acuity and the correctness of his analysis. Of course, Agnew does not engage in Litote but systematically advances, both by synthesizing the key elements of the enormous bibliography on the two subjects gathered in the title of his work, and by launching new tracks in the debate On the relationships between sovereignty and territory in the current phase of globalization. Through his numerous works, Agnew is signaled as one of the most lucid votes among researchers who work on political geography, globalization and the reconfiguration of political space in XXIe century. By brilliantly defending its essential argument that globalization does not mean the end of states, territory or sovereignty, but rather the continuation of various sovereign territories, it embodies another voice, animated by reason, in what appears sometimes like (the expression of) a millennial panic in Global Studies.
By targeting certain visions of globalization, that the work of Thomas Friedman is undoubtedly the best (“ The earth is flat is an excellent title for a book, but it does not at all realize the way the world really works ), Agnew argues that the last phase of globalization has marked a kind of reorganization of the levels of sovereignty, but in no case the end of it. According to him, the territory is not, and moreover has never been, the only concrete expression of sovereignty. The book studies how the territorial scale of the nation state came to be understood as synonymous with sovereignty and concludes that, when it seems that we are witnessing the end of an alleged monopoly of the scale of The nation-state on sovereignty, we are in fact witnesses to an extension of the multiple levels which have always been part of the sovereign power. In the current phase of globalization, AGNEW tells us, economic development-which undermines the capacity of the nation state to manage local and global flows-, the emergence of international organizations and the decline of the claim Citizenship excluding each other due to increasingly important population movements, have simply increased and made more visible the multiple levels of sovereignty that have always existed.
Decouple sovereignty and territory
Under these conditions, one of John Agnew’s contributions is to remind us what the limits of our geographic imagination are when we study questions which, such as sovereignty, have been monopolized by national structures. By relying on the work of French political geographer Jean Gottmann, AGNEw presents us a short history of the emergence of the territory as the main support of sovereign power. He concluded that then that the speeches on sovereignty have wanted to consider national borders as essential, the real flows of capital and people over the spaces (territorial), even to the peak of the nation state, n ‘have never been so complete as the researchers used to believe it. The difference with the current phase of globalization is as well as the fragmented nature of sovereignty, which has always been present but hidden under an analytical discourse which was locked in the paradigms of the nation state, has currently become so incoherent that we can only be able to see the paradigm of the territory and sovereignty collapse. We are faced with a critical moment of separation from national territory and sovereignty, but we are in no way in a situation which indicates the end of one or the other.
In AGNEW’s analysis, sovereignty is therefore necessarily in relation to spatial structures, or produces a space, but it is not, and has never been, linked to a particular scale. Consequently, we need to be able to theorize sovereignty without prejudice linked to space. In response to this challenge, Agnew builds a “ regime theory To offer us the main theoretical contribution of his work through the notion of “ sovereignty regimes ». Use the category of “ Sovereignty regime »Avoids the trap of the territory, in which the previous analyzes fell, while maintaining sovereignty as a critical element in the construction of common, national and global scales. Thus, the regime of sovereignty necessarily operates in a territory but can operate at different levels and can be shared by various actors.
The author mainly offers four types of sovereignty regimes: the regime classicL’imperialistL’integrator and the globalist. He uses the distinctions proposed by Michael Mann between infrastructure power power (power through society) and despotic (power on society). Agnew maintains that the regime of sovereignty classic is the one that has been most traditionally analyzed – a single state within territorial borders, which has generally involved a high level of power “ infrastructure ” And “ despotic ». The regime imperialist is characteristic of the opposite situation, that is to say a state based on a space control network which replaces the absolute monopoly of power in a pre-established territory. The third regime of sovereignty, theintegratoris the one that is best represented by the European Union. There, the power presents obvious territorial and infrastructure aspects, with borders which define both the limits and the inner outline. However, AGNEW also notes that this regime works to a certain extent on a non-territorial basis insofar as the construction of a sovereign power implies a constant reconfiguration of these limits and its own territorial configuration. The essential idea of this analysis of the integrative regime is that one day the territorial form of European sovereignty will no longer resemble that of an old nation state XXe century, but will work at multiple levels which will be spatial but not necessarily territorial. The last type of diet, the globalistis currently the best characterized by the United States of America or Great Britain of XIXe century. Here, the main objective is to maintain the territorial sovereignty of the States while integrating them, whether by cooptation or coercion, in an empire which is based on the hegemony of a central actor. While the ideal typology of Agnew has the obvious consequence of simplifying the nature of sovereignty to the extreme inside each particular case, it is of great help to conceive of new relationships between territory and sovereign power, referring to the work of Bob Jessop, Neil Brenner and Saskia Sassen among others.
Disappearance or recomposition of States ?
However, while AGEW echoes many of these approaches, this work highlights certain essential differences. Saskia Sassen’s recent work, Territory, Authority and Rights offers a particularly interesting and different point of view from that of Agnew. Sassen also begins his work by emphasizing the emergence of nation states with medieval and modern eras (she uses most sources in her work, such as Gottmann and Kantorowicz, which AGEW uses in its 2009 publication) and try to overcome the “ territorial trap Which consists in locating the territorial state in a study of long -term globalization. Her approach is however different in the sense that, instead of focusing on sovereignty, she deals with the question from the triple perspective highlighted in her title. She claims that globalization began to appear among the nation states during the XVIe century and, therefore, that it has always been structured by territorial states but in various ways. In addition, what made the territorial state so powerful, particularly in the form of the nation state, is that this institutional degree monopolized the production of a territory, a authority and rights while long from the last 300 to 400 years. Sassen thus agrees with Agnew to say that the most recent phase of globalization does not mean the end of states, but rather their redeployment on multiple scales. Globalization will continue to signify the mobilization of states, but they will no longer have a stranglehold on the institutionalization of the territory, the authority and the rights.
It is for this reason that Sassen begins his work by saying that “ We are living a time of transformation – A point on which Agnew is in disagreement. Agnew’s words is precisely to show that the current turning point is not at all as radical as we have been led to believe, or wanted to believe it. Agnew rather suggests that sovereignty has never been so locked up within the limits of the national territory as the social sciences and others have affirmed it. Thus, while the two works try to find answers by looking beyond the paradigm of the national territory, approaches differ in their interpretation of the relationship between the current phase of globalization and previous regimes. In this regard, the disagreement between Sassen and Agnew is at the heart of the debate that crosses literature on globalization. A debate that can be defined in the following terms: are we really experiencing a change of time, or do we simply live a new phase of processes that have developed for hundreds of years but which are not visible that now ? The disagreement between these two theses sheds light on the question of “ novelty Globalization which has become more and more a major problem.
By releasing the discussion on the sovereignty of his confinement in the issue of social relations within the nation state, Agnetwhines gave greater weight to the second argument. It offers a broader vision of the connections between the current transition and the past, by introducing another piece into the puzzle of sovereignty and democratic legitimacy in the overall process of globalization. The chapters which relate to the functioning of the various regimes of sovereignty in matters of monetary flows or immigration, although incomplete, provide a useful illustration of the way in which Agnew includes the functioning of these regimes of sovereignty on the ground. In addition, its treatment of monetary flows brings us an interesting example on the way in which the concept of infrastructure power proposed by Michael Mann can be used in space but not necessarily within territorial limits.
This contribution to Global Studies makes a lucid voice heard among works that overestimated the end of sovereignty and lacked imagination to go see beyond the “ national box ». In reality, Agnew reminds us that sovereignty and nation state are alive and will undoubtedly remain so. It is their relationships that will be subject to profound changes in the century that begins. We above all need an advanced reflection on the origins, the construction and the reconfiguration of the relationship between sovereignty and territory, and it does not matter that the world appears “ flat ” Or “ burning ».
Translated from English (United States) by Sylvie Taussig