Search

This article examines the changing relationship between global cities and territorial states in contemporary Europe, and outlines some of its implications for the geography of world capitalism in the late twentieth century. Most accounts of global cities are based upon a 'zero-sum' conception of spatial scale that leads to an emphasis on the declining power of the territorial state: as the global scale expands, the state scale is said to contract. By contrast, I view globalization as a highly contradictory reconfiguration of superimposed spatial scales, including those on which the territorial state is organized. The state scale is not being eroded, but rearticulated and reterritorialized in relation to both sub- and supra-state scales. The resultant, re-scaled configuration of state territorial organization is provisionally labeled a 'glocal' state. As nodes of accumulation, global cities are sites of post-Fordist forms of global industrialization; as coordinates of state territorial power, global cities are local-regional levels within a larger, reterritorialized matrix of increasingly 'glocalized' state institutions. State re-scaling is a major accumulation strategy through which these transformed 'glocal' territorial states attempt to promote the global competitive advantage of their major urban regions. Global city formation and state re-scaling are therefore dialectically intertwined moments of a single dynamic of global capitalist restructuring. These arguments are illustrated through a discussion of the interface between global cities and territorial states in contemporary Europe. A concluding section argues that new theories and representations of spatial scale and its social production are needed to grasp the rapidly changing political geography of late twentieth-century capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article was first presented as the RIPE annual lecture at Durham University on 7 November 1995. It seeks to explore the transformation of the capital-labour relation in the aftermath of the postwar crisis of Fordism. It examines how various solutions to this crisis, in the developed world, the newly industrialized world and, latterly, the former socialist bloc, have brought about a radical restructuring of the world's economic hierarchy. One consequence has been the emergence of continental blocs character- ized by the heterogeneity of the economic systems within their sphere. The coexistence of countries with differing labour regimes within integrated continental blocs is the primary focus, with each bloc analysed in turn for its particular aspects. This leads to consideration of the possibility of a third international division of labour. The article concludes with an examination of an unexpected consequence of this restructuring, namely the relation between systems of labour-capital relations and attitudes towards global ecological crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Europe as in the world, national economies are following divergent trajectories in their way out of the crisis of Fordism. Some rely on 'negotiated involvement of workers', others on the flexibility of the wage contract. This creates a centre-periphery type hierarchy between countries. Unfortunately the Maastricht treaty implies rules of the game which induce countries to shift towards the 'flexibility' solution. The text advocates some reforms that could induce a socially preferable general evolution, notably towards shorter labour-time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]