Globalization and Sovereignty: Beyond the Territorial Trap

291 Pages·2018·2.005 MB·English

by  John Agnew

Globalization
and Sovereignty

Globalization
and Sovereignty
Beyond the Territorial Trap
Second Edition
John Agnew
University of California, Los Angeles
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
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Copyright © 2018 by Rowman & Littlefield
First edition 2009.
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Contents
Preface to the Second Edition vii
1 Globalization and State Sovereignty 1
2 Sovereignty Myths and Territorial States 67
3 Sovereignty Regimes 127
4 Sovereignty Regimes at Work 179
5 Conclusion 251
Index 267
About the Author 279
v

Preface to the
Second Edition
A
popular story today is that state sovereignty is in worldwide eclipse
in the face of an overwhelming process of globalization. As Donald
Trump said, during his candidacy for the US presidency in 2016, the
choice was between “Americanism,” for which he stood, and the “glo-
balism” he claimed was characteristic of his opponents, particularly
Hillary Clinton, whom he described as having sold out the interests of
ordinary Americans for their own “elitist” gain. Of course, while Trump
was inveighing against the costs of this globalism to a constituency
that looked back nostalgically on a Golden Age of steadily increasing
incomes, and was blaming foreigners for just about all the ills afflict-
ing the country, Trump’s children were off making deals with many of
these foreigners to build the family brand in hotels and golf courses.
This sort of scenario is far from new and will remain with us indefi-
nitely. Recent globalization does not represent a singular epochal shift
that has undermined state sovereignty. States—above all, the United
States—have been architects of it. Globalization itself both exploits
and creates differences in market and social conditions between places,
hence the complaints of Trump’s crowds. But they are not all the
Americans. Trump’s Americanism does not appeal so much to people
who live in places within the United States that more obviously benefit
from global ties. As long as businesses, such as the Trump Organiza-
tion, search for profitable opportunities worldwide, this unevenness
will be the outcome.
vii
viii preface
The central argument of this book is that claims such as Trump’s
about “Americanism” versus “globalism,” independent of the veracity
of any of the empirical “facts” they imply about the damage to some
Americans from globalization, rely on ideas about sovereignty and glo-
balization that are both overstated and misleading. In the first place,
sovereignty, the electromagnetic-like charge of state control and au-
thority across an operational zone, is not necessarily neatly contained
territorially state-by-state in the way it is usually thought. Nor has it
ever been so. Yet the dominant image of globalization is the replace-
ment of a presumably territorialized world by one of networks and
flows that know no borders other than those that define the earth as
such. So, in challenging this image, I must trace the ways in which it
has become commonplace. Beyond that, however, I also try to develop
a way of thinking about the geography of sovereignty, the various forms
in which sovereignty actually operates in the world, to offer an intel-
lectual framework that breaks with the either/or thinking of territorial
state sovereignty versus globalization.
The term sovereignty as known to Western political theory emerged
out of a religious context in which sovereignty was first vested in the
Roman polis, then in the Roman emperor, and later in a monotheistic
God represented on the earth by the pope and the Church. The intel-
lectual descent of sovereignty has been central to European political
debate from the Middle Ages to the present. In one sense it is inti-
mately connected to the moralizing of the universe characteristic of all
three great monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
As I hope to show, it has also long had a defining role in designating
those inside and those outside of various political projects. But it has
also been a powerful underpinning of thinking about the limits and
potentials of statehood, even when it loses its more obvious religious
connotation.
The world has gone through a plethora of changes with relevance to
the argument of this book since its previous edition was published in
2009. These include, in no particular order, various maritime-territorial
disputes involving China; the Russian annexation of Crimea and the
frozen conflict in eastern Ukraine; the British vote to leave the Euro-
pean Union (Brexit) and the more general crisis of the European Union,
particularly the mismatch between monetary and fiscal policies in the
eurozone; the rise of populist-nationalist movements in Europe and the
preface ix
United States; the opposition to pan-regional trade agreements such as
the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) in Europe and the United States;
the political consequences of the refugee crisis brought on in large part
by the civil war in Syria; and the declining intensity of global trade and
foreign direct investment following the worldwide recession that began
in 2008/2009. These all potentially challenge the thrust of the claim
that globalization and state sovereignty do not exist as an oppositional
couplet but are internally related. Most of the changes are widely seen
as signaling a massive swing of a historical pendulum from globaliza-
tion “back” to state sovereignty.
In fact, I will argue that just as there never was a stable world of
state territorial sovereignty that was suddenly undermined by the on-
set of globalization in the 1970s, neither is there now a reversion to a
world of absolute state sovereignty exercised over neat chunks of ter-
restrial space. Effective sovereignty is always and everywhere exercised
in relation to a variety of actors—state-based, corporate, societal, and
so on—who can be enrolled in its exercise even as they share in its ef-
fects at home and spread its impacts far and wide beyond the bounds
of any state’s territory sensu stricto.
The argument of this book has profited from the contributions of
a number of people other than the author. I would particularly like to
thank Merje Kuus, who provided much of the impetus and many of
the ideas for the first part of chapter 3 when we were collaborating on
a book chapter. The second edition has benefited from conversations
with Mia Bennett, Mat Coleman, Andrew Grant, Sara Hughes, Adina
Matisoff, Paul Micevych, Anssi Paasi, and Steve Rolf, and from the
suggestions of several anonymous reviewers. Matt Zebrowski drew the
figures. I am also grateful to my partner, Felicity, and to my daughters,
Katie and Christine, for their long-standing moral and intellectual sup-
port. I dedicate this edition of the book to my grandchildren, Sophia
and Ross Sommer and Rosemary Brune, and step-grandchildren, Tessa
and Zadie Wilett-Jensen, who were all born between editions.