The Shifting Stage of Politics: New Medieval and Postmodern Territorialities?

Abstract

With intensified globalization, and more specifically European integration, the ground is shifting under established political institutions, practices, and concepts. The European Union (EU), however, is usually conceived in traditional ‘realist’ or ‘functionalist’ terms which obscure the possibility that distinctly new political forms arc emerging; or, alternatively, some self-styled ‘postmodernists’ speculate implausably about a ‘Europe of the regions’ replacing the ‘Europe of states’. In contrast, I argue for ‘new medieval’ and ‘postmodern’ conceptualizations of territoriality and sovereignty, which recognize that geographic space is becoming more complex and ‘relative’: Conventional political concepts based on ‘absolute’ space are increasingly problematic for understanding the political complexities of contemporary globalization. Here ‘postmodernity’ may mean something different from what some postmodernists think it means: not, for instance, a federalized ‘United States of Europe’ where regions and regionalism replace nations and nationalism, nor simply an intergovernmental arrangement of sovereign states, but something quite distinct—‘arrested federalization’ and an ‘intermediate’ arrangement distinct in its own right rather than ‘transitional’. In this paper I sketch transformations of sovereignty from ‘medieval to modern’, and from the ‘modern’ to the allegedly ‘postmodern’. I focus on the ‘unbundling’ of territorial sovereignty, which has reputedly gone furthest in the EU. However, even here the process is partial and selective, with globalization affecting different state activities unevenly. Contemporary configurations of political space are a complex mixture of new and old forms, the latter continuing to exist rather than being tidily removed to clear the ground for new politics. The EU itself is still territorial, and in many respects traditional conceptions of sovereignty remain dominant, whether exercised by the member states or by the EU as a whole. Moreover there are problems both with the elusive notion of postmodern, and with the historical analogies of new medievalism. Nevertheless, despite problems and qualifications, these concepts are useful for exploring the possibility of radical transformations, not just with respect to the ‘actors’ of global and local politics, but to the space–time of the ‘stage’ on which they operate.