Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization

History of Territoriality

Territoriality is a socio-spatial formation that emerged relatively late in modern history and has changed at several historical junctures. Territoriality replaced, on the one hand, historical configurations that are often described as imperial. These forms are based on larger transitional zones between neighboring societies without clear-cut borderlines and an interwoven network of ruler-ship, property, and loyalty regulating the relationship between different subjects, which are unaware of a universalized notion of sovereignty shared by all members of the community. On the other hand, it has been argued that territoriality is not the last spatial configuration in history, as based on the idea that post-territoriality will emerge. Whether one shares the concept of post-territoriality or not (obviously the described transformation is not yet completed), the discussion about it indicates that territoriality is a historically specific formation, slowly becoming a model for the social organization of the world from the mid-17th century onward and dominant since the mid-19th century up until the 1970s.

However, it is necessary to make two reservations. On the one hand, for a certain time, territoriality was, in the form of the modern nation-state, capable of integrating all alternative spatial [Page 407]configurations into a hierarchical pattern. The regional became the subnational, and border-transcending activities were interpreted as international. Remaining imperial patterns were integrated, often in contradictory ways, into new forms of national self-organization of colonial powers, with strategies of assimilation and integration being complemented by eventually granting gradual citizenship to the colonial populations. Former networks of trade and communication—which were much more instrumental between and for individual places often located within different territories—became integrated during the processes of industrialization of national economies and thus connected to their hinterlands. Nevertheless, each of these alternative spatial configurations continued to exist and act as a potential for different regimes of spatial organization. On the other hand, although territoriality has been employed as a model in all parts of the world, the emergence of well-functioning nation-states cannot be observed everywhere. Noticeably, counter-rotating tendencies have been at work, and their representatives—from inside and from outside—have remained strong enough to weaken the process of a complete territorialization.

...