Territory

Several dimensions of politics come together in the word territory: land, a functional factor such as communication infrastructure, and a symbolic factor such as national identity. Typically associated with a polity, particularly a nation-state, the term can also be applied to any portion of space referred to otherwise as a region, locality, or place. Sometimes, a territory is an area awaiting formal incorporation into an adjacent state, as in the case of Alaska before it became one of the U.S. states. In general, however, territory is particularly, if not exclusively, associated with the spatial organization of the modern state with its claim to absolute control or sovereignty over a population within carefully defined external borders. Indeed, until Robert D. Sack extended the understanding of human territoriality as a strategy to individuals and organizations in general, use of the term territory was largely confined to the spatial organization of states. In the social sciences, such as sociology and political science, this is still the case, such that the challenge posed to territory by networked forms of organization (typically associated with globalization) is invariably characterized in totalistic terms as “the end of geography.” This signifies the extent to which territory has become the dominant geographical term (and imagination) in the social sciences. It is then closely allied to state sovereignty. As John Agnew (1994) pointed out, because sovereignty is seen to “erode” or “unbundle,” territory is also assumed to behave likewise. From this viewpoint, territory takes on an epistemological centrality, in that it is understood as absolutely fundamental to modernity.

The territorial nation-state is a highly specific historical entity. It first arose in Europe in the 16th [Page 2589]and 17th centuries. Since that time, political power has often been seen as inherently territorial. Politics take place only within “the institutions and the spatial envelope of the state as the exclusive governor of a definite territory. We also identify political territory with social space, perceiving countries as ‘state-societies”’ (Paul Hirst, 2005, p. 27). Much interstate conflict is about competing territorial claims. The process of state formation has always had two crucial attributes. One is exclusivity. All the political entities (the Roman Catholic Church, city-states, etc.) that could not achieve a reasonable semblance of sovereignty over a contiguous territory have been steadily delegitimized as major political actors. The second is mutual recognition. The power of states has rested to a considerable extent on the recognition each state receives from the others in the form of noninterference in its “internal” affairs. Together, these attributes have created a world in which there can be no territory without a state. In this way, territory has come to underpin both nationalism and representative democracy, both of which depend critically on restricting political membership by homeland and address, respectively.

In political theory, control over a relatively modest territory has long been seen as the primary solution to the security dilemma: to offer protection to populations from the threats of anarchy (disorder), on the one hand, and hierarchy (distant rule and subordination), on the other. The problem has been to define what is meant by “modest” size. To Baron de Montesquieu (1949), the Enlightenment philosopher, different size territories inevitably have different political forms: “It is, therefore, the natural property of small states to be governed as a republic, of middling ones to be subject to a monarch, and of large empires to be swayed by a despotic prince” (p. 122). Early modern Europe offered propitious circumstances for the emergence of a fragmented political system, primarily because of its topographical divisions. Montesquieu further notes, however, that popular representation allows for the territorial extension of republican government. The founders of the United States added to this by trying to balance between centralizing certain security functions, on the one hand, and retaining local controls over many other functions, on the other. The recent history of the European Union can be thought of in similar terms.

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