New Frontiers: Territory, Social Spaces, and the State

New Frontiers: Territory, Social Spaces, and the StateAuthor(s): David JacobsonSource: Sociological Forum, Vol. 12, No. 1, Special Issue: Mathematics in Thinking aboutSociology (Mar., 1997), pp. 121-133Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/684859 .

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Sociological Forum, Vol. 12, No. 1, 1997

Review Essay

New Frontiers: Territory, Social Spaces, and the State

David Jacobson1

INTRODUCTION

A growing literature has recognized the increasing importance of cross- border and transnational flows in the realm of economics, politics, the media, and in culture. This process of "globalization" concerns the emergence of a global production process and financial markets, the emergence of new regional and transnational political entities like NAFTA, the European Union, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (together with the erosion in the sovereignty of nation-states), and in cultural terms, "the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole" (Robertson, 1992:8). People increasingly per- ceive themselves as belonging to a "global unit" (positively or negatively), a process aided by a transnational media, such as CNN or MTV Globali- zation thus has, it has been noted, profound implications for the shape of politics and democracy, citizenship, personal loyalties, the nature of communal ties, and the migratory patterns of people across borders and within countries and regions.

One theme that globalization has stimulated in a part of this literature is what all this means for the idea and institution of "territoriality"-a bounded area, a territory, thought of as homogeneous and often constitu- tive of a community of some kind (Grosby, 1995:145). The association of nations and states with fixed, clearly demarcated territories has been presumed to be so "given" or even natural that until recently, scholars left the issue of territoriality as implicit, a constant like the weather that did not need to be discussed. Political sociologist Gianfranco Poggi in his The Development of the Modem State (1978), and the international relations theorist Kenneth Waltz in his Theory of International Politics (1979), to cite

'Department of Sociology, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287-2101.

121

0884-8971/97/0300-0121$12.50/0 ? 1997 Plenum Publishing Corporation



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two prominent cases, explicitly or implicitly noted in different ways the territorial dimension of the state, but territoriality was viewed, so to speak, as an intrinsic element of the state and of politics. Territoriality, as such, was not the object of study. Territoriality as a problematique was at best left to the sociobiologists who reinforced the notion of territoriality as natural, even genetic and given, as in the case of Robert Ardrey's The Ternitoial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Na- tions (1966).

Roughly in the last decade, and under the visible impact of globalizing forces, interest developed in the idea of territoriality as something more fragile than previously thought, together with conceptions of politics and even nationhood as being analytically and increasingly empirically distinct from territoriality per se.

Roland Robertson's seminal work in, among other places, Globaliza- tion: Social Theory and Global Culture (1992) does not put the issue of territoriality at its center, but in stressing the increasing "global interde- pendence and the consciousness of the global whole" (8), there are clear implications for territorial units. Implicit in this perspective, globalization does not negate local "place" or territoriality as such, but it does relativize it; challenges are presented to the stability and sui genenis quality of inter alia, territory, space, and place. In the realm of politics and political economy, David J. Elkins has argued in Beyond Sovereignty: Ternitory and Political Economy in the Twenty-First Century (1995) that developments in technology, especially in electronics and the media, have "shifted the balance" from solely territorially defined politics to nonterritorial forms of organization and identity. This change constitutes a new "logic" that conjures up the possibility of new notions of citizenship, democracy, community, government, and of the place of the individual in society. John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge challenge, in Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory, and In- ternational Political Economy (1995), the perspective that stresses "fixity over fluidity, stasis over change." They argue that there is a growing deterritorialization of economic power, and that in this context, the nation- state is losing its "geographic primacy."

Particularly striking is the fading role of a territory in defining a people (as in the nation-state), at least in the West, and the subsequent "deterritorialization of identity." This follows the massive transnational migration of people into Western Europe and the United States from Third World countries and the growing diasporas-permanent foreign populations, such as "guestworkers," refugees, illegal immigrants, and other foreigners who showed little interest in naturalizing or assimilating. Clearly, the idea that land and people were tightly bound together in a unitary state was becoming more tenuous. Tomas Hammar, in his Democracy and the Nation State



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(1990), suggested in this context that membership of a nation and membership of the state was becoming bifurcated; implicitly, the premise that a territory constitutes or defines a people, as in the nation-state, became at least in question. Yasemin Soysal, in Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (1994), noted how guestworkers "vio- lated the presumed congruence between membership and territory," and that the growing phenomenon of dual citizenship added to the geographic fluidity of membership.

In Rights Across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship (1996), I noted that transnational migrations have had the effect of do- mesticating global, North-South divisions in the United States and Western Europe and, furthermore, living in a diaspora is becoming a common ex- perience rather than being marginal. For Turks in Germany or Mexicans in the United States, "home" metaphorically and even literally was some- where else. Even "nationals" begin to feel removed from "their homelands" as a once homogeneous landscape-in political beliefs or ethnically-becomes a roughly stitched quilt of often competing ethnicities and beliefs. Under the impact of transnational migrations, the nation-state is being "un- packed." Community, polity, and territory are becoming, rather than coextensive, discrete if overlapping spheres. Regional and transnational political institutions, transnational, subnational, and diasporic communities, and the state itself, now more an administrative entity that is increasingly being stripped of its primordial quality, occupy different (if linked and partly shared) spaces. Identities are being deterritorialized.

Focusing on the interplay of geographies-moral, social, and physical-I ask in this essay, then, what happens, as is happening now, when peoples and their lands become uncoupled and when communities increasingly live out- side their imputed homelands, in diasporas? What does such an "uncoupling" bode for the boundaries of community and the shape of politics?

THE MODERN STATE AND TERRITORIALITY

It is difficult, for those in the West, to understand the multilayered nature of "place": its geographic, social, moral, and economic qualities; its promise of order, functional and metaphysical ("to know one's place"); and its designation not only of a location but a state of being. One's place is one's home. Home is a refuge and a point of departure, it is an orientation to the world. Home is existentially where one feels secure.

Place, home, soil. These allusions are often biblical with the world-to- come portrayed as the "eternal home" after life's journey. "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who



124 Jacobson

gave it."2 In contrast to being in one's place, travel is portrayed in terms of its root meaning, a travail. In the words of one poet, "Half to forget the wandering and the pain/... And dream and dream that I am home again! "3

The difficulty in understanding the different nuances of place is due to the way the idea of the nation-state has blended and made indistinguish- able, its geographic, communal, and political dimensions. Nation-states from their beginnings in 17th-century Europe knitted the territorial, national (and religious), and political strands of collective identity into whole cloth. The Dutch Republic from its independence in 1648 represented territorial integrity, a new (republican) politics, and a newly expressed sense of (religiously based) nationhood at one and the same time. The American Revolution in 1776 demarcated a territory, established a new people, and declared a new form of government in, so to speak, a single act. The French Revolution did the same in 1789. The political systems in each case were distinctly different, though all republican in the broad sense. Nevertheless, nation and state, the people and the land, came to be conceptualized as an integral whole, singular in their unity. The marriage of nation, state, and territory has often led social and political analysts to reduce the state to a single dimension: the territorial. But as peoples' moral associations with geography change (for example, living as diasporic peoples, or imag- ining themselves as such, with their symbolic centers lying elsewhere), the very nature of "politics" and community changes.

The moral connection to a territory was not only religious or nation- alist but was inherent in the political culture of civic or republican politics which emerges in 17th-century Europe and blossoms with the American and French Revolutions. The extensive and ongoing discussion on civic politics or civil society-particularly now when it is perceived to be in decline-omits one aspect of civil society, namely, the territorial dimension. Civic societies are, as they are presented at least, made up not only of active citizens but also of persons bound together on the basis of voluntary associations, such as churches, political parties, unions, sororities, parent- teacher associations and the like, and by relatively abstract ideas and beliefs of a political, social, or religious character.

When we consider western countries today, and the United States in particular, we do in fact witness declining "civic engagement." Political par- ticipation and measures of "social trust," and membership in specific organizations, have been in decline for two decades in the United States. Even simple social engagement is down. Membership of "nationality" clubs, on the other hand, is up (Putnam, 1995: 664-683). In both the general me-

2Ecclesiastes 12:1. 3James Elroy Flecker 1884-1915.



New Frontiers 125

dia and in academia, this decline in civic membership and voluntarism and its causes have been extensively discussed; television has been blamed as a major force in this decline (Putnam, 1995: 677-681).4

Curiously, this debate has been almost completely detached from dis- cussions on changing conditions associated with immigration, foreign populations, and growing transnational associations. Over a period of thirty years in the United States and, more recently, in Europe, interest in naturalization has been declining, and the value attached to citizenship (in terms of the affiliations it demands) is evolving in new directions.5 Dual citizenship is becoming more common. With the fading of the tra- ditional conception of citizenship as a singular loyalty (these processes im- plicate natives as well as foreign-born residents) so the moral tie between land and people becomes attenuated or, at least, conceptualized in less exclusive, felt ways. In other words, the decline of civil society and the weakening of territorial identities may well be intricately tied to each other.6

Social and communal boundaries are consequently becoming quite distinct from territorial boundaries. Political models associated with the nation- state-of the state embodying the "general will" and the will of the people-are becoming less able to accommodate recent social developments.

MORAL TERRITORIES

Borders and boundaries designate moral proximity and moral distance, inclusion and exclusion.7 Boundaries, be they geographic or nongeographic, are forms of "markers"-visible signs, as Erving Goffman (1971) described

4Putnam's findings were at first even more dramatic, suggesting that membership across associations, from boy scouts to rotary clubs, had declined on average 25% in the period 1974-1994. But a subsequent correction said that there had been only a slight decline in this period in group memberships, though other indicators of civic disengagement remain valid. (See correction on Netscape http://epn.org/prospect/putn-cor.html [November 1996].) Put- nam's argument has been critiqued. See, for example, Greeley (1996).

5See Jacobson (1996). From 1995 there was a massive increase in requests for naturalization in the U.S. The different factors that account for the increase in naturalization requests have been presumed to be Proposition 187 in California, which would limit benefits available to illegal immigrants, the presumption that Mexico would legalize dual citizenship (affecting the single largest body of immigrants in the United States), the effects of a large cohort of persons eligible for citizenship under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, bureaucratic streamlining and changes at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the new welfare law enacted in 1996. Still, the differential impact of these factors has yet to be clarified and we do not yet know to what extent we are witnessing cohort effects (which would not affect rates of naturalization) and to what extent we are seeing changing rates, rather than increased absolute numbers, of naturalization.

6This not to say, of course, that other factors do not play a role as well. 7See discussion in Lyman (1995).



126 Jacobson

them, of a "territory" of some kind. Markers can delineate physical borders but so can clothes, architectural designs, an umbrella on a beach, dietary laws like kashrut or vegetarianism, and so on. Markers can be fixed (like state boundaries), transient (space on a beach), or transportable (like clothes).8 "Space" and "social distance" become the elements that, in a sense, define social and political forms (Lyman, 1995:126). Marriage, friendship, comradeship, kinship, conflict, work, play, and notions of private and public indicate varying forms of association and social spacing. The "social order" is implicitly about spacing, about maintaining the "proper" patterns of interaction. This characteristic of social order is apparent in the most pedestrian of human circumstances:

A condition of order at the junction of crowded city thoroughfares implies primarily an absence of collisions between men or vehicles that interfere with one another ... [Order] does not exist when people are constantly colliding with one another. But when all meet or overtake one another in crowded ways [and] take the time and pains needed to avoid collision, the throng is orderl. Now, at the bottom of the notion of social order lies the same idea. The members of an orderly community do not go out of their way to aggress upon one another. Moreover, whenever their pursuits interfere, they make the adjustments necessary to escape collision and make them according to some conventional rule.9

What is striking about social distance on the most personal level is that it is intricately related to the shape and form of society as a whole. For example, a society that prides itself on the rights of privacy and the individual will conversely limit the public reach of government. As the Ger- man sociologist Georg Simmel wrote,

[A] sort of circle . . . surrounds man [and] is filled out by his affairs and by his characteristics. To penetrate this circle by taking notice, constitutes a violation of his personality .... The question where this boundary lies [around the individual] cannot be answered in terms of a simple principle; it leads into the finest ramifications of societal formation. (Simmel, 1950:322)

Thus moral distancing and closeness are the very warp-and-woof of the social fabric:

Concord, harmony, coefficacy, which are unquestionably held to be socializing forces, must nevertheless be interspersed with distance, competition, repulsion, in order to yield the actual configuration of society. (Simmel, 1950:315)

Conversely, in Maoist China, for example, the self was subsumed under the collective interest. "Comradeship" became the mode of personal relations in place of friendship.10 Comradeship implies a universal morality wherein all are equal. Friendships imply the presence of a "particularistic" universe closed to outsiders and thus purportedly threaten the collective

8See Goffman (1971). Goffman explains the notion of "marker" on p. 41. 9See Ross (1908:1). Ross is cited in Goffman (1971:6). Emphasis in original. 10See Vogel (1969).



New Frontiers 127

communal interest. Instead, a norm of universal civility and helpfulness is to be encouraged.11

"Moral territories" exist, almost by definition, in any social order. But these moral cartographies or maps do not, by any means, have to be coextensive with physical territories, as in the nation-state. As Stanford Lyman writes, "interactional territories may be spatial but [may not be] necessarily cartographed on a geopolitical map." In a world of massive migrant and refugee flows, global productive processes, transnational ethnicities, and the internet, this point becomes abundantly clear (Lyman, 1995:132).

In the nation-state, we noted, territory has served as a "social space" (in the form of the national community) as well as a geographic demarca- tion; or, to put it a another way, territory has served to define the nation, its history and memory, its place and location in the metaphorical as well as in the literal sense. With the erosion of territory as the preeminent marker of political and national community, we need to ask ourselves what nongeographic forms of "social space," of community, are, in a piecemeal fashion, replacing or supplementing geographic markers? And, what is the meaning of "politics" in this context, given the inherently geographic character of the republican, civic polity associated with the nation-state?

NEW SOCLIL MARKINGS

Michael Walzer once warned that if national borders were not maintained as markers of a national community, internal distinctions and de- marcations would become more pronounced. The admission and exclusion of immigrants, he suggested, was at the very core of "communal independence." The sense of a common life, of an historically stable, ongoing association, and of a community with a special and mutual com- mitment could not be maintained without such markers. If these national markers weakened, internal boundaries would come to the fore to the point of insular "fortresses" emerging (Walzer, 1983:62-63). Walzer has proved to be at least partly correct, though the darker side of this picture appears true for only, say, parts of Los Angeles and some other urban centers.

As national borders become less significant as markers of identity, internal domestic boundaries and markers (not necessarily of a geographic kind) have become more pronounced. The idiom of "multiculturalism" may be in conten- tion, but there is increasing recognition the melting-pot ideal cannot be resur-

IIn Emile Durkheim's terms, the individual "depends upon [others] to the very extent he is distinguished from them" and these set of relationships are inherently moral. See Durkheim (1984:172).



128 Jacobson

rected.12 (Curiously, in the United States it appears from surveys that there is at one and the same time unease over increasing ethnic and racial divisions and yet a positive view of a multiethnic society.)13 In other words, internal communal distinctions have been increasingly politicized (and even internationalized; these communal identities often cut across national borders). Patterns of association and dissociation, and of moral linkages and breaks, are thus shifting in ways that cannot easily be fitted onto a political map. This development reflects a world where diasporic communities are increasingly common, and where once international divisions of North and South, of developed and developing countries, have been internalized within states.14

Thus something akin, yet obviously different, to the medieval skein of borders and boundaries may be emerging, with interlocking and overlapping sociolegal and political entities an emerging norm. In this regard, international relations cannot be viewed as something distinctly political (or, at best, political and economic), as the discipline of international relations (as well as diplomats) has traditionally viewed its domain free of cross-national communal and social "complications."15 Like the medieval prince (but in a different way), the state finds today that social and political issues cannot easily be untangled from matters concerning, for example, the en- vironment, human rights, and immigration. Domestic, even local, initiatives on, for example, illegal aliens in California produce riots in Mexico City. Thus, as social boundaries come to cut across geographic borders, so social and communal ties are more and more implicated in international politics.

Territoriality is translocal by its promotion of national or regional identities in place of or to supplement local, village, feudal, or kinship identities. Conversely, as territoriality becomes less significant in marking and defining

12See Joppke (1996). 13Recent polls indicate an overwhelming sense among Americans that racial and ethnic ten-

sions have increased and yet, "on balance," Americans believe that increasing numbers of people from many different ethnic groups, races, and nationalities make the United States "a better place to live." Similarly, only 28% of survey respondents say they are "American first and a member of an ethnic group second." They are more likely to call themselves a "hyphenated" American if those are the only alternatives suggested. See respectively Wash- ington Post poll for survey ended October 6, 1995, of 684 respondents (with oversample of 279 blacks but with results weighted to represent national adult population); Princeton Sur- vey Research Associates for survey ended January 15, 1996, with sample of 1206 national registered voters; and Gallup Organization, World Values Study Group 1990-1993 (survey ended June 30, 1990), with national adult sample of 1839.

'4See chapter 7 in Jacobson (1996). 15With the emergence of national states, communal and social issues were, formally at least,

"domesticated." This mirrors internal developments in the modern state: the realm of the "domestic" and of kinship is categorized as part of "private life," and the public arena-ul- timately the state itself-is reserved for politics, unencumbered, so to speak, by kinship, family issues. Civic polities, after all, were in large part a revolt against kinship as a basis for governance.



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(national) communities, so local and transnational communal identities are asserted or reasserted.

NEW POLITICAL LANDSCAPES

How are these new social and communal groupings marked, if not in geographic terms? They can be marked through language, ethnic insignias (clothes, speech, associations), body language, disciplinary distinctions in universities, church, and organizational affiliations-what Goffman aptly calls the "territories of the self' (28-61). What is striking about this form of boundedness is that it is fluid, portable-a constantly shifting, yet defined, road map. It can be group based, and it can be individual; in a so- called multicultural world, it is predicated on the discourse of "rights," and this is important for its political configuration. Rights accentuate differ- ences in contrast to collective notions of nationhood (which assume a commonality), and rights-as in human rights-are portable and are not predicated, as traditionally is nationhood, on territoriality.

What shape, then, does "politics" take? The "judicialization" of politics in both the U.S. and Western Europe

is inherently tied with, it is argued here, the growing stress on "social space" and personal or group distance (as expressed in, for example, multiculturalism) on the one hand and the "deterritorialization" of political and social relations on the other. Judicialization is the growing ability of courts in many parts of the world, particularly in Europe where in many cases par- liaments traditionally have been the supreme branches of government, to void legislative acts when they have been deemed to violate constitutional norms (Shapiro and Stone, 1994:397). Even in the United States, where traditionally the courts have wielded formidable sway over the federal and state legislatures, the growing importance of human rights in law and rheto- ric has added to the courts' significance. The judiciary places bounds on the actions of government vis-a'-vis the individual; it delineates personal distance between state and individual or groups, and between individuals and groups themselves. The idiom of judicial (or constitutional) politics is one of "rights."

Conversely, legislative politics is about the collective, public interest, where commonalities (or at least majorities) are stressed. In stressing the "common," the notion of personal space is delimited. This was carried to an extreme in Maoist China where any form of personal space was viewed with suspicion. In a collective concept of self (such as in the nation-state), there is less a notion of rights (though obviously central to self-government and expressions of national self-determination-the relative dimension is



130 Jacobson

being stressed here), as one is part of a collective whole. Again, to take a graphic example, millions have sacrificed themselves for their nation in war- time. The judicial process is about marking boundaries, not defining communal and national goals. Thus, traditionally in nation-states, courts have deferred to the other branches of government in foreign affairs and other issues, like immigration, that involve international and cross-border relations. Such judicial intervention was construed as threatening the unitary and sovereign character of the nation, whereas the legislative and executive branches imputedly embodied that unitary, national quality.16

The judiciary also serves as a "traffic cop," imposing social order on a world of potentially conflicting spaces; the question becomes all the more critical as space, no longer territorial per se (in the sense of fixed geographic territories, permanently delimited from one another) has to be constantly negotiated. The judiciary reinforces (or seeks to create) a set of rituals that "respects" social spaces and thus creates or maintains social order. The everyday rules that govern "street traffic"-neutral and demanding no sense of felt commonality-are, when taken to a higher level, a way of adjudicating a society where an overarching sense of community is fading. Goffman writes, using the street example:

Take, for example, techniques that pedestrians employ in order to avoid bumping into one another. They seem of little significance. However, they are constantly in use and they cast a pattem on street behavior. Street traffic would be a shambles without them. (Goffman, 1971:6)

Needless to say, this serves as an analogy for the social order as a whole. What is interesting is that in societies with a strong collective sense of self- a common culture, a rooted collective conscience-personal space may be more contracted, the public squares more lively, the neighborhoods less closed and insular, suburbanization less marked. Speech is more vi- brant, less constrained-everything is akin to a family picnic, or squabble. Conversely, where personal space (and group space) is accentuated, so the rules of etiquette governing exchanges need to be (for an orderly society) more elaborate, and markers need to be defined. Politeness is the mark of distance. This is all the more significant in multicultural environments. (In this context the recent rise of so-termed hate-speech codes and the international prohibition of anti-Semitic or racist speech-for example, under the European national and regional human rights legal codes-make sociological "sense," though open to debate, of course, on normative grounds.)

16Another element here is what Durkheim termed the growing importance (with the growing division of labor) of restitutive sanctions (civil law) and the concomitant diminution of re- pressive sanctions (criminal law) as the "collective conscience" itself contracts. Restitutive sanctions are about personal space-of character, of property. See Durkheim (1984).



New Frontiers 131

Thus with social space no longer being fixed and geographic (and no longer being coextensive with community), other boundary markers come to the fore. This is all the more important in a world where international distinctions have been internalized within states, and internal (domestic) divisions have become all the more marked. Furthermore social "markers," being fluid and undefined by fixed geographic space, will necessarily involve more "cross- ings" than geographic borders; in other words, there are many more "borders," and those borders are constantly shifting about. As Mircea Eliade put it,

The multiplicity, or even the infinity, of centers of the world raises no difficulty for religious [or communal] thought. For it is not a matter of geometrical space, but of an existential and sacred space that has entirely different structure, that admits of an infinite number of breaks and hence is capable of an infinite number of communications.... (Eliade, 1957:57)

"Self-determination" remains important in this context but, again, it is not geographically defined. Rather, individual and group criteria come into play in terms of social space ("the territoriality of the self'):

Self-determination turns the whole possibility of using territories of the self in a dual way, with comings-into-touch avoided as a means of maintaining respect and engaged in as a means of establishing regard. And on this duality rests the possibility of according meaning to territorial events and the practicality of doing so. It is no wonder that felt self-determination is crucial to one's sense of what it means to be a fully-fledged person. (Goffman, 1971:60-61)

By extension, this can apply to ethnic, social, religious, and other such groups. In relation to "territorial" claims, individuals (and groups) have "the right and duty to call attention to offenses, demanding that something be done to set matters right" -highlighting once more the judicial element (Goffman, 1971:122).

The growing international salience of international human rights is part of this: human rights delineate personal and group rights, and "spaces," and are central to the international, regional and national judicialization of politics. In delineating social space, human rights contribute to the ordering of society in the sense of the pedestrian analogy described earlier. (The "hate-speech" laws and prohibitions described earlier are no- table in this regard.)17

In this playing field, the classic model of civil society and the public-private distinction is turned around: Public space is imbued with social distance and avoidance, not community, as in the nation-state and the classic civil society model.18 Community, ironically, is privatized; only in the private

17This is true within judicial forums (such as national courts using international human rights, or the regional organizations, particularly the European Court of Human Rights and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) and, internationally, through the predicating of aid, of recognition, and even active military intervention becoming a function of a country's human rights practices. All this most valid, of course, in the Euro-Atlantic arena.

'8See Arendt (1957).



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realm can social distance be "relaxed." Ethnic, social, and religious community is segmented, apart, private.

A FINAL WORD

The future, or lack thereof, of the nation-state is the subject of much debate. Many argue, witnessing the continuing importance of "national" and ethnic identities, or the continuing importance of the state, that pro- nouncements of the nation-state's demise are premature. But a certain nu- ance is being lost in this debate: the nation is, indeed alive and well; the state is, similarly, still centrally important; the nation-state, however, is in trouble. It is less and less the case, in the West, that territory constitutes a people in the sense that the land and people are "inextricably" linked in an exclusive relationship or that, more importantly, such a claim can be convincingly made. The state as a bureaucratic entity remains important, even critical. For example, in the area of international human rights law, it is primarily the state (and its judicial organs) that is the mechanism that enforces human rights norms. The state is the node, the mediating mechanism, of a variety of international institutions and global processes. Yet the state is less the embodiment of the "general will" but rather the locus of "competing wills" (often of global character). National, ethnic, and social identities are increasingly independent of national borders, and are either transnational or "localized" in character. "Nation" and "state" are no longer wedded together. The marriage may well be over.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am deeply grateful to Yosef Lapid, who asked the questions that led to this essay. I am also indebted to Stephen Cornell, Suzanne Keller, George Thomas, Friedrich Kratochwil, Jamie Goodwin-White, and Carolyn Forbes for their comments and thoughts.

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New Frontiers: Territory, Social Spaces, and the State

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