Global cities, glocal states: global city formation and state territorial restructuring in contemporary Europe

TLDR

Global city scholarship often assumes a zero‑sum spatial scale that erodes state power, yet this article argues that the state scale is instead rearticulated and reterritorialized, making global cities both sites of post‑Fordist industrialization and local‑regional nodes within a restructured, glocal state matrix. The study investigates how globalization reconfigures spatial scales, proposing that European territorial states become “glocal” entities whose relationship with global cities reshapes late‑twentieth‑century world‑capitalism. The author illustrates the theory by analyzing the interface between European global cities and territorial states. The article concludes that state re‑scaling into glocal entities is a key accumulation strategy, intertwining global city formation with state restructuring, and that new spatial‑scale theories are required to understand late‑twentieth‑century capitalist geopolitics.

Abstract

This article examines the changing relationship between global cities and territorial states in contemporary Europe, and outlines some of its implications for the geography of world capitalism in the late twentieth century. Most accounts of global cities are based upon a 'zero-sum' conception of spatial scale that leads to an emphasis on the declining power of the territorial state: as the global scale expands, the state scale is said to contract. By contrast, I view globalization as a highly contradictory reconfiguration of superimposed spatial scales, including those on which the territorial state is organized. The state scale is not being eroded, but rearticulated and reterritorialized in relation to both sub- and supra-state scales. The resultant, re-scaled configuration of state territorial organization is provisionally labeled a 'glocal' state. As nodes of accumulation, global cities are sites of post-Fordist forms of global industrialization; as coordinates of state territorial power, global cities are local-regional levels within a larger, reterritorialized matrix of increasingly 'glocalized' state institutions. State re-scaling is a major accumulation strategy through which these transformed 'glocal' territorial states attempt to promote the global competitive advantage of their major urban regions. Global city formation and state re-scaling are therefore dialectically intertwined moments of a single dynamic of global capitalist restructuring. These arguments are illustrated through a discussion of the interface between global cities and territorial states in contemporary Europe. A concluding section argues that new theories and representations of spatial scale and its social production are needed to grasp the rapidly changing political geography of late twentieth-century capitalism.