Remaking Scale: Competition and Cooperation in Prenational and Postnational Europe

The geography of Europe only two decades ago was broadly conceived as a stable hierarchy of places at different spatial scales: Eastern and Western blocs, discrete nations, subnational regions, and local and urban communities. The disruption of this “given” postwar geography in the intervening two decades and of the political, economic and cultural assumptions that went with it could barely have been predicted in the early 1970s (but see Mandel 1975, 310–42 for a prescient discussion; Rowthorn 1971; Murray 1971). Certainly the development of a “European Economic Community”, equalizing conditions of trade in several commodities between six countries beginning in the early 1950s, and the steady growth of a more fully fledged “Common Market” served notice that some disruption of the traditional economic geography (at least at the national scale) was afoot. Nonetheless, the reconstruction of Europe at all spatial scales that would follow the 1970s economic depressions in the West and the post-1989 implosion of official Communist Party rule in the East were quite unforeseeable. Thereby, the largely economic evolution of the Common Market into the European Community in the 1970s and 1980s and now into the more politically inspired European Union was bound up with a much more complex and halting entanglement of social, cultural and political as well as economic restructurings.