Geography Reference
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simply shrink the world to the size of their community.” Similarly, Harvey
(1990:427) notes that globalization often provokes a retreat into the local:
The more global interrelations become, the more internationalised our
dinner ingredients and our money
flows, and the more spatial barriers
disintegrate, so more rather than less of the world's population clings to
place and neighbourhood or to national, region, ethnic grouping, or
religious belief as speci
fl
c marks of identity. Such a quest for visible and
tangible marks of identity is readily understandable in the midst of
fi
fi
erce
time-space compression.
Among those who bear the costs but do not enjoy the bene
ts, globalization
understandably breeds envy and resentment. This process indicates that
postmodern time-space compression does not compress the world equally for
everyone; in the words of Bhabha (1992:88), “The globe shrinks for those
who own it; for the displaced or dispossessed, the migrant or the refugee, no
distance is more awesome than the few feet across borders or frontiers.”
The spatial scale at which globalization operates suggests that national
institutions and processes, which dominated throughout the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, may have reached the limits of their e
fi
ff
ectiveness.
The steady reduction in the signi
cance of borders leads inexorably, if
unevenly, to a seamlessly integrated world, a process that is as much political
in its construction (e.g., via trade agreements) as it is economic. The bluntest
summary of this view is that globalization is boundary-transcending and
that localization is boundary-heightening. However, it is simplistic to assume
that globalization leads inevitably to the end of nation-states as they are
currently constituted, replacing them with some mythical, seamlessly inte-
grated market that embraces the entire planet. Globalization is always
refracted through national policies (e.g., concerning labor, the environment),
which is one reason it has spatially uneven impacts across the world. Capital-
ism involves both markets and states, and the political geography of global-
ization is the interstate system, the existence of which is necessary in order for
capital to play states and localities off
fi
against one another.
Although the argument that the nation-state is disappearing has been
advanced in occasionally exaggerated and simplistic terms (e.g., Ohmae 1990;
Gergen 1991), the enormous tsunami of postmodern time-space compression
has fundamentally undermined the territorial order of distinct, mutually
exclusive, sovereign states that has underpinned the international order since
the Westphalian Peace of 1648. The decline of the nation-state—much exag-
gerated by many observers—has been fueled by, among other things, the
rising signi
ff
cance of global problems (e.g., global warming), the threat posed
by sub-national tribal con
fi
icts and transnational ideologies (e.g., Muslim
fundamentalism), and mounting international trade and integrated
fl
nan-
cial markets: in short, increasingly well-integrated economic systems and
disintegrating social ones. In this light, the nation-state is being eroded
fi
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