Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
vital to the formation of long-distance use of credit between buyers and sellers.
Communications systems such as the post were also integral to the growth of
the nation-state, as they allowed more e
ective governance (not necessarily
democratic) and monitoring of citizens, greater military potential, and the
ability to mobilize the masses during emergencies. Mass literacy, newspapers,
and the ideology of nationalism contributed to the homogenization of cul-
ture that turned feudal societies into nation-states. To this list Giddens (1984)
also adds the emergence of bodies of knowledge concerned with human orga-
nization and change: “the social sciences have themselves been persistently
implicated in the phenomena they set out to analyse” (p. 180).
Also central to the rise of the nation-state was the growth in military power
(McNeill 1982), including the draft and permanent, standing armies of paid
infantry, which socialized young men from disparate villages into a shared
national culture. The widespread adoption of
ff
rearms and cannons soon
eradicated the confederations and independent towns that formed the core of
feudal political geography. The rising costs of armaments, moreover, contrib-
uted heavily to the centralization of political power, as those rulers who could
not a
fi
ff
ord them were annihilated. Successive wars stimulated bureaucratic
and
financial centralization of all parties, particularly the winners, and formed
a key part of the arms race that locked in European domination abroad.
Ideologically, the nation-state entailed discourses of nationalism and sove-
reignty, which displaced feudal notions of the divine right of kings (Anderson
1983). Nationalism sought to unify the diverse local cultures that existed
within every emerging nation-state into an ostensibly homogeneous whole, a
project that proved to be a di
fi
cult, contingent undertaking. Typically, this
maneuver was accomplished through the mobilization of ethnicity, which can
itself be seen a production of early modernity; indeed, nationalism and ethni-
city are reciprocal constructs, and both are highly geographical. Nationalism
e
ectively transformed abstract space into a territory imbued with selective
interpretations of local history, a homeplace that fuses the immemorial past
with the future destiny of its people. “Baptized with a proper name, space
becomes national property, a sovereign patrimony fusing place, property,
and heritage, whose perpetuation is secured by the state” (Alonso 1994:383).
Frequently this shift meant that “ethnic” populations of core regions found
their language, religion, and political outlook elevated over newly formed
minorities relegated to the political margins of national space, as when dia-
lects of powerful regions were promoted into national languages. The rise of
ethnicity to a position of prominence within Europe was also closely linked
to the growth of Orientalist discourses that legitimated Western expansion
abroad.
The formation of nation-states was therefore far more than simply an
expression of the shifting geographies of power, but of deeper notions of
spatiality. This homogenization was perfectly in keeping with the Cartesian
view of space: as with linear perspective in painting, the nation-state in geo-
politics came to be de
ff
fi
ned from a single,
fi
fixed viewpoint (Ruggie 1993). “As
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