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(Häkli, 1998; Paasi, 2008). Today, however, the state has been weakened by the
rise of modern globalist ideology, and with it supra-national organisations such as
the European Union and multi-national corporations. As the power of the modern
state weakens, we see the re-emergence of historical regions, such as Catalonia or
Wales, that pre-existed the rise of the modern state (Kaplan and Häkli, 2002). Such
historical regions, which are often roughly equivalent to the Dutch
landschap
, are
usually not defi ned by the sharp map-drawn boundaries of a state bureaucracy, but
by fuzzier cultural practices such as the speaking of a language or dialect, as the
geographer Tomas Germundsson (2006) has argued.
During the Renaissance many regents sought to consolidate their power in the
form of centralised states under their absolute control.
The metaphor of the 'theater
of state' provided an offi cial cultural means of envisioning the organisation of the
state, its spatial enframement and regionalisation, and the material and social prog-
ress that was promised by the centrally organised state. The boundaries of the state,
as in the case of Britain, or Sweden, were often naturalised and legitimised through
the argument that they naturally should follow a mapable environmental barrier,
such as a coastline. In England the argument was even made, using the vehicle of
the theatre and its landscape scenery, that such bounded territories formed natural
human entities, linking hitherto separate nations (e.g. the English, Welsh and Scotts),
into a single 'British' natural region, where people shared a temperament and race
determined by their physical environment (Olwig, 2002a, pp. 148-75).
In the course of the Enlightenment the ability to perceive the landscape as spatial
scenery came to be seen as a mark distinguishing a person belonging to the educated
elite, and hence a person capable of running an estate within a modern state (Barrell,
1987). The emergence of popular democracy and the nation state in the late 18th
and early 19th centuries also saw the emergence of popular education, and by
the end of the 19th century children from all classes were being educated to see
the world from the perspective of landscape scenery and cartographic space. The
problem with this form of education, however, was that the landscape model has
the tendency to almost subliminally give the impression that the natural foundation
of the landscape determines its subsequent cultural overlay. This characteristic
helped further a research and educational agenda known as 'environmental deter-
minism' in which differing landscape environments were seen to foster different
types of societies - e.g., freedom-loving people in cold mountains, slavish people on
warm irrigated planes, etc. etc. A problem with this approach is that, while it creates
a framework within which to examine the relationship between culture and nature,
it also polarises society and nature, creating a tendency to see the one (normally
nature) as the determinant of the other (normally culture) (Olwig, 1996a).
Environmental determinism was not only questionable as science, it also facili-
tated nationalistic indoctrination, so that children would be taught that their national
character and culture was an outgrowth of the landscapes demarcated by their
national territory - an ideology known as 'blood and soil.' Social groups (such as
Jews or the Romany) who were not seen to be rooted in the native soil of the nation,
could then be made the object of nationalistic discrimination and scapegoating
(Livingstone, 1994). The ideological excesses of W.W. II gave, in retrospect, this
form of geography a bad name, and landscape was largely abandoned, in name, by
mainstream Anglo-American human geography, though it maintained scenic land-
scape's focal spatial 'sensorium'. Postwar mainstream human geography thereby
redefi ned itself as a modern science of space in which regions were defi ned in terms
