Embedded Statism and the Social Sciences 2: Geographies (and Metageographies) in Globalization

Abstract

This paper was stimulated by the ability of David Held and his colleagues to produce a rigorous and coherent treatment of globalization from a conventional social science position. Their geographical-scale approach to globalization is contrasted with Bauman's emphasis on the space of flows. Four arguments are sustained. First, to produce a viable social science treatment of globalization the academic pecking order has to be reversed: political science dominates the analysis. Second, an emphasis on geographical scale promotes a comparative ‘historical globalizations’ approach which, combined with the politics, leads to the omission of the 1970s global watershed when a century of reducing economic polarization was reversed. Third, the problems of studying flows are rehearsed and it is emphasized that networks need to be studied in the whole; you are not studying flows unless you have both origins and destinations. Fourth, the embedded statism is recast as a problem of metageography, a states metageography exists which has no rivals; a possible alternative metageography, the world-city network, is briefly introduced.