States and their territorializations: Class,local dependence,and how geohistory matters

Abstract

Despite its significance for social research, the territorial structure of the state remains a lacuna. States can vary quite significantly, but this is not something attracting attention. Understanding this variation depends first on a recognition of the capitalist form of the state. The result is that class conflicts have to enter into their division into sub-units and the powers and responsibilities accorded to them. These conflicts are never indifferent to questions of uneven development. Accordingly, the local or regional nature of class interests has to enter into struggles around the state's territorial structure. On the other hand, geohistory matters. Contemporary struggles unfold in conditions relayed from a pre-capitalist past or from the early years of capitalist development, and these conditions can vary very considerably from one country to another. These claims are illustrated by a comparison of the American and British cases.

Context

In a recent (2019) paper, Jane Wills addresses what she calls “the geo-constitution,” which can be defined alternatively as the territorial structure of the state. She argues that this is a somewhat neglected topic in geography. One could add that that is the case not just in geography; the topic is virtually terra incognita, even in political science. It is unfortunate because, as she claims, while there is a lot of interest in social movements and civil society, they need to be understood in the context of the way the state is territorially structured. There is also the fact that it is a crucial condition for the politics of scale. There is more than enough reason, therefore, for examining it more closely.

In talking about the geo-constitution she identifies three different aspects: representation; the state's organization or its division of labor; and policy outputs, all as they are expressed geographically. So she wants to emphasize, and by way of example, issues of electoral organization, the state's scalar division of labor, and the geography of policy effects. All of these can be examined critically. I would, for example, prefer to talk of territorial structures of policy rather than policy effects. ¹ Her three aspects also have the merit of corresponding to Jessop's three dimensions of state structure, as they are manifest in a geographically differentiated context: So inputs, through-puts, and outputs (Cox, 2016: 300–303).

These different moments tend to go together and reinforce one another in different sorts of territorial structure. A centralized state tends to be centralized across all dimensions, including representation, where strong national party organizations influence choice of candidates for election, as well as Wills’ policy effects: There is a homogeneity to policy outputs in the United Kingdom that is hard to find in a decentralized state. These relations, internal to the state, should be emphasized. This is because there are tendencies to study them as objects separate from one another: Voting studies, gerrymandering, why American metropolitan areas are so jurisdictionally fragmented, or territorial justice.

A major virtue of her argument is an insistence on the importance of historical legacies: How state territorial structures are rooted in the past, structure political practice and get reproduced. This is a crucial point that will be drawn on and emphasized in this paper. If we are looking for an understanding of state territorial structure, then that is an essential aspect. What is missing, though, is an attempt to situate territorial structure with respect to class relations. There is no mention of class; capital gets a reference, but only in terms of the highly contested notion of social capital. One can broaden this concern. Class relations do not encounter received state structures in a vacuum. Rather they are part of a structured coherence that includes all manner of specificities molded by a country's geohistory: a feudal past, a particular relation to nature, a position in the international division of labor, and old, decaying class relations, like the peasantry or even, today, the industrial proletariat. It is within this wider context that class struggles play out, and which class forces sometimes try to transform, albeit with difficulty.

The idea of historical legacies suggests that there might be variation in territorial structure; and indeed, the US is different from France and France is different from the United Kingdom, etc. This is despite the fact of the superordinate logic of the capitalist state and all that it entails in terms of the insistent logics of accumulation and class conflict. Geography certainly matters in an abstract sense. Every capitalist state has some form of territorial division: a territorial division of labor, territorial forms of representation, territorializations of policy. But some are far more territorialized than others. The prevalence of territorial forms of representation through geographically defined constituencies might suggest that this is not the case. But some systems of local representation are more so than others, as in the reference above to the role of national parties in the selection of local candidates: strong in the United Kingdom; extremely weak in the US. And when it comes to representation, although France and the United Kingdom are commonly regarded as highly centralized states, there is no equivalent in the latter to the French practice of central appointment of departmental prefects.

How, therefore, and in sum, might we explain the generalities of state territorial structure? And then the way in which it varies from country to country? Regarding the first question, the existing literature is not very helpful. What limited work there is has tended to emphasize questions of organization in abstraction from the other two aspects of structure. Mainstream economics has been particularly influential, though with a normative emphasis. A major focus has been the variable scope of externalities in the economy and how territorial divisions, some nested within others, can facilitate their internalization; something important in public choice understandings (Tullock, 1970). This theme can also be found in theories of state formation (Mann, 1984). In economics, the counterpart to the determinism of markets and their unintended consequences has always been the idea of individual preferences. How these factored into the territorial organization of the state was foregrounded by Tiebout's (1956) arguments about the fragmentation of metropolitan areas in the US: how, that is, the offerings of local governments could be interpreted as differentiated responses to people with accordingly different tastes for various public services. ² Aside from this concentration on one aspect of how states are structured territorially, what also strikes is how mainstream arguments are oblivious to the way in which organization has been a class stake, as in, and not least: Externalities for whom? Harvey's geopolitics of capitalism provides some guidance of a more coherent nature and is a major contribution to making sense of the problem.

Yet we have to bring Harvey's arguments about a necessary territorialization of the state into a relation with the particularity of different state territorial structures. While as per Harvey, logics of capital accumulation and the subsequent contradictions of mobility and fixity might exercise an important structuring role, they typically operate within state structures inherited from pre-capitalist times, and these can be very different: Jane Wills’ historical legacies. These then frame class relations and how they get expressed: a crucial aspect of what Jessop called the strategic selectivity of the state; some strategies get selected in, while others will tend to be filtered out.

Harvey's geopolitics, state structure, and forms of class politics

Harvey's 1980s contributions to the geopolitics of capitalism are a crucial entry point. In the first of two papers (1985a), he emphasized the role of geographically uneven development in state formation; and then the way it interacted with the fixities of production: how, that is, the latter turned uneven development into a challenge to profits and wages in particular places, and how resolving that contradiction would be a matter of struggle. While it was not difficult to extrapolate his arguments to sub-national scales, he himself underlined the possibilities in a paper on the politics of urban areas and how it had to be situated with respect to uneven development at broader geographic scales (Harvey, 1985b).

In the circuit of capital, the phase of production requires a certain fixity: Physical facilities in the form of plant, housing, and means of transport; but also a division of labor with other firms, based on a sensitivity to particular needs and cemented by relations of trust of long standing; a labor force with a particular set of skills built up, again, over a long period of time; a particular class compromise based on certain mutual expectations; all of which, in the context of a shifting space economy, is either impossible to move or difficult to re-establish elsewhere. This is what he referred to as a structured coherence that, in the event of challenge as the geography of the space economy changed, would be defended; though from the standpoint of class stakes that could be experienced quite differently.

With respect to countries (1985a), he emphasized how the defense of a structured coherence, when confronted by challenges from elsewhere, could generate processes of state formation. ³ The state itself would become part of the structured coherence to be protected and to be used as a base for overcoming contradiction. In a paper dedicated to geopolitics in the classical sense (1985a), he emphasized territorial expansion, as through empire and neo-colonialism.

In his article on urban areas (1985b), the scalar focus contracts, and the class interests at stake are much more local. There is, again, a structured coherence to defend and to mobilize in resolving contradictions threatening its reproduction, and state institutions that emerge as a constituent part. How to meet the challenge of changes in the contours of the space economy: De-industrialization, new spatial divisions of labor, competitive threats to the economic base from elsewhere? This is not to privilege the urban area. Structured coherences can emerge at any geographic scale and assume diverse shapes, as in urban corridors. ⁴ But, and in short, one can already see the fertility of his conception for understanding the way in which states are territorially organized; why the power to influence central government through the legislature, through devolution of powers, or some sort of territorial privileging might be important.

The key to his argument is the contradiction in the circuit of capital between mobility and fixity: If a firm is to maximize its profits, then it needs to be free to lay them out for new production wherever surplus value, in virtue of lower wages, worker productivity, access to markets or whatever, is enhanced. On the other hand, once that money is invested in physical infrastructure, typically of long life, and workers trained to the firm's labor process requirements and experienced in it, it needs to stay long enough to at least retrieve its investment. The fact that firms are part of networks of suppliers and client firms complicates matters further since the movement of one firm can mean a contraction in the sales of a supplier company; or the absence of necessary parts for another.

The role of firms is foregrounded here because they are crucial not only for other firms with their particular fixities, but for labor and for state agents. Workers have their own forms of local dependence (Cox and Mair, 1988): if employment in a particular place shrinks, then, assuming home ownership, the value of their housing goes down, which makes it more difficult to sell up and move to where job markets are more buoyant (Savage, 1987). This then assumes, of course, that they are in a position to move and for some, that will not be the case: Locked into a very favorable mortgage, too old to be taken on by another employer, or simply too reliant on word-of-mouth for new employment. Likewise, local governments cannot move around. They can owe money on public works. They have to meet the pension obligations of their employees. It is true that they might be able to expand so as to retrieve a suburbanizing tax base, but even in the United States, that is not an option open to all local governments (Cox, 2021: Chapter 2). Shifts in the space economy can provoke fiscal crises and touch off struggles with workers around compensation and work conditions. ⁵ The powers that they have over new development can then become a priority: The ability to make land-use decisions; the ability to grant tax concessions so as to attract new investment; and indeed, the ability to annex new, developable, land.

State interventions, whether those of the central government or its sub-national counterparts, aim to shift the mobility of capital in their favor, but this can have effects of an inter-scalar sort. Central government initiatives to support a country's export industries, can alter the geography of infrastructure to the benefit of some localities or regions and the disadvantage of others, injecting a new element into the contradiction between fixity and mobility. ⁶ The same occurs in urban areas: A local government initiative aimed at attracting in new investment, can quickly generate claims of neglect on the part of particular neighborhoods, as in central city/suburb tensions in many American cities.

These interventions aside, the contradiction plays itself out at any number of geographic scales, all depending on patterns of fixity in physical and social infrastructures and the complex interrelations of firms, and in the highly variable local dependences of workers and local or regional branches of the state. On the side of capital, a firm with deskilled labor processes, operating plants producing the same thing in different regions, can be relatively indifferent to policy at the local level. The national level is different since issues like fixing the minimum wage or rules on immigration could weigh on profitability. A firm, locked into a particular area in virtue of its specialized labor needs, on the other hand, might be highly sensitive to local housing costs and a resultant upward pressure on wages. Historically this has been the case in Silicon Valley (Cox, 2016: 20–25).

For workers, dependence on a local labor market can be extraordinarily intense: where else, prior to digitization, would an animated cartoon artist have found work other than in Los Angeles? Or a designer of advanced medical equipment outside of Milwaukee? And for the vast mass of lower-skilled workers, knowledge of jobs works through word-of-mouth or local advertising, so they too tend to be locked in, particularly once a family and house are acquired. On the other hand, for those in the techno-managerial class, it can be quite different (Gordon, 1995).

This is, of course, oversimplified. Firms and workers can, and typically do, find themselves dependent on conditions and policies that occur at more than one scale. Firms in the City of London depended not just on a highly specialized set of local connections and worker skills, but also on the global monetary regime. A small retail outlet in a British High Street can be vulnerable not only to national policy regarding the development of suburban shopping centers, but also to local car parking policies. While even Musgrove's (1963) “migratory elite” can have children in local schools to worry about and how local zoning policies might impinge on their housing values.

An interim conclusion might be that this patterning of localized class interests, where “localized” is always relative to some larger sphere of mobility, should be reflected in the state's territorial organization. This, however, brackets two important considerations. The first is that, as per Jane Wills, geohistory matters. There has to be some adaptation of class strategies to existing state structures. And second, just how (localized) class interests will be expressed is uncertain. These questions can be usefully considered together.

In considering how class interests in the future of a country, region, or urban area might express themselves, Harvey's tendency was to emphasize what he called cross-class alliances, bringing together capital and labor or significant fractions thereof. While this might be the case at the national level, it is not so clear when we look at other, infra-national, scales and issues outside of the so-called “national interest.” Just one example: In the United Kingdom, voters in local elections take their cues from identities with the national parties and respective agendas, historically around issues like housing, public transport, and schools (Dunleavy, 1979). In the United States, this is not at all the case and Harvey's cross-class alliance form, typically around promoting local development, is more likely to apply, as in fact he implied, though as will be argued, not exclusively.

In short, there are differences in the way in which localized class interests get expressed. Two polar types suggest themselves, but are by no means exhaustive. First, to talk about a working-class confronting a capitalist class at a national level, and abstracting from the fact of the way in which class interests are localized, each class, organized politically, can be considered as a coalition of the locally dependent. This would mean a working-class interest that is shared across places but as an interest in places: Notably housing and employment, an improved health service, labor market protections, minimum wages, where we live. Likewise for capital: An interest in profitability where the firm is located, but one that can be realized to a very considerable degree by entering into coalition with firms elsewhere around an agenda of weakening labor rights, lower corporate taxation, and subsidies for worker training. They might be supported in this by more affluent strata with their own stakes in support for homeownership and in class-exclusive schools, though not so much for new development impinging on the neighborhood. In short, we can imagine a situation in which class interests are constructed on a supra-regional or supra-local level, around policies that abstract from the particularities of localities, but which nevertheless apply across them, and are conceived as such.

Alternatively, and as per Harvey's cross-class alliances, we can imagine division along territorial lines, typically orchestrated by capital, though not always, ⁷ with the goal of supporting an existing economic base, bolstering it by inward investment, and whose social program essentially depends on the idea of trickle-down. This does not necessarily mean a radical territorial fragmentation of politics in which cities or regions struggle to determine national policy in their favor. Rather one can imagine aggregations of localities in similar structural positions, as in the Coldbelt/Sunbelt struggles of the 1980s and 1990s (Cox, 2016: 6–12; Mollenkopf, 1983: Chapter 6).

This is to assume respective local dependences that are indeed “local” or, at best regional. Yet as noted, things are more complicated than that. Businesses, workers can be dependent both on a particular locality, and on conditions at wider scales; as in the instance of business that wants to expand locally but is subject to a contested and local rezoning process, but also depends on a national market and therefore on macro-economic policy. The same applies to the working class, as in Savage's (1987) remarks about the buoyancy of local housing markets and some dependence on the expansionary or otherwise tendencies of monetary and fiscal policy. In short, interests and therefore political movements, can be constructed at diverse geographic scales.

As we will see, there are real-world cases that approximate to these very different types of class politics. Just why that might be the case takes us back to Jane Wills’ insight about historically received forms of state territorial structure. Some are clearly more centralized than others. The Napoleonic state as a case of a highly centralized form has achieved the status of a stereotype, though the ‘Napoleonic’ attribution is almost certainly misleading, since it echoed the form of the earlier French absolutist state. The United States, on the other hand, is extraordinarily decentralized, and this can be traced back to the creation of the country, which was sometime before the emergence there of what might recognizably be called “capitalism.” These different structures then select in certain class strategies over others: A centralized case like the French one is a necessary condition for organizing class interests across space, since local state powers were and remain relatively weak. The American case is the obverse: a weak federal branch but strong states and local governments, providing powers for localities and states to do battle with each other over diverting mobile capital into respective territories. These strategies then tend to reproduce the state's territorial structure.

On the other hand, the state is only one part of the capitalist social process as it develops under particular geohistorical conditions. Classes and class relations also have their own histories, generating equally particular features: Compare the highly ideological form of French working class politics with the more pragmatic character of the American labor movement. Again, to what extent are class imaginaries rooted in earlier, pre-industrial experiences and a national discourse that, equally, has resonances in the past? While territorial structures of the state might be seen as selecting in particular class strategies and forms of class politics, to what extent have those forms been more than a simple adaptation; forms for which classes, in virtue of their formation could see no alternatives? In short, might it not be more reasonable to see state territorial structure as part of the capitalist totality as a whole as it unfolds in particular countries, under the influence of equally particular geohistories? We now consider that question through a comparison of the American and British cases.

Contrasts in territorial structure: the American and British cases

… there is no such thing as the ‘capitalist state.’ There are only the states of particular capitalist societies, the ‘condensates’ of highly specific historical struggles. (Leys, 1983: 229).

National “systems of local government”—their taxation and spending, regulatory and ownership powers—are highly varied between countries. This is due in part to the hugely varied historical evolutions of national capitalisms. (Gough, 2014: 204).

The territorial structures of the American and British states are almost as different as it is possible to imagine. On the one hand, an extraordinary decentralization across all three dimension of state structure; on the other, a highly centralized one. Both have roots deep in equally different histories, and prior to the advent of industrial capitalism and all that the latter would entail for social cleavage. We should not be surprised that they have given rise to contrasting forms of class politics: more direct in the British case, where the classes do battle with one another, and where the labor movement has retained, if to a diminishing degree, a sense of injustice and tried to act on it; more indirect in the American instances where class interests get expressed through alliances of convenience struggling with other alliances elsewhere: The sorts of relation that Harvey had in mind when drawing attention to cross-class alliances. These different state structures then get reproduced, and not just through contrasting forms of class politics but equally contrasting social imaginaries: The different valences attaching to market and state, competition and monopoly, etc. And by the same token, these social imaginaries in turn have to be understood in their relation to state structures. The competition of the individual American states through the burnishing of respective “business climates” far from being regretted, as it might be, is celebrated as keeping overweening state power at bay: A modal feature of the national imaginary.

Starting with its initial constitutional form, the American state has sought and celebrated a strict separation of powers: Of legislature, from executive, and both from the judicial branch. According to Skocpol, (1992: 568) the American revolution was not only against empire, but about concentrated political sovereignty whether in the form of parliamentary supremacy, as in Great Britain, or an official bureaucracy built up under the absolutism of continental Europe. Rather sovereignty resided in the constitution and in the rule of law. The principle of separation of powers was then reinforced by a radical federalism. It is worth recalling that prior to the war of independence, there was no single breakaway colony, but 13 separate ones, each with their own administrations and commitments. These were then divided between the free and the slave states. The latter would be resolved by the civil war, but the desire to integrate the Southern ruling class (Marx, 1996) gave the states considerable leeway, not least in determining who would get to vote.

The powers of the individual states remain highly significant, and particularly for the class relation. Over time they have gained control over significant aspects of labor law, including workers’ compensation for injury, the legality of the closed shop, and the conditions and magnitude of workers’ unemployment compensation. The vast majority levy income taxes of limited progressivity. All these features combine in the struggle to promote business investment in the form of “business climate.”

Progressive reforms tended to add extra layers to this dispersion of power, as in the form of the various regulatory agencies. These are found at both state and federal levels. In metropolitan areas, they targeted the monopolies of the urban machines, facilitating the formation of new, competing municipalities in a way that would stymie any central planning for metropolitan areas (Hays, 1964; Teaford, 1979); much as a federal planning power was itself contested and dismantled in the reaction to the New Deal (Katznelson and Pietrykowski, 1991). The states then lent their own impetus to this decentralized form through delegating powers and responsibilities to local governments: power over primary and secondary education, land use regulation, provision of water and sewerage, and so giving the fragmentation of local government serious material weight.

The United Kingdom is quite different. There is a long history of centralized formal power, going back at least to Tudor times, the growth of the power of parliament under Cromwell's commonwealth, and then given a further boost by the so-called Glorious Revolution and the institutionalization of parliamentary sovereignty. Centralizing tendencies would then be strengthened by the demands of warfare, empire, and maintaining a permanent army. The separation of powers was always highly qualified. Parliament is sovereign not just in the sense that it signs off on all laws but also in the fact that it chooses who will be the Prime Minister and hence the government; for while the Prime Minister has the privilege of appointing her cabinet, virtually all members of which will also be Members of Parliament, failure to govern in a manner deemed appropriate by Members of Parliament, can mean a vote of no confidence.

What local governments have been allowed to do, what they must do, has been strictly at the behest of the central government. Within those fairly tight constraints, they can make their own decisions, as, for instance, with respect to land use regulation, but performance across all responsibilities is monitored by the central government through various inspectorates and it can intervene if it feels it would be justified. So schools are judged to be failing and local educational authorities are called on to make necessary changes. Or central government planning officials are sent out to adjudicate on planning permissions where it is judged that a national interest is at stake: something notably absent from the American instance.

In both the US and the UK, in elections, first-past-the-post rules. Only in the US, in cities with at-large elections, is there something different. This suggests that in both countries representation is territorialized; that legislators are elected by a territorially defined population which they are supposed to represent. But some electoral systems are more territorialized than others. The question of how candidates are selected can be important.

In the United Kingdom, local party organizations select candidates, but the national party retains the right of veto and even to insert its own preferences. It has not happened very often. Significant figures in national parties have sometimes been “parachuted in” to “safe” constituencies but it is rare. The relation between local and national party organizations has been highlighted recently by the attempts of the national Labour Party to purge left-wing candidates from the nomination process: ⁸ an uproar that is, in part, indicative of what is usual practice. This seems territorialized, the national party veto aside. But when we examine the American case, its limited nature is clear.

National party organizations are much weaker there and play virtually no role in who stands for election. Crucial to understanding the way in which candidates are selected in the US is the primary election: An election prior to the actual one, and through which respective candidates for the two major parties are selected. Anyone can put their name forward but success depends on resources. The primary election was an institutional innovation inspired by the Progressive movement at the end of the nineteenth century and introduced as a way of mitigating the two-party monopoly: monopoly of virtually everything is a very American concern, even obsession. Nevertheless, for election to national office, state party organizations have tended to play an important role: urging particular candidates to put their names forward and providing financial support. This would change with the emergence of the so-called PACs in the ‘eighties: a shift towards interest groups that would be displaced still later by the growth of individual money (Rauch and La Raja, 2017). But in short, candidate selection is a very localized process, and one in which the social power of money has played an increasing role: Very different from the British case, therefore.

This highly territorialized form of representation is then furthered by the committee system. Any legislation in the US has to be considered by House and Senate committees. These are specialized in their function. So in the House, and by way of illustration, Agriculture, Financial Services, Natural Resources, and Transportation and Infrastructure. Typically and significantly, representatives and senators get seats on committees with businesses significant for their district/state economic base. New York City has a strong presence on the House Financial Services committee (Cox, 2016: 306). No bill can advance for a vote in House or Senate without the relevant committee's approval. This is a significant gate-keeper function that can work to a district's or state's advantage. ⁹

It also has implications for how policy in the US is so territorialized: how defense policy is about money flowing to the states of Washington, Texas, and California, in particular; and why cotton still thrives in West Texas (Rivoli, 2005). These are not accidental effects of policies conceived in terms of a well-articulated national interest, but to a significant degree, bottom-up. Legislation in the US often takes the form of some sort of federal-state arrangement: Some joint funding, in which federal funding is determined by what the state is willing to contribute, and, in the case of individual eligibility, where the states can exercise considerable influence. This is, in the first place, a result of the committee system and amendments made to bills; and in the second, of weak national parties so that voting in House and Senate are often along bi-partisan lines: in effect, one coalition of territorial interests confronting another, as in the attempt by Rustbelt states to curb Sunbelt growth (Cox, 2016: 6–12).

There is nothing remotely like this in the British case. There are committees but they have no powers to proscribe or amend parliamentary bills, and there is no obvious connection to particular parliamentary constituencies that might be affected. Being a unitary state, there are no states or provinces to wield power over legislation and its content. One might argue that regional policy and attempts to shift employment to depressed areas is an exception to the territorial indifference of British legislation. But that was always articulated at the national level and in accord with widely agreed principles not just of equity but also of national economic policy, as in the need to reduce inflationary pressures in the major urban areas (Cox, 2022). If there was partisan support, it was a cross-locality coalition of Labour Party MPs, concerned about equalizing life chances across the regions.

Strategic selectivity ¹⁰

State territorial structures are very different, therefore. This sheds light on the different ways in which class interests get expressed, and how these then help to reproduce respective structures: a congruence of structure and practice. Certain sorts of class practices are privileged over others, selected in, simply in virtue of the opportunities and limits defined by state structure, while others get excluded. In his paper of 1985 (1985a), Harvey emphasized the role of cross-class alliances in struggles over uneven development. He also recognized that how class interests got represented politically would be contingent and always subject to contestation. Just what they were contingent on, was outside the scope of his paper. How state territorial structures matter, how they privilege different sorts of class politics, can now be addressed.

The way in which class interests manifest themselves in the US defies easy definition. Sometimes there are shades of Harvey's cross-class coalitions; sometimes there are coalitions of particular factions of capital that span the country and in opposition to the labor movement. However, and crucially, the molecular unit is the special interest or pressure group, sometimes entering into coalition with other special interests; and in a world where union locals and workers more generally are just one special interest among many.

It bears emphasis that a dominant theme in discussions of American politics, and at least since the writings of the political scientist Arthur Bentley, has been that of the special interest group: business coalitions, environmentalist organizations, feminist groups, civil rights groups, labor unions, private and public sector. People do not talk about the labor movement; on the other hand, there is a common view that as an organized force, American capital is especially weak (Vogel, 1978), and only making itself heard through different fractions defined by the social division of labor: Airlines, banking, coal, etc. Their jostling for favorable policies has then been picked up in numerous ways in American political science literature. These include:

Their role in colonizing administrative agencies, supposedly emasculating democracy: something strongly emphasized in Theodore Lowi's The End of Liberalism. The various pressures, for and against, would be the way in which the national interest gets defined.

This suggests that politics is akin to a competitive market with elections bringing together opposing coalitions of interest groups, orchestrated by political entrepreneurs, competing one with another and producing an equilibrium in the demand for and supply of political goods: What Macpherson called equilibrium democracy and taken up in a more celebratory fashion by others (McKean, 1965; Stigler, 1971).

Pluralism as decision-making through the competition of interest groups calling on various resources, including expertise, monopoly power, money, but, given their variety, not excluding anyone from being part of it.

These are overlapping approaches, differing in their emphasis, but not in the fundamental premise that American politics is about interest groups and the coalitions that they form in order to achieve their ends. This is contested literature, notably in the way it brackets class relations; for the effect is increasingly acknowledged as extremely unequal (Brady et al., 2012): something to which we will return. The state is seen as neutral: Something fought over by contesting special interests. This is surely wrong, since it too has interests that play into policy. It is also silent on the territorial commitments and relations of the different interest groups; something clearly significant if we are to assess the way in which the territorial structure of the state selects in this particular sort of politics.

That there are territorial interests at stake is very clear from the literature on developers, growth coalitions, neighborhood organizations (Cox and McCarthy, 1980; Davis, 1991), and local governments; but also a dependence on the particular localized conditions that facilitate profitability whether it is that of particular manufacturing industries or the potato growers of Idaho. Connections are then forged across space to influence state and federal governments. The committee system is a notable nexus of influence, bringing together legislators armed with very local agenda, with administrative departments happy to help realize them and channel money through their own bureaucracies. ¹¹ If it is a matter of legislation, then legislative bodies, notoriously subject over the longue durée to bi-partisan coalitions and horse-trading, can do what is necessary. Alternatively, special interests can join together in a nation-wide coalition to bring about administrative procedures and legislation that works to their advantage. Marc Weiss has (1980) written about this with respect to the urban renewal legislation of 1949. His The Community Builders (1987) is equally illustrative: How failing to get their way with local governments, they used their national organization, the National Association of Real Estate Boards, to “help” write Federal Housing Association mortgage insurance procedures that would give them what they wanted.

A similar politics is at work in metropolitan areas: A paragon of what Macpherson (1977: Chapter 4) referred to as “equilibrium democracy.” The major special interests are the developers and the local governments, the first bent on appropriating rent, and the second on getting some of the tax revenue fallout. The competition is intense, one local government against another, and exploited by developers eager to gain tax incentives, zoning, and infrastructural advantage (Cox, 2021). They can come together in organizing to attract new investment but not on how the booty will be divided up. A variety of administrative agencies then protect the process from democratic oversight: airport commissions, zoning boards, county commissioners, water and sewer agencies. ¹² Whether in fact the result is an “equilibrium” is debatable. Not least there are all manner of monopoly effects at work, certainly among the developers, but also, in some cases, among the local governments: a more appropriate metaphor might be geopolitics; most significantly, the masses rarely count for much. ¹³ In his famous paper about the jurisdictional fragmentation of metropolitan areas, Tiebout (1956) underlined the competition of local governments but in his emphasis on resident preferences, failed to note the more fundamental role of the developers and their connivance with local government.

This sort of politics is inconceivable outside of the way in which the American state is territorially structured. A common view is that there are simply more access points at which to exert influence in the US. This is then enhanced by a separation of powers that gives the judiciary unusual possibilities of making a difference. This, though, is to miss the importance of the extraordinary degree of decentralization that is the American state. States need money, just as do local governments, which makes them vulnerable to the demands of businesses with their own forms of local dependence. Highly territorialized forms of political representation then increase that vulnerability, not just through corporate financing of candidates, but also the way in which candidates have to address “local” concerns, however dubious their construction might be: Concerns for some, but by no means all. The enhanced role of administrative agencies and special commissions increases the pressure points while protecting corporate interests from public exposure.

To some degree, but not always, it is a politics redolent of Harvey's cross-class coalitions. Growth coalitions in American metropolitan areas are dominated by the developers, but they manage to enlist in support, not only local governments but also the construction unions. A firm that is significant to a local or regional economic base will get the support not only of local or state governments but also of its workforce. ¹⁴ The coalition is further soldered together by appeals to trickledown: In other words, something for everybody. What one might call the Olson effect, ¹⁵ then works to secure success: The stakes for a particular locality are quite massive, so organization is more likely to occur; while the costs of whatever concessions are made are more nebulous, and certainly spread out over a very large population indeed, so that the typical result is indifference (Stigler, 1971).

In other instances, there is no pretense of benefits for an immediate constituency. The National Association of Real Estate Boards helped write provision for stricter zoning ordinances into FHA mortgage insurance rules (Weiss, 1987), though in hindsight it would certainly have appealed to the anxieties of home owners about secure zoning rules. In still other cases, the special interest is able to capitalize on wider class prejudices: such was the way in which landlord interests managed to convince the American Congress to whittle down in 1949 what had been a much more ambitious program of public housing (Freedman, 1969: Chapters 1 and 2).

Special interests are the way in which a capitalist class exerts its influence in the US and the territorial structure of the state is a necessary condition for that. One should not be surprised that corporate influence dominates the lobbying process (Brady et al., 2012). There are umbrella organizations like the American Manufacturers’ Association, but the way in which different sectors organize themselves, and the presence of major corporations, is suggestive more of the division of labor than of class. This is just one of the reasons that their class nature is concealed. There is also the technocratic gloss given to their demands by the reports of the administrative agencies with their own interest in seeing particular projects or legislation brought to fruition.

One struggles to find anything quite like this in the United Kingdom. There might be representations from the local MP to a government ministry when a development decision, possibly a major housing development, goes against local residents. But that is typically the limit. An intriguing exception was a decision by the Department of Transport to reject a tender offer for new rolling stock coming from Bombardier headquartered in Derby in favor of a German firm. There was the anticipated protest from a Derby MP. It also, however, divided along partisan lines, the Labour Party leadership claiming that it contradicted the Conservative government's plans for “leveling up”: Meaning promoting development in Northern England—a metaphor for supporting blue-collar employment.

Partisan divisions organized along class lines tend to trump territorially defined cross-class coalitions of an American sort. What might seem to be local issues are interpreted through a national lens of a class sort. The sensitivity of the Conservative Party to the anxieties of homeowners everywhere—a major component of its social base—regarding new residential developments in their vicinity is a striking case, but also one that they can use against the Labour Party when the latter is in power, as in the case of “garden grabbing” (Cox, 2016: 266–270). A Labour government had tried to mitigate the country's housing crisis by permitting demolition of existing houses and the redevelopment of their lots at higher density. This led to an outcry from the neighborhoods affected. The Conservative Party took up the issue and it became a national one, forcing the government to rescind. This sort of redevelopment also occurs in the US, as in the McMansion phenomenon, or even tearing down older two-story housing in order to replace it with a four or five-story apartment building. But it does not become a national issue with class resonance. ¹⁶

The politics of cross-class alliances is also apparent in the urban areas of the US. Mall wars involve not just the jurisdictions in which they are located, as they struggle to embellish tax bases; but also the neighborhoods surrounding them: a desire to keep new ones out on amenity grounds; or to retain an ageing one on the grounds of its stabilizing effect on a neighborhood teetering on the edge of serious social change and all that means for property values. Accordingly, mall owners can enter into alliance with surrounding residential areas; even new ones can gain local support because of the promise of enhanced revenues for a struggling school district. The local tax base is, therefore, a crucial element in these debates, helping weld together an alliance between business and residents and promoted by developer discourse; something supposedly for everyone, in other words (Cox, 2021).

The totality of social relations

The clear danger in this analysis is that of elevating state territorial structures into the solitary condition for the way in which class struggles develop and then reproduce those structures. Rather, states and their territorial structures should be seen as part of an entire totality of social relations, reflecting all the different moments of the social process, just as class struggles reflect not only the moment of a distinctive state structure but express other features of the social formation with equally deep roots in history. Consider, and by way of example, questions of geography, class relations and social imaginaries.

For a start, is it reasonable to ask if a more centralized structure for the US could possibly have worked over such a large area and one that was constantly expanding? How could the expanding Western states have possibly been governed from Washington, given that a transcontinental railroad was only completed in 1869? Certainly there was the telegraph from the 1840s on, but how to get new ordinances delivered speedily, or money transferred just to pay civil servants in remote parts of the country, and to monitor what was happening on the ground? The logistics would have been challenging on a scale not experienced in France or Great Britain. There was a railway line from London to Edinburgh by 1846, and from Paris to Marseilles in 1856. Prior to that, stage coaches had been a reliable means of connecting capital cities and countries and not subject to the insecurities of a Wells Fargo of Hollywood fame. Sheer geographic extent was then a challenge to creating a unified political community simply because of the difficulties of creating a national press. Rather, unlike the United Kingdom and France, newspapers would have a regional market and that would then be reflected in the news that they carried. And that remains the case.

Class relations are central to the current argument, but they differ in virtue not just of state structures and their histories, but very different histories of their own, which, in their origins, are hard to reduce to state structure. In the United States, capitalism developed on what was virtually a tabula rasa; no pre-capitalist relations to clear away, aside from those of simple commodity exchange. In Great Britain, as it was then called, it was different, as in the rest of Europe. Feudalism and transitional forms of simple exchange left a residue. This has meant that in addition to the class tensions of industrial capitalism, there has also been a tension between past and present that has affected both political parties: a tension between the modern and the traditional; the commodified and the non-commodified.

The different party systems provide a window. In the United States, the Republicans are not a “conservative” party in the sense of the British Conservatives. The conserving that they are interested in is the rule of the capitalist market ¹⁷ and limits on a state which might impede it. The British Conservative Party is certainly intent on maintaining the market as the governing principle of economic life, but it has to constantly balance this against claims of social protection. This has then meant, inter alia, ceding to the centralized structures of a welfare state: A centralization that was certainly made easier by the historical legacy of a unitary, highly centralized state but which has also responded to the pressures and demands of a Labour Party for which there is, again, no equivalent in the United States. But emphatically, British conservatism drew strength from traditions of noblesse oblige rooted in social hierarchies that go back to pre-capitalist times and the gentry; just as the Labour Party in pushing its own agenda, could draw on values of a pre-capitalist sort: Notably the suspicion of the commodified, and the sense of absolute values that should not bend. The British brand of conservatism has then extended to the relation to nature, most notably in the form of the British “countryside”: Conservation in another sense, therefore. Again, and in contrast, we see a different relation between the commodified and what is commonly regarded as what should not be commodified: something that is part of a residual tension between modernity and tradition missing in the US. The result is to reinforce a different balance between state and market that was then expressed not just in the welfare state, but in the American aversion to planning and the supposed danger of choosing ‘winners and losers.’

Underpinning these differences in class relations and party systems are broader social imaginaries that bathe them in a distinctive light, facilitating and limiting as the case may be. One can grasping these through a set of overlapping and mutually reinforcing contrasts, expressing not absolute differences but differences in emphasis. For example:

individual enterprise / state planning

individual choice / social protection

individual freedom / social obligation

private property / social claims

competition / monopoly

Centrally coordinated planning has been scarcely contested in the United Kingdom. There have been homeowner revolts, and the golden age of regional planning is long gone. But land use planning is still coordinated from the center and its decisions accepted. In the US, central planning scarcely got off the ground (Katznelson and Pietrykowski, 1991). In part this reflects differences in the legitimacy of individual choice: something unquestioned in Tiebout's explanation and justification of jurisdictional fragmentation in metropolitan areas; while in the United Kingdom there has been more concern about its exclusionary implications. This then aligns with the different emphases on individual freedom – a constant drumbeat in American life that is hard to avoid – and social obligation. Something like the Anti-Social Behavioral Orders or ASBOs applied in Britain would be viewed with incredulity in the United States. On the other hand, the view of private property as irreducibly ‘private’ and not to be infringed by claims of a social nature, has long been an issue in the US. One thinks here of the continual wrangling over the so-called ‘takings’ clause of the constitution and more recently the ‘stand your ground’ legislation regarding the legitimate use of guns: remarkable but its wider social resonance should not be missed. Accordingly the British idea of a national park, where private ownership continues but subject to state constraints, would be utterly anathema; so national parks in the US are federal property and, bar some very limited concessions, exclude any form of private enterprise. American rejection of a state seen as intrusive is then secured by the long antipathy to monopoly. The state is a monopoly and so antithetical to the free choice implied by the market place. Competition should rule, including within the state; which was the announced purpose of Progressive reforms, even while the underlying agenda had strong class associations.

Quite aside from the tensions of a capitalist society and how they have interacted or not with what went before, differences in national histories have been the occasion for constructing different views of the nation that have then fed back to reinforce social imaginaries. The idea of America as the land of opportunity was constructed on the back of continual and at times, quite massive, immigration and an expanding frontier. America was the paragon of the New World and its possibilities set beside the limits of ‘the old country’: Europe as the playground of dangerous -isms and in contrast to the wholesome one of Americanism. But if the US constructed its image in intended contrast with an equally constructed one of the European countries, so was the compliment returned: the virtues of continuity and anchorage in the past, and rejection of the singular rule of money and a seeming superficiality of feeling.

This is quite sketchy, but the point is to understand territorial structures of the state as parts of much larger totalities of social relations, expressing their respective peculiarities while reinforcing their equally distinct class relations and social imaginaries. Ideas of freedom of choice expressed in the mosaic of school districts and local governments in metropolitan areas of the US resonate positively because of the way in which people imagine themselves as independent of a social bond: as, indeed, free to choose from a smorgasbord of options. Notions of class have weak echoes and while there is a labor movement it has always been more pragmatic in its inclinations than ideologically driven. This then means that working class people are more easily drawn into those cross-class coalitions so characteristic of American politics and facilitated by territorial structure. Class antagonism is weak: the American dream ¹⁸ is still within reach if only one acts strategically.

In a recent paper, Riley and Brenner (2022) are at pains to demonstrate the distinctive way in which class manifests itself in the US: not as collective and class-based, but individualist and class collaborationist. The tendency for those of the working class is to view their labor power as one more form of property to be hawked around and drawn on as the basis of upward mobility or joining with others to defend some labor market privilege against usurpers. This recalls a distinction made earlier by Parkin (1979) and which underlines the difference in class politics between the US and the United Kingdom. Drawing on Weberian categories of class exclusion, and usurpation, he identifies a tension within bourgeois ideology. This is between a liberal version that emphasizes individual achievement and equality of opportunity; and a conservative one aimed at limiting such equality through collectivist criteria of race, religion or simply a culture of born-to-rule. Where exclusion is based on a criterion of a collective nature, then the tendency is to produce a subordinate group of a strongly communal character showing high levels of solidarity. Still earlier (1971), in a discussion of meaning systems, he had referred to a very particular and subordinate one, that was clearly intended to refer to the British case: A culture of us-and-them, and, one might add, easily identifiable through leisure pursuits, spectator sports, newspaper readerships, schools and quite simply, accent. It would be hard to construct anything similar in the US. ¹⁹

In the United States the relations of the different states and local governments, conditioned by the decentralization of functions, reflect the value placed on competition and those anxieties about monopoly that surged at the turn of the last century. States compete for inward investment, honing their “business climates” through their control of considerable swathes of labor law and taxation. In the United Kingdom, there has always been unease about competition. It smells too much of a capitalism viewed as heedless of broader social responsibilities: Its “irresponsible face” as Conservative Party Prime Minister Edward Heath famously described it. The very idea that labor law might vary across the country and that local authorities should offer tax incentives would raise more than the proverbial eyebrow.

These differences have to be set against the fact of what the two countries share: Not just capitalism and its laws of motion but very similar patterns of local dependence. In both countries, skills-intensive industries are locked into very particular places, whether one is talking about Rolls Royce and Derby, GE jet engines and Cincinnati, or Silicon Valley and its British counterpart, Silicon Fen around Cambridge. The less skilled are then, in virtue of the ways they are recruited into employment, highly dependent on local labor markets and what they can offer. While in both countries, homeowners are anxious about neighborhood conditions and the implications for property values.

But nevertheless, the way in which class interests in localities and regions get expressed is different: Through interest groups that organize themselves at different geographic scales, sometimes entering into coalition with one another; or through coalitions across areas that are quite clearly of a class character and expressed in a national party system that historically has been more polarized than in the American case.

These relations and the structures supporting and reinforcing them are hard to change. In the United States, it would be a matter of an amendment to the constitution. It has certainly been amended despite the obstacles put in its way: A two-thirds majority in Senate and House or through a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of the state legislatures. The easier way is through creeping legislation that allocates new powers to the states or the federal government. This was one of the goals of the New Deal of the 1930s. To some degree, it succeeded, most notably through the Social Security Act of 1935. ²⁰ But, and as a result of pressures, largely from Southern states, the states would retain important powers. The Act provided for unemployment compensation, but the aid provided and the terms under which it was provided would be state prerogatives. The same applied to the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) legislation. This compromising of the original intent of the legislation can be traced back to the structure of the American state: Not least the way it functions, through the primary and the committee system, to ensconce territorial power. Abolishing the committee system would be very difficult indeed: Far too many vested interests.

Consider, now, the British case and how that state structure resists change. Jane Wills makes the point well, if in a different way:

While contemporary politicians may declare their ambitions to localize power and reconnect with the citizenry, the geo-constitution means that they face major challenges in achieving their ends. First, there is only weak governmental capacity for localism and very little popular experience of local political autonomy. If they exist, local political institutions are very weak with little autonomy, authority or responsibility. Second, the electorate have been encouraged to expect standardized services across the country as promised to them by national political parties. As such, there is an entrenched centralization in the British geo-constitution, its political practices, culture and the production of citizenship. Added to this, national politicians are all too eager to wade in to micro-manage the affairs of local government and the people expect them to do so. (2019: 428)

She is making the same general point that was made above for the American case: inherited state structures make change difficult. In the American instance, it was a matter of moving from a decentralized to a more centralized territorial structure: a shift in the balance between federal and state governments. Here, it is the opposite: a devolution of power to local government. But her main emphasis is interesting: less a matter of pre-existing structures, though she does mention the weakness of local political institutions; and more one of government capacities and popular expectation rooted in the way in which those structures have been mobilized. Local government officials are used to doing what they do, and to adjust to acting in new ways, presumably demanding new relations with other local governments, since new responsibilities would require it as, for example, they entered into competition one with another. Likewise, central government practice would have to change and that too would be difficult: No more micro-management. Meanwhile, the citizenry has, in virtue of past practice, certain expectations: they expect some homogeneity in standards of public service—something underlined by the fact that inequalities from one local government to another are a common target of the media.

A concluding comment

The paper took off from Jane Wills’ important contribution and it returns to it. She provides an outline of what state territorial structure amounts to and then shows how historical legacies matter: How those territorial structures were formed within particular geohistorical contexts and how they continue to structure contemporary institutions. My task here has been to deepen her understanding, by emphasizing the way in which the territorial dimensions of state structures are aspects of social totalities in their entirety; totalities which have developed over time, in respect to the impulse given to social development by the class relation as it has unfolded under particular geohistorical circumstances. The accumulation process is inevitably rooted geographically, which means that class struggles are always fought out through territorially-defined institutions; but class struggles as they reflect a geohistorical specificity that is as stubborn as it is crucial. In assessing the possibilities of change in the institutional geographies of states, therefore, it is the totality of social relations that ultimately matters.

The paper has then tried to set out a framework of understanding that will be useful in future research. As far as human geography is concerned, state territorial structures are deeply implicated in the politics of urbanization and uneven development, and in the entirety of their relations that Wills emphasized: how people get represented, how the state's territorial division of labor matters, and then the structures of relations through which policy gets implicated. Again, while political geography has tended to view these different dimensions separately, putting them in the context, if only of the territorial structure of the state as a whole, would be highly illuminating, even clarifying. Beyond that, the territorial structure of the state has to be a central topic in the human sciences as a whole: how can one understand the history, or indeed culture, of any country without attention to the territorial form assumed by its state? And then how that state complements other aspects of the social totality? The scope is quite huge.