GLOBAL CITIES, GLOCAL STATES - GLOBAL CITY FORMATION AND STATE TERRITORIAL RESTRUCTURING IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPE

This article examines the changing relationship between global cities and territorial states in contemporary Europe, and outlines some of it s implications for the geography of world capitalism in the late twent ieth century. Most accounts of global cities are based upon a 'zero-su m' conception of spatial scale that leads to an emphasis on the declin ing power of the territorial state: as the global scale expands, the s tate scale is said to contract. By contrast, I view globalization as a highly contradictory reconfiguration of superimposed spatial scales, including those on which the territorial state is organized. The state scale is not being eroded, but rearticulated and reterritorialized in relation to both sub-and supra-state scales. The resultant, re-scaled configuration of state territorial organization is provisionally labe led a 'glocal' state. As nodes of accumulation, global cities are site s of post-Fordist forms of global industrialization; as coordinates of state territorial power, global cities are local-regional levels with in a larger, reterritorialized matrix of increasingly 'glocalized' sta te institutions. State re-scaling is a major accumulation strategy thr ough which these transformed 'glocal' territorial states attempt to pr omote the global competitive advantage of their major urban regions. G lobal city formation and state re-scaling are therefore dialectically intertwined moments of a single dynamic of global capitalist restructu ring. These arguments are illustrated through a discussion of the inte rface between global cities and territorial states in contemporary Eur ope, A concluding section argues that new theories and representations of spatial scale and its social production are needed to grasp the ra pidly changing political geography of late twentieth-century capitalis m.