‘The Poverty of Territorialism: A Neo-medieval View of Europe and European Planning‘, a book by Andreas Faludi.
This book will by published in summer by Edgar Elgar Publishing.
This book identifies cases for and against territorialism giving states a monopoly on controlling their territories. The territoriality of EU members is also a barrier to European spatial planning. This is also true for EU territorial cohesion policy and casts light on the crisis of the EU. The book explores more congenial notions for dealing with the jumble of relations in our world. It invokes the notion of the EU as a neo-medieval empire and presents spatial metaphors for the organization of its space: member states forming an archipelago of islands surrounded by a sea of functional relations, or ice floats sometimes changing their shapes or even disappearing. Imagine the EU itself also as a swirling cloud of institutions each with their own overlapping areas of responsibility. But what remains is to rethink democracy in less territorial terms. Whatever is the case, planners must adjust to a reality shaped less and less by territorialism.
The book will look something like the figure in this blog. The cover illustrates one of the metaphors of EU space as proposed in this book: rather than viewing EU space as being filled to the rim with the territories of its members, think of it as an archipelago where each island represents the territory of one member and where a sea of functional relations provides them with access to each other and to opportunities near and far.
