This book combines perspectives from political science, history and geography to provide a comprehensive introduction to `Europe' or European space as we understand it today. Central to the book is the phenomenon of the sovereign state and the question of alternative ways of organizing Europe politically and economically. The book explores four different ways of organizing space: state, union, region and network. By tracing the origins of the sovereign state in Europe, the book first reviews the resilience and adaptability of the sovereign state historically, and then looks at the implications of the contradictory processes of integration and fragmentation, or globalization and regionalization, present today. A key concept developed throughout the book is that of networks, especially with respect to the European Union, and the relationship between regions, networks and cities, a relationship long traditional to Europe's political organization. The authors review critically popular notions of a 'Europe of regions' or 'the end of the sovereign state' and instead serve to combine their different disciplinary conceptual tools and perspectives to provide new insights into the future organization of European space. Organizing European Space will be essential reading for all students of contemporary Europe seeking a deeper understanding of the modern state and the complexity of changing notions of identity, political organization and territoriality inherent in Europe in the past, present and future.
Sven Taegil, born 1930. Historian, professor of Empirical Conflict Research at the Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences and at the University of Lund
State of Mind Mapping Space Historical Space The Emergent State The Resilient State Transcending Space Towards an Ever Closer Union? Spatial Fragmentation Places in Networks Towards a New State of Mind
`Three leading Swedish social scientists - a geographer, a historian, and a political scientist - convincingly show that Europe's political-geographical organization into various territories and networks is not just incidental but absolutely vital to understanding its political-economic trajectory over the long term. Sensitive to how Europe has been studied as much as to their own reading of its geographical organization, the authors provide the single best account in English that I have seen of a Europe that is much more geographically complex than a singular focus on its division into national states often makes it seem. In providing a rich transdisciplinary perspective on Europe's complex geographical organization of state territories, city-based networks, regions, and supranational entities the authors succeed in throwing fresh light on the continent's political trajectory and suggesting the main directions it may take in this new century' - John A Agnew, University of California, Los Angeles
