The Internal Other: Exploring the Dialectical Relationship Between Regional Exclusion and the Construction of National Identity

Abstract

Societies have historically sought to spatialize difference—to other—even within the boundaries of supposedly unified polities. Drawing on previous scholarship on the spatialization of difference in published case studies, we examine the dialectical relationship between the formation and institutionalization of regions, on the one hand, and the nation-building process more broadly on the Other. Certain regions become repositories for undesirable national traits as part of a dialectical process of nation and region building. The processes of othering are rarely as linear and tidy as proposed in some current formulations of the theory; rather, othering involves a host of concomitant processes that work together to produce economically and culturally differentiated regions. The processes by which particular places or regions become “othered” are not only interesting in the abstract but also carry with them enduring material consequences. To demonstrate this effect, we visit two historical case studies that examine the formation of internal Others in nineteenth-century Europe (Italy and Germany).

A lo largo de la historia las sociedades han buscado espacializar la diferencia—para otrear—incluso dentro de los límites de entes políticos supuestamente unificados. Con base en estudios académicos anteriores sobre espacialización de la diferencia, en casos ya publicados, examinamos la relación dialéctica existente entre la formación e institucionalización de regiones, por una parte, y el proceso de construcción de nación en sentido más amplio, por la Otra. Ciertas regiones se convierten en repositorios de rasgos nacionales indeseables como parte de un proceso dialéctico en la construcción de nación y región. Los procesos de otrear son raramente lineares y ordenados como se propone en algunas formalulaciones corrientes de la teoría; más que eso, la otredad involucra un conjunto de procesos concomintantes que actúan juntos para producir regiones diferenciadas económica y culturalmente. Los procesos por medio de los cuales ciertos lugares o regiones se hacen otros no son solamente interesantes en abstracto sino que también acarrean con ellos consecuencias materiales perdurables. Para demostrar este efecto, visitamos dos estudios históricos de caso que examinan la formación de Otredad interna en la Europa del siglo XIX (Italia y Alemania).

Key Words:

• Germany
• Italy
• nationalism
• othering
• regionalism

关键词:

• 德国
• 意大利
• 民族主义
• 异化
• 地区主义

Palabras clave:

• Alemania
• Italia
• nacionalismo
• otredad
• regionalismo

Acknowledgments

We are indebted to Audrey Kobayashi and three anonymous reviewers for valuable critical feedback that made the final version of this article much stronger than the first. We also thank Alec Murphy, Reece Jones, Matt Derrick, Fred Shelley, Leslie McLees, and Guntram Herb for commenting on earlier drafts. A very early version was presented at the Political Geography Specialty Group preconference in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2009. Any omissions or remaining errors are the sole responsibility of the authors.

Notes

1. Schmitt, so claims Abizadeh, “conflates internal and external ‘others’” (Abizadeh 2005, 51). Abizadeh argued that all of social science operates in some way under the shadow of particularism (he did not mention geography specifically). He critiqued the particularist thesis (or anticosmopolitan thesis) that forms the basis of much of political theory about identity because it conflates individual identity with collective identity (making a collective identity “particular”) and is premised on the nation being “invested in the modern notion of sovereignty,” which itself is based on an unnecessary conjoining of external and internal sovereignty (Abizadeh 2005, 50).

2. New regional geography was meant to represent a paradigmatic change in thought about the region, but the literature suffered from the absence of a unifying theoretical or philosophical approach. The “philosophical confusion” (Agnew 1999) that characterized the new regional geography impeded the theoretically informed regional approach from coalescing into a coherent framework that could speak to broader questions of regional identity, national identity, and the relations between them. Emerging at a time when the world was undergoing radical economic and political reordering, the new regional geography, especially with its emphasis on the historical approach, did not seem capable of explaining much about the contemporary world, and by the mid-1990s, a political-economy interpretation of regions, often called “new regionalism” began to take root.

3. Other scholarship in this vein includes recent work on Balkanism and balkanization (Agnew 2009; Todorova 2009) and Wolff's (1994) influential work on the creation of the geographical concept of “Eastern Europe.” He illustrated that this now taken-for-granted regional construct was in fact a modern creation and was tied up with notions of the supposed backwardness of this area in relation to the West. Adamovsky, meanwhile, persuasively argued in his work on the orientalization of Russia that such dichotomies are problematic because the successful role is inevitably ascribed to one part, whereas the “Other” region is left to justify its lack of development. Echoing a range of subaltern scholars, Adamovsky described the consequences as being that “the narrative of the West constructs a narcissistic, self-sufficient, self-identical image of itself, by subalternizing its others” (Adamovsky 2005, 615, emphasis in original). In this case, Adamovsky showed how Russian history is constructed as one of repeated failures as a result of Russia lacking those Western European traits required for success. There are clear parallels between this narrative and the ways in which regions within nation-states are constructed.

4. Unsurprisingly, a voluminous history of this period exists, covering all different aspects of unification. Particularly compelling accounts are to be found in Blackbourn (2003), Blackbourn and Retallack (2007), Evans (1997), and Gross (2004).

5. There were twice as many Catholics in Prussia (in Silesia and the Rhineland) as there were in Bavaria, but Bavaria was viewed as being essentially Catholic because of a large, culturally dominant population in the southern part of the kingdom (Blackbourn 2003).

6. Unlike new regional geography approaches, new regionalist literature emphasizes the functional role that regions play in globalized strategies of economic development. Regions emerge in an assumed partial vacuum where nation-states, the previously unrivaled containers and orchestrators of economic activity, had once been firmly planted. These new regions are the result of local initiatives in response to global processes and, as such, they often reflect the “ultra-liberal rhetoric of the borderless world” (Paasi 2002b, 807) promulgated by popular sages of the region such as Ohmae (1995) since the end of the Cold War. Whereas the “old” economic geography of regions examined the presence of raw materials, agricultural potential, labor availability, and specialization, the political–economic geography of regions is largely premised on an assumption that the economic success of regions is due in part to other, often less tangible, cultural or institutional assets and attributes. Consequently, regions have been examined as the appropriate scale of analysis for interrogating the competitiveness of spatially proximate assemblages of “postindustrial, knowledge-based” industries (James 2006, 289; see also Storper 1997; Keating 1998; Scott 1998).