European Spatial Planning Between Competitiveness and Territorial Cohesion:
Shadows of Neo-liberalism
ALBERTO VANOLO
Final version published in European Planning Studies (2010), vol. 18, n. 8, pp. 1301-1315.
ABSTRACT. This paper analyses the use of the concept of territorial cohesion in policy documents produced by the European Union. It is an idea celebrated in community documents, such as cohesion reports, the Territorial Agenda of the European Union and the Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion; after more than a decade of political debate, the concept is about to gain a legitimate institutional role, after being included in the Lisbon Treaty, and is among the competences that the EU shares with other member states. At first, territorial cohesion seems to oppose the logics of neo-liberalism by reinscribing welfare problems and policies in spatial terms. However, using the analytical framework of cultural critics, and intending cohesion to be a discourse carried on by a community of European scholars and policymakers, the research will discuss the conceptual relationship between competitiveness and territorial cohesion in European policies and narratives.
1. Conventional wisdoms in European spatial planning
The expression “new conventional wisdom”, originally introduced by Galbraith (1958), has been recently proposed in the field of urban studies by Buck et al. (2005). The irony of this definition is that certain concepts are generally accepted as true by both the public and the experts, but at the same time, though widely used, they are unexamined, depoliticized and hence may be re-evaluated upon further analysis. In recent scientific debates, the shaping of conventional ideas about society and the economy has often been related to the diffusion within the public sphere of a neo-liberal mode of regulation (Swyngedouw et al., 2002; Barnett, 2005; Harvey, 2005). Particularly, a feature of neo-liberal discourses is that they tend to reframe socio-political problems and issues in specific ways, implicitly suggesting and supporting recurring policy recipes (Peck & Tickell, 2002; Raco, 2005; Leitner et al., 2007). For example, this is the case for those debates that assume globalization is an exogenous force, shaping global markets and general dynamics “from above” and pushing local societies to adapt by privatizing, enhancing competitiveness—whatever that means—and by supporting flexibility and the general movement towards a “global society” (Cerny, 2000). Certainly, for those particularly close to radical theories, the limits of such argumentations are evident, for example, by framing problems mainly in economic terms, by considering flat spatialities and by denying that globalization is an ongoing social process and the performative nature of its representations (Massey, 2005). Notwithstanding, as stressed by Buck et al. (2005), many debates tend today to assume and represent problems and perspectives concerning urban development by relying on rhetorical constructions focusing on a small number of straightforward ideas: economic competitiveness, cohesion, responsive governance and environmental sustainability. This line of argumentation does not intend to criticize those ideas; however, it is suggested that the selfish use of scientific concepts, which are depoliticized and represented as “scientific” (i.e. true, in non-epistemological terms), does support certain discourses and, consequently, can support certain power structures. One example is the discourse on the knowledge society
and lifelong learning: these ideas implicitly remove responsibilities from governments in light of structural unemployment and human dequalification; they tend to pose the logic that it is a duty of any citizen to update their own skills and suggest that the condition of unemployment is due to a non-optimal learning process of the jobless. This is an unusual discourse, if one considers that a few decades ago unemployment was considered a social problem and a state-welfare failure. This is not to say that European Union has abdicated responsibilities in this field: for example, the less-favoured regions in its member countries have been stimulated (through Structural Funds) to implement training initiatives for workers. However, the framing of the discourse on unemployment has certainly marked a shift towards an increasing pressure being placed on the individualization of responsibilities. This tendency has been described by Bourdieu (2005) as culturally connected to a liberal (and Calvinist) “self-help” conduct (see Wacquant, 2008 for similar reflections concerning poverty).
This paper proposes that, in the case of European spatial planning too, a conventional wisdom makes its appearance on the back of discourses and policy documents. Of course, the European spatial planning debate has become high profile and no explicit and simplistic neo-liberal perspectives are evident; instead, they are hidden between the lines and in the margins through the use of certain concepts. The following pages will discuss the case for the discourse on territorial cohesion, a relatively new concept found in European documents and a new keyword in the debate.
In order to implement this deconstructive exercise, a cultural political economy approach will be used, which has recently been developed by Bob Jessop (2004) and applied by other authors, such as Robertson (2008), Jessop and Oosterlynck (2008) and Dannestam (2008)1. Put it shortly, this approach seeks to
reintegrate political economy within cultural and institutionalist analysis: in this case, it demands attention being paid to the discursive formation of the territorial cohesion imperative. According to this perspective, it is crucial to consider the relationship between the production, circulation and mediation of discourses, their connection to the deeper structures of power and how these discourses take material or institutional form (Robertson, 2008): the European spatial policy is thus simultaneously a project, a process and a socio-cultural product. From a methodological point of view, the paper will try to integrate semiotics into policy analysis by scrutinizing the logics underlying the discourses spelled out by policy actors and urban scholars in the field of European spatial planning. The aim of the paper is thus to provide an interpretation of territorial competition and territorial cohesion as contested terrains of political agency and public discourse. In this paper, the analysis will be based on official documents proposed by and within the European Commission (EC). It will particularly focus on: the European treaties of Amsterdam, 1997 (introducing territorial cohesion), Nice, 2001 and Lisbon, 2007 (European Commission, 1997, 2001b, 2007a); the Lisbon Strategy and its 2001 and 2005 revisions (European Council, 2000, 2001, 2005); the reports on economic and social cohesion (European Commission, 2001a, 2004a, 2007b, 2008a) and specific planning documents, including the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) (European Commission, Committee on Spatial Development, 1999), the Territorial Agenda of the European Union (Informal Ministerial Meeting, 2007a), the Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion (European Commission, 2008b) and two preparatory documents (Informal Ministerial Meeting, 2005, 2007a).
In order to develop the argument, the next two sections introduce European spatial planning and the discourse on territorial cohesion. Then, Section 3 analyses the use, the logics and the meanings of territorial 1 For a theoretical introduction to cultural political economic; see Ribera-Fumaz (2009); see also the works developed by the Cultural Political Economy Research Cluster at the University of Lancaster: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ias/researchgroups/polecon (accessed June 2009).
cohesion (and territorial competition) within the European discourses. Finally, Section 4 will draw some general conclusions and argumentations concerning the relationship between the concepts of cohesion and competitiveness.
2. The territorial cohesion discourse
Before analysis, it is necessary to introduce what is meant by European spatial planning. It is suggested that the EU does not have legitimate competencies in terms of spatial planning, so concrete actions in this field are left to the member states. However, the EU does provide guidelines for spatial planning, offering an open forum for discussions on these topics (e.g. within informal ministry meetings) and supporting analysis and scientific debate, particularly within the ESPON programme (European Network on Spatial Planning and Territorial Cohesion). It should be pointed out that it is possible to detect many different national traditions of spatial planning in Europe, and therefore the development of a wider debate under the umbrella of the activities carried out by the European Directorate General for Regional Development (DG Regio) constitutes a particularly new and stimulating task. Despite the lack of formal competences, the European spatial planning discourse has grown quickly in recent years, reaching the climax of its celebration in 1999 with the publication of the ESDP (European Commission, Committee on Spatial Development, 1999). Approved by the Informal Council of Ministers of Spatial Planning of European Commission in Potsdam in 1999, the ESDP is not a legal or binding document, though the 60 policy options form a policy framework for all tiers of administration with a planning responsibility. The strategic aim of the document is to achieve a balanced and sustainable spatial development strategy. In order to promote these goals, much use has been made of the concepts of competitiveness and of polycentrism, the latter intended as a fair and balanced territorial development path. This is in opposition to current, centre–periphery dualistic configurations (i.e. the idea of a “strong” spatial backbone, also known as the blue banana—from London to Milan through Paris and the Ruhr—opposed to “weak”, European peripheral regions: see Dühr, 2007). It is in this milestone document that the expression spatial cohesion (soon substituted by territorial cohesion) reached a wide planning debate2.
While there is a long tradition of European cohesion policies (reflected in about one-third of the total EU budget, in 2000–2006 and 2007–2013, through the Structural Funds including the European Regional Development Fund, the European Social Fund and the Cohesion Fund), there is no formal definition of territorial cohesion (Waterhout, 2008; Evers et al., 2009). This concept was slowly diffused in debates and documents concerning visions for European space and society (Faludi presented accurate reports concerning these debates, and this brief survey is largely based on his contributions: see Faludi, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c; see also Doucet, 2006, Evers, 2007). The idea was simply used and taken for granted in many subsequent documents and discourses, for example, in the Second Report on Economic and Social Cohesion (European Commission, 2001a). In essence, it was intended to “complement” economic and social cohesion in search of a “harmonious and balanced development of the Union”. Clearly, the EC’s DG Regio never wanted to present territorial cohesion as a radical departure from existing policies (Faludi, 2006), and particularly from the principles of the so-called Lisbon Strategy (European Council, 2000), which was to make Europe “the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion, and respect for the
2 The first appearance of the expression “territorial cohesion” dates back to 1997, in the Amsterdam Treaty, with reference to “services of general interests” (European Commission, 1997).
environment by 2010”3. It is likely that keeping the concept sufficiently vague was a political caveat in order
to introduce a welfare element into the debate: as stressed by Davoudi (2005), a real harmonization of social regulations, as a precondition for integration into the European market, would have been too difficult in a Europe with six countries (the number at the time of the Treaty of Rome, in 1957) and is basically impossible today, with 27 member countries. Therefore, cohesion assumes more “nuanced” meanings. Particularly, explanations about the sense of territorial cohesion may be found in three documents, written in 2004:
(1) The Third Report on Economic and Social Cohesion (European Commission, 2004a, p. 27) explains how:
people should not be disadvantaged by wherever they happen to live or work in the Union ... The concept of territorial cohesion extends beyond the notion of economic and social cohesion by both adding to this and reinforcing it. In policy terms, the objective is to help achieve a more balanced development by reducing existing disparities, avoiding territorial imbalances and by making both sectoral policies which have a spatial impact and regional policy more coherent. The concern is also to improve territorial integration and encourage cooperation between regions.
(2) The European Commissioner responsible for Regional Policy and Institutional Reform, Barnier (2004), outlines the principles of a territorial cohesion policy: (a) exploiting opportunities and not just addressing problems; (b) encouraging cooperation and networking; (c) building on existing strengths so as to improve the targeting of cohesion policy; (d) ensuring the incorporation of the sustainability agenda, including addressing the issue of natural risks and (e) more coherence and coordination between regional and sectoral policies.
(3) The ESPON Interim Territorial Cohesion Report (European Commission, 2004b, p. 3), argues that it means: the balanced distribution of human activities across the Union ... it translates the goal of sustainable and balanced development ... into territorial terms. Territorial cohesion includes fair access for citizens and economic operators to Services of General Economic Interest, irrespective of the territory to which they belong.
Since the publication of the ESDP, the concept of territorial cohesion has been discussed in informal meetings in 2004 (Rotterdam) and 2005 (Luxembourg), leading to the production of a document entitled “Territorial State and Perspectives of the European Union” (Informal Ministerial Meeting, 2005; it was initially considered as a follow-up to the ESDP: Davoudi, 2005). In summary, it argues that territorial development policies must help areas increase their territorial capital as part of the overall effort to increase Europe’s competitiveness. The substantive priorities, as laid down in the document, are to strengthen polycentrism and urban–rural partnership, promote clusters of competitive and innovative activities, strengthen the trans-European transport and communication networks, promote trans-European risk management and strengthen trans-European ecological structures and cultural resources (Faludi, 2006). The final outcome of the reflections, discussed in the informal ministerial meetings, was represented by the Territorial Agenda of the European Union and the Leipzig Charter on Sustainable European Cities (the latter did not consider explicitly the topic of cohesion), both approved in Leipzig in May 2007 (Informal Ministerial Meeting, 2007a, 2007b). The Territorial Agenda of the European Union is basically a synthesis of the
3 To be precise, the Lisbon Strategy (or to be exact, the outcome of the European Council meeting in 2000) aimed only to increase competitiveness, while the integration of the sustainable development objectives occurred with the so-called Goteborg Strategy (the outcome of the European Council meeting in 2001). Finally, in 2005, in a mid-term review, another update placed more centrality on the objectives of cohesion: see European Council (2000, 2001, 2005).
Territorial State and Perspectives of the European Union (Informal Ministerial Meeting, 2005), signed by all 27 ministries responsible for spatial planning in Europe (and was different from the informal nature of the previous document). In the Territorial Agenda, the first paragraph is explicitly dedicated to “strengthening territorial cohesion”, intended:
as a permanent and cooperative process ... achieved through an intensive and continuous dialogue between all stakeholders of territorial development ... the private sector (especially locally and regionally based entrepreneurship), the scientific community, the public sector (especially local and regional authorities), non-governmental organizations and different sectors need to act together. (p. 1)
In the conclusions of the Leipzig informal meeting, the EC was invited to prepare a report on territorial cohesion by 2008. As a result, the Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion (European Commission, 2008b, p. 4) aimed to open “a debate on territorial cohesion with a view to deepening the understanding of this concept and of its implications for policy and cooperation”. Here, the concept becomes more “operationalized” by describing various links with concrete European policies: transport (because of the effects on the locations of economic activities and the patterns of settlements); energy (by developing a fully integrated internal gas and electricity market, energy efficiency measures and a renewable energy policy); ensuring high-speed internet connections; agriculture (in maintaining rural areas and sound land management); employment (development of human capital through better education); improvement of maritime basins’ management and sustainability; common research space (access to high-quality research and the possibility to participate in transnational projects) and even competition policy (in the sense discussed later). The Green Paper (European Commission, 2008b) was once more accused of being vague: the Dutch European Parliamentary group, particularly, criticized it for failing to propose either a clear definition of, or an objective for, territorial cohesion (and proposed the publication of a White Paper, with a view to developing a post-2013 legislative package on Structural Funds). The vagueness of the concept may also be revealed by the interesting attempt to involve the public through an open consultation, carried out subsequent to the publication of the Green Paper. Between October 2008 and February 2009, contributions were sought particularly from stakeholders in departments of national government, local and regional authorities, EU institutions, economic and social partners, civil society organizations, academics and citizens. It resulted in a list of 388 comments, fully available on the web4. This public consultation manifested on the one hand, the
plurality of the different perspectives surrounding the concept (and the need for a shared definition, as stressed, for example, by Finland) and on the other hand, the widening of interests and the relevance of this topic in public debates.
Eventually, the affirmation of territorial cohesion as a central concept was fully celebrated in the Treaty of Lisbon, signed on 13 December 20075. In Article 2, it explicitly recognizes that the European Union “shall
promote economic, social and territorial cohesion, and solidarity among Member States”. Once again, the concept is taken for granted—given the “general” nature of such a document—and used side-by-side with the “economic” and “social” dimensions.
The concept of territorial cohesion was also increasingly being found in European analysis and reports, particularly in the Fourth Report on Economic and Social Cohesion (European Commission, 2007b) and in the Fifth Progress Report on Economic and Social Cohesion (European Commission, 2008a); yet, once again,
4 http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/consultation; see also the COPTA web site: http://www.eu-territorial-agenda.eu (accessed June 2009).
5 European Commission (2007a). Also known as the Reform Treaty, this is the document ideally substituting the European Constitution, failed after the French and Dutch referenda of 2005. The treaty would amend the Treaty on European Union (Maastricht) and the treaty establishing the European Community (Rome).
in this report (p. 6), there is a critical reflection that some contributions however urge the Commission to develop a definition of territorial cohesion and indicators for better understanding this concept. At the same time, several national governments consider that territorial cohesion is already integrated within cohesion policy, and that the economic, social and territorial dimensions of cohesion cannot be separated.
3. Deconstructing territorial cohesion
It is worth re-emphasizing that the aim of this paper is not to analyse the relationships between competition and cohesion policies (Buck et al., 2005; Ache et al., 2008), but to deconstruct the existing use of the concept of territorial cohesion in European documents and debates in order to discuss the hidden “political unconscious” (Jameson, 1981). Looking at the evolution of the use of the expression territorial cohesion, two particular elements seem to persist over time. First, territorial cohesion is presented together with the more established notions of “economic” and “social” forms of cohesion, and secondly, it is often intended to counterweight the notion of competitiveness.
In the first documents, and particularly in the ESDP, territorial (spatial) cohesion once had a weak conceptual content, referring to a depoliticized and deproblematicized policy aim: who would oppose “a more even geographical distribution of growth across the territory of the EU”? (European Commission, Committee on Spatial Development, 1999, p. 7). Here, the difference between social and economic forms of cohesion is not clear: instead, it only emphasizes a particular geographical scale (the EU regions, as will be discussed later) to frame these particular problems. In fact, suggesting that territorial cohesion refers to an even geographical distribution of growth (a strange and simplistic term considering the long and well-known debate on the differences between growth and development, for example, growth is generally market-driven and private-sector reliant, see Fainstein, 2001; Brenner & Theodore, 2002; for a general critique see Rist, 1996) means nothing more than convergence, that is an objective logically included in economic cohesion. Territorial cohesion seems, in this particular framework (lately differently elaborated in the debate6), to give a name to a particular ontology: that of the gross domestic product (GDP) differences
between regions. However, it is worth emphasizing that there is nothing natural about that particular scale: why would the regional differences (and specifically NUTS-2) be more worthy of attention than lower scale differences, such as urban? In addition, how can be this translated into policy actions, setting aside individuals, groups and markets—who are in strict sense the subjects of social and economic cohesion? On the one side, a response provided by the EU refers to territorial cooperation policies, i.e. cross-border, transnational and interregional policies (such as the former Interreg initiatives) financed by the European Regional Development Fund (about 2.5% of the 2007–2013 allocation for cohesion policies). However, the recurring discursive association between the three forms of cohesion, usually mentioned together in the same sentence, sheds lights on some weaknesses of the concept of territorial cohesion, which often merely evokes the logics of the Structural Funds that are managed on an area basis. Conceptual problems thus arise and they are one example of the “scalar question”: every spatial cohesion logic goes hand-in-hand with some kind of exclusion via demarcation, definition of borders and liminalities (Novy et al., 2009). Every time a boundary is defined, i.e. a policy is spatialized, included and excluded subjects are defined: what is considered a step to further cohesion in one particular scale may be interpreted as a step away from
6 As stressed later in the paper, the scientific debate continues the discussion into more problematic areas; but considering, for example, the European Commission (2001a), or the European Council (2001), this narrow interpretation of cohesion is evident. Furthermore, later debates add conceptual meanings to territorial cohesion, but the convergence perspective is arguably still alive.
cohesion in another scale. This problem is particularly evident in the logic to foster internal cohesion within cities in order to be more competitive (intrinsically meaning “to be more” than another, which is ultimately an opposing concept to cohesion). To tackle an even more provocative perspective, the whole of Europe is not a natural scale, as demonstrated by the political tensions resulting from the enlargement process that included many “new”, poor regions in the cohesion policies, and suddenly excluded others from Structural Funds (even with phasing out/liminality policies). From a theoretical perspective, this problem may be faced in two ways: by proposing multi-scalar analysis (and policies) concerning patterns of cohesion (and exclusion) (Park, 2005), or by denying the geographical scales logic as a whole, in favour of a “flat ontology” of spatial phenomena (Marston et al., 2005). From a political perspective, the problem is dealt with by the EU by supporting cooperation policies in order to limit the dangers of the “boundary effect”.
The deproblematicization of scale seems to persist in the debate,7 but soon, territorial cohesion managed to
acquire meanings from the evolving discourses and documents. This occurred in two, intertwined directions: linking the topic of territorial cohesion, on the one hand, to that of competitiveness and, on the other hand, to sectoral policies. The argumentation will begin from the latter.
The Third Report on Cohesion remarks once more that the goal of territorial cohesion “is to help achieve a more balanced development by reducing existing disparities ... by making both sectoral policies which have a spatial impact and regional policy more coherent” (European Commission, 2004a, p. 27, my italics). This is, of course, a sound objective: many authors in the past have criticized the excessive fragmentation of European policies, dispersed between many (not rarely overlapping) Directorate Generals, offices, initiatives, programmes and national traditions (Leibfried & Pierson, 1995; Knill, 1998; see also Schout & Jordan, 2007). The idea of the need of a better coordination between sectoral policies has been fully developed in the Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion (European Commission, 2008b), presenting the abovementioned list of policy sectors to be linked to territorial cohesion (energy, transport, information and communication technologies, employment, etc.). The list included particularly “hot” topics, such as employment. Leaving aside the already-discussed problem of spatial scales (which is the best scale to address cohesion in relation to a structural unemployment problem?), the emphasis on the relationship between territorial cohesion and issues of societal and spatial cohesion explicitly pushes territorial cohesion towards a conceptualization in terms of spatialization of welfare policies (Davoudi, 2005; Doucet, 2006) understood as a demise of the State regulatory role (Brenner & Theodore, 2002). The building of a territorial cohesion policy framework may give rise to a social protection regime standing outside the traditional Keynesian welfare logics organized (and bureaucratized) at a national level. This is a perspective fully developed in Faludi’s (2007c) book, discussing the notion of a European social model in relation to “shared values of equity, competitiveness, sustainability and good governance” (p. 19). The second of these four terms (competitiveness) will now be discussed, particularly focusing on the idea that the relationship between cohesion and competitiveness is conceptually tricky and problematic.
The scientific debate on the notion of territorial competitiveness is rich, and this is not the place to reviewit; suffice it to say,many relevant authors (particularly Krugman, 1996) strongly criticized the validity of the concept. To put it simply, territories cannot be considered enterprises for a number of reasons (e.g. they cannot “exit from the market” as a consequence of failure) and also, territories have no single, natural development “goals” (e.g. do they have rising GDP, full employment, quality of life or all of the above? See Malecki, 2002; Turok, 2005). On the contrary, other authors (Camagni, 2002) further elaborated on these
7 See also the metaphor of the “protector” and “mystical” knights developed by Doucet (2006), but above all, consider the inner idea of “evidence-based” policy (Faludi, 2007b).
critics, supporting specific interpretations of competitiveness on urban and regional scales (in relation to absolute and not comparative advantages, in the case of Camagni).
The EU, with time8, has fully acquired the notion of competitiveness, once more depoliticizing it and
presenting it as a “natural” and “innocent” goal. The most relevant issues are included in the well-known Lisbon Strategy (and in its 2005 revision): here, from the beginning, being competitive is intended as “the” goal. For example, the first version of the Lisbon Strategy (European Council, 2000) argues the need to “speed up liberalisation in areas such as gas, electricity, postal services and transport”, “to further their efforts to promote competition and reduce the general level of State aids”, “eliminating barriers to investment” and to “redirect public expenditure towards increasing the relative importance of capital accumulation—both physical and human”9. It is not in the logic of this paper to analyse weather this is, or is
not, a sound strategy: the point is that this is presented as an “objective” and “logical” argumentation, perfectly compatible with developing territorial cohesion, reproducing once again the process of naturalization and depoliticization of choices. The question now is: how is it possible to consider as two sides of the same coin the support of liberalization and competitiveness (e.g. in terms of supporting the aspiration towards becoming “global cities”), and territorial cohesion?
This conciliation occurs through another rhetorical device, present in most of the abovementioned documents: territorial cohesion will be functional to delivering growth and ompetitiveness (and obviously, employment and sustainable development), and thus the Lisbon objectives: “cohesion policy has boosted GDP, created employment and improved the competitiveness of EU regions” (European Commission, 2007b, p. iv; see also Allen, 2005). Consider the following passage in The Territorial State and Perspectives of the European Union (Informal Ministerial Meeting, 2005, p. 4): “The most competitive are those that are able to respond most effectively to globalisation. Less competitive regions may suffer as a result of globalisation, leading to greater EU regional disparities”. Globalization is intended here as an exogenous explanation, while there is a certain ambiguity in posing causes and consequences of phenomena: is there lack of cohesion because of the lack of competitiveness? Is there a lack of competitiveness because some regions are “too strong”, or because others are “suffering globalization”? Certainly, it is logical to argue that there may be some sort of link between cohesion and competitiveness (here, suggested by GDP growth and the movement towards a sort of “modernization”, denying, de facto, the possibility of having multiple development paths), but the link is probably much more complex and has to be contextualized in different places. Above all, if we consider GDP growth as a proxy for competitiveness, and GDP dispersion (or variance, in statistical terms) as a proxy for cohesion, the logic becomes problematic: for what are we searching? Perhaps we are searching for GDP growth for all, but above all for the poor. Consider, for example, Figure 1: are the more competitive nations also the more keen to develop cohesion? The answer to this superficial question is generally negative.
Figure 1. GDP per inhabitant (purchasing power standard, NUTS-2, 2006), percentage of the EU27 average (EU27 = 100)
8 Particularly since 1993, when Jacques Delors made a presentation to the leaders of the nations of the European Community, meeting in Copenhagen, on the growing problem of European unemployment, framing the question in terms of “lack of competitiveness” (Krugman, 1996).
9 Many critics argued that the Bologna Process may be read as a process of commodification of knowledge, education and research (Jacob, 2003).
Source: EUROSTAT (2009, p. 54).
Certainly, while the above-mentioned political documents equate competitiveness with GDP and cohesion with convergence (and GDP is the indicator used to support such approach in the cohesion reports)10,
scholarly debates generally advance deeper understandings of these phenomena, stressing the importance of other dimensions of “spatialized social capital” and adopting a “positive sum” interpretation of competition. This adds complexity to the debate, but presents as synergic the goals of competitiveness and cohesion, which sound like a neo-liberal rhetoric (see, at the urban level, Fainstein, 2001; Gordon, 2005; Vranken, 2008): for example, consider, at an urban level, the relationship between urban entrepreneurialism and social justice (Harvey, 2008). Basically growth accentuates exclusion and difference, and in this sense policy practices focusing on cohesion can be seen as necessary actions for embedding 10 At the same time, DG Regio has often asked the ESPON Network to develop territorial cohesion indicators in order to surpass the GDP limits (Dammers & Evers, 2008; Ferrugia & Gallina, 2008).
economic practices in the social (using the language of Polanyi, 1944), and there are, of course, many successful examples of this, particularly in Northern Europe (Faludi, 2007c). Cohesion is a value and a goal per se, not something instrumental to raise GDP or (in the hypothetical eyes of the EU) a way to rebalance the uncertain distributive effect of the market, avoiding the pernicious risk of disintegration (Janin Rivolin, 2005). However, we can push our deconstructive exercise further: telling in this way, the story of cohesion (that is, in counterweight, a story about exclusion) suggests that exclusion is an after effect of economic competition, and not an integral part of the same spatio-temporal narrative. Recasting poverty as exclusion (a lack of cohesion) is, from a discursive point of view, the creation of an “imagined economy” (Palan & Cameron, 2004). In the EU, hardly framed by the notion of community but by the discipline of competition, the poor regions are no longer “peripheries in an international division of labour”, but a sort of threat to everyone else’s prosperity. Using the language of Agamben (2003), this creates a sort of “exception”, that is a conceptual “banning”, drawing a boundary between a “normal” space of inclusion and an “abnormal” space of uncompetitiveness.
4. Concluding reflections on conceptual relations between competitiveness and territorial cohesion In spatial planning debates, many authors advocate the necessity to promote a European model of society, embedding social protection elements and avoiding the movement towards an “American” model of neo-liberal society (Davoudi, 2005; Faludi, 2007c; Dammers & Evers, 2008). Scandinavian economies are indicated as “good” examples in this field, a conclusion shared by a number of authors (Castells & Himanen, 2002), and many scholars in the field of capitalist analysis emphasize the “social” value of economic practices in the European tradition (Gilpin, 2001). It is difficult to disagree with such statements, and the territorial cohesion debate has to be welcomed as a way to support the search for alternative development paths and practices for embedding the economy in the social sphere: there can be growth and welfare, though we have to be aware that this is more the exception than the rule. A very simple exercise would be to take a rough table showing world GDP growth at national levels: certainly, the faster-growing countries would have names not generally associated with ideas of democracy, social justice, the welfare state or cohesion. To put it simply, competitiveness and cohesion are not necessarily overlapping phenomena. From a phenomenological perspective, competitiveness is “something different” from cohesion, and discourses presenting the two perspectives as fully coherent and overlapping sound as “conventional wisdom”. In the logic of this paper, this argumentation has been linked to a neo-liberal reframing of political concepts. Looking at the connections between neo-liberalism and the discourses on competitiveness and cohesion, it is important to consider that neo-liberalism is not a state-of-fact, but a mobile technology (Ong, 2007) which can assume a variety of forms according to the different evolutionary paths and institutional backgrounds of a society: the impression, looking at the Lisbon Strategy and other EU documents, is that the neo-liberal logic is increasingly grounding in the old continent. By framing cohesion as coherent with neoliberalism, privatization and growth could be over-simplified—a sort of rhetorical device in order to maintain credibility towards free market strategies. In this sense, it can contribute to delegitimate progressive, originally left views of the problems by emptying them of their contents: where is the problem if the cohesion policy only produces virtuous effects and is coherent with neo-liberalism? Yet why, otherwise, have we supported a progressive decoupling of European economic integration and social protection issues from Rome to Maastricht, and now to Lisbon (Davoudi, 2005)? Depoliticizing strategies is a perilous task and the production of generic documents, full of “flat” concepts and foundational policy orientations, does not help in any way the consolidation of an European model of society. This becomes
evident once cohesion policies produce new forms of corporativism and localism, with regions “competing” in order to attract Structural Funds, and EU territorial cooperation policies trying to limit the boundary tensions.
This is a clear outcome when we face the tension between particular and universal interests in a political framework where states used to embody universal ones. Following this logic, territorial cohesion and competitiveness are identified as high politics (or post-political ideas, to use the language of Mouffe, 2005, and Žižek, 2006) that deny their political character and their internal contradictions. So, what is the role played by power structures, market domination and exploitation in the EC documents? Where is the political field in celebrating egalitarianism in terms of “we”, a collection of regions, facing “globalization”? It can be argued that the described harmonization of contradictions (Jessop, 2002)—easily reconciling competitiveness with local authority, sustainability with growth, market forces with quality of life—may take place only in the field of abstract rhetoric.
References
Ache, P., Andersen, H. T.,Maloutas, T., Raco,M. & Tasan-Kok, T. (Eds) (2008) Cities Between Competitiveness and Cohesion. Discourses, Realities and Implementation (Berlin: Springer).
Agamben, G. (2003) Lo stato d’eccezione (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri).
Allen, D. (2005) Cohesion and the structural funds: Competing pressures for reform? in: H.Wallace,W.Wallace & M. A. Pollack (Eds) Policy-making in the European Union, pp. 213–241 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Barnett, C. (2005) The consolations of “neoliberalism”, Geoforum, 36(1), pp. 7–12.
Barnier, M. (2004) Preface, in: Innovative City and Business Regions. Structural Change in Europe 3,p.1, (Bollschweil: Hagbarth).
Bourdieu, P. (2005) The Social Structures of the Economy (Cambridge: Polity Press).
Brenner, N. & Theodore, N. (2002) Cities and the geographies of ‘actually existing Neoliberalism’, Antipode, 34(3), pp. 349–379.
Buck, N., Gordon, I., Harding, A. & Turok, I. (Eds) (2005) Changing Cities. Rethinking Urban Competitiveness, Cohesion and Governance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
Camagni, R. (2002) On the concept of territorial competitiveness: Sound or misleading? Urban Studies, 39(13), pp. 2395–2411.
Castells, M. & Himanen, P. (2002) The Information Society and the Welfare State. The Finnish Model (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Cerny, P. (2000) Restructuring the political area: Globalization and the paradoxes of the competition state, in: R. Germain (Ed.) Globalization and Its Critics: Perspectives from Political Economy, pp. 117–138 (London: Macmillian).
Dammers, E. & Evers, D. (2008) Beyond heuristics: Applying scenarios to European territorial development, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 99(5), pp. 629–635.
Dannestam, T. (2008) Rethinking local politics: Towards a cultural political economy of entrepreneurial cities, Space and Polity, 12(3), pp. 353–372.
Davoudi, S. (2005) Understanding territorial cohesion, Planning, Practice & Research, 20(4), pp. 433–441. Doucet, P. (2006) Territorial cohesion of tomorrow: A path to cooperation or competition? European
Dühr, S. (2007) The Visual Language of Spatial Planning. Exploring Cartographic Representations for Spatial Planning in Europe (London: Routledge).
European Commission (1997) Treaty of Amsterdam amending the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty establishing the European Community and Related Acts, Official Journal of the European Union, 10 November 1997, C 340/01.
European Commission (2001a) Unity, Solidarity, Diversity for Europe, its People and its Territory. Second Report on Economic and Social Cohesion (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities).
European Commission (2001b) Treaty of Nice amending the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty establishing the European Community and Certain Related Acts, Official Journal of the European Union, 10 March 2001, C 80/01.
European Commission (2004a) A New Partnership for Cohesion. Convergence, Competitiveness, Cooperation. Third Report on Economic and Social Cohesion (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities).
European Commission (2004b) Interim Territorial Cohesion Report (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities).
European Commission (2007a) Treaty of Lisbon amending the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty establishing the European Community, Official Journal of the European Union, 17 December 2007, C 306/01.
European Commission (2007b) Growing Regions, Growing Europe. Fourth Report on Economic and Social Cohesion (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities).
European Commission (2008a) Growing Regions, Growing Europe. Fifth Progress Report on Economic and Social Cohesion (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities).
European Commission (2008b) Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion. Turning Territorial Diversity into Strength, Bruxelles, COM(2008) 616 (Brussels: DG Regional Policy).
European Commission, Committee on Spatial Development (1999) European Spatial Development Perspective.Towards Balanced and Sustainable Development of the Territory of the European Union (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities).
European Council (2000) Conclusions of the Presidency, Lisbon European Council, March 23–24. Available at www.europarl.europa.eu/summits (accessed 1 June 2009).
European Council (2001) Conclusions of the Presidency, Goteborg European Council, June 15–16. Available at www.europarl.europa.eu/summits (accessed 1 June 2009).
European Council (2005) Presidency Conclusions, Bruxelles European Council, March 22–23. Available at www.europarl.europa.eu/summits (accessed 1 June 2009).
EUROSTAT (2009) Eurostat Regional Yearbook 2009 (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities).
Evers, D. (2007) Reflections on territorial cohesion and European spatial planning, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 99(3), pp. 303–315.
Evers, D., Tennekes, J., Borsboom, J., van den Heiligenberg, M. & Thissen, M. (2009) A Territorial Impact Assessment of Territorial Cohesion for the Netherlands (The Hague: Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL)).
Fainstein, S. (2001) Competitiveness, cohesion and governance: Their implications for social justice, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25(4), pp. 884–888.
Faludi, A. (2006) From European spatial development to territorial cohesion policy, Regional Studies, 40(6), pp. 667–678.
Faludi, A. (2007a) Territorial cohesion policy and the European model of society, European Planning Studies, 15(4), pp. 567–583.
Faludi, A. (2007b)Making sense of the “Territorial Agenda of the European Union”, European Journal of Spatial Development, 25, Available at www.nordregio.se (accessed 1 June 2009).
Faludi, A. (Ed.) (2007c) Territorial Cohesion and the European Model of Society (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy).
Ferrugia, N. & Gallina, A. (2008) Developing Indicators of Territorial Cohesion, Research Report 1, Federico Caffe Centre, Roskilde University. Available at www.ruc.dk/federico (accessed 1 June 2009).
Galbraith, J. K. (1958) The Affluent Society (London: Hamish Hamilton).
Gilpin, R. (2001) Global Political Economy: Understanding the International Economic Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
Gordon, I. (2005) Integrating cities, in: N. Nuck, I. Gordon, A. Harding & I. Turok (Eds) Changing Cities. Rethinking Urban Competitiveness, Cohesion and Governance, pp. 78–93 (Basingstoke: Palmgrave). Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Harvey, D. (2008) The right to the city, New Left Review, (53), pp. 23–40.
Informal Ministerial Meeting (2005) The territorial state and perspectives of the European Union. Towards a stronger European territorial cohesion in the light of the Lisbon and Gothenburg ambitions, Informal Ministerial Meeting, Luxembourg, May 20–21.
Informal Ministerial Meeting (2007a) Territorial Agenda of the European Union. Towards a more competitive and sustainable Europe of diverse regions, Informal Ministerial Meeting on Urban Development and Territorial Cohesion, Leipzig, May 24–25.
Informal Ministerial Meeting (2007b) Leipzig charter on European sustainable cities. Informal Ministerial Meeting on Urban Development and Territorial Cohesion, Leipzig, May 24–25.
Jacob, M. (2003) Rethinking science and commodifying knowledge, Policy Futures in Education, 1(1), pp. 125–142.
Jameson, F. (1981) The Political Unconscious, Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
Janin Rivolin, U. (2005) Cohesion and subsidiarity: Towards good territorial governance in Europe, Town Planning Review, 76(1), pp. 93–107.
Jessop, B. (2002) Liberalism, neoliberalism, and urban governance: A state-theoretical perspective, Antipode, 34(3), pp. 452–472.
Jessop, B. (2004) Critical semiotic analysis and cultural political economy, Critical Discourse Studies, 1(2), pp. 159–174.
Jessop, B. & Oosterlynckb, S. (2008) Cultural political economy. On making the cultural turn without falling into soft economic sociology, Geoforum, 39(3), pp. 1155–1169.
Knill, C. (1998) European policies: The impact of national administrative traditions, Journal of Public Policy, 18(1), pp. 1–28.
Krugman, P. (1996) Pop Internationalism (London: MIT Press).
Leibfried, S. & Pierson, P. (Eds) (1995) European Social Policy. Between Fragmentation and Integration (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution).
Leitner, H., Sheppard, E., Sziarto, K. & Maringanti, A. (2007) Contesting urban futures: Decentering neoliberalism, in: H. Leitner, J. Peck & E. Sheppard (Eds) Contesting Neoliberalism. Urban Frontiers, pp. 1–25 (London: The Guilford Press).
Malecki, E. J. (2002) Hard and soft networks for urban competitiveness, Urban Studies, 39(5–6), pp. 929– 945.
Marston, S. A., Jones, J. P. &Woodward, K. (2005) Human geography without scale, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30(4), pp. 416–432.
Massey, D. (2005) For Space (London: Sage).
Mouffe, C. (2005) On the Political (London: Routledge).
Novy, A., Moulaert, F., Coimbra de Souza, D. & Beinstein, B. (2009) Social cohesion: Conceptual and political clarifications, Social Polis Vienna Conference, May 11–12 (unpublished).
Ong, A. (2007) Neoliberalism as a mobile technology, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32(1), pp. 3–8.
Palan, R. & Cameron, A. (2004) The Imagined Economies of Globalization (London: Sage).
Park, B.-G. (2005) Globalization and local political economy: The multi-scalar approach, Global Economic Review, 34(4), pp. 397–414.
Peck, J. & Tickell, A. (2002) Neoliberizing space, Antipode, 34, pp. 380–404.
Polanyi, K. (1944) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (New York: Farrar & Rinehart).
Raco, M. (2005) Sustainable development, rolled-out neo-liberalism and sustainable communities, Antipode, 37(2), pp. 324–346.
Ribera-Fumaz, R. (2009) From urban political economy to cultural political economy: Rethinking culture and economy in and beyond the urban, Progress in Human Geography, 33(4), pp. 447–465.
Rist, G. (1996) Le Développement. Histoire d’une croyance occidentale (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques).
Robertson, S. L. (2008) Embracing the global: Crisis and the creation of a new semiotic order to secure Europe’s knowledge-based economy, in: N. Fairclough, R. Wodak & B. Jessop (Eds) Education in the Knowledge-Based Economy in Europe, pp. 89–108 (Rotterdam: Sense).
Schout, J. A. & Jordan, A. J. (2007) From cohesion to territorial policy integration (TPI): Exploring the governance challenges in the European Union, European Planning Studies, 15(6), pp. 835–851. Swyngedouw, E., Moulaert, F. & Rodriguez, A. (2002) Neoliberal urbanization in Europe: Large-scale urban
development projects and the new urban policy, Antipode, 34(3), pp. 542–577.
Turok, I. (2005) Cities, competition and competitiveness: Identifying new connections, in: N. Nuck, I. Gordon, A. Harding & I. Turok (Eds) Changing Cities. Rethinking Urban Competitiveness, Cohesion and Governance, pp. 25–43 (Basingstoke: Palmgrave).
Vranken, J. (2008) Competitiveness and cohesion: A Janus Head? Some conceptual clarifications, in: P. Ache, H. T. Andersen, T. Maloutas, M. Raco & Y. Tasan-Kok (Eds) Cities Between Competitiveness and Cohesion. Discourses, Realities and Implementation, pp. 19–37 (Berlin: Springer).
Wacquant, L. J. D. (2008) Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge: Polity Press).
Waterhout, B. (2008) The Institutionalization of European Spatial Planning (Amsterdam: IOS). Žižek, S. (2006) The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
