Review by Michael Romandel
While there is no doubting that Neil Brenner’s New State Spacees: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood is a remarkable achievement in interdisciplinary scholarship that actually attempts to take up Sayer’s (1999) call for post-disciplinary research that completely surpasses the disciplinary research paradigms characteristic of non-dialectical bourgeois scholarship, the analysis provided of the relationship between post-Fordist-neo-liberal restructuring, space, and urbanization lacks any mention of the role of class struggle and fails to provide a sufficient analysis of the role that economic crises play in this relationship. One of Brenner’s main focuses and contributions in this work is his use of three ‘cuts’, ironically following Harvey’s (1982) example of using three cuts to explain the development of capitalist crises, to help him explain the development of what he calls rescaled competition state regimes or RCSRs, which he explains as being:
“rescaled, because it rests upon scale-sensitive political strategies intended to position key subnational spaces…within supranational…circuits of capital accumulation; a competition state, because it privileges the goal of economic competitiveness over traditional welfarist priorities such as equity and redistribution; and a regime, because it represents an unstable, evolving institutional-geographical mosaic rather than a fully consolidated framework of statehood” (260).
He posits that the first-cut of RCSRs, which were primarily implemented in the 1980s and early 1990s in western Europe, were of an explicitly neo-liberal nature in their orientation towards making certain sub-national spaces (cities, city-regions and particular urban spaces) more competitive, with these strategies largely being developed in reaction to the perceived crises of Keynesian state spatial policies based on territorial equalization across national spaces. The second-cut of RCSRs refers to the combination of state spatial projects (actual policies and practices) and state spatial strategies (the goals of state spatial projects and politico-ideological orientations that influence these goals) that were developed in the 1990s and early 2000s in response to the political and economic crises that arose out of the state spatial projects implemented under the more explicitly neo-liberal RCSRs of the 1980s and 1990s (the time periods vary considerably for different nations and/or subnational units), and generally attempted to ameliorate some of their negative effects. The third cut is undoubtedly the strangest of the three, as it amounts to a prediction that a possible long-term social-democratic solution to the crisis-tendencies of RCSRs could be found through an RCSR that would involve some kind of EU-wide Keynesianism, under which Europe-wide territorial equalization policies would be promoted. This is definitely the weakest aspect of Brenner’s work in New State Spaces, as his failure to look beyond Europe in his final ‘optimistic’ solution and the fact that he largely fails to examine the importance of class struggle in the shift from first-cut to second-cut RCSRs, and then to his proposed third-cut RCSR, causes him to repeat the errors made in the bourgeois disciplinary studies that he is trying to break away from. His social-democratic ‘solution’ also seems to ignore the fact that the objective crisis-tendencies of capitalist urban development cannot be ameliorated by Keynesian strategies of territorial equalization. Regardless of why Brenner failed to include class struggle or a Marxist analysis of capitalism in his framework, the fact remains that his analysis could have benefited from a relatively elementary application of the work of Robert Brenner (2002, 2006) on the long downturn as well as the work of Ellen Meiksins Wood and Simon Clarke on class struggle in the current era of post-Fordist-neo-liberal restructuring.
However, despite the fact that Brenner’s work fails to include work on important issues like class struggle and the actual crisis tendencies of capitalism in its analysis, it still provides a strong examination of the role of the state in attempting to ameliorate the political and economic crises caused by both Fordist-Keynesianism and post-Fordist-neo-liberalism through spatial restructuring. Brenner’s analysis provides a firm base that other researchers can build on by analyzing the role of class struggle and the crisis tendencies of capitalism in shaping the processes of state spatial restructuring that he explores. Interestingly, another useful application of his work has been driven by the need to explain the fiscal and programmatic downloading that has been undertaken in advanced capitalist states under neo-liberalism, though these applications of his work often simplify his analysis of the process of state rescaling, which obviously goes far beyond fiscal and programmatic downloading to regions and municipalities under neo-liberalism. One of the other major contributions that Brenner has made in this work and his overall academic project on state spatial restructuring has been his divergence from earlier theorizations that viewed the nation-state as becoming increasingly unimportant under post-Fordist-neo-liberalism, with Brenner seeing the nation-state as simply shifting the scalar articulation of its exercising of state power to both sub-national and supra-national scales. Thus, despite the flaws pointed out here, Brenner’s work on state rescaling and the elucidation of his theories in New State Spaces represent a definite contribution to analyses of post-Fordist-neo-liberal restructuring that should not be ignored by anyone researching this issue regardless of their ‘discipline’ or whether they even agree with the regulation school framework he utilizes or the main arguments he makes about shifts in the scalar articulation of state power.
References
Brenner, N. (2004). New State Spaces: urban governance and the rescaling of statehood. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brenner, R. (2002). The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy. London; New York: Verso.
Brenner, R. (2006). The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945-2005. London; New York: Verso.
Harvey, D. (1982). The Limits to Capital. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Sayer, A. (1999, April). Long Live Postdisciplinary Studies! Sociology and the Curse of Disciplinary Parochialism/Imperialism. Lancaster University Department of Sociology. Retreived July 28, 2008 from the World Wide Web: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/papers/sayer-long-live-postdisciplinary-studies.pdf