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REGIONS, SPACES OF ECONOMIC PRACTICE AND DIVERSE
ECONOMIES IN THE ‘NEW EUROPE’
★
Adrian Smith
Queen Mary, University of London, UK
Abstract
This paper considers some alternative readings of
‘the region’ in contemporary Europe. It does so
through examining cities and regions as moments in
webs of connections and through considering the
diversity of economic practices that constitute
regional economic life. Drawing inspiration from
non-essentialist political economy, the paper charts
several debates over how European regions are
conceived in the mainstream, and emphasizes the
limits of seeing regional spaces as bounded, centred
on capitalist social relations and fixed in their
identities. The paper explores alternative readings
that emphasize the relational and open nature of
regional spaces through a consideration of the
economic practices found in the European garment
industry.
Steps towards a new ontology of Europe’s
regions
also necessary to understand how and why groups
construct regions as ‘bounded’ and coherent at
particular times as part of larger political projects.
At times such ‘bounded constructions’ of places can
be highly regressive, in the form of petty yet
powerful nationalisms and other territorial
exclusions; at others they may be attempts at
developing a progressive politics in the face of
uncertainty and instability. Clearly, there is a
complex pathway to be taken between seeing
‘regions’ as ontological spaces of openness and
connectivity, or as bounded and homogenous. Yet, I
would argue that these positions are not
incommensurable if we understand territorial and
regional spaces as always already socially
constructed. Indeed, regional spaces at the panEuropean scale have often been constructed as
bounded as a result of a form of territorial
governmentality which positions territories relative
to one another as a basis for the disbursement of
regional assistance programmes at the Community
level, such as the Structural Funds. Consequently, I
argue in this paper that it is helpful to move away
from claims regarding the boundedness of European
regions towards a consideration of the trans-local
Regions and territories in Europe have come to the
forefront of thinking about Europe’s futures.
Whether it is through discourses concerning a
‘Europe of the regions’ or through the recent
emphasis upon the significance of regional clusters
as the basis of economic competitiveness (see
Martin and Sunley [2003] for a critical review),
regions are seen as key sites of new European
identities and the ‘new economy’. However, what
such renderings have often missed is a wider,
emergent debate that has begun to problematize the
ontological basis of spaces such as ‘the region’ and
‘the city’ (see, in particular, Allen et al., 1998; Amin
and Thrift, 2002). In particular, this debate has
begun to challenge our conceptions of ‘the city’ and
‘the region’ as bounded, homogenous, as a container
of identities, and as the source of economic
competitiveness. Instead, cities and regions are
conceived as moments in spaces of flows, as
relational places entangled in webs of connections.
Hudson (2001) has argued that while these claims
towards geographical openness are important, it is
European Urban and Regional Studies 11(1): 9–25
10.1177/0969776404039139
KEY WORDS ★ clothing industry ★ diverse
economy ★ Eastern Europe ★ regions ★ space
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EUROPEAN URBAN AND REGIONAL STUDIES 11(1)
connectivities that constitute economic practices in
and between particular spaces.
A related but separate debate has also emerged
highlighting the importance of understanding places
as the coming together of myriad economic
practices and discourses – of regions as ‘diverse
economies’. There are two key themes that I wish to
consider here. First, part of this body of work
associated with the debate over multiple economies
has focused on the role and political significance of
recognizing ‘diverse economies’ (Gibson-Graham,
1996; Community Economies Collective, 2001;
Gibson, 2001). As I discuss in more detail below,
this work aims, in part, to engage between research
and political action by highlighting and ‘envisioning’
the possibilities for non-capitalist economic
practices in particular places and regions. In this
paper, however, I emphasize the role of this body of
work within the context of an opening-up of our
conception of regional economies as multiply
constituted by capitalist and non-capitalist relations.
A second approach has emphasized the role of
multiple actants in our understanding of economic
practices (Murdoch, 1995; 1997; Thrift and Olds,
1996; Dicken et al., 2001). Drawing inspiration, in
part, from actor network theory, this body of work
has begun to unpick how economic geographies and
practices are constituted through the action of
diverse and multiple agents: not just powerful
corporations, but active workers (Smith, 2003a),
machinery and technologies, and the non-human
(Whatmore and Thorne, 1997). While I focus in
more detail in what follows on the former rather
than the latter, I argue that both claims share a core
concern for understanding how economic
geographies of regions are multiple and not
reducible to an essentialist capitalist form. This is
not to exclude a recognition of the dynamism and
role of capitalism and social relations constituted
through and within market and commodity
relations. Nor is it to exclude the profound and
constitutive power of neo-liberalism in shaping
development trajectories. What I hope to do is to
explore the ways in which these capitalisms and
neo-liberalisms are, and have become, always already
articulated with a wider political economy of noncapitalism and to explore the significance of these
claims within the context of (East) European
transitions.1
In this paper, then, I want to consider how these
two debates concerning a different ontology of cities
and regions – that dealing with the unbounded
spaces of the region and that dealing with regions as
diverse economies – might be used to rethink the
changing positionality of European regions. In
particular, and drawing upon Amin and Thrift’s
(2002) provocative rethinking of the city, I argue,
first, that instead ‘of conceiving [regions] … as
either bounded or punctured economic entities, we
[should] see them as assemblages of more or less
distanciated economic relations which will have
different intensities at different locations’ (Amin
and Thrift, 2002: 52). This is not to argue that
regions are never ‘discursively’ bounded through
claims to identity – regionalist movements,
nationalism, and so on (Hudson, 2001). Rather, it is
to suggest that a fruitful starting point conceives of
places as always already constituted through
relations across space. Second, I argue that in
conceiving of ‘regions’ as ‘sites in spatially stretched
economic relations’ (Amin and Thrift, 2002: 63),
‘every site … is approached as precisely a grouping
of distinct, constitutive processes’ (Resnick and
Wolff, 1993: 64).2 Such a claim is important to
recognizing the specificity of constitutive forces in
regional economies in Europe but it is also
suggestive of the need to make and understand links
between ‘sites’ – what George Marcus (1995; 1998)
has called the need for a ‘multi-sited research
imaginary’. Consequently, later in the paper I
illustrate how this focus can assist in the
understanding of regions with growing garment
production in East-Central Europe. In particular, I
situate the growth of such economic activity within
a context of wider, geographical flows of value and
garment contracting relation across European space
– precisely the kind of ‘spatially stretched economic
relations’ emphasized by Amin and Thrift.
The paper is organized as follows. The first
section considers two ways of ‘thinking’ regional
economic performance in Europe. It contrasts the
conventional, nevertheless useful, approach that
attempts to ‘represent’ relative regional economic
performance through the mapping of regional
economic data. The power of these representations
of performance lies, in part, in their use by the
European Commission for the allocation of
Structural Funds. I consider, however, some of the
ways in which the bounded nature of such
conceptions of regional economic performance has
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SMITH: REGIONS, SPACES OF ECONOMIC PRACTICE AND DIVERSE ECONOMIES
been manipulated in the search for politically
motivated definitions of ‘the region’ that have the
potential to maximize regional assistance
disbursements. As such, I argue that such regional
statistical mapping is an attempt to make regions
‘visible’ and to subject them to forms of
governmentality at the pan-European level. This is
most clearly seen in the recent extension of the
territorial units used by the European Commission
to the terrain of the new member states of EastCentral Europe. Equally, an emphasis on the
‘bounded spaces’ of conventional measures of
regional economic performance creates a closure
around our recognition of diverse economic
practices. A key element missed by such conceptual
closure concerns the role of the ‘informal’ economy
in economic life – expressed not only in terms of the
non-monetary economy of barter, street trading,
informal employment, etc., but also in terms of the
reciprocal ‘economies of regard’ (Lee, 2000; Smith,
2002a) that underpin household and community
economic practices across Europe. As a
consequence, any focus on regional closures using
GDP data – while important for initial mappings of
uneven development – must be rethought within the
context of a recognition of diverse economies of
regions. I consider a different reading of regional
economic ‘performance’ in which regional
economies are understood as constituted through
and by diverse economic practices. Such practices
may lead to: (a) a recognition of different regional
capitalisms and different models of performance; (b)
the importance of being open to different and
diverse economic practices constituting regional
economic life; and (c) a recognition of the discursive
renderings of ‘Economy’ and ‘Region’ in which all
too often ‘Regions’ are subjected to an ‘Economy’ of
economic rationality and the market that excludes
other possible readings (Gibson, 2001). I am not
arguing that these elements provide a simple
celebration of economic difference – what Watts
(2003a) calls ‘grassroots postmodernism’. Rather, I
am suggesting that capitalist social relations and
neo-liberalism have limits, and that these claims
open up questions concerning these limits and the
‘forms of power and economy – the contours of
hegemony’ (Watts, 2003a) expressed through the
diverse economies of regional Europe.
The second section of the paper then considers a
relational reading of ‘the region’ as the basis for
understanding the spatially stretched and
distanciated economic relations practised within and
between regions. In particular, I emphasize the role
of trans-local flows of capital in ‘regionally sited’
economic practices and illustrate how this
perspective enables an understanding of the
changing geographies of deindustrialization and
industrial growth in the garment sector in different
parts of Europe. In the third section I turn to
consider the diverse economies of regions, as a basis
for moving away from capital-centric readings of
‘regional performance’ and towards a recognition of
the plurality of regional economic practices in
Europe. In particular, I emphasize the multiply
constituted class processes underpinning the diverse
economies of garment production in Central
European regions.
Regional economic ‘performance’ in the
new Europe
A central element in considering regions in the ‘new
Europe’ concerns the relative wealth distributions of
European capitalisms across space. Conventional
approaches to this question have emphasized the
disparate and uneven geography of European
capitalisms through an analysis of regional economic
performance indicators, notably GDP per capita.
Indeed, such a territorialized representation of
regional economies is used widely by the European
Commission, among others, in its analyses of
regional inequality and ‘cohesion’ in Europe (see for
example, CEC, 2001; 2002; 2003). Under the dual
focus of competitiveness and cohesion, regional
economic performance is centred on trends in GDP
per capita over time. Other indicators are used, such
as employment and unemployment rates, but the
centrality of GDP performance is underlined by its
use in determining the allocation of the EU’s main
regional assistance programme, the Objective 1 of
the Structural Funds. Such analyses have
highlighted a number of key outcomes in the
experience of regional economic performance in the
European Union. Since the publication of the
European Commission’s first report on cohesion,
and as discussed in its annual periodic reports,
disparities in wealth between EU member states –
measured by per capita GDP relative to the EU
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average – have continued to fall, but have grown
within member states (CEC, 2001; 2002; 2003).
Together this monitoring of regional economic
performance suggests, then, that convergence and
divergence within the European Union coexist at
different geographical scales within a context of
increasing liberal market integration (see Dunford
and Smith, 2000).3 More recently, however, the
future enlargement of the EU in 2004 to include 10
of the applicant states (mostly from ECE) has placed
issues of territorial performance at centre stage.
This is particularly so because of the wide
disparities that exist between the current 15 member
states of the EU and many of the applicant states.
Indeed, the most recent periodic report from the
Commission argued that enlargement will ‘present
an unprecedented challenge for the competitiveness
and internal cohesion of the Union’ (CEC, 2003: 2).
In highlighting the large-scale increase in territorial
inequalities that will ensue with enlargement in
2004, such reports underline the very real material
disparities that underpin territorial economies in an
increasingly integrated Europe.
While providing a comparable framework for
assessing ‘performance’ and Structural Fund
disbursements, the use of GDP per capita also
brings with it a number of limitations. First, as is
widely recognized, GDP figures fail to record
accurately that economic activity undertaken
outside, or on the margins of, the ‘formal’ economy.
In some regions such activities are of great
significance not only in terms of their contribution
to ‘unmeasured’ economic output (Schneider and
Enste, 2000), but also as sites of potentiality as
alternatives to capital-centrism – a point to which I
will return. As Altvater (1998: 599) reminds us, for
example, official data on GDP in East-Central
Europe do not fully record the size of the
‘underground’ or ‘shadow’ economies. Nor does
GDP data, as feminists have importantly reminded
us, say anything about ‘unpaid’ labour in the home.
While the shadow economy is important in all
national economies, it has become central to the
development of economic ‘survival strategies’
throughout ECE since 1989 (Bridger and Pine,
1998; Clarke, 1999; 2002; Smith, 2000). Equally, for
the EU, a European Commission communication
estimated that the ‘black’ economy accounted for
between 2 and 4 percent of GDP in Finland and
from 29 to 35 percent in Greece and for between 7
and 19 percent of total declared EU employment,
with most undeclared work carried out by people
with regular jobs (CEC, 1998). Indeed, the
‘informal economy’ is widely recognized as a key
element in the economies of Europe from the
Mediterranean region to Northern Europe
(Mingione, 1988; 1995; Williams and Windebank,
1998). For East-Central Europe, Altvater (1998)
estimates that the size of the shadow economy in
Russia is at least 40 percent of GDP. The role of the
shadow economy is less significant in Central
European countries, but it may still account for
between 15 and 25 percent of national GDP,
therefore suggesting that official GDP figures
underestimate the ‘true’ level of economic activity
(Altvater, 1998). The basis on which it is thus
‘accurate’ to use GDP data recorded for the formal
economy to capture the ‘real’ performance of
territorial economies in Europe thus becomes
problematic.
Such an approach highlights the failures of
conventional renderings of ‘Economy’ in which the
diversity of economic practices is obscured by the
hegemony of the formal capitalist economy (see
Gibson-Graham, 1996). A more productive starting
point, as I will discuss later, is to recognize the
articulations of different social formations in
particular places and regions, and on the basis of
this recognition to begin to build an understanding
of the socially constructed nature of economic
practices resulting from the coming together of
different social formations. In addition,
conventional readings take regional economies as
fixed and bounded entities. In treating regions as
bounded a number of issues are raised concerning,
first, the very definition of Europe’s ‘regions’
(which is dealt with in this section), and second the
importance of seeing regions as relational, open
spaces, bounded only by the trans-local practices
that engage sites across space (which is dealt with in
the following section).
The first issue concerns the process of regional
definition in Europe. As is widely known, the
European Commission uses the NUTS procedure
to identify regions, which are initially defined at the
national level but subject to approval by the
Commission. NUTS (Nomenclature of Territorial
Units for Statistics) are territorially defined units at
five levels of aggregation. NUTS II regions, which
are the most widely used unit of analysis, are called
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SMITH: REGIONS, SPACES OF ECONOMIC PRACTICE AND DIVERSE ECONOMIES
Basic Administrative Units and NUTS III regions
are subdivisions of these units. The NUTS system
is based on an explicit set of normative criteria,
largely the territorial or political division of a state.
As a result there is a large degree of heterogeneity in
the NUTS system. But notwithstanding this
heterogeneity, territorial delimitations such as
NUTS and the attempts to map relative
performance of such units is one element, as we
shall see, of attempts at territorial governmentality.
Because the definition and demarcation of
NUTS II regions is used for the disbursement of
EU Structural Fund assistance, it is not surprising
that the definition of the regional units required for
assessing regional economic performance is highly
politicized. This politicization results not only from
the role of such units in territorial governance but
also because the definition of the territorial units is
often aimed to maximize regional assistance
funding. There are clear illustrations of this process
in the UK and in Ireland (see Boyle, 2000). More
recently in East-Central Europe, where Structural
Fund assistance is likely to provide a key mechanism
for new investment in relatively poor regional
economies, it is also clear that the definition of
NUTS II regions – in particular that of the capital
city regions – has affected measures of relative
regional performance.4 Decisions concerning
regional boundaries were made in some ECE
applicant states on the basis of maximizing potential
Structural Fund disbursements (Rajčak, 2002). For
example, under currently recognized NUTS II
boundaries in the Czech Republic, Prague city is
designated a NUTS II region with a population of
1.2m in 1999 and has a per capita GDP of 124
percent of the EU15 average. The surrounding
Central Czech region has a population of 1.1m and
a per capita GDP of 48 percent of the EU15
average. As such the Central Czech region would be
eligible for Structural Fund assistance after the
Czech Republic joins the EU. If the two regions had
been incorporated into one NUTS II region the
population total would have approximated that of,
say, the Central Hungary NUTS II region (which
includes the capital city of Budapest, and which falls
below the 75 percent of EU per capita GDP level)
but its average per capita would have been 87
percent of the EU average, thereby taking 1.1m
people above the 75 percent of EU average per
capita GDP threshold required for Structural Fund
eligibility. In Hungary, by contrast, Budapest city
was included with the surrounding region with the
result that overall average GDP per capita was just
below the 75 percent level, making the entire region
of nearly 3m people eligible for Structural Fund
allocations (see Smith, 2003c).
The overall effect of these politicized decisions
concerning regional boundaries is to make
comparable analysis of NUTS II regions difficult,
even though the purpose of Eurostat’s use of NUTS
II regions is precisely for such comparative analysis.
For example, if the regional definitions for the
Czech Republic and Slovakia are changed to
position the capital city regions within their
hinterland regions (and thereby making them
approximately the same population size of
comparable regions in Hungary and Poland) the per
capita GDP of each falls to 87 percent and 57
percent of the EU average, respectively. This has the
effect of significantly reducing disparities in
regional performance at the NUTS II level in both
countries. Together, such approaches reflect what
Paasi (2002: 804) has called a ‘pre-scientific view’,
one that:
implies that ‘region’ is a practical choice, a given spatial
unit (statistical area, municipality or locality), which is
needed for collecting/representing data but which has
no particular conceptual role … The current ‘Europe of
regions’ provides a particularly tempting grid of regions
(and data) that are often taken for granted.
The ‘region’ here is rendered as a bounded space, a
form of governmentality in which economic
‘performance’ is measured, mapped and compared
as a basis for the distribution of EU funding.
Alternative readings of regional ‘performance’
in the new Europe
An alternative way of thinking about regional
economic performance is to emphasize that
representations such as those found in EU
assessments of cohesion tend towards viewing
regions as fixed, as containers of economic activity.
By contrast, in some of the critical geographic
literature, an emphasis has been placed more
usefully on seeing regional economies as
‘performed’ through and by complex economic
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practices. First, there are those who emphasize that
geographies of economies are actively constructed
through multiple economies of practices (see, in
different ways, Community Economies Collective,
2001; Gibson-Graham, 1995; 1996; Amin and
Thrift, 2002; Whatmore, 2003). Second, there are
those who focus more on the discursive
constructions of ‘Economy’ and ‘Region’, in
particular emphasizing the ‘subjection’ of the
Region to Economy, that is of the Region to marketled economic rationalities (Gibson, 2001).
In the first reading, a challenge is made to the
performative centrality of capitalism for
understanding regional change. In challenging what
Gibson-Graham has called the ‘capitalocentrism’ of
much work in economic geography and political
economy, they argue that understandings of regional
and local change must take as their starting point the
overdetermined nature of social life. Drawing upon
a long lineage of Althusserian-inspired Marxian
thinking, Gibson-Graham (1996: 27) has argued
that overdetermination avoids positioning capitalism
as always already hegemonic, and can be understood
as:
the irreducible specificity of every determination; the
essential complexity – as opposed to the root simplicity –
of every form of existence; the openness or
incompleteness of every identity; the ultimate unfixity of
every meaning; and the correlate possibility of
conceiving an acentric – Althusser uses the term
‘decentered’ – social totality that is not structured by the
primacy of any social element or location.
Such an approach to overdetermination positions
‘theory’ within a context of partiality and openness.
It does not rely on assessing the ‘empirical primacy’
of any social element – such as capitalist social
relations – but highlights the importance of
selecting ‘entry points’ to the complex terrain of
theorizing. In developing this epistemological
position, Resnick and Wolff (1987:3) argue that
‘essentialism is the presumption that among the
influences producing any outcome, some can be
shown to be inessential to its occurrence, while
others will be shown to be essential causes’. Nonessentialist claims, such as those pursued by
Gibson-Graham and Resnick and Wolff, actively
implicate ‘all exteriors’ – the ‘constitutive outside’ –
and undermine ‘the hierarchy of importance that
defines some attributes or causes as necessary or
essential, and others as contingent or peripheral’
(Gibson-Graham, 1996: 28). In other words, the aim
is ‘to resuscitate the suppressed, to make room for
the absent, to see what is invisible, to account for
what is unaccounted for, to experience what is
forbidden’ (Gibson-Graham, 1996: 28). The claim
here is to liberate the non-capitalist from its
secondary position in understandings of social
formations and to reposition ‘capitalism’ alongside
the multiple determinations and class processes
constituting any one social formation.
One consequence of recognizing this bewildering
complexity of overdetermination is that some kind
of ‘entry point’ is necessary at which to begin
analyses of social formations (Gibson-Graham,
1996: 29 fn9). For Gibson-Graham an important
point of entry to understanding such multiple
economies is that of class processes. Class processes
are understood as that set of processes associated
with, first, the way in which surplus product is
produced and appropriated, and second, with the
way in which that product is then distributed among
a population. Resnick and Wolff (1987) have called
these ‘fundamental’ and ‘subsumed’ class processes.
Understanding the ways in which diverse class
processes are articulated, then, becomes a critical
theoretical project grounded in the complex terrain
of the everyday. Take, for instance, the following
hypothetical example of the co-mingling of class
processes and possible identities from GibsonGraham et al. (2000: 10):
Consider, for instance, a married laborer in a rural
mining enterprise who spends his weekends hunting for
game that is consumed by his family and also sold
through a marketing cooperative. This individual may
participate in a capitalist class process ‘at work’ (where
he works for a wage and produces surplus value that is
appropriated by the board of directors of the enterprise);
a communal class process ‘at home’ (where he and his
spouse jointly engage in housekeeping and childrearing,
collectively producing, appropriating and distributing
their surplus labor); and an independent class process on
the weekends in the outdoors (where he works on his
own and appropriates and distributes his own surplus
labor). His class identity could be fixed in any number of
ways – as a worker in a capitalist firm, as a new age
communard, as an independent producer – or not at all.
With a conception of the multiplicity of class relations
that intersect in an individual’s life, we cannot assume
that participation in any one class process is a basis for
self-identification or establishing common cause with
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SMITH: REGIONS, SPACES OF ECONOMIC PRACTICE AND DIVERSE ECONOMIES
others. This is not to say that individual and collective
class ‘interests’ or desires cannot be constituted, but to
suggest that they cannot be presumed.
Indeed, in their collaborative work in the
Community Economies Collective (2001), and
through grounded action-research projects in the
Latrobe Valley in southeastern Australia and the
Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts, USA, GibsonGraham et al. have sought to illuminate both the
analytical richness of this kind of reading, as well as
the alternative politics and possibilities of the
diverse economy. I would argue that what is
important about these claims is not that we should
elevate ‘non-capitalism’ to some higher plane, as
some form of already existing emancipatory
potential, but to seek understanding of the
articulations of forms of social power and economy.
One form in which an alternative politics of
‘region’ has been considered is found in Kathy
Gibson’s discussion of the Latrobe Valley region in
Australia (Gibson, 2001). Gibson discusses how
various discourses about the region allowed for a
subjection of Region to the rationalities of the staterun and capitalist Economy. As the key industries,
particularly energy generation and mining, were
abandoned, Gibson seeks to show how alternate
conceptions from those residents abandoned by
Economy might be thought. In discussing the
discourse of one resident of the valley, Tracy,
Gibson argues that:
We see her both recognizing her subjection and putting
forward the possibility or potentiality for a different kind
of subjectivity based upon the experience of still being in
the Valley. Her identification of an ethic of care among
the focus group participants and her call to perform
community in a different way was echoed by other
community spokespeople. (Gibson, 2001: 664, emphasis
in original)
In this reading, the ‘performance’ of and about the
region is considered not through the rationalities of
regional GDP data, but through a consideration of
the discourses by which various and alternate
conceptions of region and economy come about. It
is by considering how different conceptions of
economy and region might be thought, Gibson
argues, that a space for alternatives to resourcebased regional abandonment might be considered.
However, such a conception of an alternative
politics of ‘region’ may not be relevant solely for
resource-based and single-industry places, despite
their prevalence across Europe (and elsewhere). In
re-focusing attention on a wider reading of
‘Economy’ and ‘Region’, a conception of places as
‘performed’ by multiple economic practices and
class processes becomes possible. Such a conception
differs considerably in its vitality and possibilities
from the more conventional approach to mapping
territorial disparities within bounded spaces of
regions in Europe. In particular, this alternate
perspective links to related concerns over
understanding ‘practices’ as a powerful framing of
economies (Whatmore, 2003), but it does so within
the context of a political economy of class processes
as an entry point to understanding overdetermined
social formations in regional economies. It has the
potential to position ‘capitalism’ and capitalist class
processes alongside and articulated with ‘noncapitalism’, non-capitalist class processes and nonclass processes. As such, this framing, I would
argue, has the potential to open our conceptions of
‘Economy’ and ‘Region’ through linking with an
‘old’ development studies debate over ‘articulations’
– one that was concerned with the ‘articulations of
modes of production’5 – at the heart of which was a
concern to understand the interlacing of power and
economies.6
Relational regions
The approach emphasized above concerning
regional economic ‘performance’ is suggestive of a
more open, fluid rendering of regional economies in
Europe. In this section of the paper I want to
elaborate the role of relations of flows and practices
across trans-local spaces in the creation of
connected and relational regions. My starting point
here is a range of writings in human geography,
which have variously attempted to articulate the
unboundedness of cities and regions. For example,
Allen et al. (1998) emphasize how regions are
‘unbounded’ (p. 54), ‘spatially porous’ (p. 57),
‘linked’, and internally variable or spatially
discontinuous. They are ‘full of holes’ in the sense
that the metaphor of ‘the doily [is invaluable], for
they have holes in them between the connecting
links’ (p. 56). In a similar way, Massey (1994: 154)
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has emphasized how places and regions are
‘articulated moments in networks of social relations
and understandings’. Regions, therefore, ‘only take
shape in particular contexts from specific
perspectives. There will always be multiple,
coexisting, characterizations of particular
spaces/places … There is … no “essential place”
which exists in its real authenticity waiting to be
discovered by the researcher’ (Allen et al., 1998: 34).
Furthermore, ‘variations over space are
conceptualized in terms of differentiated
articulations of social relations/processes …
[which] enables a view of uneven development
which interprets it not solely in terms of spatial
differences in the levels of certain selected criteria
…, but also in terms of the inter-regional … social
relations which produce these differences and, at
least temporarily, lock them into place’ (Allen et al.,
1998: 50). Clearly, then, this focus on the
unbounded nature of processes which are
temporarily locked in place emphasizes the spatial
porosity, discontinuity and relationality of regions.
As Hudson (2001: 265) has reminded us, however, it
is of equal importance to also understand why, at
times and in certain places, people living in
particular places construct images of those places as
bounded and/or closed, in part ‘as a way of
surviving and dealing with the risks and
uncertainties of their precarious existence’. Within
the context of East-Central Europe, for example, the
construction of bounded places and exclusionary
spaces has been a key element in the emergence of
nationalist and regionalist movements, which in
many cases have resulted in quite negative
conceptions of regional/national identities to the
exclusion of others. At the same time, however, and
notwithstanding the links between nationalism and
economic decline in the region (Pavlínek, 1995;
Smith, 1998), it is also important to recognize that
an exclusionary politics is not reducible solely to
capitalist austerity.
Amin and Thrift (2002) have made a similar
argument to those of Allen et al. (1998) and Massey
(1994) concerning cities as ‘unbounded’ spaces.
They suggest that instead of seeing cities or regions
as ‘either bounded or punctured economic entities,
we see them as assemblages of more or less
distanciated economic relations [flows and
networks] which will have different intensities at
different locations’ (Amin and Thrift, 2002: 52).
This kind of thinking has been reflected in some of
the ‘global cities’ literature, in which – echoing
Castells’s ‘network of flows’ arguments – key nodal
points in the global economy are seen as collectors of
wealth ‘because of what flows through them, rather
than what they statistically contain’ (Beaverstock et
al., 2000: 126).
Trans-local networks and relational spaces
One way of considering regions as unbounded,
relational and linked is through the form and
function that trans-local networks assume and that
the flows of economic value take across geographical
space (see Smith et al., 2002; Smith, 2003a). For
example, the emphasis on trans-local processes has
been helpful elsewhere in enabling a transcending of
a simple notion of hierarchical scales from ‘global’
to ‘local’ to ‘body’. Instead, considering trans-local
connections allows us to think the intertwining of
locals by considering the ‘stretched’ nature of
relations over space (Latham, 2002). It enables, if
you like, an ability to think across various ‘locals’. As
Law and Hetherington (2000) have argued, thinking
about trans-locality enables us to argue that
‘knowing, knowing at a distance, acting, acting at a
distance, and the making of space, are all relational
effects. And they are materially heterogeneous effects.
Materials of all kinds are being disciplined,
constituted, organised, and/or organising
themselves to produce knowledges, subjects, objects,
distances and locations.’
Such challenges to thinking trans-locally have
been echoed in recent innovations in critical area
studies, a realm that traditionally has been centred
on understandings of discreet and bounded
regions/spaces somewhat in isolation to one
another. For example, the recent programme of
doctoral training run by the Institute of
International Studies at the University of
California, Berkeley, is one model. Here the ‘New
Geographies, New Pedagogies’ and the ‘Crossing
Borders’ programmes have been aimed at
revitalizing area studies to highlight that doctoral
training is required to provide skills to manage ‘the
fact that much area studies research is being
conducted in “globalized sites”’ (IIS, n.d.). Coping
with transnationalism and trans-local relations
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might then become the heart of a rejuvenated
approach to economic geographies of regional
transformation in which the local is situated within
the context of the connectivities with distinct and
distant Others (see Smith, 2002a). Indeed, such an
approach has its parallels with work on ‘multi-sited
ethnography’ (Marcus, 1995; 1998), which is
centred on the ‘unexpected trajectories in tracing a
cultural [or any other] formation across and within
multiple sites of activity’ (p. 96). Indeed, Marcus
(1995: 97) emphasizes ‘strategies of quite literally
following connections, associations and putative
relationships’ whether through ‘following the
people’ engaged in such multiply sited networks, or
through ‘following the thing’, such as commodity
flows, across space (see Smith, 2003b for a fuller
discussion of these ideas).
Production networks and trans-locality in the
European garment sector
One illustrative form that such trans-local flows of
commodities, capital and value take in contemporary
European regions can be illustrated through an
examination of the pan-European garment sector
(Begg et al., forthcoming; Smith, forthcoming).
Since the early 1990s there has been an
intensification of networked linkages across
European regions articulated through many forms
in the process of European integration but
experienced profoundly through the outsourcing of
garment production by West European contractors,
retailers and buyers seeking lower cost but
proximate and relatively quick response production
sites in East-Central Europe. The organization of
such pan-regional production networks has been
enabled in part through various EU trade regulatory
environments, not least that known as ‘outward
processing trade’ (see Pellegrin, 2001; Begg et al.,
forthcoming). Outward processing is often
understood as either a production process or as a
specific vehicle for regulating that production
process through trade and customs regimes. It is,
however, both. As a production process, outward
processing involves offshore garment assembly and
contracted out-sourcing. EU-based manufacturers,
agents and retailers contract producers in ECE to
manufacture garments for re-import into the EU. As
a production process this may involve the bundled
supply of most inputs and components to the
producer in ECE, although it can also involve other
forms of contract production in which greater levels
of responsibility for the supply of inputs rests with
the ECE producer (Smith, 2003a). As a trade regime,
however, outward processing trade (OPT) is a
system of production governed by EU trade
regulations.7 OPT as a trade regime between the
EU and ECE takes two forms (see Pellegrin, 2001).
The first is ‘fiscal’ or ‘tariff OPT’ in which customs
regulations established in the early 1980s suspend
entirely tariff on re-imports of goods from ECE into
the EU. As a formal customs agreement no duties
are levied on raw materials (such as textiles)
temporarily exported for outward processing (into
items of clothing) undertaken in ECE countries and
re-imported into the same EU country as partially
finished or fully finished goods.
The second form is known as ‘economic OPT’,
which consists of granting additional quota for the
import into the EU of specific products produced
with EU-originating materials. By carefully
controlling the export, processing, and re-import of
certain textile and clothing products under OPT, the
EU attempted to manage the political and economic
conflict between the potential loss of domestic
employment in clothing and textiles and the erosion
of its global position in those industries to foreign
competition. However, both forms of trade regime
OPT have effectively transformed a combination of
east–west contracting relations, begun in the 1980s,
into a fully integrated pan-European garment
production system. This networked production
system binds different local spaces of contracting,
production and retailing – which some have
identified as a commodity ‘chain’ (Gereffi, 1994;
1999) or value ‘network’ (Smith et al., 2002) – and
establishes garment-related economic activity as an
always already trans-local process bounded only by
the particular geographies of the various contracting
networks put in place by key agents working within
the relevant regulatory environments of OPT.
More recently, as the EU enlargement process
has gathered speed, there has been a clear shift
towards more fully liberalized garment trade in
Europe. This has occurred to the extent that
garment trade is now fully liberalized between those
states joining the EU in 2004 and the current 15
European Union member states (Begg et al.,
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forthcoming). However, the importance of these
forms of regulatory realignment in garment trade
lies less in the detail of the regulations and more in
the way in which they have had specific localized
effects across European regions, dramatically
reconfiguring the geography of the industry as the
neo-liberal project of macro-regional integration
proceeds apace. For example, outward processing
enabled the integration of East European
manufacturers in distantiated networks of
contracting and production with EU-based retailers
and buyers, while at the same time resulting in a
significant reduction in production and employment
in Western Europe. One instance of this, discussed
in more detail in Smith (2003a), is the case of the
relatively ‘peripheral’ region of East Slovakia in
which a regional economy centred on garment
production has emerged. Garment producers in the
East Slovak region of Prešov constitute a dense
network of largely export-oriented firms. Indeed,
the Prešov region, as well as the region of Trenčín
further to the west, has one of the highest
concentrations of garment firms in Slovakia. The
clothing sector accounts for the largest individual
share of manufacturing employment in the region,
with just over 12 percent of the total (5,600
employees). The industry is largely integrated into
export-oriented, outward-processing production
networks, with more than half of enterprise receipts
in 1998 derived from exports.
These forms of outward processing have
involved such firms being integrated into
production networks largely organized by West
European buyers and retailers, notably in Germany,
Italy and the Netherlands. Clearly one of the many
determinants of these forms of distantiated
networks of production involves the stretching of
contracting across space to involve clusters of
producers in relatively poor regions of ECE (Begg
and Pickles, 2000; Pickles, 2002; Smith, 2003a; Begg
et al., forthcoming). Drawing upon relatively lowcost, largely female labour, factories in ECE have
been able to position themselves for the time being
in the globally competitive European garment
sector. However, it is also clear that these garment
producing networks involve a whole series of
geographical transfers of value across European
regional space that underpin the globally
distantiated nature of garment contracting and
production. As I have argued elsewhere, the
majority of key garment producers in East-Central
European regions such as Prešov are invariably
integrated into a system of short-term outward
processing contracts with West European buyers
and branded manufacturers. Many production
plants are involved in largely asymmetrical flows of
value underpinned by relations of power established
through contractual relations for low-cost outward
processing. One example, discussed in more detail in
Smith (2003a), illustrates the somewhat typical form
that these flows of value take through such panEuropean actor-networks. The firm is a producer of
men’s trousers for export largely to the German
market and employs just over 200 workers. With an
estimated production capability of 340,000 pairs of
trousers per year, approximately 90 percent of the
sale value of annual production accrues to the
German merchandiser and contractor (some of
which is also passed on to retailers as mark-up). An
estimated 15 percent of the final value of production
is paid to the contracting firm in Slovakia to
produce the goods for export, of which
approximately 4 percent sees its way in wage
payments to production workers and managers.
Here, the space of a peripheral region is constituted
in relation to external flows of value embodied in
‘the thing’ – in this case, specific garment
commodities – as they move down the value chain
and as value is appropriated by EU-based retailers.
Networked and distantiated production relations
thus constitute open, relational regional
economies through forms of economic integration
across trans-local spaces. In this sense, and this is
not an experience only witnessed in the garment
sector, European regional economies are always
already unbounded spaces articulated through
networked and distantiated commodity production
relations.
While regions across ECE have seen the growth
of employment and production in the garment
sector, job loss has been the norm in higher-cost
locations as production networks have shifted to
East-Central Europe and North Africa (see Dunford
et al., 2003; Begg et al., forthcoming). As
production is relocated we have witnessed a
continuing process of plant closure and decline in
Western Europe as clothing firms, designers and
retailers concentrate upon higher-value-added
design, marketing and production-oversight activity.
For example, between 1984 and 1994 there was a
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loss of some 349,000 jobs in the clothing sector in
the EU. Much of this plant closure and employment
loss has been concentrated in relatively peripheral
regions. For example, in North-east England there
has been an almost complete collapse of clothing
manufacturing in recent years, with employment
falling to just over 6,000 employees from a level of
over 20,000 in the 1950s. Intense competitive
pressure on major UK-based clothing retailers – as
elsewhere – such as Marks and Spencer has resulted
in a search for cost-saving supply locations,
mediated through its UK-based suppliers (see
Marks and Spencer, 1999; Hudson, 2002).
Processes of regional economic transformation in
East-Central Europe have clearly involved the
extension and development of capitalist relations of
production and capitalist class processes on the
terrain of the former soviet world. One profound
form that this has taken has been in the meteoric
rise of the relatively low-wage economy of garment
contracting. The growth of this sector, among
others, has also been linked to the extension and
integration of the territories and regions of parts of
East-Central Europe into the project of European
and global neo-liberalism, largely expressed through
the continuing liberalization of global and macroregional trade regimes (see Begg et al.,
forthcoming). Clearly, such a rendering of regions as
unbounded and linked spaces involving trans-local
economic practices and divisions of labour/flows of
value remains centred around the importance of
capitalist social relations. However, other readings,
which I turn to in the next section, also emphasize
the plurality of economic practices in space, which
are non-reducible to the capital-centrism of the
above reading. What these other readings ask,
however, is for a consideration of the kinds of
articulations between the spaces of emergent
capitalism and the diverse regional worlds of
economies in Europe.
Diverse economies of regional Europe:
emergent capitalism and domestic
economies
I mentioned earlier in this paper the importance of
examining class processes as a point of entry in nonessentialist approaches to regional transformation.
As Resnick and Wolff (1993: 64), following
Althusser, have argued:
… all social sites, being composed of multiple social
processes, must experience uneven development. Since
each of the distinct social processes comprising any site
has its own overdetermined form and rhythm of change,
the site itself displays the uneven, differential
movements of its components; it develops unevenly. For
Althusser as for Marx, the uneven development of all
social entities was a basic premise of social analysis. The
Althusserian concepts of overdetermination and
complex contradiction, however, enable us to clarify and
justify that premise more carefully and thoroughly than
had been possible without those concepts.
At the heart of such an approach has been an
attempt to examine the co-mingling and complex
overdeterminations of economic practices through
the lens of diverse class processes. Central to this
approach has been the examination of the
articulation of diverse class processes in particular
regional economies, in part to indicate the nonreducibility of economic spaces and in part to
demonstrate an alternative politics of the diverse
economy.
In order to illustrate this framing I want to
continue to develop the example of such
articulations within the context of communities
engaged in garment and textiles production in EastCentral Europe. The above discussion of panEuropean garment production networks and the
role of trans-local flows of value emphasized the
role of networks of capital in understanding the
trans-local openness of European regions engaged
in outward processing. In this section I wish to
consider the multiple determinations of garment
production and the diverse economies that give rise
to the possibilities for, and restructuring of, garment
production. First, I discuss the restructuring of
articulations between the formal economy of textiles
production, the domestic economy of agricultural
labour and gender identities. Second, I examine the
articulations between the expansion of garment
production and the class practices of the ‘informal’
economy of domestic life.
Frances Pine (2002), in her study of the Łódź
textiles region in Poland, examines what she calls
‘the ambivalence of modernity and tradition’.
Within the context of large-scale job loss
experienced by women workers in the textiles
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economy of the city of Łódź, Pine (2002: 100)
argues that ‘if [women] are forced back into the
traditional household, they will lose what made
them modern; conversely, if they choose to go back
to the household, they will rediscover the value of
their own traditions’. Clearly, then, for Pine an
articulation between the formal and household
agricultural economies is key to understanding the
nature of both the regional transformations of the
Łódź region and that of the gendered identities that
construct regional and local economies as lived
everyday space. Pine argues that:
Here, as elsewhere in the world, textile production relied
heavily on female labour. Agriculture was primarily
associated with men, as both landholders and heads of
rural households, despite the fact that women were
responsible for a large proportion of the actual labour.
This meant that whereas masculinity and male value in
rural areas were constructed around provision and
visible agency through farming … femininity was more
fragmented, divided between a domestic (kinship) self
[of home and largely unrecognized farm labour] and a
public (productive) self [based on work in the textile
factories of the city]. (Pine, 2002: 100)
With the loss of jobs this public self has been eroded
and recourse has been made to a partial expansion of
the domestic economy, which lies at the heart of
what Pine identifies as ‘ambiguous modernity’. In
this context, gender and class identities (and their
reconfiguration) intertwine in complex ways.
Capitalist class processes – involving the extraction
of surplus value in the textiles economy – are rearticulated as a result of employment downsizing
with the household labour process in the domestic
economy. Domestic class processes – involving the
appropriation of women’s surplus labour in both
farming and other spheres of the domestic economy
– rework gender identities and reconfigure the place
of women (and men) in such regions previously
dominated by textiles production.8
Elsewhere, collaborative research in which I have
been engaged has sought to expand on these
articulations of the textiles and garment economy
and the domestic economies of ECE (Pickles, 2002;
Pickles and Smith, 2003; Smith, 2003a). In
understanding the emergence of local capitalisms of
‘Klondike’ proportions across ECE, in which the
garment economy expands under pan-European
outward processing contracting systems, an
explanation of growth lies not only with the
essentialist ‘logic’ of global capitalist contracting in
distanciated production systems. What is also
required is a recognition of the ability of the
domestic economy of worker households to
simultaneously underwrite and enable relatively
low-wage garment production involving largely
female workers while also creating pressures – felt in
terms of wage increases and the expansion of worker
benefits – for firms to move beyond low-wage and
low-value contracting (Pickles, 2002; Smith, 2003a).
As Pickles (2002: 266–7) has argued in the
context of the Bulgarian garment sector:
… low wages are sustained only to the extent that
household budgets are supplemented by complex nonformal economic practices. [Outward processing] …
firms thus articulate in diverse ways with the labour
demands of household economies. … ‘Export
processing’ captures an economic aspect of this
emerging regional development model, but it is a form of
assembly for global markets predicated on pre-existing
industrial structures and social networks, and is
articulated with flexible household economies.
The processes of capitalist class relations
expressed through the extraction of surplus value in
the trans-local garment contracting system thus
becomes only one facet of this overdetermined set of
constitutive relations. Non-capitalist class processes
along with gender relations identifiable in the
domestic economy, in which women workers
negotiate the double and triple burdens of homework, other domestic responsibilities, and garment
production, enable the emergence of pressure on
wages and other work conditions in the apparel
sector. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that in
some peripheral regions of Bulgaria, for example,
the relative scarcity of labour in the formal economy
of garment production – what we could call a ‘tight
labour market’ – emerges because of the multiple
demands on women workers who move out of
manufacturing production to work on domestic
farms and plots during, among other times, the
harvest (Pickles, 2002). In Slovakia, for example,
such tight labour markets have emerged in different
conditions in which the woman’s wage becomes the
sole source of formal income. Here, labour shortages
and the attendant pressures to retain workers are
due more to a considerable growth in demand
for suitably skilled women workers able to sew
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high-quality tailored garments for EU markets.
Both forms, however, have created conditions in
which relatively poorly paid women workers have
been able to place pressure upon employers to
improve wage levels and other work conditions. One
form that this has taken is the geographical
extension of the garment labour markets and travel
to work areas, concomitant with some factories
providing bus transportation for employees. Other
forms include the improvement of the social
conditions of production, including the provision of
factory canteens, wage supplements and other social
subsidies, normally absent in the ‘cost sensitive’
economy of low-wage garment production in the
region.
Conceptually, then, this points to the need to
think regional economies in Europe, and elsewhere,
as diverse and multiply constituted. As Resnick and
Wolff (1993: 70–1) have argued:
resources and power. One form that such
disseminated practices take, then, can be found in
the articulations between various economic practices
and class processes.
Conclusions
Considering the articulated moments of economic
practices in contemporary Europe raises wider
questions concerning the way we understand
cultures, economies and power as disseminated
practices. In a recent essay on power, culture and
political economy in development geography,
Gillian Hart (2002: 818) drew upon a discussion by
Stuart Hall of the articulation of race and class in
apartheid South Africa, and argued that:
… individuals may participate in various fundamental
and subsumed class processes during the course of the
day or a lifetime. Similarly, there may be different forms
of the fundamental class process at different sites in
society at the same time: for example, there may be
capitalist production of surplus going on in …
enterprises, while the feudal fundamental class process
reigns inside households, and while individual producers
appropriating their own individual surpluses (selfemployed persons) function in small enterprises.
Hall extended the concept of articulation along
Gramscian lines to include not only joining together of
diverse elements in the constitution of societies
structured in dominance but also the production of
meaning through practice … [what Hall] accomplished
was to lay the foundations for non-reductionist
understandings of race, ethnicity and other dimensions
of difference – including gender – firmly situated within
material practices and inextricably linked with class
processes in particular geographical and historical
conjunctures.
This framing of multiply constituted diverse
economies points, then, to the potentiality of
thinking the articulations of different economic
forms. It highlights the need to consider the
‘actually existing transitions’ (Smith and Pickles,
1998) of post-socialism within a context in which we
eschew simple, linear models of a ‘transition to
capitalism’. Instead, it requires attention to the
complex histories and geographies of politicaleconomic transformation. But such transformations,
while embodying forms of emergent and (at times)
‘virulent’ capitalisms, cannot be reducible to a oneway, centred reading of economy similar to the kind
found, for example, in many contemporary
treatments of regional transformations in Europe
and elsewhere. Rather, we need to account for the
disseminated and distributed nature of economic
practices in which it becomes possible to highlight
the complex practices and cultures of economic life
that sustain individual and household struggles over
In this paper, I have tried to map out some of the
ways in which these multiple articulations can be
thought within the context of a non-centred
ontology of European regional economies. It is
through recognizing and pursuing what Hart (2002:
819) calls the Gramscian ‘terrain of the
conjunctural’ that, I have argued, we are able to
rethink the diverse economic practices
underpinning and interconnecting regional
economies in Europe. One possible entry point to
such conjunctural, non-centred readings, drawing
upon Gibson-Graham et al.’s (2000) own attempts
to non-essentialize ‘economy’, is that of class
processes in which economic practices are rendered
as struggles over the control of surpluses. Class
processes are multiple (‘capitalist’, ‘feudal’,
‘communal’) and in any social site articulate together
in complex ways as practices constituting diverse
economies. But class processes also articulate with
non-class elements, as Hall and Hart suggest, in the
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construction of ‘meaning through practice’. Thus,
class processes are not reducible to non-class
processes, nor are they determined by each other.
Rather, social forms and struggles over power are
the result of the co-mingling of these practices and
processes in any social terrain. What becomes
important, then, in this reading is the need to
understand the complex, sited and linked forms
taken by class and non-class processes. In a similar
way to global value and commodity chain analyses
(Smith et al., 2002), then, this approach is
suggestive of the need for what Marcus (1995; 1998)
has called ‘multi-sited ethnographies’ of regional
economies in which a tracing of the trans-local
connections becomes possible as a way of ‘opening’
our analyses to the articulation of different moments
of economic practice across space. Such a nonessentialist, geographically contingent reading of
European regional economies might, I would argue,
provide the basis for rethinking the kinds of
articulations and connectivities that we are currently
witnessing across European spaces as processes of
geo-political and geo-economic integration proceed
apace. Such research might begin to engage with a
number of issues concerning, inter alia: the links
between household ‘strategies’ and formal and
informal labour markets; the reconfiguration of
commodity flows in Europe and beyond and their
role in constituting transformations of local/diverse
economies and vice versa; consideration of the links
between the kind of readings of territorial
transformations presented here and wider debates in
political economy and development studies
concerning the ‘articulations’ of different economic
and social forms, and how these might inform
readings of economic practices and alternative
economies. Each of these elements requires
sensitivity to the multi-sited articulation of
economic and non-economic practices as a
potentially powerful way of representing the ‘terrain
of the conjunctural’.
Acknowledgements
2028), which was part of the One Europe or
Several? research programme, and the United
States’s National Science Foundation (award no.
BCS/SBE 0225088) for a project entitled
‘Reconfiguring Economies, Communities, and
Regions in Post-Socialist Europe: a Study of the
Apparel Industry’. I am grateful to the ESRC and
the NSF for supporting this research and to my
various colleagues and collaborators, Bob Begg,
Milan Buček, Mick Dunford, Jane Hardy, Ray
Hudson, John Pickles, Al Rainnie, Poli Roukova and
David Sadler. I am especially grateful to John
Pickles and Bob Begg for ongoing discussions over
some of the ideas developed in this paper, and to
Ray Hudson, David Sadler and Allan Williams for
very helpful comments on an earlier version. The
normal disclaimers apply.
Notes
1 See Gibson-Graham and Ruccio (2001), Gibson-Graham
2
3
4
5
6
7
This paper results in part from research funded by
an Economic and Social Research Council project
on ‘Regional Economic Performance, Governance
and Cohesion in an Enlarged Europe’ (L213 25
(2003) and Watts (2003a; 2003b) for a recent ‘spat’ over
this very issue, articulated itself through a broader
discussion of the political relevance and utility of what
Watts (2003a) calls ‘grassroots postmodernism’ in
development theory.
While Resnick and Wolff provide a clear focus on the
concatenation of diverse class practices in the constitution
of such ‘sites’, Amin and Thrift’s approach is perhaps
more indeterminate. Nevertheless, the shared focus on
non-essentialist approaches underpins the analysis
pursued in this paper to European regional economies.
In light of the earlier discussion of the social construction
of territorial units, it should be recognized that there is
great variability in the extent of ‘national’ and ‘regional’
territories. I return to the issue of the social construction
of regional scales for the purposes of territorial
governmentality later in the paper.
Whether European Union regional assistance – such as
the Structural Funds – will be fully utilized for regional
development funding is an open question, not least
because disbursements are tied to assessments of the
‘absorptive capacity’ of any one particular region.
See, for example, Wolpe (1980).
See Smith (2003b) for a fuller discussion of these
potential links.
Similar arrangements emerged in North America where it
is known as ‘production sharing’ or ‘807 production’,
referring to the clause of US trade laws that governs the
process (see Glasmeier et al., 1993; Bair and Gereffi,
2002).
European Urban and Regional Studies 2004 11(1)
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SMITH: REGIONS, SPACES OF ECONOMIC PRACTICE AND DIVERSE ECONOMIES
8 I should stress here that these comments reflect my
interpretation of Pine’s work. She does not make these
arguments in the way I have done here.
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Correspondence to:
Adrian Smith, Department of Geography, Queen
Mary, University of London, Mile End Road,
London E1 4NS, UK.
[email: [email protected]]
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