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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 Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, www.sagepublications.com Downloaded from eur.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 19, 2016 10 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 European Urban and Regional Studies 2004 11(1) Downloaded from eur.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 19, 2016 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 European Urban and Regional Studies 2004 11(1) Downloaded from eur.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 19, 2016 11 12 EUROPEAN URBAN AND REGIONAL STUDIES 11(1) 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 European Urban and Regional Studies 2004 11(1) Downloaded from eur.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 19, 2016 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 European Urban and Regional Studies 2004 11(1) Downloaded from eur.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 19, 2016 13 14 EUROPEAN URBAN AND REGIONAL STUDIES 11(1) 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 European Urban and Regional Studies 2004 11(1) Downloaded from eur.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 19, 2016 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) European Urban and Regional Studies 2004 11(1) Downloaded from eur.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 19, 2016 15 16 EUROPEAN URBAN AND REGIONAL STUDIES 11(1) 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 European Urban and Regional Studies 2004 11(1) Downloaded from eur.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 19, 2016 SMITH: REGIONS, SPACES OF ECONOMIC PRACTICE AND DIVERSE ECONOMIES 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., European Urban and Regional Studies 2004 11(1) Downloaded from eur.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 19, 2016 17 18 EUROPEAN URBAN AND REGIONAL STUDIES 11(1) 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 European Urban and Regional Studies 2004 11(1) Downloaded from eur.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 19, 2016 SMITH: REGIONS, SPACES OF ECONOMIC PRACTICE AND DIVERSE ECONOMIES 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 European Urban and Regional Studies 2004 11(1) Downloaded from eur.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 19, 2016 19 20 EUROPEAN URBAN AND REGIONAL STUDIES 11(1) 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 European Urban and Regional Studies 2004 11(1) Downloaded from eur.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 19, 2016 SMITH: REGIONS, SPACES OF ECONOMIC PRACTICE AND DIVERSE ECONOMIES 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 European Urban and Regional Studies 2004 11(1) Downloaded from eur.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 19, 2016 21 22 EUROPEAN URBAN AND REGIONAL STUDIES 11(1) 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). 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