Bulletin n. 1/2012
June 2012
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
  • Varró Krisztina
    Reconsidering the English question as a matter of democratic politics and spatial justice
    in Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy , Volume 30, Issue 1, February ,  2012 ,  29-45
    This paper is concerned with the implications of state territorial decentralization for the management of uneven regional development and spatial justice. It is argued that accounts of post-1997 UK devolution and the treatment of ‘the English question’ with a similar concern have tended to dismiss government policies against the backdrop of an uncritical view of spatial Keynesianism. Furthermore, these accounts have not succeeded in capturing the interconnectedness of the issues of democracy, solidarity, and spatial justice. In order to address these shortcomings I elaborate on a perspective that draws on insights of postfoundational political thought and interprets justice as democratic practice. This perspective reminds us that any notion of solidarity between people sharing a ‘national space’ and, consequently, any understanding of spatial justice is always politically constructed. Accordingly, the main task becomes to ‘unimagine’ the nation as a community of pregiven interests and to examine the obstacles to a meaningful debate on the institutional supports of solidarity.
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