The Limits of Post-Territorial Political Community

Abstract

The attenuation or hollowing out of territorial politics has created a crisis of traditional frameworks of political community. Territorially defined and constructed political communities are suffering from a generic lack of cohering values and sentiments, expressed in regular discussions of the meaning and relevance of different national values, symbols, and traditions. Governments have great difficulty in legitimating themselves in traditional ways. With the decline in party membership and voting, even holding elections every five years does little to legitimate governing elites or to cohere political programmes for which they can be held to account. Traditional framings of foreign policy in terms of the national interest appear problematic and are often buttressed with claims of ethical or values-based foreign policy, which seek to secure the interests of people elsewhere rather than collectively expressing the interests of their citizens. In the face of this crisis in, and transformation of, traditional ways of understanding and participating in politics it is of little surprise that discussion of the possibilities of post-territorial political community has taken centre stage — that is, ways of politically constructing communities that are not based on (or can overcome) the exclusions seen as integral to territorially constructed forms of political association.