Politics is rooted in territory. State-building, war-making, porkbarreling, gerrymandering – the examples are legion. Much the same can be said about markets, which allocate resources not just to firms, sectors, factors of production, and individuals, but also to subdivisions of the national space. Indeed, the spatial dimension of the political economy is so prevalent that it is easily, if not frequently, overlooked. I wrote The Territorial Imperative as a modest attempt at a partial corrective. Thanks to scholarly contributions of the past two decades, we now know a great deal about the responses of states, political parties, and peak associations to economic crisis. Yet we know little about analogous phenomena at the subnational level. The present volume explores what I have chosen to call “the territorial imperative”: the political foundations of the complex, interactive responses by national and subnational actors to the problems thrown up by regions in economic crisis.

This book grew out of a thesis undertaken at Yale University between 1984 and 1988. A dissertation is supposed to provide a formative experience for the aspiring scholar, and this one was no exception. For me, however, the dividends went beyond the purely intellectual. I count myself as fortunate to have had the opportunity to live in four diverse regions that lie far off the beaten paths of tourists and academics. There is far more to the periphery than the absence of the center.

Several organizations provided vital support during the field research stage of this study: the Council for European Studies at Columbia University; the Yale University Council for International and Area Studies; the Fulbright Commission; the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD); and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung.