Political Geography Quarterly最新文献

Swindon has experienced a remarkable transformation in the post-war period from a working-class railway town to an economically and socially diverse centre for high technology industry, distribution, research and development, and financial services. This paper explores this transformation in the wider context of changes in the space economy of post-war British capitalism. A central theme is the rise of a local ‘growth coalition’ and the effectiveness of the policies pursued by the Labour-controlled local authority in assisting this transformation. The paper concludes with a discussion of the political challenges and policy dilemmas that Labour now faces in this ‘M4-corridor’ town as a consequence of economic restructuring and social change.

This paper develops a Marxist conception of the role of state formation in the ‘politics of place’ under capitalism. It argues that struggles over state formation shape possibilities for political practice by creating particular terrains of conflict over policies and procedures, by determining terms of access to the state, and by influencing subjective experience of the state and political life. Examples from the author's research on conflicts over state regulation of community legal clinics in Ontario, Canada, are used to illustrate this approach.

To understand German National Socialism and its involvement with science including geography, we have to trace ideologies and doctrines back into the 19th century, including their continuity, their refraction by outstanding political events, and the interaction of conflicting and competing concepts. Germania triumphans, a study on the outcome of World War I published as early as 1895, demonstrates how far the integration of imperialist and racist, Lebensraum and Weltpolitik concepts had been developed. What is more important, these concepts were transformed into plans for concrete actions against people including forced Germanization and expulsion of the Jews long before the Nazi regime. Passarge's Erdkundliche Weltanschauung (1922) is an even better example for the integration of different ideologies, reflecting at the same time radical conservative responses to World War I and the instrumentalization of geography. Bringing up the problem of evaluation and judgement, we need to combine the notions of relevance and ethics with the underlying image of man and the treatment of spatial scale.

Did fascism just drop from the sky? Ignazio Silone (1934) answered this question in the negative. Fascist ideology in the theory and practice of geographers did not just come from nowhere. We assume a basic continuity of this ideology in German geography from the time of the Weimar Republic through the period of National Socialism (NS) to beyond the end of World War II.

German political geography has been reviving for about five years. New insights and impulses for further research have been produced by the transfer of Anglo-American approaches and orientations on conflict research. The integration of political geography and the history of geographical thought, based on the specific German experience, is of equal importance. Combining historical, critical and contextual approaches, a group of young geographers is contributing differentiated insights into the Nazi period and its roots, far back into the 19th century. The special issue is a collection of papers linked by the common concerns of continuity, functionality and relevance of geography in the political context. The topics included—Mitteleuropa and nationalism, racism, social and territorial contradictions in the performance of the nation-state—are present in West Germany in current ongoing political discussions. The motivation to elaborate ‘a history that won't go away’ comes from the present time and its projection into the future.