SOME DEFINITIONS AND THEMES

The term ‘regionalism’ is a very inadequate one. Recent discussions in the CSE Working Group, however, failed to come up with anything that was both more accurate and less than a paragraph long. For the purposes of this survey, ‘regionalism’ is taken to refer to the analysis of intra-national spatial differentiation. Its concern is to study the mechanisms by which the process of accumulation generates uneven spatial development, and the effects of such unevenness on the development of a national social formation and particular areas within it. The scale is intra-national in the sense that it is at this level at which the spatial unevenness which is the focus of attention occurs. This does not mean, however, that such differentiation is produced solely by mechanisms defined at the national or intra-national level. Spatial unevenness in the process of accumulation, within a social formation, may just as well be dominantly the product of mechanisms operating at an international scale. The object of study, however, is spatial uneven development and its effects within a national economy. Such effects may occur at any spatial level within the social formation, from inequalities between major regions to patterns of growth and decline of particular cities (1).

The process of accumulation within capitalism continually engenders the desertion of some areas, and the creation there of new reserves of labour-power, the opening up of other areas to new branches of production, and the restructuring of the territorial division of labour and class relations overall. The geographical distribution of population is typically far more than a general tendency to agglomeration superimposed on a “territorial division of labour, which confines special branches of production to special districts of a country” (Capital 1, p.353), as occasionally implied by Marx. Even in those few areas where particular branches of production have entirely dominated the economy, it is not possible simply to assume that such areas will be the same as others equally so dominated. It is more than the branch of production which determines the characteristics of a region.