Territory and Power and the study of UK and comparative politics
Jonathan Bradbury and Peter John
Abstract
The article provides an introduction to scholarly analysis of Jim Bulpitt’s Territory and Power in the United Kingdom, an Interpretation. It first addresses the principal theoretical concerns and the historical interpretation Bulpitt pursued in Territory and Power. It discusses the principal lines of criticism that have been laid against the book and how in turn these have been rebutted. The article then assesses how the contributions made in this volume provide fresh reflection on its contribution to the study of UK and comparative politics before suggesting how Territory and Power could shape the agenda of future research.
Author Contact Details
Jonathan Bradbury, Department of Political and Cultural Studies, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea, SA2 8PP.
Peter John, Institute of Political and Economic Governance, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL.
This collection seeks to re-appraise Jim Bulpitt’s Territory and Power in the United Kingdom, an Interpretation originally published in 1983. In 2008 the ECPR Classics series re-issued the book to introduce it to a new generation of scholars and because it addressed issues of abiding interest in the study of comparative and UK politics. Territory and Power developed an innovative conceptual language for the study of politics and it delivered an original interpretation of UK politics by focusing on the problems, preoccupations and projects of central government in relation to centre-periphery relations. Moreover, it provided one of the few theoretically and historically grounded analyses of the development of the UK as a territorial state. It covered a wide range of issues including the Irish and Northern Irish questions; the challenge of sub-state nationalism and movements for home rule/devolution in Scotland and Wales; and English regionalism and centre-local relations.
Despite its qualities, Territory and Power has probably not achieved the attention and influence it merits. Accordingly, this collection brings together a complementary group of authors to explore the book’s significance for contemporary scholarship. The contributors discuss how the book can still inspire original thinking in comparative politics - both through sympathetic reading and re-interpretation as well as critical opposition. Most of the collection was originally presented as papers at a British Politics Group panel to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Territory and Power at the American Political Science Annual Meeting in Boston in 2008. This introductory article first addresses the principal theoretical concerns and the historical interpretation Bulpitt pursued in Territory and Power. It discusses the principal lines of criticism that have been laid against the book and how in turn these have been rebutted. The article then assesses how the contributions made in this volume provide fresh reflection on its contribution to the study of comparative politics before suggesting how Territory and Power could shape the agenda of future research.
Territory and Power, its critics and its defenders
Bulpitt’s Territory and Power sought to clarify the key components of the system of governance, to understand the nature of institutional political culture and to explore the key assumptions guiding the exercise of authority and power across the entirety of a nation state. From this basis he sought to develop the study of governmental decision-making as it affected a broad range of subjects, including economic policy, foreign affairs and sub-national politics. His approach stemmed from a vigorous critique of contemporary political science. These criticisms were, firstly, of constitutional approaches that emphasised the importance of ideas and legal rules in politics; second, of public administration studies that assumed the importance of inter-organisational relations to governmental actions; and third, of Michael Hechter’s internal colonialism thesis that emphasised the class basis to relations between a territorial centre and exploited peripheries. He believed that these approaches used concepts very ambiguously. Federalism, for example, had come to mean all things to all people. All of the approaches over-stretched the potential for their analytical frameworks to underpin a broader analysis of politics; the public administration study of centre-local relations, for example, left a lot of politics out. Such approaches, while competing over how to study politics, also accepted the greatest myth in the study of UK politics: that of the over mighty and coercive centre. This was most starkly exhibited in Hechter’s account of the capitalist class concentrated in London and the South-East of England. Finally, UK political science was pre-occupied and blinded by normative preoccupations about the proper shape of government and its decision-making rules; whether it was in favour of constitutional federalism, governmental decentralisation, or the re-empowerment of exploited proletarian peripheries.[i]
Bulpitt wanted to develop a framework for analysis that was both manageable and plausible yet also offered an account of the nature of governing across the whole polity. This project depended on refining a number of linked concepts. Firstly, he conceptualised territorial politics. He defined this as ‘that arena of political activity concerned with the relations between the central political institutions in the capital city and those interests, communities, political organisation and governmental bodies outside the central institutional complex, but within the accepted boundaries of the state, which possess, or are commonly perceived to possess, a significant geographical or local/regional character’.[ii] Second, in studying territorial politics, Bulpitt drew on an idea from the study of English history, that territorial politics could be understood as a division between a centre court and the country beyond it. Using the updated concepts of centre and periphery, where the centre was ‘the locus of actual political power’ in the central governing complex, and the periphery was everywhere else, he defined centre-periphery relations as the ‘primary cleavage in society between a “central value system”, its institutions and elite supporters, and subordinate peripheral value systems and their non-elite supporters’.[iii] Third, Bulpitt advocated an explicitly centre approach to analysis examining the centre’s approach to territorial management as it responded to tensions in court-country relationships.
In analysing the centre’s approaches to territorial management Bulpitt then drew up a typology of territorial governing codes, which guided the centre’s strategic approach to governing. These codes were defined by their extent of centre intervention into peripheral affairs. Firstly, there was simple central penetration for such purposes as law and order and raising taxes. Second, there was at an attempt at local elite assimilation, organising indirect rule through local collaborators. Third, there was a move to central control, entailing imposing limitations and/or demands on peripheral governors. Fourth, the centre established its own organisations in the periphery to help it govern. Fifth, and finally, the centre sought to encourage support from people in the periphery. Bulpitt also explored the strategies that the centre might wish to pursue and how these interacted with territorial management codes. Laissez faire strategies were most consistent with relatively less interventionist codes whilst promotional ones demanded more interest in control and mobilisation. He also explored the kinds of political resources that the centre might develop to support the successful prosecution of strategies and codes. These comprised political culture, constitutional rules, the power and role of the bureaucracy, the nature of the party system and economic resources. Finally, Bulpitt insisted on the importance of the link between centre-periphery relations and external affairs in how territorial management was developed. He introduced the concept of the external support system, where the centre would seek to use foreign policy to support domestic policies.[iv]
The concepts Bulpitt employed were not in themselves original as he mined a broad scholarship in comparative politics and British history. But he combined them into a conceptual framework for analysis that was innovative. He demanded that the study of politics should have an historical perspective, and true to his word Territory and Power delivers an account of the development of territorial politics in the British Isles from the 11th century onwards. He argued there was a relatively low level of centre intervention into peripheral affairs in the UK. Chapters 3-7 interpret the English centre and - after the union of England with Scotland, Wales and Ireland - the British centre as employing a territorial code based on the precepts of local elite assimilation. This was associated with territorial management strategies that - even into the 20th century - could generally be characterised as detached. The centre sought to use up as few of its precious political resources over territorial affairs as possible. In its development of an external support complex, the centre generally sought an approach that would ‘attempt to minimise the impact of external forces on domestic politics, or ensure that these forces are favourable to the maintenance of domestic tranquillity’.[v]
Bulpitt invoked a distinction between high and low politics concerns determined by whatever the centre considered to be central strategic priorities and what were considered troublesome nuisances. In the main high politics was focused on the economy, defence, global prestige and the management of the external support complex. Low politics referred to a wide range of social and individual concerns that centre governors sought to get reliable peripheral elites to adopt. Generally, the English - and subsequently the UK centre – aim in pursuing a code of local elite assimilation was to gain centre ‘autonomy from peripheral forces to concentrate on what it regards as ‘high politics’.[vi] Bulpitt traced this approach to governing back into pre-modern times, but his analysis is perhaps best known for its interpretation of the period between the 1920s and the 1960s when - even amidst the growth of government - the centre’s desire to separate high and low politics concerns can be discerned. They pursued this strategy so successfully that Bulpitt dubs this period the dual polity.[vii]
This interpretation of UK territorial politics was far from celebratory. It was grittily realistic about the underlying difficulties of governing an island state composed of different national groupings and a resentful English core, and of maintaining the perception of state success from the late 19th century onwards. Territory and Power emphasised the modernisation challenges of around the turn of the 20th century - and then again from the 1960s onwards - that have threatened to overwhelm historic patterns of centre-periphery relations. In seeking to withstand these challenges the approach to managing the UK had strong parallels with how the UK sought to continue to govern the Empire as it struggled under the weight of its many varied responsibilities; ceding some power to local elite collaborators to keep the show on the road. In many ways the centre-autonomy approach to governing was the only approach that was realistic. To be more interventionist domestically would have inflamed peripheral dissent and unravelled the implicit understandings that held the territorial state together. It would also have immersed centre politicians in extensive domestic entanglements that would have made the assertion of external interests very difficult. However, just as Bulpitt assessed the centre’s problems in managing the decline of the Empire, so too did he see that the domestic approach to governing was ultimately vulnerable to challenge by elites and publics in the periphery.
Bulpitt argued that the UK’s traditional approach to governing withstood the pressures for modernisation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But the challenges from the 1960s onwards presented a much stiffer test. The dual polity declined and governments from those of Harold Macmillan onwards went in search of a new approach to territorial management. There was an intensification of the pressures on UK government in the 1970s, both from increasingly assertive elites in the periphery and from the centre’s weakness in dealing with crises. The decade saw the political defeat of the biggest territorial challenge, that of nationalism in Scotland and Wales. Devolution referenda in 1979 failed to gain either a majority (Wales) or foundered on legislative obstacles (Scotland). Then in 1979 the British people elected a Conservative government, led by Margaret Thatcher, which was highly committed to withdrawing from reform agendas that entertained territorial fragmentation on the one hand or a permanently more interventionist central state on the other. Even so, as Bulpitt signed off in 1983, he observed that Thatcherism was a composite code in which long-term aspirations to return to a more sustainable centre-autonomy approach to governing coexisted with short-term measures of greater central intervention to sort out the UK’s political and economic problems. His political astrology confirmed both his perception of the continued influence of centre approaches to governing that focused on achieving autonomy from peripheral affairs as well as his pithy analysis of the vulnerabilities and challenges of governing the UK that made the future uncertain.
Criticisms of Territory and Powercome in a variety of forms.[viii] Firstly, it is criticised for the relatively high level of abstraction of the conceptual framework. Concepts of the centre and periphery are thought to be too vague; and notions of high and low politics are too problematic if they have no fixed meaning. Second, its methodology is criticised for privileging an elite-centred and top-down approach to the study of politics, which omits too much that is important, especially in territorial politics. Third, it is an enclosed approach to analysis, explaining politics as part of a system of relationships rather than in terms of concepts and methods employed from the rest of political science. Just as much as in Marxism, this self-referential type of analysis can lend itself to functionalist explanation and a circularity of argument. If one makes certain ‘as if’ assumptions, then certain arguments can be pursued which endorse the original ‘as if ‘assumptions, without any recourse to a proper methodology for testing either the assumptions or the resulting arguments.
Fourth, the centre approach is criticised for the inherent problems involved in researching a territorial management code. Indeed Territory and Power put forward relatively little empirical evidence regarding centre motivations and actions and its role in centre-periphery relations. Implicitly he stands accused of developing a perspective, not a set of testable hypotheses or an explanatory theory. Fifth, in applying his interpretation historically Bulpitt’s analysis is in sharp contrast with a large historically-based literature that emphasises the rise of centralisation in UK politics in the 19th and 20th centuries. Generally he is criticised for exaggerating the extent of centre disinterest in peripheral affairs. Sixth, Bulpitt’s approach is thought to have become ever more inapplicable. Globalisation and Europeanisation have rendered a state-focused approach to politics and an attention to territorial management increasingly marginal to current political trends and their causes. Following this, it becomes questionable as to whether Bulpitt's thesis has much relevance to the study of contemporary politics. Finally, Bulpitt is labelled a Tory, developing a historical account of the UK that over-stresses the importance of continuity and tradition. In viewing politics from the perspectives of centre elites Territory and Power is over-sympathetic to the problems of those who govern and gives little or no voice to those who are outside the circles of power.
The latter part of the 20th century saw a transformation of comparative political science, involving considerable refinement of both the research traditions that Bulpitt critiqued, as well as the development of new ones. Despite the many criticisms, UK political scientists did not ignore Territory and Power. Notably Rhodes engaged with it as part of his reconstruction of how to develop the study of governance out of traditional public administration and centre-local relations approaches. Describing the dual polity theory in Territory and Power as ‘the most stimulating contribution to the analysis of centre-periphery relations in the UK’, Rhodes accepts that public administration writers had previously drawn their methodological focus too narrowly.[ix] Rhodes seeks to include political as well as governmental organisations in the study of how the UK was territorially governed. This leads him to an account of the multiplicity of policy networksin UK territorial politics, and to an analysis of the UK as an increasingly differentiated polity. Referencing of Territory and Power for its discussion of the UK as a dual polity was widespread in the 1980s research literature on UK centre-local relations.[x] Within the literature on devolution from the late 1990s, Territory and Power continues to be cited for its definition of the broader field of territorial politics.[xi] Recently, Bevir and Rhodes in their development of an interpretivist approach to studying governance acknowledge Territory and Power for its invitation to ‘explore the operational code, or rules of statecraft, of central political elites’ and ‘the historical analysis of the beliefs and actions of elite actors’.[xii]
Even so, recent work feels the need to defend Territory and Power against criticisms within UK political science. Bradbury, in his discussion of the utility of Territory and Power for scholarship on devolution, emphasises that constitutional, governance and neo-Marxist approaches still face the problems of ambiguous and/or over-stretched conceptual frameworks for understanding the politics of devolution. The literature now abounds with rich periphery-focused analyses, but this has contributed to a fragmented understanding of the significance of devolution to UK state as a whole. The conceptual framework of Territory and Power remains attractive precisely because it does focus on the big picture and assesses the significance of devolution for the whole polity, rather than individual parts of it. Bradbury also stresses that Bulpitt conceded the self-referential character of his conceptual framework and admitted the paucity of his empirics. Readers, however, do not observe Bulpitt’s modesty in the claims he made for his book. Essential to its provocative intellectual project, Territory and Power drew on a large scholarship and assumed a lot of knowledge in the reader. But it made limited empirical claims and focused on interpretation. His theoretical purpose was to shake up questionable and complacent conventional wisdoms.[xiii] Bulpitt directly stated that it was for future scholars to explore the empirical validity of his claims, to test, refute and revise them as they saw fit.[xiv]