This chapter covers regional loyalties and religious institutions, focusing on the Kulturkampf, the state’s attack on Catholicism.

This introduction outlines the main questions and debates which the book addresses, followed by an overview of the history of the Heimat idea and the study’s methodological approach. While scholars have looked at post-war cinematic and literary Heimat tropes, the book argues for more attention to Heimat as specific sites of home. On the question of the concept’s Germanness, it steers a middle path that recognizes how the history of German-speaking Europe has shaped the concept, while acknowledging its connection to broader questions about place attachment. Rather than positing a single “German” understanding across time and space, the work approaches discussions about Heimat as an evolving and contested discourse about place attachments and their relationship to diverse political and social issues. The introduction continues by outlining the book’s contribution to debates about West German democratization, reconstruction, post-war confrontation with dissonant lives, and expellee history. It concludes by outlining the book’s findings on the history of efforts to eliminate the concept in the 1960s and left-wing attempts to re-engage with Heimat in the 1970s and 1980s.

Chapter 8 analyzes East Asian regionalism projects, which demonstrate that the choices of governments and non-state actors constitute the structure of East Asian international relations, albeit within evolutionary constraints. East Asian countries are not integrating in a European Union sense, but their desire for and efforts at regional cooperation remain strong. East Asian regionalism was underdeveloped compared to Europe and some other developing regions, but an economic regionalism open to non-East Asian countries emerged when the Cold War ended. The 1997 Asian Financial Crisis trigged greater East Asian efforts at creating more exclusive economic and financial groups, but East Asia has shifted to mega regionalism since the early 2010s, reflecting growing great power rivalries between Japan, China, and the United States. Other East Asian countries, particularly those in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), have their own agency and drive the process in more immediate terms.

This chapter examines the post-WWII era where the idea of exclusive Convention Peoples Party (CPP) radicalism and Pan-Africanism rests most thickly. It argues that debates about the CPP’s Citizenship Act complexifies its pan-African credentials. Also, the CPP’s political philosophy was not radical and distinct compared to its opponents, as it fits within a broad liberal/ cosmopolitan tradition rooted in Europe and America. So-called conservatives were oftentimes more radical, as shown in parliamentary debates on the “Motion of Destiny.” Contentious discussions about whether to achieve self-government by proclamation or negotiation, are obscured by the dyad of radical versus conservative. Debates about federalism, regionalism, and unitary government remain unexplored because the grand narrative rebukes the opponents of Kwame Nkrumah’s socialist agenda, while granting him hero status. Nkrumah’s prolific writing and the squeezing out of his opponents after he became Prime Minister in 1957 are identified as the architects of Ghana’s grand narrative.

This chapter explores the rapid “coming apart” of white working-class communities across the American South as the New Age of Inequality (post-1980) settled in. As the economic doldrums took hold across swaths of the American South and its diaspora during the decades since 1980, social dysfunction emerged with a vengeance in white working-class communities, a phenomenon that captured national attention through J. D. Vance’s depiction in his best-selling Hillbilly Elegy (2016). Older industrial cites suffered and declined as the economy deindustrialized. The many challenges the faltering economy presented to white southern workers and their communities stimulated a visceral response from disaffected workers, a response manifest in angry efforts to reclaim white privilege and the aggressive championing of “traditional” values, and ultimately an unprecedented level of death and despair. The complex story of disruptive economic forces, lingering racial resentments, and fierce atavistic loyalties led white southern workers to choose clinging to cultural values over building alliances that might redress their economic grievances.

Latin American international lawyers are prolific historians. However, while having profusely written histories of international law, Latin Americans have shied away from historiographic controversy. Latin Americans have not disagreed much about how to conceive and write history, but they have had sound disagreements about the international law that is constructed by history, they have disagreed over different ways of using history as law. This chapter offers a history of these disagreements. Some Latin-Americans have used universal histories, echoing the familiar Eurocentric history from the Latin-American periphery to the core, in order to gain doctrinal authority to speak and change international law. With a similar goal in mind, other Latin-Americans have used particularistic histories, foregrounding the region’s doctrinal divergences and contributions to universal international law. Universalist and particularistic histories were dominant between the first half of the nineteenth century and the second half of the twentieth century, between independence and the Cold War. Towards the end of the Cold War, these two types of history merged into one, presenting the region’s historical trajectory as in harmony with universal international law. This represents a break. If in the nineteenth century an international legal tradition emerged in Latin-America, during the twentieth century it radicalised, diverging from international law as conceived from the West. From the Cold War merger an endemic history emerged, which depoliticised and deradicalised the Latin American tradition. Exploring this history of history-writing in the region may help rearticulating a more ambitious Latin American international law.

This chapter provides background information about the literary mode known as regionalism and explains what is queer about New England regionalism. It analyzes White-authored New England regionalist fiction from the 1865-1915 period, using Sarah Orne Jewett’s novel Deephaven as its primary example, to argue that White-authored New England regionalism imagines independent, queer lives for White women characters, living outside of the heteronuclear family. The chapter then turns to examine the underacknowledged African-American women’s tradition of New England regionalism, a tradition that reworks conventions of the earlier, White-dominated one. This African-American tradition begins in the nineteenth century and extends well into the twentieth: Harriet Wilson, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Dorothy West, and Ann Petry all limn the contours of New England life for Black women, engaging and claiming an inheritance of defiant, queer New England character while exploring the limitations and violence of that inheritance when understood as only available to White people.

The prospects for Australia’s relations with its most immediate region at the beginning of the decade seemed bleak indeed. On the surface at least, they continued to be troubled as the rise of terrorism and people smuggling as major security issues, and Australia’s participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, introduced new sources of tension into Australia’s relations with its northern neighbours. Yet by 2005 the picture had changed remarkably. John Howard’s government, despite being dogged by diplomatic gaffes and pilloried by its critics, had achieved some remarkable successes in Australia’s relations with South-East Asia. Bilateral trade agreements had been signed or were under negotiation with the region’s major economies. Talks had begun on a new security agreement with Indonesia, and the Australian Prime Minister seemed to have forged a close rapport with the first directly elected Indonesian President. Perhaps most significantly, Howard was invited to two meetings crucial to the development of a new East Asian regional institution: the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in November 2004 and the inaugural East Asia Summit in December 2005.

This chapter considers the structure of territorial cleavage from a national perspective. It focuses on patterns of polarization between regional electoral blocs, or “territorial oppositions,” in national politics. Axes of territorial cleavage arising between predominantly rural regions tend to take canonical forms associated with core–periphery politics in countries that are undergoing national economic integration and the growth of the central state. Stable axes of sectional competition, whereby leading regions square off against each other or against those on the periphery, are visible in the electoral data and in persistent policy cleavages in countries in this study. In broad outlines, these conform to models of territorial opposition in national politics advanced by earlier scholars (Lipset & Rokkan 1967; Gourevitch 1979; Bayart 2013). The analysis is built around four countries – Kenya, Zambia, Malawi, and Uganda – that serve as archetypes of different patterns of territorial opposition and core–periphery politics. Tanzania is a shadow case.

This theory of regional cleavages in African politics embeds the behavioral assumptions of microlevel, ethnicity-focused models in a broader spatial, institutional, and temporal frame. A theoretically grounded framework built on economic geography, economic inequalities, and institutions produces general findings about national-level political dynamics in African countries that are close to what classical and mainstream treatments in the comparative politics and comparative political economy literatures would lead us to expect. Leveraging this perspective, this chapter reconsiders questions of economic cleavage, urban–rural politics, institutions, class politics, policy interests, opposition and regional parties, and ethnic identities in African politics. The challenges of territorial politics in regionally divided countries that confront most African countries today are increasingly prominent in non-African, postindustrial countries. This makes research on the politics of spatial inequality in African countries relevant to general understandings of how economic and spatial inequalities may heighten the challenges of national politics. For policy and politics, the analysis lends weight to calls for place-based economic development strategies that are designed to support national cohesion.

Regional competition in African countries finds expression in tensions, debates, and competition over policy. Regional economic tensions in African countries tend to find expression in four persistently salient issue areas: (a) demand for redistributive policies and social policy, (b) region- and sector-specific development and regulatory policies, (c) land policy, where redistributive tensions and conflicts arise in the building of national land markets, and (d) issues around state structure and design (the territorial division of powers and prerogatives, as under federalism or decentralization). In most countries, regional cleavages trump class-like or interpersonal income inequalities as a driver of national contestation over issues of policy and collective choice. A 2x2 matrix predicts “regional preferences for decentralization and redistribution” based on a region’s relative economic standing and its political alignment with the center. South Africa, where regional inequality is lower and nationalizing institutions are stronger, is an outlier: Redistributive social policy is more developed than it is anywhere else in Africa, and the issue of national land market integration is less salient than it is in many African countries.

This chapter explores relationships between regional economic advantage and regional political advantage, making two arguments. The first is that relative political advantage among the regional electoral blocs tends to map onto the economic hierarchy of regions. This conforms to the theoretical expectation that politically dominant blocs tend to be economic leaders as well (see Gourevitch 1979). A corollary is that when relatively advantaged regions are out of power, they are likely to constitute a rival electoral bloc or an opposition-leaning zone. The second argument analyzes the formation of national winning electoral coalitions. Evidence from the 12-country study suggests that national electoral coalitions are built mainly via the ability of incumbent blocs to mobilize electoral support in constituencies in the weakly organized non-bloc areas. The most common alliance structure is alliances of the extremes (richest and poorest regions) against the middle. Similar patterns of alliance have been noted for countries cleaved by high spatial inequalities in other parts of the world. These coalition patterns tend to reproduce regionalism in national politics.

This chapter situates this book’s conceptual and theoretical approach with respect to earlier work on ethnicity and region in African countries and beyond. Earlier work has looked away from regional economic inequality as a political force in Africa, defaulting to theories centered on ethnicity, understood as a force orthogonal to programmatic policy interests and devoid of economic ideology. This work inverts these arguments, showing that regional economic inequalities and differentiation give rise to political cleavage and divergent policy interests. In Africa, the sources of subnational (regional) economic difference and inequality lie in unevenness of natural endowment, regionally specific patterns of state intervention in the economy that date to the colonial period, spatial–sectoral differentiation, and administrative structure. This chapter follows Lipset and Rokkan (1967) in theorizing the sources and nature of regional cleavages that arise in the course of state-building and national economic integration. It identifies institutions that contribute to the “regionalization” of national economies and politics in African countries. Section 2.5 of this chapter lays out the main elements of an approach to the analysis of regionalism that is fit for African contexts.

Does regional inequality give rise to political cleavages in African countries? If so, why and how? At what scale of politics? How do regional difference and inequality shape national politics and policy? The theory of regional politics advanced here is drawn from comparative politics theories of regional tensions that arise in the course of state-building and national economic integration. These are accentuated when socioeconomic inequality and territorial institutions align. This book argues that regional economic differentiation and spatial inequalities, in interaction with strongly territorial state institutions, shape politics and policy in African countries as they do in countries in other parts of the world. National economic integration and state-building activate subnational interests and fuel political tensions over the integration of subnational regions into the national polity and the national market. Regional economic and political heterogeneity and cross-regional inequalities shape both preferences and the relative bargaining power of subnational collectivities. These forces combine to produce persistent regional cleavage structures in national politics. Empirical support is drawn from electoral data from 44 elections across 12 countries, historical maps, and nighttime luminosity, household survey, and crop production data.

Regional interests and tensions are manifest in regional bloc voting in multiparty elections (1990s–2010s). We present an electoral geography analysis of constituency-level voting in presidential elections in twelve countries from 1990 to 2015 (44 elections). We describe the economic attributes of the electoral blocs using forty rounds of DHS surveys for geocoded education and ethnicity data, nighttime luminosity, historical maps of producer regions, and raster data for population densities and contemporary crop production profiles. Most electoral blocs arise in rural regions that are wealthier, better educated, more densely populated, and more deeply incorporated into the national economy than other rural areas. Most are specialized in high-value export crops (or traded food crops.) Some have nonagricultural production profiles as labor-exporting or mining regions. Most coalesce within provincial-level administrative units. Almost all are multiethnic. The evidence is consistent with the argument that state institutions work to channel politics arising from uneven economic development into the national political arena. Microlevel mechanisms contributing to this outcome are related to interests, organizations, ideology, and actions of political agents and coalition-builders.