This interesting and thought-provoking book, based on a cross-national research project involving both U.S. and European scholars, provides a sustained meditation on the “restructuring of territoriality” in both the United States and the European Union. From initial starting points, such as John Ruggie's “unbundling of territoriality” and other writing on the challenges to the modern state system, from domestic privatization to globalization, the authors focus on the contemporary challenge to the sovereignty of the nation-state and the rebundling of territoriality associated with the development of the EU, reflecting a central concern with how the relationship between territory and governance is changing.

Key theoretical perspectives are provided in the chapters by Stefano Bartolini and Sidney Tarrow. The former, drawing on Stein Rokkan on the territorial structuring of European states and Albert Hirshman's concept of voice and exit, argues that the increase in exit options for social, economic, and political interests challenges the state's authority: “While subnational regionalization disorganizes functional interests and identities from below, European integration disorganizes them from above” (p. 10), leading to the reemergence of center-periphery tensions. Tarrow, in contrast, draws upon Alessandro Pizzorno's model of dynamic “political exchange” and Charles Tilly's relational approach to political contention in order to analyze the increasing role of subnational territories in the EU. A strength of the book is the way in which other contributors take up such perspectives: in relation to welfare provision in Europe (Maurizio Ferrara), the American experience of state building (Sergio Fabbrini), immigration policy (Bruce Cain), and democracy (Guiseppe di Palma). Other contributions, while not necessarily within these conceptual frameworks, also contribute to the wider discussion of the challenge to nation-state sovereignty and the rebundling of territoriality: James Casparo and Joseph Jupille on the impact of the expanding legal authority of the EU; Alberta Sbragia on air pollution policymaking, Alec Stone Sweet on private commercial law, Gary Marks and Ian Down on left support for the EU and NAFTA. Referring also to other work by some of these authors, the book very successfully becomes a lively and complex debate across the Atlantic divide. To the extent to which broad conclusions emerge, these are to point up that “territorial sovereignty is institutionally fragmented” on both sides of the Atlantic, but that the American experience is instructive for the current trajectory of the EU.

It is, hopefully, a strength, not a weakness, of the book that it prompts a number of critical reflections. Firstly, while the importance of the context of “globalization” is acknowledged at various points, the concrete meaning of this is often not pursued very far—for example, the impact of neoliberalism (a word that does not feature in the index) on state policy and on the perceived scope and focus of state action and intervention. It would have been interesting to see some of these authors, writing from a political science tradition, engage with, say, some of the contemporary work of geographers, such as Neil Brenner and Nick Theodore in the United States and Ash Amin and others in the UK, on the restructuring of space under neoliberalism, for whom the recasting of political territoriality is very much a part of the reshaping of contemporary capitalism. Much of this work offers critical confirmation of the significance of the “rebundling of space” but not necessarily of the increasing importance of subnational spaces, while some recent work is more critical of the “dominant scalar discourse” and argues for a perspective that emphasizes network forms of organization that resist spatial categories.

Secondly, this book is primarily concerned with the territorial restructuring of the state. But this dimension of state restructuring is merely one part of the contemporary restructuring—“modernization”—of the state, and indeed of the so-called shift from government to governance, the increasing involvement of actors from outside the state in the governance process, and the increasing porosity of the boundaries among state, market, and civil society. These processes are briefly recognized here from time to time, but I wonder whether they need to be given more prominence than they are. In my own country, the UK, important territorial restructuring processes, such as the establishment of elected regional assemblies in Scotland and Wales, can only really be understood in terms of this modernization of the state.

Finally, and this is an inevitable feature of the publication process, the book largely cuts off before the recent—and ongoing—enlargement of the EU toward Central and Eastern Europe, and its engagement in this area beyond its boundaries—in the Balkans, for example. These recent events prompt a number of reflections on the book's themes, in the first place, about the great variety of “states” within the EU from, on the one hand, the long-established, large, powerful states (the UK, Germany, France, etc.) to, at the other extreme, the three small, weak, and impermanent Baltic states. Estonia, for example, has a population of 1.4 million, which is likely to decline significantly as Russians leave. It is several times smaller than the average “region” in the UK. Of course, there have always been tiny and weak states—Andorra, Liechtenstein—in the EU, but not of the strategic significance of the new entrants, and those on the margins of the EU, such as Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, with whose fragile “sovereignty” the EU is intimately concerned. The sovereignty relationship between such “statelets” and the EU is bound to be qualitatively different from that between the Union and the major and long-established member states.

It would be interesting to hear the authors compare this situation with the differential architecture of the states of the United States. The accession or potential accession to the EU of states that were formerly part of the USSR (or satellite states, such as Yugoslavia) also points to differences in the formation of the United States and the EU. Europeans, as the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once said, are the children of Marx and Coca-Cola. The EU lay, and still arguably lies, between two empires, and its trajectory is profoundly shaped by the relative fortunes of the two. Moreover, the EU now lies at the boundary of “the West” and “Islam” (a porous boundary that itself resists spatial categories as a result of the large Muslim populations within the EU), and issues such as the potential accession of Turkey make religio-cultural aspects of territorial restructuring a key concern. As a locus of semisovereignty, these dimensions of the history of the EU tend to differentiate it significantly from that of the United States.

Such comments, however, reflect the fertile seeds of thought that Restructuring Territoriality promotes. The authors, and the editors particularly, are to be congratulated on a significant contribution to what needs to be an ongoing debate.