Michael Keating enters into a rich literature that is focused on the shifting nature of territory in light of forces like globalization and Europeanization. He beings his book by exploring and questioning a widely held view: that the forces associated with these developments—such as the emergence of new levels of government and institutions, increased trade, financial flows, and an enhanced capacity to communicate and organize across national boundaries—have eroded the ability of states to control territory, changed the nature of sovereignty, and diminished the importance of nation-states in favor of other units or levels of government. While Keating acknowledges that recent arguments about the impact of European integration on nation-states are subtler, much scholarship still sees it as undermining sovereign, territorially bounded states.

Behind this view, Keating points out, is an implicit functionalist assumption: that territorial units arise because they are well adapted to perform a certain function. As the function is no longer useful or can be performed more efficiently elsewhere, the argument goes, the unit will also be transformed or fade away to be replaced by a different unit. In Rescaling the European State, the author develops a subtle and sophisticated correction to this view, arguing that functional change alone does not create new territorial spaces. Instead, the rise of mobilization, representation, and public policy at new levels is explained “by the political dynamics of institutionalization and boundary building in a context provided by functional change” (p. 22). Instead of simply rejecting functionalism, Keating links functional change with the contested political and social processes of creating territorial boundaries. It is the latter, he argues, that drive rescaling—the “migration of functional systems, identities and institutions to new levels” (p. 22).

Rescaling occurs at many levels, but the book’s focus is on what Keating labels the “meso” level, which sits between the municipal and the national. Whereas shifts at the national level have received much attention, the meso level is relatively unexplored. The author uses developments in European Union countries to trace the myriad complex ways that globalization and Europeanization have led to the rise of this new level between the national and the municipal.

Locating the meso level is not difficult. For scholars of Europe, the term brings to mind the emergence of regions, some of which cross national boundaries, and the rise of various forms of regional government. Nevertheless, the term is difficult to pin down because, as Keating points out throughout the book, the meso is in fact quite varied. What unifies all the different meso-level developments is that they lie between the municipal and the national level; this may seem, at first, to validate the functionalist view. However, Keating easily demonstrates that even the most obvious form of the meso—the move to establish regional levels of government—exhibits a great deal of variation across European countries and was not the result of a functionalist drive to move governing functions to a lower level. Thus, much of the book is dedicated to describing and cataloguing the various changes that are all instances of the emergence of this level. Although the reader is not left with a neat and simple account, this is by no means a shortcoming of the book.

On the contrary, the variation of the meso serves to support Keating’s argument that the development of territorial units is shaped by historical and political forces. He carefully traces the development of the meso at the level of politics, institutions, interests, policy and norms. For example, in the chapter on politics (Chapter 4), he argues that the relationship between territorial struggles to build up nation-states and the political representation of interests is complex and cannot be reduced to a narrative about how the nationalization of political alignments and party systems contributed to the development of national forms of identity. Drawing on examples as varied as Italy, Scotland, Poland, Spain, and Scandinavia, Keating shows how national-level parties often reinforced regional identities. Similarly, in Chapter 8 he explores how norms of solidarity, sovereignty, and nationality are framed at multiple levels and are being reframed and renegotiated by rescaling. However, Keating points out, this renegotiation of the national level does not necessarily mean that social solidarity, for example, will decline, nor will the same forms necessarily be reproduced at new territorial levels. Again, the message is that the relationship between the national and the meso is complex and cannot be reduced to a functionalist argument about one level displacing or diminishing another.

That message is driven home conclusively. Perhaps unavoidably, at times the book moves through many examples, as Keating identifies and enumerates the different ways that the meso appears and influences each of these different spheres across a large number of European countries. He nevertheless makes a strong and well-written case, and Rescaling the European State represents the kind of careful, historical, political science scholarship that generates new and important knowledge while avoiding the temptation to reduce a messy and varied reality into a single, neat story. As the reader is reminded in the discussion of meso-level government, pinning down what exactly happens at this level can be difficult. Instead, Keating prefers to develop “a set of concepts with ‘family resemblance’ [but no] inclusive and exclusive definition of each” (p. 109). This recognition of complexity, rather than the development of taxonomies, is one of the many strengths of the book.

While the overall argument is exciting and compelling, some policy areas might seem to challenge this layered and historically bounded approach and provide evidence in favor of the simpler functionalist argument and statist focus. One such area that is not mentioned is security. In an era when security issues in Europe are so prominent, attempts at rescaling seem to have seriously fallen short of the times. I anticipate, however, that Keating would explain these failures by similarly appealing to the long-term historical development of these functions at the nation-state level and to the difficulty of reshaping the interests involved in policing and defense.

As such, the book offers a rich and useful set of tools with which to consider European development in light of continual rescaling. It is an important contribution to the literature on globalization and the nation-state and will be of interest to scholars seeking to understand not whether but how new forms of government are emerging. Although it deals with European Union countries and is primarily aimed at scholars of Europe, it is certainly of interest to scholars interested in globalization, devolution, and decentralization elsewhere.