The purpose of this paper is to rethink the concept of politics in geography and the relation between geography and politics. To do so we examine a case study of a practical geopolitical process produced by the attempt at the separation of ‘Padania’ from Italy in 1996 by the Lega Nord (Northern League).
Since the so-called ‘cultural turn,’ the sphere of politics in geography has been greatly broadened into a variety of realms such as daily life or geographical representations. However, it has seemed that this diffusion, even when producing fruitful results, has lacked sufficient critical reflection. It may even risk neglecting the autonomy of the concept of politics.
For this reason, we refer to the argument of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, who has actively theorized about the autonomy of the concept of politics. He couples politics with the concept of the polis. On the one hand, the ‘polis’ spatializes communities of human beings cartographically, distributes them in that space, and allocates proper identities or positions, namely ‘parts’ to them. On the other hand, ‘politics’ is interruption of this spatialization from ‘the people’ who have no ‘parts’ there and forces the polis to change the whole spatial configuration of the community.
The geopolitical attempt to represent Northern Italy as ‘Padania’ by the Northern League was considered to be a mistake in Italy. The reason for this is that a political place called ‘Padania’ does not exist in Italy. However, the ‘Padanian people’ raised their voices, and by performing as if they embodied a ‘national’ form, tried to demonstrate that they were on a par with Italy. Padania was neither simply a space for a new nation, even if one were to speak of separation, nor an already existing region within Italy. Padania was not a clear-cut identifiable space, but a place of discomfort for exposing the ‘parts’ of the people who had no ‘parts.’ The nature of this discomfort could give rise to a political opportunity.
The Italian polis responded to and finally rejected the Padanian politics through the following four modes: The first was ‘parapolitics,’ a response particularly from the politically left-wing politicians, that rejected Padania, reducing it to the status of a region inside Italy by trying to eliminate its uncomfortable nature. The second was ‘ultrapolitics,’ mainly of the right-wing politicians, that identified Padania as the identified space of a seperate nation distinguished completely from Italy. The third was ‘metapolitics,’ which in this case was practiced by the Northern League itself. This means that the League considered the separation of Padania as merely a means for obtaining regional autonomy for the North within the Italian state. The fourth was ‘archipolitics’ which was also practiced by the Northern League itself. This saw Padania as an organic community in a globalizing world that needed to be defended from immigration and the circulation of commodities through border controls. All four of these modes exercised by the polis, but most decisively the last two modes, denied the politics of Padania. All of them, by actualizing Padania as a ‘region’ or as a nation’ that could be cartographically represented on a map, denied the politics.
In order to more deeply examine the concept of politics, one of the important tasks for contemporary political geography is to examine the formation of political communities that cannot be reduced to a cartographic representation.
