Opening up das Schloβ: Creating Room for Thinking by Combining the Territorial Cohesion Discourse and the Debate on the European Union Polity

Abstract

To widen the debate about territorial cohesion, one can have a look at political science. We can namely critique the territorial cohesion discourse's exclusion of reasoning about the political by showing the relevance of the simultaneous debate on the European Union polity. It thereby also comes forward that the concept's power practices illustrate the bureaucratic, multi-level, polycentric, and network governance in flux that characterizes this polity. The territorial cohesion discourse might then exemplify how this opaque organization of governing leads to and is made possible by an associated form of expertise, which raises new questions on the role of social and spatial science in our society.