Scholte calls Globalization supraterritoriality. According to Jan Aart Scholte's Globalization, in a globalized world, territory and borders no longer matter. The benefit of defining globalization as supraterritoriality is that supraterritoriality encompasses trade liberalization and cultural homogenization. In supraterritoriality, barriers to the flow of goods and services between countries are almost eliminated. Globalization has been widely grasped in spatial terms and Scholte presents a strong version of this position. Globalization is a transformation of social geography marked by the growth of supraterritorial spaces, although he simultaneously recognizes that 'territoriality and supraterritoriality coexist in complex interrelations.
Supraterritoriality is growing more important. Territorial and supraterritorial spaces, national-international as well as supranational-transnational relations, are all globalized. One of the many key questions in the political economy of globalization concerns the implications of this broad trend for forms of collective identity and the associated shapes and strengths of community in the contemporary world system. Globalization, which is conceived here in a distinctly geographical sense as the rise of supraterritoriality, has shifted away from a situation thoroughly dominated by national identities.
For Scholte, globalization is a transformation of social geography marked by the growth of supraterritoriality and supraterritorial spaces, though he recognizes that 'territoriality and supraterritoriality coexist in complex interrelations.' Scholte, suggests that the historical moment we are living in involves a new sense of the world as a single social space, involving two central components: transplanetary relations and supraterritoriality.
Scholte's notion of "supraterritoriality" implies in the world that is being created today relations are "relatively delinked from territory, that is, domains mapped on the land surface of the earth, plus any adjoining waters and air spheres." Older trend towards a shrinking world occurred within territoriality, Scholte suggests that in the new world of supraterritoriality, place is not territorially fixed, territorial distance is covered in no time, and territorial boundaries present no particular impediment. (Scholte 2000).
The Geography of Collective Identities in a
Globalizing World
Jan Aart Scholte.
Abstract: Globalization has helped to reinvigorate or newly invent a host of substate localisms as
well as a diverse array of transborder solidarities. Concurrently, recent moves away from
territorialist geography have in other respects reproduced the nationality principle and
have also prompted a number of nationalist reactions. These different and often
contradictory tendencies have resulted in widespread fragmentation of identities in the
world political economy of the late twentieth century. The article concludes with some
(admittedly problematic) suggestions for the construction of
fluid, post-nationalist global communities of difference.