2 - The Austere State

Summary

Introduction

In this chapter, I forward an analysis of the institutional, social and spatiotemporal features of the austere state. Bringing work on state austerity arrangements into conversation with ideas about the role of actors working within and beyond the state to actively construct – as well as critique and contest – austerity as a discursive and material project, I develop a conceptual framework for the subsequent chapters of this book, in which I use specific sites and cases to attend to the different configurations (or ‘spatialities’ – following Keith and Pile [1993] who use this term to reference the idea that spatial and social relations are mutually constituted) of the austere state, as well as how geographical diversity inflects the experience of austerity and the relationship between austerity and inequality. Throughout the discussion, I refer to ‘the state’ not merely as an operational ensemble, but as a medium through which different social potencies act. Informed by Jessop (1990: 270), who asserts that ‘the power of the state is the power of the forces acting in and through the state’, my intention is to highlight the active construction of austerity through the action and inaction of different agents and forces (Peck, 2012; Bailey, 2015; Bailey et al, 2018). This approach importantly allows for a consideration of how the economic and political project of austerity is shaped by past state activity or inertia, and the historical basis of variation in local government capacity and financial resource.

Given the emergence of the state is a dynamic process involving actors that produce and perform institutions through particular spatial relations, in response to and in combination with the effects of previous state forms and policy interventions, a geographically and historically sensitive approach is required. In conjunction with this, an empirical focus on the UK serves to bring the multi-scalar composition and articulation of austerity into greater focus. With high national and regional inequities within the centralized union-state structure, as well as persistent spatial disparities in social and economic conditions between and within cities, the transfer of budgetary pressures down to lower spatial scales sees austerity unevenly impact places and people, with cuts in public expenditure concentrating hardship for those living in and around poverty (Hall, 2019a; see also Peck, 2015). At the same time, state restructuring and institutional dismantling generates legacies and ramifications that pattern future developments (Pike et al, 2018).