regimes of national governance. This leads them
to claim boldly that Cascadia is ‘as meaningful
an economic entity as California’ (1993: 29).
However, as they go about repeatedly presenting
the region in such exaggerated ways, it starts to
become clear that, just as in the poster for the
‘Two-Nation Vacation’, the boosters call upon
and depend upon the more general contours of
the Cascadian landscape to do the work of
ideologically legitimating the scaled-up cross-
border development plans. It is this landscape
and the diversity of peoples and opportunities
placed upon it, then, that help naturalize and dis-
seminate the concept of a scaled-up cross-border
regional identity to outside visitors. In this way,
the geographical representation of a rescaled
Cascadian region serves to justify and facilitate
the very processes it presents as a fait accompli.
As a basic rationale for Cascadian development,
the rescaled binational scope of the landscape
vision is often called upon to explain the oppor-
tunities that lie in store. In this way it is said to
be natural for the separate parts of Cascadia to
cooperate locally and build a regional alliance
in the context of global interdependencies (for
example, Artibise, 1994: 4). Moreover, in terms
of explaining why the cross-border scope and
scale of Cascadia put the region on a trajectory
towards high-tech growth, the promoters also
often invoke the landscape’s more aesthetic quali-
ties, arguing that its natural beauty and diversity
create the basis for attracting and nurturing a
highly educated professional workforce. The
lifestyle appeal of the landscape is what is used in
turn in the naturalizing accounts of Cascadians’
special destiny as citizens of a rescaled free-trading
node of neoliberal opportunity (for example,
Sutherland, 1997: 42). There is an unhappy irony
in all this in so far as the promoters of Cascadia
coopted the concept from its original ecotopian
roots in the work of local bioregionalists (see
Henkel, 1993). Much cross-border environmen-
talism persists in the region, and, despite the
boosters’ attempts to harness it to Cascadian sus-
tainable development discourse, it is sometimes
connected to radically alternative views of eco-
centric governance (for example, Schoonmaker
et al., 1997). Such visions of governance are
oriented by mappings of the region’s ecological
diversity and vulnerability. But these more
counter-hegemonic representations of the cross-
border landscape remain fundamentally displaced
and replaced by the Cascadia of recreational
diversity and high-tech business parks envisioned
by the neoliberal promoters.
Ultimately, as a rescaled landscape vision put
to work in widespread rhetorics and plans
for regional development, Cascadia is also anideological coproducer of the very changes it is
supposedly meant just to reflect. It actually helps
to frame and naturalize a terrain that can then be
said to have magnetism, soul and magic. Perhaps
the most impressive, even magical, aspect of this
ideological rescaling process is that it also con-
jures up idealized citizen-subjects for the land-
scape too. Such citizens, or rather post-citizens
as they are imagined in the various promotional
projects, are basically just potential tourists and
investors. But as independent agents bringing
money and desires that respond to price signals,
they would seem to represent the practically per-
fect inhabitants of a rescaled post-national region
that is imagined as a neoliberal utopia.STRATEGIC SCALE-JUMPING: SUN,
SEA AND CARIBBEAN UNITYThe logo of the Caribbean Common Market and
Community (CARICOM) was introduced in
1983, 10 years after the organization’s initial
inception (Figure 26.2). As a flag and an emblem
on official documents, the logo symbolizes and
names an organization empowered to promote
supranational regional integration, trade and
economic cooperation among the small economies
of the Caribbean archipelago. In this sense the
logo registers a process of scale-jumping, of
extending and integrating economies beyond the
borders of the nation. The logo invokes a discourse
of islandness in which the region is naturalized
through reference to ecological similarity and, in
the absence of contiguous borders, a locational
proximity in the Caribbean Sea. Much more than
this though, through its reference to a collective
history of domination and subordination the logo
also invokes memories of struggle, and as such
points to the complex and ambivalent tensions
between ideology and resistance in the produc-
tion of scale. Highlighting a particular sense of
Caribbean specificity, the logo represents a
complex hybrid of neoliberal and postcolonial
remapping.
Like the landscapes used to promote Cascadia,
the logo of CARICOM naturalizes the supra-
national region through recurrent reference to local
images of the physical and ecological landscape.
Reflecting CARICOM’s origins among ex-British
colonies, the logo situates the Caribbean Sea as a
backdrop upon which islandness, natural vegeta-
tion and sunshine are scripted as characteristic of
the region (CARICOM, 1999). The iconification
of the entire Caribbean, as geographically
unanchored islands in the sun, erases history and
geography in favor of a homogeneous and490 GEOPOLITICAL CULTURES3029-ch26.qxd 03-10-02 11:05 AM Page 490