Globalization or denationalization? Economy and polity in a global digital age.

1
Globalization or denationalization? Economy and
polity in a global digital age.

• Distinguishing and locating the key dynamics that
  constitute globalization
• Presentation by Professor Saskia Sassen at the
  Workshop on the Sociology and Cultures of
  Globalization,
• October 8, 2002, The University of Chicago

2
What is it we are trying to name with the term
globalization?

• Two distinct dynamics
• 1. The formation of global scale institutions
  and processes WTO, global financial markets, the
  new cosmopolitans, the War Crimes Tribunals. This
  is what is usually understood by the term
  globalization.
• 2. A second set of processes that does not
  necessarily scale at the global level specific
  forms of the work of states such as particular
  monetary, fiscal and regulatory policies the use
  of Human Rights instruments in NATIONAL courts
  non-cosmopolitan forms of global politics and
  imaginaries.

3
Towards an incipient denationalizing of the
national?

• The national as constructed condition.
• A long-term historical process. Thus
  characterized by institutional thickness and
  considerable formalization.
• Much of the work of the state over the last
  hundred or more years has been directed towards
  the construction of the national.
• Under globalization (since 1970s) a (forced?)
  partial reorientation towards global agendas.

4
Denationalization as an incipient, partial
dynamic that reorients what had been constructed
as national

• Global financial markets require very specific,
  specialized reorientations in the monetary
  policies of a growing number of countries.
• National courts using human rights instruments
  introduce non-national criteria where before the
  normativity of the national state was exclusive.
• The growth of a global consciousness (human
  rights, environment, poor peoples struggles,
  first nation people claims for direct
  representation) unbundles national citizenship
  it is more than the formal bundle of
  nation-linked rights.

5
Scales and spaces of the global

• The global as multiscalar
• The global scale is one of the scales for the
  global.
• The subnational is a second type of scale for the
  global.
• One debate does the multiscalar character of
  globalization run through nested hierarchies of
  scale or does it in fact destabilize such nested
  hierarchies?
• Micro and macro spaces of the global.

6
Scales and spaces of the local

• The local as multiscalar
• physical proximity has been a key marker of the
  local as constructed historically and as
  specified theoretically (with important
  exceptions all along our histories)
• Today we see a proliferation of emergent
  experiences and conditionings of the local not
  marked by ph.p.
• A global scaling of the local through
  participation in, articulation with global
  networks.
• A horizontal, lateralized global scale not
  dependent on vertical world encompassing
  hierarchies to be global.

7
Citizenship partly denationalized

• Two trends are evident today
• 1.A renationalizing of certain components of
  citizenship and of immigration policy.
• 2. An unbundling of citizenship
• Formal rights
• Citizenship practices (can be enacted by non
  citizens also, incl. undocumented immigrants).
• Citizenship identities can be transnational.
• Locations for citizenship local,
  transnational,supranational.

8
Sites where these citizenship dynamics become
legible

• There are multiple sites where these dynamics
  become legible. Most significant are global
  cities and institutional settings where the human
  rights instruments get applied.

9
Global cities Strategic sites for new types of
political practices

• The unbundling of citizenship into several more
  flexible components can both transnationalize and
  localize citizenship.
• National political space is very formal and
  highly institutionalized. In comparison, EU
  citizenship is underdeveloped. But by being so it
  can accommodate many more types of citizenship
  loosely defined, e.g. by nationality of members
  states. It is more inclusive than nation-based
  citizenship.
• Cities are also more inclusive than natl.systems

10
As a political space cities are informal,
inclusive and flexible.

• Informal political subjects
• Non-cosmopolitan forms of global politics
• Subjects who are unauthorized yet recognized
  (e.g. undocumented immigrants)
• Informal social contracts
• A politics of places on cross-border networks
• The partial denationalizing of global cities