For her fellow social scientists, Saskia Sassen is a "leading scholar of globalization." Each new project, she says, takes her eight years of intense thinking and relative silence. Her latest book moves one step on from her authoritative work The Global City into what might be called the Global Globe -- the denationalized state.
Traditional theorizing on the subject (see, for example, Marshall McLuhan's "global village") tends towards optimistic simplification.
Sassen complicates the subject, massively. But unless we come to terms with the complexity, she believes, we cannot understand the dangers and possibilities of the "foundational change" our world is undergoing. We are, she says, poised at the moment "when the future begins."
Something big is clearly happening -- but how do we make sense of it?
"Well," says Sassen, the Ralph Lewis professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and centennial visiting professor at the London School of Economics, "I have long been uncomfortable with notions like `the global economy.' Where exactly is this global economy? I'm interested in the point at which the issue gets messy. Yes, there is something we can call globalization. But there is something else happening as well. My main effort is towards making sense of that `other thing.'"
Is that other thing what you call "denationalization" -- not the disappearance of traditional nation state, but its profound transformation?
"The notion of globalization does not adequately capture this transformation, which leads on to the question, where, precisely, is this foundational transformation happening? My answer is, to a large extent, within, not outside, the architecture of the nation state," she says.
"Yes, there are novel global formations, but they are thin compared with the nation state, the most complex structure we have produced historically. I think some parts of today's transformation are partial, contradictory, incipient -- they have uncertain trajectories and may well collapse, even as others thrive," she says.
Does the category "global," however one modifies it, truly global?
"There is a north-south divide marked by radical differences in hunger, deaths, kinds of war. But these differences in a way belong to an older history, even though they are also becoming part of a new history. In this new history, there are realities that cut across borders and across this old north-south divide," she says. "Thus the elites in Sao Paolo and the elites in Manila both share an emergent geography of centrality that connects them -- rather comfortably -- with elites in New York or in Paris. There are parallel geographies of poverty and disadvantage that also cut across old divides: we are becoming a planet of urban glamour zones and urban slums. I focus on these types of formations. It's not enough to talk of rich countries and poor countries."
So where do these elites hang out?
"Many different places. But it's not a question of friendship, it's not a face-to-face thing. It's how they are positioned in power systems, in labour markets, in cultures of leisure and in spaces of luxury. They share these positionings, even though they mostly don't know each other personally. This is a new kind of elite -- not the 1 percent of the old elites, but about 20 percent in major cities. It's a sort of `mass elite,'" she says.
How is the Internet playing into all this?
"The question of the digital is tricky. We have notions about it that keep us from seeing some of what is actually happening. One such notion is, `If it's digital, by God it's digital, and it's nothing else,'" she says.
"Digital technologies deliver the goods through complex ecologies that are partly social. `Who is using it, and for what?' is the important question. Digital interactive worlds are partially embedded in settings that are non-digital. In financial markets, digital interactive technology leads to greater concentrations of capital. In the social sphere it typically enhances equal access. What's critical is the logic of the user. It's a bit like the hammer: you can use it to kill, or to build a house," she says.
You clearly oppose any romanticism or easy optimisms about the Web.
"Yes ... Supposedly the issue is the `digital divide.' But once you're inside cyberspace there are many other divides. There is a poor man's email and there is a rich man's email. We really have to go digging into the specifics," she says.
What is globalization doing to us politically? Liberating us?
"Yes and no. For instance, what's not talked about enough is that we citizens in liberal democracies are losing rights as part of the current transformation -- even as we also gain rights through the human rights regime. They are little rights, so we don't notice that we're losing them -- not immediately," she says.
"Many of these losses are somewhat invisible because they are embedded in complicated technical systems like bankruptcy law, or, in the US, our right to start class action suits -- which we did against the tobacco companies, for example -- in lower order courts. We just lost this right two months ago. I keep a list of all the little rights I have been losing since the early 1990s, regardless of the political party in power, Clinton or Bush, though many more with Bush," she says.
Is the new complex globality a stable condition, as for many centuries the nation state was?
"I'm always asked to talk about the future -- most recently for cats in the cities of 2050. I'm not quite sure of that one ... We have indeed entered a new phase, but we are at its beginning. We don't know what's coming," she says.
"But I don't think it will be about the national versus the global. I see, rather, a multiplication of what is beginning to happen today: The formation of partial, often very specialized, assemblages of bits and pieces of territory, of authority, of rights, that used to be lodged in national states. Some of these assemblages will be private, some public, some will continue to inhabit national spaces but be actually denationalized, others will be global," she says.
"The future we are entering may turn out to be very, very bad, or it may turn out to be reasonable. We don't know, partly because it will be shaped not only by technology and power but also by the dispossessed.The past shows us that history has also been made by the excluded. We can make politics even if we lack power," she says.
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