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