Nearly twenty years after "the fall of the Iron Curtain," one can be surprised that the nation-state is still going strong. A theoretical current running through the study of international relations and security during the 1990s was that a fundamental weakening of the nation-state was occurring. Without a consuming contest between two superpowers, the reasoning went, space opened up for new thinking about "a new world society."
The emergence of globalization was one of the main factors both giving rise to, and seeming to confirm, such ideas. With the standard account's emphasis on growing interdependence and the formation of global systems, it has been too tempting to understand what has been going on in terms of a simple equation. Its logic is that the advent of globalization must result in the declining importance and viability of the nation-state. Globalization, in other words, is at the expense of states.
The failure of that account to adequately explain the complexity of what is happening to the nation-state as globaliz-ation unfolds is the subject of much of the recent work of Saskia Sassen, Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, and Centennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. Two of her most recent books, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, and A Sociology of Globalization, provide a convincing platform for a thorough exploration of what globalization means.
Her work shows how the nation-state is constitutive of globalization and that, rather than being the helpless victim of the latter's onslaught, it is in many ways redefining itself as a powerful agent of globalization for its own rapidly changing purposes. If some 800 pages of intense analysis can at all be summarized in such a brief review, it is by saying that Sassen argues for an "unbundling" of the intricate inter-relations, structures, systems and power that have characterized several hundred years' of the nation-state's consolidation as the ultimate authority, territory and assemblage. Having done at least some of that unbundling, she shows how centuries of nationalization of nearly every aspect of human interaction (in one way or another) are now undergoing "de-nationalization" and, subsequently, "re-nationalization," as a driver of the transformation taking place under the banner of "globalization."
Her strength is that she is able to push the understanding of globalization, not only through sophisticated theorizing, but by referring to empirical material whenever possible. It becomes a vivid adventure in a search to understand what is going on "out there." She describes with poignancy how the notion of analytic borderlands came to her as a result of a psychological collision of different efforts to understand complex systems of interaction from several intellectual and disciplinary directions. Those efforts often led to the perception of completely empty spaces where no previous theoretical approach could suffice, and new ways of speaking about the observed needed to be invented.
A typical example is the labyrinthine complexity of the situation of an illegal immigrant woman working as a janitor for a globally-operating, electronically-based, finance company, on Wall Street. In that example, to mention only some of its aspects, she shows the meeting and mixing of the informal (the janitor working illegally) and the highly formalized (global electronic financial markets) in one of the world's "forty or so" global cities. Global financial markets rely on the robust institutions that have been painstakingly constructed and maintained by the nation-state; in turn, those global activities generate new institutions that enter the state at specific and highly localized nodes, the global cities, which bring the global into the local, and at the same time remain anchored to it.
Sassen repeatedly calls for more empirical research, and the attentive reader finds much to dwell on as the reading slows, not from boredom, but from a rush of reflections on potential research pathways. She explores the possibilities for redefining the role and power of regions; she turns on the prospects for understanding how gendered structures contribute particular spins to global networks of NGOs which intertwine the yearnings of individuals with the mandates of global institutions, such as the United Nations. Indigenous peoples and their questioning of borderlands show the way to seeing borders as zones, rather than as lines, and that new territories of associations create multiple boundary lands.
It is no accident that one of Sassen's more significant bows to previous writers is to Deleuze and Guattari, with their development of the assemblage, as a "contingent ensemble of practices and things that can be differentiated (that is, they are not collections of similar practices and things) and that can be aligned along the axes of territoriality and de-territorialisation."
Where does all this connect to my globalization.com? For me, it is found around a dinner table after a meeting of Nordic experts in Greenland. The other diners include MPs, representatives of industry and commerce, the administration and the university. The hottest topic concerns the plans for mineral exploitation, including the proposal by a global corporation (with its headquarters sited in a very specific locality in the USA) to construct a huge new aluminium smelter.
One of the biggest questions here is in which of the far-flung communities it should be built, and what the potential effects will be. The minister for economic development enthuses about job creation and infrastructure. A leader of one of the remote municipalities that would welcome the smelter joins in with how those spin-offs would have an even greater effect in his community.
The minister for environmental matters then patiently laments that no matter how much he can identify with the importance of those issues for the future of the economy, he worries about the potential pollution and being able to look his grandchildren in the eye. He could stop the entire project. In the morning, the various experts from all the Nordic countries that have been called to the meeting will fly back home. Greenland is as far from the centres of "the two pentagons"—that American one and that other, European one—as anywhere can be in today's world, but it is at the very centre of globalization. They all need each other.
See also article on Aluminium smelter in Greenland pp 10-11