Territory, Authority, Rights (S Sassen)
Saskia Sassen (2006), Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton University Press, p. 512
p.1
Yet, if this transformation in indeed epochal, it has to engage the most complex institution we have ever produced : the national state. Global-level institutions and processes are currently relatively underdeveloped compared to the private and public domains of any reasonably functioning sovereign country. This engagement cannot be reduced, as is common, to the victimhood of national states at the hands of globalization. The national is still the realm where formalization and institutionalization have all reached their highest level of development, though they rarely reach the most enlightened forms we conceived of Territory, law, economy, security, authority, and membership all have largely been constructed as national in most of the world, albeit rarely with the degree of autonomy posited in national law and international treaties.
A good part of globalization consists of an enormous variety of micro-processes that begin to denationalize what had been constructed as national- whether policies, capital, political subjectivities, urban spaces, temporal frames, or any other variety of dynamics and domains. Sometimes these processes of denationalization allow, enable, or push the construction of new types of global scaling of dynamics and institutions; other times they continue to inhabit the realm of what is still largely national
p.2
These instantiations of the global, which are in good part structured inside the national , do not need to run through the supranational or international system. Nor do tey need to run through the new types of global domains that have emerged since the 1980s, such as electronic financial markets or global civil society. They include particular and specific components of a broad range of entities, such as the work of legislatures and judiciairies, the worldwide operation of national firms and markets, political projects of nonstate actors, translocal processes that connect poor households across borders, diasporic networks, and changes in the relation between citizens and the state.
p.3
“there are two distinct set of dynamics driving globalization
But there is a second set of process that does not necessarily scale at the global level as such, yet, I argue, is part of globalization. These processes take place deep inside territories and institutional domains that have largely been constructed in national term in much of the world. What makes theses processes part of globalization even though they are localized in national, indeed subnational, setting is that they are oriented towards global agendas and systems. They are multisided, transboundary networks and formations which can include normative orders; they connect subnational or “national” processes, institutions and actors, but not necessarily through the formal interstate system. Examples are cross-border networks of activists engaged in specific localized struggles with an explicit or implicit global agenda, for example, human rights and environmental organizations; particular aspects of the work of states, for example, certain monetary and fiscal policies critical for the construction of global markets now being implemented in growing number of countries; the use of international human rights instruments in national courts; and noncosmopolitain forms of global politic that remain deeply attached to or focused on localized issues and struggles.
p.6
Where in the past most territories were subject to multiple system of rule, the national sovereign gains exclusive authority over a given territory and at the same time this territory is constructed as coterminous with that authority, in principle ensuring a similar dynamic in other nations-states. This in turn gives the sovereign the possibility of functioning as the exclusive grantor of rights.
Much attention has gone to the fact that the nation-state has lost some of its exclusive territorial authority to the new global institutions. Now we need to examine in depth the specific, often specialized rearrangements inside this highly formalized and institutionalized national apparatus that enable that shift.
p.8
Much discussion about the ongoing role of the national state in today’s global age evinces this type of confusion. First, it is not the national state as such, in its totality, but particular components that are undergoing denationalization; second the valence of particular capabilities arises out of the organizing logics within which they are inserted.
p. 9
An analytics of capabilities and tipping points keeps us from having to posit that the ascendance of a new order necessarily means the end of the old order
The notion of tipping points first entered the public discourse in the US in discussions about white flight from inner-city neighborhoods in the 1960s where black residents had crossed a certain thresholds as a percentage of the population.
p.12
That which has not yet gained formal recognition can often be an indicator if change, of the constituting and inserting of new substantive logics in a particular domain of the social – economic, cultural, political discursive, subjective – which is thereby altered even though its formal representation may remain unchanged, or, alternatively, altered even though it remains informal, or is not yet formalized.
p.21
In my interpretation the current phase of globalization consists at least partly of global systems evolving out of the capabilities that constituted territorial sovereign states and interstate system. In other words, the territorial sovereign state, with its territorial fixity and exclusivity, represents a set of capabilities that eventually enable the formation or evoltution of particular global systems – itself a partial condition- that require neither territoriality nor exclusivity. This runs against the dominant interpretation which, whether explicit of not, constructs the global and the national as mutually exclusive.
p.23
Third, globalization is not simply growing interdependence – its typical definition – but the actual production pf spatial and temporal frames that simultaneously inhabit national structures and are distinct from national spatial and temporal frames as these have been historically constructed.
p.28
Second hypothesis in Chapter 2 that organizes my reading of the historiography of the period pertains to a distinct political economy of urban territoriality in the Late Middle Ages that contains dynamic tendencies toward the production of modern capabilities: secular authority, constitutional forms of government, and territoriality.
p.29
My elaboration of the first two capabilities rest on the somewhat rare legal scholarship that emphasized the importance of urban law. This is an aspect less noted in the general historiography of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which tend to emphasize economic and political aspects, in particular the relationship of cities to lords, kings, and the church. The making of urban law entails a second, related dimension: the informal political practices of twon dwellers inside the city, which contributed to constitute the burgher as a specific type of subject. With important exceptions, these two factors have not been given sufficient weight in the pertinent historiography. They are, however, critical to my capabilities analysis. The third critical urban element that has been insufficiently theorized concerns the implication of inter-city transaction for the construction of specific types of territoriality.
The question of territoriality has generally not been central to the historiography of cities, far more focused on their relations to various sources of power. When it has been emphasized, the focus has typically been on the cities themselves, conceived of as a type of territorial organization. In specifying a distinct political economy of urban territoriality I include the fact that these cities were not only nodal but also partly networked forms of territorial organization. Insofar as inter-city trade and the mobilities of particular corporate groups, notably the guilds, needed protections and rules for the crossing of territories, they produced a specific type of spatiality. This spatiality wormed its way into territories encased in multiple, formal, nonurban jurisdiction – feudal, ecclesiastic, and imperial – and set up a system of “urbanized” authorities over those routes. These authorities were mostly de facto and customary rather than formalized, and they were partial and form the ground up; in that sense they constituted a mostly informal type of territoriality.
p.54
Most towns in the Middle Ages did not necessarily have such hegemonic power and authorities, though in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with the explosion in new towns and trade, several of they become enormously rich, powerful, and influential. An indication of this is that some of theses towns were among the signatories to the Peace of Westphalia, on meant for national states.
p.55
I see today’s global cities and high-tech district as partly denationalized strategic territorializations with considerable regulatory autonomy through the ascendance of private governance regimes. It makes for lumpy geographies of sovereign control in both the past period and today.
p.312
Rubenstein and Adler’s (2000) distinction between formal nationality and effective nationality captures a departure from the decision in Nottebohm, which emphasized an older understanding of nationality as allegiance and of the place of nationality in international law. It strengthens citizenship as a category, precisely because of its greater flexibility and fluidity (Bosniak 2000); at the same time, the more fluid standing of nationality in international law produces a potentially fruitful convergence.
p.321
Again, the critical assumption here is that citizenship is inevitably an incompletely specified contract between the state and the citizen, and that in this incompleteness then lies the possibility of accommodation new conditions and incorporation new formal and informal instrumentalities. Periods of change make this incompleteness operational and legible, whether in the contesting of discrimination, aspirations of equal citizenship, the decision by first-nation people to go directly to international for a and by pass the national state, or the claims to legal residence by undocumented immigrants who have met the requisite formal and informal criteria. I also interpreted this growing distance between the state and the citizen as the emergence of a type of political subject that do not quite correspond to the notion of the formal political subject that is the voting and jury-serving citizen, notably citizen woman with center their political claim-making in the subject that is the mother or housewife rather than citizen. The multiplying of informal political subjects points to the possibility that the excluded (in this case from the formal political apparatus) also can make history, thereby signaling the complexity of powerlessness. Many of these dynamics become legible in cities. Through the thickness of daily life and local, mostly informal politics, cities can accommodate and enable the unbundling of the tight articulation of the citizen and formal state politics. These various trend resonate with the case of the burghers in medieval cities: they were informal actors who found in the space of the city the conditions for their source of “power” as merchants and for their political claim making. In my interpretation, complex cities today also function as such productive space for the very different types of informal political actors and their claim-making. Whether this is productivity exclusive to cities or or whether cities simply make these processes more visible, is, at this point, an empirical question.
p.381
Braudel’s (1984) examination of the times and spaces of late medieval Europes illuminates some of these issues. His treatment of the distinctiveness of the major cities – his “supervilles” – of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries compared with their surroundings- show is the coexistence of diverse spatialities and temporalities. But a signicicant difference is that these were largely mutually exclusive zone, core and peripheries articulated at best through relations of hierarchy. What I am positing is different from Braudel’s mutually exclusive zones. For instance, in the case of the global economy, the capital fixity necessary to produce hypermobility can be seen as instantiating a spatiality/temporality that is distinct from that of the circulation of hypermobile dematerialized financial outputs yet it is one constitutive element in the possibility of the latter. This means that the spatiality of the global economic cannot be fully contained in either one, but inhabits both. The specificity of the global does not necessarily reside in being mutually exclusive with the national; the mechanism through which new legal forms, necessary for globalization, are implemented are often part of state institutions. The infrastructure that enables the hypermobility of financial capital at the global scale is embedded in various national territories. But the processes that constitute this insertion partly denationalize the national.
p.419
Authority with territorial parameters can take many different forms: the historical territorial exclusivity associated with the nation-state should be conceived of as just one of these. Chapter 2 1 posited that medieval cities constituted a type of urban political economy of territoriality. Can we make this more abstract so as to accommodate particular forms pf territorial authority today? Some of these get constituted as denationalized territories inside ongoing national regimes. Global cities are such entities as compared to electronic financial networks, which are not. Insofar as some components of historical borders are evolving into chains with multiple locations inside national territories create a new type od internal bordering. One question for research is whether these internal bordering bring particular type of advantages to some actors and institutions- for instance, do they entail capacity akin to arbitraging in finance? These are all issues that complicate the question f state authority: it remains critical but corresponds less to its representation in national and international law than it did before the current transformation.
p.1
Yet, if this transformation in indeed epochal, it has to engage the most complex institution we have ever produced : the national state. Global-level institutions and processes are currently relatively underdeveloped compared to the private and public domains of any reasonably functioning sovereign country. This engagement cannot be reduced, as is common, to the victimhood of national states at the hands of globalization. The national is still the realm where formalization and institutionalization have all reached their highest level of development, though they rarely reach the most enlightened forms we conceived of Territory, law, economy, security, authority, and membership all have largely been constructed as national in most of the world, albeit rarely with the degree of autonomy posited in national law and international treaties.
A good part of globalization consists of an enormous variety of micro-processes that begin to denationalize what had been constructed as national- whether policies, capital, political subjectivities, urban spaces, temporal frames, or any other variety of dynamics and domains. Sometimes these processes of denationalization allow, enable, or push the construction of new types of global scaling of dynamics and institutions; other times they continue to inhabit the realm of what is still largely national
p.2
These instantiations of the global, which are in good part structured inside the national , do not need to run through the supranational or international system. Nor do tey need to run through the new types of global domains that have emerged since the 1980s, such as electronic financial markets or global civil society. They include particular and specific components of a broad range of entities, such as the work of legislatures and judiciairies, the worldwide operation of national firms and markets, political projects of nonstate actors, translocal processes that connect poor households across borders, diasporic networks, and changes in the relation between citizens and the state.
p.3
“there are two distinct set of dynamics driving globalization
But there is a second set of process that does not necessarily scale at the global level as such, yet, I argue, is part of globalization. These processes take place deep inside territories and institutional domains that have largely been constructed in national term in much of the world. What makes theses processes part of globalization even though they are localized in national, indeed subnational, setting is that they are oriented towards global agendas and systems. They are multisided, transboundary networks and formations which can include normative orders; they connect subnational or “national” processes, institutions and actors, but not necessarily through the formal interstate system. Examples are cross-border networks of activists engaged in specific localized struggles with an explicit or implicit global agenda, for example, human rights and environmental organizations; particular aspects of the work of states, for example, certain monetary and fiscal policies critical for the construction of global markets now being implemented in growing number of countries; the use of international human rights instruments in national courts; and noncosmopolitain forms of global politic that remain deeply attached to or focused on localized issues and struggles.
p.6
Where in the past most territories were subject to multiple system of rule, the national sovereign gains exclusive authority over a given territory and at the same time this territory is constructed as coterminous with that authority, in principle ensuring a similar dynamic in other nations-states. This in turn gives the sovereign the possibility of functioning as the exclusive grantor of rights.
Much attention has gone to the fact that the nation-state has lost some of its exclusive territorial authority to the new global institutions. Now we need to examine in depth the specific, often specialized rearrangements inside this highly formalized and institutionalized national apparatus that enable that shift.
p.8
Much discussion about the ongoing role of the national state in today’s global age evinces this type of confusion. First, it is not the national state as such, in its totality, but particular components that are undergoing denationalization; second the valence of particular capabilities arises out of the organizing logics within which they are inserted.
p. 9
An analytics of capabilities and tipping points keeps us from having to posit that the ascendance of a new order necessarily means the end of the old order
The notion of tipping points first entered the public discourse in the US in discussions about white flight from inner-city neighborhoods in the 1960s where black residents had crossed a certain thresholds as a percentage of the population.
p.12
That which has not yet gained formal recognition can often be an indicator if change, of the constituting and inserting of new substantive logics in a particular domain of the social – economic, cultural, political discursive, subjective – which is thereby altered even though its formal representation may remain unchanged, or, alternatively, altered even though it remains informal, or is not yet formalized.
p.21
In my interpretation the current phase of globalization consists at least partly of global systems evolving out of the capabilities that constituted territorial sovereign states and interstate system. In other words, the territorial sovereign state, with its territorial fixity and exclusivity, represents a set of capabilities that eventually enable the formation or evoltution of particular global systems – itself a partial condition- that require neither territoriality nor exclusivity. This runs against the dominant interpretation which, whether explicit of not, constructs the global and the national as mutually exclusive.
p.23
Third, globalization is not simply growing interdependence – its typical definition – but the actual production pf spatial and temporal frames that simultaneously inhabit national structures and are distinct from national spatial and temporal frames as these have been historically constructed.
p.28
Second hypothesis in Chapter 2 that organizes my reading of the historiography of the period pertains to a distinct political economy of urban territoriality in the Late Middle Ages that contains dynamic tendencies toward the production of modern capabilities: secular authority, constitutional forms of government, and territoriality.
p.29
My elaboration of the first two capabilities rest on the somewhat rare legal scholarship that emphasized the importance of urban law. This is an aspect less noted in the general historiography of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which tend to emphasize economic and political aspects, in particular the relationship of cities to lords, kings, and the church. The making of urban law entails a second, related dimension: the informal political practices of twon dwellers inside the city, which contributed to constitute the burgher as a specific type of subject. With important exceptions, these two factors have not been given sufficient weight in the pertinent historiography. They are, however, critical to my capabilities analysis. The third critical urban element that has been insufficiently theorized concerns the implication of inter-city transaction for the construction of specific types of territoriality.
The question of territoriality has generally not been central to the historiography of cities, far more focused on their relations to various sources of power. When it has been emphasized, the focus has typically been on the cities themselves, conceived of as a type of territorial organization. In specifying a distinct political economy of urban territoriality I include the fact that these cities were not only nodal but also partly networked forms of territorial organization. Insofar as inter-city trade and the mobilities of particular corporate groups, notably the guilds, needed protections and rules for the crossing of territories, they produced a specific type of spatiality. This spatiality wormed its way into territories encased in multiple, formal, nonurban jurisdiction – feudal, ecclesiastic, and imperial – and set up a system of “urbanized” authorities over those routes. These authorities were mostly de facto and customary rather than formalized, and they were partial and form the ground up; in that sense they constituted a mostly informal type of territoriality.
p.54
Most towns in the Middle Ages did not necessarily have such hegemonic power and authorities, though in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with the explosion in new towns and trade, several of they become enormously rich, powerful, and influential. An indication of this is that some of theses towns were among the signatories to the Peace of Westphalia, on meant for national states.
p.55
I see today’s global cities and high-tech district as partly denationalized strategic territorializations with considerable regulatory autonomy through the ascendance of private governance regimes. It makes for lumpy geographies of sovereign control in both the past period and today.
p.312
Rubenstein and Adler’s (2000) distinction between formal nationality and effective nationality captures a departure from the decision in Nottebohm, which emphasized an older understanding of nationality as allegiance and of the place of nationality in international law. It strengthens citizenship as a category, precisely because of its greater flexibility and fluidity (Bosniak 2000); at the same time, the more fluid standing of nationality in international law produces a potentially fruitful convergence.
p.321
Again, the critical assumption here is that citizenship is inevitably an incompletely specified contract between the state and the citizen, and that in this incompleteness then lies the possibility of accommodation new conditions and incorporation new formal and informal instrumentalities. Periods of change make this incompleteness operational and legible, whether in the contesting of discrimination, aspirations of equal citizenship, the decision by first-nation people to go directly to international for a and by pass the national state, or the claims to legal residence by undocumented immigrants who have met the requisite formal and informal criteria. I also interpreted this growing distance between the state and the citizen as the emergence of a type of political subject that do not quite correspond to the notion of the formal political subject that is the voting and jury-serving citizen, notably citizen woman with center their political claim-making in the subject that is the mother or housewife rather than citizen. The multiplying of informal political subjects points to the possibility that the excluded (in this case from the formal political apparatus) also can make history, thereby signaling the complexity of powerlessness. Many of these dynamics become legible in cities. Through the thickness of daily life and local, mostly informal politics, cities can accommodate and enable the unbundling of the tight articulation of the citizen and formal state politics. These various trend resonate with the case of the burghers in medieval cities: they were informal actors who found in the space of the city the conditions for their source of “power” as merchants and for their political claim making. In my interpretation, complex cities today also function as such productive space for the very different types of informal political actors and their claim-making. Whether this is productivity exclusive to cities or or whether cities simply make these processes more visible, is, at this point, an empirical question.
p.381
Braudel’s (1984) examination of the times and spaces of late medieval Europes illuminates some of these issues. His treatment of the distinctiveness of the major cities – his “supervilles” – of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries compared with their surroundings- show is the coexistence of diverse spatialities and temporalities. But a signicicant difference is that these were largely mutually exclusive zone, core and peripheries articulated at best through relations of hierarchy. What I am positing is different from Braudel’s mutually exclusive zones. For instance, in the case of the global economy, the capital fixity necessary to produce hypermobility can be seen as instantiating a spatiality/temporality that is distinct from that of the circulation of hypermobile dematerialized financial outputs yet it is one constitutive element in the possibility of the latter. This means that the spatiality of the global economic cannot be fully contained in either one, but inhabits both. The specificity of the global does not necessarily reside in being mutually exclusive with the national; the mechanism through which new legal forms, necessary for globalization, are implemented are often part of state institutions. The infrastructure that enables the hypermobility of financial capital at the global scale is embedded in various national territories. But the processes that constitute this insertion partly denationalize the national.
p.419
Authority with territorial parameters can take many different forms: the historical territorial exclusivity associated with the nation-state should be conceived of as just one of these. Chapter 2 1 posited that medieval cities constituted a type of urban political economy of territoriality. Can we make this more abstract so as to accommodate particular forms pf territorial authority today? Some of these get constituted as denationalized territories inside ongoing national regimes. Global cities are such entities as compared to electronic financial networks, which are not. Insofar as some components of historical borders are evolving into chains with multiple locations inside national territories create a new type od internal bordering. One question for research is whether these internal bordering bring particular type of advantages to some actors and institutions- for instance, do they entail capacity akin to arbitraging in finance? These are all issues that complicate the question f state authority: it remains critical but corresponds less to its representation in national and international law than it did before the current transformation.
Publicité