Sassen suffers from Castells Disease - a breathless torrent of assertions supported by not much in the way of evidence.
>In my reading, the impact of globalization on state authority or sovereignty
>has been significant in creating operational and conceptual openings for
>other actors and subjects (See Sassen 1997). At the limit this means that
>the state is no longer the only site for sovereignty and the normativity
>that comes with it, and further, that the state is no longer the exclusive
>subject for international law and the only actor in international relations.
When was it ever, really? Whenever the pre-Blair British Labour Party formed a government, it quickly felt the sting of international capital's disapproval. And that was well before everything was supposed to have changed, around 1980. The United Fruit Company used to run whole countries; now it just runs a corner of U.S. trade policy. ITT and Kennecott had no small influence in Allende's Chile. Brown Bros. Harriman ran Nicaragua. And so on.
Foucault goes a bit too far for my taste in his critique of traditional notions of sovereignty, but he did have a point, no? Sovereignty has always been a lot more dispersed than our old kingly top-down models.
>The large city of today emerges as a strategic site for these new types of
>operations. It is one of the nexi where the formation of new claims
>materializes and assumes concrete forms. The loss of power at the national
>level produces the possibility for new forms of power and politics at the
>subnational level. The national as container of social process and power is
>cracked. This cracked casing opens up possibilities for a geography of
>politics that links subnational spaces. Cities are foremost in this new
>geography.
What the hell does this mean? Sassen had some consulting contracts with the Regional Plan Association, the planning body that has long had a lot to do with the development of the New York metropolitan area. It'd be nice if she were to share some of her experiences with this body, or talked a bit about its history. The RPA, dominated by real estate and financial interests, has since its 1929 master plan, spearheaded suburbanization, the eviction of industry (and smelly unsightly workers) from Manhattan, the stimulation of finance and other elite business services as the motor of the city and regional economy, and the transfer of the port across the Hudson to New Jersey - all in accordance with the "nexi" vision that Sassen treats as a recent innovation.
>The evidence does show that NGOs can effect power redistribution even though
>they do so slowly and often at micro scales: e.g. micro-credit extended to
>women has done more to empower them than government legislation and Bureaus
>of Women's Affairs.
This is really crap. There's no evidence that microcredit has done anything of the sort. The Self-Employed Women's Association of India, yes, but that's about self-organization, not microcredit. There's a good reason the World Bank and the Ford Foundation love microcredit - good PR without really changing social relations much (gender relations included).
Missing in action: unions.
>In sum,
>Some of the depoliticisation of NGOs evident in the above series of examples
>is emblematic of a broader pattern of depoliticisation of power generally as
>discussed in the first part of this paper, e.g. the privatization of public
>bureaucracy functions and relocation of these functions onto the world of
>corporate agendas.
>
>But some of these developments may also be pointing to new forms of the
>political, forms which are not embedded in state forms or privatized forms.
>The distributed power made possible by the Internet and the types of NGOs
>that can benefit from this do represent, it seems to me a new world of the
>political.
How, after conceding the symbiotic relations between states & NGOs and the role of the big ones as servants of power, does she come to this conclusion? And how, if states are so radically weakened, can NGOs fill the bill? I never understood the argument that if national states are weakened this opens up the space for NGOs and local governments. Aren't they even weaker than national governments?
Doug