>>As I read this
>>text it was easy for me to identify - Berlin I think is one of these
>>global cities, if I understand correctly what she means. But it sounds,
>>well, hmmm, I dunno -
>too celebratory?>
Actually, I had first written "dangerously utopian" and axed it.
>I'm not sure what you are referring to here -
>with 'de-nationalised zones' you would be associating the occupation of
>German territory by the allied militaries? is that what you mean?
Actually I was thinking of the far right tag, 'national-liberated zones', which is a nineties equivalent of judenrein, in reference to places in brandenburg (the state surrounding berlin) where as an auslaender, punk, or non-white you might run into trouble. last summer the brandenburg kids were also attacking berliners on weekend outings.
But also the "Zone", SBZ - soviet zone of occupation was the west german designation for the GDR. The word "zone" itself denotes a constructed, eminently political geography. And to relate this point to saskia sassen again, if you've got zones, even "de-nationalized" ones, you still have borders and you've still got states implementing and upholding them. (An interesting aside: the posters for the next europarliament elections went up about two weeks ago all over the city. The SPD's posters include one with a photo of a typical red-white striped customs barrier, with circular duoane shield, diagonal on the poster, i.e. half-open or half-closed. The caption is similarly ambiguous along the lines of "social problems don't stop at the border" I don't remember the exact phrase)
> when she writes: "There is an incipient
>unbundling of the exclusive authority over its territory we have long
>associated with the nation-state.", it strikes me that the state is not
>really defined in such a way as to give it any reality other than the one
>plotted according to the line of 'global<----> national', or perhaps more
>accurately, 'global =/= national' [that's the best 'does-not-equal' sign I
>can do in text, btw].
Yes, I think your analysis is right, but the following sentence is not clear to me:
>I'm not at all sure that this is the case,
>especially inasmuch as the state, indeed the nation-state, can be thought
of,
>or even emerged historically, outside the global (or imperial) economy.
There were states in antiquity, and in greece there was the classic difference between the small, member-based poleis and the spread out states like macedonia. But territorial states in the sense of post-1648 Europe? I think these emerge part and parcel with the modern world system, to use wallerstein's terminology.
Many greetings from Berlin,
Anita