Jeffries Vincent (Editor). Handbook Of Public Sociology

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392 Chapter 22

are they limited to work through the existing formal international system

to do global politics. They can use national instruments. But it will take

making, including the making of new kinds of statework and of new types

of global jurisdictions.

There are two critical facts underlying these possibilities, and they are

often overlooked, blinded as commentators become when confronted with

the massive resources and unfettered power of global firms. One is that

global firms are far more dependent on national states and national terri-

tory than the typical arguments of the most familiar commentators as well

as the globalization literature allow for. I argue that states have had to do

much more international work than nationalist speeches might indicate.

This in turn has produced a particular type of state authority and power,

one geared to global projects. The challenge then becomes to reorient this

new internationalism of national states away from the corporate global

economy and toward other global agendas—in the case of this author, pref-

erably such causes as human rights, the environment, and a more socially

just economic development. The second fact is that already now multiple

individuals and civil society organizations are intensely involved in global

politics, even when they are mostly immobile. There is also a whole new,

emergent move to use existing national laws in regular national courts to

make novel global jurisdictions and fight corporations of many different

countries, not just home countries, for their abuses worldwide. But these

are all fairly invisible histories and generally unknown by those who would

become such actors if they only knew. I return to these issues later in this

chapter.

Public sociology can remap these invisible histories and make them

public. And it can remap the discussion and interpretations that dominate

current commentary about the power of global firms and the powerless-

ness of national states and citizens. These remappings open a window to

the possibility of novel types of public imaginaries and new possibilities

for the making of the political. The larger theoretico-political project that

gives this examination its substantive rationality is an exploration of the

limits of power and the complexities of powerlessness. Both power and

powerlessness are made, and hence variable. Elsewhere (Sassen 2006)

I have examined the work of making the condition we call power, and

thereby emphasized the variability of its meaning—the variability of its

success and effectiveness and of the durability of its results. Also powerless-

ness is constructed, made, and hence variable rather than fixed; it is not

simply the absence of power or mere victimhood. From there, then, comes

the possibility that while at one end of that variable powerlessness can be

elementary, at the other end, it can be complex. This variability does not

simply depend on the characteristics of individuals: the settings also matter.

For instance, the powerlessness of a specific undocumented immigrant will

392 Chapter 22

A Public Sociology for a Global Age: Recovering the Political 393

be quite elementary in the context of a California commercial farm but can

become complex in a city like New York or Los Angeles. In that complexity

of powerlessness lies the possibility of a politics.

I begin with a brief introduction of the larger conceptual landscape

within which the specifics of this chapter need to be situated. Then I

examine the participation by the state in the implementation of a global

corporate economy in order to show that certain parts of the national

state gain power because of globalization; the aim here is to indicate that

this gain in international power can be used for a broader range of politi-

cal aims than supporting global firms, as it is today. To show this growth

of power I focus on the growing alignment of the executive branch of

government with global, mostly corporate economic logics. The final sec-

tion examines some of the conditions giving national actors options for

global action.

MAPPING A NEW CONCEPTUAL LANDSCAPE

A first proposition in this argument is that the partial yet epochal transfor-

mation we call globalization gets shaped inside the national to a far larger

extent than is usually recognized. There is an as yet small but growing

scholarship that is beginning to research globalization through the lens

of national settings (Aman 1998; Ferguson and Jones 2002; Mittelman

1996; Brenner 1999; Payne 2006; Harvey 2007; Datz 2007). But by far the

most common focus in the globalization literature continues to be on self-

evidently global institutions and processes, notably the World Trade Orga-

nization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the North Ameri-

can Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and so on. This first proposition also

goes against the common assumption in the globalization literature that

the global and the national are mutually exclusive. Even if many compo-

nents of both the national and the global are separate and mutually exclu-

sive, I argue that this still leaves a specific set of conditions or components

that does de-border this dualism.

Two consequences of this proposition matter for the argument in this

chapter. One is that actors confined to national settings can engage in global

politics. The other is that an adequate understanding of what globalization

entails for people requires that we decode some of what continues to be

experienced as national but may well be part of a global condition. The ef-

fort to recover the national in the larger discussion about globalization is

to establish that the national can give us one platform for global action. It

is not to defend the national state per se; historically, national states have

mostly pursued politics that have benefited a limited number of their peo-

ple. It is rather that (a) the recognition of this limitation of national states

394 Chapter 22

by citizenries worldwide in combination with (b) the unsettlements brought

about by globalization, can generate a new type of politics aimed at larger

common needs. But this possiblity is severely undermined by the common

notion that the national matters less and less in a global world and that the

national state is a severely weakened if not disappearing actor. It thus be-

comes important to recover how the state is an active shaper of the current

condition and hence could, if governed accordingly, reorient its aims to a

more enlightened state agenda and a new kind of internationalism.

Some of the most complex meanings of the global are being constituted

inside the national, whether national territories and institutions or na-

tional states. A good part of globalization consists of an enormous variety

of subnational micro-processes that begin to denationalize what had been

constructed as national—whether policies, laws, capital, political subjectivi-

ties, urban spaces, temporal frames, or any other of a variety of dynamics

and domains.

This argument can perhaps be developed most persuasively

at this time through an examination of the critical role of national states

in setting up the basic conditions, including governance structures, for the

implementation of a global economy (e.g., Aman 1998; Datz 2007; Harvey

2007; Sassen 2006: chs. 1 and 2; Rajagopal 2003). Ministries of finance,

central banks, legislatures, and many other government sectors have done

the state-work necessary to secure a global capital market, a global trading

system, the needed competition policies, and so on.

This participation of the state in the implementation of a corporate global

economy engenders a particular type of authority for the state. But for now

the deployment of this authority has largely been confined to supporting

private corporate interests. This raises a number of issues. What type of state

authority is this mix of public and private components? Does the weight of

private, often foreign, interests in this specific work of the state become con-

stitutive of that authority and indeed produce a hybrid that is neither fully

private nor fully public? My argument is that, indeed, we are seeing the in-

cipient formation of a type of authority and state practice that entail a partial

denationalizing of what had been constructed historically as national. This

denationalizing consists of several specific processes, including importantly,

the reorienting of national agendas toward global ones, and the circulation

inside the state of private global agendas dressed as national public policy.

Such a conceptualization introduces a twist in the analysis of the state

and corporate economic globalization because it seeks to detect the actual

presence of private agendas inside the state, rather than the more common

focus in the globalization literature on the shift of state functions to the

private sector and the growth of private authority (e.g., Cutler 2002). Fur-

ther, it differs from an older scholarly tradition on the captured state, which

focused on co-optation of states by private actors (e.g., Cox 1987; Panitch

1996). In my own research I emphasize the privatization of norm-making

A Public Sociology for a Global Age: Recovering the Political 395

capacities and the enactment inside the state of corporate private logics

dressed as public norms (Sassen 2006: chs. 4 and 5, 1996: ch. 2).

One critical question for the purposes of this chapter is whether this par-

ticipation by the state in global processes and the consequent partial, often

highly specialized or at least particularized, denationalization can also take

place in domains other than that of economic globalization. Among these

are recent developments in the human rights regime that make it possible

to sue foreign firms and foreign dictators in national (rather than inter-

national) courts. Can denationalization be extended to aims other than

those of global corporate actors—including an attempt to develop a global

economy with broader social justice aims, and aims other than economic

ones (e.g., Beneria 2003; Kirsch 2006; Tunstall 2006; Lucas 2005; Ribas-

Mateos 2005; Nashashibi 2007)? Elsewhere (Sassen 2006: chs. 8 and 9) I

have argued yes. Like globalization, denationalization can, thus, be multi-

valent: it can include the endogenizing into the national of the global agen-

das of diverse actors, not only corporate firms and financial markets, but

also human rights and environmental agendas. The existence of a dynamic

and growing transnational sphere (e.g., Khagram, Riker, and Sikkink 2002;

Moghadam 2005; Naples and Desai 2002) becomes critical at this juncture

as it can sustain this entry by national actors using national instruments

into global struggles (Sassen 2006: ch. 6). Sometimes these processes of

denationalization allow, enable, or push the construction of new types of

global scalings; other times they continue to inhabit the realm of what is

still largely national.

Except for the most superficial and self-evident instances (e.g., globalized

consumer markets), this constituting and shaping of global dynamics inside

the national generally gets coded, represented, formulated, or experienced

through the vocabularies and institutional instruments of the national as

historically constructed. This is to be expected insofar as nation-states and

national states are enormously complex organizations, with often very long

histories of developing the needed capabilities. In contrast, the current

phase of global institutions and processes is young and constitutes an as yet

thin reality. Part of the research task is then decoding, and, more generally,

discovering and detecting the global inside the national (Sassen 2006).

Can the embeddedness of the global in the national and the resulting

possibility of a distinctive type of state authority enable citizens to engage

in global politics? After all, citizens are still largely confined to the national

for the full exercise of their rights and powers. In brief, can citizens use their

national state institutions as a bridge into global politics? Critical to my

analysis is whether this specific type of authority can in fact extend to global

domains beyond the global corporate economy—such as the environment,

human rights, and socially just economic development—and be used to

contain rather than promote the powers of global economic corporate actors.

396 Chapter 22

This would require moving toward new types of joint international action by

national states—coalitions of the willing focused not on war but on environ-

mental and social justice projects.

These and other denationalizing dynamics (e.g., the insertion of human

rights into national judiciary decisions) have additional consequences.

They begin to disassemble bits and pieces of the nation-state and the state

apparatus itself as containers. This disassembling is one dynamic feeding

the multiplication of partial, often highly specialized, cross-border as-

semblages of bits of territory, authority, and rights once lodged inside the

national. Many of these are beginning to function as formal or informal

entities for both operational and governance tasks in a growing range of

global processes.

At one end of the range these particularized assemblages include private

arrangements such as the lex constructionis—a private “law” developed by

the major engineering companies in the world to establish a common

response to the strengthening of environmental standards in the 100 plus

countries where they are building. At the other end of the range, we find the

International Criminal Court, the first ever global public court, and TRIPS

law, the first global law. Beyond the fact of the diversity of these systems,

there is the increasingly weighty fact of their numbers—over 125 according

to the best recent count. This type of analysis has the effect of disassembling

particular components of the nation-state and the national state apparatus

from the inside, but in this process also possibly generating novel enable-

ments for national and local actors insofar as they can enter these partial,

often highly specialized spaces. I return to this in the last section of this

chapter.

To the usual global components, we can add denationalizing dynamics

and the multiplication of cross-border assemblages of bits and pieces of na-

tional territory, authority, and rights dislodged from the national container.

Seen this way, the kingpins of the globalization literature—particularly

WTO, IMF, and NAFTA—may well turn out to be bridging events for the

formation of a new order, rather than being the new order itself, as is so

often assumed or proclaimed. These institutions should rather be conceived

of as powerful capabilities for the making of a new order—they are instru-

ments, not the new order iself.

Neither the proliferation of these partial assemblages nor the denational-

izing of key components of state work entail the end of national states. But

they do dislodge bits and pieces of national and inter-state governance out

of their traditional institutional settings (whether national or international)

and shift them to novel settings. Both developments are examined here in

order to sketch out the particular substance and conditionality of what I

argue is a new mode of state authority that remains insufficiently recog-

A Public Sociology for a Global Age: Recovering the Political 397

nized and theorized, and, secondly an opening up of the domain of global

politics to nation-based actors such as citizens.

GROWING ALIGNMENTS BETWEEN THE EXECUTIVE

AND GLOBAL CORPORATE LOGICS

One typically overlooked feature of the current transformation is that the

state’s work in the implementing of a global corporate economy strength-

ens the power of particular components of the national state (Sassen 2006:

ch. 4; 1996: ch. 1). These components are mostly located in the executive

branch of liberal democracies and in multiple agencies of the public ad-

ministration, a body increasingly under the control of the executive branch.

The body that loses the most in the current alignment is the legislature (or

parliament, depending on state organization). In this unsettlement, the

judiciary branch tends to gain strategic functions.

Thus a more precise way of capturing these dynamics rather than the

usual notion of a declining state is to argue that the executive branch of

government evinces a growing alignment with global corporate logics. In

the larger research project on which this is based (Sassen 2006) I identify

at least the following five trends in the global economy feeding executive

power.

A first trend is that certain parts of the administration (the Treasury, the

Federal Reserve, the office of the Trade Representative, and so on) have

been critical in this work of the state. They have become stronger over the

last two decades because of globalization, thereby feeding the power of

the administration. To illustrate briefly, ministries of finance (or the U.S.

Treasury) can impose certain kinds of fiscal policies as part of the new

conditionalities of economic globalization. These have tended to include

a push toward what we have come to call “small government,” mostly

applied to the components of the social wage—rather than, for instance,

defense expenditures.

With economic globalization it has become increasingly common

for rules originated by private global actors, either directly or indirectly

(through the global regulators) to be eventually enacted by governments.

This has been the case with some of the WTO rules, financial and account-

ing rules, and capital requirement rules, even when each member country

processes the incorporation of the rules into its national law and institu-

tional frame. One incentive for this type of process of inserting global rules

into national regulations is that it can overcome the lack of collaboration

among governments if they remained as global regimes. When we use terms

such as deregulation, financial and trade liberalization, and privatization to

398 Chapter 22

describe this specific work of states, we only capture the withdrawal of the

state from regulating its economy and, further, we overlook the new func-

tions this has brought to the executive branch and the administration.

A second trend that began in the 1980s was the marketizing and privatiz-

ing of what were once public functions. The privatizing of prisons and the

outsourcing of particular welfare functions to private providers are prob-

ably two of the more familiar aspects. Today we can add the outsourcing of

soldiering to private contractors even in war theaters, as is the case in Iraq.

Economic globalization has been one push-factor in the marketizing of a

growing range of public functions. The shift to markets and market author-

ity is a far more complex dynamic than terms such as “deregulation” sug-

gest. The formation of new public-private arrangements can blur particular

components of the public-private divide. One example of this blurring is

the difficulty the U.S. Supreme Court had in establishing whether guards in

privatized prisons have the same federal rights as those in government-run

prisons. The foundational change lies in the details.

What matters here is that this type of privatization and marketization has

reduced the oversight role of Congress but added to the role of the executive

through the setting up of specialized commissions. This is perhaps most

clear in the extent to which the executive branch is handling the growth of

contractors in the Iraq war, with little oversight by Congress. The degree of

secrecy is high, to the point that deaths among contracted soldiers are not

reported even though they number more now than regular soldiers. The

shift to markets also raises questions as to the effects on citizens’ rights.

Some public services involve rights; when such services are marketized,

citizens’ rights may get lost. Are rights subject to markets still rights?

The deregulation of the economy and the privatization and marketiza-

tion of public functions not only expand the private sphere but also remove

economic activity from public scrutiny and accountability. This matters

because privatized and marketized public functions often retain public as-

pects. It is further accentuated by the fact, sharply illustrated by the United

States, that where there are specialized regulatory commissions these are

mostly within the executive branch of government and escape routine

public oversight by the legislature. Increasingly the private sphere functions

outside the scope of most forms of public accountability and scrutiny be-

yond basic compliance with the law.

A third development that fed the power of the executive and weakened

congressional oversight functions was the decision by the executive branch

to give the Departments of Health, Environment, and Agriculture the author-

ity to classify their documents, a first in their history. More important than

whatever the national security component in these departments is the fact

that departments once thought to be largely involved with domestic issues

have assumed a whole new meaning in the context of intellectual property

A Public Sociology for a Global Age: Recovering the Political 399

rights (e.g., for the large pharmaceuticals), a global trading regime such as

WTO, and global warming. Further, insofar as the executive seeks to control

the public administration, granting these departments classification rights

weakens congressional oversight, and strengthens executive authority.

A fourth source of executive power is that the major global regulators,

notably the IMF and WTO, as well as many lesser known ones, only ne-

gotiate with the executive branch. As the global corporate economy and

the supranational system have expanded and continue to expand, execu-

tive power grows as well, and so does the disadvantage of Congress. The

executive branch is increasingly aligned with a number of global actors and

processes that are critical to the global corporate economy. While the other

branches of government are beginning to develop novel international rela-

tions (House Speaker Pelosi’s visit to Syria; the Supreme Court’s emergent

consideration of foreign law in its deliberations), this type of novel devel-

opment does not necessarily feed their power within the state. The develop-

ment of an institutional apparatus geared toward the global war on terror,

with its growing cross-border collaborations, involves largely the executive

branch and particular agencies of the public administration. Further, the

globalizing of criminal networks for the trafficking of drugs, arms, and peo-

ple, also feeds into the development of inter-governmental collaborations

largely centered in the executive branch. To some extent this is inevitable.

The concern here is with detecting the extent to which globalizing dynamics

feed executive power rather than simply weakening “the” state.

Inter-governmental networks centered largely in the executive have

grown well beyond concerns with global security and criminality. The par-

ticipation by the state in the implementation of a global economic system

has engendered a whole range of new types of cross-border collaborations

among specialized government agencies focused on the globalization of

capital markets, international standards of all sorts, and the new trade or-

der. These often build on long-standing networks and older international

organizations, and involve the national ministries or agencies charged with

the particular issue area. Increasingly we see a growing number of such net-

works that function outside a formal international institution and outside

a formal treaty, with the Basel Committee of the Bank for International

Settlements (BIS) one of the more distinguished and influential examples.

As globalization has expanded there has been a proliferation of agreements

among domestic regulatory agencies of two or more countries, a kind of

low-level but often very powerful network, one not dependent on a treaty.

They can produce agreements that can be implemented by the regulators

themselves, without requiring legislative approval. These have grown far

more than traditional treaty negotiations.

A final bundle of issues makes visible this alignment of the executive

with global logics in a range of very particular domains. One way of captur-

400 Chapter 22

ing what I am trying to convey is to focus on some of the current debates

between Congress and the executive. The case of Dubai Ports, a corpora-

tion from a Muslim country, which was meant to acquire control over U.S.

port security was supported, strongly, by Bush. This indicated a sense of a

global economy that becomes, inevitably, partly denationalized, even as

the War on Terror against Muslim countries raged. More recently, and not

as positive as the Dubai Ports case, was Bush’s insistence on not attaching

environmental and labor standards in the new free trade agreements. The

Democratic controlled Congress succeeded in adding several measures op-

posed by Bush. Besides enforceable labor and environmental standards,

these trade pacts will scale back on intellectual property protections of

pharmaceutical companies when it comes to generic medicines, to give

the poor in poor countries access to life-saving medicines. Another such

instance was the House passing legislation requiring certain conditions be-

fore the Bush administration could proceed with a plan to allow long-haul

Mexican trucks access to U.S. highways, a plan that would have “opened

the border with minimum public notice and at a threat to safety.” In both

of these cases, the trade pacts and the Mexican truckers provision, Bush

showed an inclination to align with global corporate interests.

CROSS-BORDER ASSEMBLAGES OF TERRITORY,

AUTHORITY, AND RIGHTS: NOVEL SPACES FOR POLITICS

The second critical feature of today’s transformation is the multiplication

of partial, often highly specialized, cross-border spaces and arrangements

that begin to de-border national institutional confinements even when they

take place in national territories. This can bring with it a potential for global

political action on the part of those confined to the national or the local.

That multiplication of arrangements disassembles from the inside particu-

lar components of the nation-state and of the formal state apparatus. In this

process we can also find the elements for generating novel enablements for

national actors, including the national state itself, in global spaces. Let me

illustrate by selecting four types of assemblages (for further developments

of this subject see Sassen 2006: ch. 8).

A first type of instance can be found in the development of new juris-

dictional geographies. Among the more formalized cases are a variety of

national legal actions that, notwithstanding their transnational geogra-

phies, can today be launched from national courts. A good example are

the lawsuits launched by the Washington, DC–based Center for Constitu-

tional Rights in a national court against nine multinational corporations,

both American and foreign, for abuses of workers’ rights in their offshore

industrial operations. In other words, this is a three-sited jurisdiction,

A Public Sociology for a Global Age: Recovering the Political 401

with several locations in at least two of those sites—the locations of the

headquarters (both the United States and other countries), the locations

for the offshore factories (several countries), and the court in Washington.

Even if these lawsuits do not quite achieve their full goal, they signal it is

possible to use the national judiciary for suing U.S. and foreign firms for

questionable practices in their operations outside their home countries.

Thus, besides the much noted new courts and instruments (e.g., the new

International Criminal Court, the European Court of Human Rights), what

this example shows is that components of the national rule of law that once

served to build the strength of the national state, are today contributing to

the formation of transnational jurisdictions. Again, signaling the multi-

valence of so many of these processes, another instance is the U.S. practice

of “exporting” prisoners to third countries (rendition) to facilitate their

torture. Diverse jurisdictional geographies can also be used to manipulate

temporal dimensions. Reinserting a conflict in the national legal system

may ensure a slower progression than in the private jurisdiction of interna-

tional commercial arbitration (Sassen 2006: ch. 5).

A second type of specialized assemblage that is contributing to a novel

type of territoriality is the work of national states across the globe to con-

struct a standardized global space for the operations of firms and markets.

What this means is that components of legal frameworks for rights and

guarantees, and more generally the rule of law, largely developed in the

process of national state formation, can now strengthen non-national

organizing logics. As these components become part of new types of

transnational systems they alter (rather than destroy) the valence of older

national state capabilities. Where the rule of law once built the strength of

the national state and national corporations, key components of that rule

of law are now contributing to the partial, often highly specialized, disag-

gregating of particular national state orders. For instance, corporate actors

operating globally have pushed hard for the development of new types

of formal instruments, notably intellectual property rights and standard-

ized (i.e., Anglo-American) accounting principles, for which they need the

support of each individual state where they operate. In their aggregate this

and other emergent orderings contribute to produce an operational space

that is partly embedded in particular components of national legal systems

which have been subjected to specialized denationalizations (Sassen 2006:

chs. 4 and 5); thereby they become capabilities of an organizing logic that

is not part of the national state. Further, in so doing, they often go against

the interests of national capital. This is a very different way of representing

economic globalization than the common notion of the withdrawal of the

state at the hands of the global system. Indeed, to a large extent it is the ex-

ecutive branch of government that is getting aligned with global corporate

capital (Sassen 2006: ch. 4). A key implication here is that national states