An Atlas for Our Time

FOR THE PAST TEN YEARS, Saskia Sassen has been exploring and mapping the terrain of globalization -- a set of processes that many believe distinguish the present from all earlier periods. A creative theorist with no qualms about thinking big, Sassen crosses half a dozen disciplinary lines to tease out fact from fiction about what has changed and what hasn't. She illuminates the connections between such seemingly far-flung phenomena as the Internet, free trade, human rights, the condition of women, the labor market, patterns of immigration, and the rise of what she terms the "global city" as a primary nexus of global integration. And by articulating what is unknown alongside what is known, she clears the way for future research.

In Globalization and its Discontents, her latest collection of essays, Sassen builds on a body of ideas she has been developing since the early 1990s. Her previous books include The Global City, The Mobility of Labor and Capital, and Losing Control. As a professor of urban planning at Columbia University, she has made her mark by using the city as an analytical lens through which to view and understand the world.

Everyone seems to agree on the central fact of globalization -- the stepped-up process of economic, political, and cultural integration of all nations into a single world system. But while some hail it as desirable and others oppose it categorically, Sassen allows us a glimpse of a more nuanced picture.

Much of the globalization debate thus far has centered on the identity of the state itself. Whether mainstream or left-of-center, scholar or activist, most have tended to see the global system's gain as the state's loss. According to this thesis, economic activity has been "denationalized," freed up from the legal and regulatory confines of the nation-state -- a trend that is most vividly exemplified by the vastly accelerated rate of capital mobility and the emergence of a global marketplace. The state, some say, is increasingly powerless to block the inexorable march of this global juggernaut as it levels all barriers to trade and investment and rides roughshod over labor rights, the environment, and social protections of any kind. Wall Street is delighted with the prospect of a McWorld-like global village. By contrast, the perceived weakness of national governments has left many progressives adrift on a sea of political anomie.

Sassen points to a way out of this fatalistic ideological trap. She shows the state as the primary author of multiple transnational processes, including deregulation, flexible labor markets, and new legal regimes to guarantee the rights of capital. But in the process of ushering in the global economic system, she argues, the state has undergone a transformation itself, characterized by "the ascendance of agencies linked to the domestic and international financial markets . . . and the loss of power and prestige of agencies associated with issues of domestic equity" -- most notably, those identified with the "outmoded" welfare state.

Weaving together many lines of argument, Sassen reveals a global grid of highly unequal forces and relationships that are coming into ever sharper conflict. And even though production and consumption are dispersed throughout the globe, she describes a new "economic geography of centrality and marginality," with strategic resources concentrated in the business districts of a select number of urban centers: New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Frankfurt, Zurich, Sydney, Los Angeles and Hong Kong, among others.

A two-tiered economy thus emerges within global cities, as well as within and between entire countries. The financial industry flourishes, while traditional manufacturing continues to decline. The former generates high-wage jobs and the latter relies on an increasing supply of low-wage and immigrant labor. All in all, globalization has served to privilege financial firms and the high-end services on which they depend, enabling them to earn super-profits. And even given substantial consumer demand, manufacturing firms simply can't compete, even when they're moderately profitable.

Sassen may not delve into the root causes of late capitalist development, but she takes on significant chunks of its functioning, explodes myths and exposes the hidden links between economic internationalization, migration flows, and the restructuring of the labor market. By focusing on the city, she shifts our gaze from the usual suspects -- transnational corporations, banks, governments and international financial institutions -- and exposes the infrastructure and production complexes that form the underpinning of the global economy. She moves us, therefore, from structures and entities to functions and processes. For the student of globalization, then, the global city becomes a laboratory. Here, we can observe polarization as it plays itself out in the use of land, the organization of labor markets, the housing market, and the structure of consumption. Sassen offers a compelling diagnostic of a new pattern of growth that contributes to inequality rather than expansion of the middle class -- a set of arrangements that constitute the beginnings of a "new economic regime."

DISCERNIBLE IN THIS NEWEST GROUP OF ESSAYS is a thread of feminist inquiry. Sassen devotes an entire chapter, "Toward a Feminist Analytics of the Global Economy," to investigate the growing presence and participation of women in the global arena. She builds on earlier research on women's role in subsistence farming and the feminization of the proletariat in manufacturing, and explores what she terms the "strategic nexus" of gender itself. Even though export-oriented Third World manufacturing accounts for a relatively small percentage of overall manufacturing jobs, she argues, it is undeniably a strategic feature of global economic reconfiguration. Entire export industries, including textiles, toys, and small electronics, have been shifted to low-wage countries, relying on an indigenous female workforce and displacing thousands of workers in the higher-income importing countries of Europe and North America. Thus, Sassen shows gender as pivotal to economic restructuring and class formation and consolidation in the present period.

But women's increasing participation turns out to be a very mixed blessing. Certainly, the incorporation of ever-greater numbers of women into the labor force is a welcome development. Wage employment has undeniably increased women's power in the household, the community and the public sphere -- a fact that holds true for both working- and middle-class women in rich and poor countries alike. When Sassen turns our attention to the plight of women at the bottom of the wage scale, however, we see the dark side of labor market inclusion. These are the service workers, largely immigrants, who work in the interstices of global cities. They are the invisible layer without which the super-powerful financial sector couldn't function and, as such, are employed in a "leading industry." But unlike their predecessors in heavy industry one or two generations ago, they are not candidates for upward mobility. In the United States, they are the "systemic equivalent of the offshore proletariat."

Sassen is less persuasive when discussing the emergence of women as political actors on the international stage. At her most sanguine, she lays out the following line of argument: new developments in international law have combined with a number of supranational trends to erode state sovereignty. Now, joined together in hundreds of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), women and other disenfranchised groups are making their voices heard at the international level. The world's invisible are thus becoming visible in international courts, at world conferences, and at the United Nations itself. But Sassen has little to tell us about the real-world impact of this increased visibility. After all, an NGO can be anything from a guy with a business card to a multi-million-dollar non-profit enterprise. It might even represent corporate interests outright, like the Business Council for Sustainable Development. Unlike progressive political parties and social movements, many are broad, dispersed networks that lack constituencies in real geographical space. It is important not to confuse this buzz of transnational networking with the real cross-border solidarity that will be needed to push for greater equity and justice in actually existing workplaces and communities.

Which leads me to a final point. Although Sassen has addressed Globalization and its Discontents primarily to her academic colleagues, she rightly hopes its insights will reach -- and influence -- policymakers as well. We can all hope her words will be read, understood, and taken seriously by those in power. But it is not at the level of public policy that meaningful change will occur, no matter how well-meaning the intention or how enlightened the policy. Globalization notwithstanding, there's still no substitute for human beings engaged in common struggle to change the world.

Contents of No. 26