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January 6, 2008
In an article entitled The world’s third spaces at Open Democracy Saskia Sassen challenges the way that much of the globalization literature has assumed a global vs national binary. She argues that we can no longer speak of "the" state, and hence of "the" national state versus "the" global order. What lies between the two, in the middle, as it were, is:
the proliferation of partial, often highly specialised, global assemblages of bits of territory, authority and rights once firmly ensconced in national institutional frames. These assemblages cut across the binary of "national vs global" - this being the usual way of attempting to understand what is in fact genuinely new.These emergent assemblages inhabit both national and global institutional and territorial settings. They span the globe in the form of trans-local geographies connecting multiple, often thick, sub-national spaces - institutional, territorial, subjective.
The example that is most relevant to Australia -apart from the green NGO's with international linkages---is the possibility of decay inside the liberal state itself – and the attendant consequences of such decay.
In this earlier article at Open Democracy Sassen argues that:
the liberal-democratic state cannot simply be viewed as a function of the democratic deficit brought on by external forces. A focus on external forces – in turn, globalisation and terrorism – is the most common method of explaining the increasingly evident deficit in liberal democracies.There are consequences to such an interpretation. A focus on external forces keeps us from examining the possibility that the state is not simply responding but is also potentially producing the democratic deficit. My own research on globalisation over the last decade and a half has explored to what extent the global also gets constituted inside the national rather than just coming "from the outside". The state apparatus is one of the key sites for this sub-national constitution of the global.
The example she gives is the segmentation occurring inside the state apparatus, characterised by a growing and increasingly privatised executive branch of government aligned with specific global actors (notwithstanding nationalist speeches), alongside a hollowing out of the legislature whose effectiveness is at risk of becoming confined to fewer - and more domestic - matters. Sassen adds:
A weak and domesticated legislature in turn weakens the political capacity of citizens to demand accountability from an increasingly powerful and private executive, since the legislature gives citizens stronger standing in these matters than the executive. Further, the privatising of the executive partly brings with it an eroding of the privacy rights of citizens - a historic shift of the private-public division (even if always an imperfect one in practice) at the heart of the liberal state
Isn't this what we are seeing happening in Australia now?
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