Saskia Sassen: From National Borders to Embedded Borderings
From Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 415-417
State sovereignty is usually conceived of as a monopoly of authority in a particular territory. Today it is becoming evident that state sovereignty articulates both its own and external conditions and norms. Sovereignty remains a systemic property but its institutional insertion and its capacity to legitimate and absorb all legitimating power, to be the source of law, have become unstable. The politics of contemporary sovereignties are far more complex than notions of mutually exclusive territorialities can
capture.
The question of territory as a parameter for authority and rights has entered a new phase. State exclusive authority over territory remains the prevalent mode of final authority in the global political economy. But it is less absolute formally than it once was meant to be and prevalence is not to be confused with dominance. In addition, critical components of this authority that may still have a national institutional form and location are no longer national in the historically constructed sense of that term. One way of deciphering some of these issues and opening them up to a research agenda is by singling out the capability represented by the power of the geographic border in the modern nation-state project.
We are seeing the formation of global, partly territorial alignments that incorporate what were once protections encased in border regimes. Insofar as the state has historically had the capability to encase its territory through administrative and legal instruments, it also has the capability to change that encasement -- for instance, deregulate its borders and open up
to foreign firms and investment. The question that concerns me here is whether this signals that the capabilities entailed by territoriality, a form of exclusive and final authority, can be detached from geographic territory. Such detachment is conceivably partial and variable, depending on what is to be subjected to authority. This in turn raises a question about how the issue of borderings can function inside the nation-state.
This detachment today assumes two forms broadly speaking. One is that the border is embedded in the product, the person, and the instrument: a mobile agent endogenizes critical features of the border. The other is that there are multiple locations for the border, whether inside firms or in long transnational chains of locations that can move deep inside national territorial and institutional domains. Global cities account for a disproportionate concentration of such border locations; the latter are
mostly institutional locations that assume a territorial correlate, for example, the large concentration of international banking facilities in New York City. Institutional locations in principle need not have territorial correlates. The locations of bordering capabilities are in a phase of sharp unsettlement, which opens up a whole new research agenda. If there is one sector where we can begin to discern new stabilized bordering capabilities and their geographic and institutional locations it is in the corporate economy.
Thus, rather than conceiving of the much noted new mobilities as a function of globalization and the new information and communication technologies, I argue that these new types of mobilities also arise from a third criticaldimension: the fact that state border capabilities centered on nineteenth and twentieth-century geographic concepts of the border could switch into nongeographic bordering capabilities operating both transnationally and subnationally. In this process, particular legal protections get detached from their national territorial jurisdictions and become incorporated into a variety of often highly specialized or partial global regimes and thereby often become transformed into far more specialized rights and obligations. I also see in this dynamic capabilities jumping tracks and becoming lodged into a novel organizing logic. One example is the bundle of rights granted by host states to foreign firms under the WTO which unsettles older national regimes. Many of these rights and guarantees derive from what were once national rights and guarantees used precisely to distinguish national firms from foreign firms; these rights and guarantees were also one critical component in the building up of the state's exclusive authority over its national territory.
Such shifts from geographic borders to embedded bordering capabilities have been far more common and formalized in the case of major corporate economic actors than they have, for example, for citizens and migrants. Firms and markets have seen their advantages shift toward new types of institutionalized protections while for citizens this has not been the case. The international human rights regime is a weaker system of protections than the WTO provisions protecting the cross-border circulation of professionals.
It is also weaker, through far broader, than the specialized visas for business people and the increasingly common visas for high-tech workers. As national states are directly and indirectly involved in both the human rights and these business regimes, one question this raises is how much divergence in critical regimes a system can accommodate.
> Saskia Sassen