A NEW GEOGRAPHY OF POWER?

The formal political system today faces a new geography of power.
Globalization and the new technologies have contributed to the shrinking of
state authority and the explosion of a whole series of new actors engaged in
governance activities.

The current phase of the world economy is characterized by significant
discontinuities with the preceding periods and radically new arrangements.
This becomes particularly evident in the impact of globalization on the
geography of economic activity and on the organization of political power.
There is an incipient unbundling of the exclusive authority over its
territory we have long associated with the nation-state.

The most strategic instantiations of this unbundling are probably a) the
global city, which operates as a partly de-nationalized zone for economic,
political and cultural activities, and b) the Internet as a space for civil
society that escapes all conventional jurisdictions and is also incipiently
de-nationalized. At a lower order of complexity, the transnational
corporation and global markets in finance can also be seen as such
instantiations through their cross-border activities and the new
semi-private transnational legal regimes which frame these activities.

The privatizing of public power and the rise of new actors.

 Briefly, the major dynamics leading to these new conditions are the
following. Privatization and deregulation --two key features of economic
globalization-- have shifted power away from public bureaucracies and onto
the world of private corporations and markets. Shrinking state functions
linked to social welfare broadly understood have relocated a growing range
of responsibilities in this domain onto civil society. The weakening of
international public law and the strengthening of market forces in the
international system have produced growing inequalities in the
socio-economic situation of people worldwide and a diminished will and fewer
resources in the formal political system to address these. A growing number
of international and non governmental organizations have stepped in.
Finally, the enormous growth of the Internet represents an expanding zone
where most established jurisdictions (i.e. various state authorities) are
neutralized.

In my reading, the impact of globalization on state authority or sovereignty
has been significant in creating operational and conceptual openings for
other actors and subjects (See Sassen 1997). At the limit this means that
the state is no longer the only site for sovereignty and the normativity
that comes with it, and further, that the state is no longer the exclusive
subject for international law and the only actor in international relations.
Other actors, from NGOs and minority populations to supranational
organizations, are increasingly emerging as subjects of international law
and actors in international relations. The growth of the Internet keeps
strengthening the options of non-state actors (both good and bad!).

The ascendance of a large variety of non-state actors in the international
arena signals the expansion of an international civil society. This is
clearly a contested space, particularly when we consider the logic of the
capital market --profitability at all costs-- against that of the human
rights regime. But it does represent a space where other actors can gain
visibility as individuals and as collective actors, and come out of the
invisibility of aggregate membership in a nation-state exclusively
represented by the sovereign.

A de-nationalizing of politics?

 There are two strategic dynamics I am isolating here: a) the formation of
conceptual (including rhetorical) and operational openings for actors other
than the national state in cross-border political dynamics, particularly the
new global corporate actors, NGOS, and those collectivities whose experience
of membership has not been subsumed fully under nationhood in its modern
conception, e.g. minorities, immigrants, first-nation people, and many
feminists. And b) the fact that this dynamic brings with it an incipient
de-nationalizing of specific types of power that used to be embedded in the
national state and have now been relocated, at least partially to global
corporations and markets, NGOs, international organizations and sub-national
structures, particularly global cities, and transnational spaces,
particularly the Internet.

The large city of today emerges as a strategic site for these new types of
operations. It is one of the nexi where the formation of new claims
materializes and assumes concrete forms. The loss of power at the national
level produces the possibility for new forms of power and politics at the
subnational level. The national as container of social process and power is
cracked. This cracked casing opens up possibilities for a geography of
politics that links subnational spaces. Cities are foremost in this new
geography.

One question this engenders is how and whether we are seeing the formation
of a new type of transnational politics that localizes in these cities but
is part of a transnational network of such localizations. The local is today
part of cross-border networks rather than simply the bottom or smallest
level in the conventional spatial hierarchies that have dominated formal
political systems, i.e. local-national-international. The Internet plays a
strategic role in this re-positioning of the local.

There is little doubt that the Internet is an enormously important tool and
space for democratic participation at all levels, the strengthening of civil
society, and the formation of a whole new world of transnational political
and civic projects.
notably some of the struggles around the Bosnian-Serb conflict. But it has
also become clear over the last few years that the Internet is no longer
what it was in the 1970s or 1980s; it has become a contested space with
considerable possibilities for segmentation and privatisation. We cannot
take its democratic potential as a given simply because of its
interconnectivity. We cannot take its "seamlessness" as a given simply
because of its technical properties. And we cannot take its bandwidth
availability as a given simply because of the putative exponential growth in
network capacity with each added network.

This is a particular moment in the history of digital
networks, one when powerful corporate actors and high performance
networks are strenghtening the role of private digital space
 and altering the structure of public digital space. Digital space has
emerged not simply as a means for communicating, but as a major new theater
for capital accumulation and the operations of global capital. But civil
society --in all its various incarnations-- is also an increasingly
energetic presence in cyberspace. The greater the diversity of cultures and
groups the better for this larger political and civic inhabitation of the
Internet, the more effective the resistance to the risk that the corporate
world might set the standards. From struggles around human
rights, the environment and workers strikes around the world to
genuinely trivial pursuits, the Internet has emerged as a powerful medium
for non-elites to communicate, support each other's
struggles and create the equivalent of insider groups at scales
going from the local to the global.

     The political and civic potential of these trends is
enormous. It offers the possibility for interested citizens to
act in concert across the globe. It signals the possibility of a new form of
politics: local politics with a difference -- simultaneous action in
multiple localities or local action with an awareness of many other
localities struggling around similar issues. We are seeing the formation of
a whole new world of transnational political and civic projects.

These developments in the transnational networks that connect cities and in
the digital space of the Internet bring with them a series of new
interactions between what has been constituted as the private and the
public, the domestic and the international. The public can now operate
through the private and the private through the public (Aman, Jr. 1998).
For instance, markets are taking over many of the functions that used to be
in public bureaucracies and so are NGOs. On the other hand, market forces
and corporations can now influence public agendas to a much larger extent
than was the case twenty years ago (powerful corporations always did
influence public policy, but what we are seeing today is on another scale).
Similarly, NGOs have grown in number and in influence. The large
international organizations such as the World Bank now are expected to
consult with (the well-established) NGOs and large western funders now often
prefer to fund NGOs in Africa to do development and public work rather than
governments.

Some Notes on NGOs.

 NGOs have been around for a long time. What is different today? It is
their diversity, breadth of coverage, and, perhaps most interestingly, that
they are forming transnational networks among each other--indeed many NGOs
today are transnational networks.

Further, the larger context within which NGOs are operating has changed
significantly: there is today a whole discourse about NGOs which has
exploded onto the scene and has given the notion of NGOs (often more so than
the actual NGOs) much greater visibility. Further, there is today a massive
interest by Western governments in NGOs and the large western private
funders are putting enormous resources into some NGOs. In fact, some NGOs
function as subcontractors to governments: for instance, the U.S. Wildwlife
Fund gets over half of its budget from USAID, to do work that a government
could do. Finally, many governments are now "mandated" to consult with NGOs,
and so are the World Bank and the IMF.

One issue that has emerged forcefully in recent years is that of NGO
influence on states. In his research, Pter Uven has found that it is only a
small minority of mostly the very large western NGOs that lobby states. Some
of the lobbying has a global circuit: to get back to one's state a NGO may
go through various organizations in different countries, e.g. influence
international organizations so that these put pressure on the home state of
an NGO. Further, we also see innovative strategies for influencing
governments that go beyond western style lobbying. For instance, one large
Indian NGO delegated part of its staff to the Indian gov't and tried to
change the government position on specific issues from the inside. Finally,
we are also seeing joint venturing with state agencies, which is another way
of shaping a government's agenda on specific issues. These cases also
represent the increasginly ambiguous distinction private/public discussed
above.

The evidence does show that NGOs can effect power redistribution even though
they do so slowly and often at micro scales: e.g. micro-credit extended to
women has done more to empower them than government legislation and Bureaus
of Women's Affairs. More generally, today NGOs often directly engage
questions of democracy, empowerment and redistribution in a way that they
did not in the past.

 There is an emergent hyper-critique of NGOs today, focused particularly on
the large western NGOs that are well financed, operate globally and have
basically technocratic organizational standards. According to james Ron,
they are basically depoliticising the motivations and objectives of NGO
activists and, more broadly, depoliticizing international political
movements. The large, well-funded NGOs have developed multiple standards
that they implement in their work and expect compliance with on the part of
workers and beneficiary communities all over the world --and embedded in
specific cultures. They have the effect of westernizing what they get
engaged with; they do so through the implementation of organizational
standards and codes across borders and through imposition on people who may
have a very different experience or perspective on an event or notion of
politics. This leads to the formation of an elite stratum of NGOs that
become the favorites of large Western funders and set the standards for
other NGOs if they are to be funded. They then emerge as the "good NGOs."

Further this world of NGOs is seen as a part of the West's hegemonic
project: by instituting standards and aiming at strengthening western style
liberal democracy they have the effect of making places safe for
western-style capitalism. These elite NGOs often by-pass national
governments in developing countries arguing that they want to institute
standards and western style democracy in places where the national and local
governments are not oriented this way. James Ron finds this to be especially
the case in Africa. At the same time, Peter Uven notes that many NGOs act
the western, neutral role while dealing with funders --mostly from the
west-- but when that phase is over and they have the funds they re-enter
their society and can turn out to be very political.

A lot of NGOs may have started in opposition to the state, but have become
mutually constitutive with it (Lipschutz 1996). Today they wind up
augmenting the capacities of states, providing the equivalent of welfare
services, generally subcontracting "state work." This is not always bad. On
the contrary, as the case of ISO-14000 (the environmenal protection series
of standards in the International Satandards Organization) illustrates. In
the US, it deploys more inspectors going from factory to factory checking
on compliance with standards than the EPA (the government's Environmental
Protection Agency). But one question is whether there is capture of
national environmental agendas by speficic interests, notably corporate
interests embedded in the state. By acting as enforcer of national law, ISO
does not function as a critic, potentially in opposition to the state, but
merely as an entity augmenting the inspection capacities of the state
(Lipschutz 1996).
 In sum,
Some of the depoliticisation of NGOs evident in the above series of examples
is emblematic of a broader pattern of depoliticisation of power generally as
discussed in the first part of this paper, e.g. the privatization of public
bureaucracy functions and relocation of these functions onto the world of
corporate agendas.

But some of these developments may also be pointing to new forms of the
political, forms which are not embedded in state forms or privatized forms.
The distributed power made possible by the Internet and the types of NGOs
that can benefit from this do represent, it seems to me a new world of the
political. Securing distributed power, its reproduction, its
diversification, its growth and multiplication will mean we need to invent
new forms. There are crucial examples of this inventing that will be
discussed in tis conference, notably open-source operating systems and
"insurgent technologies." This line of thinking does also raise a question
about the need to find new ways of naming what it is that we are describing
when we speak today of the world of NGOs, with their enormous diversity,
resources and relations to the formal political apparatus. In this regard,
the concept of Post-governmental Organizations is an intriguing one, which I
hope we will be discussing at this meeting. It is clear that simply saying
NGOs has become inadequate because we are grouping many different political
projects, some related to exisitng power and others in opposition to it.

BIO:
Saskia Sassen is Professor of Sociology at The University of Chicago. Her
most recent book is Globalization and its Discontents (New York: New Press
1998) which will be published in Dutch by Van Genep (May 1999, Amsterdam)
Her books are translated into ten languages. She directs the project
"Cities and their Crossborder Networks" for the United Nations University
(Tokyo).