LATIN AMERICA:
Conditions for a ‘transnational citizenship’ are solidifying

Saskia Sassen Constant VZW

Reproduced from Latinamerica Press, www.latinamericapress.org

Saskia Sassen, sociologist, demographer and economist is a “transnational citizen.” Born in Holland, she grew up in Argentina and now resides in the United States, Sassen carries out research around the world. She is author of works like “Losing Control? Sovereignty in the Era of Globalization” (2002), “The Global City” (2001) “Guest and Aliens” (1999), “Globalization and its Discontents” (1998). Professor at the University of Chicago and London School of Economics, she integrates with linguist Noam Chomsky and other prestigious US academics a movement against the war and Washington’s ultra-nationalist policies.

Sassen recently presented in Buenos Aires “Cities Transformed: Demographic Change and Its Implications in the Developing World,” a study she helped coordinate that was implemented in several countries and sponsored by the US National Academy of Sciences. In the following interview with LATINAMERICA PRESS correspondent Miguel Lara Hidalgo, Sassen talks about the recovery of the State in Latin America, Argentina’s place in the world and the “urbanization” of social sciences.

In your book “Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization,” you question “the explicit or implicit trend to use the State as a comprehensive framework for social, political and economic processes.” How could you explain the attempts of Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina to strengthen the government’s role in social development?

There are two different tendencies in play. Neoliberalism, along with International Monetary Fund and US policies diminished the autonomy of the Nation State, mainly in the countries of the South. On the other hand, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil want to use the State as a political base to implement the changes they consider necessary in their nations. A social democratic State can implement measures and give resources for projects benefiting the citizens and local economy.

In this sense, recovering the role of the State is a challenge that can mobilize popular support as we have seen in Venezuela and Brazil. It could be said that the President of Argentina, Néstor Kirchner, has understood this issue when he announced a revision of the privatizations and the assets still in State hands. No politician has made such a pronouncement over the past decade.

Neoliberalism reoriented key local economic components toward the global financial markets and gave way to tremendous earnings to an elite concentrated primarily in the big metropolises. This elite represents nearly 20 percent of the inhabitants of the 40 global cities of the world, like Buenos Aires, Bangkok, São Paulo, Seoul or New York. The Argentine crisis (that really started in the 90’s) is one of the most dramatic instances showing the marginalizing nature of neoliberal policies. Now the projects we see in Venezuela, Brazil and the one emerging in Argentina are seeking to distribute national resources to favor much more than that 20 percent.

More and more people have named themselves “citizens of the world,” and identified themselves with universal values. Does national citizenship make sense as the State loses power in the globalized world?

The conditions for a transnational citizenship are solidifying. Although some groups are genuinely transnational like internet communities, world social forums or international volunteer movements, transnational citizenship is just a component of a much more complex experience: traditional citizenship. Formal rights with regards to the State continue to be the crucial element.

The enormous quantity of people from all over the world produce a sort of “transnacionalism in situ”: they meet on the street for the first time, in companies, in the neighborhoods of the global cities, or while encountering other immigrants in highly professional jobs. For example, we could venture to see a relation between the situation of the immigrants and the emergence of political practices of an informal nature. Immigrants, even the illegal ones, often become new political subjects.

It is remarkable how the phenomenon of so-called “transnational citizenship” opens the possibility both to generate new forms of lateral power among groups with few resources, and to improve transnational policies mobilizing more and more sectors inside a country.

In what sense do governments with markedly nationalistic policies as the United States or Cuba need an “enemy” to legitimate their existence?

They need it in a certain way, but the motivations are different. Cuba is a project of political power with a social mission: the common well-being. In the US, one political party wants to hold power without caring about the costs — because power represents military control, economic wealth and ideological influence.

On the other hand, the meaning of each project counts. It is painful to see so many freedoms eliminated in Cuba, but it has achieved an excellent medical and housing system and a basic wage for every citizen. That is much more than what the US can show, where we have 50 million under the poverty line — 5 times the population of the island — 40 million workers without medical insurance and much higher child mortality rates in poorer areas than in Cuba.

It is true that each country has a sort of a necessity for creating crises to justify its government’s actions. The Cuban state has an obsession with power mixed with strong social policy in which many still believe. In the US, the measures limiting civil freedoms and allowing big companies to exploit resources such as in Iraq, are connected to the interests of a small group of politicians from the Republican Party and their associate companies. In this sense, the differences between both countries are scandalous.

You claim that there is a necessity to “urbanize the social sciences.” To what does this refer?

To understand social processes, one needs to research and focus on what happens in cities. Firstly, metropolises are strategic places in the global economy for several reasons: a) they are bridges between the Nation State and the world b) they are locations in which measures are implemented to reduce the influence of big foreign companies. These measures include assuring housing for the impoverished middle class, establishing taxes for the “new rich” and corporations, promoting civic responsibility and guaranteeing strong labor standards.

In the second place, the coexistence of huge clusters of power and poverty give the city a unique political character. Cities clearly show the contradictions of globalization - concentrations of international capital and increasingly marginalized populations exist side by side.

Globalization is tangible in the way that struggles are recurrent from one city to another. This is makes it necessary to research the practice of citizenship and the role of civil society. The loss of governments’ influence gives way to new forms of power at local levels. Cities are the ones that are building that new political geography.