 It's my great pleasure and honor to introduce our very distinguished lecturer of this evening, Professor Saskia Sassen. And I'm sure all of you didn't wait until we had this opportunity to to hear at least of Professor Sassen, if not read her. Well, as you know from the announcement, at least Professor Sassen is Lynn Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, and she also teaches in various places. She's a sentinial visiting professor at the London School of Economics. She's been also teaching in Chicago and some other places. I've left Chicago. Yeah, that's why I used the past tense. It can be all over the place. Good. Well, to make it just a bit, I would just say two points. First is that we can't or there can't be any series called Globalization Lectures without featuring Professor Sassen, because she is definitely one of the major thinkers of globalization. And think of it, her, I mean, the book probably most well-known of her, best known among her books, Global Cities, was first published in 1991. And at the time when globalization had not yet become the fashionable term that it became during the 90s. And this book, I think, made a lot in turning the issue of globalization from the economic realm where it was or financial realm where it was locked up initially into a real reflection about globalization in general, seen through the various processes, social processes, and cities, of course, are very much at the center of such processes. And this is a book that first was published, as I said, in 1991. And the second edition came 10 years later, in 2001. So this is in itself an indication of the importance of the book, which became actually one of the classics in sociology and urban sociology and the studies of globalization and the rest. And the second point where I think that Professor Sassen is, I mean, very important for our series is that she is a critical thinker of globalization. I mean, I read one of her self-recentation where she stresses the fact, and this is absolutely true, if you read her works, that she demolishes established truths. And that's exactly the point. I mean, most of her writings are just challenging, common ideas about if we take our topic, globalization. I mean, she's, of course, challenge a lot of views about globalization, one of them being that globalization means going beyond territoriality, the nation, and the rest. And in the field of also migration studies and borders, which is one of the topics she will be addressing this evening, she is also absolutely a major name. And therefore, we are very, very happy to welcome her. And I mean, you can see from the title of the lecture, the world's third spaces, neither global nor national, that this is in itself already a stimulating title and a challenge to preconceived truths. So please welcome Professor Sassen. Thank you very much. Well, it's a great pleasure to be here. And thank you, Gilber Ashkar, for inviting me. I walked for about 25 minutes in circles around. It was a rather nice experience, trying to find 10 Farnbow Place. Everybody clearly has the knowledge of the buildings, not necessarily the numbers of the streets. So it gave me a lot of time to sort of move into this space, London, et cetera. My starting point really in my research about globalization and Gilber already touched on it, is in a way a kind of dissatisfaction with the language of globalization, the vocabulary of globalization. It captures something. We know that something is happening. We know that some foundational changes are taking place. The question is, does the vocabulary of globalization capture them? And it captures some, but there's a lot of stuff that it does not capture. And I have sort of positioned myself in that zone, a zone where I go digging, to try to understand some of these emergent processes, conditions that don't quite fit the language of globalization. Now, let me start with some, by the way, I should say that a lot of what is happening is captured by the vocabulary of globalization. It's just that there are other things that I'm not sure are getting adequately captured by that vocabulary. Let me give you an example. We all talk about global firms. I talk about global firms. I do research about global firms, strictly speaking, very, very strictly speaking. There is no such legal persona as a global firm. It doesn't exist. Yet, we know that there are lots of firms. In fact, 277,000, something like that firms that conduct themselves as if they were global firms. What is it that has happened? The language of the vocabulary, if you want, of globalization would go for global firm and leave it at there. It's a self-evidently global fact, and I would agree with that. But I'm still interested in recovering what happens in the juxtaposition of no such legal persona as a global firm. All firms are national. They may be multinational. There may be alliances between two, but chances are that one dominates the other. And yet, there is all this globality that firms are producing spaces within which they're moving, et cetera. Well, what there is when you really go digging is the fact that government after government after government around the world has produced the regulatory changes, the legal changes, et cetera, to transform some aspects of the institutional spaces within which firms function so that these foreign firms, ultimately foreign firms, can conduct themselves as if they were global. It's the work of states, state after state, after state, after state. In denationalizing, this is another language that one could use, parts of the operational space for firms inside each country so that a foreign firm can move through whatever 150 plus countries now in order to, you know, and function as if they were global. Now, when you bring that dimension into the picture, it is not that you are rejecting or I'm rejecting the fact of a global firm. I am recovering, however, the participation of national states in the making of that possibility that is a global firm. And thereby, I'm also problematizing, if you want, the duality between it's either global or it's national. A lot of what we call globalization, perhaps the most complex elements of that which we call globalization are actually produced, made deep inside the national, including deep inside certain parts of the national state, ministries of finance, central banks, you know, particular parts of it. So one of the languages that I like using is something that is denationalization. You know, it denationalizes what has historically been constructed as national. Mind you, it's not a very elegant word. I grew up in five languages. The result is, and then I had to learn a sixth one, which was English. English was my sixth language. So as a result, you know, I don't speak one language perfectly. And as a consequence of that, the zone of language is the zone of play experimentation. Mind you, it's either that or it's a zone of oppression. Because for somebody who has to write and give lectures, not to know one single language well is either an opportunity or it is a disaster. I opted for opportunity. So I'm forever sort of inventing and playing around with words. I know that denationalization is not a particularly elegant word, but it actually works. And it's part, it's Latin, of course. You can actually use it in quite a few languages, which you can say for everything. But what I'm really trying to do is to juxtapose. Juxtapose something to what we usually are describing as globalization and capture in that which I bring in a connection with the national, even though it is in terms of denationalizing. So besides, you know, the global firm, et cetera, the example that I just gave you, you know, there are all kinds of cases where we know we're dealing with a global formation. But you know what? They're mostly informal. Strictly speaking, we have only two global laws. The rest is national or supranational. But we have a lot of globalities. And I really, I have worked on quite a few of them. So that one way of putting it then is that a lot of the global either really consists, or kind of denationalizing that I just described, or it consists basically of a lot of informal globalities. Now by informal, I don't mean to say it's not in compliance with the law, it's in violation, it's illegal, none of that. That is not the point. The point is that what I'm trying to sort of compare it to is that it is not fully formalized. And so the title of this talk, neither global nor national, is sort of an attempt to open up the analytic space, the analytic terrain within which to do research, to study, to construct an object of study, to develop interpretive techniques, to conceptualize elements, conditions, processes, dynamics, contradictions that are part of the current transformation, but that you cannot quite richly capture. You capture them perhaps only thinly, and sometimes you don't even capture them with a vocabulary of globalization. Now I want to show you some slides. And I'm going to start a bit simply, elementary, and then I'm going to push you a bit towards slightly more complicated things. Now I want to take an example, the border. Mind you, this is just an example. I'm not doing the ultimate in-depth lecture on the border, but I'm just taking this. Now I hope that this is visible for everybody. Can you see it? Great. So this is the US-Mexico border, a well-known border, the most militarized border in the world between two countries that are not at war. And what I want to, one point of entry, because this is now a concrete, thick, messy, violent reality. So you need a point of entry. So one way of starting is to think of the limits of militarized border control, given new reality. So that already produces juxtaposition. So let me start by mentioning that over the last 15 years, there has been a huge increase in the militarizing of the border. In fact, in my reading, I prefer the word weaponizing, because in a way, the military are an institution. They have tribunals. They're not always at war. When you say weaponizing, a weapon is a much narrower kind of, and for me, the Mexico-US border in that particular element, the wall, is a weaponized border. Now the annual budget of the INS, which now is part of Homeland Security, but most of the time it was an autonomous agency, went, as you can see, it went up to 1.6 billion a year. It must be said that in the 90s, when this rapid increase happens, and mind you, it's under President Clinton, you know, a democratic president, or at least a democratic party president. Now it is true that in the 90s, the armaments industry, which is a very big one in the United States, did not have a good, solid war at its hands, you know, that they could sell its toys. And I really have the impression, when you look carefully at the data, that they pushed very hard for this project of weaponizing. So that, I'm already saying that the limit, when I talk about the limits, that they may not have, you know, nobody may have been fooled necessarily by the impossibility of controlling a border just by weaponizing it, but there was a strong push on the part of the armaments industry, you know, to get this weaponized. Now again, by a final point here, the border patrol also increased vastly in numbers. Now what's the result? Notwithstanding all of that stuff, there is an all-time high today, whether that is good or bad is another matter. I'm just examining, you know, the mechanics if you want of this situation. All-time high an estimated unauthorized immigrant population, circa 12 million, which is a doubling over the last basically 10 years, a sharp increase in the cost per arrest, extremely expensive now to arrest, and a falling arrest rates. In fact, they are at a 40-year low, which might be good or bad. You know, that's again, I don't want to. Now, by two or two, as you see that cost had grown 2700 from 300 before 1992. So, and here we begin to enter a complex reality, and then you'll see why I consider that this space is neither national nor global, no matter the weaponizing, no matter the wall. So, in the early 1980s, about half of all undocumented Mexicans returned home within 12 months. By 2000, the rate of return migration stood at just 25%. So, you can already see that one of the reasons of the growth in the undocumented population is precisely the impossibility or the difficulty, if you want, of circulating between home country and immigration country, which of course then leads to an increase. Now, let's just look at this border zone, and we can think of it as the social ecology of the border. These are now entries from Mexico to the US. This is a list of all the things, it's not a complete list, of all the things that are coming over the border from Mexico to the US. I don't need to read to the figures, but as you can see, there's all kinds of things. There are company employees, there are tourists, there are traders and investors, there are students, there are dependents. It's a very lively scene. They all cross without difficulty, really, the border. So, this border, no matter how weaponized it is, also has this kind of very, you know, very active passing. Now, from the US to Mexico, there's also quite a bit happening. There are one million Americans who live in Mexico. Now, these one million Americans are the documented one. Then there are two million undocumented Americans living. They're mostly artists and that type. The one million documented are probably all very nice retired people who do it, you know. But the two million artists, they have a great life and they're also very nice, but they're there. And then there are 19 million Americans who travel every year to Mexico. Now, in other words, the border is a space that has to accommodate a vast number of flows. Some of the flows are just part of the global tourism industry. Some are old flows that simply are going on. Some are part of the NAFTA agreement. So, when we talk border, we're talking about an enormous complexity of flows coming in and out, in and out, in and out. In other words, you might say that the project of controlling is almost meant to fail. It cannot. Now, at the same time, it is interesting that all these bodies, you know, there are also dollars clearly, but all these bodies can actually construct a resistance to the weapons. Now, other embedded cross-border links. Here what I'm trying to argue is that the social ecology of the border actually also moves into spaces that are not just the border. So Wall Street, for instance, I'm just mentioning one little example. Wall Street made $2 billion just in handling the remittances sent only to Latin America. So, as you can see, there are all kinds of elements that mark this ecology. Here is another one. Well, we could just say that we're dealing with two categories. One is the border and the other one is borderland, you know, and clearly one might say that this is a borderland. And in some ways, it is neither national nor is it global. Here is another case, Hezbollah. Now, Hezbollah, of course, exists within Lebanon, but you can't quite say that it is simply Lebanese. Like, you might say that the state of Michigan, or the state of, I don't know, Idaho is sort of, it's American and, you know, or the Democratic Party or whatever. At the same time, it exists within Lebanon. And what one way of putting it is that the terrain that is Lebanon really contains multiple spaces or at least two spaces, that contain the formal political apparatus. Formal and one should say informal. So that Hezbollah is a kind of also controls a space. It is not the full geographic terrain of Lebanon, but it is a space. Is it national Lebanese and only that? No. Is it global? No. And there you begin to see some of these issues. Now, here's another case that again, this goes back to the United States situation. And this is at a time. Here the juxtaposition is that the American, this happened two years ago, the American Congress is discussing criminalizing illegality. Now, illegality right now, you know, is a violation of the law, but it is not criminal. If you criminalize something, if you're found, you're meant to go to jail, you know, do process, et cetera. But criminalizing is very different from simply a violation of residence law. So, and the other event is the president of Mexico, he was then president, comes and meets with a whole bunch of undocumented farm workers somewhere in the Midwest and the media are there and everything. Now, one way of interpreting it to get at this neither global nor national is to say that he actually produced an informal extraterritorial jurisdiction through his practices. Let me just leave it at that. We can all go through return to it. That's a bit abstract, but you know that in every supranational, I mean in the supranational system, you have this extraterritoriality. It's a formal jurisdiction of each nation state that is a member of the community of international states and the embassy, for instance, is a good example of that. That's a kind of extraterritoriality. Now, what Fox did by meeting with these undocumented workers in full site of the media while Congress was seriously considering criminalizing is actually he created a novel type. It was a new kind of extraterritorial jurisdiction for himself. But informal and here we begin to get into something that is very important, which is the amount of stuff that represents a novel development that is informal. It's not in violation of the law per se, you understand. In my view, I like to use this term regulatory fractures. It's neither in compliance nor is it in violation. When you begin to use these kinds of categories to understand what all is happening, you really open up the field and you begin to pick up on a lot of microprocesses, micro instances, that when you pull out just the big guns, the global, the national, you simply lose. That is one of the reasons that I'm really interested in this kind of. Finally, another example, Chavez. This Chavez of Venezuela, who is basically, he has been basically declared an enemy of the United States, and he has managed to also produce an informal extraterritorial point of entry for himself, which is through the distribution of oil. Venezuelan oil to low income households, I don't know if people know that. He also did that for the buses here when Ken Livingstone was mayor, Boris canceled it. When Ken Livingstone was mayor, he had a deal for the buses. I don't know what the share was, but the buses used charity oil, so to speak, to keep the prices low, et cetera, and Ken and lower bodies. Now, it's like one image that I like to use is that these are all micro practices. The edges might be a bit unclear, but that's not the point. There is a point of gravity there. That is the point. That informal practices, micro practices, that worm themselves into, I love this notion of worming. They worm themselves into the nationally constituted territory where the national state has exclusive authority. These are the juxtapositions. Again, these are micro. Now, there's a whole long list of these kinds of things, and they keep growing, but I don't want to do that now, to go into too much detail. Now, one way, one way of trying to capture it, one way of trying to bring it together conceptually, et cetera, is to say that what we're seeing is a kind of proliferation of partial, often highly specialized, global, or denationalized. They might be subnational. I just have global written there, but it could really be a whole range assemblages of bits of territory, authority, and rights that were once firmly ensconced in national institutional framing, and they sort of exit. For me, there is an image of La Ternomade. The virilogue just had this show, but in other words, territory, land, but let's stick with territory. It was land to be different, but territory is a category. It's a complex formation. The territory of the national is a complex formation, but it still is connected to terrain, to land. The image that I have is that territory is easier to convey than with rights and with authority. They are more complex and abstract, but when territory exits, like this space is denationalized space of the global firm that I was talking about before, when territory exits the institutional framing of the national state, it actually can be thought of as nomadic. It could reconstitute itself formally speaking in many different ways. One way is when I said that Fox made for himself, former President Fox from Mexico, an extraterritorial, an informal extraterritorial jurisdiction for the Mexican president. Now, I find this very interesting. I'm not necessarily saying that this is bad, by the way. I hope that people are understanding where I'm coming from, but how to conceptualize this, because conceptualizing also means that you can see it, that you don't lose sight of it, that you can actually understand that something is going on here that needs to be captured. Again, in the book, I have lots of these kinds of examples and they can get quite complicated. For instance, if you think of electronic finance, electronic financial networks, they also are a very interesting case, because at some point they hit the ground, really in the global network of financial centers. Those financial centers begin to function like frontier zones. It is the land that has exited partly as is the space of the global firm within each nation. It's land that has exited the formalizing, the encasement of the nation state. Then it exists. It's not clear how it's going to get reformalized. In that sense, it becomes nomadic, not in the sense that it moves, but in the sense that it's institutional articulation, it's institutional encasing, is not clear. I'm hoping that you're following what I'm saying, because it's a bit abstract. For me, it's all terribly clear, but then I've been writing this for years. Now, one I should say the last one here. Now, here I am really emphasizing the global dimension, but these assemblages cut across the national versus global divide, but they also can happen, as I was just describing, inside the national. The human rights regime, insofar as human rights begin to be used, in the case of the UK, I'm dying to ask questions to people, but you know that on the one hand, the UK is thought of among experts of liberal democracy as one of the most enlightened forms, parliamentary liberal democracy. I know that when you live in the UK for a while, you begin to have a slightly more critical stance. They consider it one of the most enlightened forms. Certainly much more than the United States, that one I agree with, but the UK, just to mention this iconic so to speak case, as you know, only integrated human rights law into its national law in 201. That's very recent, but the human rights regime represents something that is a denationalized instance of law, because the source of the rights, I'm not telling you anything new here, the source of those rights is not the national state, it's not the sovereign, the sovereign of course doesn't have to be a queen, the sovereign is the language for the state in international law, but within the nation state sort of model, the state is the source of law. So when human rights enter the judicial system of a liberal democracy, they are a very particular kind of presence, because sure you need the state to implement, you need a national judiciary to use those rights in adjudications, but the source of those rights is not the national state. So they are also a kind of an element that has exited partly the framing of the nation state, of the national state, and so again they are a kind of a nomadic presence, nomadic in the sense that they don't have the institutional anchor of the nation state. So this is just the global view, but I'm just trying to say that there is a whole other space for these assemblages that happens inside the national. That is more complicated to capture, you need to do research on each single country that has somehow undergone some processes of globalization, it's a collective endeavor, in that sense it's much easier to look at some of these global assemblages, because you know then you can just sit there at your supercomputer in New York and you don't have to move anything and you're going to study them, whereas really understanding how these dynamics get constituted inside South Korea, inside Thailand, inside Argentina, etc. requires the knowledge of experts in all of those countries. So for me it's also a very distributed sort of research project. How do we really understand the transformation? And this is a kind of the language that I use opens it up, you know, to all the whole variety of particular empirical conditions that may vary from country to country, yet can be conceptualized, you know, and brought into some more abstract framing, if you want, that would allow communication. Now here I begin to say, you know, that these emergent assemblages inhabit both national and global institutional and territorial settings. Now a key point about these kinds of elements that I'm talking about is that they do not run through supranational institutions. Remember at the beginning when I said we have only two formal global laws. I didn't say what they were by the way I realized. The rest, it's not that there isn't a lot of informality, a lot of globality, but it is not formalized as such. Why? Because most of it runs through the supranational system. And what's the difference between supranational and global if you want to be strict, you know, if for the purposes of whatever research you are doing you need to make distinctions. If you're speaking at a public rally or for certain kinds of research projects, frankly you don't need to make those distinctions, but the kind of research that I do requires making these distinctions. Now what are the two global laws? One is the ICC, the International Criminal Court. Why is it global? Because the state does not represent the collectivity, in this case, you know, the nation. I as a citizen, you as a citizen of some, it doesn't matter what country, as long as it's a signatory country, the US is not a signatory country by the way, can launch a lawsuit against this dictator, that torturer, etc. You do not have to go through the state as your representative. And the second, formally speaking, global law is TRIPS through WTO. In other words, WTO, and you all have heard these stories, with WTO law, as it is called to simplify the matter because TRIPS, you know, it's such a long name. A firm can go to a local court, there have been many cases that have happened, especially between Canada, the United States, etc., can go to a local court and contest, the most famous cases are these, the environmental regulations of a locality, because they interfere with the freedom of trading rights of that firm under WTO law. There is no need for the state to represent, it's not an interstate, it's not the usual international law zone where states, you know, are the representatives, it is something else. So those are the two. Formal, if you want, global laws is one way of putting it, it's sort of, it's shorthand again. But of course, you have all of these other stuff that is happening, I want to keep on emphasizing that. So in other words, some of these assemblages that I'm talking about, they do not run through the supranational system, I'm trying to control for the formal supranationality that really dominates a lot of what is the international. And that is a way then of forcing the question, you know, how do we study the global, how do we free ourselves from this type of stuff. And I should mention here one thing that I find extremely interesting, and that is simply not being picked up by anybody, except the ones who are using this option. And this is the new constitutions that were written after the dictatorships in Latin America, you know, these very bloody dictatorships in the 70s, early 80s. So in Argentina, in Brazil, in Paraguay, Uruguay, I don't know about Paraguay, but Uruguay and Chile. And then in Central and Eastern Europe, after the fall of the Soviet Union, and of course South Africa, after apartheid. Now these constitutions have a clause that in some of these constitutions is very long, you know, like the Brazilian constitution just spells it out in the last, I mean, detail. Others are much pithier, they're very short. I'm giving you my summary language. This is not the language that you would find, but this is what it amounts to. These constitutions say the following, and what I want to bring up is that they represent in this clause a rupture with the French and American constitution, which have really fed most of the constitutions in the world. And the rupture has to do with the fact that the state is not the exclusive representative of its people. Whereas in the American and French Revolution, the achievement is the state, the sovereign is not divine, the sovereign is the people, the people are the sovereign. You all know this. So what is this clause in these new constitutions? The sovereign, again, that is the language for state in international sphere. The sovereign, even if democratically elected, cannot presume to be the exclusive representative of its people in international fora. Now, I don't know if you can see the import of this clause. It basically says that I, as a citizen of those countries with those new constitutions, can say, no state. You do not always represent me. I can make direct representation in international fora. This exits the supranational system. This is a far more radical clause than one might think, if you look very formally at this stuff. Now, a beautiful law is nothing if it's just sitting there pretty on the shelf. So if it doesn't get used, it might as well not exist. It is being used, but by only certain types of actors, and I'm sure that you already can guess who they are, the indigenous people, First Nation people. They have been claiming for direct, you know, I'm thinking of the indigenous people of Brazil, Indonesia, even Japan, the Auno, though there are very few left, and of course Canada and the United States. They have for years been claiming that they have a right for direct representation in international fora. And the Canadian government has granted considerable rights, you know, not the full thing to them. But this clause, I think, comes partly out of the militancy of these indigenous people. And in the case of South Africa, apartheid, of course, was a kind of situation where the A and C in exile needed to have a right for direct representation in international fora, bypassing the representation of the apartheid state of South Africa. So you can see that, again, at this pragmatic level, this level of micro-practices, there were reasons for that. Now, to me, these new constitutions represent the beginning also of something that can go beyond the supranational system and that if used, it has to be used, and also of something novel. You can call it denationalization. Globalization, I don't know what is a proper language, but certainly it is a very, very interesting tool. So this is the point here, coming back, what I wanted to elaborate, that a lot of these assemblages that I'm interested in understanding, in discovering, and then in conceptualizing, do not run through supranational institutions. That to me is a real marker. A lot of what the globalization literature has focused on is the IMF, is WTO, and I'm very glad that that has happened because we need those data. But I've always been, partly because so much of the attention, so much of the research went to those institutions, which are basically supranational, you understand. I was interested in that whole other world. That is why the global city, a space where you had a lot of informal practices, etc. And for me, the global city is, of course, a space which also has a political production function, not just an economic production function, which has received probably most of the attention. And the political production function, and again, I'm just using language to capture something very particular. And the political production function has to do with the fact that the global city is, for certain types of actors, a frontier space, which means, I want to emphasize two aspects, which means it is, by the way, one of these spaces that is neither national nor global. But to repeat, a frontier space here means two things. One of them is that actors encounter each other, which belong to different worlds. And there are no rules of engagement for their encounter. So it is an exploration. It's an experiment. It's also a zone of violence, could be institutional violence, legal violence, you know, that displacements of people. It can be a variety. It could be ideational violence. It could be material violence. So that is one aspect. And the other one is that the global city, in being a frontier space, is a space that makes it possible for actors who are not represented by traditional, formal political entities, such as political parties, such as labor unions, to actually make politics. And here I'm thinking both of such actors as the multinational corporation, which legally speaking is a private economic actor, which in the context of, say, financial center, et cetera, really functions as an informal political actor. Again, I'm talking about informal here, not in sense of illegal, all right? It's much more complex and saying it's illegal or breaking the law. It is not that. It is that it is not a formalized political actor. And it's a kind of making of politics that goes beyond having lobbies, which they are entitled to hire, okay? Not all lobbies, but certainly many of these lobbies are legal, they're legal entities. And the other one is all kinds of disadvantaged subjects, whether they are undocumented immigrants, whether they are queers and gays, whatever, people who have not found easy representation in existing organs for representing, especially political. It's a space where politics can assume the form of cultural events, like the parades, you know, the Afro, the Afro, the, what do we call it here? In New York, we have the Afro-Caribbean Parade, and we have the Puerto Rican Parade, et cetera. I don't know. You have here in Afro, I can't remember what name it has, but something, Afro-Caribbean also? Carnival, right, the carnival. Yeah, they are carnivals, basically, but sometimes they have this name parade. But you get the picture of, I'm hoping what I'm, so it is a space that enables both very powerful, strictly speaking, economic actors to actually make the political to their advantage. I would say a lot of the displacements that happened during the high period of gentrifying, of reconstituting the, the central space in the cities that was in the image of these very powerful actors, the displacements that were allowed, you know, under, with major violations, at least of the human rights of people, but also to some extent, you know, of their civic rights or their citizens' rights. You know, I see in the era that begins in the 1980s and the 1990s a kind of making of the political and a kind of conflict that is wired into urban space itself, so that urban space becomes, you know, one of the actors in this. And so in that sense, it's informal political, these informal political actors, whether they are the queers, the undocumented immigrants or whether they are the multinational corporations or whatever they might have been, you know, very powerful actors, very abusive actors, that, you know, a lot of this kind of stuff for me is part of the political production function of the global city. Now, let me continue with this. Now, you know, they vary enormously, these assemblages, I'm not going to, but I just want to get at sort of two extreme instances just to illustrate because there are over 125 of these kinds of, these are global, these are really crossing the national global divide. So these are not these more elusive and complex things that are happening inside, but that's all in the book, that's too complicated to talk about, but this is a bit easier. So at one extreme, we have something that Gunther Taubner, a legal scholar, I don't know if people know his work, very interesting, he's forever obsessing about is there global law, you know? Anyhow, the Lex construction is. Now, the Lex construction is a rather dirty deal that the big construction companies that are sort of, there are about six or seven of them that have rebuilt the topography of the earth, you know, in the last 20 years, sort of agreement, shake of the hand agreement, that they made among themselves when Kyoto comes up, but already before, because many governments had implemented, you know, environmentally sustainable criteria for building and for big engineering projects, but they have to deal with this. And so the arrangement is basically that they have to find a common procedure, because otherwise, you know, everybody's going to do something else, it doesn't work. And so this Lex construction is one way, it has a terribly elegant name, of course, is one way of capturing what that procedure is. And the procedure is really dirty. It's dirty pool, as you say, it's not fair. So they have decided to put the onus, to put the weight of demonstration on the government. Now, that's okay with the United States government, though it's actually not, by the way, but think of most governments are really too poor to bring in the legal experts, the financial experts, the accounting experts, and the environmental experts to demonstrate in a court of law that these firms are engaging in practices that are in violation of environmental laws, whether they're national laws or the international regime. So by just putting the, and acting like that, but they needed a common front. So this then has, this creates a whole space, an operational space, an ideational space, and a politics in terms of their practices. You know, that is one example. Now that's very narrow, very focused, very few actors, even though their scope is planetary, of course, very powerful actors. And now I want to go to the other extreme, which is the International Criminal Court. The International Criminal Court is good. It has, it's a nice, nice sort of arrangement. Now again, I have already said this, but you know, it is not part of the supranational system. It has universal jurisdiction among signatory countries. It is potentially, again, it's like in that new constitution, that clause, you know, if this stuff doesn't get used, you know, it's not very, very powerful, let's say. But it is potentially a revolutionary innovation. It means that citizens, we as citizens, where we still have, even in the European Union, most of our rights derived from national states, hopefully that will eventually, you know, change, we can actually launch new types of jurisdictional geographies. We can go after certain. We don't need, you know, the United Nations, et cetera, to approve or whatever the other supranational instance. So it's very significant. Now today we have over 125 of these, you know, this is the best count, and they really range all over the place. And, and they're just growing, they're proliferating because every sub-sector or sub-project can sort of reinvent itself a bit along these lines, find the cracks in the existing system, avoid the supranational system, for good or for bad. What I'm also saying is they're multivalent. Some are very good and attractive, and some are really not good at all. I have written a paper where I tried to get at the ethics, you know, the political ethics, that this kind of, of situation, this proliferation, even though they are minor and at the sides very often, that this produces because it does destabilize whatever the existing frames, you know, that we have used to negotiate between wealth and poverty between exit and allegiance between what is legitimate and what is not legitimate. Now I personally am not such a great admirer of our past trajectory in terms of some of these ethical questions, so, so I'm not saying that this is great what's happening, this proliferation, but at the same time, perhaps it is the beginning of a new phase, you know, that could lead us to some, some alternative source of authority and protection that is not just your national state, that is one way of putting it, whether that then becomes a formalized supranational entity or a formalized, you know, truly global entity. I don't believe in a global state by the way, but, you know, some sort of supranational global entity, I mean global entity is, is, you know, a possibility. Now final point here, as you can see, this all produces a kind of third space for a growing range of operations, which are economic, cultural, political, subjective, they have a whole range of, you know, of versions if you want. One summarizing image, you know, if you want to stand back and you say, well, what is actually happening out there, is that, is one way of putting it is that we're sort of seeing a shift that is partly centered in global formations, but only partly, a lot of that stuff is really happening deep inside the national, which is where I started out here, that a shift from unitary systems or centripetality, you know what, the national state in the trajectory of its formation, agglutinates around itself, it nationalizes land identity, security, et cetera, et cetera, belonging, you know, all these kinds of things, law, legitimacy, you know, you name it, it nationalizes, never achieves it perfectly, many national states never have even that kind of autonomy, of course, they are colonial, you know, in one way or another, post-colonial, but still, that is sort of an overarching dynamic. Even the big empires, I make this argument in this book, the British empire, you know, the French, the American kind of empire, they all were actually producing, even with those imperial geographies in my reading, the national, they, you know, they, those were just sources for extraction, and I don't know what all, but in the end, at the end of all of that, the project was to construct these very powerful nation states. Now, what this proliferation of partial assemblages does, it begins to desegregate some of these constitutive rules through which we have dealt, and that is why I was saying at the beginning, most of what we think of as globality is really supranational, which is something that nation states, the community of nation states, whose number has grown, the geography of nation states has grown, you know, there are many more now, et cetera, that has been a key project to create some of these rules. And it also, it does really mean such things as the pursuit of national security is good for the citizens, which now we know this whole new category, human insecurity, you know, one of the things, one of the propositions that I work with is that the pursuit of national state security actually produces human insecurity, you know, when you're dealing with asymmetric wars, which means that war gets urbanized. So you go to war, you have produced human insecurity. So we're beginning to see cracks, you know, in this, in the project that has marked, in the case of the European space, of course, for hundreds of years, this pursuit of, you know, the nation state. And that has then come with a whole set of rules and ethical frames for action, for what is good, what is bad. Now, since these novel assemblages are partial and often highly specialized, they do tend to be centered in very particular utilities. This is a real challenge because in a way they downgrade the grand ethical project, I say that was quotation marks, okay, of the nation state. So the big question for me is, is this a period of transition? Are we moving towards a new set of formations? And there I think I depart from the position that a lot of people who work on globalization, so which think that this is the new regime. I don't buy that at all. I think this is really a period of transition. And the continuation of this, the further development can coexist with the nation state. So my idealized version is some sort of denationalized nation state that can regear its energies, not just towards the internationalism of making a global corporate economy, but to all of those other things that need to be done internationally or globally, the environmental challenge, global justice, global poverty issues, et cetera, et cetera. So to me right now, this notion of having all these lower level, almost particular, as I say, their utilities replacing grand normative frames, not so great, but the grand normative frames have brought us a lot of grief. You know, the notion of national state security that I was describing before. Now in the end, the normative character of this landscape is multivalent. It ranges from some very good things to some very bad ones. And it depends of course on your stance. But in the end, I think there is a vast amount of work to be done if we're going to get, you know, a better situation. Right now it's an in-between zone. The financial crisis is destabilizing a lot of this. But let me end with a final note, because I think that sort of, to me it's very illuminating, a lot of the interpretation of the fact that national states are actively participating in rescuing banks and putting in money. In other words, the national state is back as a key actor in these national economies. The interpretation of this has gone in the direction of new nationalisms, renationalizing. Frankly, as I argue in enormous detail in chapter four of that new book, which is like a hundred pages long, it might as well be a little book, is that, you know, if you really, the state number one is not an entity that I can deal with, you know, from the outside. Do you say the state you're looking at it from the outside? When you go inside the state, see that the executive branch, whether it is parliamentary, you know, a prime minister or whether it is a presidential executive branch, executive branch is located in global logics. It is part of that neither national nor global. This is a whole other lecture, so I don't want to really go there. But the main point that I'm trying to make is that all, like with that global firm, remember that I started with, that state after state went through its own particular laws in order to create a standardized set of global spaces for these firms to move through. Well, we see something like that now. The executive branch is the one that is really in charge of this reentering into the national economies. And what is really happening is that the collectivity of states are in amazing agreement with rescuing, you know, whatever it is, the financial system and this and that. They are actually conducting themselves as global actors. This is not national. They are trying to rescue a global system. Now, the logic, you know, we could have a whole debate about is a good or bad. I have written quite a bit about it, including just on Sunday, a whole page in Le Monde. I got a lot of response to that. But in my view, this is part of this new formation that I'm talking about, that part of the government is actually working with the executive branch, working with other executive branch around the world in order to rescue a global system. Because this global financial system is global. Part of the fact that many of the innovations that have brought us down are made in America. They are really made in Wall Street. There is no doubt about that. I have zero doubt about that. But still, the whole operation, it is not a return to nationalism. Final thought, my hope is that this willingness of national governments to act internationally, in this case, to develop a global corporate economy and to rescue now a financial system, a global financial system, but that this kind of emergent internationalism of national states can be regeared towards other global issues, as I was saying before, the environment, et cetera, et cetera. I want to rescue something out of it. I think I've said enough and I'm open to questions. Thank you very much.