Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages [Paperback]

This is primarily a book about globalisation, though it also includes an extensive discussion of the historical emergence of the nation-state which serves to demonstrate its method and argue for parallels with the present. Rather than being a decline of the nation-state and of the national and local scales, Sassen interprets globalisation as often enacted through changes within the state itself, including the emergence of technical ministries, strengthening of executives and redefinition of state functions. The global is embedded and imbricated in the local and national by means such as the state construction of privatised regimes of regulation, the local construction of global cities and financial centres and the dependence of the entire cities on the concentration of resources in these nodes. So while a fundamental change has happened through globalisation, and it has led to the usual effects (interconnectedness, declining national scales etc), the picture here is both more complex and differently inflected.

Sassen argues that society as a complex system is inadequately expressed in unduly simplified schemas, which she implicitly associates with most other commentaries on globalisation. At a higher level of complexity and detail, the arguments of different approaches are all shown to have a certain validity but without the simplicity of their usual expression. She also shows why she thinks the tipping point for globalisation was in the 1980s, and why she differentiates this both from the global economy of the nineteenth century and from the earlier Bretton Woods regime. In this respect she makes a convincing case for her viewpoint, linking this temporalisation of change to an appreciation of the longer duration of some of the "capabilities" which made it up.

Sassen's method distinguishes between the emergence of specific institutions, techniques and social forms - what she calls "capabilities" - and the organisation of the entire system in a particular way, as an "organising logic" or "foundational" level. She claims that changes at the latter level do not necessarily require new capabilities; they can involve rearticulating existing capabilities into new combinations, and can also result from a cumulative development of capabilities. One thus ends up with a rejection of sudden breaks in history; rather, dramatic changes come about when flows already in operation reach a certain "tipping point" or "jump tracks", turning a change in capabilities into a change in organising logic. This account is developed first in relation to the emergence of the nation-state, then in relation to the changes associated with globalisation.

This is an important book which makes important points, but with certain weaknesses. Her method makes sense in principle, and her warnings about the importance of complexity and multiple factors are very necessary in a field prone to tendential oversimplifications. Her account of what changed and when is well argued and convincing, with plenty of empirical specificity. On the downside, a lot of the empirical detail of the book operates at a formal rather than a concrete level, concentrating on laws, financial instruments, institutional arrangements and so on, rather than on social relations as they actually happen. What is missing is a detailed engagement with how globalisation affects everyday life and how people respond to it. Such issues are discussed, but far more briefly than the institutional issues and without the depth of specificity on the relations involved, compared to the discussions of elites. She is too prone to assume that what is "constructed" as a "legal persona" also exists on the ground, in actual social relations (in terms of the emergence of the worker for example).

The book is somewhat repetitive and longer than it needed to be, and the case for connecting globalisation to the historical changes involved in the formation of the nation-state is not really explored. If the aim was to construct something akin to what is done by people such as Hannes Lacher and Arrighi and Silver, it really fails; these provide strong diachronic accounts tracing structures over time, whereas Sasser provides parallels which are at best suggestive. Among other things, an entire historical period, and notably the rise of the welfare state, are largely missing or skimmed over in this account.

The method at times veers towards eclecticism; Sassen has a fondness for synthesising different accounts and adopting a "bit of both" kind of approach, which means that rarely is anything left out, but at the same time, it is often unclear which forces are driving changes or why they happened one way rather than another. Descriptions of details are both excessive and uneven. In some sections, such as that on the Internet and social movements, the method is applied almost mechanically, without a real appreciation of the specificities of the assemblage concerned. While the emphasis of contingency seems to point to the possibility of many possible lines of escape from global capitalism, these possibilities are never mapped or made clear, leaving an unduly closed narrative which ends with the present. I'd also expected to read a lot more about the evolution, discursive articulation and transformation of the key concepts of the title - territory, authority and rights - and hence, something more like Foucault's "Society Must Be Defended" or "Territory, Security, Population", tracing the imaginaries and discourses associated with these concepts through their various institutional expressions. What one gets from Sassen is rather more of an empiricist use of these concepts, tracing how changes alter territorial regimes between scales, produce new rights and so on, without really linking these back to the basic concepts.