Transnationalism in Theory and Practice: Uses, Mis-Uses, Abuses
17/11/2010
- Opinión
I discuss below a number of problems associated with the concept of transnationalism in relation to issues of “border-crossing” in the contemporary city. These are problems that have bothered me in my academic analyses of transnationalism, as well as in my experiences as a migrant intellectual. They relate mostly to the politics of transnationalism both in its practices and its theorizations; in particular the celebratory tone that infuses many discussions without regard to the equally important problems it presents.
As conceptual fashions come and go in the chase after the elusive realities of our times, transnationalism would seem to have become one of the most popular concepts of choice. It complements and extends the off-ground realities that inform its companion concept--globalization--by re-directing attention to the grounded practices of everyday life. But it also shares with globalization a propensity to an exaggerated emphasis on flows, border-crossings and cultural hybridizations against the evidence of the great majority of humankind who lead settled lives unless pulled or pushed into mobility, the proliferation and reification of boundaries, and the persistent attachment to real or imagined cultural identities. The oversight raises questions about ideological biases built into the concept, as with globalization, which has ignored the marginalization of populations as they were left out of its processes. The consequences are problematic intellectually and politically.
The oversight is a product partly of the practices of transnationalism, that in their apparent novelty attract attention as will any new trend that seems to be in the process of transforming the world. But the attribution to these practices of teleological power to reshape the world has much to do with the appeal of transnationalism to those who are its products and beneficiaries as border-crossers of one kind or another—from corporations to intellectuals to skilled and unskilled laborers who fill the needs of a globalizing political economy. Transnationalism is not just something that is propelled by invisible economic and social forces, it is also a disposition, a world-view, and a conscious strategy of living in the world. It would be surprising, indeed, if the world-view fostered by transnationalism did not have a part in shaping its theorization by those who are more often than not participants in its practices. Whether or not transnationalism is historically novel, is it possible, then, to speak of a transnationalist discourse that is indeed novel, that speaks to a significant development of our times? At the same time, does this discourse itself suffer from an ideological appropriation of the world, as well as the reification of transnationalism, ignoring the contradictions that dynamize it, as well as those that it generates itself in its practices?
I will discuss some of these contradictions below. In keeping with the goals of this conference, I will reference my observations with recent literature on the city, its internal relations, and its relations with its national, regional and global contexts that has had seminal or influential impact on the conceptualization of urban studies. I will supplement what these works have to say with illustrations drawn from different parts of the world, most importantly the Peoples Republic of China. If transnationalism itself is not to become a hegemonic concept, imposing upon the world the parochial experiences of its centers of power, we need to be attentive to its practices and problems in different parts of the world. It seems to me to be a predicament of urban studies that most of the current theorization of the city is based on a limited number of cities, commonly referred to as “global cities,” that then serve to show the rest of the world its inevitable future. The teleology here is similar to teleologies of globalization and, prior to that, modernization. For both intellectual and political reasons, whether or not this is the case is a matter that calls for urgent attention.
The Conceptual Field:
Globalization, Transnationalism, Translocalism, and the Nation-State
It seems to me that whether or not it is explicitly acknowledged, at the center of most discussions in the social sciences as well as cultural studies presently is the question of the future of the nation-state. The terms I have named above represent different alternatives to an understanding in both politics and social and cultural studies of global relations based on the nation-state as the spatial unit of political economy, political and cultural interactions among peoples, and social unity and coherence. Globalization, which has hardly been about the globe as a whole except in matters of ecology, is informed by an urge to transcend the nation-state, and has come to refer to all spatialities beyond the nation, from the regional to the continental and oceanic, to the global, at least rhetorically. It is an “off-ground” concept, if I may borrow a term from the late French historian of China, Jean Chesneaux. Transnationalism is an expression of efforts to ground these phenomena by bringing the nation back in, but with an emphasis on border-crossings that challenge the boundaries of national spaces. Unlike globalization, it stresses the nation-state at the very least as the still significant context, if not the agent, of contemporary global relations, albeit one whose future may be in question. Translocal is the most concretely grounded of the three concepts, as it locates these relations at ground-level interactions that by-pass state regulation without being independent of it. Here, too, border-crossings are important, not just as the crossings of national boundaries but as the crossing of borders between places that are linked to one another, often but not always urban places. They undermine the boundaries of the nation-state from below.
Globalization is in some ways the least useful of these concepts in comprehending contemporary phenomena. It has played a most important part in breaking down the hold of the nation-state on political and cultural imagination, but if its spatial provenance is taken seriously (the whole globe), there are few institutions and phenomena that qualify for inclusion within its scope. Aside from atmospheric and environmental phenomena, we could name financial transactions, communications, including the internet, and formal and informal institutions of governance, from various international organizations to social movements. These may seem important enough to justify the concept, but it is clear upon close examination that most of these phenomena work not above but through the existing organization of the globe in nation-states. Globalization may refer metaphorically to the transcending of the nation-state only if we recognize also that it is mediated by the latter. Hence its many contradictions.
It is these contradictions that transnationalism as concept seeks to grasp. As Michael Peter Smith puts it in his book, Transnational Urbanism, with reference to the work of Manuel Castells, “while the globalization discourse draws attention to social processes that are 'largely decentered from specific national territories…research on transnational processes depicts transnational social relations as 'anchored in’ while also transcending one or more nation-states…In contrast [to globalization discourse] the transnationalist discourse insists on the continuing significance of borders, state policies, and national identities even as these are often transgressed by transnational communication circuits and social practices.”[1] While these processes challenge the nation-state, moreover, the effect is not simply one way. As the medium for these processes, the peculiar constitution of each nation-state is also visible in the form these processes assume as well as in the determination of their trajectories. Transnational processes may be global in reach, but they are not therefore universal in the meaning and significance they carry, or their effects, which are localized in the nation-state.
Similarly with the term translocal, which lies at the other extreme from global in referring to locations within the national.[2] If globalization seeks to deconstruct the nation from above, translocal does the same from below, calling into question assumptions of national homogeneity or even coherence. Transnational processes are almost by definition also translocal, as they originate from specific locations within the nation, and have different effects on different parts of it. Indeed, one of the most fundamental consequences of so-called transnational processes is to introduce new kinds of boundaries within the nation itself, most notably between those parts of the nation that are on the pathways of transnational transactions, and those that are not. Here, too, however, the relations are reciprocal. While translocal relations introduce new faultlines into the national topography, they themselves are shaped to no small extent by their topographical context.
These three terms may refer to similar phenomena, but they refer to different aspects of those phenomena, and account with different degrees of success for their geopolitical, political economic, and cultural contexts. But it seems to me that they share a common shortcoming over the question of the nation-state. This is the failure to account for a peculiar contradiction of our times: The seeming accumulation of power in the nation-state even as its existence seems to be in jeopardy due to the various processes that inform these concepts. This shortcoming may be most evident in the case of globalization and translocalism which in different ways presuppose the marginalization of the state, but it is also the case with transnationalism despite the incorporation of the nation in its semantic structure.
The failure concerns the issue of the nation-state. Three of the most intriguing phenomena of our times are the strengthening of the state, the hardening of national boundaries, and the surge of nationalism, contrary to expectations of their weakening under the assault of globalization, transnationalism and translocalism. I have tried to capture these contradictions with the concept of “global modernity,” or modernity globalized under the sign of capitalism, which points simultaneously both to the breaking down of political and cultural boundaries, and to their proliferation and hardening. The nation-state may well be said to be at the pivot of these contradictions. What seems to be weakening, in this perspective is neither the state nor the nation, but the nation-state, which for two centuries now has been premised on a unity of the state and the nation. Rather than serve the nation of which it is the state, the state increasingly assumes the task of managing the contradictions created by forces of transnationalism--which in many ways makes it more, not less, powerful. The managerial turn of the state complicates its relationship to the nation of which it is the putative representative. This is so even in democratic states. The nation in turn assumes an existence of its own independent of the state, which finds expression in claims of cultural identities as distinct from political identities. One of the results is the proliferation of boundaries, and the hardening of existing ones, if not necessarily at the level of the nation-state.
Not surprisingly, given their pivotal role, these contradictions are most evident in the reconfiguration and composition of cities on transnational circuits, not simply as their nodes, but as generators of their transmissions. How to address these contradictions has set off conflicting discourses on the contemporary city, which enable further elaboration of the conceptual challenges presented by issues of globalization, transnationalism, and translocalism.
The City as Space, Place, and Transit Station
In an article published in a decade ago, Saskia Sassen wrote that urban studies were challenged by new “macrosocial trends” among which were “globalization and the rise of new information technologies, the intensifying of transnational and translocal dynamics, and the strengthening presence and voice of specific types of socio-cultural diversity.”[3] There is considerable disagreement over the novelty of these trends, their configurations, and how their effects should be understood. It seems safe to say, nevertheless, that they have figured prominently in urban studies over the last two decades. One consequence has been the overshadowing of the relationship of cities to their hinterlands-as in “central place” approaches-by long-distance, border-crossing interurban or translocal relationships that find expression in a renewed emphasis on transnational networks, “Historically,” the authors of one article observe, “cities have always existed in environments of linkages, both material flows and information transfers. They have acted as centers from where their hinterlands are serviced and connected to wider realms. This is reflected in how economic geographers have treated economic sectors: primary and secondary activities are typically mapped as formal agricultural or industrial regions, tertiary activities as functional regions, epitomized by central-place theory.” By contrast, the transnational functions of “world-cities… materially challenge states and their territories. These cities exist in a world of flows, linkages, connections, and relations. World cities represent an alternative metageography, one of networks rather than the mosaic of states.”[4]
I will return below to some problems presented by this shift. But first I will comment briefly on a significant division in transnational urban studies between those who give priority to “the spaces of capital,” to borrow a phrase from David Harvey, and those who favor greater attentiveness to more grounded place-based interactions. The fundamental question at hand concerns the dynamics of the “world-city.” I will take as my point of departure the idea of “transnational urbanism,” that has been proposed by Michael Peter Smith as a way to approach urban studies at a time of transnationalism. What makes this work particularly relevant here is the author’s effort to overcome the divide between space and place, a fundamental issue raised by transnationalism.
In his critique of the paradigmatic works of David Harvey, John Friedmann, Saskia Sassen, “the Los Angeles School of urban studies” (represented by Edward Soja, under the influence of Fredric Jameson’s work on postmodernism), and, to a lesser extent, Manuel Castells (or what he describes as “’the time-space compression’ imaginary, the 'global city’ metaphor, and the 'postmodern urbanism’ paradigm’”), Smith finds these works to be guilty of an economistic equation of “the 'global’ with the space of top-down political-economic power relations,” and reducing “the 'local’ to a site of either class polarization or ineffectual cultural resistance to the inexorable march of global capitalism.”[5] Furthermore, he locates global city debates inspired by these works in “a conceptual and epistemological borderland where positivism, structuralism, and essentialism meet,” and charges them-especially Harvey-with “masculinist” prejudice, as well as complicity with the self-image of capital.[6] While these works anthropomorphize capital as “a unitary agent,” they fail to recognize the political agency of struggles at the ground level that play their indispensable part in the shaping of the city. We might surmise by extension that these criticisms would also apply to world-systems analysts from Immanuel Wallerstein to Anthony King who also assign priority to the structuring forces of capital, and the fundamental importance of class division and struggle.
Despite the silliness of some of these criticisms, possibly inspired by the more ideologically inclined versions of feminism and postcolonial criticism, Smith’s critique is significant for its insistence on greater reflexivity in discourses on the city, and the need for sharpened historical and ethnographic sensibility in urban analysis. No less important is his observation that theoretical resources (especially Marxism) used by leading urban theorists “to conceptualize the global-local connection has tended to reify the terms of this dialectic,” and to reproduce “a totalizing binary framework, which privileges the local as a space of 'authenticity’ and 'community.’”[7] Equally well-taken is his advice that cities are not merely “nodes” in a global network, but are products themselves of “social, political, and economic networks…criss-crossing the boundaries between spatial 'insides’ and 'outsides’ and thus completely articulating local with global social processes.”[8]And we could hardly quarrel with his case for greater attention to the “self-production of society”; of interaction at the everyday ground-level of political agency for the part it plays in the dynamics of the city-and, by extension, global formations. However fundamental the spaces of capital and of the nation-state, they are over-determined presently by transnational social spaces ranging from transnational households and villages to transnational grass-roots organizations, from diasporic politics that encompass political activity at both places of departure and places of arrival to cultural formations that are not reducible to cultures at either end.[9] Class formations are similarly ethnicized and regionalized. There is a plea in these critiques for recognition of a more complicated dialectic that resists reductionism, but that may be crucial also in accounting for particularistic variations between world or global cities that not only have different histories but also experience these forces in different alignments and combinations.
And yet, serious questions remain. “Transnational urbanism,” which Smith offers as an alternative to Marxist or liberal (and cosmopolitan) interpretations of the city, if only to compensate for the stress of the latter on structures of political economy or multiculturalism, leans toward street-level agency from below, without pursuing the dialectic the concept promises. Smith is critical of “populist” or ethnographic romanticization of politics from below. Unlike some analysts, Amin and Thrift, for example, to whom flows and circulation seem to be everything, he recognizes the importance of structuring conditions.[10] He nevertheless endorses such politics without reference to questions of class, degrees of power, and the actual content of the politics they espouse, which may be motivated by goals of resistance to injustice or inequality, but also right-wing ideologies of one kind or another. The inattentiveness to questions of power is most evident in the absence from the ranks of agency of those who are responsible for the business of running the institutions of capital. While capital in the abstract does not serve well as the “author” of transnational phenomena, as the author rightly observes, those responsible for its functioning and expansion—a crucial and essential force of globalization and transnationalism—certainly have agency, and powerful agency at that. Other aspects of globalization, including cultural aspects such as those in communication, are also products of these very same agencies, however they may be modified in the transmission. The state itself is entangled with these very same agencies who play a dominant part in the formulation of policies that guide the institutional contexts of transnationalism, however they may be evaded or modified at the ground level.[11]
The Marxist or Marxism-inspired urban theorists Smith criticizes, would find little difficulty in recognizing the importance of the qualifications he offers. Castells, of course, has all along stressed the importance of other social movements beyond class, David Harvey has over the years not only accounted for diversities of urban resistance to capital and the state, but also turned to the examination of agency in the neo-liberal turn that is at the source of the most recent round of globalization (along with the fall of socialisms). Saskia Sassen may have been most insistent on the bifurcation of the urban landscape by the globalization of capital, but that is not the same thing as a failure to recognize the existence of other fractures. It is what Mao Zedong would have described as the “primary contradiction.”
It may be fairly suggested, I think, that Smith’s difference with these authors lie elsewhere: in a different valorization of migrant populations, and their experiences. The divide, in other words, is political. His analysis, too, ultimately recognizes the fracturing of politics into genders, ethnicities, etc., what Anthony King has described as “the struggle of the margins to come into representation.”[12] But whereas the authors above perceive in this fracturing the undermining of a unified political struggle, Smith renders it into the political cornerstone of “transnational urbanism.” His is a pervasive feature of many a discussion of transnationalism nourished, on the one hand, by the enhanced visibility of migrant populations, including migrant intellectuals who are prominent in these discussions, and, on the other hand, the increasing turn to the right among the working classes in response to the ravages of neoliberalism for which competition from migrant workers often is made to bear the burden. Especially among non-Marxist left intellectuals, migrants and their experiences have become a substitute for earlier affiliations with working-class causes.
Similarly with issues of place and space. It is true that in his preoccupation with the formative power of capital, a theorist such as David Harvey has stressed space over place as the domain of capital. This would suggest also the priority of top-down over place-based politics, for which Harvey has been criticized by other urban theorists, especially feminist theorists, among whom Doreen Massey stands out (Massey also provides the inspiration for Smith’s arguments on places).[13] We might argue not only that place-based politics does not necessarily follow the logic of capital, but also that such politics provides the possibility of alternatives to a state-centered politics in which capital and labor play out their struggles. Capital itself does not operate in offground spaces, but through agencies that are grounded places. On the other hand, the entanglement of the global and the local, which is a premise of Smith’s argument, suggests also that places do not exist outside of spaces. Place-based politics, if it is to escape marginality, needs to be projected into spaces. Such a formulation is not entirely inconsistent with Harvey’s approach, as he has explained it in a recent work.[14]
If the attachment to the working class seems at times archaic, the substitution of transnational migrant politics for class politics evades a fundamental question: can the problems of one be solved without solving the problems of the other? The valorization of transnationalism also has led in much work on cities to a neglect of those who prefer for one reason or another to remain stationary—and who still constitute the vast majority of the inhabitants of cities and nations. Those in motion are not necessarily, if at all, desirous of being in perpetual motion even when driven by sheer necessity to seek in transnationalism the solution to survival or a decent life. Transnationalism, moreover, does not guarantee the good life they seek, placing them in the same predicament as those whose stationary lives have been destabilized by the very same transnational forces. Labor migration, no less than the plight of those who remain stationary, is dynamized by the motions of capital, as is indicated by recent works by Jane Wills on London and Xiaojian Zhao on Chinese Americans.[15] The question of class, too, is an issue not just for the “traditional” working classes but for immigrant populations as well. At a time when class divisions themselves are being transnationalized, what is required is not the abandonment of class but its modification in response to these new phenomena. The challenge is not a new one. As in earlier episodes of the transnationalization of capital, in particular the nineteenth century, the challenge is to formulate class politics out of the many fissiparous divisions (most importantly ethnic, indigenous and gender) that undermine it. The difference between now and then is the globalization of the question of class.
Cities Out of Place
Regardless of where they stand on issues of capital and classes, or space and place, most of the outstanding works on contemporary urban formations share one shortcoming in common: a seeming obliviousness to the relationship of world-cities to the countryside. Whether out of a sense of an academic division of labor, or an ideological fascination with urban networks, there is little discussion in these works of world cities’ changing relationship to their hinterlands (including lesser urban configurations), extending to and possibly beyond national boundaries. This may be more the case with those who stress the global over the transnational, and spaces over places, but it is difficult to find in these works any sustained analysis of urban-rural relations which received far greater attention in approaches based on “central places.” Where the countryside comes into analysis, it is in the guise of “transnational villages,” rural settlements in some distant location in some other nation that have come to gain a foothold in world-cities. Analyses of migration rarely attempt to account for migrations within nation-states that swell the rapidly growing slums of world-cities, especially in countries of the Global South.[16]
It is as if world-cities are offgrounded from their concrete environment, and their relationship to one another renders invisible any relationship to the countryside. Some analysts, such as the advocate of borderless globalization, Kenichi Ohmae, go so far as to celebrate the distancing of the world-city from its environment as a condition of efficient development.[17] The result, as Riccardo Petrella of the European Union has noted, is a portrayal of world-cities as a “wealthy archipelago of city regions…surrounded by an impoverished lumpenplanet.”[18]
The “disappearance” of the countryside from theorizations of the city may be attributable to actual changes globally. More than half the world’s population presently resides in urban areas (not all of them “world-cities”), and the figure is expected to rise to 60% over the next two decades.[19] As Immanuel Wallerstein has observed, the emptying out of the countryside into the city has been underway since the origins of capitalism half a millennium ago. What we witness presently is the latest phase of this development in which problems of urbanization in the Global South have moved to the center of attention.[20] In some instances, such as the People’s Republic of China, the forces of political economy are reinforced by actual state policy that perceives in urbanization in mega-urban complexes the resolution of problems of agrarian society as well.[21] The urbanization of the rural population is also expected to contribute to further agricultural development by replacing the family farm by “agricultural production that mimics the agribusiness management techniques of North America.”[22]
The case of China is particularly important in illustrating the dramatic shift that has taken place from Maoist policies of self-sufficiency and self-reliance, which gave priority to national surfaces over urban networks, to an export-oriented transnational economy which has marginalized the countryside, and reduced the peasantry to second-class citizenry.[23] It is arguable that while Maoist policies placed a premium on agriculture, they too helped “de-peasantize” the countryside through collective organization that mimicked industrial organization. Those policies were also responsible for the hukou (household registration) system that divided the city and the country.[24] Megacities, rather than resolve this problem, are more likely to bring the urban-rural bifurcation into the structure of urban complexes, as has happened already in cities like Beijing.[25] The system of hereditary registration in place of birth, moreover, has rendered the urban-rural division into a caste-like system, denying rural migrants to the city full citizenship in their inability to access basic needs like education and health.[26] In this regard, they are not all that different in the difficulties they face from the so-called illegal immigrants that are flowing into cities around the world.[27]
These developments hardly justify the neglect of the countryside. On the contrary, the absorption of the countryside into urban areas presents problems of long reaching significance: the conversion of the peasantry into an urban underclass; uncertainty over the future of agricultural production, which already shows signs of crisis in chronic food shortages; the ecological consequences of the redistribution of population from the rural to the urban; problems of governance, and the psychic costs of the concentration of populations in enormous megacities.[28] No less important are the political consequences that include new challenges in urban governance, and have led already to increased surveillance of populations, proliferation of instruments of repression in anticipation of possible urban disorder, and, internationally, intensified competition for resources necessary for the sustenance of national populations. Jane Jacobs argued in her influential book, Cities and the Wealth of Nations that the relationship of cities to their hinterlands have been of great importance in determining the welfare of either, and that this also was of consequence in shaping transnational urban relationships. The latter may be quite effective in generating wealth and security for classes and groups that are its beneficiaries, but its distancing from the former raises serious questions of sustenance and sustainability in the long run for the urban populations at large.[29]
Whither Transnationalism?
There is a utopian strain in studies of contemporary world-cities that celebrates their promises of overcoming nations and nation-states, opening the way to encounters between peoples, genders, and classes that may be antagonistic initially, but will lead in the long run to improved human relations in a new, genuinely global, cosmopolitanism, and, finally, expansion of the social scope of creativity inspired by these encounters, as well as the challenges of ceaseless speedy transformations in these new “spaces of flow.”
Appealing as it is, such optimism may be sustained only by ignoring the more problematic aspects of transnationalism, as well as those phenomena that contradict its premises. Among the latter are the tightening of border controls (where they are not already heavily guarded), the proliferation of new walls that separate people, sometimes running through cities (as in Jerusalem and Baghdad), and the appearance of carceral regimes as other means of controlling human migrations prove to be ineffective.[30] Gated communities and ghettoes under police siege are as much a feature of the contemporary city in some places, as rubbing elbows along ethnic boundaries. It would take a great deal of imagination—not to speak of moral irresponsibility-- to conceive of Palestinian refugee camps or Australian prisons for refugees as “spaces of flow.” As one author writes, “The contemporary world is governed by the following paradox: the more intensely its course of development is analysed as a state of flux, a flowing network of goods, resources, thoughts and people, the louder the claims on the singularity of territories, and the tougher the separation (through walls, passports, biometric scans) between its nations.”[31] We need not share the deep pessimism of a Giorgio Agamben to recognize considerable validity to his description of “the camp” as a paradigm for a modernity that has found fulfillment in urban society.[32] Cities themselves have become reminiscent of camps with the intensification of surveillance practices, and anxious preparations by states to make war on their constituencies, based on assumptions that deepening inequality and struggle for survival are likely to breed chronic disorder.
Whether or not transnationalism will in the long run produce more humane relationships, or lead to increasing division and conflict remains an open question. Diasporic nationalisms stretch across boundaries of existing nation-states, but they also divide people from one another where they live. Migration and intensified communication have globalized ethnicity, and seemingly endowed ethnic identities with greater durability.[33] Ethnic issues, once restricted largely to immigrant societies, have become a pervasive feature of countries globally. That such identities may be more imagined than real does not make them any the less important in the social and cultural fragmentation of the city. The signs presently are of further consolidation of ethnic frontiers—as with the Moslem populations in Europe, for instance—before things get better. The dystopian vision of a city like Los Angeles in the movie, “Blade Runner,” has as much plausibility as utopian visions of cosmopolitanism. The US military, for one, shares in this latter vision, as preparing for urban insurgencies at home and abroad has become one of its top priorities; urban insurgency, it seems, has replaced the rural insurgencies of an earlier period.[34] This is the case no doubt with many states as they prepare for potential troubles arising from class and ethnic conflict. The production of crowd control weaponry is a flourishing industry.[35]
While most reflection concerns the implications of transnationalism for the nation-state, Manuel Castells has drawn attention to the possibility, given present trends, that transnationalism may mean the end of the city--at least the city as we have known it—as the local disappears into the global. Megacities, or “metropolitan regions,” as he prefers to describe them, represent a new urban form that has none of the social, political or cultural coherence associated with the idea of the city. What is at issue here is not nostalgia for the fragmentation of a community that never was (as Smith suggests in his critique of Castells, Harvey, and others), but the appearance of a new urban form that expresses transformation of relationships within the city as much as of its relationships to the outside. The distinction between the inside an the outside itself has become increasingly untenable as urban boundaries have become porous and new boundaries have appeared within them, a point on which most analysts seem to agree despite their differences otherwise.[36] The consequences are not just social and cultural, but political (governance)as well as ecological. The challenge, as Castells views it, is how to use new technologies and modes of governance to put the city together again.[37]
We may recall here that the metaphor of network is not restricted in its applicability to contemporary world-cities. Indeed, discussions of globalization since the 1990s have been quick to find analogies between contemporary reconfigurations of space and configurations of urban networks, such as the Hanseatic League of Northwestern Europe at the origins of capitalist modernity, or the trading networks of South Asia. While contemporary urban networks are characterized by interactions of far greater speed and intensity, translocal interactions have been a constant feature of human history. Interrupted by the dominance of the nation-state for two centuries, networks have become visible once again with global capitalism and the cracks it has opened up in the borders of nation-states.
It does not follow, however, that the nation-state has been merely a transitory form of organization that is likely to disappear without a trace with the globalization of capital, and the forces it has set in motion. As I noted above, the nation-state is only one form of the state. There were states before the nation-state, and there will likely be states at similar scales of governance if the distancing of the state from the nation forces a mutation of the nation-state. It is not just a question of the state, either, as two centuries of nationalism has made nationalism into a dominant expression of social, political and cultural identity that continues to shape politics globally and locally.
Craig Calhoun has argued in a recent work that for all its shortcomings and depredations, the nation-state remains as a key player in the resolution of the many problems we face, including most importantly problems presented by the globalization of capital.[38] It is possible that the problem presently is not the decline of the nation-state under the forces of transnationalism, but its conversion from a state of the nation to a managerial state that no longer represents the people of the nation. The task then would be not to wish the nation away, but render it more democratic, and more responsive to the needs of its citizens. On the other hand, the nation itself needs to undergo transformation away from essentialist primordialism and multiculturalism. If I may reverse the argument of a work on Chinese nationalism published some years ago, what may be needed most is “rescuing the nation from history”; the histories that nations invent in search of ontological justification, that then become prison-houses from which there is no escape.[39] Nations as we know them are products of many local interactions. It is imagined ethnic purities more than anything else that divide one nation from another, and shut the gates of mutual accommodation in which co-existence, rather than purity of identity, should have priority.
Transnationalism offers the possibility of reopening those gates--but only if we are willing to recognize the perils that come with its promises. Neither its condemnation, nor its celebration, is very helpful in coming to terms with its contradictions. Translocal relations historically have played a crucial part in shaping human societies. The particular trajectories they take presently are directed by the forms human interactions have taken under the regimes of capitalism, colonialism, and the nation-state. The same interactions also challenge the legacies of those regimes. This “double movement” generates the contradictions of transnationalism in its current phase. Recognizing it is a necessary first step in any effort to resolve those contradictions. The dynamics of urbanization is the indispensable point of departure to that end.
[1] Michael Peter Smith, Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), p.3
[2] We may note in passing here that translocal has a much broader applicability historically than transnational, which, strictly speaking should be employed only for the last two centuries when the nation-state has emerged as the dominant unit of spatial organization. It is a tribute to the power of academic fashions that transnational is the more widely used term, applied anachronistically even to pre-nation-state history. One of the consequences of the emergence of the nation-state was to force translocal relations, if only with partial success, into the spatial container of the nation-state, also erasing in the process their importance throughout the past in shaping economic, social, political and cultural relations, which would also provide the context for the emergence of the nation and the nation-state. It may not be surprising that the proliferation of translocal relations presently should be accompanied by calls for “unbundling” the nation-state (Saskia Sassen) .
[3] Saskia Sassen, “New Frontiers Facing Urban Sociology at the Millenium,” British Journal of Sociology, 51.1 (January/March 2000): 143-159, p.143
[4] J.V. Beaverstock, R.G. Smith, and P.J. Taylor, “World-city Network: A New Metageography?” Annals of the Association of American geographers, 90.1 (March 2000): 123-134, p. 123
[5] Smith, Transnational Urbanism, p. 10
[6] Ibid., pp. 48, 32, 64-67
[7] Ibid., p. 102
[8] Ibid. p.60
[9] For examples of works discussing these various transnationalisms, see, Nina Glick Schiller and Georges Fouron, “Transnational Lives and National Identities: The Identity Politics of Haitian Immigrants,” in M.P. Smith and L.E. Guarnizo (ed), Transnationalism from Below (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1998); Peggy Levitt, The Transnational Villagers (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001); Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini (ed), Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (New York: Routledge, 1997; Ludger Pries, Migration and Transnational Social Spaces (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999)
[10] Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2002)
[11] For a detailed analysis of agency (financial institutions, transnational corporations, property developers, architectural firms, communications media, and motions of peoples) in the creation of Pacific Rim urbanization, see, Kris Olds, Globalization and Urban Change: Capital, Culture, and Pacific Rim Mega-Projects (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001)
[12] Anthony O. King, Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 34
[13] Smith, Transnational Urbanism, p.15. Massey, of course, does not reject the importance of the global political economy, but sees them as “central to neoliberal globalisation.” Her emphasis is rather on the multiplicity of ways of “placing” the city—places in the city/city as place/city as location in global networks of power, the interactions of which produce a complex dynamics, and different results in different cities. Doreen Massey, World City (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007), p. 9. It follows that these differences also make for local differences in the workings of the political economy, which does not imply “the end of capitalism,” as some authors have suggested (and Smith finds himself in agreement with), but rather modifications of its operations in the course of globalization-a sign of its durability perhaps. For the latter, see, J.K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (as we knew it): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996)
[14] David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), chapter 8
[15] Jane Wills, et.al., Global Cities at Work: New Migrant Divisions of Labour (London: Pluto Press, 2010), and, Xiaojian Zhao, The New Chinese America: Class, Economy and Social Hierarchy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010)
[16] Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006
[17] Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies (New York: The Free Press, 1995)
[18] Riccardo Petrella, official forecaster for the European Union, cited in Beaverstock, et.al., “World-City Network,” p.131
[19] Brian C. O’Neill, et.al., Demographic Research: A Guide to Population Projections, Vol.4, Article 8 (June 2001): 203-288, p.263
[20] Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Return of the Peasant: Possible? Desirable?.” Paper presented at the Conference, “Global Capitalism and the Future of Agrarian Society,” the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, University of British Columbia, 28-30 June, 2009. For a discussion of over- or hyper-urbanization in the megacities of the Global South, see, J.D. Kasarda and E.M. Crenshaw, “Third World Urbanization: Dimensions, Theories, and Determinants,” Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 17 (1991): 467-501.
[21] Andrew Moody and Lan Lan, “Focusing on Future Urbanization,” China Daily, Monday, March 22, 2010, p. 13, for the development of megacities that are expected to resolve questions not only of poverty and urban-rural differences but ecological problems as well. Some Chinese advocates of urbanization may have been influenced by the work of Paul Romer, who has emerged as the most recent prophet of alleviating poverty through urbanization. See, Quentin Hardy, “Postcolonialism: An Economist’s Plan to Save the World’s Poor; New Cities Built Around Profits,” Forbes, September 21, 2009, p.38. If this report is to be believed, Romer’s “charter cities” seem to differ from Ohmae’s “region-states” mainly in his concern for alleviating poverty, and his proposal to internationalize city governance (hence, postcolonialism). One recent study proposes Shanghai during the pre-1949 colonial period as a model for a new Hanseatic League appropriate to the globalized world. See, Geoffrey Bracken, “The Shanghai Model,” IIAS (International Institute for Asian Studies)Newsletter, #52 (Winter 2009): 4-5. For one instance of labor export to cities to relieve poverty, see, “Work Dries Up in Rural Areas,” China Daily, Tuesday, April 1, 2010, p. 4. On occasion, forced urbanization is intended to undercut peasant mobilization for politics. For an example, see, Abidin Kusno, “Peasants in Indonesia and the Politics of (Peri)-Urbanization,” paper presented at the conference, “Global Capitalism and the Future of Agrarian Society.” The absorbtion of villages into urban areas is discussed in another paper presented at this conference by Leslie Hsieh, “Awaiting Urbanization: Urban Village Redevelopment in Coastal Urban China.” For peasants as “management problem,” see, Alexander Woodside, “The `End of the Peasantry` Scenario: Dream and Nightmare,” Paper presented at the same conference. One recent study suggests, however, political intervention in urban development and rural-urban population has been responsible for an excessive number of cities with the result that they are all underpopulated from a global perspective, the caste-like division that leads cities to live off the labor of migrants who are denied citizens’ privileges, and a consequent “under-urbanization.” See, Kam Wing Chan, “Fundamentals of China’s Urbanization and Policy,” The China Review, 10.1 (Spring 2010): 63-93. The first probably reflects the determination to preserve the national surface in the course of globalization, the second a strategy of development heavily reliant on the abuse of labor, especially agrarian labor, and the third a consequence of the first two.
[22] Gregory E. Guldin, “Desakotas and Beyond: Urbanization in Southern China,” Ethnology, 35.4 (Fall 1996): 265-284, p. 268.
[23] For an historically informed critical study of Chinese urbanization,see, Jonathan Friedmann, China’s Urban Transition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005)
[24] It is important to note that while the hukou system aggravates the bifurcation, it is not necessarily responsible for it. The exploitation of agriculture for industrial development is a commonly recognized characteristic of primitive accumulation. See the discussion of the Korean case in Chng Kyung-sup, South Korea Under Compressed Modernity: Familial Political Economy in Transition (London: Routledge, 2010), Chapter 6. Chang uses the term “dual dualism” to refer to inequality between urban and rural, as well as “the urban reproduction of rural poverty” as the countryside moves into the city (p.95)
[25] For an illuminating and critical study, see, Dorothy J. Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999). On the other hand, the new category of “peasant-worker” (nonggong)also suggests the possibility of some integration, which presently has taken the path of “the urbanization of the countryside,” by force if necessary, which is quite often. Some Chinese scholars believe that megacities, surrounded by rural areas, offer the possibility of integrating the urban and the rural into complexes that may resolve problems of both. For a discussion of urban-rural becoming “one body” (yiti) in the Chengdu “model,” see, Ni Pengfei, et.al, Zhongguo xinxing chengshihua daolu” chengxiang shuangying: yi Chengdu wei anli (New Urbanization Path of China: Urban and Rural Win-Win: Take Chengdu as a Case (Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2007)
[26] Dorothy Solinger has documented this in depth in Contesting Citizenship in Urban China. For an up-to-date report, see, “Millions of Chinese Rural Migrants Denied Education for Their Children,” The Guardian, Monday, 15 March 2010. A more optimistic assessment is offered in Yu Keping, “The New Migration Movement, Citizenship, and Institutional Change at the Global Age: A Political Understanding of Large-Scale Urban Migration of Rural Workers Since the Reform in China,” unpublished paper (2010). Yu believes that marketization, globalization, and efforts to equality of migrant workers themselves have created forces for democratization that will lead to eventual resolution of this problem. I am grateful to Dr. Yu for his willingness to share this unpublished paper with me. For migrant struggles to overcome their status, see, “Unlike Parents, Young Migrants Won’t Take Their Fate Lying Down,” Cover Story, China Daily, Tuesday, March 23, 2010.
[27] For this analogy, see, Li Zhang, “The Right to the Entrepreneurial City in Reform-Era China,” The China Review, 10.1 (2010): 129-155, p. 132. The internal migrant population in Chinese cities is presently estimated at around 160 million. For an interesting discussion of the internal organization of one migrant community that shaped up as an urban enclave beyond the formal city government, the “Zhejiang Village” on the outskirts of Beijing, see, Li Zhang, “Migration and the Privatization of Space and Power in Late Socialist China,” American Ethnologist, 28.1 (February 2001): 179-2005. Whether or not this kind of organization can achieve permanence against the high-tech visions of the regime is an open question in a society in rapid transformation where governance itself is subject to ongoing experimentation.
[28] Richard York, et.al., “Footprints of the Earth: The Environmental Consequences of Modernity,” American Sociological Review, 68.2 (Aoril 2003): 279-300. For the city as both ecological problem and ecological solution (presently more the former than the latter), see, Mike Davis, “Who Will Build the Ark,” New Left Review, 61 (January/ February 2010): 29-46. Chinese planners meanwhile are working toward the “ecological city.” See, Wu Haifeng, Shengtai chengshi dai jianshe yu quyu bantiao fazhan (Construction of Ecological Metropolis and Coordinated Development of Regions) (Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2009). For an example of problems of governance in Chinese cities, see, Feng Zhen, Qing Shen, Boxiu Jian and Jun Zheng, “Regional Governance, Local Fragmentation, and Administrative Division Adjustment: Spatial Integration in Changzhou,” The China Review, 10.1 (2010): 95-128.
[29] (New York: Vintage Books, 1985). Whether integration of the city and the countryside in the Chinese imagination of megacities recreates a productive relationship of this kind remains to be seen.
[30] Stuart Elden, Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009)
[31] Bert de Muynck, “Moving Cities: Life on the Frontier,” in Frontiers (Sarai Reader #7, ed. by The Sarai Programme (Delhi: Center for the Study of Developing Societies, 2007), pp. 527-536, p.527
[32] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, tr. By Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp.154-159
[33] Sun Wanning, “Media and the Chinese Diaspora: Community, Consumption, and Transnational Imagination,” Journal of Chinese Overseas, 1.1 (May 2005): 65-86
[34] See, Jennifer M. Taw and Bruce Hoffman, “The Urbanization of Insurgency: The Potential Challenge to US Army Operations,” prepared for the US Army (The Rand Corporation, 2000)
[35] Ando Arike, “The Soft-kill solution: New Frontiers in Pain Compliance,” Harper’s Magazine, 320.1918 (March 2010): 38-47
[36] Doreen Massey, World City, op.cit. See also the essays collected in the section, “Urban Frontiers,” in Frontiers, op.cit., pp. 437-536. See, also, J.V. Beaverstock, R.G. Smith and P.J. Taylor, “World-City Network: A New Metageography?”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 90.1 (March 2000): 123-134
[37] Manuel Castells, “The Culture of Cities in the Information Age,” in Ida Susser (ed), The Castells Reader on Cities and Social Theory (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2002): 367-389. For a similar reading that inquires into changing configurations of urban –rural relationships, see, Robert C. Kloosterman and Sako Musterd, “The Polycentric Urban Region: Towards a Research Agenda,” Urban Studies, 38.4 ( (2001): 23-633. The decline of cities and citizenship with urbanization was argued earlier by the anarchist social philosopher Murray Bookchin in his book, The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizensip (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1987)
[38] Craig Calhoun, Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream (New York: Routledge, 2007)
[39] Psasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)
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