saskia sassen's "Entrapments rich countries cannot escape" (fwd)

[Saskia Sassen]

here is a piece.
just scroll down...saskia
I don't know if this is of intrest, but i just see that this going to
Norway: my book on immigration just appeard in Swedish--which i understand
people in Norway understand) with a small press called Daidalos. it is
called Guests and Aliens (it is on immgtn and refugee in Western Europe
and how we should understand this, etc. 

Saskia Sassen 
Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology 
The University of Chicago
Social Science Research Building,
Rm 323 1126 east 59th Street Chicago, IL 60637 
Telephone: (773) 702 7279 Fax: (773) 702 4849 
e-mail: ssassen at midway.uchicago.edu

-
	We need to think this horrible event  in terms other than an act
of war as the
military establishment in the US wants us to and so many of the Allies it
sems also.I thought this might be of intrest to some of you: a somewhat
different perspective on the horror of NYC. saskia


Saskia Sassen
Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology
University of Chicago
and
Centennial Visiting Professor 
London School of Economics

ENTRAPMENTS RICH COUNTRIES CANNOT ESCAPE:
GOVERNANCE HOTSPOTS
    
The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon brings home more 
clearly than ever, that we cannot hide behind the walls of our peace and 
prosperity. The evidence has been growing--it is all over the place. But our 
leaders do not want to see it. It will take this horrific event today, with a 
current estimate of 5,000 people dead and large numbers of wounded. The 
horrors of other wars and other deaths far away in the global south simply do 
not register.

Globalization has not only facilitated the global flows of capital, goods, 
information and business people. It has also facilitated a variety of other 
entanglements. Intercontinental Anti Ballistic Shields cannot protect us from 
hijackers of commercial planes on domestic flights flying into commercial or 
military buildings. Powerful states cannot fully escape "bricolage" terrorism 
-- bombs spiced with carpenter nails, elementary nuclear devices, and 
"homemade" biological weapons. The growth of debt, unemployment, decline of 
traditional economic sectors, has fed an exploding illegal trade in people, 
largely directed to the rich countries.  The diseases and pests present in 
many parts of the global south which we in the rich countries could forget 
about, are now increasingly here as well: tubercoliss is back in the US and 
typhoid fever in the UK, the encephalitis producing Nile mosquito has made 
its first appearance in the global north and so have a growing number of 
other pests and diseases, largley through the expansion of global
trade. As governments become poorer they depend more and 
more on the remittances of immigrants in the global north and hence have 
little interest in the management of emigration and illegal trafficking. The 
pressures to be competitive make governments in poor countries cut their 
health, education and social budgets, thereby further delaying development 
and stimulating emigration and trafficking. In brief, the interdependencies 
are many and they are multiplying.

The growing interconnectedness of the world has given new meaning to old 
asymetries as well as creating new ones. The rising debt, poverty, and 
disease, in the global south are begining to reach deep into the rich 
countries. We can no longer turn our backs on all this misery as we so often 
have in the past. If we dislike humanitarian reasons for addressing these 
issues, we can opt for self-interest as a motivation. 

After a decade of believing that markets could take care of more and more 
social domains, we must now accept that markets  cannot take care of 
everything. In an era of privatisation and market rule we are facing the fact 
that governments will have to govern a bit more. But it cannot be a return to 
old forms --countries surrounding themselves with protective walls. It will 
take genuine multilateralism and internationalism, some radical innovations 
and new forms of collaboration with civil society and supranational 
institutions. The violence of hunger, poverty, decimation of once fertile 
lands, the oppression of weaker states by highly militarized ones, 
persecution--all of these feed a complex, slow but relentlessly moving spiral 
that moves into the global north. The global north has the resources and 
power to produce much of the damage and it has the resources to redress some 
of it. 

Part of the challenge is to recognize the interconnectedness of forms of 
violence that we do not always recognize as being connected or for that 
matter, being forms of violence. We are suffering from a translation proble, 
it would seem. The language of poverty and misery is unclear, uncomfortable. 
The languge of the attacks to day is clear. No translation problem there.

Let me address two hotspots as a way of dissecting the nature of the 
challenges and identifying specific governance mechanisms: the debt trap in 
which a growing number of governments are caught, and immigration.  Both of 
these will require innovations in our conceptions of governance. And both 
show that even as the world is more interconnected, we will need multiple 
specialized governance regimes in order to address the issues, rather than 
more overarching institutions.

The debt trap is far more significant than many in the global north 
recognize. The focus is always on the amounts of these debts which are indeed 
a small fraction of the overal global capital market now estimated at about 
83 trillion dollars. There are at least two utilitarian reasons why rich 
countries should worry. Because it is not just about an endebted firm, but 
about a country, it will eventually entrap rich countries indirectly, via the 
explosion in illegal trafficking in people, in drugs, in arms, via the 
re-emergence of diseases we had thought were under control, the further 
devastation of our increasingly fragile eco-system. Secondly, the debt trap 
is entangling more and more countries and now has reached middle income 
countries. There are now about 50 countries recognized as hyper-indebted and 
unable to redress the situation. It is no longer a matter of loan repayment 
but a fundamental new structural condition which will require innovations in 
order to get these countries going.

The actual structure of these debts, their servicing and how they fit into 
debtor countries economies, suggest that most of these countries will not be 
able to pay this debt in full under current conditions. Debt service ratios 
to GNP in many of the HIPC countries exceed sustainable limits. What is often 
overlooked or little known is that many are far more extreme than what were 
considered unmanageable levels in the Latin American debt crisis of the 
1980s. Debt to GNP ratios are especially high in Africa, where they stood at 
123%, compared with 42% in Latin America and 28% in Asia. The IMF asks HIPCs 
to pay 20 to 25% of their export earnings toward debt sevice. In contrast, in 
1953 the Allies cancelled 80% of Germany's war debt and only insisted on 3 to 
5% of export earnings debt service. These are also the terms asked from 
Central Europe after Communism.

A second governance hotspot concerns immigration and illegal trafficking. 
Both will grow partly becasue of the conditions described above. The growth 
of debt, poverty , unemployment, closing of traditional economic sectors, has 
fed an exploding illegal trade in people as well as created whole new 
migrations. As the rich economies become richer they become more desirable 
and as they raise their walls to keep immigrants and refugees out, they feed 
the illegal trade in people. 

Yet even as the rich countries try harder and harder to keep would-be 
immigrants and refugees out, they face a growing demographic deficit and 
rapidly aging populations. According to a major study by the Austrian  at the 
end of the current century,   population size in Western Europe will have 
shrunk by 75 milllion (under current fertility and immigration patterns) and 
almost 50 percent will be over 60 years old --a first in its history. Where 
will they get the new young workers they need to support the growing elderly 
population and to do the unattractive jobs whose numbers are growing, some of 
which will involve home and institutional care for old people? Export of 
older people and of economic activities is one option being considered now. 
But there is a limit to how many old people and low wage jobs you can export. 
It looks like immigration will be part of the solution.

But the way the countries in the global north are proceeding is not preparing 
them to handle this. They are building walls to keep would-be immigrants out, 
thereby feeding illegal trafficking. At a time of growing refugee flows, the 
UN High Commissioner for Refugees faces an even greater shortage of funds 
than usual. This will also feed illegal trafficking of people. And anything 
that involves development of infrastructures for illegal trafficking will 
easily bring about an expansion and diversifying of illegal trafficking of 
all sorts, not just people, but also arms and drugs. 

We will need regionally focused multilateral approaches involving the 
governments of both emigration and immigration countries, as well as a range 
of non-governmental actors, to develop the capacity to manage migration 
flows. This means recognizing that migration flows are part of how an 
interconnected world functions. The challenge that lies ahead will demand 
that all countries involved move beyond current conceptions of immigration 
policy in the receiving countries and that the governments of sending 
countries, notorious for their lack of involvement and indifference, join in 
this effort. 

We may think that the debt and growing poverty in the global south may have 
nothing to do with today's violence in New YOrk and Washington. They do. The 
attackes today are a language of last resort: the oppressed and persecuted 
have used many languages to reach us. We seem unable to translate the meaning 
of what they say. A few then take it into their hand to speak a language that 
needs no translation. That was the language used today.

Saskia Sassen is the Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the
University of Chicago. Her book The Global City has just appeared in a new 
edition with Princeton University Press.