Has the Eurozone crisis undermined Europe’s place in the world? In an interview with EUROPP’s editors Stuart A Brown and Chris Gilson, Saskia Sassen discusses the role of finance in the crisis, the threat posed by transnational systems of surveillance, and the potential for public disorder to give a political voice to the powerless

Brown, Stuart A.

Gilson, Christopher

Sassen, Saskia

LSE Research Online

Credit: Ash Violette (CC BY 2.0)07/05/2013Five minutes with Saskia Sassen: “The issue right now isnot the lack of discipline in Eurozone economies; it’s thefinancialisation of everything”blogs.lse.ac.uk /europpblog/2013/05/07/saskia-sassen-interview-europe-eurozone-crisis-surveillance-london-riots-global-cities/Has the Eurozone crisis undermined Europe’s place in the world? In an interview with EUROPP’s editorsStuart A Brown and Chris Gilson, Saskia Sassen discusses the role of finance in the crisis, thethreat posed by transnational systems of surveillance, and the potential for public disorder to give apolitical voice to the powerless.In your view, what is the root cause of the Eurozone crisis?I have great respect and great admiration for the project that is European integration. That respectcomes not from the notion that we should all get together and create some sort of ‘super-state’, butfrom the foundational elements that drove the project: the belief in law and the belief in non-military solutions. Butthere is one big qualifier to that respect, which is that when the push to accelerate the adoption of the euro wastaking place it was driven by corporations. The big winners from the euro were the big corporations who couldbecome bigger and who could enter the global economic space more effectively. The ones that suffered were thesmaller firms connected to subnational and regional markets.Now, I’m not against having an integrated currency – certainlyfor me, as someone who travels all over Europe, it’s fantastic– but the problem was the rush. I remember the debates thatthere was supposedly no way we could do it. Well, we got itdone. Why? Because enormously powerful corporateinterests were behind it and when they want to get somethingdone, by God they get it done. The fact that most of thesenational economies are constituted by small enterprises,regional markets, and localised production – that was simplyoverlooked. And now I think we’re paying the price for that.There are, of course, other issues that come into the picture.One is that by integrating on the continental scale, and byhaving a single currency, it became much more worthwhile forfinance – which is very different from banking – to do its thing.If we still had separate national currencies then central bankssitting on top of the situation tightly would have prevented thescale-up that makes it worthwhile for global finance. When youhave that level of integration, finance moves in and finance‘financialises’.Finance is not about money: if you take outstandingderivatives, which are the basic measure of the value offinance, then it’s several times larger than global GDP.Finance is extraordinarily disruptive and part of the issue rightnow is not the lack of discipline in Eurozone economies. It’snot even the lack of responsibility displayed by national1/5governments. It’s the financialisation of everything. The situation in Greece, where we suddenly had financialmarkets betting against the country is, to me, criminal conduct.Given the economic problems in the Eurozone, is the European Union’s relevance for the rest of the worlddiminishing?I’ve always thought that if the European Union had been wise it would have incorporated Turkey. Turkey no longerwants to join – it’s arguably a far more dynamic economy than the European Union at this point – but it would havebeen wise to bring them into the project. It would have brought in a Muslim population which is incrediblyenlightened. Turkish academics, for instance, are in my opinion among the best. I think that was a missedopportunity to create a bridge into the part of the Muslim world that is closest to Europe.However I still believe that European integration matters. It matters for the world as one powerful zone that standsfor solving problems with negotiation and diplomacy. Europeans know about diplomacy; the only diplomacy theUnited States recognises is having the biggest guns. So losing the European Union would be a real pity for worldgeopolitics, much more so than from an economic perspective.In the last decade European cities, such as Paris and London, have experienced rioting. How should weunderstand these acts of public disorder?When I see this happen my first move is to step out of the current language about ‘riots’, or the descriptions of theOccupy movement, which is mostly seen as slightly useless or even destructive because it doesn’t have a party or aprogramme attached to it. I think we need to step back from these types of descriptions in order to understandwhether something is happening that actually matters. The key question for me, as an academic and a theorist, is:do the powerless make history? And if the answer is yes, then do they make history without becoming empowered?If you look at how we’ve usually handled the question of powerlessness, we’ve typically viewed it as if we arepowerless by default, but if something positive happens then we become empowered. I argue that in between thesetwo conditions there are a vast number of invisible histories involving people who were powerless, but neverthelessmade a history which has remained invisible because they did not become empowered. Becoming empoweredmakes it visible. But I find that under certain conditions powerlessness can become complex and in that complexitylies the possibility of making history, or achieving political aims in a different way, even if one does not becomeempowered. These moments may be points in a trajectory that is multi-generational. Think of the civil rightsmovement in the US, which took a century or more, or women’s struggle for the vote. I do not want to lose thesemoments that are perhaps a stepping stone towards something that makes a difference.So when I look at these riots and uprisings, I ask whether this is the politics of those without power. They know thatif they try and engage with parliaments directly to get a law changed they won’t get anywhere, so these movementsare other ways in which the powerless can acquire a political voice. In Paris, in the Banlieues, it’s been recognisedfor a while that the only language in which you can become visible to the media and the rest of society is if you goburn a few cars. So that’s what happens. It’s a kind of urban violence which acts as a form of communication.However I think the riots in London were a bit different from the Occupy movements. The riots in London were alsoconnected to middle class disappointment with the failure of the liberal state, as are the Occupy movements. Toelaborate on this, the liberal state’s social contract has always been with the middle class and what we’ve seen isthat the social contract with this particular generation has been broken by the neo-liberal politics of privatisation,spending cuts and austerity.So I see in the riots in London an inarticulate version that does not function as a form of communication as it does inthe Occupy movements, but rather uses its body: it’s the somatising of politics. They want material objects, theywant to become consumers, their bodies become the instrument and they enter shops to take what they want/need.This is really more like looting than a political movement, but that is one extreme end of the scale and at the other2/5Tottenham during the London riots (Credit: Nico Hogg, CC BY 2.0)end you have occupying with its far more substantive social agenda. That agenda is about the traditional middleclass being confronted with a situation in which thestate is failing them: they played by the rules of thegame, they took education seriously, they perhapsgained a university degree, and yet there are no jobs.Now I don’t deny that the London riots in particular werean ambiguous situation – they did many things whichwere reprehensible – but there is that other dimensionwhere they are actually part of this history in themaking. And my main point here is that even thoughthey are not empowered, they can still make history.You’ve developed the concept of ‘global cities’:places that act as bridges between vast emergingglobal markets and national economies. Howshould we view global cities in Europe and theirlinks with the rest of the world?The global city is a kind of structural hole in the tissue of national economies, national societies, and nationalterritories. Each global city is highly individual and highly specialised, but that’s largely gone under the radar ofcommentators because when you look at the consumer side of these economies, which is more easy to understandand see, there is an enormous amount of standardisation. Further, when you look at the visual order of therenovated city centers you find that state of the art financial centres, state of the art airports, and luxuriousresidential and commercial districts all have a high degree of standardisation… yes, on the luxury vector! No matterhow imaginative the architects are, no matter the details they incorporate into the buildings to make them lookdifferent, you can smell that standardised, state of the art environment.That has then led to the assumption that the economies of these cities are also becoming more homogeneous.However in my research I find that what globalisation has pushed is an increased specialisation of differentcapacities across cities. Take Europe: London is a very different type of financial centre from Paris and Frankfurt,and further, from New York and Shanghai, and so on. And yet all of these cities are radically different. If you look atthe United States, there are two major global financial centres, Chicago and New York, and they are radicallydifferent – even though the state of the art environments which have been built in both cities have the sametechnical elements. This holds for all top-level financial centres. China has four major financial centres that are allradically different. And this involves not only finance but also the specialised services – everything that involves thefirm-to firm economy at the top corporate level. Specialised lawyering and creative accounting also tends tospecialise around diverse sectors – it can handle heavy manufacturing and global logistics in Chicago and inShanghai, in New York and Beijing. So when it comes to the global city function – separate from the larger socialand cultural milieu of a city – you can’t really generalise at the continental level and draw a distinction betweenEuropean global cities and those in the United States or Asia. Each of these cities has a specialised, unique functionthat they provide to global markets which no other city can provide.Now the global function of these cities is only one part of the city. London is many cities, and within it exists thatglobal function: a completely specialised function that operates in multiple global circuits, where most of theconsumer markets – the art world, the insurance market and so on – don’t participate. So if we’re talking about citiesoverall, then of course there are similarities, but we can’t generalise about these cities in terms of what they meanfor the global economy. What matters to the global economy is the intermediate sector: not the consumer end of theeconomy, but the ‘firm to firm’ economy where businesses do business with each other. It is in this world of ‘firm tofirm’ where you pick up on the extraordinary importance that the specialised differences of these cities have forglobal markets, global firms, and governments – who also use those capabilities.3/5Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt (Credit: Gizmo23, CC BY 2.0)You’ve recently written on the issue of surveillance. Do you think that the rights of citizens, both inside andoutside of Europe, are potentially threatened bysecurity measures aimed at dealing with terrorism?Surveillance is one of the issues I’ve been working onrecently, but this is not small-scale surveillance such asCCTV cameras or traffic cameras – which, to me, isrelatively fine if it helps prevent crime or killing cyclists. Iam concerned about something very different: atransnational system of surveillance which spans severalcountries.The United States is the most extreme of these countriesand is setting the norm for this system. Over the last tenyears, as part of the war on terror, the United States hasdeveloped a surveillance system that consists of over10,000 massive buildings that store a vast technicalapparatus for surveillance and gathering data about peopleand organisations. It employs almost a million people withtop level secret clearance, including at least 260,000private firms. These firms hire foreign talent, which is onepart of this that I find particularly interesting because itcompletely transnationalises and denationalises this worldof top secret clearance.Now what is the logic behind this? The logic is that for oursecurity – and by this we really mean to prevent terroristattacks – every citizen has to be considered, by the logic ofthat system, a suspect. And all of this surveillance exists simply to get at the handful of individuals within a givenyear who could actually be terrorists. This raises two issues. First, in this kind of system, who are we the citizens?Are we the new colonials? Do we have to be monitored and taught how to be civilised? Second, we have this hugesurveillance superstructure to get at a few individuals who are real threats, and then we still have what happened inBoston. They now have a massive amount of data that they’ve collected on everybody; yet at the same time they’renot doing intelligence in the old fashioned way. So the key issue is who really benefits from this? The answer is thecorporations who are involved in making and upgrading this technological apparatus.So the surveillance issue is not this obsession that exists in the UK about small-scale surveillance and the retentionof personal details – we are already so mapped by online technology like Facebook, Twitter and Google that thishardly matters. Rather as one person put it, it’s that we are a ‘turn key’ state: we haven’t yet turned the key, but allthe elements are in place.Please read our comments policy before commenting .Note:  This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy, norof the London School of Economics.Shortened URL for this post: http://bit.ly/121kx7V _________________________________About the author4/5Saskia Sassen – Columbia UniversitySaskia Sassen is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. She also was aCentennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, and has just returned as aResearch Fellow in Destin. Her publications include Cities in a World Economy (4th ed, Sage 2011),Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages  (Princeton University Press2008), A Sociology of Globalization  (W.W.Norton 2007), and The Global City (2001, 2nd ed).5/5

Five minutes with Saskia Sassen: “The issue right now is not the lack of discipline in Eurozone economies; it’s the financialisation of everything”

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