www.theglobalsite.ac.uk global times 11 september 2001

Saskia Sassen

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 10,000 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. 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, ssassen@midway.uchicago.edu, is the Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the

University of Chicago and a member of the international advisory board of www.theglobalsite.ac.uk

Her book The Global City has just appeared in a new edition with Princeton University Press.