1.

After Lieven De Cauter’s testimony of the dystopian conditions at the borders of Fortress Europe in his lecture last week, we are happy to have Saskia Sassen as a speaker tonight.

Saskia Sassen’s lecture will be based on her recent book Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. This book deals with the emergence of new assemblages of bits of territory, authority and rights, which used to be fully encompassed by the nation-state, but which nowadays depart from the institutional, though not the geographic settings of the nation-state.

One of the most daring and path-breaking theses of Sassen’s book is no doubt that globalisation is not so much a process that takes place outside, or at the expense of the older system of the nation-state, but, on the contrary, has a more intricate, parasitic relation with it. According to Sassen, the future, global order constitutes itself by selecting and borrowing from national structures and capabilities, but appropriating them and putting them to use in ways that transgress or transcend the national scope or framework. In this sense, one could say that the new global order is growing and developing in the womb of the older nation-state. Because of this more complex positioning of globalisation processes between the national and the international or global – simultaneously inhabiting national structures and being distinct from them – these processes are often difficult to discern; in Sassen’s work they receive the qualities of a sort of Deleuzean, deterritorialised flow that escapes easy localisation and schematisation. This impression is strengthened by the importance she grants to informal, minor or micro-processes.

Sassen’s thesis thus sits uneasy with existing theories of globalisation. The main existing theory locates globalisation in global institutions or multinational enterprises (which she calls ‘the self-evidently global’), which are said to increasingly erode the powers and rights of nation-states. Against this consensus view, she develops the idea of globalisation as a process of certain national elements and capabilities that denationalise themselves. As such, these – originally nationally developed – capabilities subvert and transgress the nation state from within, rather than from above, i.e. by global institutions or multinational enterprises.

This thesis has massive implications on the level of the analysis of globalisation processes, as well as for the resistance to some of its negative effects. One of the practical implications of Sassen’s thesis, for instance, is the continuing relevance and importance of the political apparatus of the nation-state as a site of protest against trans-national developments.

2.

The implications of Sassen’s work are important for this lecture series, in terms of the notion of the unresolved borders and border issues of Europe, both as problematic entities and as potential sites for a progressive European political project. Sassen’s more complex architecture of the existing and growing global order, with its thesis of a continuing and constitutive link between the nation-state and the global order, suggests a more complicated border geography. This implies that the old territorial space and borders of the nation-states are not simply annulled (for instance, by international organisations like the EU or global companies), nor do they simply remain unchanged. They are, on the contrary, subverted from within by a variety of processes that have their origin within local, urban, regional or national settings, but are explicitly cross-border in scope.

This complicated subversion of the borders results in complex cross-border geographic entities that are neither global nor national. One can think here of global cities, active border zones with complex social ecologies, trans-local activist networks focused on very local issues and the EU itself, as one of the most developed and formalised of such instances, with its multiplication of internal, third spaces between the national and the global. According to Sassen, these spatial assemblages unsettle traditional institutions for membership and citizenship and create interesting potentials for rethinking these categories and for inventing radically different concepts of governance and democracy.

3.

In conclusion, Sassen’s theory of globalisation is very productive for thinking about the nature of, and current developments in the Euregion Meuse-Rhine, since the Euregion Meuse Rhine is perhaps one of the oldest of Sassen’s internal third spaces of Europe.

In the first place, it challenges us to locate the Euregion Meuse-Rhine not so much at the self-evidently Euregional level (for instance, at the level of official Euregional institutions such as the Foundation Euregion Meuse-Rhine), but to conceive it rather in terms of a variety of micro-processes that begin to denationalise what has been constructed as national. We can think here, for instance, of the recent emergence of the project for a United Limburg, uniting Belgian and Dutch Limburg. This project has been more effective in subverting the persistent national reflexes in the Euregion Meuse-Rhine than all attempts by the official Euregional government in its thirty or so years of existence. We can also see the recent operations of the Dutch social housing corporation Servatius in the Belgian city of Liège as a promising development, in which the excellent capabilities of the Dutch with regard to social housing – an excellence closely linked to their strong social democratic national heritage – are put to good use across the national borders.

Secondly, Sassen’s emphasis on the multi-valence of these processes of denationalisation from within the nation-state – i.e. the fact that the destabilisation caused by these processes has both positive and negative potentials, that it can function both as a creative and destructive force – is a valid point in the context of the Euregion Meuse-Rhine. Euregionalisation is often negatively equated with bureaucratisation or ‘Eurocratisation’ and the furthering of the narrow business interests of multinational corporations. There are, however, more positive Euregional developments that operate from the bottom-up, such as the project of a United Limburg and the cross-border operations of the social housing corporation Servatius mentioned above. But also the established practice of Dutch temp agencies to recruit and employ labour forces across the borders can be seen as a creative solution to keep labour costs low in the Euregion Meuse-Rhine. The last example confirms Sassen’s hypothesis that the future trans-national order will also be shaped by the relatively powerless, such as migrant workers.

Finally, as Sassen states, all these denationalising national processes share the central characteristic of being informal, not yet formalised or obscure in nature, which makes them hard to notice, read or decode. Still, despite of this, or precisely because of this, they are important indicators of an on-going major social change in the Euregion Meuse-Rhine, of the coming of a new Euregional Order.

We are therefore very eager to listen to, and learn from Saskia Sassen’s lecture and, afterwards, to discuss the many implications of her theories for the unresolved borders of Europe and the Euregion Meuse-Rhine.