The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, by Saskia Sassen (Princeton University Press, 1991)

The new century seems to be challenged by at least four realities: the increasing development of cities, especially mega-cities; the international migration of peoples that is resulting in a more culturally diverse world; the internationalization and globalization of finance capital into a world economic system dominated by transnational corporations; and growing resource scarcity and environmental stress. Key to the new order of things is globalization.

Note: This is an expanded version of the review that was published in the print version of The Witness

Professor Saskia Sassen, of the University of Chicago, wrote the definitive book on the nature of globalization, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton University Press, 1991), a decade ago. A revised edition is widely anticipated. Many thought that globalization would lead to radical decentralization, and would therefore work against urbanization. Sassen showed this to be absolutely not the case. The new globalization process has not only contributed to growth of cities, but has required such. While manufacturing and production has been dispersed to third world nations, the control of information and the administration of finance has found its ways to key cities. This constitutes the reality of the Global City.

Cities are places where "producer services" can be found. Sassen connects globalization to the information society and to the rise of the service economy. Such services include advertising, accounting, business law, insurance, banking, real estate. She argues that global cities are interconnected units in a world economic system and "producer services" provide the infrastructure necessary.

Sassen also makes a distinction between first-tier and second-tire global cities. The former specialize in producer services necessary for the smooth operation of the transnational corporations disproportionately headquartered there. In more peripheral cities or regions dependent on the global city, there is a greater concentration of consumer services. Consequently, the new economy tends to devalue industrial and manufacturing workers who are pushed to the periphery of the system. And a radical distinction in wages emerges in the service sector. On the one hand, wages for professionals and specialists are higher, even luxurious; whereas the wages of routinzed service workers, like clerical workers, are severely depressed. So not only has the new economic system contributed to economic concentration in global cities, but it has also produced increased inequality between the professionals who manage the system and those who serve it.

Others writing about globalization have focused on how the new system of cities in a global economy has been put together by and for "footloose" transnational corporations whose power and wealth are quickly outstripping the power and wealth of nation states. This view is argued by Richard J. Barnett and John Cavanaugh, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (Simon and Schuster, 1994); David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World (Kumerian Press, 1995); and Richard C. Longworth, Global Squeeze: The Coming Crisis for First World Nations (Contemporary Books, 1998). To illustrate, Longworth notes that of the 100 top world economies, 51 of them in 1995 were multinational corporations. To put it more distinctly, "Wal-Mart is bigger than Poland."

For writers such as William Greider, author of One World Ready or Not (Simon and Schuster, 1997), globalization reflects the "manic logic of global capitalism." That is, global capitalism is a process that, left unchecked, necessarily leads to the concentration of wealth, competition between firms, and the age-old contest between capital and labor. It is an inevitable process that noone is able to stop, even if they wanted to. For Benjamin Barber, author of Jihad vs. McWorld (Random House, 1995), globalization is essentially a culture war between forces of centralization and forces of factionalism. "Jihad forges communities of blood rooted in exclusion and hatred. ... McWorld forges global markets rooted in consumption and profit." The winners thus far are U.S-based corporations, many of which control the entertainment industry.

While there are some authors, like Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (Farrar, Strous and Giroux, 1999), who believe that globalization is good and desirable, others are strong critics. Friedman, a reporter for The New York Times, cites the ever-present cell phone usage in Saudi Arabia and the "democratic" impact of the Internet as examples. Others are not so sure. For Saskia Sassen or Marvin Cetron and Owen Davies, authors of Crystal Globe: The Haves and the Have Nots of the New World Order (St. Martin's, 1991), globalization is resulting in increased wage inequality and will result in more violence and ecological depletion.

For many, globalization is also contributing to increased instability in the third world: Witness the "Asian flu" of a few years ago. Globalization threatens the authority and place of nation states, but also democracy and civil society as well. In a popular book by Kevin Danaher called Corporations are Gonna Get Your Mama: Globalization and the Downsizing of the American Dream (Common Courage Press, 1996), it is argued that corporate domination leads not only to the exploitation of peoples in the developing world, but also results in the oppression for workers in the developed world. For Kevin R. Cox, editor of Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local (The Guilford Press, 1997), and the works of David C. Korten, including his Globalizing Civil Society: Reclaiming Our Right to Power (Seven Stories Press, 1998); globalization requires popular mobilization and a civil response at the local level. Korten maps out a vision for a new society that respects the living world, not just the money world. He argues that economic sustainability and economic democracy are necessary ends that are in conflict with globalization.

Cox contends that globalization, in the final analysis, cannot occur without the consent of the local, and hence he argues for the resurgence of the power of the local over global markets. For Cox and others, globalization is not inevitable, for there remain other possible social arrangements. No political economy can be so transcendent that it can ignore the concrete realities that consumers face or control. The cure to unregulated capital is increased democracy and the necessary regulatory governmental checks on global capital hegemonies. As Greider argues in One World Ready or Not, someone needs to buy the stuff that corporations are trying to sell. That for him is an argument for the increasing importance of unions and the necessity of the escalation of wages, not its suppression.

The church's response to globalization must not be just to seize the opportunity for evangelization while ignoring the impact of globalization as a political economy. On an international level, churches can support efforts to regulate the global economy so that the greater good of economic sustainability might be more possible. On a local level, we can control more of what we produce and consume. We don't have to "buy" what is being marketed to us. We do not have to see globalization as an inevitable force, nor do we have to see ourselves as more powerless than we are in fact. As Michael Lerner of Tikkun magazine notes, there is nothing more corrupting or disempowering than "surplus powerlessness," and nothing more enhancing than a greater democracy and the solidarity that builds communities of resistance.

Clinton Stockwell is executive director of the Chicago Metropolitan Center, an urban internship program for nine private liberal colleges, and an adjunct faculty member of the Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education, where he teaches courses on urban policy and on the church and globalization.