Sassen engages in an in-depth analysis of corporate power on the institution of citizenship.56 After reviewing the particular “combination of conditions that had to crystallize for citizenship as we know it to emerge,” she deploys the notion of economic citizenship as a construct to destabilize the “linearity” of history. As she poignantly observes: “Economic globalization has transformed the sovereignty and territoriality of the nation state.” But her take has a “twist”: economic globalization has eroded the environment in which the idea of citizenship evolved, particularly “social rights.” Consequently, Sassen urges that there is a need to develop the idea of economic citizenship to include the “rights to economic well-being and to economic survival,”57 which includes the right to work for a living. Sassen concludes that there “exists a reality today that represents an aggregation of economic rights that one could describe as a form of economic citizenship in that it empowers and can demand that governments be held accountable in economic matters.”58 The holders of such economic citizenship, however, are not individuals but “global economic ‘actors.’” Thus, such economic trappings of citizenship need to be extended to individuals (see section 8.9 on corporate abuse of labor rights).
The basis for the economic citizenship demanded by Sassen is the impact of the increasingly global capital market on economic policy and hence governmental policy. The global financial markets have many new rights and huge power, giving them much economic influence over government policy and other, even noneconomic, initiatives.59 The global economic reality translates to “a partial privatization of key components of monetary and fiscal policies” that inevitably results in the undermining of the voice of the individual citizen in the social, economic, and political system to which he or she belongs. Thus, the economic interests of the larger corporate actors trump the popular vote; the basis of public decision-making is the corporate interest rather than the desires of individual citizens as expressed at the ballot box. (See, however, section 13.4(A), examining the idea of voting.)
In sum, the new corporate actors that have emerged, as a result of existing globalization and the world economic systems, have put pressure on, if not effectively changed, the traditional concept of citizenship. Powerful private economic actors have supplanted the individual vote by gaining access to and having the ability to influence the government’s decision-making. Governments thus implement policies favorable to corporate interests; hence, corporate enjoyment of a somewhat innovative citizenship status—Sassen’s “twist” on the traditional notion of economic citizenship, which concerns individuals’ economic rights.60
Globalization has centralized market economies and marginalized, indeed rendered invisible, human economies. In a peculiar turn, hegemonic globalization forces, because of their emphasis on financial markets and their marginalization of human lives, currently equate the existence of a market economy with democracy (see section 13.4(A)), a notion that effectively excises pluralistic participation from democracy.
5.6 Final Thoughts
Bringing together the discourses on trade and human rights can offer a balance to this morphing of the citizenship idea. While trade depends on the economic actors, it also largely depends on human capabilities to realize the trade goals of economic well-being for all. Reinforcing individual citizenship in its social and economic sense—access to a job that enables human thriving; access to food, health, shelter—would enhance, not detract from global actors’ economic goals. A human rights lens on globalization can recapture personhood from the edges or perimeters to the center of a globalization project. It can reconstruct the concept of citizenship as one that includes the relocalizations, multiplications, and recreations of cultures, people, communities, and languages61—events that occur because of the ubiquity of global actors and the opportunities created across increasingly porous borders.
As we already are seeing in the travel of goods and peoples across myriad borderlands, globalization has blurred the characteristics of citizenship. We see much exportation and importation of language, culture, dress, food, and religion. It explains the travel of music, musicians, food, and dress from Peru to Capitol Square in Madison, Wisconsin, every Sunday during the Farmers’ Market. On the other hand, one travels to Peru and sees Levis and Burger King.
A human rights perspective on globalization and citizenship will return value to human economies; it will relocate people from the margins to the center.62 This new geography, centrally mapping human rights, reconstitutes sovereignty, redefines legitimacy of states under the rule of law and the concept of territoriality, and revaluates humanity irrespective of borders or boundaries.
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