A New Frontier Space
As I was reading not only the post but also some items in Cole's book it struck me that we are seeing a new frontier emerge in the encounter (not clash!!) of the US and the larger muslim world. Let me say that this is not the language Cole uses. This is me working off some of his history of the present.
I want to emphasize the formation of a frontier zone -a no man's land where the rules of engagement are not established, and where those who interact may bring very different notions about rules of engagement. Each historical frontier is specific -whether the "Far West" of the old Americas, or my argument that today's global cities are a post-colonial frontier space. And so is this emergent frontier zone between the US and the Muslim world, a frontier that spans the globe, involving yes, Iraq and Afghanistan and other critical countries in the US "War against Terror", and all kinds of other countries who have participated in one way or another in the fighting of the last several years. But this frontier space also consists of thick localizations in cities and neighborhoods in the US, and in several European countries, and beyond.
Let me underline two markers of such frontier spaces. I think of frontier zones as spaces of imbrication, of mixing, of interdependence. They are not lines where civilizations clash. Secondly, they are spaces where the work of teasing out the rules of engagements/encounters can happen. One of the things I like in Cole's work is the sense that there is work to be done; it is not simply matter of who wins, and if we lose, we are finished.
Juan Cole brings to this an engagement with the multiple histories that have been made over time, and shows us that some of these histories are never or rarely part of today's dominant understandings. I think this is extremely important, but also, very useful precisely because this is a time of transitions - in the US, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, to name just some!
But beyond all of this, I think there is something else that is becoming visible, even though it may have been taking shape for many years. The making of a new political zone -a frontier zone-- through the emergence of a new political actor at a global stage, where before the norm of liberal democracy reigned as the deserving actor for dominating the global stage, particularly after the end of the Cold War
Byline: Saskia Sassen (Columbia University, www.columbia.edu/~sjs2/) blogs on finance for the Huffington Post, and regularly contributes to OpenDemocracy.net.
"One of the things I like in Cole's work is the sense that there is work to be done; it is not simply matter of who wins, and if we lose, we are finished."
Very nice.
March 19, 2009 4:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm pretty sure the countries involved would object to being considered in a "frontier" zone. Isn't this just an updated version of a West-first ideology, to say what "we" can define where the rules apply and where they don't?
I would exclude cases of clearly failed states, such as Afghhanistan, from this comment, but to say that the US can define, say, Pakistani cities, as "frontier" is not in accordance with any international law and is frankly staggering.
March 19, 2009 6:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
This piece is absolutely chilling in its urbane contempt, sophisticated disdain and courteous fear-mongering toward the Muslim world.
Whose frontier are you talking about exactly Professor Sassen? And where is it located?
You mean the cradle of civilization, the seat of ancient Babylon, the homeland of monotheism and the capital of the glorious Abbasid dynasty, is now a frontier? A "no-man's land"?!
Or is the frontier in Persia, the land of Darius and Xerxes, Omar Khayyam, Rumi, chess and a succession of extremely successful empires?
The rules of engagement are not established there? Don't the people who live in those lands have rules and traditions of their own, like anyone else, rules that civilized guests are bound to respect?
How very diplomatic of you to say that this frontier is not where civilizations are clashing, but only a place where they are engaged in "imbrication", "mixing" and an "encounter". How charmingly PC. But what you are describing - a supposed no-man's land with unclear "rules of engagement - is indeed a clash. And your fear is palpable.
Even our own cities are now a frontier, Heavens! When did that happen? Is that just because they contain "thick localizations" of frightening and bearded Muslims? And it was just yesterday that an earlier generation of fear-mongers were telling us that our cities were the fearsome boundary between the White Race and the Dirty, Criminal Negroes. I can't keep up.
What I would like to know is this: How did the boundary between "our" civilization and that "other" civilization that evidently frightens you so much get moved into the middle of other people's countries?
This is just rank Islamophobia with a liberal face.
March 19, 2009 6:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dan, Did someone get up on the wrong side of the bed today? Usually I find your comments very accurate.
"I think of frontier zones as spaces of imbrication, of mixing, of interdependence. They are not lines where civilizations clash."
March 19, 2009 8:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
"I think of frontier zones as spaces of imbrication, of mixing, of interdependence. They are not lines where civilizations clash."
Yes. I quoted that passage myself, eds. But it is dissembling BS, in my opinion. The whole thrust of the piece is that the "encounter" between the US and the Muslim world is taking place in a "no-man's land" along a "frontier" where there are "no established rules of engagement". Nevermind that almost everywhere we find this "encounter" throughout the world, it is taking place in other people's countires. These so-called no-man's lands where the US is encountering Muslims don't look like frontier regions to me. They look to me like already settled lands, inhabited for centuries and millennia by other people, with established and enduring cultures, where the US has inserted itself as an invader. Sassen has rhetorically transformed these lands into a scene for the revival of Turner's frontier thesis. Maybe next she will be telling us that we have a "manifest destiny" to encounter Muslims in all of their benighted no-man's lands across the world.
Sassen says this "frontier space" even exists in "cities and neighborhoods in the US" and in "several European cities." Nevermind that the people inhabiting those "thick localizations" are actually citizens of the US and European countries they inhabit, and might be thoroughly shocked to learn that Islamophobic snobs like Sassen view their neighborhoods as wild, frontier no-man's lands.
The whole piece is dripping with blatant and ugly chauvinism, bigotry and cultural imperialism, barely gussied up with pseudo-intellectual doublespeak.
I was looking forward to Sassen's appearance here, since she comes advertised as a scholar on globalization and internationalism. I consider myself a globalist and internationalist. But Sassen appears to represent a style of globalizing pseudo-internationalism, popular in the 90's and the early part of this decade, which exploits internationalist language in the service of western cultural hegemonism and bigotry.
Internationalism tends to support a diminishment of the importance of national boundaries, and looks to the establishment of more potent institutions of global governance. Good. But Sassen's brand of internationalism seems to be an excuse for having no respect whatsoever for the non-western political communities, cultural formations and states that actually exist, and seems disposed to disdain and erase existing boundaries so the west can ooze across all of them and "encounter" the barbarous others on the new "frontier spaces" and "no-man's lands" that run through countries those people ignorantly thought were already inhabited and civilized.
March 19, 2009 8:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
Could be your view of the subtext is correct, and I'm reading it too shallowly (and naively).
Maybe Sassen will reply to your comments.
March 19, 2009 9:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
I like the way you write and think. It is clear and to the point. If only Sasson had that skill. I saw in her last paragraph a possible idea that we could agree upon, but it's meaning is obscured in the turgid prose.
Namely: But beyond all of this, I think there is something else that is becoming visible, even though it may have been taking shape for many years. The making of a new political zone -a frontier zone-- through the emergence of a new political actor at a global stage, where before the norm of liberal democracy reigned as the deserving actor for dominating the global stage, particularly after the end of the Cold War
The first sentence defines something becoming visible. The second seems to difine what this might be, i.e the making of a new political zone. But then the sentence trails off into a couple of subsidiary clauses that rather than defining what is becoming visible, defines what is being replaced. If she was able to coordinate her syntax with any over-riding thesis, she could have told us what this new political zone consists of. If it consisted of respect for the muslim culture, then we might be in agreement. But, alas, we really can't tell. Perhaps the absense of a period in the final sentence is the clue, namely she was unable to complete the thought.
March 20, 2009 2:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
Try rereading the article. It's defined pretty well in earlier paragraphs.
March 20, 2009 4:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
Absolutely correct, DanK. There is no "new frontier", there is the old, old story of the clash of paradigms and yes, one paradigm always prevails over another.
March 20, 2009 1:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
Who said it was new?
March 20, 2009 6:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
The point is that the great global cities are not "frontiers" and they are not "post colonial" cities. "Frontiers" to what and "post colonial" to what?
There are very clearly rules of engagement in all great cities and if immigrants didn't catch on to them fairly quickly we wouldn't see the assimilation and absorption that happens in a relatively short period of time, very often in one generation. To claim that these cities are lawless, ungoverned places where people need to learn to live all over again everyday is false.
To claim that this frontier extends to ancient civilizations seems false to me and makes me very uneasy. The answer isn't to find new rules, but to adjust ourselves to their rules, just as we expect them to adjust to ours. Cities, like nations, like humans, all have their own ecology of place and if we are to succeed we must be adaptive to that particular ecology. Frontierism smacks of opportunism, of a suspension of rules and adaptive behavior and implies that conquer and change is acceptable - it has a bad connotation for those living in the "frontier" and for those who are determined to further territoriality - that there are no rules, no means of engagement other than what the frontiersmen say they are.
It is a bad theory no matter how it is interpreted. It is disrespectful to those dwelling in these countries and disdainful of the past. It is a bad analogy - our frontier is always someone else's backyard and because their rules may be different it doesn't mean that there are no rules and thus we have a right to establish new rules.
What DanK is saying is perfectly true - it is disdainful of ancient civilizations to call them "frontiers" whether the meaning is intended as benign or not.
March 21, 2009 11:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
Oh my, look here: Barack Obama ventures into the supposed no-man's land along the frontier, and finds to the surprise of many that a whole civilization lives there:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/Nowruz/
March 20, 2009 12:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
That's where your post grabs me, between those quotes. I find your concept of new political zones as the new frontier fascinating. Multiple histories which have not penetrated into the dominant understandings, combined with the making of new political zones as the outposts where these histories emerge, find voice and then have to be contended with is lovely. Really. I love the idea that the multiple histories manifest and then compete with the center's efforts at monolithic direction of policies driven from one direction with one agenda. Instead it becomes a contestation, (a conversation, at the very least then...) which then becomes an accommodation and then a place of understanding which then in turn, as an outpost, becomes an actor in the global political game.
Fab post, Ms. Sassen.
March 20, 2009 11:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
This is a very poorly reasoned argument in support of the claim that global cities are a "new frontier" and "post colonial" and defies the history of the great cities of the world. Great cities such as London, Paris and New York have since their beginnings absorbed and contained great new waves of cultures and are great global cities because for the most part are very successful in assimilating immigrants into their societies. To claim that there are "no rules of engagement" is wrong - there are very set rules of engagement and most immigrants learn very early how the society works, what the rules are and how they can take part in the workings of the cities.
It's a contradiction in terms to claim that "global cities" are "post colonial" - the fact that they are global and have always been global would tell us that these cities have always been the antithesis of colonial or "post colonial" just as their history proves that this is so. Immigration to great cities didn't begin with Muslims and it won't end with Muslims, they are simply one more wave in great migrations to cities that provide the means to wealth production. When we do see clashes in these cities, for the most part the clashes are about the perception that the immigrants have that the cities are not following the rules of engagement - providing opportunity and assistance to all members of that society - in other words, the cities are not following the set rules of engagement.
It is dangerous to set aside the history of cities and pretend that this migration of Muslims to the great cities is a historical precedent generated by post colonialism in the Middle East. It gives rise to the view that Muslims are a separate class, one that must be treated differently with new rules of engagement in assimilation, that somehow they are to be afforded more or less opportunity solely dependent on their religion and cultural memes and norms. Cities are then in the dangerous territory of romantizing or villifying the new wave of immigrants according to the political whim of the party in power.
Great global cities are dynamic - there will always to dissatisfactions, clashes of cultures
and paradigms, religions, resentments and all those things that make these cities global but to think that these cities are "new frontiers" without rules of engagement is a flight of fancy based on a great misunderstanding of migration and immigration. Immigration is the sincerest form of flattery.
March 20, 2009 3:35 PM | Reply | Permalink