Notions of the National and International

The terms “national,” “international” and “global” are important points of reference in all three papers. However, they open up questions about how to deal with these constructs and how to approach the various processes by which science and technology, here understood as central to questions of global politics, are constantly transcending borders, oscillating between the global and the local, between national institutions and regulations, and between territories and (epistemic) cultures. As Jasanoff and Martello wrote in 2004,

“The world today is in the grip of globalization. Networks of economy, technology, politics, and ecology have encircled the Earth, weakening the historical claims of nation-states, sovereignty, and cultural identity” (2004: 1).

So how to analyze processes of ^S&T policy-making that take place on the national level but at the same time are a response to globalized ^S&T systems? How to understand the inherently transnational character of science while at the same time accounting for local particularities, be they the specific techno-political histories of nation states or regions or

the ways science and technology are used as an instrument of soft power, thereby becoming embedded into the context of foreign policy and transferred to different cultures and political systems? And how do global politics affect national epistemic cultures of knowledge production, since the institutions of global governance are neither domestic nor international?

One way of approaching these questions has been suggested in the edited volume “Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance” by Jasanoff and Martello in 2004. Focusing on different aspects of environmental politics, the authors argue that in a globalized world where distances between places are decreasing and where problems caused by climate change become everyone’s problem through the interconnectedness of ecologies, economies, knowledge production processes, technology and politics, we need to find ways to bring the “local back in.” One of their main arguments here is that a stronger acknowledgement of situated knowledges (Haraway 1988) in global environmental governance is necessary in order to balance the local and the global within policy frameworks and (expert) institutions of global governance (cf. Jasanoff and Martello 2004). While their contribution helps us to understand the interplay of the local and the global with regard to the diverse agencies, institutions, knowledge practices and decision-making processes that come to matter in the field of global environmental governance, there may also be other ways to approach the multiplication of different levels of analysis caused by processes of globalization. Here, I draw on the work of Saskia Sassen, who suggests the notion of “global assemblages of bits of territory, authority, and rights” as a way to exit the national institutional frame (2008: 61).

The focus on territory, authority, and rights aims to encompass the diversity of institutions, actors and legal frameworks that constitute these assemblages. Sassen outlines four types of assemblages that contribute to changing territorialities. First, there is the changing geography of legal frameworks for rights and guarantees (which could probably be applied to patents and the current TTIP negotiations as well) in the course of globalization processes. While these were originally developed during the formational processes of nation states, they are now increasingly being shaped by international or transnational requirements and agreements – sometimes pushing nation states to go beyond their own financial or political interests (cf. Sassen 2008: 64). However, the subordination of national law to transnational agreements has brought about institutions with as transnational jurisdictions, such as the International Criminal Court and the European Court of Human Rights. Second, there are the ways that nation states construct

and shape standardized global spaces to facilitate economic globalization, e.g. through intellectual property rights and standardized accounting principles (Sassen 2008: 65).

The third assemblage is closely related to the previous one, namely the formation of global financial centers that “are part of global financial markets as constituting a distinct kind of territoriality, simultaneously pulled in by the larger electronic networks and functioning as localized micro-infrastructures for those networks” (Sassen 2008: 65).⁶ Here, we can think of the City of London as a primary case in point, that is, as a global financial center, physically located within the national territory of the United Kingdom but at the same time largely denationalized in its functions, thus resembling a new form of “multi-sited territoriality” (Sassen 2008: 66). The last assemblage is constituted through the configuration of a global civil society. What Sassen sees as the localized involvements of actors is quite similar to the local forms and situatedness of knowledges outlined by Jasanoff and Martello as being central to the formation of a global civil society, regardless of their universal knowledge and/or political claims. What is more, all three authors see that global communication networks have facilitated forms of participation even for people in remote areas, be it by taking part in international negotiations or in constituting different and locally embedded areas of expertise that are (potentially) recognized on a global scale.

Understanding the interconnectedness of fields previously attached to the realm of the nation-state as a global assemblage allows one not only to grasp the multi-sitedness of institutions, actors, knowledges and politics but also to conceptualize them as cutting across a dualistic understanding of the national and the global. Although assemblages are still embedded in national institutions and territories, we can conceive of them as no longer being a part of what was historically constructed as the national. For this thesis, this opens up the opportunity to focus on the level of national policy-making and global politics without stepping into the trap of deciding whether things are national or international, as this is no longer a question of neither-nor.

6 See also Knorr-Cetina´s work on transnational epistemic communities and global financial markets (2007).