If >the state= were secure, we would not be so puzzled. The state is supposed to make society orderly and to set bounds between one society and the next. It is also supposed to organize governance. The state is a mark of modernity. It rationalizes human relations by forming people into citizens of separate, sovereign countries. However, the order produced by the state system only seems secure if sovereign identities fill the whole world and give it a unique history. There must be no surplus, no messiness that disrupts the system. Sovereignty-thinking suggests that people must be distinct and self-governing, both individually and collectively. If instead social and individual identities bleed into one another, and difference is expressed as an endless repetition of the same, then we always have only a simulacrum of autonomy or sovereignty. If, moreover, there are no centres from which to govern ourselves individually or socially, then we lack any order that makes sense in sovereignty terms. This is both puzzling and frightening. It is significant that many of our contemporary fears are expressed in the ideology of globalization, which suggests that the state (and with it distinct societies, cultures, and economies) is about to wither away. The idea of statelessness, which two decades ago was dismissed as a Marxist fantasy, is now presented as a logical consequence of the global triumph of capitalism. Only the most sanguine look forward to such statelessness, because all of us have absorbed the lessons of Hobbes= Leviathan. Without the state, we fear, the life of man will indeed be >solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short= (Hobbes [1651] 1962, 100).

Sensitive thinkers realize that the crisis of the state is really a crisis of modernity. The whole edifice of modern identities is in question, from >the individual= on up and from >the state= on down. This edifice makes the world intelligible, and enables us to communicate despite differences in language and culture. We can create values in such a world, and learn to act accordingly. However, that activity is always premised on an >ontology of sovereignty=. The latter is an understanding of what must exist, for the world to be intelligible. According to the ontology of sovereignty, there must be autonomous decision-makers (us) who can create order by surrendering their sovereignty to an over-arching authority. In other words, if there are people, there must be autonomous individuals; if there is society, there must be sovereign authority; if there is a transcendent order, there must be a law of nature. Since the seventeenth century, our political ontology -- the ontology of modernity itself -- has been an ontology of sovereignty. This ontology depends on early modern assumptions about space, time, and identity, assumptions that have been challenged (if not refuted) by subsequent philosophical and scientific investigations, but that nonetheless have been fixed as common sense (Walker 1993). It is not just the most conventional forms of thinking that have been fixed in this way. Most of what passes now for radical or progressive politics -- the politics of resistance, the politics of difference, the politics of social transformation -- is premised upon an ontology of sovereignty. This is testimony to the political power of the latter. To coin a phrase, the ontology of sovereignty is sovereign. This is not a natural fact. As Hobbes certainly recognized, sovereignty is always an artificial political construct.

What follows is an effort to raise consciousness about the ontology of sovereignty and to suggest the importance of engaging with this ontology politically. I am a child of my time, and I cannot simply abandon the sovereignty-thinking that enables me to make sense of the world and to communicate with other people. However, I am going to try to lead the reader toward another way of thinking about space, time, and identity, a way that has helped me to unsettle my prior ontological assumptions. I invoke two contemporary images: one from physics (hyperspace) and one from social science (the global city). I try to combine these images and relate them to a conception of social movement that detaches the latter from its state-centric assumptions. I conceive of the global city as an ensemble of social movements in hyperspace, and attempt to locate the politics of the global city within and between those movements (Magnusson 1996). In so doing, I am trying to offer a political ontology that breaks free from sovereignty-thinking, or at least that problematizes the assumptions on which such thinking depends. Whether I am successful in this regard is less important than the fact that I am putting ontological questions at the centre of what I take to be the crucial political debate. As I argue in the first section, these questions have been raised again and again in twentieth century art and literature, but have nonetheless been marginalized in political discussion. This is testimony to the ongoing power of the ontology of sovereignty. In the second section, I attempt to deal with the contemporary ideology of globalization, which appears to open up the questions I raise here, but then re-phrases them just as quickly in terms of a problematic of sovereignty. Putting >world cities= or >the global economy= in place of the state in our thinking allows us to mark a difference that repeats the logic of sovereignty step by step. In the final section, I suggest a different political ontology, and so point toward a different politics. Whether or not my suggestions are persuasive, I will succeed in my purpose if I convince the reader that our puzzles and fears are indeed ontological.

The modern citizen is an effect of the relation between the sovereign state and the sovereign individual, and it is this citizen who enters into other social relations, like the ones that produce >markets= and >cultures=. The domain of citizenship proper is the domain of the state, and hence of liberal democracy. This is a domain in which the transcendent ideal is always already defined by the conditions of citizenship. However, there are other ideals -- of salvation or personal enrichment, for instance -- that are enabled by civil society, which is the state=s other. These ideals are supposed to be consistent with good citizenship. The disciplines of state and society are apparently the ones that flow logically from the needs of the autonomous Kantian self, the self that supposedly establishes its own morality freely and comes to knowledge of things independently. The latter is the self that sets our liberal hearts aflutter, and provides the rationale for the disciplines that run from top to bottom and from side to side within the order of sovereignty. But, what is this self that we seek to free, if it is not a miniaturized version of the Hobbesian sovereign?

It is not surprising that the ideal of sovereignty appeals to those who have heretofore been denied sovereign identities. Thus, we have powerful claims to sovereignty from women and gays, Africans and Asians, indigenous peoples and others who have been oppressed or marginalized. The temptation for people of enlarged sympathies is to defer uncritically to these claims, and thus to re-write Mill=s classic, On Liberty ([1859] 1972), in terms of a more adequate understanding of cultural differences and privileged identities. Unfortunately, even the revised versions of On Liberty are likely to repeat the ontology of sovereignty. As Foucault put it, AWe need to cut off the king=s head: in political theory it has still to be done.@ (Rabinow 1984, 63) He might have added that our constant resort to a king-like conception of the self is a sign that the political ontology of sovereignty is prior to and constitutive of our understandings of individual and social difference. If we do not put those understandings to the test by questioning their ontological foundations, we repeat the logic of kingship or sovereignty in a particularly unhelpful way. Radical rhetoric comes to conceal conventional politics.

For a long time, philosophical attention has been directed toward the ontological assumptions of selfhood. Indeed, the assertion of the autonomous self (most usually associated with Descartes, but long foreshadowed in the Western tradition) is implicated in a discourse that poses selfhood as a problem (Taylor 1989). Twentieth century speculations, following on from Nietzsche and Freud, have generated many ideas about the split self, the fractured self, the repressed self, the free self, the transcendental self, and so on. One of the positions enabled by this discourse is a radical denial of selfhood, a denial that takes the form of assertions about the impossibility of integrating human experiences into a single narrative. The narrative in question is both personal and political. Many recent analysts have said that we cannot tell a single story about an individual person, or about humanity in general (Lyotard 1984). In fact, a denial of the possibility of narrative or >representation= is implicit in much of the great art, music, and literature of the twentieth century. The philosophical counterpart of this is to be found in post-Existentialist and post-Wittgensteinian thought. Post-structuralism expresses similar themes from within the historical and social sciences. One would think that such work would generate a different politics, a politics that broke free from the strictures of sovereignty-thinking. However, the politics that we have seen under these signs is usually one of childish self-assertion, motivated by nostalgia for the sovereign self. However often the subject is de-centred, it returns as a spectre: the ghost of freedom lost, or selfhood denied, to be revenged by an act of radical self-assertion. Thus, we have a politics of Nietzchean agonism that covers for ontological loss without ever addressing the problem of sovereignty.

But, perhaps there is something wrong with identifying sovereignty with the order of the state? Perhaps we do live in a rational order of our own making, one that reflects our needs and desires. Is this not what Smith, Bentham, and Marx suggested, in their own very different ways? Isn=t capitalism the order in which we live? Isn=t the market the mechanism for rationalization? Isn=t it also the mechanism for translating our desires into social outcomes? That certainly has been the claim of free-market liberals, up to the present day. Although Marx, for one, thought that this claim was ideological, he also thought that it expressed a truth. To the extent that there is order and rationality in a capitalist world, that order and rationality flow from the market. States do not create the capitalist order; they emerge within it, and help to secure the order of which they are part. Vital as states are, they are not perfect embodiments of capitalist rationality, any more than are joint-stock companies, banks, or brokerage houses. The organization of the state or state-system, like the organization of capitalist business, is constantly evolving, in accordance with the requirements of the mode of production. Thus, the Keynesian welfare state was only temporary. New forms of state have emerged since the 1970s, and they too will be temporary. We may be pleased or disappointed as these forms wither away, but we can be assured that other forms will emerge, more suited to the current phase of capitalist development -- unless, of course, the long-promised socialist revolution occurs. The idea that the state is essentially capitalist can be articulated in either critical or celebratory terms. The implication still is that the state is to be understood as an effect of social order, rather than as its main source.

This oscillation in our thinking reflects the gap between the order of the state and the order of society. The order of the state is supposed to be juridical, and that juridical order is supposed to put every other entity in its place. The state=s monopoly of legitimate violence is supposed to express and secure its supremacy. On the other hand, the state=s capacity to create a juridical order is limited, in the first place by the presence of other states, and secondly by the presence of its own subjects. Those subjects generate other orders -- economic, social, cultural -- that are resistant both to the force of law and to the force of arms. These other orders have their own geographies or territories that are not amenable to direct control by the state. Thus, the state is always in an impossible position, in which it must legitimize what it cannot control for fear of forfeiting what control it has. Although no politician imagines that the state is actually sovereign, every politician -- and indeed every citizen -- has an interest in pretending that it is. How else can one make sense of the idea that one lives in a democracy, that the order of things is an expression of the will of the people, and that politics as it is now constituted really matters?

The trouble is that none but a few fanatics really believe that the state or the market provides for popular sovereignty. It is hard to imagine that a man as bright as Bill Gates actually believes that a Microsoft monopoly will facilitate consumer control. In any case, it is obvious that even under competitive conditions the main effect of market relations is to turn people into consumers -- consumers who must then be workers, entrepreneurs, rentiers, thieves, or beggars if they are to survive. Consumer >sovereignty= thus produces a particular and not very attractive array of identity-effects. The same is true for electoral sovereignty, which is the equivalent of consumer sovereignty in the domain of the state. The downward, disciplinary force of sovereignty is much more evident than the autonomy it promises. Although we habitually respond to our frustrations by demanding to make >our= sovereignty real, we find that the consolidation of sovereignty in >our= state or in the >free= market actually intensifies the disciplinary force that we are seeking to control. So, we have rolled back the state in recent years only to expose ourselves more completely to the disciplines of the market. This should suggest to us surely that sovereignty is not the means to liberation: that the problematic of >liberation= is just an effect of the ontology of sovereignty.

We need to think again about the politics that gives us this insoluble problem. Would it help to leave >state= and >society= behind us, and to begin thinking of ourselves as inhabitants of the globe? Or, would we just repeat the dream of sovereignty on another scale?

If it is true that people have been living in a globalizing world for hundreds, if not thousands of years, how are we to make sense of this phenomenon? One way is to start is with the old idea of civilization, but to keep the focus on the idea of city-building (rather than to be distracted by spurious notions of cultural superiority). If civilization in this sense is about building towns and cities, and if (as Jane Jacobs [1969]suggests) agriculture is better understood as an effect of cities rather than as a cause, then we have in the notion of urbanization a key to understanding both modernization and globalization. If (as Louis Wirth [1938] suggested) urbanism is a >way of life,= then we can understand what we have been doing in terms of a shift from one way of life to another. As far as we can tell, that earlier way of life was nomadic, and it was dependent on hunting and gathering. Pastoral nomadism developed later, in constant tension with civilization, a way of life that involved both settled agriculture and settled towns and cities. We are the heirs of Cain, a cultivator whose hubris was inevitably displeasing to God, and who expressed his anger in an unfortunate way. We are also the heirs of Prometheus, an inventor who was also punished by the gods. What marks the project of civilization is the development of a man-made world, in which the natural order is made to serve human purposes, and in which an artificial environment for human life is constructed. Our capacity to create such an artificial environment is now much greater than it was. So, our cities are no longer like isolated enclaves, and we no longer need to condemn the majority of people to what Marx called >the idiocy of rural life=. On the contrary, we have largely erased the distinction between the urban and the rural, and re-organized agriculture as a business like any other. We have spread our cities out more comfortably, organized agricultural regions as country retreats, developed the wilderness as a recreational area, and linked our cities into a seamless web, tied together by wires, pipes, roads, airplanes, and most recently by various forms of radio communication. What were distinct cities are in the process of integration into a single, global city, which will be the ultimate product of this process of civilization.

One of the advantages of focusing on the project of civilization, rather than on capitalism or patriarchy or Western domination, is that we are drawn to recognize that this project has involved many cultures, with widely varying social relations, over a long period of time. We are talking about the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians, the Han and the Mexica, the Greeks and the Persians, the Moghals and the Incas, the Haida and the builders of great Zimbabwe. We are not talking about practices that are simply European or Christian. We are not talking only about the modern era. We are not talking about something in which only men have been implicated. We are talking about an ensemble of human practices in which we can discern a varied and variable effort to make the world over into a home for humans. Women=s domestic practices are as much a part of this effort as men=s labours in the fields. Over long years, in many different places, with different cultural assumptions and different social relations, people have transformed their environment, developed new technologies, learned to live in new ways. They have in the process become different from what their ancestors were. This civilizing effort began long before people began settling permanently, but the development of permanent settlements marked a significant change. From this permanence came the form of the urban, a form, significantly, that appears static, but that is in constant motion. By bringing large numbers of people in close proximity, cities intensified human activity. Cities became centre of innovation and differentiation. They enabled specialization. They facilitated learning and the preservation of learning. They created the conditions under which people could learn to make lives for themselves that were not governed by the immediate requirements of food-gathering. The urban is the mode of life that enables the development of agriculture and manufacturing. It is the mode of life within which modernity emerges.

It is pointless to enter into the endless debates about the origins of modernity. However, the historical record seems to make a few things clear. First, the practices and ideological orientations of modernity -- capitalism, statism, scientific rationalism, and liberalism in particular -- seem to have developed in concert with one another. They form an ensemble. Secondly, modernization was bound up with European expansionism. The Europeans changed as they moved outward, and they themselves became mediators of change within and between different parts of the world. Thirdly, modernizing practices everywhere modified civilizations that were long in the making. Whatever the Europeans might have thought, modernization did not begin ex nihilo. Finally, the effect of modernization was to bring distant peoples into relation to one another, in ways that could not previously have been imagined. Globalization was implicit in modernization and vice versa. To use the term >modernization= is to draw attention to the temporal character of civilizing activities. >Globalization= shifts the focus to spatial relations. Ironically, the recent popularity of the latter term reflects the belief that time has finally triumphed over space, that we have at last come to the moment at which distance becomes meaningless, and that as a result we are now starting to live in the same space and hence in the same time. However, the collapse of space is also the collapse of time. We are living, supposedly, in an eternal present, in which differences can only be expressed spatially. Thus, the Hobbesian problem appears to be reversed. Sovereign individuals and sovereign communities have to be created out of the unity that is always already present.

Let me expand on this idea. On the traditional analysis, the distance between people is always already given, and it is this distance that creates the Hobbesian problem. We do not feel pain and pleasure as one; we do not live or die as one; thus, our interests are always different. Given that the individual is an autonomous source of motion, the possibility of collision and even mutual destruction is always present. Moreover, given the physical impossibility of global sovereignty -- an impossibility that arises from the distances between people on earth -- there will always be a plurality of political sovereignties. The Hobbesian solution reduces individuals to order, but only within a confined space. If global sovereignty becomes technically possible, thanks to instantaneous global communications and the dispersal of centrally controlled armed forces, then the claims to sovereignty by particular groups, nations, or states come to appear as problems subject to Hobbesian resolution. However, it is beyond belief that formerly sovereign authorities would surrender their power without a struggle. The struggle is evidently going on now. The key to it is the creation of two states of nature that exist in uneasy relation to one another. The first of these states is in the form of the Hobbesian dystopia, which seems to exist in the >no-go= zones that journalists have identified in various parts of the world. (Whether conditions conform to the Hobbesian dystopia or not is less important than the fact that outsiders believe that such conditions prevail there.) The twin to this Hobbesian world is a Lockean state of nature, in which people=s lives, liberties, and estates are secured by mutual enforcement of a natural law. Market relations are the supreme embodiment of the natural law, for they preserve such sovereignty as is consistent with absolute security of property. What is hidden in the Lockean idyll is the fact of Hobbesian sovereignty. That is, it is the power of the sovereign that ensures that the rules of the market are everywhere observed within the Lockean world. We are all Lockeans now, because the only other choice is the Hobbesian dystopia.

What social contract theory has always obscured is that the contract that is supposed to solve the problem only becomes possible when the problem is already solved. Thus, the formalization of global sovereignty will only become possible when sovereign authority has been deployed again and again with such deadly force that it becomes apparent to all that obedience is the only rational option. The punishment of Iraq, the humiliation of Indonesia and Korea, and the adoption of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment are all aspects of the same process, by which a new global regime is being created. The aim, clearly, is sovereignty, but sovereignty will not the take the form of statehood (if only because the form of the state is necessary to secure the dignity of formerly sovereign countries: in this respect, ongoing statehood is akin to ongoing medieval institutions like the British monarchy). To be effective, global sovereignty must take its own shape, and this will inevitably be rather different from the familiar form of the nation-state. Various commentators, like David Held (1995), have attempted to respond to this reality by offering more benign models of global sovereignty. Intriguing as some of these models are, they all seem premature, since the messy work of crushing the opposition is still going on. There is a consensus among the most powerful authorities in the world today that everyone must be obliged to obey the Lockean rules. Only when the great majority of people in the world have accepted that >there is no alternative= will it be possible to formalize arrangements, and allow for a more meaningful show of democracy. Un-Lockean behaviour has to be rendered unthinkable, and this is not a task that can be entrusted to people who have too many democratic scruples. Liberal democracy may come at the end of the process, but at the beginning people must be terrorized into submission by threats of starvation, imprisonment, displacement, destruction, dismemberment, and death. People must learn proper market behaviour or face exclusion from the civilized world. The price of exclusion is much as Hobbes indicated.

Let us put it this way. It is becoming clear now that >globalization= and >modernization= have to be understood as >spatial= and >temporal= descriptors of the same process. These descriptors draw attention to certain features of the project of civilization. >Sovereignty= is evidently one of the ideological effects of this project. It appears first in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as a way of understanding the relationship between human identity, political authority, and divine law. The individual, the ruler, and the divinity were all understood in the same terms, as autonomous persons with a capacity to rule in accordance with a rational plan. Given the remoteness of God and the natural difference of interest between individual human beings, it was assumed that, for practical purposes, >sovereignty= would have to be conferred on a ruler whose authority would be accepted by his subjects. This idea has been elaborated with great subtlety in the last three hundred years. It has been shown, for instance, that sovereignty can be organized in a way that is consistent with individual self-government, provided that everyone conforms to certain rules (rules that allow both citizens and rulers to exercise considerable discretion within their own spheres of activity). It has also been shown that sovereignty can be divided in a way that enables rulers to live in harmony with one another. The key to this is the creation of a modern/global order that includes most people in the world. To be viable, this order must not only offer a better life than what is possible >outside= (so that people naturally choose to be within it), but it must also engender, naturally, the disciplines required to sustain it. What is required to be successful in this world must be fairly plain, and the basic habits and skills must be ones that people in most if not all cultures tend to acquire. Moreover, it must be clear that children of the new entrants will be able to develop more advanced skills that will enable them to do better than their parents. Such conditions have by no means been universally achieved, but it seems clear that globalization/modernization will not be complete until this does happen. People who are not now >sovereign selves= of the right kind have to transformed into such beings, if sovereign authority is to work as expected within and between states. Sovereignty is, in a sense, the ultimate objective of globalization and modernization.

On any of the models of space and time that we might take from twentieth century physics, the possibility of autonomous government seems much less likely. Significantly, the physicists have invoked concepts of >relativity,= >uncertainty,= and >chaos= to make sense of their discoveries. Those of us who lack the necessary mathematical understanding are invited to conceive of the basic principles of physics in terms of Einstein=s theory of >relativity,= Hiesenberg=s >uncertainty= principle, and the more recent theory of >chaos=. Few of us really understand what the physicists mean by these terms, and it is clear that the physicists themselves are taking ideas from cultural and social theory and applying them in accounts of physical processes. Be that as it may, it is significant that the twentieth century physicists found that they could only make sense of what they could observe experimentally if they abandoned the idea that space and time were qualitatively different (in favour of the notion that time was a dimension of space: or, what it is to say the same thing, that we experience the second, third, and fourth dimensions of time as >space=), if they dropped the assumption that objects had to be in a unique space at any moment in time, and if they recognized that the key relationships they had to understand were non-linear (and hence alternated between chaos and order in an unpredictable but not indeterminant way). The resultant theories displace the fixities of space, time, matter, energy, order, and chaos in favour of concepts that explain patterns, relations, contingencies, and transformations. Although the public has been frightened by concepts like relativity, uncertainty, and chaos, the physicists keep assuring us that the theories that invoke such concepts make the world more intelligible, not less. What is more, these theories enable human beings to do things that were unimaginable a century ago. That some of these unimaginable things proved to be horrific is no reason for losing sight of the fact that our environment is now more susceptible to human control thanks to our understanding of relativity, uncertainty, and chaos.

The work of the physicists is in various ways complementary to the work of the biologists, biochemists, and theoreticians of artificial life and artificial intelligence. As Donna Haraway (1991) has argued, the individual is no longer the entity to be explained in modern science. The body, the group, and the species are contingent effects of more complex systems that can only be understood when we drop the distinctions between >whole= and >part,= >internal= and >external,= >living= and >dead,= >individual= and >group,= >human= and >animal,= >animal= and >plant,= >organic= and >inorganic=. Modern biology, like modern physics, requires categories that make nonsense of the distinctions that were shared between the human and natural sciences from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. The categories concerned -- like system and network -- were not developed by natural scientists working in isolation from the social sciences. As Haraway notes, some of the most crucial innovations were made by the people planning the bombing campaign against Germany during the Second World War. It was impossible for these planners to understand the effects of the bombing without modelling flows in a way that made little or no reference to Germany as such, let alone to Hitler or other individual Germans. Although the analysts were only dimly conscious of what they were doing, the effect of such an approach was to make nonsense of the hierarchy of sovereign identities. No sense could be made of the effects of the bombing on the assumption that Hitler was in control of Germany. What had to be understood were flows of energy and materials, patterns of communication and transportation, etc. In this context, one could identify ways in which the flows could be disrupted, and also see how these disruptions could and would be overcome by systemic adaptation. The more sophisticated the analysis became, the clearer it was that the model of sovereign identities was absolutely useless for analytical purposes. So, modern war planning, like modern biological theory, demands an ontology that breaks free from seventeenth century categories. Haraway=s famous >Manifesto for Cyborgs= grows out of a recognition that the seventeenth century categories that inform most political theory will not work in a world that is governed with the assistance of twentieth century science.

Eighteenth century political economy and nineteenth century sociology anticipate some of the insights of twentieth century science. The focus is on flows, systems, structures, equilibria, etc. However, these social sciences pre-suppose a seventeenth century theory of government that flows from seventeenth century ideas of space, time, and individual identity. One effect of this is that we have innumerable accounts of Canadian society or the Canadian economy -- accounts written in face of the recognition that >Canada= is an inappropriate unit of analysis for sociological or economic purposes. Although we know that the boundaries around Canada are about as useful for contemporary analytical purposes as were the boundaries of Germany for the military analysts half a century ago, we keep insisting on their importance. Only if we do can we make >Canada= work as a sovereign identity, and only then will our >citizenship= make sense to us in terms of the seventeenth century dream of self-government. That dream -- the dream of sovereignty -- still has a powerful grip on our political imagination. It informs not only the idea of sovereign nationhood, but the ideal of individual freedom. It is not a dream that we know how to abandon, no matter how unrealistic it may seem.

Some of the most interesting writing on globalization focuses on the world city as a node of global domination (Sassen 1991, Knox and Taylor, 1995). Urban geographers long ago noted that individual towns and cities functioned within systems of cities. Analysts showed that there were local, regional, national, and global hierarchies of urban settlements. In the last twenty-five years, the boundaries that separated local, regional, and national systems from one another (and that contained subordinate systems within larger ones) have become much more porous, and the relevant hierarchies have been differentiated and de- or re-spatialized. In terms of finance, Toronto may be higher in the urban hierarchy than Calgary, but in terms of the oil business, the relation is reversed. And, in terms of the operation of a big bank or oil company, it is not clear that Calgary or Toronto or indeed Houston or New York has much meaning. However, the globalization of the urban system -- by which people mean the disruption of the established spatial hierarchies -- has led to an almost obsessive interest in identifying the global command centres. It is somehow reassuring to think that we now have a tri-cephalous urban system, with New York, Tokyo, and London each governing the world for eight hours a day. A comforting >sovereignty= is thus re-installed in a world that is at once exploding and imploding (and in the process destroying the sovereignties that we once knew).

I have learned much from the literature on world cities, but I am disappointed by the way in which analysts revert to the seventeenth categories when they are confronted with political issues. Although the analysis always suggests that urban system can no longer be analyzed in terms of a neat hierarchy of cities, there are persistent attempts to impose such a hierarchy on the data. Some cities have to be on top; some cities have to be world cities; some cities have to be >major league=; otherwise, there is no order to which people can relate. That the world is not like that -- or, rather, that >major league= or >world city= status is something that can be commodified and sold, as it is by Major League Baseball or the International Olympic Committee -- is at once acknowledged and denied in an effort to impose an intelligible hierarchy of sovereign identities. The assumption seems to be that we need to identify the hierarchy in order to determine where and how we should act politically. If the capital of the world is the tri-cephalous megalopolis centred in New York, London, and Tokyo, then we have to focus our politics at this sovereign centre, and not elsewhere. If, instead, the capital is in Washington (or, perhaps, in Washington-Brussels-Tokyo-New York), then our politics has to be organized differently. The global city literature, like the literature on global civil society, the globalized economy, and global culture, draws our attention to the possibility that the governance of the world is no longer mediated by states, so much as by other institutions. Out of these literatures have come claims about the decline of sovereignty and the withering away of the nation-state. These claims are rarely posed in hopeful terms. Rather, there is great nostalgia for the world we have lost and great anxiety about the world to come. It is in this context that the search for a sovereign centre becomes particularly anxious. If no such centre now existed, that would be a matter for concern. But, if no such centre could ever be created -- at the level of the individual, the state, or the world as a whole -- that would be a much fearful prospect. For good or ill, that is precisely the prospect that is before us.

Sovereignty is an illusion in the sense that the king is never in control of his own domain. Whenever we ask, AWhy is this happening?= or >How could this be changed?=, we are forced to abandon the idea that the sovereign is in control. At best, the sovereign (self or state) is a site at which various forces interact, but more likely it is not a site at all, for analytic purposes. We have to construct different categories and identify the space-time of action in some other way to make sense of what is going on. And, as a result, the sovereign disappears in the analysis. On the other hand, sovereignty-thinking is of crucial importance, because people still tend to model themselves and the political entities that concern them with reference to the sovereignty-model. So, we have a paradox. Sovereignty is an illusion, but it is an illusion that people are constantly trying to put into effect. It seems clear that the most powerful people in the world would like to re-configure sovereignty in the form of what Steven Gill (1991) calls >disciplinary neo-liberalism=. There has been much progress in this direction, and no doubt it will continue. If there is a hopeful aspect to this, it comes not from the prospect of >world governance= -- since the only form of world governance imaginable is the kind Newt Gingrich and Jesse Helms would like to establish -- but from the fact that any sovereignty-project is unachievable.

The sovereignty-project with which we have become familiar has a number of anticipated effects, including the state system, representative government, and the modern individual. All of these effects are now in question. The new sovereignty-project seems to involve creation of institutions of governance that are at once >global= (in the sense that they are all-pervasive and all-encompassing) and >local= (in the sense that they are articulated in the form of local practices). The capacity to create, shape, or transform these emergent institutions is by no means equally distributed, but it is not evident that there is any centre from which the process could be managed. If sovereign authority emerges, it will be from the interaction of agencies that lack sovereignty. The contemporary sovereignty-project appears to be an effect of processes that cannot be modelled in sovereignty-terms. The immediate consequence of the project is to disrupt traditional sovereignties, and its ultimate effect (if successful) will be to establish conditions in which there is an implicit order, but no recognizable sovereignty. The world will be self-governing only in the sense that it can be modelled as a self-organizing system. The self-governance to which any entity (individual, state, region, globe) could aspire will be conditioned by the logic of a system over which it has no effective control. So, the most evident effect of the contemporary sovereignty-project would appear to be the >loss= of sovereignty. Or, at least, that is way that we could construe the effect, if we were to suppose that we had sovereignty to lose.

I have suggested elsewhere (1996) that it might be useful to begin thinking of the global city (or >urbanism as a way of life=) as a political hyper-space. Hyper-space is a term taken from contemporary physics (Kaku 1994). It refers to n-dimensional space of which our universe is supposed to be a particular domain. Contemporary string theory suggests that space actually has ten, rather than four dimensions. According to this theory, the four-dimensional world in which we live is in a sort of giant, expanding bubble on the surface of a six-dimensional space curled up in a tiny ball. Whether or not this theory is correct is of less interest to me than the fact that it can be shown mathematically that the four fundamental forces of the universe would operate in the way that we observe if space were configured in the way indicated. In other words, the theory of hyperspace offers a possible account of the world in which we live. As I understand it, there is no such possible account of the fundamental forces in a strictly four-dimensional space. The theory of hyperspace offers an explanation of the way that relativity, uncertainty, and chaos can be produced by the interaction of the four fundamental forces in a space that transcends any particular domain, but that is internally differentiated so that the particular space-time of a domain like our own universe appears distinct, self-subsistent, and self-governing, even though it is over-determined (to borrow a term from Althusser) by its relations with other domains that can be posited theoretically but not detected empirically.

I find the theory of hyperspace helpful in so far as it loosens the hold of sovereignty-thinking (and seventeenth century physics) on my brain. Other people will find more assistance in different tropes and figures. When I try to imagine the global city, I see a variety of social movements that have constituted and are constituting various institutions, practices, and forms of identity. I begin from Marx=s idea that the most powerful of the contemporary social movements is capitalism. Clearly, he thought that most of what we associate with modernization and globalization could be understood as an effect of capitalism. His argument along these lines was extremely insightful, but he was too much in the grip of sovereignty-thinking to accept the possibility that there were other, powerful social movements that developed in conjunction with capitalism and were neither its cause nor its effect. When we think of scientific rationalism, statism, liberal individualism, and Western imperialism developing in conjunction with capitalism and each influencing or >determining= the others in infinitely complicated ways, we get a better sense of the origins of modernity or globalism. However, this means learning to think of each of these movements on its own terms. Rather than imagining a space-time that encompasses them all (which is what we do when talk about modernity), it is more helpful to think of each of these movements producing a space-time of its own. Capitalism has its own history and its own geography, but so too do scientific rationalism and the rest. The various spatio-temporal domains of these movements are not independent of one another, but the relations within each domain have a logic peculiar to it. This logic is, in a sense, constituted by relations that traverse the particular domain, but those relations are not usually apparent within the domain itself. To comprehend the most powerful movements (like capitalism) we have to relate them back to the architectonic movement of which modernization and globalization appear to be particular effects. This is how we come to an idea of civilization or urbanism as the movement that somehow encompasses all the other movements. Hence, the idea of the global city as the hyperspace of human life.

Already I seem to have been led into a trap. The effort to comprehend the whole leads to me to posit a sovereign space (>the hyperspace of the global city=) within which the particular movements like capitalism, statism, and the like appear as domains governed by the over-determining logic of urbanism. However, if I am saved (to use a Christian metaphor) it is by the illogic of the city. One can certainly interpret the city teleologically, as I have done above: that is, to say of the city that it is an effect of human efforts to humanize the human environment. But, this is not to say anything very specific. In any case, it is to attribute to human actions a purpose that can only be assigned post factum. What seems clear is that the hyperspace of the global city is an effect of the various movements that constitute it. On the other hand, the form that it takes itself has an effect on those movements. Among those movements are not only the ones that I think of as governing movements -- movements like statism, capitalism, Western imperialism, and so on -- but also the various movements of resistance. The latter are what we usually think of as social movements, for they are not so obviously constitutive of the world in which we live and they seem to be moving against what is already there. Each of these movements of resistance constitutes its own space-time: It defines an object of attack, gives that object a history and a geography, defines itself in relation to the object, and tells a story of its own struggles, struggles that hopefully lead toward ultimate victory. The governing movements take shape in face of these movements of resistance, and so the hyperspace of the global city is by no means an effect of governance in isolation. Instead, new spaces are always in formation, as people struggle to give effect to what has been excluded or devalued. Although we can read the politics of the last half-century in terms of the progress of sovereignty, we should also be able to see that there has been a proliferation of new political spaces. The hyperspace of the global city is not fixed in a way that it suppresses every possibility. On the contrary, it is surprisingly open to political innovation.

Gill, Steven. >Reflections on Global Order and Sociohistorical Time,= Alternatives 16 (1991), 275-314.

Wirth, Louis. AUrbanism as a Way of Life,@ American Journal of Sociology 44 (1938), 1-24.