By Anubha Anushree
Anubha Anushree reviews Atossa Ataxia Abrahamian’s The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World (Riverhead Books, 2024, 336p.)
The Iron Island, a 2005 film by Mohammad Rasalouf, starts on a giant decommissioned oil tanker off the Persian Gulf inhabited by a community of minority Sunni Arabs. Held together by the charismatic but authoritarian figure of Captain Nemat, the film is a parable of the frayed, precarious, and uneven nature of citizenship that has come to define nation-states in the twenty-first century. Films and literature from across the world have addressed the precarity of national citizenship by focusing on artificial and natural zones of exceptions such as borders, camps, ships, prisons, and sometimes just unusual geographies like islands, archipelagoes, mountains, and forests. These cultural products revealed the tenuous nature of international social mobility and clarified the conditional connections between citizenship and immigration. Yet, the focus on the latter has obscured the fundamental precarity that undergirds mainstream policies and discourses on citizenship.
Atossa Ataxia Abrahamian’s latest book, The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World contributes to this shifting discourse, alerting us to the paradoxes of citizenship in the twenty-first century. With an exceptional cast of characters, geographies, and episodes, The Hidden Globe accomplishes a dizzying journey across the world, chronicling how this topic is conjured in mainstream spaces by engineering exceptionality. These exceptional spaces are neither economically deprived, nor politically persecuted. They are neither legally peripheral, nor culturally backward. In Abrahamian’s narrative, these exceptional spaces are instead nestled within nation-states, protected by crafty legal and administrative apparatus, saturated by artistic marvels, and inhabited by the wealthy and the powerful. These spaces are “composite,” co-existing with normal citizenship. As Abrahamian suggests through an analogy with Victor Frankenstein that runs throughout the book, these spaces are “like the monster…a product of colonialism, capitalism, technology, megalomania, and a pinch of alchemy.” (449) Much of Abrahamian’s book is about how such spaces came about and the distortions such configurations produce.
With the release of Panama, Pandora, and Paradise Papers, a steady raft of journalistic and scholarly works has engaged with the topic of extra-territorial citizenship. Moreover, economists have pointed out the limits of the fiscal viability of such projects, political scientists have alerted us to the potential dangers of these oligarchic arrangements, legal scholars have quibbled over questions of jurisdiction, and historians such as Vanessa Ogle and Quinn Slobodian, have argued for more long-term perspective and demonstrated the connections between early modern imperial formations and the rise of complex sovereign structures and extraterritorial citizenship. As political philosophers from at least Aristotle onwards know, citizenship has never been contiguous and consistent. The rise of modern democracies, however, did promise to neutralize the conditional and selective criteria of citizenship and yet, as Abrahamian demonstrates, we are far from even making those conditions transparent, let alone abolish them.
The perspective that nation-states have been increasingly “hacked” to suit the wealthy is not new. With its connotations of stealth and fragmentation, the verb “hacking” also recalls a secret form of digital/virtual activity for defrauding the world. As the book’s title suggests, Abrahamian’s work is about the hidden globe populated by illicit geographies and inhabited by the oligarchic rich “hacking” the world. What is novel about the book is showing how this hacking is occurring not in any stealthy way but rather in plain sight. Indeed, the theme of the book is to show the normalization of this hacking to modern democracies.
Through about four-hundred fifty pages that includes notes and sources, Abrahamian argues that exclusion and selectivity are critical to modern democracies, that modern democracies function by creating zones of exception where rules don’t apply or are applied selectively. In her telling, these supposed zones of exceptions are not exceptional anymore. These zones are not located in shady imperial islands with impossible geographies or murky colonial chronologies, remote and distant, no more are these zones peculiar to autocracies, but rather very much central to twenty-first century democracies and indeed, formative to their functioning.
Thus, Abrahamian begins with Zurich and Geneva, cities which emblematize the origins of modern democracy. As if to demolish the normative place these cities occupy in the history of modern democracy, the introductory chapter recollects these cosmopolitan enclaves through the sense of personal unease Abrahamian felt growing up in Geneva. The epilogue from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a 1972 novel about 55 fictive cities, sets the tone of the book, which parallels Calvino’s polyhedron novel in depicting cities as contiguous and circuitous, geographically apart but deeply interconnected through global oligarchic interests. Each of the subsequent ten chapters (excluding the introduction) describes a different city and a particular form of political exceptionality. Although separated by culture and geography, these cities, located in the US and Mauritius, Pakistan and the Caribbeans, Svalbard and Laos, operate as zones of concessions and exceptions to those who can afford. These zones, described as fantastical “portal[s] to the other world,” (10) operate as “legal fictions: on a nation’s territory but technically outside its customs and tax.” (125) The selective modularity of these cities, their elastic cosmopolitanism, and their outside-inside character is not a reflection of the expanding inclusivity of the world, but rather the problematic ambiguity of sovereignty germane to twenty-first century politics. It is the intermeshing between the outside and the inside, the co-existence (and indeed, in some cases co-constitution) of normative citizenship and its extraterritorial iteration that makes this book particularly useful in thinking about the nature of modern democracy.
Abrahamian’s latest work continues a theme developed in her previous book, The Cosmopolites, that similarly challenged the celebratory narratives of globalization dominating twenty first century politics. Abrahamian’s work encourages us to read globalization as a deeply contradictory episode in the history of human politics, calling into question the constitution of the “global” and its near universal utopic characterization. With giant closets that stack art and antiquities worth trillions of dollars (Zurich), port cities that outsource sovereignty to high-profile portable judges (Dubai) and inhabit dual sovereignties to convenience business interests (Boten), countries that sell their flags to unscrupulous shipowners (Panama and now, Liberia), Abrahamian’s globalization is pathological because it is sustained by systemic obfuscation and fragmentation of endogenous laws, cultures, economies, and labor. Even international organizations and projects like the IMF, the World Bank, the UN, the DIFC (Dubai), and the Chinese Belt Road Initiative stymie local initiatives, displace indigenous economic arrangements, ravage environments, and enable corruption and distrust. But this globalization is also pathological because it allows escape routes to kleptocrats and megalomaniacs like the DRC leader Mobutu and normalizes unaccountability like in the case of the transfer of Luxembourg’s unaccountable trillion-dollars mutual funds to sponsor shady space projects in Seattle (249).
Fueling libertarian exit utopias for the rich, globalization in this work shields the corrupt and gives rise to oligarchic aggregations that defy national sovereignty and international rule of law. Consider the rise of Bitcoin jungles and beaches in Costa Rica and El Salvador and the FTX scandal that was routed through the Bahamas. But more crucially, this globalization has hurt concrete democratic engagements, introducing unpredictability in national politics, adversely impacting international consensus, local economic and environmental relations. For example, the establishment of the first modern EPZ (Export Processing Zone) in Puerto Rico in the early 1940s by Arthur D. Little Inc., hired by the US government, also led to the steady erosion of agriculture and loss of local livelihoods. Similarly, in a striking coincidence, the induction of Ireland into United Nations in 1958 also paralleled the establishment of Shannon EPZ in the country that popularized the idea of EPZs to the world. Arthur D. Little was indeed hired repeatedly through various US international agencies and national governments to reproduce its ‘success’ in Puerto Rico and helped establish EPZs beginning with Taiwan and Korea to other Asian countries such as Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, as Stephen Haggard argued in Pathways from the Periphery.
While Abrahamian does well to call out the diseased globalization we live in today, she provides little hope for how to pose a substantial challenge to the cynicism that undergirds the hidden globe. Instead, if one was to consider the last chapter of the book, “Terra Nullius”. This represents a voyage through the history of Longyearbyen and Svalbard, an Artic island without borders and any visa requirements, where the concluding message of the book confirms precisely the disease it diagnoses. If democratic political relations could only be realized through “fortuitous brew of historical contingencies, human egos, and environmental hindrances” (415) in remote frozen islands without contentious but tangible entanglements, then the future of democracy indeed remains sporadic and uncertain.
Equally disappointing in the book is the scalar presentation of the operations and consequences of exceptional spaces such as free trade zones. Populated by intercontinental oligarchic networks of asset laundering, free trade, and personnel mobility, Abrahamian’s hidden globe also ends up erasing very different patterns of historical compulsions that mandated the emergence of such zones in the first place. With its history of colonial encouragement of corrupt enterprise and illicit trafficking, the emergence of Shenzhen and Macau as ‘free ports’ is not comparable to the relaxed tax regulations of Luxembourg. Even within the countries of the Global South, historical and cultural experiences have played a vital role in influencing the nature and scope of the ideology of free trade. For example, in response to stagnating economies, both India and Mauritius were the first countries to set up special economic zones in Asia and Africa in 1966 and 1971 respectively. Yet, the cultural and economic outcomes of these SEZs were vastly different because of the different patterns of postcolonial engagement with the Global North.
I suspect Abrahamian’s flattening and ahistorical perspective may have to do with her choice to write a book that traverses across the world and very different historical and economic contexts. Nevertheless, as The Hidden Globe would attest, and Abrahamian would agree, the phantom world is not so hidden anymore.
Dr. Anubha Anushree is editor at the Review of Democracy.
