The Hidden Globe

“On one hand, Geneva’s composition epitomizes a familiar kind of internationalism: the tangible, imperfect, often lovely kind that brings people of the world together in one place at one time, in peace. But there is something else at work here—something you can’t see, but whose influence on the world around it is as potent as the globalism of flesh and blood. I call it the spectral economy: the distant, disparate, yet astonishingly lucrative transactions that happen not in Geneva, but from Geneva. The city is full of conduits, or entrepôts, for a capitalism that is run remotely. It functions less as a place where things happen than as a portal to other worlds. And it turns out there are many more places like it. This book is about these places.”

Abrahamian lays out the qualities that make up the geographies she describes as the “hidden globe.” Here and elsewhere in the text, Abrahamian uses vivid figurative language and metaphor to bring these places to life. For instance, she refers to the hidden globe as “the spectral economy,” a metaphor that emphasizes the obscure, barely glimpsed character of this purposefully concealed system; the comparison also evokes the historical antecedents of the hidden globe—the “specters” or ghosts of colonial pasts.

“The hidden globe is a kind of transfiguration of this map, an accretion of cracks and concessions, suspensions and abstractions, carve-outs and free zones, and other places without nationality in the conventional sense, stretching from the ocean floor to outer space. The hidden globe is a mercenary world order in which the power to make and shape law is bought, sold, hacked, reshaped, deterritorialized, reterritorialized, transplanted, and reimagined. It is state power catapulted beyond a state’s borders. It is also a state’s selective abdication of certain powers within its remit: enclaves filled not by lawlessness but by different, weirder laws.”

Abrahamian uses poetic language to depict the Differing Modes of State Sovereignty that constitute the hidden globe: The long list of active verbs that portray law as a body that is violently assaulted and otherwise deranged relies on the rhetorical technique of personification. Abrahamian describes the hidden globe as “mercenary,” implying that it did not naturally arise but was rather created with intention and, in some instances, by force.

“When the wealthiest citizens hide their money instead of paying taxes, towns and municipalities make do with less, which means worse schools, roads, infrastructure, and health care. When that money ends up in offshore centers, or is funneled through them westward, inequality grows. At a time when money is disproportionately transferred from poor countries to rich ones, and not the other way around, we need to think about the mechanisms that make that happen.”

Abrahamian describes The Impact of Liminal Jurisdictions on Vulnerable Peoples. She emphasizes how such structures contribute to global income inequality. It is an example of how upfront Abrahamian is about her personal beliefs and opinions; she does not pretend to present her experience of these places in an objective manner, but urges readers to “think about” what it means for populations to have “worse schools, roads, infrastructure, and health care.” She directly blames the inequities on the desire of “the wealthiest citizens” to avoid the civic responsibility of taxes.

“Never mind that Geneva and Mauritius have little to do with each other in the physical world. They are part of an invisible firmament that binds a most unlikely constellation of places. Swiss banks have historically been ground zero for this fractured atlas.”

As illustrated throughout The Hidden Globe, the geographies that Abrahamian describes are far flung; she poetically describes them here as a “fractured atlas” and an “invisible firmament.” Typically, the slightly archaic word “firmament” describes the sky or the vault of heaven. Here, it emphasizes the disordered geography created by this hidden globe: The sky is not above as normal, but rather hidden beneath the “physical world.”

“But there’s a confluence of worldview, I think, that unites selling off citizen-soldiers and the fashioning of securities out of the life expectancy of little girls. It’s the spirit of the thing: a process of abstraction through which a body becomes a bond. It’s the essence of speculation, the metaphysics of globalization. You could even call it a calling.”

The philosophy that underlies the various jurisdictions, markets, and geographies explored in the text is the “process of abstraction through which a body becomes a bond.” By this, Abrahamian means that financial speculation is grounded by the abstraction of physical labor and/or living beings into a market. She terms this the “metaphysics of globalization,” or the first principles upon which the process of globalization is predicated.

“The fence—not the cuckoo clock, not fondue, certainly not brotherly love—is the nation’s contribution to the world we live in. If you know where to look, you will see little Switzerlands anywhere you go.”

The “fence” in this passage refers “either to a physical barrier or to a recipient of stolen goods” (40). Abrahamian lists things stereotypically associated with Switzerland (the cuckoo clock, fondue, brotherly love). She then argues that Switzerland is best defined as a “fence” with barriers to entry (both figurative ones, as in its banking secrecy laws, and literal ones, as in its mountains), which receives ill-gotten gains.

“When the rules benefit the wealthy, the wealthy need not break the rules.”

This sentence succinctly summarizes the logic upon which the creation and promotion of the legal structures described in The Hidden World rely. Even though the practices might seem morally questionable and exploitative, they are legal because the wealthy ensure the law is crafted in their favor. The wealthy use the law to avoid paying a fair share of taxes, thus adding to The Impact of Liminal Jurisdictions on Vulnerable Peoples.

“For at least a century, intermediaries like Deloitte have helped countries divert their lawmaking and governing capabilities—the power to regulate industry, naturalize citizens, and protect their borders—to benefit private interests. This is how the hidden globe gets made: piece by piece, hole by hole.”

Abrahamian emphasizes that the “hidden globe” is not the result of a cabal or conspiracy. Rather, it is the result of self-interested actors, like the consulting firm Deloitte, seeking to “benefit private interests.” The final phrase, “piece by piece, hole by hole” recalls the chorus of “Garden Song (Inch by Inch),” a song about the slow, steady process of growing a garden. In this instance, the “garden” is the assortment of special jurisdictions created for the benefit of the wealthy elite and global capital.

“As is the case today, [the United States and former imperial powers] believed markets were the best way to achieve prosperity around the world, and in political terms would go out of their way to prevent communism from spreading. They did not want to give up these convenient relationships with their poorer dependents—even if those relationships were fundamentally exploitative. They just had to find a more palatable arrangement than full-on imperialism. They would find it in the liminal territory of the zone.”

Abrahamian describes the underlying logic that led imperial powers to create free-trade zones around the world and especially in low-income, recently independent former colonies. This is an example of The Impact of Liminal Jurisdictions on Vulnerable Peoples. Abrahamian tacitly makes the argument here that the proliferation of free-trade zones is another form of imperialism and anti-communist activity.

“This world-building endeavor will require acts of imagination from us all. We must begin to understand ourselves as citizens of a nation, of the world, and, increasingly, of the places in between. This means extending humanity, decency, and optimism into places they have not always ventured: places for money, and things, but not people. These are places where any of us might end up. Can we claim them for our own?”

This is a call to action that uses first-person plural pronouns (“us” and “we”) to encourage readers to use the examples provided in the text as a starting point to think differently about the nation-state system. As an advocate for open borders, she believes that, just as capital and goods move freely in globalized economies, so too should people.

“Saidi, a former Lebanese policymaker, went as far as to call the DIFC a ‘Vatican of international finance,’ comparing the center’s authority over its little fiefdom to the pope’s in Rome. The analogy can easily be pushed further. What is the DIFC if not a microsovereignty embedded in a global city, insulated from the broader political environment while serving the interests of a group of powerful men who believe they represent a higher power—in this case, the market?”

In Chapter 1, Abrahamian argues that “wealth has replaced God” (13) in Switzerland. She reprises this argument here in her discussion of the DIFC: The “powerful men” who work at the DIFC see themselves as serving the “higher power” of the market much like those at the Vatican see themselves as serving God. Abrahamian is tacitly critical of those who value wealth and the market over human well-being.

“In nondemocratic states, cookie-cutter jurisdictions like the DIFC and AIFC can obscure bigger social problems, offering sound business laws to corporations without civil and human rights reforms to match.”

Market systems rely on stable governments that defend the rule of law, particularly contract and property laws. Standard globalization development theory holds that governments that institute a liberal rule of law (with fewer human rights abuses, for example) will likewise economically prosper from stable, predictable markets (as described in Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree [1997]). Abrahamian argues that the DIFC and similar structures decouple these elements: Jurisdictions provide stable, liberal laws for businesses without extending the same liberal guarantees to their populations.

“Much like its close cousin, Switzerland, the tiny nation of Luxembourg has enriched itself significantly over the past century by greasing the wheels of global finance. Now, as billionaires, start-ups, and larger aerospace companies prepare for a cosmic land grab, Luxembourg is using its place on Earth to help send capitalism into deep space.”

Abrahamian connects the terrestrial hidden globe to efforts to “send capitalism into deep space.” She also draws a connection between Luxembourg’s history of using jurisdictional entrepreneurship to its efforts to provide a legal framework for companies to profit from outer space. This is one of the more unusual examples of Differing Modes of State Sovereignty explored in the text.

“Space law is a slippery concept by definition—primarily because space is not a place, but infinite, and composed of mostly untouchable and unreachable matter. There can by definition be no borders in space, because there can be no fixity; and without fixity, no containment. The prospect of ascribing the laws of man to a realm so vast, so unknowable, and so timeless is a futile and egocentric exercise that only humans could attempt. Heaven knows, we’ve tried.”

Modern trade generally and contemporary capitalism specifically depend on a legal framework based on two founding principles: property rights and enclosure. Enclosure is the practice of demarcating a territory to assert property rights over it. Abrahamian alludes to this when she notes that in outer space there “no containment”—in other words, since it is difficult to enclose property in space, it is therefore difficult for legal frameworks to allocate property rights on that basis. The pun of “heaven knows,” a casual expression of resignation that here becomes a reference to outer space, is an example of Abrahamian’s informal voice, found throughout the text.

“The party’s over now, the summer long gone. In her final resting place, in a shipbreaking facility far from home, the Titan is dismembered, her entrails left to dry in the baking sun.”

Abrahamian often uses vivid imagery to illustrate the world she is describing. In this passage, Abrahamian personifies the ship the Titan by using the female pronoun and referring to its “entrails.”

“Sovereignty at sea moves like a current, contingent on political gravity, ideological winds, and social friction, which makes freedom of the seas a lot like all other freedoms: more free for some than it is for others.”

In her exploration of Differing Modes of State Sovereignty, Abrahamian focuses on marine law. She highlights how, despite its unusual qualities, sovereignty on the high seas shares a commonality with other legal systems, namely that it is fundamentally unequal. As she puts it, “[freedom is] more free for some than it is for others.”

“It was the sense of placelessness—physical, temporal, spiritual, and legal—that drove so many to abject despair. ‘Being in perpetual limbo has so many destructive impacts on the mental health of every single person,’ wrote the Iranian Kurdish intellectual Behrouz Boochani, whom Aziz befriended in immigration detention. Boochani was referring to the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the ‘state of exception’—when the state creates legal black holes in the name of emergency management. Our legal status as individuals has been suspended and we become legally unnameable beings, transformed into animals devoid of dignity,’ he wrote.”

In the Introduction, Abrahamian describes feeling at home in placeless geographies. Here, she quotes Boochani describing how such a feeling of placelessness can become pathological. This is a tacit acknowledgement that not everyone feels similarly to her. Giorgio Agamben’s theory about how the state creates “legal black holes” is an example of the signposting Abrahamian uses to situate her work within a larger academic and journalistic discourse about states, economic development, and human rights.

“I told him how my own experience of Geneva made me understand Manus Island and Nauru as a continuation of other kinds of offshore activity: if not morally equivalent, then party to the same logic, and certainly complicit in helping nationalist ideologies thrive in a globalized world. (One difference is that offshore financial centers do, occasionally, cave to pressure and close loopholes. No state has yet been formally reprimanded, let alone sued in international courts, for detaining people offshore in this manner.)”

Abrahamian alludes to the abstracting “metaphysics of globalization” she described in Chapter 1. In the parenthetical, Abrahamian underlines a key distinction between the parts of the hidden globe that deal with the treatment of goods and capital, and those that deal with the movement of people: Namely, that states can treat people with impunity in offshore detention facilities, whereas capital markets are sometimes subject to reprimands.

“I embarked on this journey because I had read that Boten was not just your average free zone, but one so dominated by Chinese businesses that it had pushed its clocks forward by an hour to better suit Beijing. That, to me, seemed to exemplify the hidden globe’s capacity for manipulating time, be it in a warehouse, in an offshore prison, or on the wall behind a hotel’s reception desk. In Boten, I’d hoped to observe how the vagaries of clock time affected daily life: how ordinary people lived with one foot in one zone and one in another.”

Abrahamian often narrates her thinking and particularly her reporting in the first person. In this way, she presents the hidden globe not only as a series of legal and economic frameworks, but also as a lived experience. This is a phenomenological approach to understanding the subject and an example of the new journalism genre within which Abrahamian is working.

“Karl Marx famously theorized about the ‘annihilation of space by time’: the tendency of capitalism to destroy spatial barriers to its expansion with inventions like the railroad or the telegraph. He would have felt vindicated in Laos.”

Abrahamian quotes Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Notebook V (1857) to analyze the concept of time in Boten; she argues that the situation there “vindicate[s]” his argument that capitalism collapses space and time. Abrahamian also quotes Marx in the epigraph of Chapter 6. Marxist analysis is one way to characterize the framework of the hidden globe; it indicates Abrahamian’s left-leaning political views.

“As climate change renders large swaths of the globe hostile to human life, the nations of the world must make choices about how to accommodate those left behind. One option is to throw up walls and keep newcomers out. The other is to tear them down, let them in.”

This call to action urges readers to use the information in The Hidden Globe to encourage their national governments or communities to rethink how to handle migrant populations. Abrahamian is an open supporter of open borders, and her argument to “tear [walls] down” reflects this position. She creates a sense of exigency by connecting this political belief to the material reality that climate change will result in more migrant populations.

“In the modern world, the concept of state sovereignty governs how we govern. It is a human invention—the setting of borders, the wielding of power, the deciding of who belongs. But in the Arctic, as in any remote place, it’s obvious that we’re not actually in charge. We carry no special privileges or diplomatic immunities in spaces where nature makes the rules.

It feels especially absurd to impose the construct of the nation-state, what with its laws and regulations, on something so wild, so unruly. Svalbard’s landscape disregards any concept of national borders, of industrial time, or of politics as we know it. We aren’t its citizens, residents, or denizens. This far north, we are all at its mercy. We are its guests.”

Norway’s territory in Svalbard is the book’s final example of Differing Modes of State Sovereignty. The openness of the territory to anyone who can manage to get there appeals to Abrahamian’s support for open borders. She gives the place a romantic character, going so far as to personify it when she writes “we are all at its mercy. We are its guests,” as if the territory is a human host.

“Like the monster, the places I have traveled to are composites. And like the monster, they are a product of colonialism, capitalism, technology, megalomania, and a pinch of alchemy. Taken together, these places are much more than the sum of their parts. They can’t be entirely reduced to single policy decisions, or individual people, or clear ideologies. I don’t think they can be definitively written off as all good or all evil. Like the visible world of flesh and blood and bone, they just are what is.”

Abrahamian expands on the metaphor of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster introduced in Chapter 1 of The Hidden Globe. The monster in Mary Shelley’s book is a complex, morally ambiguous creature. Abrahamian argues that the geographies, jurisdictions, and economies explored in the text are likewise.