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cover of episode The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian

The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, with Atossa Abrahamian

2025/2/5
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Atusa Araxia Abrahamian: 我在日内瓦长大,但我的成长环境与日内瓦的国际社区息息相关,这使我感到与我实际居住的地方有些脱节。我在日内瓦的成长经历塑造了我对地方和身份的认知,促使我写了第一本书,探讨公民身份的全球市场。我对公民身份的传统观念产生了怀疑,因为我在日内瓦的经历让我觉得这些标签与我无关。我发现一些国家公开出售公民身份,这验证了我的预感,即公民身份已经商品化,成为资本主义循环的一部分。我开始思考,如果国家可以出售公民身份,那么它们还可以出售哪些其他独特的“国家商品”?国家可以出售各种“国家商品”,从小小的邮票到法律的访问权,甚至是护照。我在20多岁时读到一篇文章,讲述了瑞士如何通过租赁士兵和提供银行服务等方式,将自己打造成一个“资产阶级的天堂”。瑞士通过提供银行服务和建立免税仓库等方式,服务于外国财富,这成为了其独特的运营模式。

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The episode begins with Atossa Abrahamian's personal experience growing up in Geneva's international community, which influenced her understanding of global wealth and citizenship. She discusses how Geneva's history, shaped by figures like John Calvin and the concept of Swiss neutrality, created a culture of wealth accumulation and secrecy, forming the basis for her exploration of global wealth.
  • Atossa Abrahamian's upbringing in Geneva's international community shaped her perspective.
  • Geneva's history, particularly the influence of John Calvin, fostered a culture of wealth accumulation and secrecy.
  • The Swiss model of neutrality and its role in global finance are examined.

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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet.

I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Our guest today is Atusa Araxia Abrahamian, a journalist and author whose writing explores the cracks in the nation-state system. A former editor at The Nation and Al Jazeera America, Abrahamian's reporting and criticism have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the London Review of Books, The Intercept,

and many other publications. In her new book, The Hidden Globe, How Wealth Hacks the World, Abrahamian maps the hidden geography of the wealthy elite, exposing a parallel universe that transcends national borders, bureaucracy, and red tape. Joining her in conversation is Adam McCauley, the politics and philosophy writer and researcher. Let's join Adam now with more.

Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Adam Macaulay. It is my pleasure to welcome Atusa to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for having me, Adam. So this book takes the reader around the world and into corners not usually seen or perhaps consciously explored. But the propulsive force of the book stems from your personal experience.

So I wondered to start, if you could take us home for a moment. Tell us about Geneva, what the city is or was to you, and what it's since come to represent. Yeah, so I grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, but not just Geneva. I grew up in a very particular enclave of Geneva, which is the international community.

Both of my parents worked at the UN, international civil servants. I went mostly to international schools. I had mostly international friends. And so I grew up in this kind of bubble or enclave that...

most of the time had very little to do with the place that we were physically. This isn't to say that we didn't benefit from the beautiful lake and the wonderful municipal services that Geneva has to offer. It's, you know, it's a pretty nice place to grow up. But it was, there was something weird about it. There was something...

felt like we were displaced, that we were always moving, even though we really, I'd never moved until I was 18 years old and I came to New York for college. And I think this really informed my sense of place and my sense of identity. It certainly led me to write my first book, which was The Cosmopolites, about the global market for citizenship, that is the buying and selling of passports.

And I came to that topic because, you know, I was 18 years in Geneva. Everyone was from everywhere. I had Iranian, Canadian and Swiss citizenship through a parent's birthplace and by virtue of living in Geneva for so long. But I didn't really identify with any of these passports or labels. I just they didn't really speak to me because of the way that I grew up. And this hunch that citizenship maybe isn't this, you know,

monolithic, character-defining thing stuck with me. And when I started working as a reporter, I discovered that there were actually countries that sold their citizenship legally, like not, you know, James Bond stuff, like completely above board, advertising it in the FT and airline magazines. And I got obsessed with this world. I started going to conferences that this passport industry was putting on to sort of

hawk their wares. You'd have prime ministers of small states get on stage and pitch their passport like it was shoes or a timeshare. It was really quite, in a sense, quite shocking, but for me, validated this hunch that I had that there was something a little, I don't know, citizenship maybe didn't make sense in the way that it had at some point in history, that it had to become

you know, part of this cycle of commoditization and of buying and selling of everything, right? It was a victim of capitalism as well.

And I wrote a book about this. And while I was working on the book, this theme kept coming up that these countries that were selling their passports, Malta, St. Kitts, Dominica, et cetera, were in some way selling their sovereignty and compromising it in the process, but selling this kind of mythical, untouchable thing. And that stuck with me too, because as time passed, I started thinking, well, if countries can, countries have a monopoly on citizenship, on granting it.

If they can do this, what other things are unique to countries that they can sell as well? And it turned out that there are lots of these types of state goods, for lack of a better term. It can be as small as a postage stamp. There are countries that create postage stamps just for collectors. I'm sure you can use them too. And the whole point is that these things are legitimate functional commodities.

But you end up with, I think it's Burkina Faso putting Elvis Presley on a postage stamp, not because the local population loves Elvis, but because there's a market for these novelties on the philately circuit. But then it can also be as big as access to laws or indeed a passport. And so after my first book about the passports, I just kept track of these different

ways of selling oneself as a state. And it eventually kind of came together into a book. To bring this back to Geneva, though, which is really where it all started, at some point in my early 20s, I was at a bookstore and I was looking through old copies of the New Left Review, which is a lefty magazine, and I happened upon an article by John Halliday called Switzerland, Bourgeois El Dorado.

And if the title doesn't tell you enough, it talked about how Switzerland was essentially the mercenary business, which Switzerland perfected as early as the 1200s, leasing its own men to neighboring monarchs to fight in wars.

This kind of became Switzerland's MO. They evolved to doing versions of this, whether it was banking or, you know, in the modern day, creating warehouses that are on its territory, but outside of its legal rules to serve foreign wealth. And so all of these

these ideas kind of gelled together into the book. It took a long time, it took a lot of thinking, but that's where it all started in Geneva. I think what's so fascinating is that the story you're telling here is both one that we're intimately familiar with, right? We have certain assumptions that we make about the solidity of the state,

but you trouble those assumptions by sort of recasting perhaps the fiction of sovereignty, at least in terms of how it plays out. And I'm going to stick with Switzerland just for a moment because we can think about it sort of it's landlocked, it's quote unquote neutral, it's exceptional perhaps in the strict definitional sense of the word, but it offers a unique lens through which you explore the wider implications of our age of modernity.

what I find affecting is your engagement with individuals like John Calvin and by extension Max Weber among others. You outline a kind of political or state philosophy of Switzerland and that serves as the scaffolding, intellectual scaffolding perhaps for the book. I just wonder if you could take us a little bit through the history or at least the thinkers and their ideas and how you feel they've emerged to shape the present, what they've enabled perhaps.

Sure. So Geneva is known these days for things like the UN and the Swiss banks and chocolate shops at the lake. But in the past, Geneva's kind of most famous figure historically was John Calvin, the Protestant reformer. There's been an interesting effort to sort of recast John Calvin as someone sort of a little hip and cool. He was not. He was like the

the least fun guy on the planet. And he came into Geneva at a time when, you know, there were wars going on in Europe, religious wars going on in Europe. There was a lot of mistrust in the Catholic Church. And he came in and kind of, he really cleaned up shop. You know, there were fines, there were punishments, very austere gentlemen. Of course, there were others supporting him. But, you know, as Calvinism took hold of, you know, parts of Europe, this

I don't want to overgeneralize it. I'm not a theologian, right? But Max Weber's interpretation of this is that it created a culture of accumulation, of industriousness, and of secrecy as well. And so...

wealth as it came into Geneva through, you know, organic means, shall we say, coming from places where there were wars to a place where there wasn't a war, coming from places where people were persecuted to a place where Protestants were welcome. In fact, Geneva opened its arms to Protestant exiles from neighboring countries. Combined with this Calvinist focus on hard work created

this very, according to Weber, capitalistic way of doing business and accumulating wealth. And Geneva's special sauce here was also that they were very private. This culture of secrecy emerged.

And you can draw a line between this early Protestant movement in Geneva and what ended up being, you know, massive business of private banking, where the Swiss ended up hiding money for pretty much anybody who showed up at their doorstep. We should note people have argued about Weber's interpretation about Calvinism, about Protestantism, and all of its links to, like, capitalist production.

So I'm not going to weigh in these debates. But I think we can say with some certainty that Calvin started a culture that the Swiss then inherited.

perfected and capitalized on. And so as Switzerland became known as a place where you could make money and keep money and even hide money, the money would come from all corners of the earth. And I think that that has been a pretty consistent theme in Switzerland as a whole and in particular in Geneva, which was late to join the cantons in the Confederation, but in Geneva that was a city-state

you know, with ties to that was adjacent to the cantons for a very long time. And that degree of, let's call it care for and protection of the

the precise materials, the money, the source, and perhaps the impact or outcome of these resources as they move becomes sort of the common and recurring theme throughout the hidden globe, which emerges kind of as a patchwork map or a network that explores or explains perhaps how everything from money or art or ideas like law

goods of all kinds really, and people themselves travel across and through the world. What's interesting too is that evident quite quickly in this story is that there's a managerial and usually wealthy elite that seems to be dictating how these spaces operate or at least what transits where and under what terms and conditions.

And I wonder if you could just take us into one of these spaces in particular so we could focus on the art world and FreeZone sort of as you unpack this concept and maybe the personalities that start to people this space to the Yves Bouviers as it were. Tell us a little bit about what this world looks like once you've cracked open that door.

So broadly, just to reiterate, the world is full of these exceptional spaces that are run by laws and institutions that are not quite national. There's endorsement on the national level, otherwise these places would not exist, right? But the masterminds are not necessarily heads of state or heads of international organizations even.

of under the radar operators who see an opportunity and seize on it. And a lot of the time I found the people that were instrumental in creating and carving out the space, whether it's a warehouse for art that you alluded to or an industrial zone for manufacturing, these tend to be sort of outside consultants. And I cast them as in line with this mercenary model of

going abroad and pitching something and being able to create a new sort of regime out of it.

In the case of Yves Bouvier, I mean, he-- so let's back up a minute. We're talking about a place called the Geneva Freeport, and this is a warehouse that's in Geneva on Swiss soil, but for the purposes of customs, so that is tariffs and duties and things like that, is outside of it. It is exempt from certain laws that the rest of the Swiss territory is subject to. And so you find yourself in this strange kind

Kind of situation where you're both somewhere and not somewhere you're in a place and not in the place. It's really placeless This is like fun to think about right? But the real impact of this is that if you put goods in this warehouse that is both in Geneva and not in Geneva for legal purposes It can it does not incur the same taxes that it would otherwise if it was sitting in someone's apartment or even in a you know a gallery or what have a normal kind of storage and

So, the origins of the Geneva Freeport go way, way back to the 1800s. Geneva was historically a crossroads. It was a marketplace. Merchants would come from Germany, from France, from all over Europe and stop and sell their wares and move on. And the Freeport emerged from this need for them to put their wares in a place and temporarily store them and then go on along their way.

And to avoid what we would now refer to as bureaucracy and red tape, I don't know if that's how they called, that's what they called it back then. This customs entrepot emerged. At the time it was silos, it was for grain. So that, you know, they could drop it off, you know, have a meal, have a sleep and then move on. And the limits on how long these things could stick around in the Freeport were natural. I mean, grain will go bad. You can't just leave it there forever and expect it to hold on to its value.

And so, as Geneva became more of a crossroads for other types of wealth, maybe it's a gold bar or maybe it's even wartime supplies. The Red Cross used the Freeport to store humanitarian supplies.

And then later, as the ultra-rich began to invest in things like wine and art, the contents of the Freeport changed, but the rules that bound them didn't. And so you end up with this loophole of you can leave something there temporarily. It will be considered for legal purposes in transit.

But then no one's forcing it to leave. There's no clock that says after 12 days you have to move on. So it's pretty intuitive, if you have the right kind of mind for it, to make the connection and say, "Well, there's this place. It's kind of a haven. I can put things there tax-free. And actually, I can just leave them there because no one's going to evict my gold bars or my Picasso."

And in that way, you can avoid certain taxes, you can avoid certain types of scrutiny, you can maybe avoid family members or ex-spouses from finding out the vastness of your wealth and your assets.

And Yves Bouvier is Swiss. He works in the art world. There's been some debate over whether he's an art dealer or an art shipper, but let's just say he's a figure in the art world who saw this Freeport and really built it up and marketed it as a place for art.

He had connections in the art world. He'd worked as a shipper and a mover before. And he built out of this really a thriving and somewhat notorious business that wound up bringing in, you know, no one can say for sure, but like millions, if not billions of dollars of really high-end artwork into the Geneva Freeport.

And there was a loss of multiple lawsuits. He got into some conflict with a client of his who accused him of sort of wheeling and dealing. And we don't have to get into it because it's really complicated. But the upshot is that the Geneva Freeport became notorious for this reason. It was the site of this conflict between a Russian oligarch and a Swiss operator. And

As this lawsuit, you know, I think they finally resolved things and I think it's finally almost over. But Bouvier made a name for himself. He became known as the Freeboard King. A lot of what he was doing was marketing to rich people and making this place seem like

you know, cool and sexy and like a little dangerous and a place where you can get away with things without fully saying, you know, this is a place you can launder money. And the Freeport actually became kind of a cultural phenomenon on a greater scale because I don't know if you've seen the movie, the Christopher Nolan movie Tenet, but everything in Tenet is set, almost everything is set in this Freeport.

And there's a really interesting twist, and I'm not going to get too deep into it. The conceit of Tenet is that objects in this warehouse, which is really a cut-and-paste Freeport, down to the marketing that they use to pitch it to clients, things in this Freeport, time does not move forward. It can move backwards. There's this manipulation of time that takes place within the walls of this Freeport.

which is really astute because the whole point of the Freeport was to temporarily block freeze time for the purposes of taxation, right? So I think Christopher Nolan seized on something very clever here about Freeports and also about these special zones more broadly speaking, and that is that they are placeless.

Right, because they're neither here nor there. But they are also timeless. Like the passage of time and the sort of legal status of time gets manipulated and reshaped to suit the purposes of the clientele. What I find interesting too about this story is, and how you unpack this, is that

There are clear implications, let's say downstream consequences for how products do move in and maybe stay forever in these locations. And one of the things you discuss is with respect to art, the invisibility of masterworks, for instance, maybe there's a public cost, a commons cost as it were for not having those on display somewhere.

And because the story is multiple or at least involves multiple shades of gray, there's the instrumentalization, as it were, of these spaces for maybe more nefarious ends, right? For moving money in ways that nobody can trace and into spaces that you don't want sort of any connection or link to. So I find that quite fascinating.

The idea too that laws don't sort of apply in these spaces precisely as we would understand kind of took on even greater resonance through your book as you sort of discuss how legal systems themselves have been separated from the state and then translated or transplanted into new or maybe alien environments. And what I kept coming back to

especially with the movement and force of ideas here, is that it begs pretty significant questions about who law is for or what law is for and what its aim is. Is it stability or is it justice and what that balance looks like?

So I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about how you experienced sort of the idea of transplanted legal systems and how you came to understand or see this either greater problem or potential solution, depending on who you asked.

Well, let's go back to Geneva for a second. Geneva is a place full of diplomats and people who work at embassies and consulates and missions and whatnot. And not all of these workers, but a portion of them enjoy what's known as diplomatic immunity.

Basically, if you're working for a foreign government on another country's land, you can benefit from certain rights and immunities and concessions under a very old treaty that considers you to be sort of an emissary. It's almost like an honorific. It's a Vienna Convention. So more prosaically, as a teenager, sometimes...

A friend, boyfriend would speed in their car and because these people were related to people with diplomatic immunity or a degree of it, some kind of consular immunity, they wouldn't get a parking ticket or a traffic ticket. Maybe at some point somebody was smoking some pot in an alleyway and the cops showed up and found out who the parents were and kind of walks away.

I don't want to make too much of this because diplomats do get into trouble. They do commit crimes. Most of the time they're pretty well behaved, maybe not in their cars. But this idea, right, that law isn't this flat universal thing that covers everyone on a piece of land. This idea that you can carry law with you.

that you can have pockets where it doesn't apply. I found this very powerful and interesting, and there's a long history of this, right? The imperialist legal systems created multiple levels of law. So for example, after the opium wars in Shanghai, foreign powers had these enclaves known as concessions.

Shanghai was what it was, and there was a neighborhood that was American, there was a neighborhood that was British. And so American and British citizens would not be subject to Shanghai's laws. They would be subject to their own laws, but in this place.

And then if we look at the British legal system under colonialism, there was one set of laws for British, for British, for colonial subjects, for natives, and one set for the English who were working abroad and administering the colonial affairs. So it's not, it's actually more normal historically to have multiple levels of law in this way and in a way that discriminates, right, based on,

nationality, race, privilege, like economic rights, wealth. And it was only recently that we started thinking about law in a more territorial and democratic, I suppose, way. But that's not the case at all. So when the example I used to illustrate this is in Dubai, which for a long time under British under British rule, it did actually have multiple, multiple legal systems for different people.

But then in the early 2000s, as wealth was bleeding, the region, the Middle East was losing a lot of money and investment for geopolitical reasons. Dubai was positioning itself as a new Switzerland. This is a term that many newspapers have said that Dubai is the new Switzerland.

It was trying to attract finance companies. It was trying to attract commodities and successfully did in part because it followed the free zone playbook. It carved out different zones with more permissive tax rules or immigration rules or in some cases nominally freer speech rules, a place called Media City, all of these like cities and districts.

But then, for its finance zone, which was trying to attract Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, all the big banks and trading companies,

It added a level of enticement here and it created a new court from scratch because the people that were doing the design and the marketing for this zone, known as the Dubai International Financial Center, realized that these banks and their lawyers in particular didn't want to have to worry about winding up in an Emirati court.

They didn't know, maybe they didn't know Arabic. They weren't familiar with the legal system, which was a mix of Muslim laws and civil laws, not the common law system that multinationals are used to dealing with.

And so what did they do? They just made a new court. They just put a new court in the spree zone. It's like a big mall-esque development with high rises and hotels. And there's all kinds of things there. And there's even a court. So it's almost a state within a state within a state, right? If you think of the Emirates as the country, Dubai is the city state that governs many of its own affairs. And then within it, the DIFC, which even has its own court, it's really an enclave within an enclave.

And what's so interesting about this court, the cases themselves are contracts and HR and there's not a lot of international intrigue in these court cases themselves, but the judges are

at this point, I think around half of them are imported from abroad. So they're not even trained by the Emirati court system. They're just, you know, Brits and Singaporeans and New Zealanders who a lot of the time don't even show up in person. They don't even live there. They just zoom in. And this started before the pandemic, right? This isn't even a pandemic thing. So it's all sort of deterritorialized. And I think a really good example of how law and land don't always go together

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So one of the things that you focus on and unpack throughout the book is this concept of legal fictions, right? That's the fiction of how we sort of understood law to operate, perhaps the stories that we've told ourselves. But as you've revealed here, sort of the empirical realities of how law has historically been used and who it's been used. One of the more moving sections of the book is actually where legal fictions and sort of

individuals collide, and that's in the chapter "Excised." And you explain what happens to people who are caught in the space between places. In that chapter, you introduce us to Abdulaziz Muhammad. I'd hoped you could give us a glimpse kind of into and I guess around his story and the countless others that find themselves in places like this. Yes. The flip side of this deterritorialization of money and goods

is the deterritorialization of people and entire populations. What I mean by this is that the offshore world includes tax havens and flags of convenience and all these clever ways to hide money. You offshore wealth. Well, we live in a time when countries, particularly Western countries, but I'm sure more will follow, are offshoring populations.

So asylum seekers get sent to places that they really didn't sign up to go to. Aziz Mohammed is a character in this chapter that talks about Australia's decade-long initiative to send asylum seekers who arrived by boat in Australia to the islands of Nauru, which is a sovereign nation, and Manus Island, part of Papua New Guinea.

Australia struck deals with these countries to build camps and just detain people for, I mean, as long as there were people who were sitting there for eight years with no trial, with no, they didn't do anything wrong. They were just trying to claim asylum. And Australia took really, really, really drastic measures and just sort of banished them. Now,

It's kind of ironic, right, that a place that was once full of people who were banished from England are now banishing people to yet another state. History repeats itself in strange ways. But the legal logic, I argue, is pretty similar to that of the tax haven of the Freeport. It's trying to send things to a place where they no longer have to adhere to the rules of the nation.

This is abstract, right? But if you think of a billionaire parking money in a place like the Cayman Islands where there's no tax, this billionaire is coming from the U.S. This money is not subject to the rules of the IRS on land. The U.S., there's some...

nuances because they do require you to file if you are abroad. But for the sake of example, parking money abroad, stopping it from being subject to the laws of your nation, sending people abroad, right, under this logic means that you do not have to offer them the due process and the rights that they would enjoy on your land.

The pioneers of this offshoring of people was actually the U.S. In the 90s, there were many, many asylum seekers coming from Haiti, which was quite unstable at the time and continues to be. And these people who were leaving on boats were detained in Guantanamo, a U.S. naval base. But Gitmo isn't part of the U.S. It's leased against the Cuban government's will from Cuba. So...

Again, a place that is neither here nor there. It's not American, but it's occupied by Americans. In fact, the American military. And in keeping people in Guantanamo, they were also able to say, well, you can't claim asylum here because it's not the United States. You aren't allowed, you know, you're not entitled to representation because this isn't the United States. The Constitution doesn't apply. And so this reasoning is being used around the world, right?

from starting in Gitmo all the way to Australia, and now this is a defunct plan, but it's recent, so I'm going to bring it up. The UK had struck a deal with Rwanda to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. And now again, just a couple of days ago, the incoming Trump administration, it transpired that they were trying to find other countries to send asylum seekers to. The Bahamas said no. I think that leaves us with Panama,

a couple of Caribbean states and sort of neighboring territories, I don't know if they're going to say yes, but it's a very appealing way of dealing with what countries perceive as an asylum seeker problem, right? Out of sight, out of mind.

And Aziz, who you brought up, and sorry I didn't get to him sooner, was a remarkably brave young man at the time. He came from Sudan, he wound up on Manus Island, and through his advocacy and activism on the island, when it was very, very difficult to get the word out, right, because there was almost a media blackout of what was going on in these places. They were black holes in so many respects.

was able to connect with an Australian journalist who created a podcast series about life on Manus Island. Aziz was then nominated for a Human Rights Award and somehow finagled the documents he needed to get to Geneva to receive this award. He was planning on going back, and then he ended up staying and getting asylum in Geneva, where he remains. So it's all roads. In other words, all roads lead to Geneva. What I find so interesting

I guess challenging about these ideas is that in some ways what we're actually talking about are the externalities of ideas in some sense, right? You write here quoting Samuel Moyn that freedom and capitalism, ideas both for instance, exist in a kind of forced companionship.

And perhaps similarly, so many of the ideas in your book, the creative reimagining of territory and laws, they seem to offer a solution, but in aggregate subsequently produce future problems or let's say displace problems to other places and then as they're felt by other individuals.

But I wonder if you might just talk a little bit about the balance between principle and practice here and how you see it playing out across this book. You say in multiple instances that it's hard to categorically sort of condemn the decisions in any one space to sort of open or close these

utopias, these non-places or unspaces as they might be. But I just wonder now, thinking through so many of the cases that you looked at, how you understand this balance between maybe promise and peril. So there's a lot going on here, and I'll try to be clear and concise. One of the reasons that I don't want to blanket denounce all of these

what I call weird jurisdictions, even though many, many of them are nefarious and do not contribute to any kind of human flourishing, is that I don't think that we should be as precious as we are about territoriality and governance. Most of these places, if not all of them, are wholly endorsed by the nation state, but they do offer in their various ways a respite from its rules.

That doesn't have to be bad, right? You can imagine a scenario where you would have a free zone where there are very strict environmental controls or no carbon or something that we would all consider broadly positive, like a nature reserve on steroids.

You can also imagine a zone like this being open to all, right, a commons, rather than have building walls and having more restrictions on immigration, for example. So, you know, there's a lot in tension here.

It is both of the nation and outside it. They can be both positive and quite negative a lot of the time. What encourages me is encourages and discourages. I'm really preoccupied with immigration, migration, where people are going to go. And it shocks me to this day, even though I spent decades thinking about this, that there's basically nowhere in the world that people can just show up and live.

Like, that's messed up, right? It's really weird. The world is huge. There's a lot of different places and types of places. And there's nowhere besides a small place in the Arctic, which we could talk about later, that anyone can just go to and make a life.

And that just seems counter to so many of our ideas about what it means to have agency, what it means to be human, what it means to build a life. I don't think you have to be a raging libertarian to get on board with that. And so could such a place offer these concessions? Could you have free zones not for goods or capital, but for people?

I think it's possible. I don't think that these kinds of utopian zones are going to dominate the world and dismantle the nation state as we know it. But in this moment of intense xenophobia, border walls, reimagining of citizenship restrictions, I kind of think it might be the best we can do. I think it's such an important point too, because

What's in tension certainly today and perhaps what we're losing day after day is the concept of a commons, a public space, a space that is open and free of the barriers to entry that so many have. I think in certain cases throughout your book, many have consciously tried to design in very particular ways.

I hate to take broad questions and then throw them into even greater expanse, but as we near the end of your book, you introduce us to the new space industry and the story of Luxembourg. This is very much, let's call it a capital endeavor testing the limits of the final frontier.

Something that you also discuss, at least with respect to Luxembourg, as also a process of sovereign rebranding, perhaps in a moment that's quite important.

But the stakes here are quite high. As you carefully point out, if we think about space, or at least that unknown zone above all of our heads here, as just the next place to colonize, a place that the UN in 1966 considered and declared as our largest commons, what are the implications? How do you maybe tell us the story of Luxembourg, but give us a sense of maybe what comes next?

Luxembourg, we spent quite a lot of time talking about Switzerland. Luxembourg is a close cousin, right? Same business model, small country, landlocked. They had actually a thriving steel industry, but that eventually stopped generating enough revenues and they shut a lot of the steel mines. So Luxembourg in the early 20th century refashioned itself

a la Switzerland as a place where you could park money, have trusts that aren't subject to various taxation laws, kind of taking advantage of the growing movement in the rest of Europe to tax citizens and to levy taxes on corporations as well. So Luxembourg started off there, sort of same areas as the Swiss.

And then, they actually did something really interesting. Rather than just doubling down on the finance, they really started to diversify their offerings to international capital in these unbelievably creative ways. So, around the mid-century,

Radio waves, which were sort of the airwaves, the radio frequencies, were considered government, like public goods. And then Luxembourg decided that it would privatize this. And so it would have commercial radio. Same for TV. It got into the satellite business, right, to support this industry.

So it was always, Luxembourg always had an eye on the intangible and the very, very large. And managed to make money out of what seemed to be nothing, you know, satellite, airways, like things you can't touch, things you can't put in a warehouse. And this all culminated in an interesting scheme that they got into about maybe about seven or eight years ago.

which is the business of outer space mining. Luxembourg realized that, well, two things were happening. Luxembourg was getting a lot of flack for its role in helping companies like Apple avoid European tax, so bad PR.

And at the same time, a couple of people working with the Luxembourg government realized that there's money to be made in Silicon Valley because all of these small and medium space mining companies needed a home base. And what I mean by space mining is literally mining asteroids to maybe strike gold and find precious minerals and maybe even water. So, there's all these resources in outer space, much like on Earth.

It's very difficult to mine them, but we'll get there someday. And what happens if you are in a place where there are no countries, right? There's no national sovereignty in space. Who's going to recognize your property in basically a vacuum, right? Who's going to recognize private property in what is supposed to be a commons per the UN, right?

Turns out that the UN did not make particularly firm pronouncements on the status of private property in outer space. They should have, and to be clear, some of the delegates in these conversations at the UN had anticipated this, and there's some amazing speeches from the time. But there was no such clause in these treaties. And so this opens the door to states in the 21st century to pass their own commercial space laws.

And the way that this works is that they're not claiming sovereignty over this asteroid or that piece of moon, but they are saying that if you have a company in our country, this is what Luxembourg said, if you have a company that's registered in Luxembourg and you go and land on an asteroid and can very like find a bunch of platinum, we will recognize your right to that. And that's the first step.

to creating a market for these products, these space resources. You need one state to at least recognize it in order for you to trade it and transact with it and so on and so forth. Luxembourg wasn't the first nation to pass a law like this. The U.S. had one that considered private property for U.S. citizens only.

But Luxembourg said, you know, we don't have a lot of citizens, so let's open it up to anyone who opens a firm here. And they also created incentives for the firms to come to Luxembourg proper. So there was a two-pronged approach. But the law was really the cornerstone of this project to launch Luxembourg and capitalism into space.

And I think they pulled it off. They pulled it off. There is no space mining currently happening on a large commercial scale, but there is a mission planned. I think it's for early next year at this point by a company called Lunar Outpost, based in Colorado, but they have a Luxembourg connection too. And in fact, NASA is going to pay this company $1,000.

like a dollar or something, to collect some lunar regolith, that's moon dust, and to transfer it to NASA's ownership. And so we are actually on the brink of seeing this market for private property in space that is then going to be, in this case, become U.S. government property. And it's so fascinating. I mean, we're just about to watch history happen, and I feel like we should be talking about this more.

I think I read that you had somewhere else you had written kind of the ingenuity of preposterous laws weave their fictions and create new truths out of nothing. And I found that the story about Luxembourg and sort of

space and what it isn't quite yet, but maybe one day might be sort of fits into that so nicely. To sort of take us from the largest of spaces down to the smallest as we draw to a close, I wonder if you could take us to that tiny place in the Arctic. Tell us a little bit about that, let's say a location that you found unlike so many others

that seem to be welcoming to all. And maybe some of the lessons that that either suggested to you about the ways in which this hidden globe might change, move and evolve as we do as well here on earth. But I'm just curious to get your sense of

what that story represents to you and where you see perhaps the future of the hidden globe as you see it emerging. So in 2019, I traveled to Svalbard, which is a place in the Arctic Circle. It's an archipelago, very cold, that belongs to Norway. And there's no question this is Norwegian territory, but it's subject to a really interesting treaty agreement signed in part of the Treaty of Versailles

That stipulates that Norway, the state, can't discriminate against anyone on this territory based on their nationality. So what this means is that if you're a foreigner and you're there, they're not going to make you present a visa. They're not going to check your ID. You can open a business as easily as a Norwegian. I mean, this is radical. There's no other place like it. Even if you're a Canadian in the U.S., you have to jump through so many hoops compared to that.

So it's kind of a, it has open borders to a point. It's hard to get to, you have to travel through Norwegian airport to get there. So if you have a passport from say India or China or Russia, you have to get a transit visa. So it's open in theory and practice a little bit stickier. What's remarkably interesting to me about Svalbard is that it's a sort of commons that grew out of

a very capitalistic enterprise. So when I went there, I had these ideas in my head that, "Oh, this was like, what a lovely case of post-war internationalism. All the countries got together and decided that there would be a free space."

It couldn't be further from the truth. So what really happened is that at the beginning of the 20th century, a coal magnate named John Monroe Longyear came from Michigan, northern Michigan, also really cold, to Svalbard to open some coal mines. There had been some coal mines there before. This man was known to have a nose for coal. Apparently, he could smell it in the air. So he wound up opening a bunch of coal mines there and...

making a fair amount of money. It wasn't like the greatest business in the world. And he spent quite some time there. But then after World War I, there was a question. Oh, sorry, I should go back. John Monroe Longyear spent quite some time there. And at the time before this treaty was signed, the first 15, 20 years of the 20th century, Svalbard was considered terra nullius. So no country had any claim on it.

There had been people from all kinds of countries living there, but it was actually just the Wild West. They were doing what they wanted. They marked their territory literally by planting stakes in the ground. And there wasn't really anyone to adjudicate whose land was whose. They just kind of winged it. Pretty unheard of these days. So Longyear, while he was setting up his business, was being advised by his lawyer in D.C. on K Street, believe it or not.

And given the indeterminate kind of legality of all of this that was going on, the lawyer kept saying, "Well, you've got to document everything." And so they set up very good records. We put a stake here, we built a hut there, we have a mine here, we created this much in exports, this is how much coal we had. And so they had really good records of what they were doing. And that was because they were very worried that at some point,

Svalbard would no longer be a no man's land. It would be the jurisdiction of a state and the state would be hostile to them. So these were capitalists very anxious about their property rights. And

after World War I, in part to reward Norway for being good during the war, and also because Norway had planted its own stakes and insinuated itself by creating telegraph poles. Basically, Norway had been building some infrastructure there in part to lay its own claim.

Norway was given Svalbard. It was its territory. But because of the lobbying, in part because of the lobbying on the part of these coal guys, the powers agreed that there would be this stipulation of non-discrimination because they were so worried that their property there would be expropriated.

It didn't end up being relevant because they sold the business and moved on with their lives. But I think it's a really interesting case because there was nothing utopian or idealistic about this. This was just like greedy guts from Michigan worried that the Norwegian communists were going to take away his coal. And so what it illustrates to me, and maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but like, you got to hold on to something, is that you can get

commons out of these, you know, capitalistic enterprises. They're not going to be perfect. They're not going to be, you know, havens for people in most respects, but it might at least open up a crack to create something new. And I think we're really in need of these types of structures these days. So I choose to read this positively. I want to thank Atusa for being with us today. Her book, The Hidden Globe, is now available online and at a book

store near you and is highly recommended. I'm Adam McCauley, and you've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thank you all for joining us today. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Mia Sorrenti, and it was edited by Mark Roberts.

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