Cities and Global Governance

New Sites for International Relations

Mark Amen, Noah J. Toly, Patricia L. McCarney, Klaus Segbers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317166085
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Case study rich, this volume advances our understanding of the significance of 'the city' in global governance. The editors call for innovation in international relations theory with case studies that add breadth to theorizing the role sub-national political actors play in global affairs. Each of the eight case studies demonstrates different intersections between the local and the global and how these intersections alter the conditions resulting from globalization processes. The case studies do so by focusing on one of three sub-themes: the diverse ways in which cities and sub-national regions impact nation-state foreign policy; the various dimensions of urban imbrications in global environmental politics; or the multiple methods and standards used to measure the global roles of cities.

Chapter 1
Sighting or Slighting Cities in International Relations

Mark Amen, Noah Toly, Patricia McCarney, and Klaus Segbers

Sometime in 2008, most demographers agree, the world witnessed a major demographic shift of as-yet-unknown consequence. For the first time in history, more than 50% of the world’s population lived in urban areas. Rates of urban settlement are projected to remain high, with cities absorbing the net population growth of the world over the next 20 years. The likely unprecedented effects of this demographic shift (McNeill 2007), coupled with governance trends toward decentralization and reterritorialization, may require social scientists to rethink the role of cities in international relations. Demographic and governance shifts may require a paradigm shift in our understanding of both sites and actors in global politics.

In his 1962 essay on paradigmatic changes in science, Thomas Kuhn retold the tale of the crisis in physics which prepared the way for relativity theory in the early 20th century, locating its origins in the late 17th century. In his 1695 text, Specimen Dynamicum, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz took issue with the emerging consensus in the study of physics, positing the relativity of space, time and motion. Leibniz was a member of a small minority, opposing the prevailing views of Newton and others, who retained the classic conception of absolute space. It took two centuries of various failures in what Kuhn called normal problem solving activity and false starts in theoretical inventions to account for the precarious status of absolute space. Einstein’s theory of relativity emerged in 1905 and, while it is now the basis for prevailing approaches to the discipline, it was not wholly accepted immediately (Kuhn 1970: 72–4). New developments in natural science theory and practice often emerge from claims that are inconsistent with existing literature and sometimes face considerable resistance.

New ideas about social relations are as thoroughly resisted as are those about the physical world. In this chapter, we first describe the ontological and paradigmatic developments preceding modernity and then the more or less widely held modern notion of the world, one characterized by secularity, self-interest, rationality, objectivity, state-centric sovereignty, national cultures, ideological pluralism, market systems, and an interstate arrangement of power to respond to the systemic condition of anarchy. We then summarize how major international relations theories that accompany modernity more or less distinguish themselves from one another based on how they address these characteristics in their respective explanations of the world. We trace the emerging challenges to these theories starting in the 1970s – challenges that come from within the discipline and, as we describe in the final section of the chapter, from scholars in other social sciences who write about the changing role of sub-national units of governance, and especially of the city, in organizing global political relations. How significant are these challenges to modernity? Do they require new theories and, a la Rosenau (1999), a new ontology and paradigm? What of the relationship between cities – even ordinary ones – and governance of global politics, global economics, and the global environment?

Modernity

The changing role of religion in society took one long road to reach its place in the constitution of modernity. The eventual, if only partial, separation of government and religion that has come to be associated with modernity took several turns in time. Recall the departure from feudalism throughout renaissance Europe that included frequent and incomplete attempts to secularize European society vis-à-vis Roman Catholicism. The challenges to sacred authority over secular life took several turns before loosening the hold of Roman Catholicism over monarchy and citizenry alike. Luther’s challenge to the hegemonic position of the Roman Church did create opportunities for religious choice after 1517 in Europe. Yet 100 years later the Thirty Years War was provoked by a coalescence of papal and secular power efforts to repress such choices. In his illuminating description leading to what he calls the “grand ideologies of the nineteenth century,” Steger (2008) documents how political ideologies evolved from the American and French revolutions in competition with “religious doctrines over what ideas and values should guide human communities” (3–4). Still, religious beliefs remain a formative aspect of culture and politics – so much so that it may be impossible to distinguish in any meaningful way between the secular and religious foundations of social relations.

That modernity came to be associated with secularism is therefore a tribute more to the dualistic, either/or way of thinking characteristic of modernity (Walker 2005) than to the actual relationship between the secular and sacred in the everyday lives of people (Braudel 1992 [1979]). As Bruno Latour notes, the “modern constitution” consists in the separation of subject from object, nature from society, and all of those things from a transcendent God (Latour 1993). Yet, at the same time, Latour indicates that we have never really been modern, in the sense that these separations are aspirational – we can neither practically nor completely effect those separations. The modern project was an audacious attempt to make some headway in understanding the complex and interwoven political, economic, cultural, physical, intellectual and religious dimensions comprising social relations by cutting the Gordian Knot that held them all together. To do so by compartmentalizing various aspects, including such dubious dichotomies as that between the sacred and the profane, made immanent sense once the Cartesian-Newtonian framework was deployed as the modus operandi. And the “analytic and secular culture” this framework represented was critical for the eventual role Europe was to play in world affairs. Anderson, for instance, has claimed that this culture “… was the historical phenomenon which perhaps most unerringly singled Europe out from all other major zones of civilization in the pre-industrial epoch” (Anderson 1989 [1974]: 426–7).

The epistemological foundations of modernity were derived from the belief that knowledge is attained through reason and experience and is universally accessible from neutral and objective vantage points assured by methodological rigor. The points of disagreement among the major contributors to this collective turn away from divine inspiration – Newton, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, and Locke, among others – are less important for our purposes than is the combined impact they had on the establishment of the rationalism and empiricism that followed from their intellectual innovation. The Newtonian-Cartesian model of science was based on a materialist and ideational ontology that is inherently secular and essentialist and invites claims about parallels between the physical and human worlds. Presuming that humans could be studied based on assumptions similar to those made about the physical world – that like nature, human behavior abides by a set of laws – then one need only to establish and replicate a methodology allowing for empirical verification of these laws and the behavior conforming to them. The scientific rules for investigation become claims to the accessibility of truth according to methodological rigor and as such become firmly entrenched in intellectual inquiry however slippery the soil in which they are planted!

Hobbes’ writings became the initial political philosophy that accompanied rational-empiricism. His work contributed to the modern formation of the state that over a period of more than 350 years, became the focal point for action in and thinking about the international political world. The ongoing war in Europe that began in 1618 over religious conflicts and monarchical power struggles as well as the English Civil War begun in 1641 signaled widespread crisis throughout most of Europe, warranting the kind of “… retooling [which] is an extravagance to be reserved for the occasion that demands it. The significance of crises is the indication they provide that an occasion for retooling has arrived” (Kuhn 1970: 76). While the significance of some crises is ultimately hard to deny, conditions in mid-17th century Europe provided Hobbes with good evidence that humans lived under a natural state of war.

In Leviathan (1651) Hobbes set out the initial parameters for the modern state-centric and unitary model associated with modernity (Walker 2003). The times confirmed that humans lived in a state of instability, insecurity, and violence. Government was not a natural part of this state of affairs. In this natural setting, each person had the right to everything in the world and because human nature required it, each person mechanistically staked out his rightful claim to everything. This state of anarchy could not be tolerated and so humans were required to enter into a social contract, thereby creating government and forming a civil society wherein the exercise of rights to all are foregone in exchange for security. The social contract should form a strong central authority – absolutism – as a necessary step to avoid the evil of discord and civil war. This civil society cedes their natural rights to a sovereign authority for the sake of security. Abuses by this authority are the price for security but severe abuse will lead to rebellion.

While concurring with the notion of social contract, Locke (1689) tempered the absolutist state by asserting that certain rights, including those to private property, are a part of human nature and not to be abridged by government. Hobbes’ view of human nature was far more pessimistic than was that of Locke who believed that while humans are selfish by nature, they are also reasonable and tolerant of others. Hence their formation of a civil society and government rather than war to resolve conflicts also required that government have checks on its own sovereignty (e.g., separation of powers, revolution). These ideas lay the ground for some of the central political tenets of the Enlightenment as well as the revolutions in the United States and France in the latter part of the 18th century: individual rights and freedoms, democratic government, religious tolerance, and reason as the basis for legitimate use of state sovereignty.

In his recent work on ideology and imaginary, The Rise of the Global Imaginary (2008), Manfred Steger offers a compelling analysis of the role nationalism played in solidifying the state system during the 19th century. Steger acknowledges the rich literature on nationalism as both ideological and cultural condition (e.g., Archer et al. 2008), yet sides with Benedict Anderson (1991) in adopting the latter position. Steger sees the American and French revolutions as the historical events for which the “national imaginary” was developed. This imaginary – the nation – served as the political background for communities. The national became the way to think about the community as the “polis” (Walker 2003) and it was the avenue that led to legitimacy: the state grounded in its people.

The national became the leitmotif for all ideologies in the 19th century (e.g., liberalism, conservatism, socialism). Each tied its particular values and agenda to the national as a way to rationalism its prescriptions. As Steger notes

… each ideology deployed and assembled its core concepts – liberty, progress, race, class, rationality, tradition, community, welfare, security, and so on – in specific and unique ways. But the elite codifiers of these ideational systems pursued their specific political goals under the background umbrella of the national imaginary. (2008: 9)

Ideologies secured the national. When they came into governmental power, the advocates of all these ideologies invoked the national interest in the policies they pursued. By doing so, they not only perpetuated the idea of the national but even more so solidified the institutionalization of the state as the only form of the polis.

The national imaginary and ideologies were not alone in bringing the state systems of political life to the forefront during the Enlightenment. Beginning with the industrial revolution in England around 1754, both the thinking about and practice of economic life fueled the movement toward a national economy. There is no better account than Braudel’s (1992 [1979]) of how this transformation occurred in the everyday life of Europe. In various stages throughout Europe in the 19th century, production moved from family based workshops, through manufactories to the mass production of factories and the development of markets through trade within Europe and, with the expansion of the colonial practice, between it and the world to its East, West, and South.

Smith (1776) provided the first microeconomic analysis of how this new system of wealth generation worked for “the nation”. In doing so, he outlined the economic foundations of the liberal state. His labor theory of value – that individual laborers will continue to impart a value to raw material that is greater than the wage they will receive for so doing – gave classical economists a basis for claiming that this new system was capable of growth forever. Sympathizing with Smith’s concern that government’s role in the economy be limited, Ricardo strengthened Smith’s account of the pricing system in the market and added a theory of trade that subsequently led to the roll-back of mercantilist policy. These classical foundations for the liberal state were premised on the notion that the national wealth was no more than the sum of its members collaborating to satisfy their individual self-interests. As Smith noted

… man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can … show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. (Book 1, chapter 2, p. 18)

This was the kind of individual handed over to both the state and the economy in the classical and Lockean statements of political economic theory. This was the person to make the center of society and on which to form its institutions. But could this sort of individual sustain society? That question was a source of debate throughout the 19th and much of the 20th centuries. As this debate unfolded and favored one or the other kind of individual, the national imaginary matured and became a “given” cultural context for the practice of both politics and economics. Marx’ critique of the labor theory of value, for instance, merely led neoclassical economists like Jevons, Menger, and others to redirect attention away from the laborer to the consumer. Building on their work, Marshall summarized the propensities to spend and save in marginal theory and offered a demonstration that consumers were the real source of value creation since they had needs that were infinitely capable of being fulfilled. Or again in the latter part of the 19th century, legal precedent established that the corporation was to be treated as a person with rights commensurate with humans. In the political arena, and despite the persist practice of colonialism, debates about political rights for citizens living in colonizer countries slowly chipped away privileging white property-owning males.

These debates about the individual not only solidified the link between the state and the national culture; they also strengthened the nation-state as the primary if not sole source of authority and power within an expanding, world-wide inter-state system. Modernity, therefore, also included arrangements for the distribution and exercise of power among the states engaged in world affairs. A balance of power system with Britain in the central role was the arrangement that emerged at the Congress of Vienna (1815) and was embodied in the Concert of Europe. This system remained more or less stable for a century. As Anne Mayhew points out in her excellent review essay on Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, the One Hundred Years’ Peace rested on four institutions that were crucial to the political economic world order of the 19th century: “a balance of political power, the international gold standard, a self-regulating market system, and the liberal state” (Mayhew 2000: 1). Until early on in the 20th century, these four institutions were in “overdrive.” The modus operandi until World War I was for Europe to refine and extend these institutional practices both at home and in its colonial relations.

The expansion of these liberal institutions resulted in increasing crises and instability brought on by inter-institutional incompatibilities or contradictions. For instance, in his analysis – the ‘double movement’ – (1957 [1944]: 130ff) Polanyi pointed to the untenable arrangement among these institutions. As the principle of “gain” spread among state, it led to destabilizing tendencies both from within states and in the international system as a whole. The state was increasingly tasked with finding policies that responded to domestic pressures that would simultaneously put in place a self-regulating market system and also address the rising demands for protection from the system by various social groups (i.e., laborers, land owners, bankers, merchants). The stress these demands put on domestic life was compounded by the spread of market society across the world system. While the self-regulating market system matured in England in the first half of the century, “[w]ithin a generation the whole human world was subjected to its undiluted influence.”(1957 [1944]: 30).

International Relations

World War I was such a dramatic systemic crisis that it provoked relatively rapid development of a body of international relations literature. Until the early part of the 20th century, only a few albeit well known historians, philosophers, and political economists had made explicit attempts to explain international relations (e.g., Thucydides, Machiavelli, Kant, and Marx). But in the period following the first war, two distinct theoretical trends emerged and came to dominant the new field of international relation and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Boxes, Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Sighting or Slighting Cities in International Relations
• 2 The Emerging Global Landscape and the New Role of Globalizing City Regions
• 3 Paradiplomacy in the Developing World: The Case of Brazil
• 4 The Emergence of Cross-Border Regions and Canadian-United States Relations
• 5 The Evolution of City Indicators: Challenges and Progress
• 6 Auditing Cities through Circles of Sustainability
• 7 Cities, the Environment, and Global Governance: A Political Ecological Perspective
• 8 Cities and Global Environmental NGOs: Emerging Transnational Urban Networks?
• 9 The Global City Today: Advantages of Specialization and Costs of Financialization
• 10 World City Networks: Measurement, Social Organization, Global Governance, and Structural Change
• Concluding Remarks
• Index