Читать книгу Global Political Cities - Kent E. Calder - Страница 10

Over a quarter century ago, building on important research of the previous decade, Saskia Sassen coined the notion of the global city to conceptualize the changing character of cities engaging intensely on socioeconomic terms with other parts of the world.⁴ She notes that these “cities that never sleep,” including New York, London, and Tokyo, are structurally different from other communities of comparable scale yet lacking global reach, owing to their intense interaction with the broader world. Sassen sees these cosmopolitan communities as distinctive in four respects: their key role as command points for organizing the world economy; key locations for finance and other specialized services; sites for production, including the production of innovations; and markets for the products and innovations produced.⁵

As a result of their cosmopolitan interpersonal networks and compelling economic role, Sassen also finds, global cities are growing more important as intermediaries and connectors on the international scene. Yet neither Sassen, a sociologist, nor other early specialists on such global cities probed deeply into their explicitly political role in world affairs. Her analysis focused heavily on the economic, and particularly the financial, functions of urban centers.

Subnational actors have also received significant analytic attention in international relations theory for more than four decades. They are a central concern, for example, of classic works in international affairs such as Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye’s Power and Interdependence in the late 1970s.⁶ Virtually all subnational analyses, however, have focused on transnational actors, apart from cities, such as multinational corporations and global religious organizations such as the Catholic Church.

Geographically defined subnational units, like the great cities of the world, have been accorded remarkably little attention. Yet such communities—crucial locales for the exchange of ideas and expertise—are arguably the most central dimension of the subnational universe, which itself is growing ever more important on the international scene. As Akihiko Tanaka and other close observers of the international political economy have contended, decentralized patterns of transnational interaction and governance are proliferating, drawing the world closer to the Middle Ages paradigm.⁷ Transnational networks are growing ever more functionally important.⁸ And these interactions have an explicitly political dimension that remains to be systematically explored.

At the microsocietal level, increasing attention has been given to the policy-advisory system in key nations of the world, especially the United States, and the sociopolitical context within which that system is evolving. Hugh Heclo, for example, points to the importance of issue networks, while James McGann and Donald Abelson stress the catalytic role of think tanks in policy formation.⁹ Daniel Drezner and others have drawn attention to the broader range of institutions involved in policy advice, including advisory committees, academic experts, nongovernmental organizations (NGO), and employer and employee associations.¹⁰ Yet few have focused explicitly on the political impact of such growing advisory institutions and networks or on how their development enhances the global political role of cities per se.