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This volume examines the rising role that large, cosmopolitan urban centers—including but by no means limited to national capitals—have recently come to play in global political-economic affairs. It also explores why that civic role in global affairs is rising. Its point of departure is the latent, untapped strength with which the power of proximity invests cities, if only constraints on the realization of that latent vitality can be released and its periodic dangers contained. The book argues that civic leaders are more effective than national governments in making and implementing policies in most human-security areas, in particular, since national political constraints are relatively relaxed in those spheres.

The volume also contends that cities exploit the locational power of proximity that such communities provide to nurture idea industries. These human networks, including diverse membership from the think tank, mass media, and academic worlds, provide critical intelligence to policymakers and help set policy agendas. In interaction with political interests, such idea industries transform concepts into practical advice for both local and national authorities, in policy-setting arenas outside government that are best characterized in their political dimension as penumbras of power.

The urban power of proximity can also provide cities with compelling global influence as a dramatic stage. Elites can be assembled in close proximity at global gatherings such as the Davos World Economic Forum. Grassroots groups can also be amassed in dramatic proximity to power centers such as the White House, the IMF, Tiananmen Square, or the Legislative Council in Hong Kong.

The most effective cities at influencing global agendas, as noted earlier, are those with four well-developed functional characteristics: extensive penumbras of power, cosmopolitan political forums, proactive civic leaders, and insistent grassroots movements. Innovative urban sociopolitical communities consequently tend to flourish best in countries that are open, politically connected, socially cohesive, and supportive of education. The overall impact of cities in international politics thus tends to be stabilizing and liberalizing—contrary to the more rigid, destabilizing, and all too frequently ineffective role of nation-states.

Global Political Cities begins by chronicling the struggle of cities and nation-states for primacy across the ages. This chronicle starts in chapter 2 by considering the role of politically unencumbered classical cities, such as those of the Silk Road, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Hanseatic League, as commercial and information-exchange centers for the broader world. The book then shows how nation-states were legitimated, through the Peace of Westphalia, as the central actors of international affairs and why cities subsequently receded, both politically and economically, into a more subordinate and peripheral collective standing.

Chapter 2 also shows how revolutions in military technology and in methods of warfare and social coercion once played important roles in assuring the centrality of nation-states. Conversely, chapter 3 demonstrates how the waning of interstate military conflict, deepened transnational economic interdependence, and a revolution in communications technology have all strengthened the hand of cities over the past few decades. Global political cities have emerged since the 1970s through a holistic sea change of information technology, finance, and geopolitics. This transformational triad of forces has at once sharply eroded the dominance of nation-states and also enlarged the potential role of global cities in international political-economic affairs. Technological change, interactive with finance, has been gnawing at nation-state dominance and restoring historic subnational capabilities. The rising political role of cities has led, in turn, to a growing decentralization of global political-economic power and the diffusion of international governance capabilities from nations toward cities and other subnational units, such as mass media and think tanks. We witness this trend clearly in world affairs today.

Chapter 2 provides a detailed historical examination highlighting the post-Westphalian revival of cities as political actors, followed by an exploration in chapters 3 and 4 of the technological and financial forces, in dynamic combination, that animate global political cities. Beginning with chapter 5, the book then considers the explicitly political role of major global cities over the past few decades along four functional dimensions: (1) the operation of politically connected advisory networks, which this analysis refers to as “penumbras of power”; (2) the role of intermittent political forums in shaping decisionmaking; (3) the role of grassroots groups in setting agendas; and (4) the activities of local leaders, principally mayors, in linking their cities to international politics.

Along all four dimensions, activities at the city level are growing more vigorous and globally influential, albeit with substantial cross-national variation. Devolution of decisionmaking responsibility from the nation to the city is occurring at different rates and in different ways from country to country, of course. Devolution from the state to the market also has varied profiles. Broadly speaking, it is useful to distinguish between developmentalist and market-conforming approaches at the level of both cities and nation-states, with the developmentalist approach most common and clearly emphasized in late-developing political economies, including the cities of France and several East Asian nations.²⁵

Among the constituent elements of global political cities, mayors, in particular, are growing more central globally in addressing pressing human-security issues such as transportation, public health, and environmental protection. They are also playing key roles in assuring conventional public security, including protection against terrorists. The penumbras of power now emerging in major cities—including influential networks of think tank and university researchers as well as lobbyists and analysts with multilateral institutions—are also expanding rapidly. They are exercising increasingly independent influence on policymaking. Meanwhile, grassroots groups, empowered by social media, are growing more active, while advances in connectivity are making intermittent forum gatherings, ranging from Davos to the Belt and Road Forum, more globally influential.

The collective impact of these sociopolitical developments within cities themselves is at once cosmopolitan and moderating for the global system as a whole, despite occasional disruptive outliers such as the recent Hong Kong crisis. The changes motivate cities to offset the destabilizing and chauvinistic impact that nation-states have so often had on world affairs across the three and a half centuries of their dominance. Cities are becoming, broadly speaking, more articulate and proactive forces for peace, stability, and democracy in international relations, offsetting more parochial trends at the national level.