Читать книгу Global Political Cities - Kent E. Calder - Страница 39

Rigid nation-state bureaucracies and gridlocked national polities find it difficult to exploit the elusive new opportunities recently emerging, especially on politicized regulatory or fiscal matters where their own interests are engaged. Such officials are often attacked politically by rent-seeking interest groups and have limited incentives to resist. “Smart government” options for more decentralized, flexible policymaking, created by the revolution in communications and digitalization technology of recent years, make little impact on bureaucracies due to the limited reward and increased uncertainty risks that such seemingly helpful options entail.²⁴

Bureaucrats and their private-sector clients have incentives to work at preserving existing prerogatives at the cost of broader systemic efficiencies, as George Stigler points out.²⁵ Disruptive technological and political forces conversely empower agile subnational groups, many in the private sector, that adapt more easily and eagerly to digitalization, as a consequence gaining remarkable advantage over nation-states in global analysis and even in global agenda-setting. This erosion of nation-state advantage in response to technological change has been compounded by related developments in international finance and services, not to mention transnational corporate organization.

Local government officials, of course, face many of the same incentives toward routine, risk-reduction, and clientelism that their colleagues confront at the national level. The local officials are, however, typically more responsive to outside pressures for flexibility in the emerging global economy. More limited scale, more limited internal funding, more homogeneous interests, and more intensive competition from other subnational units all encourage local adaptability in the digital age.

International service firms such as Goldman Sachs, Citibank, Bloomberg LLC, Sullivan and Cromwell, Stonebridge Associates, and Lloyd’s of London have been a critical catalyst for the emergence since the 1980s of dense transnational networks that, in turn, have critically begun to shape both domestic and global policy agendas. Those networks have, however, also included a wide range of nonfinancial multinationals, which have sought both the economic efficiencies of transnational operation and the autonomy from national regulation that cross-border activities bring.²⁶ Companies such as IBM, Hewlett Packard, and even General Motors have flocked to off-shore centers ranging from London to Singapore in search of transactional efficiencies that they cannot find at home, further eroding the regulatory power of nation-states.

Small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), numbering more than 125 million worldwide, have also been rapidly expanding their cross-border transactions, creating a new source of demand for global information.²⁷ Amazon, for example, hosts around 2 million third-party sellers. PayPal and Kickstarter provide digital platforms for both transactions and capital generation. Facebook estimates that 50 million SMEs are on its platform, up from 25 million in 2013. On average, 30 percent of the users of these SME services are from outside the United States.

Together, transnational service and manufacturing firms of all sizes, as well as urban activists, have gained formidable political-economic influence of their own. This influence has naturally been concentrated in major global cities, which offer the broadest possible range of professional services and strategic information, as well as the power of proximity. By the late 1980s, such civil-society influence, with its unprecedented combination of scale and mobility, had begun to quietly challenge the power of the nation-state along multiple dimensions.²⁸

The ICT revolution has also been empowering the urban grassroots, with the internet working as an especially powerful catalyst for social change. The internet allows activists to coordinate campaigns, both in advance and live on the front lines. It helps them expose governments and corporations to public ridicule and flexibly release information, often by filming incidents with smartphones. The list of internet-assisted movements worldwide is long, including the Zapatista movement in Mexico; the Friends of the Earth campaign in advance of the Kyoto Summit; the WTO Seattle protests; the “color revolutions” in Georgia and the Ukraine; Iran’s “Twitter revolution”; and the Arab Spring.²⁹

The internet has also allowed grassroots activists to learn from other activists around the world. Catalonian activists in Barcelona, for example, learned from Hong Kong protest tactics, and Occupy Wall Street tactics spread to more than 950 cities across 82 countries in under a month.³⁰ Advanced internet technology, such as the virtual private network (VPN), also make it easier for citizen activists to see truths that authoritarian regimes may choose to suppress.