Читать книгу Global Political Cities - Kent E. Calder - Страница 44

The global political economy has changed profoundly over the past four decades. The geopolitical changes have been dramatic and relatively clear-cut, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, greater North-South interaction, and the rise of China foremost among them. Socioeconomic transformation has also been momentous, although less visible and often ambiguous in its long-term implications. Technology and finance have been especially powerful drivers of those sociopolitical changes, although their relative importance has varied from time to time and from country to country. Finance, broadly speaking, propelled global connectivity during the 1990s and the early 2000s, and data flows have assumed greater prominence since the Lehman crisis of 2008.

Beginning in the late 1970s, a discontinuous transformation of global geography and geopolitics—a veritable sea change—has altered our political-economic world in fundamental ways. The digital revolution is the ultimate driver at the core of a holistic transformational triad with financial and geopolitical dimensions as well. Yet the transformation goes far beyond technology alone and shapes relationships at all levels of international affairs, including profoundly political dimensions, such as global governance.

The sea change in the role of cities in global affairs is of particular note. That historic transformation is leading cities in general to unprecedented prominence in the global system, as the centrality of nations declines in the post–Cold War world. It is also transforming them within—making them increasingly active stages for political action, even as they become more influential actors in global affairs. The transformational triad is thus contributing much to the birth and flowering of the truly global political city.

The recent changes are technologically driven but sweepingly global and ultimately political-economic in their implications. At the same time, those changes are deeply rooted in the power of proximity, as is the enduring role of cities. Cities allow human beings to interact much more directly with one another than does any other sort of social environment. When their dwellers are energetic, creative, and cosmopolitan, the social benefits of urban interactions are amplified. And when such city dwellers are connected quickly and efficiently to the broader world, the felicitous social effects are still greater.⁴⁵

The economic costs of sociopolitical connectivity have fallen steadily, and often sharply, for most of the past century. During the interwar period (1920–1960), sea-freight rates dropped sharply. This decline, important for world trade and for the prosperity of port cities, was followed by a revolution in telecommunications costs, in the wake of World War II, and subsequently in air fares. Computerization then expanded information flows, followed over the past decade by the emergence of social media. Deepened corporate use of the internet, to connect with domestic suppliers and customers as well as foreign operations, also enhanced global connectivity, while financial transformation generated the resources to support an invigorated civil society. Collectively, these changes sharply expanded first the economic and then the sociopolitical role of dense network nodes, with large, cosmopolitan cities being the greatest beneficiaries.

Post–Cold War political changes and the emergence of a more integrated global system have accelerated the rise of global political cities still further. With the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact no longer impediments, information flows more easily and rapidly among the great global nodes of the international system than ever before, benefiting the knowledge industries and political-economic interests of large core cities such as Washington, New York, and London, in particular. And those data flows, especially those occurring across borders in our world of growing interdependence, lie increasingly beyond the ability of government to control, despite the determined efforts of a few authoritarians. The origins of this historic restructuring in technology, finance, and geopolitics are complex, and its consequences are sweeping. And the transformed, vitalized institutions of major global political cities, together with reformed political configurations within, have begun to reshape international politics as a whole.