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GLOBAL POLITICAL CITIES IN INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

There once was a time, in the era of Plato, Aristotle, and Pericles, when cities were the central units of international affairs. They were valued way stations on the Silk Road and core constituent units of the Holy Roman Empire, as well as central members of the Hanseatic League. Until the mid-seventeenth century, the role of cities overshadowed that of nations on the global scene.

Despite the Westphalian Peace of 1648, and over three centuries of nation-state dominance in the political realm thereafter, the central role of cities in commerce, education, finance, and cultural exchange has persisted. Indeed, with sustained economic growth and increased economic interdependence since World War II, their scope has steadily expanded, especially in the international realm. Since the 1970s, the role of cities in mediating multiple forms of transnational interaction outside politics, and in becoming a platform for debates of global importance, has clearly grown.

With a historic migration from countryside to city gaining momentum over the past two decades, particularly in the developing world, cities are increasingly the principal home of humanity. Indeed, 55 percent of the world’s people live in cities.¹ Many of those urban centers are naturally growing dirty, poor, unhealthy, and environmentally unfriendly. Many are politically restive, crime ridden, and unstable. And they have been ravaged of late, as over history, by pandemic scourges.

Yet cities also have a latent potential for creativity and growth, through exploiting the varied advantages provided by the geographic concentration of skills that naturally prevails in major cities. That “power of proximity”—particularly of gathering talented, educated people of diverse backgrounds to interact personally—leverages the potential social, economic, and political role of urban configurations, even if at times it also magnifies their danger.² Cities have enormous potential, on both the domestic and international stages, if only the constraints that limit urban interaction can be safely and rationally released.³