Cities and Global Governance: State Failure or a New Global Order?

Introduction

The political theorist Benjamin Barber recently made an eye-catching call for a global ‘parliament of mayors’. ¹ His argument was that the failure of the state (and of the wider society of states) to make successful inroads into serious transnational governance issues, such as climate change, called forth a pressing need for alternative global governance arrangements. At the same time he argued that states have become ever more distant from their citizens, who are increasingly alienated by a widening democratic deficit. For Barber it is in the renaissance of urban life that solutions to these dual crises of the nation-state can be found. He wants to see new scale-jumping municipal democratic bodies emerge, harnessing technological advances to join up local participation with novel transnational urban assemblies. And, although calls for the establishment of a global parliament of mayors may sound radical, Barber claims that it would be, in effect, merely a formalisation of well-established political trends.

A networked form of city-led global governance is not, for Barber, a utopian blueprint, but simply the identification and amplification of existing trajectories and concrete practices. The capacities for such governance roles already exist in the various global city networks that have been constructed. Voluntary and informal co-operation already occur across the many city networks that have been built – of which the C40 Climate Leadership Group, Metropolis, the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), Mayors for Peace, Sister Cities International, United Cities and Local Government (UCLG), or the European Forum for Urban Security (EFUS), are but the tip of a huge iceberg. A project is currently underway at University College London to map and assess the nature of contemporary city networks and their growing diplomatic connections. Initial estimates suggest there may be over 200 such city networks, of various types. ²

It is clear, then, that we already inhabit a ‘decentralized planet of networked cities, provinces and regions [which] while obviously dominated by traditional nation-states … encompasses a wide variety of sub-state and non-state actors, from multi-national corporations and global financial institutions to civic NGOs and global social movements’. ³ These networks have grown in the spaces and gaps left by the state’s governance failures. However, what is critical to note – and this is a point that Barber leaves unmade – is that such transnational urban networks are not simply a challenge to the state. This is not a zero-sum game, where the rise of cities necessarily means the decline of states. The rise of the city should not be seen as a symptom of the exhaustion of the state as a political form, but, rather, a facet of the adaptation of the state as it tries to cope with a changing environment. In this sense, it is not the state that is failing, but a particular historical iteration of the state – the nation-state – that is being reassembled into a new form. It is not international society that is failing, but a historically specific form of international society, which is now evolving in an attempt to transcend its limitations. And a new historically distinctive form of the city – the Global City – has become a critical component of the devolved governance strategy of leading liberal states at the contemporary conjuncture. Such cities are, then, a facet of a historically specific form of world order. ⁴

This is an emerging order full of contradictions and unresolved dilemmas. The empowerment of cities is necessary for them to fulfil their crucial roles in a devolved governance regime. Yet, despite having created the conditions in which certain cities have thrived, states still retain an ambivalent relationship with the new global cities that their own policies have generated. Nowhere is this ambivalence more apparent than in the run up to the global summit, United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (UN-Habitat III), which is due to take place in Quito, Ecuador, on 17–20 October 2016. States have commissioned UN- Habitat to outline a 20 year strategy for sustainable, equitable and socially just urban development. On the one hand, the central role ascribed to cities in driving such initiatives is an acknowledgement by states that cities are the only administrative entities that can put these aspirations for sustainable development into practice: this is, after all, a ‘new urban agenda’. On the other hand, it is striking that the leadership of cities was not even consulted in the preparatory conferences running up to the main event. As the Mayor of Berlin, Michael Muller, complains: ‘countries are largely agreeing on preparatory work [for Habitat III] without the contribution of cities, even though it is the future of cities that is in question. This is absurd’. ⁵ Until the World Association of Major Metropolises (Metropolis) forced the issue, and gained urban representation at these sessions, cities and their leaders were not even part of the formal discussions on the new urban future.

States retain a residual reluctance to let go of control. In a sense, they are in denial about the emerging form of global order that they have created. And yet, letting go is likely to be the only way in which the desired outcomes can be achieved within the governance frameworks that states have themselves helped to construct. States seem to realise that they must empower cities to take a seat at the top table – the complexity of global governance issues demands that. Yet, perhaps states fear where this may lead – the reflexes of centuries of sovereignty are hard to retrain. In the longer term, possible serious tensions between cities (growing in authority, power and legitimacy) and states (the traditional possessor of these qualities) cannot be ruled out. But in the present moment, the rise of the city also reflects a transformation in the nature of the state itself, and of the wider international society of which each state is a part. The concern of this article is to show just how and why cities have become so significant to an emerging form of global order whose very existence signals the reality of profound international change.

The problem for International Relations (IR) scholars is that the shape of the historiography of the discipline has made it difficult to even see these types of developments, let alone theorise them adequately. ⁶ Cities have long been viewed as sub-national political entities, internalised within the territorial boundaries of their host states, and therefore located at a different level of analysis to those that concern much mainstream IR scholarship. There is a very marginal literature on the paradiplomacy of cities, while Chadwick Alger’s work on the role of cities in the UN system has been a significant contribution. ⁷ But, in general, cities have been deemed relatively unimportant. However, the growing appreciation of significant changes to the urban fabric over the past in few decades – particularly its transnational character – is beginning to reverse this neglect.

The immense growth of urban settlements is a core feature of the 21st century. The rural world of yesterday has disappeared, as populations have either been drawn from the land to seek the opportunities that only city life can offer, or been pushed out from traditional agricultural occupations by a combination of technological advance and structural adjustment programmes. Concentrated into just 2% of the world’s surface, the great urban hubs now hold over half of the world’s population, and it is estimated that by 2050 over 66% of the world’s population will live in cities. ⁸ UN-Habitat has documented how the number of cities in the world with populations greater than 1 million increased from 75 in 1950 to 447 in 2011. ⁹ In the decade between 1990 and 2000 alone there was a 30% increase in the size of urban settlements in the developed world and a 50% increase in the developing world.

As expanding cities merge into each other, they have generated vast conurbations that stretch across multiple national territories. Contemporary urban forms are unlike any in the historical record – stretching skyward in the immense verticality of the central business district, unfurling horizontally, spurred on by new information and transport technologies to cannibalise the national space, and often to break through its bounds to form distinctive transnational urban regions that tie stretches of global space together in novel ways. ¹⁰ Such cities also exhibit marked polarisation, and have generated huge informal settlements and slums that are as much a part of the new global city as the relatively tiny, yet globally connected, throbbing technological hub of the central business districts. Advances in information and communications technologies have given city networks global reach and augmented the centrality and power of an exclusive set of nodal points. The construction of the global digital infrastructure, in combination with the stitching together of supra-territorial urban regions via transport technologies such as high speed rail links and air-traffic routes, offers a 21st-century transnational equivalent of the ways in which networks of canals and roads integrated the territorial space of nation-states in earlier centuries. The global city network is the material exoskeleton of globalisation, and its nodes the command hubs for the governance of many kinds of global flows. ¹¹ Indeed, the construction of this planetary urban infrastructure represents the emergence of a ‘large technical system’ that in itself may be seen to indicate a shift in international order. ¹²

Such cities are being shaped by exposure to the logics of market forces, tapping into and redirecting flows of global capital, drawing their development from streams of financial speculation in real estate and infrastructure projects. In this sense the transformation of the city fabric has been driven by the far reaching neoliberal restructuring of the global economy that began in the 1970s, and the subsequent period of accelerated globalisation. Transformed by the project of leading states to build a global market society, cities have been swollen by the full force of the unique agglomeration economies that they foster. Over 80% of global economic output is generated by contemporary cities. They are the points at which productivity, innovation, and wealth converge. ¹³

Changes to the material form of cities over the last four decades have been extensively studied by scholars working in fields such as Urban Studies and Political Geography. This ‘invisible college’ ¹⁴ of scholars has done much to help us to come to terms with the dynamics of urban transformation, developing theoretical frameworks and empirical data. However, this literature is strikingly devoid of a broad geo-political and geo-historical perspective, which IR scholars should be well placed to provide. As IR scholars have belatedly recognised these trends, we have moved in recent years from a situation in which cities were barely discussed at all in IR (notable exceptions are to be found in the world-systems literature), ¹⁵ to a steady increase in the number of articles and book length scholarly treatments of the global city phenomenon within an IR context. ¹⁶

IR scholars have been particularly well placed to reveal the lack of political analysis in the global cities literature. The early work of scholars in the global city tradition had focussed primarily on the economic attributes of such cities. ¹⁷ The IR contribution has so far considered the role of cities in environmental global governance, the increasing importance of city mayors as international actors, the role of cities as regional hubs, the connection of cities to the historical development of the international system, and the uneven relative power of certain cities and the origins of such power. ¹⁸ However, my contention would be that there has to date (even in scholarship coming from an IR perspective) been an inadequate appreciation of why the global city emerged at the point in history that it did, and in the distinctive morphological form that it did. Even Saskia Sassen is content to link this urban form to globalisation, while failing to probe further the underlying form of international society that underpins and enables it. Economic functionalism, although clearly part of the story, is an inadequate explanation for how the political conditions of possibility for such cities were generated. It is also a weak guide to the very profound political implications of the emergence of global cities.

What I want to demonstrate in this article is that it is not simply a widening of the field of vision that is required here, but an appreciation that the very emergence of the ‘global city’ (whether we interpret it as a conceptual device or heuristic, as a material entity, as a political actor, as a discourse) tells us something very important about international political order at the contemporary conjuncture. Such cities are both an indicator of and a result of a deep shift in the nature of international society. The consequences of this must be wide-ranging; for the form of political order that international society has provided has underpinned international life throughout the modern period. Once we appreciate this, a whole set of questions open up that are vital to the more mainstream agenda of scholars of world politics; questions of state transformation, the nature of global governance architecture, international security and the character of international political order. IR scholars should be taking note of these urban developments, and asking: what are the political conditions of possibility that allow for such a fragile network of global cities to emerge, and to endure, in a world where security has been the preserve of the state, and cities have long ago lost their pre-modern defensive capabilities? What does the emergence of the global city tell us about the changing nature of the state, and of state sovereignty, territoriality and bordering practices in the early 21st century? What forms of identity emerge within the political spaces of global cities, and how far might they challenge a modern subjectivity and sense of citizenship constructed around the nation? What does the rescaling of the city – and the state – tell us about the ongoing tensions between an international system built upon the foundation of territorial sovereignty, and a fundamentally transnational capitalist economic system? These are issues that will feature in the following discussion. There is a vast and under-explored research programme here, and one function of this article is to try to make visible its outlines.

The article proceeds in three sections. Each section delves progressively deeper into the issues indicated by the shift in urban morphology and city practices. The first section looks at the role that cities have been playing in an emerging, decentred, global governance architecture. The second seeks to explain how and why this architecture developed, and why cities are a critical component of it. The third section then seeks to unravel some of the political implications of these developments. It argues that the evolution of international political order, towards a nascent form of global order, augers a period of transition for states, cities and international society alike, and examines some of the consequences of this transition at the contemporary conjuncture. In particular, this final section of the article warns that, even though an urban renaissance may be necessary to deal with problems of a transnational scope, it represents a disruption to core ordering principles such as sovereignty and territoriality. It therefore brings in its wake the risk of reopening many of the problems of political order that the modern international system emerged to resolve. In this sense, cities are likely to be central spaces in which systemic contradictions and distortions will be played out in the 21st century, and in which novel forms of political, social and economic practices will emerge.

Decentring Governance: Towards Global Order

As Barber’s recent intervention makes clear, cities take their place in an emerging global governance regime that has unfurled gradually over recent decades. The global governance features of global cities may be seen as a facet of an emerging global order, imperfectly worked out and feeling its way into the 21st century. Such an emerging global order may be seen as a historically specific iteration of international political order, and rests upon the bedrock of the international society of states, which provides it with its conditions of possibility.

The concept of international order lies at the core of international theory. Differing interpretations of the character of this order continue to divide the discipline. There is a tension between those that view international political order as a set of stable and regular patterns of behaviour (for example, the school of structural realism, which concerns itself primarily with recurrent patterns of power balancing between states across the span of history), and those that view order in a more normative and less mechanical sense, stressing the evolution of norms, rules and values. Hedley Bull argued that the common rules and institutions developed by states over time constituted not just a system of interaction, but an international society. ¹⁹ It is this understanding of international order that allows insight into how states might collectively develop new norms that can fundamentally alter the environment in which they operate. ²⁰ I want to show here how the historical evolution of the dominant norms in international society, specifically the centrality of liberal ideas, backed by a particular configuration of material power, has begun to reshape international society in interesting ways, changing the nature of the state itself, as well as its relation to other entities and actors, including cities previously internalised within the national polity.

In this sense, the emergence of both global cities and global governance is a result of the distinctive path taken by the international society of states in the latter part of the 20th century. For much of the modern period the values or goals of international society aimed at little more than coexistence; the norms of political sovereignty and non-intervention, for example, were directed towards the guarantee of political independence for states, and the regulation of the conduct of conflict and warfare between them. The key value of this form of political order was the survival of international society itself.

Although this type of minimal – or pluralist – international society seemed especially valuable in the Cold War context in which Bull wrote, the character of political order has undergone an important shift since the mid 20th-century. The narrow focus of a pluralist international society on issues such as war, peace and diplomacy has begun to give way to a more extensive complex interdependence aimed at regulating an increasingly complex global economy, and dealing with transnational issues such as climate change, or the management of volatile global markets, or the emergence of transnational forms of criminal activity and security threats.

The issue of how a traditional sovereignty-based order might come to regulate the transnational forces and transnational spaces that are a feature of the current conjuncture becomes a key problem of our time. This mismatch between the transnational scale of such problems and the resources of international society to deal with them seems to indicate a functional requirement for such problems to be devolved to other actors who do have the scope to make an impact. It is here that new practices of global governance are emerging – and it is this requirement that scale-jumping cities are well placed to fill. In this sense, global cities may be seen as part of an emerging global order generated by a shift in the normative structure of international society.

Cities are thus able to take their place among a range of other actors in a nascent global governance architecture. Such a global order has been constructed on the foundations of an increasingly solidarist liberal international society. But it is also clear to English School thinkers that the nascent global order contains many points of tension and contradiction with that earlier pluralist form of international order. ²¹ This has, of course, long been the contention of globalisation theorists, particularly the more sophisticated ‘transformationalist’ variant. ²² But this question of order transition needs a more sophisticated and nuanced interpretation than much of the globalisation literature offers. Rather than a simple transition from the national to the global scale, we seem to be seeing the emergence of complex multi-nodal and multi-scalar forms of governance, where the emerging links between different actors are ‘crystallising into transnational webs of power’, and states are increasingly becoming enmeshed in these webs. ²³

Global governance, then, offers a compromise: a mid-point on the spectrum of order, somewhere between the pluralist anarchical international society, and world government. It involves the empowerment of many actors above and below the state, including the individuals, social movements, NGOs and institutions that comprise civil society. It involves a fusion or recalibration of public and private actors, coming together in hybrid functional networks to find solutions to problems of collective action where states have been wanting. These are forms of interaction that are horizontal, non-hierarchical, and embrace the bottom-up dynamics of self-organisation. The normative proposition is that they bypass vertical, hierarchical, and centralised (statist) structures where power has so often ossified in the history of the 21st century. This derives from a set of liberal philosophical principles, particularly those of market exchange and mutuality. It lays emphasis upon an expansion of private authority in complex governance and the provision of public goods – whether this manifests itself in private legal systems such as commercial arbitration, or the use of technical knowledge, such as in the work of credit ratings agencies. ²⁴ This emerging system is no longer effectively captured by either the anarchical or hierarchical categories of international structure, but represents instead a form of heterarchy – a system in which political authority and governance are shared among a variety of actors. ²⁵

In delegating state authority to a range of other actors, via its fusion of public and private governance, this form of global order is inherently decentralising. The importance of contemporary cities to this global governance system lies not just in their proximity to the local, nor in their transnational reach, but also in the way that they have developed capabilities to tie these scales together to generate the capacity for novel forms of governance. The growing network of 83 major cities represented by the C40 Climate Leadership Group offers a greater scalar reach than any state can achieve. There is a growing literature on global governance in IR that stresses the hybrid nature of transnational governance. ²⁶ Many of the same drivers that have allowed actors such as international NGOs to take up an important role in such arrangements are also applicable to the rise of cities. In this sense, the global city is revealed as part of an emergent hybrid global order, in which the primacy of the state appears to have been either eroded or abdicated, and new practices are developing. As cities have increasingly become a core feature of this governance regime, they have made forays into influencing global governance outcomes, and they have begun to exhibit capacities that might lead us to think that, as Barber clearly does, they will play an ever greater role in future governance arrangements. Today, we see the emerging governance capacities of cities in multiple spheres. Novel developments in scale-jumping city governance can be seen across the political, security and economic domains.

In the political domain one notable feature of changing urban governance, and one that contains significant implications for the future of global governance, is the rise to prominence of the city mayor. ²⁷ Charismatic global city mayors such as Michael Bloomberg in New York, or Boris Johnston in London, have enjoyed a rising profile in recent years. But beyond their media presence, the very phenomena of the city mayor, as well as the increasing devolution of governance functions and powers to cities, reveals a trend towards a reinvigoration of urban politics and a recalibration of state authority. British Chancellor George Osborne’s Cities and Local Government Devolution Act of 2016 – in which ‘Northern Powerhouse’ English city regions gained greater control over health, social care, policing, planning and municipal tax revenues – is but one manifestation of this broader decentralizing trend. ²⁸

These trends are not restricted to powerful Western cities. Barber highlights the impact of Delhi Mayor Sheila Dikshit, whose innovative programme of town hall meetings and participatory budgeting has successfully involved citizens directly in the governance of their city. ²⁹ This is part of a notable global trend in recent decades that has seen many experiments in participatory budgeting, with citizens playing a role in the allocation of a portion of the city budget. ³⁰ In fact, the participatory budgeting experiment that began in the 1980s in Latin America has spread around the world, including to cities in North America and Europe. There are now over 3000 cities that have experimented with some form of participatory budgeting. And, although such practices have operated at a very small scale, representing a tiny proportion of the overall city budget, nevertheless they instantiate a model of good governance practice, and offer a pathway to greater civic participation.

Mayors have also played key roles in pushing cities and local governments to develop capabilities as networked actors that allow them to have the global reach that they need to bridge the various scales at which the global issues that affect them operate. The new technical capacities offered by digital networks have meant that it is increasingly possible for mayors to straddle the local and the global scales. Mayors for Peace, with over 5000 city members in 153 states, comprises a cooperative network of cities that strive to place the abolition of nuclear weapons on the international agenda, as well as issues surrounding poverty and refugees, local conflicts and environmental change. Metropolis, or The World Association of Major Metropolises, has been around since 1985 and has over 100 members. The Association offers a forum for sharing knowledge and best practices that promote urban sustainability. The World Organisation of United Cities and Local Governments represents a recent attempt to boost the political representation of local government in the international arena, in particular with the United Nation’s agencies that deal with urban issues, such as UNESCO, UN-Habitat and the World Bank.

Perhaps the most fully developed network is the C40 Climate Leadership Group, whose city members engage in strategic partnerships with private actors such as the Clinton Foundation’s Climate Change Initiative and multi-national engineering corporations such as Arup. The C40 group seeks to lead efforts to tackle climate change, recognising that cities already have the potential resources to contribute to positive governance outcomes on the global stage. These efforts take the shape of collective action, joint-coordination and common strategy, including sharing and diffusing best practice models and technical know-how in areas such as transportation, energy and waste infrastructures, and retrofitting projects. These various initiatives engage with national and international forums, but also develop a parallel global governance architecture that bypasses traditional hierarchical channels and state diplomacy bottlenecks. There have been some clear and measurable successes, including a claimed 10,000 city climate actions among members since 2009, and a collective commitment to 3Gt of CO2 reductions by 2030. ³¹ However, there is a big caveat: the C40 network’s goals and activities remain well within the discursive space of neoliberal discourse, framing solutions in the language and philosophy of markets, offering technocratic agendas, partnering with private foundations and multi-national corporations. The C40 is a prime example of the liberal inflection of the emerging global governance regime.

Some cities have also been generating new forms of security governance. Cities are on the front line of many new security threats, as the transnational networks of value that they house have become potential targets and points of structural vulnerability. We might find the leading edge of this trend in New York City, where, in the post-September 11, 2001 era, the municipal administration has responded to the perceived inability of the state to protect it by developing its own institutional capacities for counter-terrorism. Scholars have noted a gradual militarisation of the New York Police Department, as well as its participation in sophisticated transnational intelligence gathering networks in partnership with other municipal authorities around the world. ³²

And global cities have long been at the core of economic governance – finding their initial raison d’etre as command and control nodes in the construction of a global scale market economy. Under globalisation, a seemingly paradoxical trend of the new economy was making itself clearer during the 1990s: the increasing spatial dispersion of economic activity around the world, as manufacturing relocated to areas of low cost labour, while, at the same time, the global economy became ever-more integrated. Sassen’s seminal theory of the global city provided an explanation for this double movement of dispersal and integration: that the advent of the new international division of labour, the rise of the new organisational form of the multi-national corporation, and the emergence of digital networks and new working practices, have created a need for a new form of strategic command and control in the global economy. The technologically enabled decentralisation of the economy undercuts the traditional controlling and organising function of the state in economic life. At the same time it opens up both a space and a need for new forms of global economic governance. This strategic function has been fulfilled first and foremost by global cities, and the incredible concentration of knowledge, wealth and power that crystalise at their cores.

Although the early literature on global cities focussed upon their economic functions, Sassen has also begun to draw out some of the important social implications of the distinctive political economy of the global city form. These include the forms of polarisation and inclusion/exclusion in global cities that the intervening years have only made increasingly obvious. Sassen also relates how new modes of private governance and new forms of private authority have grown up to facilitate the functioning of these global networks, as states have sought to denationalise and marketise formerly public forms of authority. ³³ This hybrid form of public/private governance, as we have seen, is at the core of contemporary global governance strategies.

A unifying factor in governance projects across the political, security and economic domains is that cities and their populations are key players in globalisation. Global cities have generated astonishing levels of growth and economic power, an unprecedented concentration of people and wealth, and have the most advanced technological infrastructures available on the planet. They have scale that stretches across traditional state boundaries, and vast populations that place the traditional understanding of what international politics is into question. Although they may generate many of the most pressing political problems of the day (generating most greenhouse gas emissions, for example), cities represent an immense creative resource to generate solutions to such problems. It is widely recognised now that new ways of urban living must be at the heart of any sustainable solution to climate change. Cities are beginning to act as important ‘norm-entrepreneurs’ in setting global agendas. A global network of thousands of linked cities affords a vast reservoir of human capital and creativity that will develop in unexpected directions.

However, there are clear limits to these early forays into global governance – and these limits speak directly to the question of whether global cities emerge from the failure and impeding irrelevance of states or from their evolution and adaptation. The new autonomy and capabilities of cities do not replace or challenge the agency of states: they are both enabled by and constrained by the power of states and the state-system. Global Cities rehouse existing capabilities and capacities built up in the era of the national-state. In this sense, the empowerment of cities is a product of state rescaling strategies. ³⁴ Global cities have not emerged from a vacuum – the underlying structure of international society that gave rise to them continues to shape their development and their possibilities.

Geopolitical Roots of the Global City

We must now push beyond simply noting such developments in global governance to analyse their causal drivers. Only by identifying the specific characteristics of the iteration of international society behind the devolution, decentralisation and augmentation of governance capacities and capabilities are we able to fully understand the implications of global cities for global politics. As I have outlined, these developments in global governance describe a contemporary shift from an international political order rooted in the society of states, to a more diffuse form of global order, which relies upon the interaction of a variety of non-state actors operating at different scales. It is this nascent form of global order that provides global cities with their conditions of possibility, allowing them to become key nodal points in global networks, key sites of systemic contention and contradiction, and actors within the politics of global governance. My central thesis is that global cities have become an integral element of the project of leading states to create, and to secure, a form of decentralised, self-organising market society. This section identifies some of the complex interacting causal drivers of this shift. By assessing the origins of these developments we can gain greater insight into their political implications.

The explanation for the transformation of both urban form and international order may be found in the confluence of a number of factors in the mid to late-20th century. These include: the rise of the United States to a hegemonic position; its central role in uniting the liberal capitalist world during the Cold War; its defeat of the Soviet Union and subsequent position of unipolarity. This geopolitical configuration of the international system then interacted with the separate dynamics of crisis induced restructuring of the capitalist world economy in the 1970s, and the rejection of Keynesian embedded liberalism in favour of a monetarist and neoliberal political and economic philosophy. The collapse of the Soviet Union, together with the rejection of Keynesian state management, points us towards another important dimension of this conjuncture: the ideological embrace of decentralisation, long advocated by neoliberal thinkers, as a response to the general crisis of statist forms of social organisation. Additionally, we must also consider the shift in the normative basis of international society outlined earlier: to one of increasingly complex interdependence and cooperation via a deepening of international regimes and institutions aimed at regulating common problems. There has been a quantum leap in the complexity of the technical transnational issues to which international society needs to respond: The response of states has been to embrace the (decidedly questionable) power of the market to solve issues of collective action. Finally, the developmental trajectory of digital information and communications technologies has interacted with these other dimensions in complex ways to empower actors, releasing them from traditional hierarchies, connecting them together in transnational networks, allowing them to process ever-greater quantities of information. In the following paragraphs I discuss each of these interconnected drivers in turn.

Cities in a Global Order: Reopening Pandora’s Box?

Having argued that global cities emerge in response to multiple interlacing historical drivers that have generated a historically specific form of global order, the final section of this article will consider some of the implications of these developments for contemporary global politics. I want to highlight three interlinked consequences of this form of global order. Because state form and city form are linked, in parallel with the emergence of global cities new forms of market state have developed that point towards a shift in the nature of modern sovereignty. New security practices are visible that bring into question traditional assumptions about territoriality and bordering. And, as a result, the logics of the wider modern international order have been fractured, with potentially destabilising results.

At its heart the emergence of the global city, and the open question of how it fits into contemporary global order, is but one symptom of a crisis in the ordering principles of international political life. Pushing beyond the pluralist form of international order, towards a form of liberal global order, has begun to produce a deformation in traditional understandings of territory and sovereignty. The compact between the market state and the global city may have offered a decentralising solution to the crises of statism, but it also raises a variety of questions about the potentially emergent and unexpected logics that may arise as a result. The creation of such new spatial forms as global cities and their networks is a symptom of ‘the increasingly puzzling character of the problem of sovereignty’. ⁵¹ As the market state moves to unravel the previous spatial mode, privatising, parcelling and commodifying its formerly homogenous national space – the most valued fragments of which are reconnected at the transnational scale in novel formations – new fractures and fault-lines appear within the structures of modern international order. As the state works to pursue strategies that reshape its territory, it places great stress on those supports that have given it its modern form. The emergence of the novel governance assemblage, of which global cities are a key component, brings into doubt the continued viability and integrity of the modern spatial settlement, and suggests an uncertain future in which this settlement must now be systematically renegotiated at every scale.

The modern concept of sovereignty has typically produced sharply demarcated boundaries – clear insides and outsides – that now appear to be weakening. But modern sovereignty is not just a historically particular production of space. As Rob Walker has tried to show throughout his work, the ‘international’ is a complex philosophical edifice that, having emerged as a solution to the crises that wracked 17th-century Europe, operates as a historically specific response to the problem of generating stable political order. ⁵² This has been a remarkably powerful system, and any unravelling of that solution (to which the developments charted here do indeed point) is likely to reopen a host of political and philosophical questions which will need to be solved in new ways. Walker thus seeks to resist the notion that we can move in any simple linear sense from a politics of the international to a politics of the globe, or of some world beyond the international: any such shift will unleash the forces that the modern international system evolved to tame. Rather than offering a way out of the problems generated by the system of territorial states, the moves towards global order that we have charted here risk opening a Pandora’s box of virulent political riddles. Such a deformation of traditional conceptions of sovereignty and territory threatens to reawaken the political issues that the modern political settlement had worked to tame within state territorial boundaries. The opening of the territorial container that the scale-hopping global city represents threatens to once again unleash the powerful forces that it was built to contain.

For example, the rescaled market state has a very different raison d’être to the nation-state it has replaced: its objects of sovereign decision now extend beyond the traditional homeland territory. This shift is exemplified by an evolution in security discourses and practices. The security practices of leading states exhibit a notable shift in focus in recent decades: from securing the traditional territorial border to new practices aimed at securing the new flows of value, which run primarily through the world’s urban networks. Stephen Graham has shown how US defence planners have been developing a strategy of ‘forward defence’, which involves pushing the concept of the border outwards to tackle threats before they reach the US mainland – as in the Container Security Initiative that seeks to secure the global network of seaports. ⁵³ But, at the same time, the valued spaces of global flows on which the US depends (electronic finance, Internet communications, trade and transport) must also be protected. The US Department of Homeland Security now talks of creating a ‘global security envelope’. There have been attempts to ‘reengineer global finance, communication, airline and port systems to achieve a kind of ubiquitous border, a ‘global homeland’ which follows the infrastructural architectures of a global network of cities and economic enclaves rather than the territorial limits demarcating nation-states’. ⁵⁴ Some have argued that these tensions may signal the eventual replacement of the national security apparatus with a decentralised transnational security system combining public authority, private actors and individuals: yet another governance hybrid. ⁵⁵ One way to characterise such a system in formation is as a transnational security assemblage – as Abrahamson and Williams do in their study of the complex transnational security formation emerging in Africa of state governments and militaries, private security firms and individuals. ⁵⁶

Part of the explanation for this shift lies in the emergence of the market state and the political philosophy that underpins it. Nation-states are no longer able to shield their citizens effectively from global economic flows, just as they are increasingly unable to guarantee the security of the national citizen in the face of transnational risks such as climate change, pandemics and international terrorism, or even to guarantee the national border in a world of nuclear weapons. The very raison d’etre of the nation-state rested upon such guarantees: securing the national border, enforcing civil peace through the rule of law, guaranteeing economic stability, welfare and employment. ⁵⁷ No longer able to fulfil its constitutional promise of securing the welfare and security of its citizens, this pillar of legitimacy has been removed (exemplified by the neoliberal roll back of welfare commitments and nationally integrated infrastructures, for example) to be replaced by a very different promise: that of securing access and opportunity in a global market society.

The post-Cold War privatisation of warfare contributes to this instability. As a result of the liberal marketisation of the weapons industry, unprecedented quantities of weapons and sources of finance flow around the system. ⁵⁸ Security threats are, as a result, much more diffuse and decentred. Here, again, the rise to prominence of the global city is a key part of this shift in the security landscape. Cities have become the primary locus of contemporary violence, whether it be the Islamist inspired terrorist attacks on cities such as New York, London, Paris, Madrid or Mumbai, or the urbanicide of the ‘war on terror’ in the cities of Iraq. ⁵⁹ Just as cities become the key nodal sites and critical infrastructure of a globalised political economy, so too do they offer the most tempting targets.

Indeed, the development in recent decades of what Graham has called the ‘new military urbanism’ (a trend that it is worth noting was in evidence even before September 11, 2001, but greatly exacerbated by those events) highlights how the city has become central to the changing architecture of international security. Novel security practices in evidence in contemporary urban spaces are a reflection of the wider structural shift in the nature of international society. Traditional security lenses are an inadequate guide to the ways in which cities and urbanisation are at the heart of novel and unfolding territorial forms of control, inequality and insecurity. As we saw earlier in the discussion of the security dimension of global city governance, urban life is increasingly subject to a creeping militarisation, and a blurring of the traditional lines between civilian policing and military force.

The emergence of novel configurations of transnational space has made it far more difficult to ‘draw the line’ between the inside and the outside of the state, and to maintain the distinction between traditional military operations and domestic policing. As transnational flows and circuits (commodity chains, logistics networks, urban transnational infrastructures) have become the lifeblood of powerful market states, so these states must develop new strategies to secure them. As global cities are the crucial command and control nodes for the deployment and switching of global capital throughout the developed and developing worlds, securing such transnational urban spaces becomes crucial to such a strategy. Global city networks are thus implicated in the operations of a system of transnational neoliberal capitalism; they form its material conduits and exoskeleton, and are increasingly the medium through which such a system is secured. The complex challenge for such a form of political order has become how to achieve such security, whilst also allowing for the embrace of the hyper-mobility that characterises the neoliberal global political economy. The answer alighted upon thus far seems to be a market liberalism underpinned by increasing authoritarianism and militarism, directed both at securing valued spaces abroad and at targeting problematic citizens at home. This is a development that would not have surprised Karl Polanyi, who saw how the 19th-century attempt to generate a market society brought its own authoritarian impulses. As the polarisation of wealth generated by market society finds its purest spatial expression in global city morphology, cities become the focus of social control. There is a notable convergence between techniques and practices of policing, intelligence gathering and military tactics:

states are becoming internationally organised systems geared towards trying to separate people and circulations deemed risky or malign from those deemed risk-free or worthy of protection…resulting in a blurring between international borders and urban/local borders. Indeed, the two increasingly seem to meld, to constitute a “multiplicity of control points” that become distributed along key lines of circulation and key geographies of wealth and power. ⁶⁰

The political geographer John Agnew has urged us to see such developments as a form of territoriality: the politically strategic use of territory ‘by way of defining market spaces geographically, organising military commands, and inventing new forms of supra-national authority’. ⁶¹

What we see here is a shift in the nature and location of borders that relates directly to changes in the nature of the state. It is the transnational extension of national interests, in the service of the logics of capital, that seems to be driving the deconstruction and reconstruction of borders, and with them the inside/outside solution alighted upon by modernity. One thrust of the new Critical Border Studies literature is to argue that the dividing line that demarcates and constitutes the state system is somehow shifting – unleashing a whole host of new speculations on the nature of territoriality and sovereignty, the transformative impact of networks and the recasting of centres and peripheries. No longer can we assume that borders appear only at the edges of the territorial state container. Rather, new borders and boundaries are appearing in unexpected places, winding their way across stretches of global space. Much of this spatial deformation has been facilitated by the new network technologies, which have the capacity to generate novel inside/outside configurations, such as global city networks. We have seen the same logic operating at a different scale: on the very fabric of the global city, where gated communities, privatised infrastructural networks and the securing of transportation and central business districts recapitulate the practice of drawing new borders and boundaries deep within the city, and thus deep within and far away from the older border of the national state. The ability of non-state actors to draw borders has become diffused throughout society, as a result of the embrace of multi-level governance. ⁶²

When order and security become the primary foundations of sovereign legitimacy, and when security threats become diffuse and borders mutate, it is perhaps inevitable that in the pursuit of these goals states will be drawn to ever more authoritarian postures and militarised techniques, as they move to secure valued infrastructures. Such developments may easily be read as a form of neo-imperial practice. Graham has argued that the network of global cities forms part of nothing less than a ‘transnational imperial infrastructure’, bound up with US structural power in the contemporary global order. ⁶³ There is a complex relationship at work here between contemporary and earlier forms of imperial control, as ‘imperialist and colonial geographies ‘umbilically connect’ the metropolitan cores of global city nodes with the developing periphery.

Conclusion

In this article my method has been to take a concrete phenomenon – the increasingly visible governance activates of cities at the transnational level – and to progressively uncover the drivers that have produced it. These have included the increasing prominence of global governance, its role as part of a decentralised neoliberal strategy of leading states to construct a global market society, the configuration of power in international society that underpins the projection of this strategy, and the history of failure of statist forms of political economy that produced the strategy.

I then went on to tease out some of the implications of these developments. We saw how from these origins a new relationship between the state and the city has emerged, and how traditional conceptions of sovereignty, territoriality and security have been stretched and deformed, as the state seeks to secure the transnational networks of value that run through global cities. Leading states now draw their lifeblood from the transnational flows passing through global city networks, and rely upon the intricate material infrastructures sustaining them. It seems a logical corollary that states will seek to modify their security practices to protect these spaces, extending their reach across selected networks of valued transnational space.

We must be careful, then, not to misread the developments charted here as some simple shift from a form of order based upon the international society of states to a form of order where the state no longer plays a central role, as in some of the more naive globalisation theories, or in Barber’s hoped for scenario of ‘municipal confederalism’. It is not simple state failure with which we are faced, but, instead, the emergence of a complex configuration of global order in which states now take their place in a meshwork of governance arrangements that includes other sites of authority and influence, perhaps the most important of which is the global city.