Parag Khanna, the director of the Global Governance Initiative and senior research fellow with the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, spoke with The Majalla about an important geopolitical trend: the rising power of the global city. In a recent article with Foreign Policy, Khanna explained that the 21 century will not be dominated by any particular super state. Instead, cities will be the drivers of governance and a future world order.
The Majalla: Can you explain in some detail the argument you proposed in a recent Foreign Policy article, where you show that the future of the world will not be dominated by any one country but by a network of powerful cities?
Cities are becoming more and more prominent and we are returning to a world that looks a bit like the Middle Ages. The 12, 13 and 14 centuries were a period in history where cities were very important and nation states hadn’t yet quite formed. Today is a world where many nation states have descended already. There are still many strong states but those strong states depend on the power of their cities.
So, the rise of global cities and mega cities are the two different kinds of cities that increasingly shape global politics, the policies of countries, or they have the power to dictate what happens within countries themselves. Those are the reasons why cities are so important today.
Now I don’t necessarily think there is a network of cities, there could be a network of cities or there could be alliances of cities against other cities, or cities rivaling each other and then causing the countries to which they belong to rival each other; so there’s no automatic network or alliance of any kind. Each city is out for itself just like each country is out for itself.
Sometimes the motive of cities is that there is a rival with others, so you find that in East Asia, for example, you have many mega cities or globalized cities rising. Singapore has been there for a long time; Hong Kong has been there, Taipei and Tokyo. Now, China has Shanghai, Beijing has absorbed Hong Kong, and you also have Sydney and others.
So you have the Pacific Rim, an entire region which now has more global hubs than any other region of the world. It also has a substantial number of mega cities, and mega cities aren’t necessarily world leaders. I try to make very clear that just because a city like Lagos or Cairo or Mumbai, just because they have a lot of people, tens of millions of people in the greater metropolitan areas of these cities, it doesn’t make them respectable, iconic, global cities that everyone wants to emulate. No one wants their city to look like Mumbai after all.
Tokyo’s a different story. Tokyo’s the largest city in the world but it’s immaculate, it’s impeccable, everything works perfectly. It has a huge economy; on any given day up to one third of the population of Japan is effectively in the greater Tokyo area, but the city works flawlessly by almost all accounts, by almost any measure, so its a very different landscape than in a place like Lagos, Nigeria. So there are very different kinds of cities, therefore I wanted to begin with an analysis of what is happening in a broader sense, and then make deductions from there about the role of cities.
Q: How did this shift from city to state, and back to city again come about?
I want to emphasize that it isn’t necessarily a shift as such; a lot of people would say that it’s either or. And I know that the title of the article would suggest that nations are gone, cities are back, but the real message is what I consider something more like the Middle Ages where you have many different entities—cities, governments, corporations, philanthropists, universities, mercenaries, private armies— that’s what the world really looks like; its not necessarily either or. Some states are fading/failing, some states are weak, but other states are growing stronger than ever, like China, for example, so I don’t really view it as an either or situation.
But obviously one of the main things driving this is what we call globalization, and that’s the emphasis on transnational flows of finance and people, largely. That has led to an accruing of power, an accruing of money and talent in cities, which has increased the power of cities to dictate their own agenda, to shape their own affairs, and I think that is something that we have observed happening all over the world.
Then the other is, as a result of that globalization a certain amount of political liberalization has allowed mayors to become more powerful or national leaders to realize that they have to emphasize their cities. For example, Korea already has a major hub of the region, and that’s Seoul, which is a very important city in the global economy and you know the capital is a very important city, but that’s not enough for them. In order to be a real regional competitor they’re looking ahead and saying we need to have a high-tech city—one that controls or dominates in 21 century technology, so we have to build a new city that has the latest amenities, that uses the best information technology to wire itself up and move regional corporate headquarters there so that Korea can be this economic engine for the North East Asian sub-area. So that kind of thing is happening as well and you see special economic zones popping up all over the place and so on. I would say globalization, competition are the main drivers of this. It becomes a tipping point—as power accrues and accrues with the cities you start to see more emphasis in that direction.
Q: What kind of predictions could you make about cities in the Middle East and North Africa?
I try to emphasize very much the way in which the trends in the Middle East show that there is a traditional set of political trends that relate partially to cities. This is the reason why traditional centers of power and influence, like Egypt, are losing ground and the city-states, or the Emirates, the monarchies of the Persian Gulf region, have risen.
In the Middle East you have a belt of city-states, stretching really from Bahrain and Qatar to the UAE, that are becoming enormously influential in the region and have a lot of international connections. Remember that the foreign policy index measures really the aggregate influence of these cities—it judges a global city in its index based on the amount of influence or sway or visibility that it has in the world. And certainly Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Riyadh, Manama, Doha and so forth increasingly fall into that category, so I see a lot of action happening in the cities of the Gulf region and that has pulled in a lot of the capital and talent of the Arab world of the Middle Eastern region. And that’s nothing new obviously to the readers of The Majalla, but I think that is the broader context that explains the great dynamism of the Middle East in the last decade.
Q: If globalization is part of the impetus for this phenomenon could you argue that there is a political dimension as well that influences how powerful a city can become?
Right that’s a really good question, and the answer is that there is no clear answer. Yes the traditional great global hubs and cities that have been in the Western world happened to reside in democracies. So, New York and London and so forth. But today, the cities in East Asia, for example, that I’ve identified, and like I said East Asia has more global hubs really than the Western world, and that’s something to really think about, and I focus on a lot in the article, but those are non-democracies—Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai and so forth, so, there is definitely not a rule about political systems.
If anything one would have to say the kind of decision-making that people have to make, or that city leaders have to make, with respect to being decisive about what type of infrastructure to build and so forth, with those kinds of things you almost wonder about how cities should be almost non-democratic in nature in order to be run more efficiently. New York is a good example, I’m a New Yorker and we all know that Rudi Giuliani, who was one of the most successful mayors in New York’s history, had somewhat authoritarian tendencies. Mayor Bloomberg, for example, cornered himself a third term, so cities have a certain amount of autonomy in how they are run that doesn’t tend to lead to them being run more rather than less democratically.
Q: Can you expand a bit on the concept of the charter city and its potential impact?
The idea of the charter city derives from looking at the way in which a colonial territory such as Hong Kong was able to rise into a global hub, as a colony that operated in a manner that was independent of its surrounding countries like China. Economist Paul Romer is basically taking a principle and saying there are a lot of poorly run African countries that have a lot of space, a lot of good useful land, particularly in the coastal areas, that could be developed into modern, thriving hubs of economic activity, that could function according to global rules rather than local rules, and so forth. But it is recommended that countries volunteer, in a way, a certain amount of space to be run by an international set of experts who could really help turn around the economic fortunes of a country through this example or role model city that would be built in their country.
That’s the theory behind it. In practice so far, no one country has committed to allow for an outside team to run such a charter city in their country, but I do think that its already happening in different ways. And two good examples are the economic development in countries like Vietnam or in India, or that are run by Singapore or Dubai Ports World. What Dubai Ports World is doing everywhere from Senegal to Djibouti is an example of really taking a space and building a world class ports facility and hiring some locals but using outside management and global practices to help these countries increase their role in global shipping and global trade. So I think that we already have micro-versions of charter cities emerging in a very practical, needs-based kind of way.
Q: You mention in your article that you draw on the research of Saskia Sassin’s Global City, how do your perspectives differ?
Well I don’t know her personally but I’ll say a couple of things about her broader work, including that book. The first is that she has a very functional approach to analyzing world politics, which I appreciate, so she doesn’t bias the state, which is why she is able to look at supply-chains, financial flows, which she calls assemblages, and that was one of the sub-titles of one of her books, and the ways in which these new vectors shape power dynamics, political results and outcomes. I think that is one of the very good things about her work. Because she doesn’t have any bias towards particular actors, she’s able to see the power of corporations and cities, and her work has consistently revealed that. I think that therefore she has a very empirical approach to globalization, which I think is good, rather than jumping towards a very normative approach or a very polemical one, so I appreciate that aspect of her work as well. And then now the focus on cities, in her latest sort of thinking that really puts cities at the center, I think is a very fresh perspective. In some ways this article is drawing a lot on her general approach, and her. If you compare her to other academics, she’s been very bold in putting cities front and center, so I think that the popularity of her work in some ways is reflected in the visibility of this article.
Q: In a recent TIME magazine article you talked about the potential importance of transcending boarders as economically and strategically necessary. How is your understanding of the global city related to that argument, if at all?
I think that to some degree we’ll always have boarders of various kinds, although as an end stage it would be fine to eliminate them, but that’s not something that is immediately feasible in most parts of the world other than in the European Union, and even there, there are soft boarders of various kinds. But the real point was supposed to say that if you wanted to eliminate boarders for a whole variety of political and economic reasons, the way to do it would be to build and construct across those boarders as much as possible, like roads and pipelines that create real neutral economic and political paths that are dependent. So I aggregate constructing those new lines that cut across boarders and have great economic utility, that’s really the main thrust, the main argument, or the main mechanism to which I think we would accomplish those goals, that’s really what the article was about.
One could certainly say the two arguments are related. For example, regional economic hubs serve not just their countries but the broader sub-region. The way in which Lagos, Nigeria is sub-regional for West Africa, the largest and most significant economic city, it draws in a lot of people from all the surrounding countries, so seven or eight countries surrounding Nigeria. And therefore, Lagos is really a city, not just for Nigeria but for that region. And you find increasingly that Luanda, the capital of Angola, is really a regional hub emerging for South West Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, because of its huge flow from the oil supply which the country has. I would say, a place like Singapore, for example, has always been an important hub, not just for Singapore itself, which is a tiny country, just a city-state. But Singapore is the place that is crucial to the growth of all the countries around it, because a lot of money that goes into poorer countries, like Indonesia and South East Asian countries, goes through Singapore. Its very important actually; the more regional hubs that develop in terms of cities, the more likely you are to have that cross-boarder kind of integration and dependence.
Interview conducted by Paula Mejia.
