9/11/2023 0 Comments Simon curtis 2014The capitalist class holds the power of allocation and the power of management by means of its ownership and control of the means of production and uses this power for reasons of private profit. This ‘has made all civilised nations and every individual member of them dependent for the satisfaction of their wants on the whole world, thus destroying the former natural exclusiveness of separate nations’ (Marx 1999:77/8). Capitalism is increasingly based upon ‘universalised competition’, overcoming the opposition of national states so as to create the ‘modern world market. It goes on to draw out some of the implications of the recalibration of the relationship between the city and the state for how we understand the emerging form of global order.ĭriven by the central dynamic of accumulation, capitalism is becoming the universal mode of production that Marx had envisaged. But do the new governance activities of cities represent a failure on the part of states, as some scholars have argued? Or are they a part of an emerging form of global order, in which the relationship between states, cities and other actors is being recalibrated? This article argues that the remarkable renaissance of cities in recent decades has been a result of a shift in the structure of international society, and assesses the causal drivers of this shift. Cities have taken on new governance roles in the gaps left by hamstrung nation-states, and their contribution to an emerging global governance architecture will be a significant feature of the international relations of the 21st century. This article will show how these two issues are intrinsically linked. One striking response has been the reemergence of cities as important actors on the international stage. Indeed, the structure of international society itself has become a significant obstacle to such pressing issues of global governance. International society, so long the resolution to problems of collective political order, now appears to be failing in its capacity to deal with transnational challenges such as climate change, global security and financial instability. It goes on to argue that the rise of the global city challenges IR scholars to consider how many of the assumptions that the discipline makes about the modern international system are being destabilised, as important processes deterritorialise at the national level and are reconstituted at different scales. It highlights how global cities are essential to processes of globalisation, providing a material and infrastructural backbone for global flows, and a set of physical sites that facilitate command and control functions for a decentralised global economy. This article argues that global cities pose fundamental questions for IR theorists about the nature of their subject matter, and shows how consideration of the historical relationship between cities and states can illuminate the changing nature of the international system. ![]() The emergence of a new urban form, the global city, has attracted little attention from International Relations (IR) scholars, despite the fact that much progress has been made in conceptualising and mapping global cities and their networks in other fields.
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