Conclusions: Towards Closing the Conceptual Gap?

Abstract

The starting point of this book was the observation of a growing complexity of actors and their interrelationships in the international arena—a development that has been driven by the pressures of globalisation. Following more than three decades of continuing discourse of globalisation as guarantor of economic growth, the dominant narrative of neo-liberalism and a belief in increasing the efficacy of government through adopting private sector-style, marketised rationales, a growing number of sub-national authorities have begun to venture into new policy fields and arenas to chase presumed opportunities. The larger cities have responded to this pressure to become more entrepreneurial and innovative in their policies. Their scope and capacity to do so varies, owing to different positions of strength: the successful metropolises, especially the so-called global cities, are in a much stronger position to become international actors than smaller, peripheral towns or struggling post-industrial cities. In addition, available instruments and established political cultures and milieux also matter. What all sub-national actors share is the growing willingness—out of conviction in the case of the desire to engage with international work on climate change or sheer economic necessity—to go beyond national borders and familiar political-economic conditions and relationships, and step into the international arena. While this action is the logical consequence of the past decades of ideological discourse and political strategies, it seems that academic debate and, especially disciplinary comfort zones, have been largely unresponsive to these developments, remaining wedded to their established respective focus on, and approaches to, cities (and regions) on the one hand, and the international realm surrounding ‘black boxes’ of nation states, on the other. The growing dynamics that have brought these two phenomena—cities and internationality—increasingly closer together, to the point of challenging nation states in their presumed sovereignty in the international arena, have not really been captured analytically and fallen into a ‘conceptual gap’. Chapter 1 discussed this ‘gap’ between the inherent topical and conceptual boundaries of the two relevant disciplines, Urban Studies and International Relations. Neither has ventured much beyond their self-defined conceptual horizons, and thus they have been unable to draw on each other’s expertise and insights to gain a better understanding of, and explanation for, the unfolding process of the growing ‘urbanisation’ of global governance. It is a process, as pointed out in Chap. 1, that demonstrates some aspects of the concept of glocalisation, although that was proposed by Swyngedow (2002) from a perspective of economic globalisation. This argued for the fusion of the local and the global scales in analysing economic globalism, so as to capture the growing role of localness in economic decisions and strategies. At first sight, this seems an inherent contradiction to the notion of an unbounded, in effect unified, global space. This realisation of a clear role for the sub-national, especially cities, needs to find a corresponding response in the analysis of global governance. Yet, while Global Political Economy does recognise the multi-scalar organisation and interaction of the global economy, IR, as the political-institutional ‘sister’ discipline, has largely stayed away from such a trans-scalar approach, and has, instead, continued to define the ‘international’ first and foremost as a sum of nation states and their sovereign action, with all other interests subordinate to that. Certainly, this largely applies to the sub-national actors, as conceptualised some twenty years ago by Agnew (1995) as the ‘territorial trap’ in IR. Yet, this container thinking, as Chap. 2 demonstrates, has shown few signs of abating, as ‘realist’ approaches continue to dominate IR in its conceptualisation of the ‘international’ and its governance (Baylis et al. 2013; Nye 2004).