The Cities and the Development of its International Role

Abstract

Due to the process of globalization of the world economy in the post-industrial era, cities i are recovered the major role in the international economic system which they had lost with the surging of the nation-state. As nexus of an interdependent world economy, the activities of cities become transnationalized and their links with other international actors escape more and more from the control of the central governments. On the other hand there are growing demands from different organized groups of activists addressed to their local governments (whose competences, for reasons related as much to economic rationaliy as to democratic principle, tend to widen), asking for the implementation of certain actions on behald of the local collectity in fields traditionally monopolized by the state. For those two kinds of reasons, the analists of lnternational Relations are increasingly accepting the «city» (decomposable in its turn into smaller elements such as local government, public opinion, interest groups, etc.) as an integrant –though secondary– part of the international actors' taxonomies. If the development of the cities' international role is a recent phenomenon, even more so is the attention payed to it by the International Relations' authors. It is possible to identify two kinds of approaches. In the first place the one which seeks to advise local authorities on the best strategies in order to act effectively in the framework of the world globalized economy, in the second place the one which describes certain kind of transnational activities taken up by citizens groups in the name of democratic principles. It is still lacking a more holistic treatment, less addressed to concrete sectors and more closely connected to other comparable subjects in the field.