Chapter Ten
City-States

Ludwig Engel is slim and elegant, with long wavy brown hair that tends to fall over his eyes. He likes to wear leather bracelets, and is the lead singer in a rock band, Eddie. He is also an analyst for DaimlerChrysler’s Society and Technology Research Group—a global team of consultants, with offices in Berlin, Palo Alto, and Kyoto, whose job is to think about the future. He works alongside historians, physicists, and other specialists in a suite of glass-paneled penthouse offices on the River Spree. “We do prognosis” and have “all the freedom we need,” Ludwig explained to me over the course of a Sunday evening that began with drinks at an outdoor café near the Alexanderplatz and finished at a trendy bar, a kind of concrete cave with graffiti on the walls and trash-pop on the music system, off the Oranienburger. Ludwig, who gets around Berlin on a bicycle, had ended his previous night’s partying at seven-thirty in the morning at a rave inside a ware house.

Ludwig’s father was an architect and his mother a teacher of French, English, and Italian. He grew up in West Berlin and was seven years old when the Berlin Wall came down in the autumn of 1989. He began learning Chinese at age twelve, and for DaimlerChrysler he has been living and working part of the time in Beijing and Shanghai, as part of a research project on emerging elites in China. But when I turned the discussion to After America possibilities, he brought up another of his projects, relating to the evolution of global cities.

How about, he said, a future of city-states, a modern version of the city-states of ancient and medieval times? These would be places distinguished by their cosmopolitan outlooks and their role as incubators of creative thinking. The emphasis in such places would be on freedom and stimulating surroundings—on the arts, music, and culture, on intellectual life. Most important, these would be cities in which global elites, who could live anywhere on the planet, would choose to live.

This is an intriguing concept. Too much of the discussion about city-states among professional expert types focuses on the emergence of “money centers” like London, New York, Frankfurt, and Hong Kong, as hubs in a vast system of global capitalism. The possibilities for the twenty-first-century city-state are much broader and more interesting than that. Commerce has always been integral to the city, which is the natural home of the marketplace, whether the medium of exchange is the hide, the coin, or the electronic currency unit; but the city also deserves to be considered as a political-social-cultural entity, a full-fledged organic creature, in its own right. While it is possible for the world to contain, at the same time, great empires, great nation-states, and globally oriented cities, in practice the distribution of power and influence among them tends to shift with the tides of history. “France would be much more powerful if Paris were annihilated,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau acidly declared in 1762, observing, “It is the big cities which exhaust a state and cause its weaknesses.” After the collapse of the Roman Empire, the chaos of the medieval European world yielded not, in the first instance, to the nation-state but to the smaller and more manageable unit of the city-state. The city, not the tribe, became the primary unit of allegiance, and some of these cities, like Florence and Venice, became spectacularly inventive centers of culture, their names renowned in ports all over the “discovered” world. In an After America world, this could happen all over again—only this time on a global scale, with every continent contributing its city-states. Perhaps the new city-states, like those of old, would even develop their own “foreign” policies and maintain, in eff ect, their own armies or militias (as the county of Los Angeles, for example, already does). In such a world, both nation-state and empire would be passé.

If all this sounds like an impossibly distant destination, consider the forces propelling the world in this direction. The most important has to do with a matter of cartography. When “economic geographers” create their maps showing concentrations of commercial, financial, and manufacturing activity, they draw boundary lines not around nation-states but around economic megaregions, anchored to one or more large metropolises. About two-thirds of the world’s economic output can be credited to forty of these regions. Some cut across nation-state lines. One example, which I explore in part 4, in the chapter on After America California, is the “bi-national” megaregion encompassing San Diego and Baja. To the north, Seattle and Vancouver, 125 miles apart, are considered part of a single northwest Pacific megaregion, dubbed “Cascadia” by the mapmakers. The economic power house of this region, Microsoft, shifts labor between the two cities as if they were part of the same economic territory. So when the company had trouble obtaining visas for computer scientists from abroad to work at the corporate headquarters campus in Seattle, the scientists were sent instead to a research facility in Vancouver.

Whatever the future of Cascadia turns out to be, it probably will have little to do with the destiny of the Miami city-state region, which is heavily tied into the Latin American economy. The idea of a unified “national economy,” especially for a country as economically diverse as America, is a quasi fiction perpetuated by bureaucracies trained—indeed required by national legislatures—to churn out national economic data, which they no doubt will continue to do no matter how much the world changes. A more honest system of economic accounting would focus more sharply on the megaregions, anchored by global cities. “The nation-state as an economic actor is basically toast. It was an arbitrary economic unit,” Richard Florida, the global-cities expert, told me.

We were chatting in Florida’s office in Toronto, which is in its own right one of the more outstanding global-city success stories of the last forty years. Florida was born in Newark and lived a number of years in Pittsburgh. He moved to Toronto in 2007, embodying the trend he described in his book The Flight of the Creative Class. Just as global movements of capital and goods are poorly understood when viewed through a national prism, “international migration trends,” as the bureaucratic bookkeepers still like to describe them, are better grasped as relocations from the globe’s economic hinterland areas to up-and-coming global-city magnets. “The major international flows of people were once coordinated by states, but today are more likely to be comprised of immigrants, transnational professionals, and tourists moving along the different intercity geographies that crisscross the planet,” a group of global-cities experts concluded for a 2007 report commissioned by MasterCard. Cities and towns, for the first time in recorded history, now contain more than half the world’s population—and by 2030, the urban share of the planet’s population may be as high as three-fifths, according to projections by the United Nations.

The opportunistic person who can’t find a decent job in depressed Tashkent, in former Soviet Central Asia, does not head for just anywhere in Russia—he or she heads for the super-magnet of Moscow, which is emerging as one of the great city-state regions of Eurasia. (There are more people in Greater Moscow than in all of the Baltic countries combined.) Moscow has always had a pull on the Russian imagination and in imperial times attracted ambitious people from Odessa on the Black Sea to Bishkek on the border with China. But today’s Moscow may be the most alluring ever. In American terms, Moscow is Washington, New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas all rolled into one—the nexus of power, money, media, fashion, and culture, as well as organized crime and entertainments on every point of the innocent-to-carnal spectrums. While much is made of its depravity, Moscow of the early twenty-first century has become a remarkably creative place, as seen in the revival of its film industry. The provinces count for nothing—all governors serve at the plea sure of the Kremlin. Meanwhile, Moscow’s petro princes, like the rulers of fifteenth-century imperial Venice, barter money and power in a complex web of relationships stretching across the capitals of Europe and Asia. In wooded suburbs heavily patrolled by private security teams, the princes are building their dachas—the Italian classical style of the late nineteenth century is an especially popular model. If Russia’s population continues to wither on the demographic vine, the country could take on a truncated (if rollicking) life as a twenty-first-century reincarnation of the Muscovy city-state of old.

Other twenty-first-century city-states could emerge from the wreckage of the clash of civilizations. Consider the trajectory of the Jewish state of Israel. The modern Jewish resettlement of Israel began as a movement away from the city, away from the suffocating urban Jewish ghettoes of Europe and the Russian empire, and toward the land on which the Zionist pioneers sweated to establish collective farms and strengthen their lungs and muscles. But the kibbutz, as a cultural and po liti cal ideal and as a practical way of life, peaked decades ago. Modern Israel’s most impressive achievement, as a social-economic project, turns out to be the building of one of the Mediterranean region’s most modern, vibrant, and prosperous cities: Tel Aviv. Secular and cosmopolitan, it is home to one of the world’s great concentrations of high-tech industry and brainpower outside California’s Silicon Valley. The Jews who have made it big in today’s Israel live not on the collective farm but in the posh Tel Aviv suburb of Savyon, which is lined with million-dollar homes and resembles an upscale Long Island neighborhood. Israel’s outward-looking secular Jews dominate Tel Aviv while Jerusalem, the inland capital backing into the West Bank, remains a geo graphically divided and politically polarized city, uneasily shared by Arabs and by a Jewish community with many of its own sectarian religious and cultural fragments. With Israeli towns in the south under periodic rocket attack
from Hamas in Gaza, and towns in the north from Hezbollah, and with the Arab population in greater Israel/Palestine growing at a more rapid rate than the Jewish one, a fortresslike Tel Aviv could turn out to be the future of the Jewish state. Even as things are now, three-quarters of Israel’s population of 7 million is concentrated on a narrow strip of Mediterranean coastline extending some eighty miles from Ashkelon to Haifa with Tel Aviv at the midpoint.

The city-state can be a refuge, and it also may be a better solver of modern social problems than the nation-state or empire. In part, this is a question of scale. India’s political elite, at times despairing of the possibility of ever bringing efficient governance to a nation-state of 1.2 billion, talk of the merits of chopping up the country into ten large city-states ruled by president-like figures with broad writs of autonomy from New Delhi. But this is not only a question of size: The manager of the global city, with its large numbers of cosmopolitan expatriate and creative/artistic types, tends to be more in touch with the modern—especially with the latest in communications and transport—than the custodian of the nation-state. “The most future-oriented country in the world,” according to the Thunderbird School of Global Management, based in Arizona, is Singapore, which of course is a city-state republic, carved out in the mid-1960s by Lee Kuan Yew and ruled by him, sternly, for decades.

Reprinted from AFTER AMERICA: Narratives for the Next Global Age, by Paul Starobin, with permission of Viking, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.