The Re-Emergence of City States

There is a great pendulum in world history, that swings to and fro between the extremes of centralization and decentralization. The cycle started in the ancient times, when local potentates fought regional wars to consolidate their power. Regardless of one's opinion on the veracity of the Old Testament historical narrative, we at least see that the writers of the time witnessed something to this effect: tribes being conquered by their neighbors, who eventually expanded into Empires. Sometimes consolidation in history occurred by treaty or mutual protection pact that ultimately gave way to greater centralization.

Then came the United States. The normal method of expansionism for would-be superpowers didn't quite work for the newly minted American Empire in-progress. Reeling from what the Revolutionaries considered overbearing Imperial oversight, the early Americans eschewed traditional consolidation of power, and birthed a new style of federalism. Because early America was overwhelmingly rural, and cities played a much reduced role in American social, political, and economic life, compared to Europe, the city-state model was incongruent, and so it was the arbitrary political sub-unit of the "states" that gained primacy. Furthermore, America expanded its borders not by conquering established cities, but by taking land from the semi-nomadic natives and claiming unoccupied lands.

Because of the geographical vastness of the what would eventually be the Manifest Destiny of the United States, and the complete lack of transportation and communication infrastructure of the time, decentralized power was thede facto political reality of the day. The Wild West could be Wild because it was nearly impossible to govern. Washington not only couldn't control the events on the frontier, but most of the time, they had little interest in doing so, until there was an economically substantive reason to be interested.

After the Civil War and the 14th Amendment, a century and a half of political centralization began in the United States. The de jurecentralization inherent in Reconstruction, the invention of the telegraph, the railroad, World War I, the economic centralization of the Depression and World War II, the popularization of radio and telephones, the advent of air travel, television, the Interstate Highway system, and ultimately the Internet were the series of technologically ground-breaking innovations and social circumstances that brought about our current state of affairs. Washington-centric governance became a logistical reality, but almost as soon as it had reached its paramount level of importance, things began to deteriorate. It is not that Washington became more corrupt, but that because it had more power (and money), its level of corruption began to have greater impact, and because of the greater influence of broadcast media, the corruption became more apparent.

Watergate seemed to have been the final blow against Washington, but almost as soon as it had happened, Ronald Reagan came along and began pushing the restoration of federalism. This was combined with the devolutionary decisions of the Rehnquist Court, and the Contract with America. For a short time, it appeared that the federal government was voluntarily abdicating part of its power. Few could have predicted the imapct, however, of the George Bush administration. Abandoning devolutionary federalism, embarking on imperialistic wars, and embracing more centralized entitlement and discretionary spending, George W. Bush wrecked the Reagan Revolution of decentralization. I do not want to make any normative claims about the Bush policies or the Reagan Revolution, but it is quite apparent that Bush has not been a Reagan-proponent in actual fact.

The national rebellion against the Imperial model will, in my view, lead to the re-emergence of the city-state. Federalism is a dying mode of governance, because of its basis in arbitrary geographic boundaries. These arbitrary boundaries will give way to more logical and flexible forms of governance, and diplomacy will take place between major cities and metropolitan areas rather than between nation-states and imperial states. New York could conduct much more appropriate diplomacy with Shanghai than the State Department can with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The scope of international relations is too complex on the nation-state level, and certainly too monolithic. Consequently, the city-state model provides for the opportunity for regions to capitalize on what unites them than what divides them.

This topic warrants further consideration, but is a viable point of discussion for now.