What City Diplomacy Tells Us About Statecraft in General

At the USC Center for Public Diplomacy Jay Wang and Sohaela Amiri have a short paper summarizing a workshop  they convened with representatives of 17 American cities  to look at the state of city diplomacy.

In reading the paper though I was struck by what it tells us about statecraft in general.*  Most of cities’ international efforts are taken up by functional activities; economic promotion, special events, dealing with foreign consulates, sister-city relations, collaborative networks.  Resources are limited and relations and their management are fragmented across different parts of city government.  Given this one of their recommendations is for a ‘policy driven’ approach that breaks down silos and generates a more integration across policy areas.

There’s an irony here that is states have exactly the same problems.  Modern statecraft involves multiple foreign relationships of different types conducted by different organizations.  The challenge is then to integrate them.  Integration is partly a matter of coordination (ie an administrative or organizational issue) but it’s also a matter of politics: how can different interests and values be brought together?

Treating statecraft as a set of functional issues is a way of managing this plurality of interests, actors, and values.  The problem is when they begin to interfere with each other and compete for resources.  On what basis can the brought into balance?

Wang and Amiri make the point that it the context of polarized national politics in the US there is space for cities to act internationally.  This is probably true but this is something that applies to the current situation not to city statecraft in general.  A city within a country represents a different scope of politics with a different distribution of actors so that a city’s politics are polarized while those of the country are not.  The key tension that applies to modern statecraft is that between the plurality of interests and relations and getting them to work together.  Of course that’s a problem that’s been around for a while and isn’t going away anytime soon.

*I’m avoiding the question of what diplomacy is and who is a diplomat.  I use the term statecraft because it’s broader and more neutral.