Globalizing Cities and Fragmenting Nations

After the collapse of communism, the West experienced the globalization of major cities. These were cities whose institutions, functions, and visions were overwhelmingly global rather than regional or national. They contained stock markets, legal firms, insurance companies, financial service organizations, and other enterprises that operated worldwide and that were linked to similar enterprises in other global cities. Within these cities, high-level decision makers set global economic policy and enacted global business. The presence of high-powered and high-income global businesspeople made urban life extremely costly, driving middle managers and engineers to lower-priced living quarters in the suburbs, which nonetheless provided good schools and other amenities for well-educated white-collar earners. Crowded into the slums of global cities and the poorer suburbs were the lowest-paid workers—the maintenance, domestic, and other laborers whose menial labor was essential to the needs and comfort of those at the top.

Global cities became centers for migration of highly skilled and medial workers alike. Paris, London, Moscow, and New York were global spaces in direct and constant contact with institutions, businesses, and governments around the world. In contrast, citizens of more locally oriented cities took pride in maintaining a distinctive national culture or local sense of community and often denounced global cities as rootless, their citizens lacking patriotic focus on national causes. Global cities were often the base for diasporas of prosperous migrants, such as the estimated ninety thousand Japanese in England in the mid-1990s who staffed Japan’s thriving global businesses. Because these migrants did not aim to become citizens, global cities were said to produce a “deterritorialization of identities”—meaning that many city dwellers lacked both a national and a local sense of themselves.

Ironically, as globalization took hold economically and culturally, there came to be more nation-states in Europe in 2000 than there had been in 1945. Claims of ethnic distinctiveness caused individual nation-states to break apart and separatist movements—like that in Chechnya—to grow. Despite two centuries aimed at unification of the Slavs, for example, Slavs separated themselves from one another in the 1990s and early twenty-first century. Yugoslavia came apart into several states, and in 1993, Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia (see Map 29.3, page 983). In 2014, after a heated campaign, Scotland’s voters, however, rejected separating from the United Kingdom.

Activists also launched movements for regional independence in France, Italy, and Spain. Some Bretons (residents of the historical French province of Brittany) and Corsicans demanded independence from France, the Corsicans violently attacking national officials. Sharp cultural differences threatened to split Belgium in two. Basque nationalists in northern Spain assassinated tourists, police, and other public servants in an effort to gain autonomy, and although in 2005 they publicly renounced terrorism, violence often resurfaced. The push for an independent northern Italy began when politicians saw its attractiveness to voters and loudly demanded secession. As cities globalized and nations fragmented, new combinations of local, national, and global identities took shape. Such changing identities, plus the overall expansion of the EU, called the nation-state into question.