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A Research and Didactic Statement by Andre Gunder Frank
Globalization is age old and has long been constructed through an ever changing
network, especially within and among cities, which constitute the nodal knots in regional,
inter-regional, and global networks of communication and other relations. The whole system
of networks is greater than the sum of its urban, hinterland, and inter-urban parts, which
are shaped and re-shaped by the structure and dynamic of the global system as a whole, to
whose transformation the changing parts themselves also contribute. For instance, a change
in global or regional trade routes can promote one or more cities at the expense of
marginalizing other cities and exert direct effects on imperial or other political
relations among these cities or between them and their respective hinterlands. Periods of
global or regional economic, technological, demographic, military, political, cultural and
other expansion offer opportunities for policy making success [lifting many if not all
boats]; while successive periods of contraction or crisis impose serious limits to policy
makers [many of whose boats and plans go down in the turmoil]. However, the same crisis in
leading cities, economies, empires, etc. also offer some but never all intermediate
economies and polities within the global network or its regional parts to improve their
place and fortune within the whole. Much of the riches and other benefits of a city,
region, and sector is derived less from its alleged internal, let alone pristine
capacities and strengths than they are from gaining and maintaining a favored position or
location, location, location within the whole from which the socio-political economic unit
[including even an individual or family] can derive benefits at the expense of those who
are or are pushed into a position of disadvantage. This structure and function has been in
place but evolving and self-transforming throughout Afro-Eurasia over several thousand
years and globally for the past five hundred years.
At the same time, the growth of those in positions of advantage generates entropy or
disorder, which compromises the continuance of such growth - unless that entropy can be
and is dissipated or exported to cities, hinterlands, or other regions who are obliged to
absorb this entropy and generate disorder due to their unfavorable position in the system
as a whole. For instance, no large city could survive nor maintain mutually beneficial
relations with others like it except for its ability to dissipate its own entropy to its
immediate hinterland and/or to somewhere else half way around the globe. The economic and
demographic growth in and of the industrialized cities would not have been possible
without the dissipation of their entropy to other parts of the world who are obliged to
absorb the ecological costs of a world development that has benefitted and
continues to do so to the few at the expense of the many.
The most glaring and yet least noted instance is the military industrial complex
against which President Eisenhower warned in his "Farewell Speech." It is not
only probably the world's most polluting industry. It is also the example par excellence
of entropy. Military production by industrial powers uses local and imported raw materials
- and often brain drain - to produce at huge economic resource opportunity and
environmental costs ''goods'' [more properly ''bads''] of no social social utility
whatsoever. Most of these are then exported back to the suppliers of the original or other
- oil - raw materials. They pay for them with foreign exchange derived from their export
of other still more commodities or goods of low value added, which they thereby deny to
their own populations. Thus, starving Africans and Asians export foodstuffs to the rich.
Entropy is thereby dissipated already through the transfer of exhaustive and polluting
industries from the rich to the poor. But perhaps more serious even is the dissipation of
socio-political entropy from the richer who sell their military hardware and training that
aids them better to afford ''democratic order'' at home to the poorer abroad who import
these arms and use them to kill each other in an entropy absorbing ever more chaotic
''Third World." Even so, the arms producers keep enough of them for their own use to
enforce, maintain and even further extend this exploitative and entropic world division of
benefits for themselves at the enormous cost to everybody else. That is called preserving
human rights, freedom, democracy, civilization and most recently also combatting
terrorism.
Urban and inter-urban politics is in large measure an outcome of this global structure
and process. Indeed, much of what appears as inter-Anational@ / state relations turns out
on closer examination to be more inter-URBAN relations. The contemporary revival of regionalism
for instance in Europe or China is importantly derived from cities and their denser
regional relations, though some of these cities may also be major WORLD CITIES, like New
York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai that form a global network of their
own,. They in turn connect minor world cities like Chicago, Toronto, Mexico, Sao
Paulo, Buenos Aires, Frankfurt/Berlin, Zurich, Cairo, Istanbul, Moscow, Mumbai, Singapore,
Sydney, Osaka and others [and the major/minor may be subject to dispute if only because
their ranking is always changing], as well as of course all other cities and their
hinterlands. The changing position or location of these cities and the efforts of their
policy makers to promote or delay these changes largely determines the benefits or costs
that its inhabitants derive from their common participation in the global whole. And it is
the analysis and understanding of the actual and potential place within the contemporary
and near future cyclical moment in global development that can afford policy makers the
intelligence on which to act. |
