“4. Global City Networks and the Spread of Global Ideas” in “A Global Idea”
4 GLOBAL CITY NETWORKS AND THE SPREAD OF GLOBAL IDEAS
The earth is in effect one world, in which empty, uninhabited spaces virtually do not exist. Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.
—Edward Said (1993), Culture and Imperialism
“Drop Books not Bombs.” This has long been one of the slogans of the anti-war movement in the United States, first adopted during the Vietnam war and revived for wars ever since, up to the Iraq war at the beginning of the new millennium. Yet, as Michael Krenn (2017) points out, the idea of “dropping books” as well as or even instead of bombs has long been embraced as a core policy objective by US foreign policy leaders themselves. During the Eisenhower period, debates around cultural diplomacy called for the use of culture as a way to challenge negative stereotypes of the United States around the world: “The idea that examples of American consumer goods, or industrial machinery, or technology might also be cultural weapons struck many U.S. cultural diplomats as simply playing directly into the hands of anti-American stereotypes. What was needed was opera, not cars; theater, not kitchen appliances; books, not bombs” (Krenn 2017, 48). What makes the anti-war movement use the slogans of the US government’s own cultural diplomacy program? Are not anti-war movements supposedly anti-foreign policy, and why are books neutral in the popular imaginary of American citizens? Why do they think people outside the United States need their books? And for what ends?
In response to this slogan of the anti-war movement during the war in Iraq, Mahjoub, a famous caricaturist from Amman, Jordan, drew a caricature with an F16 dropping books from one side and bombs from the other. “It is to tell the Americans that books can be as lethal as bombs,” he said in an interview I conducted in Amman in the summer of 2009: “They can kill the political imaginary of the population being bombarded, sway attention from the real causes of the war and weaken resistance. They are part of cultural imperialism and the effects of books—here I mean ideas dropped by social media, media, conferences, workshops that are everywhere in this city, not only books—can outlast the effects of bombing.” To remove any doubt about his awareness that bombs are truly awful and that he was in no way suggesting that books should never be shared between different regions of the globe, Mahjoub said: “The aim of the caricature was not to suggest in any sense we should not exchange books, it is a message to the anti-war movement in the US that they need to rethink their slogans as both can be forms of imperialism. At that moment in 2003, the best slogan would be, ‘leave the world alone.’ It was also a message that your government that is spending your tax money to shock and awe the Iraqis is also spending millions of dollars to train Iraqis in books and pamphlets and workshops in the hotels of Amman.” “Books and bombs go together,” says Mahjoub. “They are not separate” (personal interview, July 2009).
These critical reflections on the “dropping books not bombs” discourse made by Krenn and Mahjoub highlight some of the key concerns of this book, as well as this chapter more particularly. First, these discussions point to the central importance of the global propagation of key ideas, images, slogans, discourses, and ideologies for the extension and reproduction not just of US hegemony around the world but—with the US state long acting as the dominant state supporting the spread of global capitalism—global capitalist hegemony, as well. It is widely recognized that the hegemony of global capitalism needs to be analyzed in cultural and ideological terms as well as political, economic, and military ones. This spread of hegemonic ideas is significant both globally and domestically—as when leading groups of anti-war resistance within the United States adopt the language and cultural frameworks of the leading capitalist state itself.
The idea of “dropping books not bombs” also raises the question of how the ideas central to US and global capitalist hegemony spread across the world. What is the agency, spatiality, temporality, structures, and processes through which this hegemony is actively, and sometimes deliberately, constructed? At certain key moments, the US government, along with other states, has sought to spread ideas quite literally by dropping pamphlets en masse out of warplanes in a process dubbed “paper warfare” (Machlis and Hanson 2006; Warren 2018). In the 2003 war on Iraq, for example, leaflets dropped from US jets in Iraq called for citizens to “listen to instructions on broadcast.” One leaflet read: “History has shown that appeasement of brutal domineering regimes only brings greater tragedy. Saddam, too, has a lust for power, and the world will stand up and put an end to the terror he imposes on others before he destroys Iraq and crushes the hopes of its proud people” (Graham 2007). But this, of course, is neither the most common nor most effective means for the global transfer of ideas. Globalizing ideas, as Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore (2012, 23) write, generally “do not simply drop from the sky, yielding ‘impacts’ here and there.” How exactly, then, do the ideas central to the construction of global capitalist hegemony make their way through time and space to spread across the furthest reaches of the planet?
The relationship between global capitalism and the spread of global ideologies has been the subject of many books and articles, whether in international relations, geography, or cultural studies. Usually, ideas are seen as “travelling,” “diffusing,” “spreading,” “flowing,” “transferring,” or even “flying”—they are only rarely “dropped” out of the skies above. Their movement across space is seen as more horizontal, sometimes rhizomic or weblike. In all these terminologies, there is “space” and “time” involved in the process. There is a space and time where ideas are produced, and another where they are consumed or diffused. However, despite this extensive literature, there remains limited precision on how the ideas at the core of global capitalist hegemony get constructed, how they are disseminated, and how they are both picked up but also contested by different communities based in different locations around the globe. Yet, it is precisely this generation of ideas pivotal to the global construction of capitalist hegemony—their dissemination, reception, translation, negotiation, and contestation—that is essential to understand if we are to effectively challenge the continued reproduction of this hegemony.
This is the central question this book has sought to address, through its study of the spread of ideas about youth and youth development in the Middle East as part of the US War on Terror. In this chapter, I shift from the specific analysis of the case study to consider the broader theoretical frameworks developed for addressing the question of how dominant ideas spread across the world in the context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century capitalism. These are the literatures on cultural imperialism; cultural and public diplomacy; policy transfer, diffusion, and mobility; and cultural globalization. As the preceding chapters have shown, to put together a coherent and effective account of how dominant ideas spread globally, we need to address the questions of the kinds of actors involved, the scales at which the spread of ideas is analyzed, the ways in which the role of space and time are considered, and the degree to which issues of power, contestation, and resistance are addressed (Nader 1969; Nader 1997).
The argument of this chapter is that each of these literatures have key contributions to make but also significant limitations for understanding the global spread of dominant ideas in the context of global capitalism. However, if we are to develop an effective and insightful theoretical approach for analyzing the spread of dominant ideas globally, as has been shown throughout the chapters on Washington, DC, Amman, and Dubai, it is essential to turn to the literature on global cities and global city networks. The central importance of the global cities literature for addressing this core question is not due just to the increased importance of cities in the management and reproduction of global capitalism in the contemporary historical conjuncture. It also is because this literature provides crucial tools and perspectives that can help pull together the literatures on cultural imperialism and cultural diplomacy on the one hand and the literatures on policy mobility and cultural globalization on the other, which are literatures too often represented as being mutually opposed and, thus, frequently end up talking past one another. In so doing, the global cities approach to studying the spread of global ideas embraces the most important contributions of previous approaches to this field of study while avoiding their endemic limitations.
Cultural Imperialism
Cultural imperialism is a concept that was developed and became popular in the 1960s and 1970s, in the context of growing concerns around the world with the rising influence of the United States as a global hegemon, dominant not just politically and economically but, perhaps even more strikingly, in the context of the worldwide spread of its mass culture industries: movies, television, music, radio, sports, print media, brand name cultural products, and so forth (Crothers 2014; Gienow-Hecht 2000; Roach 1997). Today, cultural imperialism often is introduced as an old, outdated, and largely “discredited” theory (van Elteren 2003). “The cultural imperialism thesis has lost much of its initial punch,” writes Lane Crothers (2014), as “the term … is too vague and too politically charged to provide much explanatory power.” Cultural imperialism, according to John Tomlinson (1991, 3), is a “generic concept” with “superficial appeal.” To “state the obvious about cultural imperialism,” writes Colleen Roach (1997, 52), “no one would argue that the concept is still widely adhered to.” But while important criticisms need to be made about the cultural imperialism concept’s limitations, such dismissiveness risks missing some of the key contributions this literature was able to make in shaping our analysis and understanding of how ideas and discourses central to the propagation of global capitalism spread around the world.
Three simple but critical ideas stand at the heart of the cultural imperialism analysis. First, there is recognition that the global spread of dominant ideas is not random or accidental. Nor is it based necessarily on the inherent superiority, meaningfulness, or evidence-based nature of these ideas; it is linked to the political and economic power of their propagators. The global “spread of schooling,” for example, as Martin Carnoy (1974, 15) argues in Education as Cultural Imperialism, “was carried out in the context of imperialism and colonialism … and it cannot in its present form and purpose be separated from that context” (emphasis in original). Second, in certain key cases, at least, this global spread of ideas by dominant states and capitalist enterprises is intentional and explicit. These elite groups seek to promote ideas that help create or reproduce a world order that will benefit their own interests. As Herbert Schiller (1976, 2–3) writes in Communication and Cultural Domination: “If the dominated are slowly awakening to the importance of the cultural-communications component in their struggle for meaningful existence and independence, the dominators are no less alert to its significance.… Techniques of persuasion, manipulation, and cultural penetration are becoming steadily more important, and more deliberate, in the exercise of American power” (emphasis in original).
Juan Gabriel Valdés (1995, 40) similarly observes, in his study of the powerful influence of a group of Chicago School economists in Pinochet-era Chile: “Historically, powerful empires and nations have transmitted—sometimes by simply organizing their influence—their values, beliefs, and forms of organization. And in every case, specific elites located in the power structures of these powerful nations have understood the political value of these transfers and have tried to find the best way to organize them into a permanent flow.”
Third, the global spread of ideas takes place within a network of state, capital, and civil society organizations that work together in both direct and indirect ways. Armand Mattelart (1976, 160, 161), for example, traces the rise of an “institutionalized” “alliance” of American “political, economic, cultural and military interests” operating in Latin America to promote ideas and culture “which favors the expansion of American influence,” an alliance that links the “propaganda apparatus of the government of the United States,” US communications corporations, and “new research complexes” and “systems of parallel education” (see, also, Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999). Cultural imperialist analysts have drawn attention, in particular, to the central role played in these networks by foundations like Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, as key actors in the global spread of ideas (Arnove 1980; see, also, Parmar 2012; Roelofs 2003). As Robert Arnove and Nadine Pinede (2007, 397) write:
Whether new or tried, mechanisms used by foundations … remained essentially the same throughout the last two decades of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Foundations like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford continued to shape policy [ideas] through funding basic as well as applied research: they mobilized talent on an international scale providing the resources for the best minds to work on the most serious problems of the times; they continued to exert their influence on policy by funding demonstration projects and experiments that local and national governments, bilateral and multilateral technical assistance and donor agencies would pick-up; they leveraged and brokered, and networked.
Where cultural imperialism as a literature has been legitimately criticized is in its tendency toward imprecision and overgeneralization. Only rarely did cultural imperialism analysts conduct focused empirical research to follow the spread of any one specific set of ideas across time and space (Roach 1997). Analysts tend to be more interested in sketching the overall global structures of cultural domination and inequality rather than local sequences, contexts, and processes through which such dominance and inequality are constructed (and contested) over time. As Schiller (1976, 9) writes, for example: “The concept of cultural imperialism … best describes the sum of the processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the value and structures of the dominating center of the system” (emphasis added).
The core terms used in cultural imperialism literature—“culture” and “imperialism”—are both problematic and totalizing concepts; and many of the claims of cultural imperialism writers, likewise, tend to be sweeping in nature (Tomlinson 1991). Crother’s (2014) definition of the concept is emblematic of this tendency: “Cultural imperialism is the systematic and fundamental replacing of one way of life with another.” Cultural imperialism analysts are more attuned to the problematic ideological content and original authorship (or ownership) of dominant (imperialist) texts, rather than the specific contexts within which such texts are actually taken up (e.g., Dorfman and Mattelart 1975). What interests cultural imperialism authors most, argues Mark Alan Healey (2003, 393), is not the complexities of how specific “ideas circulate, but rather where they originate.”
As a consequence, cultural imperialism analysts commonly have been accused of not differentiating among different types of culture, discourse, and ideas, as each may spread across the globe in quite different ways (Dunch 2002); of seeing American or Western conspiracies to spread ideas globally where there are none (Gienow-Hecht 2000); and of failing to attend to local agency in negotiating, translating, adapting, or resisting the spread of ideas from elsewhere (Crothers 2014; Roach 1997). The literature on cultural imperialism, then, provides us with a useful overall framework for thinking about the global spread of ideas in the context of worldwide political and economic power structures and relations. But for more precise, contextualized, and detailed analysis of how ideas actually travel within these global power structures and relationships, we need to look elsewhere.
Cultural and Public Diplomacy
One common criticism of the literature on cultural imperialism is that it falsely attributes an intentionality to domination to stand behind the global spread of ideas outward from world centers of political and economic power (Gienow-Hecht 2000). The concept of cultural imperialism, writes Tomlinson (1991, 173, 175), adopts “an inappropriate language of domination, a language of cultural imposition which draws its imagery from the age of high imperialism and colonialism,” and wrongly invokes “the notion of a purposeful project: the intended spread of a social system from one centre of power across the globe” (emphasis in original). However, over the last couple of decades, there has been a “flood” of literature on cultural and public diplomacy—focusing primarily on the United States during the Cold War—that suggests cultural imperialism writers actually were not far off the mark (Krenn 2017, 1). “Over the past twenty-five years, historians and journalists have produced dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of books and articles documenting the extraordinary range of this [US driven] cultural offensive,” writes Audra Wolfe (2018, 5); this is a literary explosion that has been enabled by the partial opening of the US archive, and “release of countless governmental and nongovernmental records” (Gienow-Hecht and Donfried 2010a, 15).
Cultural and public diplomacy, despite their various definitions, are conceptualized exactly as a purposeful project of spreading ideas (and culture, etc.) outward from global centers of power. Public diplomacy, writes Gifford Malone (1985), is “direct communication with foreign peoples, with the aim of affecting their thinking and, ultimately, that of their governments”; for Hans Tuch (1990), public diplomacy is “a government’s process of communication with foreign publics in an attempt to bring about understanding for its nation’s ideas and ideals, its institutions and culture, as well as its national goals and policies.” Similarly, Frederick (1993) defines public diplomacy as “activities, directed abroad in the fields of information, education, and culture, whose objective is to influence a foreign government, by influencing its citizens” (all definitions are found in Gilboa 2008, 57; see, also, Melissen 2013).
What the recent literature on cultural and public diplomacy has documented in painstaking detail is the extraordinary apparatus for “psychological warfare and cultural infiltration” that was set up around the world by the United States (in particular) in the Cold War-era as part of a deliberate strategy to “win the minds of men” and “convince people of the ‘right’ ideology” (Gienow-Hecht and Donfried 2010a, 15). This strategy “included everything from overt propaganda—delivered via radio, television, film, and print media—to educational exchanges, cultural exhibits, overseas libraries, and even domestic information campaigns” (Hart 2013, 2). It encompassed a full range of fields of cultural practice, “such as art, music, dance, theater, literature, and sports” (Krenn 2017, 1; see, also, Arndt 2006; Belmonte 2010; Parker 2016; Saunders 2000). Over the course of the twentieth century, an entire field of practice-oriented scholarship was developed to study and theorize the most effective ways to spread ideas overseas through cultural and public diplomacy (AAAPSS 2008; Snow and Cull 2009). While preferred tactics and strategies have varied across time and place (Arndt 2005), it often is argued that the most successful approaches tend to be those that are indirect, carried out with a range of non-state, private sector, and civil society actors. “The more distance there is between the agent of a cultural diplomacy program and a political or economic agenda,” writes Jessica Gienow-Hecht (2010, 4), and “the more interactive the structure of a cultural program is, the more likely it is to be successful.” This, in other words, is the rationale behind setting up the networks of state, capital, and civil society organizations that cultural imperialism writers argue are central to the global spread of ideas.
Though the focus of the literature on cultural and public diplomacy has overwhelmingly been on the US government during the Cold War-era, cultural and public diplomacy have long been and continue to be used by both dominant and peripheral states around the world (Gienow-Hecht and Donfried 2010b; Melissen 2005; Parker 2016; Snow and Taylor 2008). Cultural and public diplomacy also have long been used by private sector and civil society actors, both in coordination with (directed and/or funded by) state agendas, and in pursuit of their own interests (Gilboa 2008; Snow and Taylor 2006). The role of foundations in the deliberate global spread of ideas, as studied by cultural imperialism writers, is a prime example. Krenn (2017, 2) argues that it was actually private sector entrepreneurs and corporations who developed the art of cultural and public diplomacy in the United States, and that “the official foreign policy bureaucracy of the US government” was a latecomer on the scene, following in the footsteps of these early pioneers and “unofficial agents.”
Cultural and public diplomacy literature is useful for providing an inside view on deliberate projects by states and (though much less researched) NGOs and corporations to spread ideas around the world: on the goals, rationales, strategies, networks, and practices set up by these projects. Where it is considerably less helpful is in providing an understanding of the overall impact or effectiveness of these projects—or their relative significance in relation to the global spread of ideas more generally. “Trying to assess the significance of American cultural diplomacy from the perspective of its direct and specific ‘impact’ on the foreign audience is [not] entirely obtainable,” writes Krenn (2017, 3), and has been the basis for “a consistent debate among scholars in (and outside of) the field.” David Clarke (2016, 147) argues: There clearly remains a theoretical missing link … in the literature [on cultural and public diplomacy], in terms of judging the effectiveness of these [cultural and public diplomacy] efforts. While there is a broad consensus that cultural diplomacy is valuable (and, therefore, implicitly effective), evidenced not least by the willingness of states to invest in these activities, the absence of clear criteria for understanding how and why such measures can be successful is not merely problematic from an academic point of view, but also in terms of the way in which policy is formulated.”
Much like the literature on cultural imperialism, cultural and public diplomacy literature tends to neglect the issue of audience reception, and of how ideas and agendas spread by dominant political and economic actors around the world may be resisted, adapted, or otherwise taken up in ways that may be different from—or even completely counter to—the original cultural diplomacy project goals (cf. Horten 2006).
Perhaps what the cultural and public diplomacy literature is most useful for when thinking about the global spread of ideas is its exhaustive documentation of the extent of deliberate projects, led by both state and non-state actors, to spread ideas globally. If we take any major set of social, cultural, political, or economic ideas or practices that have spread across the globe since the end of the Second World War—whether these be related to democracy, human rights, women’s rights, development, freedom, neoliberalism, etc.—and ask how these ideas got here and who was involved in spreading them, then what this literature suggests to us is that, almost always, deliberate projects of cultural and public diplomacy are likely to have been involved to some degree. This does not mean to suggest that everything about the global spread of ideas is reducible to these kinds of intentional projects, for there are many other channels through which ideas spread globally; and even when diplomacy has been involved, there are, inevitably, other actors, agendas, and contexts that also shape how and whether ideas spread. But it does mean that attention to the possibility of cultural diplomacy projects of some form being involved behind the scenes does need, generally, to be considered as constituting one critical part of the larger picture.
Policy Diffusion, Transfer, and Mobility
Over the last three decades, a large and heterogeneous literature drawing from multiple academic disciplines (political science, sociology, geography, etc.) has emerged to study how and why policy texts, models, regimes, and ideas travel across the world. This is the literature on policy diffusion, transfer, and mobility (Baker and Walker 2019). If the literature on cultural imperialism and cultural diplomacy were concerned to understand, in particular, the role of the United States as a global hegemon or imperial power—along with other dominant nation states and blocs—in the mid-twentieth century, the literature on policy diffusion, transfer, and mobility developed in the late twentieth century under the sign of globalization. The rhetoric of globalization invokes a sense of a world more densely and rapidly interconnected than ever before, one where international and global organizations, rather than nationally rooted ones, take on increasingly important roles. “At its core,” write Beth Simmons, Frank Dobbin, and Geoffrey Garnett (2008, 358), “the process of globalization concerns the more widespread and more rapid movement across national boundaries not only of capital, goods, and services but also of ideas, information, and people.” “Networks of policy advice, advocacy, and activism now exhibit a precociously transnational reach,” argues Jamie Peck (2011, 773). “Policy decisions made in one jurisdiction increasingly echo and influence those made elsewhere; and global policy ‘models’ are exerting normative power over significant distances.”
There are several contributions that the literature on policy diffusion, transfer, and mobility brings to an understanding of how dominant ideas travel around the world. First, unlike the literature on cultural imperialism and cultural diplomacy, this literature shines a light on the actions of those who are receiving, importing, or adopting policy ideas brought in from other parts of the globe. This includes attention to the question of how and why local individuals and organizations embrace policy ideas from elsewhere; but also, increasingly, on how recipients of global policy ideas inevitably reshape and adapt—or “mutate”—these ideas according to the demands of local social, cultural, economic, and political contexts. “Policies, models, and ideas are not moved around like gifts at a birthday party or like jars on shelves,” observes Eugene McCann (2011, 111), “where the mobilization does not change the character and content of the mobilized objects.” Peck and Theodore (2010, 173) argue, in an important corrective to some of the cultural imperialism and cultural diplomacy literature:
Transnational agencies may attempt to “format” the world according to universal principles and imperial visions, but they are only ever incompletely (and unevenly) successful in these endeavors.… Once released into the wild, policies will often mutate and hybridize in surprising ways.… The analytical pursuit of mutating policies … need not be a fatalistic affirmation of hegemony; it can reveal the limits of [hegemony] as well as its logics. There is … a politics … to following mobile policies, to tracing their twists, turns, and localized effects. One really can never tell where they may lead.
Second, by focusing on the contexts of travel and reception, the policy diffusion, transfer, and mobility literature extends our understanding of the multiple mechanisms involved in the global spread of dominant ideas. Earlier work by political scientists in the policy transfer literature argued that policy ideas may be spread globally through one of four different transfer mechanisms: independent and voluntary learning, competition, emulation or socialization, and/or coercion (Simmons, Dobbin, and Garrett 2007; Marsh and Sharman 2009). More recent work, however, especially by sociologists and geographers, has questioned the degree to which dominant policy ideas ever really spread either solely through purely independent and voluntary learning or through direct coercion. Policy ideas “are not well enforced at gunpoint” and “seem not even to be enforceable at loan-point by the IMF,” write Garrett, Dobbins, and Simmons (2008, 358–359), “indeed, coercive efforts tend to spawn effective resistance.” Conversely, as Peck (2011, 780, 788) and others have argued, fully “voluntaristic modes of policy learning are, in reality, even more rare” than directly coercive ones, since “the idealized universe of rational-actor models, in which atomized agents operate in the bright sunlight of information-rich policy markets” is largely a theoretical construct.
Instead, the literature focuses on elucidating that “intervening, messy zone” that stretches between fully independent, voluntary learning and decision-making on the one hand and gunpoint coercion on the other, to analyze those “conditioning fields and institutions, existing pathways and trajectories” that strongly shape which policy ideas tend to spread globally (and how), all of which are “deeply structured by enduring power relations and shifting ideological alignments” (Baker and Walker 2019, 6; McCann and Ward 2012, 327; Peck and Theodore 2010, 169). This may include forms of soft or indirect coercion, socialization into dominant norms and discourses that reshape local preferences, structural positioning that compels (or strongly inclines) local actors to embrace certain policy models over others, and so forth. In a review article of the literature, Erin Graham, Charles Shipan, and Craig Volden (2013 693) point out: “National policy makers or intergovernmental organizations in federal systems, as well as international organizations, may serve a … role in policy diffusion through multiple mechanisms. Such centralized actors can facilitate learning or engage in socialization through the establishment of information clearinghouses, holding conferences or suggesting best practices. They may play a coercive role, with grant and aid conditions, pre-emptive laws, sanctions regimes or use of military force. They may help restructure competitive environments, such as with the European Union facilitating the reduction of trade barriers or the US constitution limiting interstate regulation of commerce by the states.”
Recent work in the policy mobility literature, in particular, notes how the previous, historical spread of global policy can transform the social, economic, and political environment within which new policy ideas may then be taken up or rejected around the world. The worldwide spread of neoliberal policy ideas, for example, has helped construct structural constraints that predispose local actors to embrace further neoliberal policy reforms:
Not only are policy-makers surrounded by constant messages restating neoliberal “best practice,” but their opportunities for regulatory experimentation and intervention that falls outside of neoliberal parameters are increasingly circumscribed.… The financialization of the economy and freeing of capital from its spatial constraints, the erosion of the tax base, the privatization of state services and assets, the disciplining of state budgets, and myriad other processes accelerated, if not set in train, by neoliberal policy combine to restrict the options of policy-makers to policies which do not require massive redistributions of wealth but do require the cooperation of hawkish economic elites intent on maneuvering state power to their advantage (Prince 2012, 192).
In general, as Peck and Theodore (2010, 170) observe, “policy models that affirm and extend dominant paradigms, and which consolidate powerful interests, are more likely to travel with the following wind of hegemonic compatibility or imprimatur status.”
A third important contribution of the policy diffusion, transfer, and mobility literature is to direct attention to the growing significance of a networked set of global, private sector, and civil society actors in the worldwide spread of dominant policy ideas. In many ways, this is not radically new, as such networks have long been a focal concern for cultural imperialism and cultural diplomacy writers. But the policy diffusion literature has added new levels of detail as well as new sets of policy actors to the analysis. Russell Prince (2012, 189) writes of the “proliferation” of “global policy networks,” defined as “the boundary-crossing web of influences that shape … policy decisions,” and that can include “supra-national actors and foreign governments, as well as legitimating transnational epistemic communities of relevant experts.” Christina Temenos and Eugene McCann (2013, 350) write of the emergence of a “global policy consultocracy,” comprised of a highly mobile group of “policy experts and consultants whose travels spread ‘best practice’ models” around the world. For Diane Stone (2012, 494), a densely connected set of “think tanks, business coalitions, universities, philanthropic foundations and NGOs” now act as global “policy transfer entrepreneurs,” serving “as financiers for the spread and articulation of policy ideas,” as “resource banks, researchers and advocates of policy ideas,” and as “coalition builders and network conveners.” Alongside the nationally based foundations like Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie studied previously by the cultural imperialism literature, international organizations (the OECD, World Bank, World Economic Forum, etc.) and private consultancy companies (McKinsey, Deloitte, KPMG, etc.) increasingly carry out similar sets of functions to those described earlier by Arnove and Pinede (2007).
Finally, the geography-based policy mobility literature brings close attention to the central importance of space as a key element in understanding the global spread of policy ideas. As Tom Baker and Christopher Walker (2019, 8) write, policy circulation “must happen somewhere: in specific locations and contexts, or what we refer to as spatial arenas.” These policy arenas include both “macro-spatial geopolitical arenas”—such as the Global North, the British Commonwealth, or the European Union—as well as “micro-spaces” (8, 9). Researchers in this tradition, thus, focus on the role that “globalizing microspaces,” such as “the internet and social media, conferences, mega-events, and sites of protest,” play as “places where mobilized policy knowledge must touch down in one sense or another to gain fuel and traction” (Temenos and McCann 2013, 346). Eugene McCann and Kevin Ward (2012, 329) argue, for example, for the importance of studying local “situations” to understand exactly how and why policy ideas spread worldwide:
We think of the situations of policy making, policy learning and policy transfer as not only associated with local places, like government offices, but also with places outside policy actors’ own “home” locations, including ones that are fleeting or mobile, such as conferences, seminars, workshops, guest lectures, fact-finding field trips, site visits, walking tours, informal dinners, among many others.… These policy-making situations are political in the sense that they are instances of persuasion and negotiation, ranging from the formal and institutional to the interpersonal persuasive politics through which individual actors conduct themselves and seek to shape the conduct of others.
Despite the increased availability of virtual communication through global social media and information technology, direct face-to-face meetings continue to play a vital role in the global spread of policy ideas. “The perceived importance of tacit knowledge acquisition and experiential learning, and the need to develop trust among coalitions of local and international policy actors,” argue Baker and Walker (2019, 10), “have meant that being physically co-present with other policy actors and other policy sites remains central to policy circulation.”
While the policy diffusion, transfer, and mobility literature add enormous richness of depth and detail to our understanding of how dominant ideas travel across the world, there also are significant limitations to this literature that are important to highlight. In particular, what we start to lose here, especially in comparison with the cultural imperialism and cultural diplomacy literatures, is a clear sense of who is pushing global policy agendas and where the centers of power within global politics, society, and economy actually lie. Much of the early policy diffusion and transfer literature ignores the significance of unequal power structures in shaping the global flow of policy ideas altogether; and because this literature tended to focus on policy diffusion and transfer among wealthy countries in the Global North, while neglecting the situation of countries in the Global South, this “allowed the role and processes involved in less voluntary forms of [policy] movement to remain fairly understudied” (Dolowitz 2018, 330; see, also, Smith 2013). More recent literature does not ignore the question of power but tends to see power as being decentered, distributed, and diffuse (Peck and Theodore 2010). Though recognition of local agency in policy “mutation” and “hybridization,” and attention to the extensive “networks” and “webs” of policy actors is important, this sometimes comes at the expense of acknowledging the continued reality of major structural power imbalances in global political economy. The role of centralized power of capital or dominant nation states in shaping and directing the global flow of policy ideas, when not ignored altogether, often is treated in this literature as an aside or as counterfactual. As Simmons, Dobbin, and Garrett (2008, 16) write, for example: “How do hegemonic ideas emerge and become politically ascendant? Most scholars believe that the fact they are endorsed by a powerful actor is not enough.… Nonetheless, it is likely that because powerful countries have the research infrastructure, the critical intellectual mass, and well-developed connections between the policy world and various research nodes, they are likely to be influential, perhaps unduly, in the framing of policy discussions” [emphasis added].
As Michael Peter Smith (2013, 128) argues, in addition to “powerful countries” and “multilateral institutions,” it also is essential to recognize “the power of wealthy oligarchs … to command the resources necessary to unduly influence the framing of dominant policy discourses.” “There are many examples of extremely wealthy oligarchs either directly pursuing and exercising political power,” suggests Smith (2013, 121), “or seeking to shape policy discourses indirectly by deploying their wealth individually or in the form of billionaire-driven policy networks to set and partially finance policy agendas at different levels of government around the world” (emphasis in original).
Finally, it needs to be recognized that the focus of the policy diffusion, transfer, and mobility literature is on the global spread of policy rather than of dominant ideas more generally. This means the literature tends to be more focused on the role of states and less focused on the role of capital in its analysis of the global spread of dominant ideas. It also means the literature tends to pay limited attention to the engagement of the general public, or of the interactions between those promoting dominant ideas and lay audiences, through formal and informal education, mass and social media, and so on. The literature’s core concern is with communication and interactions between professionals, experts, entrepreneurs, elites, policymakers, and “middling technocrats” (Larner and Laurie 2010). This is in direct contrast to the literatures on cultural imperialism and cultural diplomacy, of course, both of which are directly attentive to the engagement of general public audiences in the global spread of ideas.
Cultural Globalization
Where the policy diffusion, transfer, and mobility literature has been concerned specifically with the worldwide spread of policy models, regimes, and ideas in the context of neoliberal globalization, a parallel literature has emerged since the 1990s to analyze the more general phenomenon of cultural globalization. Cultural globalization may be defined loosely as the “cross-border flows of national and transnational cultures,” with the term culture including “consumer, corporate, ethnic, media, political and scientific/technological cultures” (Crane 2011, 1; Crane 2012, 360). The literature focuses, in particular, on the consequences that changes in global telecommunications technology and infrastructure are having for the worldwide circulation of cultural products. As Marwan Kraidy (2005, 15) points out, for example, new “technologies such as satellite television, cellular phones, the Internet, and digital cable have created seamless flows of transnational images, ideas, and ideologies that link scattered locales” across the planet. The “radical acceleration in the flows of capital, people, goods, images, and ideologies … across the face of the globe,” write Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo (2002, 5), “has brought even the most remote parts of the world in contact with metropolitan centers.” Many of the authors in the field have developed their work either as a direct counterargument to, or in dialogue with, the earlier claims of cultural imperialism writers, and concerns that globalization is leading to the inevitable Americanization, Westernization, McDonaldization, or homogenization of the world (e.g., Appadurai 1996; Kraidy 2005; Tomlinson 1996).
Much like the policy diffusion, transfer, and mobility literature, cultural globalization writers insist on the need to focus not just on the large, multinational culture, communications, and media corporations that dominate the global production and dissemination of images, texts, media, and ideas, but also on the actions of their local audiences and recipients, to best understand how these spread across the globe. “Movement between cultural/geographical areas always involves translation, mutation and adaptation,” notes Tomlinson (1996, 27), “as the ‘receiving culture’ brings its own cultural resources to bear, in dialectical fashion, upon ‘cultural imports.’ ” “At least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or another way,” argues Arjun Appadurai (1996, 32): “This is true of music and housing styles as much as it is true of science and terrorism, spectacles and constitutions.” Transnational flows of culture may be driven as much by the work of local groups, who act as “cultural brokers” to import cultural products from elsewhere, in the configuring context of local, regional, or national fields of social and political interest and practice, as they are by dominant nation states or overseas corporations (Peterson 2010).
Also like the policy mobility literature, cultural globalization writers place great emphasis on how ideas—and cultural products more generally—are transformed as they travel across the world, a phenomenon often described as “hybridization.” Hybridization, in part, is a consequence of local agency, resistance, translation, and adaptation of dominant cultural texts and ideas from elsewhere. For some cultural globalization writers, “the phenomenon of hybridization produces inconsistent, ambiguous or conflicting meanings that create opportunities for culturally oppressed groups to resist the dominant culture” (Crane 2012, 367).
But hybridization also is a result of deliberate strategies of corporate (and state) global disseminators. For example, “media multinationals use hybridity to attract diverse audiences in many countries rather than simply marketing a homogenous Anglo-American culture worldwide” (Crane 2011, 9). Kraidy (2005, 148), thus, argues that hybridization constitutes part of the “cultural logic of globalization”: “The claim that hybridity is [always] symptomatic of resistance to globalization is troublesome, and the less forceful assertion that cultural mixture reflects the lightness of globalization’s hand is misguided. Hybridity as a characteristic of culture is compatible with globalization because it helps globalization rule … through a variety of local capitals. Hybridity entails that traces of other cultures exist in every culture, thus offering foreign media and marketers transcultural wedges for forging affective links between their commodities and local communities.” Hybridization as a strategy for enabling the global spread of dominant ideas, as Scott Robert. Olson (1999, 6) writes, “allows [global cultural exports] to become stealthy, to be foreign myths that surreptitiously act like indigenous ones.”
Cultural globalization writers have deployed an evocative set of metaphors to describe how ideas and other cultural products now spread across the globe. Appadurai (1996) writes of “fluid” and “irregular” “global cultural flows” (33); of “mediascapes,” that consist of “electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information” and “large and complex repertoires of images [and] narratives … to viewers throughout the world” (35); as well as “ideoscapes,” described as “concatenations of images” that are “often directly political,” linked with “the ideologies of states and the counterideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power” (36). John Urry (2003) writes of “globally integrated networks” that “consist of complex, enduring and predictable networked connections between people, objects and technologies stretching across multiple and distant spaces and times” (56–57); as well as the more chaotic movements of “global fluids:”
Such fluids are partially structured by the various “scapes” of the global order, the networks of machines, technologies, organizations, texts and actors that constitute various interconnected nodes along which flows can be relayed. Global fluids travel along these various scapes, but they may escape, rather like white blood corpuscles, through the “wall” into surrounding matter.… Such fluids of diverse viscosity organize the messy power of complexity processes. They result from people acting upon the basis of local information but where these local actions are, through countless iteration, captured, moved, represented, marketed and generalized within multiple global waves, often impacting upon hugely distant places and peoples. The “particles” of people, information, objects, money, images, risks and networks move within and across diverse regions forming heterogeneous, uneven, unpredictable and often unplanned waves” (60).
Daya Kishan Thussu (2007, 4) argues that, alongside the dominant flows of culture and media that emanate from the United States and the Global North, there also exist important “contra-flows” of culture and media “emanating from the erstwhile peripheries” of the global cultural and media economy.
There are a number of key points that can be extracted from this kind of imagery. The global spread of ideas is not unidirectional; given the extraordinary extension of information and communication technology, the spread of ideas around the world is increasingly difficult to control or contain; and dominant ideas are likely to spread through a multitude of parallel and divergent pathways. But, despite the powerful rhetoric often found in such texts, the analysis of how, exactly, ideas and other cultural products spread across the world remains underdeveloped in the cultural globalization literature. “Our understanding of how the space of flows operates is relatively limited,” argues Diana Crane (2011, 3), as “it has been more difficult to theorize the nature of the flows as opposed to the content of the flows.” The literature does not tend to explain how and why certain ideas become globally dominant rather than others. For this, we need to return to the literatures on cultural imperialism, cultural diplomacy, and policy transfer and mobility. In general, many cultural globalization writers (with some important exceptions) ignore or overlook centralized configurations of power, whether in the form of the nation state or coordinated capital interests, which seek to drive and shape the global flow of culture and ideas. Indeed, a key part of the globalization framework is the “ideological” assumption of a vastly weakened nation state (Kraidy 2005, 43). Cultural globalization analysis tends to be interested primarily with what happens with cultural products once they have arrived in an overseas location—in other words, with the manifold process of hybridization—and less with the precise ways in which such products have come to travel across the globe in the first place.
The literature on cultural globalization provides a helpful reminder, when thinking about how dominant ideas spread across the globe, of key pieces of the puzzle that are largely overlooked in the parallel literature on policy diffusion, transfer, and mobility; that is, ideas beyond those linked directly to policymaking models and agendas and the engagement of general publics beyond professional policymaking elites. But this reminder mostly is just a suggestive one, lacking in any great detail. Despite making regular reference to the importance of the global flow of ideas and ideologies, the cultural globalization literature is much more likely to focus on flows of media, arts, and culture—how the US television show Dallas is watched in different countries around the world, for example (Liebes and Katz 1993)—than on the flow of ideas about society, culture, politics, or the economy per se.
Global Cities and Global City Networks
In reviewing the previous four areas of literature, a split or tension emerges in how we can understand how dominant ideas spread across the globe. Cultural imperialism and cultural diplomacy literature focus attention on dominant centers of (state and capital) power in the global economy that actively seek to promote ideas that serve their interests and agendas. But they do so at the expense of recognizing how local social, political, and economic actors, contexts, and processes are also key to how ideas travel globally. Policy mobility and cultural globalization literature look closely at the local settings, actors, and networks (or flows) that both spread and transform policy ideas and cultural products as these move across the globe; but in the process, they often lose clear site of the dominant structures and centers of economic, political, and social power that are fundamental drivers of these policy and culture flows. To bridge these two sets of literature, it is helpful to turn to a fifth body of work, one that centers on the concept of global (or world) cities and global city networks.
The core idea of the global city literature is that contemporary global capitalism increasingly relies on a set of centralized hubs of command and control (global cities such as London, New York, and Tokyo), that are densely networked with one another, as well as with a lower tier of cities spread across the world. As Ben Derudder (2018, 342) writes:
Research on world cities [is] premised on two key observations. First, the increasingly worldwide (re)distribution of economic activities necessitates strategic control functions that are found in a limited number of locations: globalization in its various guises has led to increased levels of geographical complexity, and this calls for control points to ensure the smooth functioning of the global system. In other words: world cities contain a disproportionate number of strategic agents in the global system (e.g., headquarters of multinational corporations and international institutions, specialized and internationalized business firms). Second, the practice of strategic control is accomplished through the capacity of these world city agents to network across space.
“The global city network,” argues Saskia Sassen (2001, 348), “is the operational scaffolding of … the global economy.” Global cities are, thus, characterized by: large agglomerations of state, private, and third sector institutions that are oriented to globalized production, distribution, communication and services and interact extensively with one another in the context of the global city itself; a well-developed city infrastructure capable of supporting and facilitating such global city work and interaction; and a dense web of transportation and communications links that tie global work in the city to an extended network of other globally oriented cities across the world. The global city concept is, thus, about recognizing how key local sites have become pivotal for producing, managing, and governing global processes; and vice versa, how global processes always have to be produced, managed, and governed in specific, concrete, and local settings. It is this twinned concern with global structures of power and dominance, and with localized interactions and networks, that makes the global city literature such a useful addition to the previous literatures for understanding how dominant ideas spread around the world.
To a certain extent, the global cities literature always has acknowledged that part of the work global cities does in managing the global capitalist economy centrally involves the spread of dominant ideas across the world. “Today we can identify a global urban network connected by flows of goods, people, capital, and ideas,” writes John Short (2017, 2; emphasis added). “World cities can … be seen as the locales from which [various] forms of global power are projected,” notes Derudder (2018, 343), “for example, geopolitical and/or ideological-symbolical control.” Overwhelmingly, however, the global city literature has had a strong “economistic” bias, such that the majority of global city research and writing has focused on how global city networks support the financing and servicing of multinational corporations in their worldwide production, marketing, distribution, and sales (Curtis 2016, 4; Robinson 2002, 535). There are a handful of exceptions: for example, Monika Skórska and Robert Kloosterman (2012) write about “global arts centres;” Stefan Krätke (2003) and Michael Hoyler and Allan Watson (2013) write on “global media cities;” and Freke Caset and Ben Derudder (2017) study “global cultural cities” (see, also, Short 2017). When it comes to understanding the role global cities play in shaping how (and which) ideas spread around the world, the global city literature is, therefore, suggestive rather than definitive. The “empirical focus” of this literature “on economic prowess in general and financial command in particular,” as Caset and Derudder (2017, 238) note, “has tended to render some of the alternative dimensions of cities’ global centrality relatively underexposed.” One immediate question is whether the same set of global cities at the heart of managing worldwide flows of capital also are the cities that play dominant roles in managing and directing global flows of ideas and ideology.
The limited work done on global cities of arts, media, and culture suggests there is both overlap as well as divergence. Berlin, for example, stands out as a global city in the arts world but not in the world of finance or multinational business services (Skórska and Kloosterman 2012); similarly, Los Angeles is a global city standing at the hub of worldwide networks of corporate media production and dissemination but not a global city in the sense of London or New York when it comes to organizing circuits of global finance (Hoyler and Watson 2013).
In embracing the global city concept to investigate how dominant ideas spread around the world, two key points are central. First, global city power and productivity rests on the city’s networked relationships that tie the city to other key sites, institutions, and actors across the world. “The very idea of a world/global city,” Michael Hoyler, Christof Parnreiter, and Allan Watson (2018a, 6) insist, “only makes sense if these cities are seen in a relational perspective, tied to each other … but also to all the ‘ordinary’ cities … where production for the world market is carried out.” A growing number of scholars now argue that, to understand how global city networks work in managing global flows of capital (and ideas), we need to focus attention not just on the global cities that stand at the center of these flows but also on a second tier of “gateway cities”—sometimes referred to in the literature as “relational cities,” “semi-peripheral world cities,” “globalizing cities,” or “regional command centres”—that insert global flows into national, regional, and local economies, societies, and political structures (Scholvin et al. 2017; Scholvin, Breul, and Diaz 2019; Sigler 2013). Gateway cities have been variously defined as: “an entrance into (and necessarily an exit out of) some area” (Burghardt 1971, 269); a “gateway for the transmission of economic, political and cultural globalization” (Short et al. 2000, 318); “transmission channels between their respective hinterlands and the outside world” and “pathways for flows of capital and information, connecting regional systems to world-spanning circuits” (Scholvin et al. 2017, 5, 6); and as existing “at one end of a fan-shaped network, connecting the global economy with a regional economic matrix” (Sigler 2013, 612). Sören Scholvin, Moritz Breul, and Javier Revilla Diaz (2019, 11) suggest different gateway cities may specialize in mediating different types of global flows, and some gateway cities may come to focus on what they term “knowledge generation”: “By knowledge generation we mean cooperative processes that involve local and non-local firms that work together so as to adapt existing technologies to local particularities or to market locally developed knowledge globally.… Existing technologies are modified this way; hence knowledge is generated, and places where this knowledge generation occurs serve as intellectual links between different scales.”
The capacity of global (and gateway) cities to manage global flows of capital and ideas also rests crucially on the interactions among globalizing actors that take place within the local spaces of the global city, or what Sassen (2002, 11) calls “social connectivity.” As Sassen (2002) argues in The Global City, “the term global city may be reductive and misleading if it suggests cities are mere outcomes of a global economic machine.” Instead, global cities are “specific places whose spaces, internal dynamics, and social structure matter” (4). Even with the growing ability to communicate electronically around the globe, one key factor in the centrality of global (and gateway) cities to contemporary global capitalism is the continuing importance of “face-to-face encounters and personal discussions when crucial decisions are at hand” (Portes and Martinez 2019, 2). As Short (2017, 5) writes:
A central reason for the concentration of command functions in selected global cities is the need for social interaction in global financial business deals. Trust, contact networks, and social relations play pivotal roles in the smooth functioning of global business. Spatial propinquity allows these relations to be easily maintained, lubricated, and sustained. Global cities are the sites of dense networks of interpersonal contact and centers of the important business/social capital vital to the successful operation of international finance.… Face-to-face contacts between experts are facilitated by the clustering of knowledge-rich individuals in cities like New York and London.… Reflexivity and networking are at the heart of understanding global cities as places where people, institutions, and epistemic communities work to establish and maintain contacts. More importantly, these communities act as crucial mediators and translators of the flows of knowledge, capital, people, and goods that circulate in the world.
Therefore, to understand how global cities play a role in managing global flows—whether of capital or ideas—it is important to study the external networks linking global cities, gateway cities, and their local, regional, and national hinterlands. It is just as crucial to develop “a textured and fine-grained discussion” of precisely how the global flows are produced, managed, and directed through the dense, local interactions of a wide range of individuals and institutions brought together in the structured spaces internal to the global city (McNeill 2017, 5). In other words, we need to study not just the overarching “structure of the world city network” but also “agency in global cities” and the particular “practices that constitute what we call economic [and cultural] globalization and global control” (Hoyler, Parnreiter, and Watson 2018b, 7; Sassen 2001, xxii; emphasis in originals).
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