City and state relations under globalization: A network approach

The conventional state-centered view holds that the modern world is organized through a framework of nation-state and interstate systems. But recently, accelerated globalization has led to an alternative notion that cities are replacing nation-states as the basic organizing units of the increasingly globalized world. This dissertation examines three research questions concerning city and state relationships under globalization. First, as world cities---cities that are command and control centers of the world economy---become more globally central, will they stop contributing to the economic growth of the nation in which they are located or even impede that growth? Second, will world cities weaken ties with their national urban systems as they strengthen ties with other world cities? Third, is there an increased structural slippage between the world-city system and the world system?;The research finds that, first of all, globalization propels new agents and actors---including cities---into the locus of the international system. They become increasingly important under globalization to the extent that they weaken the territorial control of nation-states. Supporting evidence includes the divergence in economic interests between a world city and its nation, world cities' growing disconnection with their national companions under a neoliberal market, and the diminishing ability of the world-system to structure the world city hierarchy. Second, the intervention of a strong state only has a limited effect. A strong state is useful in buffering the impact of global capital on the domestic city system, but it cannot prevent its leading world city from diverging from its overall national economic interests.;The dissertation concludes that a relatively unified interest of global capital---independent from territorial states and the world-system of countries---has emerged and is significantly deconstructing the territorial basis of the nation-states. The state's power in reversing this trend is limited.;Adopting a relational/network approach, this dissertation assembles a large world city network of more than 20,000 cities in the world based on the location of headquarters and subsidiaries of 25,000 multinational corporations (1993-2007). It investigates the relationship between the global centrality of cities in this large world city network and various state characteristics with respect to the three research questions, employing the mixed effect model, the longitudinal network modeling, and the mixed effect Poisson regression, respectively.