What if mayors ruled the world?.
It can be argued that government structures are set up in a way that under-represent cities, but some argue that mayors are actually the ones taking care of business. And one renowned political scientist is speaking out about the idea to shake up the world’s political bodies in a new book. More from The Atlantic:
The question raised in Jihad vs. McWorld was whether there were inter-state and global institutions that could mediate the tensions between modernity and its aggressive materialism (McWorld) and the reactionary forces of “Jihad” that opposed it. It was increasingly apparent to me that traditional state-based organizations like the U.N. and the Bretton Woods institutions were paralyzed by sovereignty and distorted by private market relations and could not do much to further the interests of global democracy in the space between Jihad and McWorld.
As a result, I began to look at alternative building blocks for global governance — at which point the city appeared as a natural candidate; and one, it turned out, that was already deeply engaged in networking and transnational cooperation. The city was the solution to the hard question of whether there was a global form of democracy.
