The Bay Area as City-State
On February 23, 2011, Stanford Engineering School professor Paul Saffo delivered this speech, titled “Why the Bay Area Needs to Act Like a City-State,” at UC Berkeley. We sent an excerpted version of this speech to a variety of Northern California writers and activists and asked for their responses to his argument.
Thank you, and thank you for inviting me here. It’s an honor to speak today and to reflect on Victor’s memory, because I think what I’m talking about is something that would be close to his heart.
Here’s where I think we are. Quite simply, digital technology is the solvent leaking the glue out of all of our governmental institutions—globally, not just in terms of national governments and municipal governments, but around the world. We see it happening everywhere. The evidence is all around us. It of course is in the daily news, all the way from the latest unrest in the Middle East and the sudden retirement of Hosni Mubarak to less dramatic events, like the impending dissolution of the nation of Belgium, which we hardy pay attention to because so much is going on.
More specifically, what’s dissolving is the notion of the nation-state, and even more specifically the notion of a monopoly on sovereignty that nation-states have enjoyed. Not just at the nation-state level, but through all levels of government, exclusivity and monopolies are beginning to disappear. This process began in the middle of the last century, but digital technology is accelerating the shift. Quite simply, monopolies are being threatened by networks.
But first, some context. It all began in 1648, with the Peace of Westphalia, a moment in time when a Europe, exhausted by the Thirty Years War, reached a long overdue peace. In the process they also invented an entirely new political order, encompassing everything from a new form of diplomacy to a political order based on the novel notion of a sovereign state. This in turn led to defined territories, the notion of citizenship, and emergent governmental systems. In short, the Peace of Westphalia started us down the path that lead to the modern international order.
Nation-states came into their own in the nineteenth century, in no small part because of something quite like globalization. Instead of the Internet, it was steam-powered transport, railroad expansion, the rise of literacy, the emergence of mass media in the form of newspapers and the like. And it was a time of waning monarchs and the rise of politicians.
The nineteenth-century nation-state was a product of the Machine Age, in the same way that globalization today is a product of the Information Age. The nation-state was revolutionary because it represented the combination of two previously distinct elements: the notion of a state as a geographical entity, and the notion of a nation as a cultural entity. A nation-state is an entity with clear territory, and a political and cultural identity.
In a nation-state order, borders stabilize as territories became clearly defined, which in turn leads to everything from formal diplomacy to the widespread use of passports in the early twentieth century. The nation-state was barely one hundred years old when it began to devolve shortly after World War II. The triggering event was the adoption in 1948 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which granted individuals standing in international law.
And it was no coincidence that the dissolution began just as the Information Age arrived. The Information Age began with the invention of the transistor in 1947 by three physicists at Bell Labs and the publication a year later of Claude Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication in 1948. Those two events, barely noticed at the time, were the beginnings of this Schumpeterian wave of creative destruction that is now blowing through every corner of our governmental institutions, from Cairo to Sacramento and City Hall in San Francisco.
The nation-state is still dissolving, and it’s dissolving in two ways. First, the nation-state is losing its monopoly. What began with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 has become a process that has given individuals, nongovernmental organizations, and no end of other entities standing in international law. In addition, nation-states ceased to be a unitary entity. We think of the nation-state as a singular entity, but really it’s a bundle of rights and competencies—a defense competency, an economic competency, a cultural competency, and the like. We started breaking these elements apart in 1948, when Jean Monnet implemented the European Steel and Coal Community, setting Europe on the path of becoming a community rather than a set of nations. Europe’s integration was an astonishing process, a wildly successful erosion of sovereignty that had happened over the last fifty years. It went from a region that fought two deadly world wars to a community whose only battles now are on the soccer field and over the European Song Contest.
It is one of those wonderful coincidences in history that the erosion of the nation-state occurred in the very place where the nation-state began. The Peace of Westphalia was negotiated in the two cities of Münster and Osnabrück, which are in the exact same region where the European Steel and Coal Community was formed. European integration has made individual nations less relevant. It is no coincidence that the first nations likely to disappear are in Europe, and Belgium may be the first. Italy could well be the second, while anyone who has been to Barcelona knows that Spain has regions like Catalonia that would much prefer to be independent.
I’m not saying that nation-states will disappear entirely, though some most certainly will. Rather, nations will continue to lose their monopoly, and with it, their centrality in international affairs. Nation-states will remain but they will matter less and less because power is moving elsewhere. A new political unit is moving to the fore—the city-state.
The rise of the city-state is the result of several external factors. Globalization is the most obvious one: as our collective worldview became global, we also re-identified with intensely local affiliations. Instead of merely being U.S. citizens, we find ourselves to be members of a global community, and then Californians, or members of the Bay Area. In an age of jet travel, national identity is increasingly lost in the shuffle.
The second major factor is urbanization. According to the UN’s demographers, humankind became a majority urban population sometime in the last two years. This is an astonishing novelty. It has never before happened in human history or the history of our planet. This is pushing us into unexplored territory, and it has obvious implications for metropolitan governance and the institutions that make these increasingly huge entities run.
In an ever more mobile, globalized world, it’s not citizens of nations that matter—it’s residents of cities. Indian expats living in Silicon Valley do not feel at all that they are U.S. citizens, but they most assuredly feel they are co-equal members of the Bay Area community.
Our current shift from TV-centric mass media to Internet-centric personal media is reinforcing the rise of city-states. Mass media brought us together by presenting a common narrative, while personal media is giving us vast—and vastly different—narratives to choose from. Everywhere we turn, power is devolving from the center to the periphery. In the United States, power continues to leak out of Washington and to the states.
In this emergent order, it’s inevitable that the city-state will become the dominant unit. The city-state is a perfect confluence of commerce, culture, and governance. City-states matter because a city-state is an entity large enough to have a global impact—think of the impact of the Bay Area–Silicon Valley on the global economy. But it’s also small enough that everybody in the city-state knows where they fit. They know what their contribution is, which is very different from the United States today. At a national level, citizens in different regions are defined more by their differences than their commonalities. Cities don’t suffer from this problem—even an expat can identify with the city they live in.
There are two kinds of city-states—actual, or de jure city-states, and de facto city-states. De jure city-states are places like Singapore or Dubai or Abu Dhabi. These are entities that have formal standing in international law. De facto city-states don’t have seats in the UN General Assembly, but nonetheless flex considerable power internationally. Examples include Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, and of course the Bay Area.
California itself is showing a remarkable degree of independence these days. Think about California as a unit. It has a two-trillion dollar gross state product—the largest in the United States. If independent, it would be the eighth-largest economy in the world. In many ways it already acts like a nation-state. For example, in July 2006, the Republican president George Bush asked Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to send 1,500 National Guard troops to the Mexican border to protect us against terrorists and drug smugglers. And what did the Republican governor say to the Republican president? “No.” Even as late as 1990, it would have been unthinkable for a governor to turn down a direct request from a sitting president involving national security. When George Wallace defied Lyndon Johnson in 1965, he woke up with the U.S. Army on his doorstep!
But Schwarzenegger didn’t just turn Bush down. A month later, in August 2006, Schwarzenegger met in Long Beach on the shores of the Pacific Ocean with a real head of state, Tony Blair, to announce a joint California-United Kingdom program around combating global warming, in direct opposition to the policies of the sitting U.S. president.
California is looking increasingly independent these days. However, it’s too big to be a city-state.
Parts of the state have long wanted to go their own way—San Francisco and L.A. thrive on their differences and the far north of the state once wanted to form the independent state of Jefferson. But the Bay Area actually looks like a pretty good candidate for a city-state. We’re not an island like Singapore, and we’re not surrounded by desert like Dubai, but we have a distinct geography—a central bay bordered by mountains. We all know when we’re in the Bay Area, and we all know where it stops when we head to Tahoe or L.A.
The Bay Area also has a distinct, identifiable economy, with a $420 billion GDP according to the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. That makes us the twenty-fifth largest economy on the planet—bigger, for example, than that of Taiwan. With our economy comes a distinct business reputation. Hong Kong is synonymous with trade. Singapore is synonymous with corruption-free pragmatics. Dubai is synonymous with exuberant, freewheeling commerce. And the Bay Area is synonymous with entrepreneurial innovation and high technology. That’s why Russian President Medvedev visited here last year—to learn from Silicon Valley. We also have more Fortune 500 headquarters in the Bay Area than anywhere in the United States except New York City.
City-states also tend to have distinct brands and high social cohesion. The Bay Area definitely has a brand—that is why we are such a popular tourist destination. And our social cohesion is evident in everything from our identification with high-tech, to events like Bay to Breakers, to our shared lifestyle valuing the environment and all the Bay Area has to offer in terms of recreation.
City-states are also too often defined by an awkward relationship with their neighbors. Singapore has its problems with Malaysia. Dubai can’t decide if Abu Dhabi is a partner or a competitor. We have our rivalry with Los Angeles.
Most importantly, we have cohesive, pragmatic governments, and we have a start on regional governments: ABAG, BART [Bay Area Rapid Transit], the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, and the like. But this also is where we need to do more work. We need more regional coordination.
By the way, when I say the Bay Area should be a city-state, I am not arguing for a literal secession from the state. We can’t even if we wanted to—they have our water! Rather, the Bay Area needs to accept the fact that it is a distinct region and it should naturally occupy a leadership position in solving the problems facing California.
By the way, when I say the Bay Area should be a city-state, I am not arguing for a literal secession from the state. We can’t even if we wanted to—they have our water. Rather, the Bay Area needs to accept the fact that it is a distinct region and it should naturally occupy a leadership position in solving the problems facing California.
We need to be good citizens. We need to stop thinking like a collection of eighty-eight cities and start thinking like a single region. We need to engage in thought leadership on the statewide, national, and international level. And California’s budgetary crisis makes this sort of leadership more urgent than ever. Cities are going bankrupt, we’re facing pension disaster horrors, and some cities like Vallejo have discovered new chapters in their history: Chapter 9 and Chapter 11.
But this crisis also represents a huge opportunity. As Paul Romer famously observed in 2004, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” Singapore was born out of a crisis. It started in 1959 as an independent region within Malaysia, and then in 1963 took off on its own. So a crisis is a great time to innovate, to change direction.
Instead of looking for the lifeboats, we need to be building new institutions, and they need to be built from the municipal level upwards, not from the state downwards. Just as we have been unbundling our nations, it is time to start unbundling our cities. We need to be thinking creatively about things like boundary drops, shared services, and regionalization.
Consider fire services, and contrast the Bay Area and its eighty-eight cities with Los Angeles County, where a single fire department—L.A. County Fire—serves four million people in fifty-six cities. Why can’t we have two or three fire departments in the Bay Area, instead of dozens and dozens of tiny services? Maybe we should even have one fire department. We could enjoy lower costs and better response.
Fire departments are just a start. The Bay Area needs to think in the same big, creative way about every service and governmental function, from schools to law enforcement, municipal services, and regional planning. We need to create new regional entities. And of course, we need to get serious about transportation. It is an absurdity that CalTrain, the most heavily used service in the Bay Area, can’t get reliable funding. And the Capital Corridor has the same instabilities, even though it is the fastest-growing municipal rail service in the country today. BART is stagnating. And the institutionalized selfishness of a few cities blocking the high-speed rail in California is an outrage.
In the long run, we need to become a single, cohesive city-state, and I think Victor Jones would agree. This doesn’t mean that cities have to lose their distinct character anymore than a Walloon or Catalan loses their identity in the European Union as their nation-states disappear. This is a vision of unbundling, not extinction.
So how do we do it? Of course, we leverage the crisis, but we also need something deeper—we need a new myth. California is a place that has been built on myths. It is embedded in our name, borrowed from a sixteenth-century Spanish novel. It is embedded in our character. Myth has fueled California for a very long time. Myth impelled Sir Frances Drake to seek the Northwest Passage and touch this shore. It fueled the first 49ers. The movie business came out here not just because of the weather, but the sense of possibility. The aviation industry, Silicon Valley—they have been built on myth and expectation.
We have to make sure that the Bay Area as a virtual nation-state remembers the fact that people are drawn here by dreams as much as pragmatics. They’re drawn here by the myth. We now need to reach back and create a new myth if we’re going to be successful as a region and as a virtual nation-state. The price if we don’t will be unbelievably high.The choice before us reminds of a passage by C.P. Snow, in his marvelous book “The Two Cultures” sixty years ago. He was talking about a different place—England—and a different issue, but it applies here as well. He wrote:
I can’t help thinking of the Venetian Republic in their last half-century. Like us, they had once been fabulously lucky. They had become rich, as we did, by accident. They had acquired immense political skill, just as we have. A good many of them were tough-minded, realistic, patriotic men. They knew, just as clearly as we know, that the current of history had begun to flow against them. Many of them gave their minds to working out ways to keep going. It would have meant breaking the pattern into which they had crystallized. They were fond of their pattern just as we are fond of ours. They never found the will to break it.
That is how Venice, which was once the center of the commercial world, ended up becoming what it is today—a museum sinking beneath the waters that once sustained it. We can’t risk the same fate. We must make sure that we have the courage to break the patterns we’ve become comfortable with. We must rethink what the Bay Area is and how our institutions can best serve our future.
Ernest Callenbach
Ernest Callenbach is best known for his utopian novel Ecotopia, which describes a state roughly composed of modern-day Northern California, Oregon, and Washington seceding from the U.S. He has written a variety of other books; founded the journal Film Quarterly; and edited film, art, and science books for the University of California Press.
Paul Saffo is on to something.
He is not a bioregionalist like Peter Berg and Ray Dasmann, those Bay Area thinkers who first put forward the idea that in the long run watersheds and biology determine culture and politics. But he understands the profound impacts of global digitalization, and the paradoxical boost it gives to regionalism and the “devolutionary” forces that are weakening nation-states everywhere (including the once-invincible U.S.).
As he correctly points out, the Bay Area already operates like a city-state in many ways, and an impressive one in world terms. But it doesn’t yet truly see itself as a city-state, a dynamic ecological, socioeconomic organism. Hence the need for a shared myth or vision, which Saffo correctly diagnoses as essential for a coherent, enduring city-state. Such a vision is essential, I would agree, if the balkanized cities of the Bay Area are to achieve the shared efficiencies needed to prevent more civic bankruptcies. More than that, it is essential to making our fortunate little corner of the planet feel like home—a place where all people are valued because they are citizens, not profit-centers.
Saffo is not arguing for real-world secession, as some of us have, but a unified Bay Area with a proper sense of itself should be capable of dealing from strength with paralyzed state government or corporate-debauched national government. After all, it is our productivity, our smarts, our education and research, our innovatory culture, not to mention our taxes, which keep stodgier regions alive.
Of course, understanding of some aspects of the Bay Area’s “metabolism” needs further development than Saffo has given us here, particularly its sources of finance. We once had a regional bank, Bank of America, and it is arguable that we need one again: a local-based bank that does not indulge in reckless frauds and the co-optation of government agencies. We need to reconsider our tendency, with the rest of California, to create new government agencies needlessly, and manage them carelessly. In time, we will also have to rethink the random patchwork of counties that history bequeathed to us, and move toward some kind of regional government.
The Bay Area is, in reality, a de facto country, and some day will have to begin to behave like one. I am grateful to Paul Saffo for so cogently illuminating the path.
To read responses from Richard Walker, Sarah Karlinsky, Harrison Chastang, and Peter Richardson, please purchase the print edition of Issue 3