On the morning of Monday, September 22, I boarded a flight from Santa Barbara to San Francisco, where I would then transfer to a plane bound for Seoul. On this small upstate flight, literally the first leg of a three-month journey in search of knowledge about the international Sister Cities movement, I was confronted with a blast of pessimism.
“Sister Cities don’t do anything,” my seat-mate assured me, her eyes dimly narrowed as she brushed her hand through the air with a dismissive wave. A career employee of the San Francisco city government, she followed up by saying “they’re nice, but they’re all surface”. Knowing that Sister Cities is, in the States at least, a movement sustained at the grassroots level in cooperation with municipal government, I probed her for comments on how she thinks municipal governments truly function.
Again she framed her answer with her hands. Palms held parallel, three inches apart, she said that that there is an upper echelon of politicians and decision makers. They make self-serving choices during short political terms. Below, her palms spread to two feet apart, is a busy hive of workers who do the actual work but are treated as ‘drones’. They are dedicated to their jobs, but ultimately go unrecognized for decades of steadfast service, as the political tides swirl above and draw all the attention and credit. Her own experience came from working for the city comptroller; she purported to have improved payroll accuracy for the city from 50% to 98% over twenty-plus years of service, yet she doubted she would ever get recognized for her contribution.
As she continued on decrying the plight of the drone, I thought to myself: “If she, as an individual, has truly made such a difference, then why does she not believe in the abilities of Sister Cities to effect change?”. From its inception, the movement was designed to empower individuals; some founders explicitly stated that Sister Cities should even encourage citizens to circumvent the workings of the highest level of government. Furthermore, the mission statement of Sister Cities International is to “Promote peace through mutual respect, understanding, & cooperation - one individual, one community at a time.” . What was it that caused her to, despite her own personal contributions, still have little faith in the power of individuals?
I do not assume I can reconcile her misgivings with the reality of Sister Cities in this single entry. For one thing, working only to reconcile these perspectives entails an assumption that she is wrong and Sister Cities is right. Taking a mission statement as proof of effectiveness lacks the intellectual rigor I hope to achieve. Rather, I raise her perspective because it inspires a good, honest start to my inquiry. To what extent is her skepticism deserved? Is the inertia of government institutions so strong that individuals or those outside the so-called upper echelon cannot have an influence? Especially important considering Sister Cities’ international scope is the question: does the change-making ability of individuals and those ‘outside the system’ depend on a country’s particular political system?
Our conversation also stimulated thoughts about local or individual reactions to exterior non-local or global forces. In line with her frustrations towards elected officials, she believed that people are self-serving, and will always first look out for themselves or their constituencies. I asked her if she thought California’s Proposition 11, on the ballot for November, which would transfer redistricting power from the hands of elected officials to that of an independently selected commission, would make any difference in this regard. She thought that, should the proposition pass, it would simply put the pandering to one’s base in the hands of a different set of elites than before. Her comment was that “as the world gets smaller, people get more insular”.
Her “small world” comment is what really caught my ear. Because my proposal for this research project centers around Sister Cities and their place within the processes of globalization, I’ve been tuned in to some of the critics who try to describe globalization by categorizing the world by size. One of globalization’s most popular observers—Thomas L. Friedman - comments in the early pages of The Lexus and the Olive Tree That the current phase of globalization has shrunk the world from a size “medium” to a size “small” (FYI: the “large” to “medium” shrinkage occurred in an earlier, pre-World War I phase of globalization). An extreme simplification of his argument is that globalization is defined by interchanges of information, finance, and human populations, that these interchanges now reach to every corner of the globe, and they are sped along by ever-powerful and ever-accessible technology. These processes are all based on global free-market capitalism. The effect is that we are exposed to “some things that we’ve never seen before and some things that are so new we don’t’ even understand them yet” (p. xix). This idea of globalization forcing us to confront the unfamiliar always gets my attention.
Using size to describe globalization also appears in the most recent issue of the Economist; the magazine kicks off a special report on globalization with an article titled “A Bigger World”. (So, big or small—which is it?) The article considers multinational firms like Lenovo (China) and Tata (India), which are aware of the stultifying power the unfamiliar can have on a firm’s economic prowess; to that end, the authors find the prospects for these firms’ competitiveness to be promising because they “[make a huge effort to] integrate the different cultures within the firm,” or in the case of Tata, have a multicultural origin “which makes it more sensitive to cultural differences than many of its peers in developed countries.” While the Economist authors treat companies and corporations—not countries or communities- as the primary actors who face challenges and opportunities when confronted by globalization (this is a whole separate debate, which I’ll get to in the future”), I think the lesson remains the same for all: the ability to cope with globalization is closely related to integration with and openness to the rest of the world. I plan to use first-hand research (beginning in earnest today, as I head town to Tacoma’s South Korean Sister City of Gunsan!) to further explore this claim.