Weakening nation-states in favor of cities can carry genuine benefits

Evidence

Through specific regimes of representation the city emerges as a political subject in relation to particular and specific configurations of the countryside, race, and nationalism. Put crudely, studies of nationalism have long identified correspondent relations between the strength of nation-states and the genesis and the artifice of national cultures. In a sense the assimilatory uniformity of the nation-state and its correspondent relationship with genocide identified by Bauman is inversely significant in relation to the power of city-based identities. The weakening of the nation-state and the strengthening of cities in the networks of global capitalism in North America and a potentially federal Europe need to be placed in the context in which the weakening of national ties is not without benefits. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2293

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the nation-state/genocide link in Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust, and to Iris Marion Young’s urban theory cited in the same paragraph.