Introduction

As we have just seen, in the previous chapter the international weight of local authorities was scrutinised by sifting through their paradiplomatic activities. In so doing, I focused on the institutional dimension of cities’ supra-national action. Here, instead, I will consider the political clout of European cities beyond the national borders, that is, their capacity to elaborate innovative ideas and values and to spread them internationally (or at least across Europe). Indeed, at European level, cities have played a crucial role not only by influencing the policy-making activities of the European institutions, but also by shaping the political discourse.

At the beginning of her chapter on ‘city public diplomacy’, La Porte (2013, p 85) quotes an evocative statement from Johannes Hahn, the previous European Commissioner for Regional Policy, where he underscores the centrality of cities in the European project. Even more telling is another excerpt from the same discourse, where the commissioner celebrates the urban foundations of the EU: ‘From the Greek polis to the present day, the special character of Europe has been forged in cities. We were a Europe of cities long before we were a Europe of nation states. Much of our history is urban’ (Hahn, 2014). While this claim recalls the roots of the European nation-states in the small republics and city-states that dotted the European map, it is inarguable that the European project has been built by states for states. Since the establishment of the European Community in 1957 by the six founding countries, the European project has been shaped by and around member states’ economic and political interests and aspirations. As a result, the political posture of the European project has been primarily determined by national governments, while non-state actors’ contributions have been marginalised. Notwithstanding, the outline of Europeanism was also drawn by municipalities, which strived to develop a less grand and ambitious project running in parallel to the Europe of the states – popularised by the ‘Europe of the cities’ notion. This line of thought, advocating the political saliency of cities in the advancement of the European project (see Dogliani and Gaspari, 2003; Payre, 2010; Payre and Saunier, 2000), and the cooperative inter-municipal practices that formed around it, are here termed European municipalism (henceforth EM).