Paradiplomacy
Paradiplomacy is the involvement of non-central governments in international relations. The phenomenon includes a variety of practices, from town twinning to transnational networking, decentralized cooperation, and advocacy in international summits. Following the movement of globalisation, non-central governments have been playing increasingly influential roles on the global scene, connecting across national borders and developing their own foreign policies. Regions, states, provinces and cities seek their way to promote cooperation, cultural exchanges, trade and partnership, in a large diversity of ways and objectives depending on their decentralization, cultural, and socio-economical contexts. This trend raises new questions concerning public international law and opened a debate on the global governance regime, and the evolution of the nation-led system that has provided the grounds for the international political order in the last centuries.
The term combines the Greek word "para" and "diplomacy" to imply actions along, aside, apart and even, despite and against national diplomacy.
While the term "paradiplomacy" has sometimes been used to refer to informal track-two diplomacy, its definition has crystallized in the 1980s through the work of Ivo Duchacek and Panayotis Soldatos, proposing the clear definition of "direct and indirect entries of non-central governments into the field of international relations". The academic field of paradiplomatic studies is nonetheless suffering from fragmentation and terminological scatterdness, resulting both from ongoing debates within scholars, and from the diversity of terms characterizing subnational governments worldwide. Other current denominations for paradiplomacy and related concepts can be multilayered diplomacy, substate or subnational diplomacy, decentralized cooperation, people-to-people diplomacy and intermestic affairs. This latter concept expresses a growing trend to the internationalization of domestic issues, which takes local and regional concerns to the central stage of international affairs.
The intentions of subnational governments are diverse and depend on the level of devolution of power form the central government following the principle of subsidiarity, and from the level of local democracy defined by decentralization laws. Some subnational governments engage in paradiplomatic activities to promote development by exploring complementarity with partners facing similar problems, with a view to joining forces to arrive at solutions more easily. In addition, they can explore opportunities alongside international organizations that offer assistance programs for local development projects, with ideas of cross-cultural connections and reciprocity.
History of paradiplomacy
The global involvement of subnational government is often linked with the post-war town twinning movement, but can actually be traced back even further. Throughout history, cities and towns "have played a central role economically, politically, and culturally in all human societies and precede nation states by some 5,000 years". The historical role and stability of cities can be noted when compared to modern forms of central governance, and the recent appearance of "Westphalian" nation-states four centuries ago, binding subnational governments to the sovereignty of nations.The first envoys of non-sovereign subnational governments acting as diplomatic representatives can be traced back to the second half of the nineteenth century, with delegates of overseas colonial governments settling in Paris or London. And the first formal diplomatic agreement involving a subnational government may have been signed in 1907 between the Brazilian state of São Paulo and the country of Japan, for immigration management purposes.
Cultural motivations led to the first city-to-city twinnings in 1918 between European localities, a growingly popular form of subnational cooperation later labelled "people-to-people diplomacy" by US President Eisenhower. Town twinning became an officially recognized instrument of peace and reconciliation in the aftermath of the Second World War, inciting a lasting dynamic that led to more than 11,000 twinnings worldwide in the 1990s, and reaching over 40,000 partnerships today.
Formal cross-border connections also intensified with Europe's post-war efforts to overcome the defensive legacy of frontiers, fostering peaceful transborder relations through formal economic and cultural agreements. Generally facilitated by a decentralization process, the following decades saw a variety of transborder agreements worldwide, such as between US and Canadian states in the 1980s, between Russian and Japanese provinces in the 1990s, and between Spanish, French and Italian neighbor regions from 1992 and onward, a trend that led to numerous collaborations and agreements for migration and cultural purposes, but also for the management of environmental resources and issues transcending regional limitations and nations' borders.
Parallel to bilateral forms of cooperation, multilateralism also developed at the local scale. In 1913, the first transnational network of local governments was created in Ghent in the form of a global municipal movement: the Union Internationale des Villes. This network then became the International Union of Local Authorities in 1928. Other transnational networks appeared following the second World War to foster bonds between localities worldwide, such as Sister Cities International in 1956, the Arab Towns organization in 1957, the Union of African Cities in 1975, and the French-Speaking Mayors Association in 1979. The creation of the Network of Regional Governments for Sustainable Development in 2002 also illustrates how provinces and regions alongside cities formalized their global involvement through transnational networking, a phenomenon that has led to the creation of more than 300 networks linking localities and regions within and across all continents.
The dynamic of subnational governments' global involvement has been gradually acknowledged by international institutions.
At continental scale, this led, for example, to the creation of the European Conference of Local Authorities in 1957, allowing for territorial authorities to complement the so-far nation-led Council of Europe.
At the global scale, progressive recognition of the subnational level by the United Nations led in 1996 to the organization of WACLA, the first World Assembly of Cities and Local Authorities, gathering more than 500 mayors from around the world along the Habitat II conference in Istanbul. The assembly laid the groundwork for the creation of two major organizations. First, the United Nations Advisory Committee of Local Authorities was created in 1999 by the Commission on Human Settlements, aiming to facilitate the dialogue of subnational governments with the UN System. This Committee claims today to represent on the global stage around 323,000 institutions of all scales through its member organizations. Second, the global network named United Cities and Local Governments emerged in 2004, with the mission to "promote and represent local governments on the world stage". UCLG has since worked both as a network counting more than 240,000 members worldwide, and as an advocacy platform, initiating the creation of the complementary coordination mechanism Global Taskforce of Local and Regional Governments in 2013.
Context
Paradiplomacy may be performed both in support of and in complementarity to the central state conducted diplomacy, or come in conflict or compete with it. In 1990, Ivo Duchacek pointed out a distinction between different types of paradiplomatic engagements: a) cross-border regional paradiplomacy, b) transregional paradiplomacy and c) global paradiplomacy, to describe: a) contacts between non-central units situated across borders in different states, b) contacts between non-central units without a common border but situated in neighboring states and c) contacts between units belonging to states without common borders. An additional type labelled d) "protodiplomacy" implies actions motivated by separatist/secessionnist objectives - also framed as "sovereignty paradiplomacy" in the more recent typology proposed by Rodrigo Tavares. A comprising view of the phenomenon should also consider formal and informal contacts in a wide range of multilateral associations of local authorities, and their growing presence in global summits and governance instances.Non-central governments may formally develop official international relations by: a) sending delegations in official visits; b) signing agreements, memoranda of understanding and other instruments; c) participating in international "local" fora; d) establishing permanent representative offices or delegations abroad.
Local governments seek international cooperation for a diversity of reasons, such as economic, cultural or political. They can engage in such actions within or parallel to the frame of national foreign policies, usually following principles of subsidiarity as local scales hold specific capacities in territorial management and planning that can complement national expertise.
In the cultural field, some regions may seek to promote themselves internationally as an autonomous cultural entity - a form of "identity paradiplomacy" as framed by Stephane Paquin. This can be the case for the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia and the Basque Country. Some regions may seek to cooperate with their diasporas worldwide and try to gain the support of their nationals abroad in attaining their diplomatic goals.
As to the political aspects, local governments may join efforts internationally to pressure their central governments into a desired course of action. This strategy is exemplified in the case of eight memoranda of understanding signed, in the years 1980, between three American states and three Canadian provinces to control and combat acid rain, as the Reagan Administration and the American Congress could not reach a consensus on the matter. The cross-borders paradiplomatic efforts eventually led Washington to amend the Clean Air Act in 1990 and to sign with Canada, in 1991, the US/Canada Air Quality Agreement in which both countries agree on a timetable to reduce acid emissions.
A particular kind of local political activism is called "protodiplomacy", through which a local government may seek international support for their emancipation or independence plans. This is typically the case of the Canadian province of Québec in the seventies, under the Parti Québécois.
Non-central governments may be allowed to negotiate and sign agreements with foreign non-central authorities or even with the government of a foreign state. Conditions can vary largely from a limited capacity to negotiate with the assistance of their central authorities to a most complete autonomy based on sovereign constitutional prerogatives. This can not be the object of the international law. Only the internal law of the states is to determine which internal powers are entitled to do so and to which extent. In some states, the outward relations of their non-central governments is a constitutional matter directly related to the issue of legal competence.