International City Diplomacy

The Sister City Partnership of Glendale and Memmingen

Sister city partnerships serve as a powerful mechanism for fostering urban diplomacy. Partnerships,  such as the one between Glendale and Memmingen , enable city collaboration, promote international understanding, and can generate new insights on how to better address challenges and promote social cohesion in one’s own community. Examples of sister city collaborations have included youth exchanges, music exchanges, business partnerships, joint exhibitions, and more.

Glendale and Memmingen formed their sister city partnership in 1976, which originated as a military exchange but has since expanded. Although the city of Memmingen plays a direct role in managing the partnership from the German side, in the United States it’s managed by  Glendale Sister Cities , a private organization and member of  Sister Cities International  that unfortunately at this point does not receive city funding.

Meeting with Glendale Sister Cities

Memmingen's Work with Glendale

Potential Collaboration

Potential Impact of the Sister City Partnership

Were Glendale and Memmingen to collaborate with ASU Project Cities, this would greatly enrich the city partnership by adding a new dimension of community engagement. Similarly, it would expand the Project Cities mission by adding a new international perspective and exchange. Meanwhile, the ideas discussed with Glendale Sister Cities on how to establish and expand access to German-American youth exchanges would also extend the sister cities' partnership to the next generation and underprivileged groups.

However, both initiatives would require city funding at least from Glendale. To date, the city of Glendale has not provided any funding to Glendale Sister Cities, which greatly limits the implementation of new projects. If Glendale were willing to provide funding for these initiatives, the sister city partnership could become a far stronger force in advancing social cohesion and inclusion in both cities.

Urban Diplomacy - Tool of Modern Foreign Policy

In recent years, a new technical term has emerged for the broad field of municipal foreign relations: Urban Diplomacy.

Urban diplomacy expands the idea of what traditional city partnerships (sister cities) have done so far. It is about the concrete role of cities (and the municipal level in general) in solving global challenges. Cities react directly to the effects of climate change or the social consequences of migration because they have to create concrete answers for their citizens. They are key players to achieve the goals of the 2030 Agenda and its seventeen Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations.

At the same time, in the event of disasters such as the 2023 earthquake in Turkey and Syria or the war against Ukraine, cities can not only provide rapid assistance but also keep open channels of communication that are not available to national governments.

Through urban diplomacy, cities aim to be more involved at multiple levels as nation-states negotiate foreign policy and shape policy. Leading universities such as Harvard and think tanks such as Truman Institute, Brookings Institution, or Bertelsmann Stiftung have designed models for this. The German intermediary Engagement Global/SKEW is running the Urban Diplomacy Exchange project with the United States, the United Kingdom, and Italy on behalf of the German Foreign Office.

And there are also initial concrete successes at the international level for cities: countries such as the United States, Brazil, Japan, Turkey, Norway, Spain, France, and the Netherlands have involved cities as part of their delegations to international climate negotiations; in the United States, President Biden's administration has appointed its own special envoy for cities in the State Department, Ambassador Nina Hachigian, and under the German G7 presidency in 2022, cities were given a much more prominent role, which is also expressed in the founding of the Urban7 (U7) Initiative.

Even though metropoles and large cities such as Hamburg in Germany or Los Angeles in the United States are currently visible on an international level, urban diplomacy is by no means just an approach for cities of this size. The city of Mannheim has become a pioneer in shaping municipal external relations; its mayor Dr. Peter Kurz sits at the table when the topic is negotiated. At the same time, he uses urban diplomacy to involve the citizens of his city more closely in the implementation of greater sustainability through Agenda 2020. International networks such as Eurocities bring cities together to coordinate the reconstruction of Ukraine or to strengthen European social policy, as in the EaSI (InclusiveCities4All) project.

The city of Dortmund, represented in the second year of the American-German Institute's project “Social Divisions and Questions of Identity,” is also an important shaper of the future of urban diplomacy. Its Director of International Relations is part of the international dialogue and participates in major conferences. The German Marshall Fund's Cities Program strengthens the development of international offices in American cities and international exchange at the municipal level.

Urban diplomacy, as Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook defines it, is therefore more than just city partnerships. Rather, she says, cities are the seismographs for global developments and should be much more involved by foreign ministries in developing sustainable foreign policies.

For further information please consult  https://www.kosmopolis.org/blog/video-talk/ , where you can also find the interview with Memmingens Mayor Jan Rothenbacher.