International city

For the commercial node point city of the recent era, see global city.

An international city is an autonomous or semi-autonomous city-state that is separate from the direct supervision of "a single nation-state."

Rationale for establishment

International cities had either had one or both of the following characteristics:

(1) They were ethnically mixed.

(2) Authority over the city had previously been contested by different nation-states.

International cities were established mainly in the 1920s and in the 1940s, following World War I and World War II.

The United Nations envisioned making Jerusalem into an international city with UN General Assembly Resolution 194 in 1948. [Gregory Kane, "Hearing the Sounds of Silence at Middle East Conference" "Virginia Gazette" November 28, 2007 http://www.vagazette.com/bal-md.kane28nov28,0,6834786.column]

Instruments of state, governance

Some international cities, such as the Free City of Danzig and the Free Territory of Trieste, had their own currency and practiced tariff-free trade. ["Economics of an Internationalized Jerusalem," Richard J. Ward, "International Journal of Middle East Studies," Vol. 2, No. 4 (Oct., 1971), pp. 311-317]

These international cities had limited self-governance (as in Danzig, with supervision from the League of Nations), or they were administered by a body of representatives from external nation-states (as in the city of Shanghai from 1845-1944 and the International Zone of Tangiers from 1923 to 1957). [Carsten Stah, "The Law and Practice of International Territorial Administration: Versailles to Iraq and Beyond" pp. 7-8, Cambridge University Press, 2008 ISBN 978-0-521-87800-5 http://assets.cambridge.org/97805218/78005/excerpt/9780521878005_excerpt.pdf]

Examples

*Danzig, contested by Germany and Poland [http://countries-cities.generalanswers.org/]
*Tangiers, contested by Spain, France, the United Kingdom and others [http://countries-cities.generalanswers.org/]
*Trieste, contested by Italy and Yugoslavia [http://countries-cities.generalanswers.org/]

Notes