Paradiplomacy is the involvement of non-central governments in international relations. The phenomenon includes a variety of practices, from town twinning to transational 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" (παρα) and "diplomacy" to imply actions along, aside, apart and even, despite and against national diplomacy.
If the term "paradiplomacy" has sometimes been used to refer to informal track-two diplomacy, its definition has crystallized in the 1980's 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 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 connexions 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 Sao 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 1990’s, and reaching over 40.000 partnerships today.