A Parisian Suburb and Philadelphia Politics

See the story here. The French city of St Denis has named a street after Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose 1982 conviction on murder charges continues to generate controversy. The street naming was condemned in a recent congressional resolution, putting Philadelphia representative and now-mayoral candidate Chaka Fattah in something of a hot seat (he did vote in favor of the resolution).

Street naming as a tool of local foreign policy goes back at least to the 1980s, when New York City mayor Ed Koch used as a lower-level weapon in the Cold War, usually by renaming the intersection adjoining the offending country’s UN mission. The intersection of 44th Street and Second Avenue was renamed “Nelson and Winnie Mandela Corner”, 67th & Third “Sakharov-Bonner Corner”, an intersection near the Cuban mission was named after the anti-Castro group Brothers to the Rescue and near the Nigerian after Kudirat Abiola, the slain wife of a Nigerian dissident. Other countries sometimes retaliated in turn: Nigeria renamed the street on which the US Embassy was located, so that its mail was deliverable to Louis Farrakhan Avenue.

These initiatives could pose something of an irritant in US foreign relations; nothing, mind you, in the order of selective purchasing and more muscular displays of local leverage, but enough to attract the attention of other governments. The government of Nigeria actually challenged (unsuccessfully) the Abiola designation as unconstitutional under the dormant foreign affairs power of Zschernig v. Miller. See Opusunju v. Giuliani, 669 N.Y.S.2d 156, 159 (Sup. Ct. 1997). This use of local power for foreign-policy ends was an innovation of US cities, defended even on First Amendment grounds, so we can hardly complain to the extent foreigners have picked up on the idea.

In the St. Denis-Philadelphia example, in any case, it’s more a matter of locality against locality. Perhaps this is more of a case of another innovation of the 1980s — Sister Cities — gone bad, and yet another manifestation of the disaggregation of the state.