Picture an Olympic athlete standing on the winners’ podium waving the flag of her city, rather than her country.

That was the image Bruce Stanley, provost and professor of Huron University in London, used as an example of a changing globe Wednesday afternoon during a forum hosted by the International Program Office.

Stanley, who teaches international relations at Huron University, presented the idea that power is shifting away from countries to other entities like cities.

“The world is going in such a way that we will have multiple identities,” Stanley said. “The kind of a national box is breaking down.”

His lecture presented the idea that there are global cities that mainly operate independently of their countries like London, New York and Tokyo, describing the shift in global organization as “post-national.”

“The argument can be made that states are less important than they have been in the past,” Stanley said. “State-centric framing misses much of the global political economy.”

Cities used to be seen more as foundations and organizations of society, but somewhere along the line power transferred to states. Stanley says the power is starting to shift back.

“There is this network of cities in which the states are based,” he said.

And cities want to be recognized as global cities and hubs of global interaction. They work to be accessible and appealing to more than the immediate geography around them.

“We’ve got to have two Hilton’s because that’s what the people want,” is the ideology of the global cities, Stanely said. “The concept of political space seems to be changing, and how it is organized geographically.”

The United Nations is looking to global cities as a development strategy of connecting the cities. Many cities are connecting with sister-cities to foster development and help work on similar issues like parking problems or post-conflict development.

Amber Parker, a junior sociology major attended the lecture for her social strategies class where they had been discussing the issue.

“The most interesting thing for me was the major cities around the world,” she said. She was surprised that Frankfurt, Germany made one version of the list because of its social services. She said the whole concept of global cities was a different way of looking at the world.

“I guess it could happen, but we’d have to have more major cities around.”

Robert Augustine, dean of the Graduate School related to what Stanley had to say because international students at Eastern had trouble getting to Charleston at the beginning of the year because of terror issues in London that interfered with flights.

“We saw how London literally controlled access to Charleston on the global world,” Augustine said.

He was surprised when Stanley mentioned the idea of New Yorkers having passports from the city rather than from the United States.

“I had never thought about having something like that for your city,” he said.