 The Global Parliament of Mayors is a...
What cities in the post-Brexit era could learn from a 14th-century trading bloc As you fly from the country now known as Germany to Britain, the coastal geography of northern European cities gently unfurls. From the middle of the 13th century, and for some 300 years after, many settlements dotted along this route formed the prosperous Hanseatic League, a European trading confederation of market towns, before the rise of the nation state led to its dissolution. In the traumatised atmosphere of post-Brexit Britain, it is worth remembering the Hanseatic League. In the late 1300s, Chaucer wrote about characters travelling to Jerusalem, and others who came from Europe; and it was at exactly this point that the Hanseatic League slowly started to coalesce, eventually influencing our isles. The League is most easily understood as a loose federation of cities that acted together in self-interest to promote trade. The Hanseatic cities developed their own legal system, and their armies came to one another's aid. We think of nations today as elemental almost, immovable. "So it is not unrealistic to think of cities as discrete entities that compete and collaborate with each other, independently from the states to which they belong." In some ways it was an exercise in what we today call 'soft diplomacy'.
 ...a kind of Hanse of all cities.
 ...common platform for action.  ...a monitor of culture and economic status.  ...a kind of Hanse of all cities.  ...a governing body like the UN.