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Cities and Power

Cities emerged as concentrations of power, and of wealth, some five thousand years ago. Lewis Mumford once defined a city as a ‘point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community’,¹ and later began his list of ‘chief functions of the city’ with ‘to convert power into form’.² Cities now contain more than half of humankind; power and wealth are reaching unprecedented degrees of planetary concentration. At the dawn of planetary urbanization, understanding the inscriptions of power in our built urban environment is not only a scholarly, but, even more, a civic imperative.

Despite Mumford’s declarations, power has slipped out of the grasp of mainstream urban history and social science more often than not, or it has been relegated to the past. After the Baroque, Mumford’s own interests veered to technological and economic change. A recent (and good) collective work with the seductive title Embodiments of Power both starts and stops with the Baroque.³ Leonardo Benevolo’s monumental History of the City makes the European revolutions of 1848 a divide between the ‘liberal’ and the ‘post-liberal’ city, but Benevolo loses most of his interest in power after 1848.⁴ The late Sir Peter Hall presents a cultural axis in Cities in Civilization, but his Book Four on the ‘urban order’ is not very concerned with the political order.⁵

The great historian-cum-sociologist Charles Tilly was a sharp critical analyst of power, but a resolutely materialist network structuralist with little interest in meaningful forms, whether of cities – which he mainly saw as sites of capital concentration – or of states. He never grasped, or thought important, the difference between Baroque, absolutist, dynastic states and states of nations, with their national capitals.⁶ In his view, after Charles V’s imperial abdication in 1557, ‘nation-states began to get priority’, particularly after 1700.⁷

Synergetic encounters of political theory/history and urbanism have been few and fragile enough to allow the great urbanist, Peter Hall, to get away – twice or thrice, first in 1993, then in 2006, with a paperback repetition in 2010⁸ – with the following typology of capital cities:

1. Multi-function capitals

2. Global capitals

3. Political capitals

4. Former capitals

5. Ex-imperial capitals

6. Provincial capitals

7. Super capitals

With all due respect, this list reminds me of a list of animals which Michel Foucault, without citation, claimed Jorge Luis Borges had excavated from an ancient Chinese encyclopaedia, according to which the animal kingdom comprised the following types:

a. belonging to the Emperor

b. embalmed

c. tamed …

e. sirens

f. fabulous …

j. innumerable …

n. which from afar resemble flies⁹

In the currently prevailing urban discourse, power is submerged in conceptions of economic nodality, certainly a legitimate and important research topic in itself – but with city power measured by the zip codes of major corporations and/or business services firms.¹⁰ For all its other merits, which are many and have been deservedly applauded, this approach has two limitations in a context of cities and power. Its economism leaves out the power manifestations of the urban built environment itself. Even the most imaginable capitalist city is not only business offices and their connections to business offices elsewhere. Second, the political economy conception of world/global cities seriously underestimates the power of states in the current world.* After all, this is a world where the latest US president (Barack Obama) has been at war for the whole of his two terms of office, longer than any president in US history, making war in seven different countries of the world.†

The analytical framework deployed here – forms of state formation and their consequences, combining structural and symbolic perspectives on the city, identifying and exploring moments of major historical urban change worldwide – does not seem to have been used before. But no claim to originality is made with regard to studying power dimensions of contemporary cities. Apart from the vast monographic literature, which will be referred to repeatedly below, there are a number of distinguished comparative contributions. As this is not an academic thesis requiring a literature review, I shall confine my collegial respect to a short list only.

The portal work in the modern field is Lawrence Vale’s Architecture, Power and National Identity, a masterly study of architecture and capital city design in a wide range of national contexts, focusing on ‘capitol complexes’ of governmental buildings, with a critical political sense and the professional eyes of a city planner.¹¹ Contemporary and intercontinental in scope are also Wolfgang Sonne’s deep-digging Swiss dissertation (Habilitation) Representing the State¹² on the early-twentieth-century design of some capital cities, from Washington to New Delhi, and the collective overview edited by David Gordon, Planning Twentieth-Century Capital Cities. An impressive global study on the relocation of capitals is Vadim Rossmann’s Capital Cities: Their Development and Relocation, similar to this book.¹³

Incisive, non-parochial analyses of power in contemporary cities have also come significantly from outside the academia of urban history and social science, from architecture and architectural criticism. Two works have blazed the trail: Deyan Sudic’s The Edifice Complex¹⁴ and Rowan Moore’s Why We Build,¹⁵ both focusing on architects and their patrons. From a similar milieu also comes Owen Hatherley’s remarkable Landscapes of Communism.¹⁶

All built environments in human settlements are manifestations of the power relations among the inhabitants. Two sources and several kinds of power are highlighted in this book, which is not meant to be a general treatise on power. With its focus on the capital cities of nation-states, political power is naturally central. But political power in itself means no more than power by coercion and/or persuasion through institutions and processes of government. We are here explicitly interested in the character and the operation of political power in capital cities of the world.

Modern processes of urban power form a quadrangle of competing actors and types of influence. In one corner is political authority – national and/or urban – identifying the character of which is a major aim of this study, with variable powers and resources of design and regulation; in a second corner is capital, global as well as national, with economic power and resources of design and ‘development’; third, there are the classes of privilege, with their desires, fears and resources; and finally, there are the popular classes, with their grievances and their capacities of resistance and of change.

We begin with the national elites’ political power, emerging from the welter of nation-state formation. In this macroscopic global analysis, the national elites will be approached through the specific contexts of nation-state construction and the latter’s relationship to prevailing capitalism.

Then we shall look into two types and two eras of challenges to the historical national elites. One is a popular challenge, coming out of the rise of social and political forces once excluded from the nation-making process. The other is a global challenge of non-national forces and issues. The former is clearly a different kind of political power; the latter may posit a supremacy of economic power.

Political power can, of course, take many different forms, from the same or similar social roots. Here we shall look into the apotheosis of national elite power under perceived popular threat, i.e., at fascism and kindred military dictatorships. Furthermore, we shall analyse urbanistic Communism as an enduring radical popular challenge to historical elite rule, and into post-Communism as a new kind of political power.

After World War II there was concern with democratic versus non-democratic architecture and urban design, especially in West Germany.¹⁷ This is here taken into account, but it would not work as a master distinction, given the fact that most of the nation-states of the world for most of the 225 years covered in this book were non-democracies.

Popular political power has asserted itself in different ways: in access to institutional power, as in ‘municipal socialism’, welfare-state cities or, recently outside Europe, in city governments by middle-class coalitions with the urban poor, but also in successful protest moments: stopping the ravages of the ‘Car City’ in the North Atlantic of the late 1950s to 1970s and, even more recently, in a spate of urban revolutions – or better called, given their basically ambiguous (but always non-working-class) social character, extra-constitutional regime changes. It may also make up bargaining power in cities where public participation in urban planning and development is recognized.

Capital cities are by definition sites of political power. But popular challenges mean that they are often also sites of resistance, of political counter-power, of protest rallies and headquarters of opposition movements, parties and trade unions.

Most of the constitutive national elites were capitalist or pro-capitalist, and their imprint on their nation and its capital is duly taken into account. But there is also the raw economic power of capital and wealth outside political channels. This – economic – is the second source of power we have to pay attention to. It operates in two major ways in our story. One is its imprint on the spatial layout and on the patterning of buildings, and most specifically through skyscrapers. The other refers to the urban exclusivity of wealth and economic prosperity, as manifested in gating and private cities of the privileged.

At some level, all systems of political power need representation, in the sense of public display. Power needs public representation to be recognized, respected, awed or admired, in order to be obeyed and followed. A new reign of power is publicly and ceremoniously inaugurated. Secondly, modern nation-state power (in particular) needs representation in order to give direction to the self-identity, thoughts, beliefs, memories, hopes and aspirations of its citizens. This is the second function of monumentality, as well as of flags, cocardes, symbolic pins, public banner slogans and rhetorical addresses to the nation.

Economic power as such needs no representation; money is force enough in itself. Many times it is wiser to let it operate in the dark rather than in broad daylight.* Corporations and capitalists often want to display their wealth, though, and to bask in admiration of their buildings.

‘Representation’ has a connotation of intent, which would be much too narrow a perspective for what we are trying to do here. Basically, our interest is in manifestations of power. Representations make up an important part of the latter, but there are also power manifestations through ignorance, neglect or rejection of certain areas or parts of the population, and there are power manifestations of order and disorder, of competence and incompetence.

Reading the Urban Text

Cities are shaped by power in two different ways. First, urban social relations are structured through the constitution of city space, in terms of division/connection, of centre/periphery, of hierarchy/equality and of comfort/discomfort/misery. Second, power constructs the meaning of life in the city: the opportunities and the limitations, the sense and the priorities of urban living, identities in the city, the meanings of the city’s and the nation’s past, present and aspired future. The urban text of power can be read along these two lines. The key variables we are then going to look at are often simultaneously socially structuring and meaning-conveying.

The spatial layout

The urban layout is a production of social space, in Henri Lefebvre’s felicitous phrase.¹⁸ In the ancient grand civilizations, such as the Indic and the Sinic, it was designed as a cosmological representation of the city’s connection to the cosmic order. Later, for instance in European and modern history generally, the space produced is usually that of terrestrial power relations. The basic elements of the spatial design are its paths or system of streets; its allocation of the size of building lots; its ‘edges’ or boundaries within the city as well as its boundaries to the non-/other city (currently often blurred); its open places; its nodes of circulation; its delimited areas, districts or neighbourhoods; and what we may call their mode of orientation, i.e., their conception of centre–periphery and their use of the given topography, for example, a landscape of alternating altitudes.^*

We are not dealing with metric variables of power or with clear-cut universal categories, and our analysis has to be tentative and contextualized. Some rules of thumb about where to start looking might be worth mentioning.

What constitutes the centre of the city or, in big cities, often the centres (plural)? Historically, the polar cases were, at one end, an open public space, an agora or forum (as in republican Athens and Rome), and, at the other, a castle or palace (as in Beijing and Edo/Tokyo and in monarchical Europe) or a temple (like in Tenochtitlán). What are the functions of the centre(s)? How is/are the centre(s) connected to the rest of the city? Here the main inherited alternatives are structurally linear-axial or concentric. That is, either through linear thoroughfares, as in both ancient Chang’an and in modern Brasília, Islamabad and Abuja, or through rays of streets radiating out through a concentric urban space like an Indic mandala, in Yoruba Ife, or in European Baroque Versailles, Karlsruhe and Saint Petersburg. Blurring these alternatives of stark centrality indicates more complex configurations of power.

Seclusion of the centre from the periphery is a manifestation of a power of social exclusivity. A dramatic example is, of course, former apartheid cities, where the working and servant classes were kept in ‘townships’ far away from the centre, separated, as in Pretoria, by unbuilt wasteland. Paris has maintained a clear boundary between the city proper and its suburbs or banlieues, separated by a motorway running on the demolished city walls.

The regularity of the street system, for instance a grid, and the uniformity or harmony of its buildings demonstrate a power concerned with urban structure – which Islamic rulers, for instance, historically were not – and capable of implementing its design. The width, and sometimes also the length, of streets are often deliberate manifestations of power. Pierre L’Enfant, the designer of what became Washington, D.C., called for avenues ‘proportioned to the greatness which … the Capital of a powerful Empire ought to manifest’.¹⁹ The Paris of the mid-nineteenth-century Second Empire would make wide avenues a standard of national capitals and of all ambitious cities.

Archaeologists have long paid attention to the size patterns of building lots as indicators of hierarchy and inequality. An extreme example of spatial density differentials is offered by contemporary Nairobi. In 1999 there were between 360 inhabitants per square kilometre in Karen and 80,000 in Kibera, pointing clearly to the power of the few over the many.²⁰ A similar indicator of inegalitarian power is the existence and extension of built-up, non-produced space – in plain English, of slum areas on raw land, without prepared streets, a water supply or sewers.

A topography of hills and plains is often used as a power gradient. The (high) plateau of Abidjan and Dakar, for instance, is the site of first the colonial and then the national elite. The High City of Brussels or Kyiv is historically the city of political and religious power, the Low City of the secondary economic power of merchants and traders. But it may also be used as an instrument of hierarchical integration. In pre-modern Edo and Addis Ababa, the lords lived on the hills with their retinue around them, below. In Addis this is still visible, albeit rapidly disappearing, in poor neighbourhoods adjacent to modern buildings of wealth and power.

Still another important variable of a city’s spatial layout is accessibility of space. We may here distinguish between official, private and public space: the first accessible only to the proper authorities, the second only to the owners and the public to everybody. The relative size and importance of the three can be read as manifesting the relative power of an exclusive state, of private property and of the citizenry, respectively. Recently, post-Communism has meant a reduction of official space but, like in most other capitalist cities, an expansion of private-only space, through private shopping malls replacing public markets (or department stores) and private gating slicing up the urban space.

It should not be forgotten that the ‘public’ can be, has been and in some cities still is gendered^* and/or racialized. Racial exclusion from public areas has become prohibited, but a female public presence is still contested in Arabic and West Asian Islamic and in North Indian Hindu cities.

Functionality

The functioning of a city has two main dimensions, their supply of opportunities – of money and employment, above all – and their supply of services. In this study, the former is partly covered by our focus on political capitals, although we shall have reason to take notice of variations in their socioeconomic structure. The extent and the distribution of urban services, on the other hand, are direct manifestations of city power.

Urban life is significantly structured by the availability and accessibility of a number of necessary urban services. First of all, water supply, sanitation, electricity, garbage collection and waste management: are they provided, adequately, for everybody? Street lighting, pavement, safety and policing, mail delivery? Housing, food and employment are often left to markets: to what extent are they kept functioning and properly regulated? To what extent is there adequate public transport? Are urban roads properly maintained? Are there schools, health clinics and basic stores in all areas and accessible to everybody?

In today’s North Atlantic region, the functioning and accessibility of these services are basically taken for granted, but their history is rather short, even here. Their full importance was brought home to me during a collective study of African capitals, most of which have a huge service deficit.²¹ Only a third of households in Addis Ababa and Kinshasa had (as of around 2005) piped water on the premises, in Abuja 40 per cent. Only half of the population of Kinshasa had access to sewage or latrines, in Addis less than one in ten.

Poverty and underdevelopment are one reason for this, the powerlessness of the African powerful. But there is also a question of priority, between what Mussolini once called tasks of ‘necessity’ and tasks of ‘grandezza’. Historically, while the Paris of Napoleon III and his prefect Haussmann became a world model of grandeur, Victorian London was both a European pace-setter and the leading world exporter of water and sanitation services.

The functioning of urban services is currently a major political issue in a number of cities: the Washington Metro, public transport in Bogotá and the supply of water and electricity in Delhi, for example. The exclusivity or inclusivity of city power can be gauged by the city’s functionality.

Patterning of buildings

The pattern of buildings might be seen as a special aspect of the spatial layout. It refers to the relative location and size of buildings, above all in the city centre. What kinds of buildings occupy the most central location? How do the central buildings relate to each other?

For example, all over Latin America, except in Montevideo, Bogotá, and Brasília, the Presidential Palace is the overpowering or dominant central building, with Congress clearly offside. In Mexico, until recently, it was almost anonymous, and in Chile it was relegated to a refurbished hospital in Valparaíso. In Ottawa, Washington, Montevideo and Brasília, on the other hand, the congress or parliament building has centre stage. In the new Malaysian capital of Putrajaya, the dominant building is the prime minister’s office. City halls have no prominence in any American capital, while they are major buildings in Tokyo, Seoul and Copenhagen and clearly, if not quite successfully, compete with the state buildings in Vienna. When the Belgians created their national capital in the mid-nineteenth century, the Royal Palace was larger than the Parliament opposite it, but the largest building of all was the Palace of Justice. The main government building, whatever it is, is usually protected against construction competition by various rules of permissible height (as in Washington, D.C., for instance) and distance. But in Tokyo the official office of the prime minister is overshadowed by the non-descript corporate tower of an undistinguished insurance company. Some cities, Paris for instance, have no central representative governmental building at all: what does that imply?

The patterning of buildings takes other significant expressions, too, such as the uniformity and harmony or unrelated heterogeneity of buildings along main streets, or the extent of contrast between main-street buildings and back-street or peripheral buildings. Moreover, there is a noteworthy temporal dimension. When a regime embarks upon a building programme, what representative buildings are given priority and how are the priorities of time and money set between representation and utilitarian construction, service infrastructure or housing? Are there meaningful clusters of representative buildings?

These are just a few examples, and before jumping to conclusions of interpretation we had better see them, and others of their kind, as first of all raising questions and providing incitements to historical and contextual queries.

Architecture

Architecture is often what first catches the eye looking at a city. It has two dimensions. One is aesthetic, expressed in historical styles or in contemporary iconicity. The style chosen is loaded with meaning, which any urban scholar has to pay attention to. However, the meaning is historically path-dependent, depending upon the historical experience of the power-holder. The European Gothic of the Westminster Parliament is the style of the ‘free-born Englishman’, the Gothic of the Strasbourg Münster or the Kölner Dom is echt deutsch, that of the Vienna City Hall is the style of autonomous cities, in the Flemish tradition. Neoclassicism is republican in Washington and imperial in Paris and Saint Petersburg.

The second dimension is political, viewing built forms as expressing a ‘grammar of power’, as the Norwegian architectural theorist Thomas Thiis-Evensen has called it.²² I have found his sketch very useful. Six building variables and their power implications are listed in this ‘grammar’:

•Closure: the more closed, the more inaccessible

•Weight: the heavier

•Size: the larger

•Distance: the more distant from its immediate environment

•Symmetry: the more symmetrical

•Verticality: the taller the building, the more concentrated and the more authoritarian the power of the builder is likely to be.*

Five of the six may be interpreted as indicators of imposing awe, pomp, haughtiness, even arrogance. Symmetry is an expression of order, of a central mastering of the whole.

By size, modern power tends to be overshadowed by ancient, showing a certain popular approximation of power. The château de Versailles was 16 acres, the Moscow Kremlin 68 acres and the Vatican compound about 110 acres, which may be compared to the 175 acres of the Beijing Forbidden City, the 255 acres of the Delhi Red Fort and the 1,200 acres of the 200 BC er fang complex of Chang’an. But Saint Peter’s in Rome is much larger than the main temples of Tenochtitlán and, even more, of Cuzco. In terms of verticality, the Great Giza Pyramid of 2500 BC, at 146 metres, commanded the skies until the skyscrapers of the twentieth century.²³

The ‘grammar’ will not be used for any declension exercises of a Latin-school type, nor for any taxonomy. It is a list of variables to bear in mind when looking at buildings and thinking about their meaning.

Monumentality

Monumentality is directly geared to the production of meaning. The Latin monere means to remind. Through its built ensembles, statues, plaques and museums, a city’s monuments try to remind us of events and persons and to convey a particular historical narrative, urban and/or national. A built landmark may also constitute a monument, without an intrinsic narrative but reminding us of the identity of a place. Beijing’s Tiananmen is such a monumental landmark, figuring in China’s national emblem. Though not in the national heraldry, the Brandenburg Gate and the Eiffel Tower play similar roles for the identity of Berlin(ers) and Paris(ians).

Monumentality is often neglected in hard-nosed urban social science and was dismissed by the modernist architectural and urbanist vanguard of the years between the two world wars. However, in 1943, three leading figures of CIAM (Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne, the architectural vanguard movement) – its soon-to-be president Josep Lluís Sert, the long-term secretary Sigfried Giedion and the painter Fernand Léger – published ‘Nine Points on Monumentality’, pleading for a modernist reconsideration.

Monuments are human landmarks which men have created as symbols for their ideals, for their aims and for their actions … Monuments are the expression of man’s highest cultural needs … They have to satisfy the eternal demand of the people for translation of their collective force into symbols … Monuments are therefore only possible in periods in which a unifying consciousness and unifying culture exist.

From their sixth point the authors then move on to argue for a new, modernist monumentality without being very concrete, other than arguing for ‘modern materials and new techniques’, for ‘mobile elements’ and projections of colour.* They evade answering their own implied question, whether a ‘unifying consciousness unifying culture’ still exists. We do not need to answer that question here, because monumentality can also thrive among divided consciousnesses and cultures.

Madrid at the end of 2014 is a good illustration. On 15 October the Spanish king inaugurated in Madrid a big monumental statue to the eighteenth-century admiral Blas de Lezo. It had started as a private initiative, which soon got the enthusiastic support of the then right-wing mayor of Madrid. This happened in the build-up to the Catalan crisis, and knowledgeable Catalan nationalists soon pointed out that de Lezo had taken part in the bombardment (and final Spanish capture) of Barcelona in 1714. The Barcelona municipal council formally demanded the withdrawal of the statue, something the Madrid mayor declared she would never do under any circumstances.²⁴

In Budapest in the same autumn of 2014, liberal opinion was very upset by a new sculptural ensemble with a monstrous bird descending on an angelic Hungary, commemorating the ‘German occupation’ (from March 1944 to the end of World War II). It is interpreted, correctly, as whitewashing the reactionary, anti-Semitic regime that ruled Hungary after 1920 and aligned itself with Nazi Germany at the outbreak of World War II.²⁵

Monumentality may actually be a good indicator of the division of the country. By the outbreak of the protest rallies in Kyiv in the autumn of 2013, Lenin had been taken down in the country west of Kyiv, surviving in the capital with a battered nose, but stood tall east of the Dnipro River in the main square of every important city. After the successful regime change, Lenin is now confined to the Donbass region.^*

Modern monumentality in the narrow sense of statues, triumphal arches, allegorical and other sculptural ensembles, pantheons and columns is of Greco-Roman European origin, and processional portraits are of Christian European origin. Monumentality has had its golden ages – imperial Rome and nineteenth-century Paris – but it is very much still with us, capable of arousing civic passion. This symbolic repertoire has been imported into other civilizations in modern times and its relative scarcity in, for example, East Asia, should be interpreted in the context of its alienness. Mausoleums and symbolically charged tombs, on the other hand, are part of the heritage of all Asian cultures.

Toponymy

Urban meanings are also constructed through naming streets, places, buildings, institutions – by toponomy. The official naming of streets was a European post-medieval practice. The original, vernacular naming referred to a street’s artisans and shops, some feature of its natural location or some colourful inhabitant of the neighbourhood. Concentrated national and city governments had more representative concerns.

The first such street of any note was probably the Via Giulia in Rome, named after the great early-sixteenth-century Roman planner Pope Giulio II. In London, beginning with Henry VIII, several King Streets were laid out, none very grand. In 1765 a law was passed that all streets and squares should have a name and a name tablet.²⁶ In Paris official names started to appear in the seventeenth century, first drawn from royalty, but soon also from statesmen and high servants of the king: Colbert, Mazarin, Richelieu. By the eighteenth century, before the revolution, there were also streets named after guild heads and city leaders, and after 1728 there was a police ordinance that all Parisian streets should have a name plaque.²⁷ In the 1630s, the idea of official street naming reached the new (short-lived) big-power capital of Stockholm, whose Regency government began by commemorating itself, in Regeringsgatan (Government Street).

The practice later radiated across the European imperial area and into Republican Beijing,²⁸ but it never stuck in Japan, which has kept a block-based address system. In contrast to Communist Europe, street (re)naming was not important in Communist China, although it did happen occasionally. In the 1990s, the World Bank put out a manual of street naming, mainly aimed at Africa.

Washington, D.C., has its major avenues named after the states of the Union, with Pennsylvania Avenue outshining all others, followed by New York, in connecting Capitol Hill to the White House. The current American affection for toponymy of airports, hospitals, university buildings, etc., seems to be rather recent. US cities pioneered the utterly pragmatic manner of numbering streets, or, as in Washington, using the letters of the alphabet.

Some methodological problems

The meaning of the city text cannot be fully grasped from the existing cityscape, however sharp the urbanistic vision. Most cities are old, which means they consist of different time layers of spatial layout and of manifestations of meaning. At most given points in time, cities have to be read diachronically. You have to dive into city history and into the city’s plans, unrealized as well as realized. In general, contemporary cities have to be approached through a perspective of cultural geology. City texts have to be deciphered in archival contexts, making use of the historian’s privilege over the archaeologist.

Oslo furnishes a nice illustration of the necessity of keeping historical layering in mind when interpreting a contemporary cityscape. The central, commanding building of modern Oslo is the Royal Castle, built in the nineteenth century for the lieutenant-governor of the Swedish king, but the current centre of power is the parliamentary Storting building on the main street below the Castle. The configuration of the two buildings tells us something interesting about the transition from royal Swedish to parliamentary Norwegian rule, but it would be misleading as a guide to power in contemporary Norway.

We have already taken note of the polyvalence of architectural styles. But even politically analyzed built forms are not always understandable from general principles of construction. Transparency, for instance, is currently interpreted as a feature of democratic government and therefore of democratic architecture, underlined in the self-presentation of the EU parliamentary complex. However, a famous example of Italian Fascist modernism, the Casa del Fascio in Como by Giuseppe Terragni, is a light four-storey structure with large glass doors to the piazza and big windows, intended to convey the transparency of Fascism as a ‘glass house’ with ‘no obstacle between the political leaders and the people’.²⁹

National Power and the Pathways to Modern Nation-States

In a politico-cultural perspective on world history, the rise of national power and nation-states appears as a major historical divide, the key political dimension of modernity. By 1700, no single state in the world was claiming to be a state of the sovereign power of a nation. Britain, for which a bold sixteenth-century national claim has been made,³⁰ was after a short republican interlude again ruled as a dynastic monarchy, and its revolutionary settlement of 1688 was a compromise between two pre-national monarchical principles. The Tory one held that ‘the King is the source of all justice & authority’ and the Whig one, which became preponderant, ‘that King James the 2nd … by breaking the original compact between King & people … has thereby abdicated the government & left the throne vacant’.³¹ The Netherlands was a confederation of towns and local communities created from seven United Provinces.

Today, all states – except Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates – present themselves as nation-states. What this planetary transformation of political power, which did not stop with the proclamation of nation-states, has meant for cities and urban representations of power is a central theme of this book.

National power, nation-states and national capitals are distinctive phenomena, differing from the much more researched and hotly controversial topics of national identity and nationalism. National identities are part of a vast field of ‘Othering’ – distinguishing ‘us’ from ‘the others’ – and have, as such, ancient roots. Nationalism belongs to the secular ideological field of ‘isms’ emerging in Europe after the French Revolution.^*

National power is a conception of legitimate power, breaking with previous conceptions of the ‘grace of God’, ‘Mandate of Heaven’, of descent – whether of princely dynasty or oligarchic regimentsfähigen Familien (‘families fit for rule’, as it was called in the Swiss city cantons) – or of age-cum-descent, as of tribal elders. National independence from empires started in the Americas about two centuries ago and became a major feature of twentieth-century history. It is in this sense that national power is the political core of the vast cultural transformation we call modernity. Basically, the nation was the population of a territory; national power, national sovereignty, was its claim to rule. For a long time this population was, at most, no more than its adult, non-servile males, setting the stage for subsequent struggles about who the nation is. A nation-state is the practical institutionalization of national power. In urban terms, the struggle for national power was focused on transforming the princely Residenz city, the oligarchic mercantile city, the religious centre (e.g., Rome), or centres of imperial/colonial power into national capitals. In the ‘White Dominions’ of the British empire, national capitals were built as political replacements of the colonial.

Modernity, nation-states and their four main historical pathways

‘Modernity’ may be used as a shorthand for a current or recent culture. In the arts it has come to designate the reign of a style or a stance, ‘modernism’. Into sociology it has been imported to label a (largely pre-defined) social process, ‘modernization’. Post-classical Latin modernus means no more than ‘current, of today’. In my opinion, concepts should do better than just providing a label. They should trigger curiosity, stimulate new research questions. Concepts should be leveraged.

Leveraging concepts of modern and modernity would then mean asking: what does it mean to be modern? How and when can a social period be interpreted as modernity? Should such periods be specified by socio-cultural domains and/or by territorial areas?

In my opinion, the best and the least idiosyncratic definition of being modern is to be unbound by tradition, by the wisdom of our fathers, by the skills of our masters, by any ancient authority. To be modern is a cultural time orientation to the present and towards the future, no more and no less.

A modern culture, then, would be a culture where this time orientation is predominant, modernity an epoch of such predominance. Instead of fixing a label on what we are observing and writing about, we would then be confronted with a number of questions, without any self-evident answers: when did modernity happen? Variously in different cultural spheres, in science, the different arts, in conceptions of history, politics, economics, family life? Did it take place in different ways and at different times in the world? If so, do the variable pathways to modernity affect today’s social and cultural life?

Hopefully, the advantages of seeing modernity not as ‘modes of social life which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards’,³² but as something which has to be discovered and specified, come out of the sample of questions above. Here we have to concentrate on three issues: first, accepting that modernity breaks through in different socio-cultural domains at different times, in a comparative global perspective, is there any sectoral breakthrough which can be taken as more important than the others and is thereby useable as a benchmark? I am arguing that the modernity of political power, of the polity, is the decisive variable because of its intrinsic capacity to affect all other socio-cultural realms. However, the impact of modern political power on the traditionalism/modernity of society may be big or small, fast or slow. There is also a pragmatic reason: political change tends to be eventful and therefore much easier to pin down and date than economic change.

Second, what is, then, a modern polity? The answer, for analytical instead of ideological purposes, had better not be weighed down by particular institutional features, usually derived from the scholar’s native or otherwise ideal country. A simple, straightforward and non-aprioristic answer is, a nation-state. True, nations often refer to their past, but when they emerge, the politics of the nation assert the power of the present against the past. The nation-state is a self-constituted body claiming to rule itself into an open, non-prescribed future, unbound by past precedence, abolishing or marginalizing the rights of princes, under whatever title, denying colonial powers and transcending the traditional rights and powers of tribal elders or hereditary urban oligarchies.

Third, can the arrival of political modernity be globally typologized in a way that is analytically manageable as well as empirically warranted? Yes, it dawned upon me, as I was making a global study of the development of the right to vote,³³ that there were four major routes to modern national citizenship, four major pathways into modernity, defined by the conflict lines for and against the new, between modernity and tradition, between modernity and anti-modernity. They can be distinguished in general analytical terms and can therefore be used not only to sort groups of countries but also as ideal types, two or more of which may have been taken in a particular country.

How was the new political culture generated? Internally, in the given society, or imposed or imported from outside? Who were the forces of the new? A new stratum within the given society, an external force or a part of the old internal elite? Where were the main forces of anti-modernity, of traditional authority and submission – inside or outside?

In this vein we may distinguish four main conflictual configurations in the world. They emerged as empirical generalizations, but they can also be used as ideal types, especially as they can be located in a logical property space.* This possibility has operated above all in two great hybrid cases: Russia and China. But the four main actual roads to modernity were opened up in the following ways.

Table 1. Roads to/through modernity by the location of forces and cultures: for and against.

Pre/Anti-Modernity Forces	Pro-Modernity Forces
	Internal	External
		Imposed	Imported & Learnt
Internal	Europe	Colonial Zone	Reactive Modernization
External	‘New Worlds’ (Settler States)
Note: Countries of reactive, or externally induced, modernization include Japan, Qing China, Ottoman Empire/Turkey, Iran and Siam/Thailand.

The new future orientation of the last centuries first emerged in Europe not as a natural emanation of European civilization but out of conflicts internal to Europe, primarily north-western Europe, including wars about European overseas empires. In other words, the European route was one of civil war, which pitted the forces of reason, enlightenment, nation/people, innovation and change against those of the eternal truths of the Church, of the sublime wisdom and beauty of ancient philosophy and art, of the divine rights of kings, of the ancient privileges of aristocracy and of the customs of fathers and grandfathers. It was related to the rise of commerce, capital and industry, built upon colonial accumulation overseas.

In a global perspective, two aspects of the European nation stand out. One is its anchorage in a popular and territorial history, distinguished from the landed property of princely power. The other is its heavy, distinctive cultural load, with spoken language at its core. Standardizing and homogenizing a national language was a central part of national political programmes, of ‘making Italians’ and turning ‘peasants into Frenchmen’, as Eugene Weber’s beautiful book names it.³⁴ The creation of a national language through dialect selection and grammatical and orthographic codification became a major task of European small-nation intellectuals in the nineteenth century, from the Balkans to Norway. Where possible, minority languages were driven out of national culture.

The settler states of the Americas had to create new nations, which mythologically and emblematically, of course, drew upon historical examples as symbolic resources – ancient European republicanism in the case of the United States, historical Catholic experiences and pre-Columbian (e.g. Inca and Aztec) high culture in Hispanic America – but which claimed no ethno-cultural territorial history and shared their language with the colonial metropolis.

Most distinctive of the New World was its conception of the nation as a club to which desirable members could and should be recruited. Targeted immigration from Europe was a major dimension of nation-formation. ‘To govern is to populate’, a prominent mid-nineteenth-century Argentine politician and politician, Juan Bautista Alberdi, said.³⁵ Particularly in Latin American discourse – in Brazil as well as, for instance, in Argentina – this club-member recruitment was explicitly referred to as ‘whitening’ or ‘civilizing’ the nation.³⁶ For a long time, only people of external, European descent were regarded as a full citizens of the new nations of the Americas and Australia.

Nations of the Colonial Zone constitute a third variety, nations identified as ex-colonies. There were no historical territories, no singular historical peoples, only colonial boundaries. In a rare wise decision, African nationalist leaders decided to accept all such boundaries, however arbitrary and culturally divisive. Ali Jinnah did not, and British India, which was larger than any pre-colonial state of India, broke up into India – which Nehru refused to call ‘Hindustan’ – Pakistan and Bangladesh, through terrible pogroms and wars of divorce.

The maintenance of the colonial language is arguably the most ostentatious legacy of the colonial pathway to modernity, with its ensuing complicated and hierarchical relations of nation and culture, though also pragmatically practical in multilingual nations – such as Nigeria, with 400 to 500 languages according to different estimates,³⁷ or India, which has at least 122, according to a recent linguistic census analysis.^*

The European notion that a nation is defined by its language could not be applied in the ex-colonies. When it was, as in Pakistan, it had disastrous results, from 1952 bitterly dividing the Bengali east to the Urdu-promoting leaders of West Pakistan, where the Mughal hybrid of Urdu was not the majority mother tongue either.³⁸

A general legacy of anti-colonialism is a strong nationalism as the decisive modern mass politics. Post-colonial culture also tends to be starkly divided between elite and mass culture. Elite culture is usually conducted in the language of the former colonial power, a language which the majority of the population does not understand. In the capital city, the colonial divide is usually reproduced, the post-colonial elite taking over the official buildings and the private mansions and villas of the colonizers. Colonial administrative practices tend to be kept, although often subverted by corruption and/or lack of state resources.

Traditional authorities and rituals tend to persist, drawing upon both their colonial institutionalization and their national credentials. In spite of their use in colonial indirect rule, traditional leaders were often incorporated into modern anti-colonial nationalism. The founding programme (from 1948) of the radical Convention People’s Party in Ghana, for instance, demanded as its first objective ‘independence for the people of Ghana and their Odikros [traditional rulers]’.³⁹ Modern Malay nationalism, as the national Tunku Abdul Rahman Memorial museum in Kuala Lumpur narrates, started after World War II as a protest against British plans to reduce the powers of the traditional rulers and to institute an equal colonial citizenship for Malays, Chinese and Tamils alike. Independent India, on the other hand, did away with the princely states of India.

The nation of reactive modernization is the pre-modern realm, defined by the writ of the prince, the emperor, the king or the sultan. This was how the successful modernizers of Meiji Japan saw it, as did the less successful rulers of Siam and Abyssinia and the soon-defeated modernizers of Joseon Korea, Qing China and the Ottoman empire. It was a historical legacy of rule, synonymous with its ruling dynasty, who often (though not in Japan) gave the realm its everyday name. The modern task here was not national emancipation but building the realm into a nation. In Japan this was greatly facilitated by the high ethnic homogeneity of the country and the low salience of intertwined religions. The most important measure of national unification was the abolition of the feudal daimyo domains, returning their lands ‘to the emperor’. The Meiji modernizers built a modern Japanese nation around the symbol and mystique of the Emperor, whose status, but not his power, was more and more exalted as the modernization process progressed, culminating in the 1930s and during the Pacific War.

In Japan and Thailand in the twenty-first century, the monarch is a sublime national icon, in comparison with which even British monarchical deference and protocol pale into civic celebrity – but an icon of the nation, not the owner of the land. The great modernizer of Siam, King Chulalongkorn (Rama V), has even become a figure of religious devotion, as I noticed at his equestrian statue in Bangkok in 2007.

National language and culture were not primary issues. They were given by the realm, although the status of Sinic civilization and culture came to suffer from the recurrent defeats of China. They became primary when the Turkish nation succeeded the failed Ottoman empire.

The national capitals coming out of emancipation from colonialism and from reactive modernization both have a tendential duality, abruptly juxtaposing urbanistic elements from different civilizations. The hegemonic combination is different, though. The centre of the colonial city was built by the conquerors and then taken over by the ex-colonized, de facto reproducing the characteristic duality of the colonial city. The centre of reactive modernization – usually the princely palace and its surroundings – remained in native hands, though ‘modernized’ by foreign imports of style and amenities. Paraphrasing the doctrine of socialist realism, we may say that it was foreign in form and native in content.

The two great hybrids

The meandering of actual history is rarely captured by the straight lines of scholarly ideal types. In the history of modernity there are two great hybrids weighing heavily on the twentieth- and twenty-first-century worlds: Russia and China. Russia was a part of Europe from the time when the latter was still subsumed under the worldview of Christianity. In the fifteenth century, a Muscovite prince married a Byzantine princess and invited Italian architects to the Kremlin to bolster a claim to being a Third Rome. Peter I had learnt about the modern world in the Netherlands, and in the later eighteenth century the court of Catherine II was part of the Francophone Enlightenment, harbouring Denis Diderot as the court philosophe. In the nineteenth century, Tsarist Russia became a European precursor of the global Cold War United States, the gendarme of last resort against any rebellions against the status quo. Inside Russia there also developed powerful currents of the European labour movement, Marxist social democracy.

However, Russia was also an underdeveloped part of Europe, and among its ruling elite self-consciously so, from Peter I to Lenin. Reactive modernization—catching up with resourceful enemies—was a second crucial part of the Russian path to modernity, from Peter’s use of his absolutist power to build the city of Saint Petersburg rather than a Peterhof replica of Versailles, to Lenin’s and Stalin’s conceptions of socialism as electrification and breakneck industrialization, respectively.

Late imperial Qing China did attempt some reactive modernization, without much success as the devastating imperialist invasion of Beijing in 1900 brought home. Nevertheless, China was never properly colonized; no alien governor-general ever ruled it. But it was partially colonized: its main ports were largely foreign imperialist ‘concessions’ and a major revenue source, the Customs, was controlled by an inter-imperialist consortium.

The hybridity of China included a third, non-negligible component, an offshoot from European class structuration and mobilization. The Communist Party of China has undergone multiple mutations, but its ultimately successful character of a Marxist class organization derives from Europe and the European labour movement, transmitted through the Comintern (the Communist International) in the 1920s.

While post-Ottoman Turkey may be seen as a late case of reactive modernization, after the failed half-hearted Sultanate attempts, Egypt, an autonomous important area of the empire, had to experience the mutation of extravagant khedival modernization into semi-colonial bondage.

Summing up

Nation-states constituted tipping-points of modernity, creating a political space of open horizons of action regardless of whether the nation saw itself as rooted in ancestral territory and culture or not. At their very core of nation conception and constitution, nation-states arose out of very different kinds of power constellations, following from their history of development. Their capital cities have varied accordingly, in ways never before explored systematically, if at all.

There were four main routes to national statehood:

1.The European road: externally overdetermined internal reform or revolution

2.The ‘New Worlds’ of European settlers seceding from the motherland: outgrowing European traditions

3.The colonial road to independence: turning colonial modernity against the colonizers

4.Reactive modernization from above: defending the realm in a new way against novel challenges

These pathways may also be seen as ideal-type trajectories, which may be combined in a given country. The two main centres of twentieth-century Communism – Russia and China – were the two great hybrids of modern state formation. My hypothesis is that this nation/modernity hybridity was crucial to the victories of Communism in Russia and in China, but that is another story.

Furthermore, the new national capital cities bear witness not only to the context of nation-state formation, but also to its political process, whether ruptural or gradual. Did the nation-state arise out of a ruptural violent conflict, a revolution, a civil war, a war of independence, or did it grow into being through an accumulation of gradual shifts of power, or, alternatively, through negotiated transfer?

In the next chapter we shall investigate the constitution and construction of the major capitals along the four major routes of nation-state formation. Later we shall look into how moments of popular and global challenge to the national elites have appeared in national capitals of different constitutive origins. The hybrids of Moscow and Beijing will be dealt with in a special chapter on the coming and going of Communism.