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