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.
National Foundations: Europe – Transforming Princely Cities
Europe was a world pioneer of modernist breaks with past authorities, wisdom and aesthetic canon. However, in a global context, the most striking aspect of European nation-states and their capitals is historical continuity as well as continuity of territory, language, religion, art, architecture and urban layout. This paradox of pioneer modernism combined with de facto conservationism is mainly explained by European imperialism. Europe was the only part of the world which did not have its pre-modernity conquered, shattered or fatally threatened and humiliated. Therefore, its pre-national, pre-modern background and legacy matter more than to capitals coming out of other national pathways. With respect to cities, this background had two main features: a particular urban system and form of urbanism, and a historically evolved repertoire of architectural language and symbolic forms.
The core of European civilization was uniquely urban in a specific sense; it developed in sovereign cities, in city-states which were part of regional systems of exchange, rivalry, competition, warfare and alliances. City-states developed on other continents, too, but nowhere else did they constitute political and cultural systems of comparable significance. This was ancient Greece, succeeded by ancient Rome, a city building an empire; by Byzantium, another city holding an empire; and, after the collapse of the Mediterranean urban powers of antiquity, ancient civilization revived in Florence and the other city-states of the Renaissance.
European cities were distinctive legal-political entities, characterized by the civic, in Germanic languages Bürger, rights of its free men.* Even when not sovereign states, European cities and towns usually had institutions of collective self-governance, in the big and wealthy cities represented by magnificent city halls. They had their