Contention and Trust in Cities and States
Michael Hanagan
l
Chris Tilly
Editors
Contention and Trust in Cities and States
Editors Michael Hanagan Adjunct Professor of History Vassar College Poughkeepsie, New York USA
Chris Tilly Institute for Research on Labor and Employment University of California Los Angeles USA
ISBN 978-94-007-0755-9 e-ISBN 978-94-007-0756-6 DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6 Springer Dordrecht New York Heidelberg London Library of Congress Control Number: 2011923979 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
To Chuck and Louise Tilly: parents, teachers, scholars, friends
v
Introduction Michael Hanagan
l
Chris Tilly
Charles Tilly got us thinking about contention and trust in cities and states. When he died in 2008, he left a table of contents and first chapter from a planned manuscript titled “Cities and states in world history.” We took this very preliminary, but wide-ranging, work as a provocation to explore cities and states, the relations and interactions that link them, and the networks of trust and fault lines of contention that striate their relations with their populations. We extended that provocation to a set of scholars of cities and states, contention and trust. We did so first in a double issue of Theory and Society (Hanagan and Tilly 2010) that collected 13 of the essays in the current volume. We then newly provoked a wider circle of researchers, generating ten additional, complementary articles to complete this collection. Five are longer empirical essays in the same vein as the first group, and five are short Spotlight pieces that each zooms in on an issue demanding particular attention. The result is no festschrift. Our approach throughout, and that of the contributors, has not been so much to celebrate Charles Tilly’s work, as to use it as a point of departure. For some authors, his work serves as an inspiration, others see Tilly’s work more critically. All take the discussion of cities and states to new settings, ask new questions, and formulate new analyses. But let us take a step back. Preoccupation with the power of the state, with the social organization of cities, with the connections between the two, and with the implications of both for the lives of ordinary people dates back to the origins of social science. Charles Tilly shared these preoccupations. His attention to state-making (e.g., Tilly 1985, 1990), to states’ roles in repression and contention (e.g., Tilly 1986; McAdam et al. 2001), and to the determinants of democratization and de-democratization (e.g., Tilly 2005, 2007) are well known. But Tilly also returned repeatedly to examination of cities, in early work as an urban sociologist (e.g., Tilly 1965, 1974), in mid-career reflections (Stave 1998; Tilly 1998), and in his lifelong work on revolution, collective violence, and contention that scrutinized the urban context of many such activities. Thus, the unfinished “Cities and states in world history” marked a return to recurrent themes for Tilly. The issues raised by his one completed chapter, “Cities, States, and Trust Networks” (which immediately follows this Introduction), concerning relations among cities, states, politics, and trust
vii
viii
Introduction
networks, touch on themes long central to his work. Tilly’s growing interest in world history also makes this work a new departure. On to the process of provocation. We invited a number of distinguished scholars, 26 in all, to contribute research and commentary on cities and states. The group is exuberantly interdisciplinary, comprising geography, history, political science, sociology, and urban planning. These researchers’ subject matter spans from prehistory to the present, sprawling across six continents. Some were collaborators or students of Charles Tilly’s, some more distant colleagues in the social sciences or history, and some had little or no connection to Tilly and his work. The tether uniting these pieces is that all authors looked at “Cities, States, and Trust Networks,” and were enjoined to engage in some way with Charles Tilly’s work. (The first wave of essayists were also sent Tilly’s seminal 1996 article “What Good is Urban History?” and the second wave were sent our Introduction to the 2010 collection.) The result is, in our view, a rich, multilayered dialogue among diverse scholarly viewpoints. The dialogue coalesces around five main themes, around which we have organized the volume. The remainder of this introduction consists of discussion of the five themes as they thread through the 23 papers. The themes are: (1) historicism and historical legacies, (2) state-making, remaking, and unmaking, (3) city–state relations, (4) trust networks and commitment, and (5) democracy and inequality. Conceptually, we start at the lofty level of history and epistemology, descend from there to the still commanding heights of the national state, and then proceed downward to cities and the more grassroots phenomenon of trust networks, closing with the core political, economic, and social consequences of the interplay of these varied levels. The papers do not crisply sort themselves by theme; most touch on more than one of the five themes. Consequently, we have built a little repetition into this introduction in an attempt to do justice to the authors’ multifaceted analyses. We hope the resulting limited redundancy enlightens more than it stultifies.
Historicism and historical legacies: contingency and endurance Charles Tilly intended his book on world history to discuss big structures and large processes by means of huge comparisons. Working to scale, our introduction begins with a brief discussion of an enormous methodological issue, that of historicism. Many of our contributors discuss historicism although there is sharp disagreement about its utility. In an opening dialogue Rod Aya and Lynn Eden debate the extent and nature of Tilly’s commitment to historicism and pay quick tribute to a beloved mentor. Essays by Ariel Salzmann, Marcel van der Linden, and Hwaji Shin illustrate the variety of historicist perspectives. Tilly was known as a student of state formation who explored the emergence of modern, consolidated states and the growth of cities in a historicist vein. He defined historicism as the idea that “past social relations and their residues—material,
Introduction
ix
ideological, and otherwise—constrain present social relations, and consequently constrain their products as well” (Tilly 1996). As Marcel van der Linden points out in this volume, Tilly agreed with the sociologist Robert Merton that historicist approaches were necessary because even the most rational and considered actions often yielded “unanticipated consequences.” Actions often resulted in outcomes far different than their initiators expected or individual need required. But Tilly also raised a related question. How, despite unanticipated consequences, did social action nonetheless produce systematic, durable, social structures? To answer this question, he forged a chain from trial and error to self-correction to incremental but systematic and ultimately durable changes in social relations and culture (Tilly 1996, p. 709). Tilly’s emphasis on structure and contingency gets at the heart of any sophisticated historicist argument. Contingency is a powerful force. Small events can have wildly disproportionate outcomes. A degree or so fall in average temperature led to the abandonment of the Greenland colony, closing the Scandinavian route to North America in the fourteenth century. Two centuries later, in a warmer Atlantic, an Italian seaman sailing for Spain charted a new route to North America. It might be diverting to ask what would have happened if Norwegians had settled in North America in 1350, but the ramifications are so great that the game loses much of its interest (Fagan 1999). What role is left for structure? The relationship between structure and contingency has been hotly debated with regard to class. Some, such as Friedrich Engels (1970), have argued that class consciousness is an inevitable product of worker exploitation, and that the working class will sooner or later become a “class for itself.” In contrast, E.P. Thompson (1964) depicted class formation as a conjuncturally specific set of historical events. Echoing this viewpoint, Marxist Eric Hobsbawm colorfully commented that class consciousness is not like a bus, in that if you miss the first one you can catch the next. Enduring structures emerge from contingent origins. Social historian Tilly, of course, lined up with this latter view. In the lead Spotlight essay in this early portion of our collection, Roy Aya and Lynn Eden adopt a dialogic format to discuss Tilly’s commitment to historicism and the extent of his rejection of rational choice approaches and methodological individualism. Aya sees a giant contradiction in Tilly’s work and finds him, despite his protests, to be a secret methodological individualist. Formally to be sure, Tilly rejected as inadequate rational choice theories centered on the premise “that people will do what they think will get them what they want.” But Aya claims that Tilly’s emphasis on causal mechanisms and the primacy of social relations and his relational realism are “just rational choice under different constraints.” When we examine what Tilly actually does, Aya argues, we find “a model whose elements are people trying to make the best of their situation as they see it over time.” In response, Eden de-emphasizes the elements of contradiction and underlines Tilly’s effort at synthesis and his effort to bring together diverse strands of social analysis. According to Eden, Tilly was driven by a “tension between two sensibilities”—an openness to contingency and an effort to generalize. Tilly was not alone in his effort. Numerous essays in this collection walk the tightrope
x
Introduction
between contingency and structure, balancing Merton’s emphasis on unintended consequences with Marx’s interest in durable structures. As you read the essays by Salzmann, van der Linden, and Shin imagine how they would be told by historicists, by structuralists, or methodological individualists. Contingency and structure play key roles in all their analyses. Many of the essays in this collection weigh in on the historicist debate and, in a sense, all do so fashioning arguments that employ different methods of explanation. Ariel Salzmann, Marcel van der Linden, and Hwaji Shin launch particularly interesting and relevant historicist departures from Tilly’s works. Salzmann’s analysis of the treatment of groups whose religion was different from the ruler shows how contingent actions can harden into durable structures—in this case focusing on cultural understandings, religious communities, and institutions. Salzmann compares the treatment of Jewish minorities in Western Europe with that of Jews and Christians in the Islamic world between 600 CE and 1914 CE. She asks: why were entire Jewish and Muslim communities expelled from Western nations while Christian and Jewish communities were successfully integrated into a Muslim state, without being completely absorbed? Salzmann’s answer points to the historically contingent roots of sturdy structures of inclusion and exclusion. At least part of her argument hinges on the unique and never-to-be repeated historical context in which social compacts were established in the societies conquered by the Arabs in the seventh and early eighth centuries. This founding understanding was also strongly shaped by the existence at the time of Christian majorities in the Near Eastern and North African lands that the Arabs had conquered. While the results of these compacts were quickly embedded in institutions and laws, Salzmann argues that such compacts, when reinforced by concrete institutions, established a broad cultural consensuses about relationships between Muslims and non-Muslims that would endure in the Islamic world for centuries to come. Salzmann discusses several of the principal religious trust networks of the period: Christians and Jews in the Islamic world, Muslims and Christians in the European world. But Jews form the chief object of her study. Jews were a minority in both the western Catholic and the Muslim world and present a classic example of a trust network, defined as “major, long-term, collective enterprises at risk to the malfeasance of others” (Tilly 2005, p. 4). Of course, Jews shared a common religion; they also spoke a second language common to the group. In a world where charitable giving was monopolized by religious institutions, Jews developed their own institutions to help fellow believers. In worlds where their religion was not hegemonic, Christian and Muslim minorities formed similar networks. Accepted by the Arab conquerors, Jewish and Christian trust networks were able to integrate themselves into Islamic society in a variety of contexts. In contrast, she argues that Jews came late to Western Christendom, arriving at a point when some niches typically filled by Jews in the Muslim world—literate bureaucrats, capital providers, and people with contacts throughout the Mediterranean—had already been filled by Christian clergymen who regarded the Jews as rivals. Never strong, the position of Jewish minorities in Europe weakened, weakness opened them up to
Introduction
xi
plunder and thus to further weakening—and so on in an ever-descending spiral. European Jews found themselves increasingly confined to ghettos which imposed occupational limitations on them and made it more difficult for them to integrate into the larger community than for their compatriots living in the Muslim world. It was a relatively short step to expulsion. Salzmann identifies with Tilly’s historicist approach at the same time as she takes his argument in a new direction. Not only does the construction of the trust network itself include a large cultural component, so do the ties relating it to the larger society. The picture that Salzmann draws is of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Islamic society sharing a vision of appropriate roles and relationships. Trust networks and commitment are not things apart but exist in a larger cultural context. Marcel van der Linden also provides a striking demonstration of a historicist point, showing how the actions of abolitionists, missionaries, and the British navy produced historical outcomes that would have utterly surprised all actors and shocked many. In response to the power of the abolitionist movement the British government introduced a series of practices to combat slavery that were later, in a stunning turn of events, used to facilitate British imperialist domination in Africa. Over time, responses to the durable inequality of slavery created other structures designed to dismantle it. After the 1807 passage of the “Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” to respond to slavers’ subterfuges British authorities pursued one strategy after another. Each proved fruitless and each increased British control in West and South Africa, moving Britain down a contingent path toward new structures of domination. In retrospect, this gradual penetration and control over large portions of the African continent seems to have led almost inevitably to the expansion of imperialism on the African continent in the 1880s. But this is to ignore the intent of most of the staunch abolitionists who had initiated and long sustained the process of British expansion into Africa. No one in the early 1800s could have foreseen the partition of Africa in the late 1880s. Hwaji Shin’s article on the formation of Japanese identity in the first half of the twentieth century focuses on the formation of national identity that persists to this day. In so doing, her work helps explain the mechanisms that contributed to the replication of inequality for Korean migrants over decades. She argues that the particular exclusionary identity that appeared in post-1945 Japan must be understood, not as an eternal conflict between Japanese and Koreans, but as linked to official efforts to deal with the legacies of imperialism in the defeat in war. According to Shin, modern Japanese identity—with its focus on the ethnic homogeneity of the homeland—was an image produced and sustained by the post–World War II collapse of empire. In the era of imperial expansion that preceded World War II, Japanese imperialists had encouraged the idea of pan-Asian identity, promoting a front of Asian peoples united by a common culture against Caucasian imperialist domination. On these terms hundreds of thousands of Korean workers entered Japan to labor in industry. The end of the war and the loss of empire created a “Korean question” in Japan. Politicians sought to deal with restive Korean workers, some suspected of Communist sympathies; Koreans occupied jobs seen as rightly belonging to Japanese colonists fleeing advancing Chinese armies. Japanese bureaucrats
xii
Introduction
responded by reinventing Japanese identity to include only those within the nation sharing a homogenous cultural identity, consigning Koreans to deportation or semi-clandestine assimilation and inferior status in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1980s and 1990s, years of Japanese boom and bust, this same policy of deportation, discrimination, and denial of citizenship to Koreans and newer immigrant groups was pursued unreflectively. The 1950s policy was re-implemented without debate or discussion, according to Shin, in large part because a bureaucracy that imposed the 1950s policy was still intact in the 1980s and applied the very policies it had initiated then. Hwaji Shin shows us the origins and impact of this trust network, a network of Japanese imperial officers posted in the colonies, where they formed ties of mutual aid among the few Japanese. What renders this network so significant is that its members became responsible for the formulation of a Japanese citizenship policy crucial to national identity formation. In the wake of imperial collapse a small part of the Japanese bureaucracy, the Immigration Bureau, imposed a narrow definition of Japanese identity on a defeated population, and later reconstituted itself to impose this definition even in the very different climate of the 1980s and 1990s. Like the trust network described by Salzmann this one was based on longstanding ties. Where van der Linden’s networks built new institutions, Shin’s preserved old ones within a preexisting institution, the Japanese state. In Shin’s postwar Japan, an “insider” network (made up of those formerly “outsiders” in the colonies they administered) enacted policy decisions that resonated with popular fears and suspicions of Koreans and quite literally shaped a new Japanese culture and identity. Here culture was not just, as in Salzmann, a context for the functioning of trust networks, but a consequence of that functioning. (One suspects there is yet another trust network story to be told about how Koreans banded together for mutual support in postwar Japan.) Though Shin rounds out the group of essays that make up our part headed Historicism, other chapters also address this cluster of issues. For instance, a number of essays other than Shin’s take a closer look at the process of identity construction so critical to the maintenance of durable social structures. A key element of any historicist argument concerns the mechanisms for both the spawning of innovation and the reproduction of tradition, and identity formation can bridge the two. Wim Blockmans’s contribution shows how after 1000 CE a new mercantile class emerged in growing cities to assume civic and commercial responsibilities that had disappeared after Roman emperors and Germanic kings had dropped the reins of government. Originally stepping in to perform occasional commercial chores, merchants gradually expanded their competence and became conscious agents of urban capitalism. Contingent interventions accreted into structural roles. Nine hundred years later, Elisabeth Clemens also shows how business communities—in this case in urban America—organized themselves into collective bodies and forged distinctive identities. But in this case the typical identity was a political one basing itself in the broad middle classes and using charity to sustain a claim to represent the general good. Though US urban elites stumbled onto this identity through experimentation, they developed a vested interest in the role, and fiercely
Introduction
xiii
defended it. Interestingly, at the outer end of both Blockmans’s and Clemens’s accounts, we see these structures being displaced—by formalized state institutions and national charities, respectively. We further examine those transitions below. Sidney Tarrow, in his reexamination of the French revolution, and Antonina Gentile, in her analysis of the rise of neoliberal governments in Europe and the USA, also scrutinize how contingent political coalitions, platforms, and reforms hardened into enduring structures; we discuss their accounts in the next part, State-Making. Of course, historicist approaches are only one set of weapons in the quiver of social scientists and historians. Not everyone in this collection agrees either in whole or in part with historicism. Edward Soja criticizes the foregrounding of time as against an emphasis on spatial analysis. Beginning like Tilly in the era of the Neolithic revolution in the Near East, he thoughtfully criticizes Tilly’s definition of the city. In his essay in this collection Tilly defines the city as a “human settlements combining significantly denser resident population than their surrounding territories, differentiation, and inequality within the resident populations, some central authority, and nodal locations within existing networks of communication.” Soja, however, argues the first cities were formed by egalitarian bands of hunters and gatherers, preceding inequality and authority but laying the foundations for their later development. Soja criticizes Tilly’s definition for teleologically combining urbanization and state formation, distracting us from understanding how urban population concentration in itself has propelled social change. In sum, discussions of historicity in this collection offer a rich grab-bag of ideas. They show us repeatedly how path-dependent contingency shapes enduring structures—structures that may then be reshaped or shattered by a later wave of historically contingent events. The authors highlight identity formation as one key step in processes connecting contingent human actions and choices with persistent social realities. Several of them spotlight empires, exploring worlds that parallel the world of Westphalian states that drew most of Charles Tilly’s attention, and probing the applicability of Tilly’s concepts in these parallel worlds. And one paper, that of Edward Soja, offers an explicit, spirited challenge to historicism, proposing instead a “geohistory” that puts spatial differentiation at the center of social change.
State-making, unmaking, and remaking In one of his most memorable article titles, Charles Tilly (1985) described “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” The making, unmaking, and remaking of states was a persistent preoccupation for Tilly, dating back to his dissertation and first book, The Vende´e, about the French counterrevolution of 1793, and extending through decades of work (for example, Tilly 1964, 1975, 1978, 1990, 1993; Tilly and Blockmans 1994). Perhaps inevitably given this output, and especially given the state’s central role in other Tilly literatures on contention, democracy, identity, and citizenship, Tilly’s
xiv
Introduction
work embodies some of the tensions present in social scientific and historical treatments of the state in general. Thus, Antonina Gentile, in her contribution to this volume, identifies at least two Tillys studying the state: the “polity model Tilly” analyzing the give and take of contention, concession, and repression, and the “statist Tilly” scrutinizing top-down processes of state formation. Not to be outdone, Sidney Tarrow discerns three Tillys, studying revolution, war, and state-building, respectively (though on closer examination this troika regroups into a revolutionand-contention Tilly and a state-and-war-making Tilly quite similar to Gentile’s dyad). Clearly, Tilly figures here both as a thinker in his own right, and as a proxy for distinct literatures that have not sufficiently engaged each other. How do we explain the sometimes violent and extractive, sometimes permeable and responsive, nature of states? Can we link the processes involved in toppling and remaking states with those entailed in making states in the first place? How can widening our field of vision beyond Tilly’s favored terrain of European national states over the last millennium enrich our understanding of the determinants of state form and content? Start with Tarrow, who takes as his case study the canonical case of state unmaking and remaking, the French revolution. Tarrow discards accounts explaining the course of the revolution in terms of class interests or political philosophy, instead directing a Tillyan (and Tarrovian) attention to political processes and the recurrent mechanisms that give them a somewhat systematic (if still contingent) character. Tilly, he notes, described long-term state-making processes in terms of bargains struck and repeatedly renegotiated between rulers controlling a war-making apparatus and elites controlling commerce and wealth—between coercion and capital. The initial result was precisely the “protection racket”—pay me and I’ll make sure nothing bad happens to you—that led Tilly to characterize statemaking as organized crime. Over time, however, states bargaining with citizens shifted toward added duties of “adjudication, distribution, and production.” Tarrow’s claim is that the French revolution, in a compressed period of a few years, recapitulated this process that took centuries the first time around. He traces how the revolutionaries quickly centralized control and administration, made war with established European elites, and crushed contenders for localized power or rollbacks of the revolutionary mandates. But the revolutionary government’s claim to legitimacy also quickly led to the need to organize the provision, distribution, and pricing of food, “[laying] the foundation for the machinery of the modern secular state.” Mounting a citizen army to consolidate revolutionary power and to attempt to extend it abroad via invasion soon led to the need for conscription. The new social pact implied in this large-scale mobilization of citizens helped produce “both modern citizenship and its inequalities.” In short, state-making seems to follow similar patterns whether undertaken slowly and incrementally, or rapidly in the whirlwind of revolution. If states take different forms depending on the relative weight and position of coercion and capital, national states emerging from empires mark an important special case of this process. Miguel Angel Centeno and Elaine Enriquez consider the transition between empire and post-imperial state(s). How does the persistence of imperial legacies shape successor states and former colonies? Centeno and
Introduction
xv
Enriquez trace the origins of their essay to their search for some area of scholarly interest “under-explored” by Tilly. Looking at empire, they sought to explore ways in which he “may have approached the sociological phenomenon of empire. . . using his characteristic forms of inquiry and interest to suggest links between imperial phenomena and national state outcomes.” Like Tilly, Centeno and Enriquez seek “to develop a discourse around state transformation.” Centeno and Enriquez advance a list of propositions about the impact of imperial legacies that draws on the discourse that Tilly developed in analyzing the consolidated state. The concern for warfare, money, the state’s ability to extract it, and the role of capital in politics are central to Centeno and Enriquez’s analysis of empire formation as they were central to Tilly’s study of state formation. Their propositions neatly embody the tension between structure and contingency. Each proposition starts by stating an expected legacy of empire, but each such statement is followed by an exception to the rule: “Under some circumstances, however. . . .” Thus, Centeno and Enriquez argue that empires generate complex administrative structures that are inherited by post-imperial states, except when they rely on indirect rule that retards the development of bureaucracy; that empires “require efficient capital-extraction systems, which lead to well-developed state fiscal structures,” except when they prove so lucrative that they obviate the need for tax collection; and so on (in these cases, Spain falls into the “exceptional” category). The imperial context discussed by Marcel van der Linden, Hwaji Shin, and Centeno and Enriquez raises questions of special interest to historians (Centeno 2003). What are the forces in empire formation and how similar is the process of empire formation to that of the consolidated state formation so thoroughly studied by Tilly? They push us to look at the character of decision-making under conditions of multiple sovereignty and the question of how consolidated states develop from transnational polities, in situations of differently empowered polities, governed by local rulers with supreme power within their domain but subordinated to an often distant metropole. Centeno and Enriquez present an effort to adapt Tilly’s approach to the study of empire but we might also consider the limitations of his approach for the study of empire. Tilly’s analysis of state formation focused on the competitive state system in which the threat of war forced every country to fight to survive. It was a world in which a change in the balance of power was sufficient justification for a declaration of war. But as Immanuel Wallerstein (1974, pp. 16–17) pointed out, such a world was atypical and infrequent in world history; empires have been more common (Wallerstein 1974, pp. 16–17). As Karen Barkey has argued recently (Barkey 2008, p. 14), empires were often based both on force but also on administrative and political flexibility as well as on constant negotiation with potential troublemakers. Empire-ruled worlds were not worlds in which states continually stretched every last resource to engage in war. Indeed, one legacy of empire might be its generation of less cutthroat state systems among the nations emerging from imperial dominions. Both the Spanish empire and the British empire as they sloughed off the raiments of empire left relatively
xvi
Introduction
noncompetitive state systems in their place among their heirs in Latin America and among the North American colonies south and north of the St. Lawrence River. Fernando Lopez-Alves looks at this other side of the imperial coin, contemplating the formation of newly independent states in Latin America, including a brief contrast with their northern neighbor the United States of America. In the Americas we see a string of successful revolutions extending from the American revolution in 1776 to Cuba’s independence in 1898, concentrated in the explosion of independence movements in New Spain in the early 1800s. If Tarrow cocks his eye for similarities across history, Lopez-Alves trains his eye on differences across geography. As Lopez-Alves observes, Tilly noted that though the nation-state is the archetype of the modern state, nation-states (i.e., states containing a single nation in ethnic terms) were rare in the Old World. Far more common were national states agglomerating various nations and national minorities, such as Great Britain’s collage of English, Scots, Welsh, and Irish. In the New World, given the presence of native peoples and African slaves, states faced even more extreme ethnic diversity. However, Lopez-Alves points out that upon independence the new states of the Americas rapidly consolidated nation-states. Why and how was this the case? Lopez-Alves argued that the newly empowered elites of Latin America saw ethnic diversity as an existential threat. Unlike their forebears and counterparts in Europe, they were not able to draw on centuries of tradition and historical symbolism to shore up their state’s legitimacy. Nor, as weak states, did they have the wherewithal to launch invasions of neighbors, rallying citizens with war-making and external threats. Instead, they embarked on highly deliberate accelerated nation-building projects—the term proyecto de nacio´n remains in common use in Latin America to this day—using appeals to a bright, shared future to construct robust new shared imaginaries uniting their populations across ethnic, racial, and class lines. This drive was reinforced by the dominant European political philosophies of the early nineteenth century, which emphasized the desirability of consolidating smaller nations into larger ones. The new Latin American republics also consciously promoted European immigration to “whiten” their populations and further anchor the new national identities. This highly planned and rapid process of nation-building in some ways echoes Tarrow’s Jacobins, who quickly built a new state. But the Europeans on the western side of the Atlantic had different tools at hand, inventing a vision of the future rather than invoking the glories of the past. The echo is stronger when comparing Latin America with the USA, another new nation founded on dreams of the future. But, Lopez-Alves says, the new Latin American states constructed a secular vision of material progress, whereas in the case of the USA moral progress was central to the national vision. Given this moral claim, and, we might add, the fact that most of the continent west of the original 13 American colonies was colonized lightly or not at all, the USA incorporated into its identity a conception of “manifest destiny” for regional dominance, and a vast process of territorial expansion largely absent in Latin America. Leaving aside revolutions and war-making, Smita Srinivas tackles the softer side of state-making, the construction of welfare states, a process Charles Tilly gave
Introduction
xvii
relatively little attention. Srinivas traces the differential development of social insurance schemes in early industrializing countries and late industrializers, with special attention to India. Like Lopez-Alves, she reveals again that European templates are not necessarily replicated in the rest of the world. Research on early industrializers, especially in Europe, has led to a notion of a standard trajectory from localized mutual insurance systems based in affinities such as family, church, and community, to national-level, unified, government-run systems via processes of incorporation and displacement. Even in the early-industrializing category, Srinivas deconstructs this hypothetical trajectory in two ways. First, she distinguishes between insurance institutions based in place (residential location), work (labor force status), and work-place (employer provision of benefits). The US system, leaning heavily on employer-provided health and retirement benefits, looks quite different—and responds quite differently to a changing economic environment— than European systems with redistributive, government-guaranteed social insurance. Second, she points out that even among nations that ended up with similar systems, the historical trajectories varied widely: for instance, Britain accommodated residential mobility far earlier than nearby Holland. In the interim between community-based and national systems, a welter of “corporations” took up the slack, including “fraternities, mutual insurance guilds, universities, communes, military orders, and city-states.” Adding late industrializers to the mix yields even wider variation in the lines between local and national coverage, Srinivas demonstrates. Japanese universal health insurance, while in many ways resembling European systems, combines workplace-based coverage with national community-based health insurance rooted in community-level jyorei health programs. More typical of late industrializers, Srinivas argues, is the Indian case. Outside of islands of coverage the Indian state offloads the insurance function onto local institutions rather than incorporating or linking up with these institutions: “evolution remains stunted and local, never merging into any grand ocean of national solidarity and industrial welfare.” For much of the Indian population, social insurance depends on localized organizations akin to medieval Europe’s corporations rather than on national stateconstructed rules. Of course, the recent shift to neoliberal economic governance regimes means that even among many early industrializers, safety net responsibility has increasingly been outsourced from the national state to regional and local authorities, affinity groups, and individuals themselves. Antonina Gentile examines the reversal of state trajectories represented by this neoliberal turn. Gentile starts from the contrast between the “two Tillys” cited above and a third Tilly, he of “Globalization Threatens Labor Rights” (Tilly 1995). This added Tilly depicts a state that, unlike the stern states of “polity model Tilly” and “statist Tilly,” protects workers from the ravages of an unfettered market; he argued that since globalization shifted markets’ increasingly out of states’ control, it would undermine hard-won working class gains. Not so fast, says Gentile. She contends that changes in state policy itself, not state-bypassing global markets, account for labor’s weakened state in many
xviii
Introduction
countries. Understanding these shifts requires examining a unit of analysis distinct from the state itself, namely parties contending for political power. Furthermore, she holds, today’s neoliberalization continues a process promoted by a hegemonic USA since the end of World War II, though interrupted in significant ways by the Cold War. She reviews histories of late twentieth century Britain and Australia, and mid-twentieth century Italy and Germany, to make her case. Gentile’s account directs our attention away from broad economic changes and toward historically and politically determined, and therefore highly contingent, shifts at the level of the individual state and of international alliances. This is a case of remaking the state, not through revolutionary change as in Tarrow’s essay, but through domestic and international contention reverberating in existing state structures. Gentile notes that her two main Tillys hang their analyses of the state on a Weberian notion of state monopoly of organized means of violence. Javier Auyero, Carmenza Gallo, Diane Davis, and Jeff Goodwin, however, highlight important current exceptions to this monopoly, raising the specter of displacing the state to a greater or lesser extent. Auyero, in a shorter Spotlight piece, discusses “violent specialists” (Tilly 2003), professionals at fomenting and carrying out targeted violence for political purposes. His particular focus is extrastatal violence carried out on behalf of powerful groups—parties, elites—often with the collusion of state agents. Such violence is often wrought in the name of “order,” but blurs the boundaries of the state, not incidentally undermining democracy and the rule of law. Carmenza Gallo, illustrating the differential implementation of varied sets of rights with the case of Colombia, also examines the use of extrastatal violence even in situations where democratic rights per se are well entrenched. She argues that in fact, rights to security in person and property are far more difficult to implement than basic democratic rights. Davis examines the growing role of private armed forces, in particular those mobilized by criminal networks (gangs, drug cartels). As criminal enterprises, such as smuggling of drugs, humans, and other contraband, go global, these networks have done so as well, as Davis illustrates with examples from Mexico, Brazil, and El Salvador. Rather than doing the state’s dirty work as in Auyero’s examples, such criminal networks build significant coercive power that unmakes the state in important ways, for example offering Mexican law enforcement officials the choice of plata o plomo (“silver or lead,” i.e., a bribe or a bullet). We discuss Auyero, Gallo, and Davis further elsewhere in this introduction. Goodwin, another Spotlight author, considers violence that seeks directly to unmake the state via attacks on civilians: oppositional terrorism. Oppositional terrorism is in some ways the mirror image of Auyero’s subject matter: rather than using extrastatal violence against civilians to extend the reach of state power, terrorists use such violence to challenge state power. They consciously undermine the “protection racket” at the heart of Tilly’s account of state-building, seeking to demonstrate the state’s inability to protect its civilians. Goodwin’s concern is less with the process of terrorism than its rationale: why violently attack civilians? He concludes that oppositional forces adopt terrorism most commonly when broad groups of civilians are seen as complicitous in state attacks on an oppressed and excluded group: “Extensive state terrorism. . . begets extensive oppositional
Introduction
xix
terrorism when the state has popular support, usually because the dominant ethnic group has significant democratic rights and political influence.” In this tour of state-making, unmaking, and remaking, we have cycled from the storming of the Bastille to the Battle of Algiers. Thanks to the contributors, we have encountered two, three, many Charles Tillys contemplating the state from varied vantage points. We are reminded that states are at times much like a Mafia don, at other times powerful contenders with popular and sectional interests, at still other times protectors of labor rights and vulnerable populations. Perhaps most importantly, we are reminded that how states are made—whether by slow accretion, imperial rise or disintegration, or revolution—and remade, places enduring imprints on their form and function. Zooming in to the relation between cities and states affirms all of these insights on a somewhat different terrain.
City-state relations Charles Tilly’s essay in this collection poses the question of “how our incredibly connected world emerged from the once-fragmented relations between cities, states, and trust networks.” Tilly was interested in more than the degree of world integration, he was also interested in the character of that integration. In the concluding sections of his paper he asks about power relations between cities and states and about the integration of cities into states. The essays in this collection respond to this challenge in two related ways. First, they address the importance of scale in the relationship between states ruling larger territories and cities occupying smaller subsets of those territories. Second, they examine the political articulation between cities and states, on the whole making a stronger case for wide variation in that articulation than for a modal or tendential pattern. In Charles Tilly’s formulation, the rise of the nation-state is a triumph of scale. Tilly’s Figure 1 summarizes the direction of evolution of city-state relations with a large arrow pointing toward integration of cities and states, and toward state domination of that integrated complex. Despite the continued existence of some city-states, and of cities that evade the writ of their national states, Tilly argues, over the long sweep of history power has shifted to nation-states. Wim Blockmans adds historical detail to Tilly’s schematic proposition, showing the importance of increasing urban scale in precipitating a greater state role. Blockmans documents that in the early centuries of the last millennium, to a large extent merchant trust networks organized life in European cities. But as cities grew, they outstripped the ability of trust networks to govern them, and increasingly urban actors established and expanded institutional state structures. (We discuss Blockmans’s analysis further in the section on Trust Networks.) We can see a Tillyan arrow pointing from city-state segregation to integration. In this process, territorial rulers often intervened and helped build local states accountable to national ones—generating a second Tillyan arrow from city dominance to state dominance.
xx
Introduction
But before we accept this account of scaling-up of power, we must take account of an elaboration and a riposte that also crop up in this set of articles. The elaboration is empire. As noted above, Miguel Centeno and Elaine Enriquez, Marcel van der Linden, Ariel Salzmann, and Hwaji Shin remind us that over much of the populated territory of the world, over most of human history, empires rather than nation-states represented the dominant form and scale of territorial power. A unidirectional arrow from autonomous cities to centralized states may offer a good approximation of the earliest centuries of human history, as cities gave way to empires, and also of the last thousand years of European history. But in between, elsewhere, and even within recent European history many empires have crumbled—at times displaced by competing empires in a scale-preserving process, but at other times scaling down into localized states or even cities. Today, the empires that survive are the ones that have successfully incorporated hinterlands into a unified nation-state, such as Brazil, China, India, Russia, and the USA (though ongoing struggles by Chechens, Kashmiris, Puerto Ricans, Tibetans, and Yanomami remind us that such integration is not always definitive). In place of a single scaling-up arrow, it would be plausible to argue that the global trend has been scaling up to empire followed by scaling down to the nation-state. At a minimum, the “many a wiggle” Tilly acknowledges in the process of centralization and integration merit closer examination. Beyond the elaboration on empire, there is an even more incendiary riposte. Edward Soja ignites the blaze by throwing three bombs. Soja’s bunker-buster, as we have observed, is a thorough-going reinterpretation of world history. “There may indeed be a trend toward increasing state vs. urban power,” he allows, but this misses the main point: “cities and the urbanization process have provided perhaps the most important generative force behind every major breakthrough in human geohistory” (geohistory, recall, is Soja’s term for a reconceptualization of human experience that restores space to a rightful equal status with time). States may have the power, but cities have the spark that has repeatedly generated social, technological, and cultural advances. According to Soja, a one-sided focus on change over time at the expense of variation across space has blinded not only Tilly but most social scientists and historians to this regularity. Soja’s other two projectiles are more modest in scope. His second blast, also previewed above, posits that cities preceded centralized authority of any kind. His evidence is the ruins of Jericho in modern-day Jordan, C¸atalho¨yu¨k in Turkey, and other ancient locales in the region, dense and differentiated settlements with no archeological evidence of hierarchy or authority that predate by thousands of years cities showing the residues of state power. As Soja notes, Tilly nods toward these settlements but concludes that they are not cities precisely because his definition, following much historical convention, includes “some central authority.” So Soja’s conclusion directly contradicts Tilly. Ironically, however, at the same time it reinforces Tilly’s arrow. If urbanization preceded the creation of even a local state by thousands of years, that implies a Tillyan shift toward integration of cities and states over time. But Soja’s third missile flips Tilly’s arrow by introducing the concepts of rescaling and regionalization. In the last three decades, Soja argues, globalization
Introduction
xxi
and the flexibility of economic processes have shaken up established hierarchies of scale, diminishing the significance of the national state and increasing the power and prominence of both multinational regional entities (such as trade blocs) and subnational metropolitan regions. Although Soja stops short of arguing that cities are gaining power at the expense of states, he does insist that metropolises are becoming more important and that conventional conceptions of the geographic and power structures of nations are becoming obsolete. Diane Davis’s contribution illustrates the process of rescaling. As we alluded to above, she describes how, in countries like Mexico and Brazil, non-state actors, most notably organized crime groups involved in the drug trade, bypass the state by forging direct economic connections between their city-based organizations and the global economy and by creating their own groups of armed enforcers. The result is “subnational and transnational communities of allegiance,” newly flourishing illicit trust networks like the Salvadoran-originating Mara Salvatrucha and the Mexicanoriginating La Familia Michoacana that use global-scale economic muscle to challenge the state on its home turf of monopoly of repressive power. Thus, this collection’s discussion of scale in city-state relations shapes up to be something of a brawling debate. Tilly and Blockmans tell a familiar story of the scaling up of the locus of authority. But empire-gazers van der Linden, Salzmann, and Shin suggest that the scale of power has followed a more zigzag path. Urbanists Davis and Soja point to contemporary rescaling processes that shift key activities and networks both above and below the national level. And Soja goes farther to preach outright subversion of conventional state-centered historicism. Turning to the political articulation between cities and states, the contributions offer up some debate as well, but rather more exploration of the dimensions of variation in that articulation. Few giant arrows here: rather, primarily a set of historically grounded maps of many possible relations between city and national state. Peter Marcuse does erect a large arrow. It points from the national and international conflict between dominant and subordinate classes, to the reproduction of that conflictive interface on the urban scale. But Marcuse points out that this central conflict only goes part of the way to explaining urban form and processes. Along with a logic of domination, urban space is governed by a functional logic based on which land uses it is efficient to co-locate and to separate. Functional spatial logic dictates that housing should be located near shopping facilities, and far from slaughterhouses and chemical plants. A cultural logic also shapes urban form: ethnic enclaves and gay zones may result in part from exclusion, but in large part from self-selection. Nonetheless, the central axes of urban contention are shaped by broader economic and social divisions, particularly those of class. Susan Fainstein, in a brief Spotlight contribution, brings a different lens to bear on the struggles between dominant and oppositional forces that power Marcuse’s story, using the term urban social movements to categorize a range of oppositional struggles centered in cities. While Marcuse focuses single-mindedly on opposition from the left, Fainstein notes that right-wing anti-tax and anti-immigrant movements have been among the most successful urban mobilizations in the USA. However, she agrees with Marcuse on the democratic and progressive potentials
xxii
Introduction
in this form of movement, particularly its ability to cross community-labor divides that have persistently stymied working class politics in the USA (Katznelson 1981). She distances herself from more sweeping claims about the importance of urban social movements, such as those of Manuel Castells (1983), describing them as one important social actor among many, and judging that in the global north their power peaked in the 1960s and 1970s. She concludes that their effectiveness has depended crucially on their ability to influence or directly control significant parts of the local state or party system. Implied here is a significant degree of relative autonomy of the local state from the national one. Patrick Heller and Peter Evans pick up on the theme of relative autonomy to parse the links between city, national state, and social movements in Brazil, India, and South Africa. Implicitly challenging Marcuse’s arrow, they point out that despite similar progressive, populist regimes, South Africa and Brazil manifest utterly different state-city relations: in the former case top-down, in the latter case far more decentralized and bottom-up. Indeed, their second case gainsays Tilly’s arrow toward greater national state dominance as well, since Brazil’s urban empowerment is new, with roots in a recent social movement upsurge and a new constitution. More broadly, Heller and Evans problematize the relationship between national and local democracy, and thus between national-level democracy and local lived relations of inequality, based on a comparison of cities in the three countries. They conclude that in India and South Africa, national-level democratic impulses have been channeled into top-down, technocratic reforms that constrain local autonomy, ultimately compelling redistribution-minded national governments to form alliances with entrenched local political machines, freezing local inequalities in place. They approvingly cite Arjun Appadurai’s (2002) phrase “citizens without cities” to capture this juxtaposition of national democracy with local exclusion. In Brazil, in contrast, decentralization and institutionalization of participatory processes have forged a virtuous circle between national democracy and local democracy fueled by social movements, opening the way to successful assaults on categorical inequality. Heller and Evans’s exercise bridges the theme of city-state relations and our final theme of linkages between democracy and inequality, and indeed the duo’s ideas will make another appearance in our discussion of that theme. Smita Srinivas’s comparative history of the social safety net also spotlights the interplay between localities and the national state. In her telling, among many late industrializers the state has failed to build a national welfare system, leaving local communities (along with religious groups and families) responsible. In effect, she argues, countries like India have not (yet?) traveled up Tilly’s giant arrow to national centralization when it comes to social welfare. Teleporting from Srinivas’s modern Bangalore to a collection of early twentieth century US cities, we observe through Elisabeth Clemens’s eyes local urban elites grappling with yet another local-national dilemma: how could they retain control over organized charity (another “corporate” system for assisting those in need) in the face of federal government attempts to privilege national-level organizations? Whereas Srinivas primarily fingers a low-capacity national state for continued reliance on local welfare systems, Clemens points out that even within modern
Introduction
xxiii
capitalism, turf-conscious local influentials may also contest nationalization. This clash puts Theodore Roosevelt’s designation of the national Red Cross as the organization responsible for relief efforts following the 1906 San Francisco fire and earthquake in a different perspective. As Clemens shows, far from welcoming this endorsement of private charitable initiative, Bay Area worthies scrambled to reverse the decision. Clemens’s story sheds light on two of our Big Arrows. It conforms with Charles Tilly’s schema with regard to centralization, since we know the Rotary Club and the Community Chest (now the United Way) have in fact ceded ground to the Red Cross, nationally regulated systems of unemployment insurance and welfare, and FEMA. But it challenges Peter Marcuse’s mapping of national interests onto local ones, reflecting in inverted fashion Heller and Evans’s rejoinder. Heller and Evans show that when champions of the subaltern hold national government, their attempts to implement a redistributive program may, willy-nilly, contribute to disempowerment and marginalization of popular classes at the city level. Clemens adds that local ruling classes may resent and resist the centralizing impulses of their national-level counterpart. On the relationship between cities and states, then, our authors have much to add to Charles Tilly’s two-by-two diagram showing increased city-state integration and state dominance over cities. Some amplify his story by fleshing out historical detail. Others nuance it by showing continuing variation in the degree of integration and dominance. Still others challenge Tilly’s summary by extending history backward, forward, or sideways to different regions. Though nearly half the contributions in this volume could comfortably fit under the heading of City-State Relations, our nod to the cross-cutting nature of the central themes is to include four in the part of the book with that heading. We start with Fainstein’s evocation of contemporary urban social movements, and then move progressively backward in time to Clemens’s early twentieth century US cities and Blockmans’s European cities circa the turn of the first millennium, closing with Soja’s essay that takes us back to the (urban) dawn of geohistory.
Trust networks and commitment Common to the world of empires and consolidated states and binding together many different kinds of political and social structure are the links that Tilly defined as trust networks. They can undertake responsibilities sometimes performed by states; they may support and reinforce state structures; and they are often a tempting target for predatory states seeking resources. Reinforcing and elaborating Tilly’s idea of the trust network is his emphasis on commitment. According to Tilly trust networks are “commitment-maintaining” connections expressed in “common languages, secret lore, distinctive communication lines.” They take the form of “shared religion or ethnicity, trading ties, work-generated solidarities, communities of taste.” Commitment is reproduced by “birth within households or by person-by-person enlistment.”
xxiv
Introduction
Tilly’s definition of trust networks and commitment was capacious, including many different types of social and cultural formations. Contributors to this collection provide striking ways of thinking about various kinds of trust networks and using them in empirical research. Their essays address several important questions emerging from Tilly’s work. First, how are trust networks formed? Tilly devoted a good deal of attention to the operation and dissolution of trust networks but relatively little space to the manner of their creation. From a medieval and early modern perspective, as Wim Blockmans shows us trust networks that involve multistranded relations between individuals and groups. They may start with simple relations, single strands, maybe only casual encounters, but as the number and variety of ties increase they bring individuals more intimately together. Blockmans’s medieval European trust networks were the product of face-to-face encounters at markets and intermarriage among mercantile families, which compounded into new networks within and between cities. As cities grew, merchants took responsibility for providing security and guaranteeing financial transactions, activities earlier undertaken by states. Between 1000CE and 1600CE merchants in the great commercial belt from the southern Low Countries to northern Italy, constructed networks: to facilitate travel, to administer growing cities, to organize confraternities and guilds, to form jointstock corporations for long-distance commercial transaction, to participate in urban political factions, and to provide a literate and secular officialdom to serve expanding states. Over time they created a mercantile identity not only within the community but within an entire trading network. Each of these projects intertwined with the others and strengthened commercial identities. As we have noted above, where Blockmans focuses on trust networks as based on personal contact, Elisabeth Clemens shows us middle-class reformers working to construct an institutionalized trust network that would capture civic consciousness for the emerging US urban elites. Such an institution fused personal ties and institutional structure. In the early twentieth century, laissez-faire advocates decried what they saw as the corruption of charitable giving. They mocked what they believed to be the crowds of skillful shirkers who feigned illness or incapacity. One laissez-faire solution was to recruit solid middle-class volunteers, often women, who were charged with the task of sorting out charities and deciding which ones were worthy of sponsorship and which were not. Decision-makers, largely members of the elites, were recruited via networks based on informal contacts and reputation. Over time, this organized volunteerism created a network of institutions. Such a system was exemplified in the Community Chests of the 1920s, which played an important role in many communities. Essentially the Community Chest, predecessor of the modern United Way, was an organization of organizations. Hwaji Shin shows us the origins and impact of another trust network, that of Japanese imperial officers posted in the colonies, where they formed ties of mutual aid among the few Japanese. What renders this network so significant is that its members became responsible for the formulation of a Japanese citizenship policy crucial to national identity formation. As we have seen, in the wake of imperial
Introduction
xxv
collapse a small part of the Japanese bureaucracy, the Immigration Bureau, imposed a narrow definition of Japanese identity on a defeated population, and later reconstituted itself to impose this definition even in the very different climate of the 1980s and 1990s. Like the trust network described by Clemens this one was based on longstanding ties. While there may not be any honor among thieves, there is trust. Diane Davis presents yet another case of trust network construction and expansion, in which localized gangs follow the paths of drug networks and other criminal activity to escape local confines and become a transnational organization. Contemporary Latin American gangs initially formed in urban environments that offered comfortable rewards for criminals and little danger of repression from semi-powerless, and often corrupt, local authorities. The evolution of gang life follows the migration networks of these young men, for example, jumping from El Salvador and Guatemala to Mexico City and Los Angeles and recruiting in each location. Returnees deported or fleeing police in foreign countries help to maintain the two-way connections across this transnational network. Borders no longer loom large in group calculation nor in the construction of group identity. In a second question about trust networks, many of our contributors follow Tilly in asking about the conditions under which trust networks are segregated and entirely distinct from states and under what conditions are they integrated into states. Blockmans presents a classic case of the dissolution of segregated trust networks by predatory rulers. Blockmans’s trust networks ended as the power of the European state increased and, he argues, as the scale of human communication and interaction reached its limits. As cities grew, financial trust networks split and factionalized. Mercantile communities outgrew their face-to face informality and, lacking communicative technologies to keep in sustained contact with their fellows, were forced to institutionalize. But institutionalization further encouraged factionalism and made trust networks sitting ducks that could easily be incorporated by growing states that craved their resources, both in money and in personnel. Desperate for public servants who were literate, informed, and secular, rulers recruited state officials from the urban commercial classes, freeing states from dependence on the church. Though integration of trust networks into the state may expand state capacity, it may actually destabilize the state. The fractiousness of the urban elites in the medieval and early modern city is mentioned by Blockmans as one of the reasons for the collapse of mercantile polities. Charles Tilly argued that capital-intensive states were characteristically unstable. The reason for this instability, Sidney Tarrow has posited, is precisely that mercantile interests were integrated into states in a way that favored the perpetuation of special interests and discouraged any concern for the commonweal. Following the chain of city states and autonomous regions that ran down the center of Western Europe from Amsterdam to Florence, the phenomenon of bitter urban rivalry and suicidal factionalism was most prominent in the south. Taking the case of Florence, Tarrow (2004) shows that wars were undertaken as interest-earning investments; government decisions were often made by short-lived pacts of private interests; and underlying all decision-making was a fear of popular revolt. In such a polity it was all too easy to make foreign
xxvi
Introduction
policy decisions by looking at the account book. Penny-wise and pound-foolish merchants refused to invest in personally unprofitable wars even if they redounded to the long-term good of the commune. Complementing Blockmans’s account of the capture of commercial trust networks by the state, Tarrow reinterprets the event as the capture of the state by commercial trust networks. Clemens provides a dramatic example of the integration of trust networks into government, that of Theodore Roosevelt’s tapping a nearly moribund Red Cross to mobilize national resources to help an earthquake-ravaged San Francisco. Rather than create a federal authority to perform this task, the US president encouraged the growth of an independent, private volunteer organization. Looking over the longer historical sweep, what is remarkable is that unlike European monarchs in the early modern period, Roosevelt did not view trust networks as a threat to state power nor did he seek to seize their resources. Instead he supported the growth of independent volunteerism as a way of mobilizing reformers for national purposes. Although Clemens does not discuss the situation in her brief paper, it is worth recalling that the president’s enthusiasm for voluntary organization was partial. He did not try to extend rights to radical groups such as the Industrial Workers of the World nor endorse the civil rights agenda of the Niagara Movement. He did try to promote a middle-class, private volunteer organization, probably for the same reasons that urban elites supported the Community Chest: because it brought middle-class men and women into government to pursue universally approved tasks. The Latin American polities described by Diane Davis and Carmenza Gallo at first glance seem to show a contrary pattern of separation and in some cases outright hostility between trust networks and the state. In Davis’s Mexico and Gallo’s Colombia, despite regular and competitive elections and other trappings of democracy, groups of armed men with no state sanction—gangs, paramilitary squads, private security forces, vigilantes—circulate more or less freely, defending the interests of a variety of trust networks. The model looks more like warlordism than what we think of as modern governance. But upon closer examination, manifold links emerge between the state and the freelancers. The armed groups’ free circulation is itself premised on buying off or otherwise enlisting the support of police, military, and government officials. Criminal enterprises may enjoy support from elites or even broader publics if they provide economic benefits and physical security. So while official government discourse deplores extrastatal violence, invariably shadowy ties connect the state with the perpetrators of that violence. Javier Auyero’s Spotlight essay in this collection further considers cases like those analyzed by Davis and Gallo. He stresses the continuum between statesanctioned violence and private violence. Violent specialists can be found within armies and police forces as well as among criminal gangs and vigilante groups. But often, as in the cases instanced by Davis, a gray area exists, underpinned by tacit or explicit understandings between gangs and police, vigilantes and soldiers. Auyero suggests the importance of such groups and also the difficulty of studying them when information is more plentiful and easier to obtain about private groups than about relationships between public and private violence specialists.
Introduction
xxvii
Businessmen, middle-class volunteers, and gangsters may belong to trust networks but so do members of mutual aid societies. Smita Srinivas’s discussion of welfare states underlines one of the enduring problems of late industrializing states. By absorbing welfare trust networks, the states could greatly increase the commitment and identity of the citizens, as well as pooling risks more broadly. Yet the cost of such integration is so substantial that only partial integration is possible. As a result, the injured, sick, aged and incapacitated remain dependent on particularistic institutions, reinforcing their loyalty to these non-state groups. She points out that in European history national welfare states developed out of and incorporated local institutions. The modern Indian state has established a welfare system based on compulsory workplace insurance, but given the relatively small formal sector this scheme’s reach is quite limited. Meanwhile, the state has proven unable or unwilling to integrate myriad local relief mechanisms based on community, caste, language, religion and jati (occupational/caste/clan categories peculiar to Indian society). A variant of the question about state-trust network integration inquires: under what circumstances do trust networks engage in collective political action? For most of their long history most trust networks have tried to remain outside politics for fear that political engagement would attract the attention of predatory rulers. Tilly noted that democratic governance provides a climate in which they could participate in political action. Of course, as Gallo points out, even in regimes with competitive parties and regular elections, trust networks are not likely to enter politics in force when there is every chance that critics of the elite will be assassinated. A number of papers in the volume take on the question of political action by trust networks by examining the special case of social movements, which themselves typically incorporate trust networks. A less violent version of democracy than that sketched by Gallo offers a more encouraging environment for trust network mobilization, but that does not ensure that government will incorporate the networks. Patrick Heller and Peter Evans, analyzing what is often called the political opportunity structure (though they do not use the term), depict democratic governments that exclude trust networks from meaningful participation. Their contribution, which we have discussed above, compares Brazil, India, and South Africa, three stable democratic politics. In all three cases, vibrant local civic and social movement organizations are active in politics. But top-down governance in India and South Africa locks out such organizations. The contrary case is Brazil, where integration of local grassroots networks is widespread due to the construction of decentralizing institutions and political traditions. In addition to Heller and Evans, Fainstein, Marcuse, and Tarrow all analyze urban social movements, though their concerns center on outcomes—democratization, reform, defense or rights, and in Tarrow’s case revolution and state reconstruction—rather than the functioning of the networks themselves. Marco Giugni takes another tack by focusing broadly on the concept of political opportunity structure, asking whether that concept still packs an analytical punch and how it could be strengthened. Political opportunity structures (POS) were an important element in the political process orientation to which Tilly subscribed in the 1990s. Definitions of POS abounded but they generally referred to features of
xxviii
Introduction
regimes and institutions that facilitate or hinder a political actor’s collective action. Tarrow and Tilly identified six dimensions of opportunity: “(1) the multiplicity of independent center of powers within the region, (2) its openness to new actors, (3) the instability of current political alignments, (4) the availability of influential allies or supporters for challengers, (5) the extent to which the regime represses or facilitates political claim making and (6) decisive changes in any and all of these regards” (Tarrow and Tilly 2007, p. 189). Despite the efforts of scholars such as Tarrow and Tilly to define the term more precisely, sometimes it almost seemed that the whole universe of political contention was divided in two. On the one hand there was the social movement seeking to win concessions by mobilizing masses and searching to frame demands to make them acceptable to the larger society. On the other hand, there was the POS, which included all the rest of the political world. Some scholars considered POS as structures shaping social movement behavior while others saw them as dynamic factors that altered political prospects. No wonder many complained that the concept was too broad and unwieldy. Giugni argues for a reshaping of the term: (1) to take account of discursive opportunities, (2) to look at opportunities as specific to fields (3) to examine how activists perceive alternatives and (4) to approach the study of social movements more dynamically through attention to mechanisms and processes. His essay is filled with suggestive ideas. Perceived opportunities are a generally neglected area of investigation, despite Kim Voss’s important article on labor movement framing. Voss sought to explore why some labor movement defeats were viewed by labor militants as catastrophic and final while others were portrayed as temporary setbacks in a great and ongoing struggle. In 1885–1886 a devastating defeat led to the destruction of the American Knights of Labor while defeats on a similar scale of the British New Unionists proved only temporary losses in the construction of a mass unionism in Britain. Part of the reason for these outcomes was the Knights’ own perception of massive defeat while the New Unionists spoke of a moral triumph and proclaimed their faith in the eventual triumph of their class (Voss 1998). The issue of perception also suffuses Ann Mische’s discussion, in this volume, of recent decades of youth activism in Brazil in ways that focus on trust and distrust. Such activism flourished in a highly factionalized political environment, with intense trust within factions and sharp distrust and competition between them. Mische discovers that rather than finding the splintering distrust demoralizing, activists reported that it added to their exhilaration and commitment. Giugni’s call for dynamic POS analysis is perhaps his most challenging point. On this score, students of historical state formation may feel a bit frustrated by Giugni’s omission of one important dimension of dynamics, the role of POS in state formation or state dissolution, which could have built interesting links with some of the papers in our State-Making part. Situations of fragmented sovereignty and composite states are the everyday material of many historians and trust networks can play a significant role in filling political lacunae. But certainly other papers in the volume implicitly rise to Giugni’s challenge. One example is Wayne Te Brake’s discussion of the unexpected emergence of religious tolerance in daily
Introduction
xxix
life in post-reformation Europe. Te Brake, whose work we discuss in more detail below, presents a dynamic view of political contention in which an emphasis on conditions that defines POS is joined with an emphasis on dynamic factors that constitute processes and mechanisms. His analysis takes into account the wide variation in state forms in early Modern Europe. Te Brake’s essay presents a striking example of the use of mechanisms to explain the emergence of religious coexistence. In his study, religious diversity was sheltered and ultimately preserved by a variety of mechanisms rooted in trust networks: secrecy, dissimulation, casuistry, private education, indifference, connivance, and toleration. Here trust networks play a new role in the explanation of contentious action. Giugni also argues that the changing relations of states with transnational actors, increased integration of states and private interests, and a globalizing economy require the reformulation of the POS idea. His mention of Tarrow and della Porta’s emphasis on the need to study “multilevel opportunity structures that challenge traditional, state-centered conceptions of political opportunities” is intriguing (Tarrow and della Porta 2005). Of course the need for such an approach is reinforced by Davis’s study of Latin American violent entrepreneurs. Her essay shows criminal gangs ignoring states and operating across borders from Central America to the USA as state power, at least in some settings, dissolves in favor of trust networks extending across borders. POS might seem to dissolve along with states but we would argue, following Giugni, that this represents instead an opportunity to rethink the nature of the linkages binding political trust networks within state systems. A third broad question shifts the focus from the trust networks’ relationship with politics and the state, to their relationship with culture and society. How can we relate trust networks with the broad feelings that emerge from citizenship or from other forms of broad-scale allegiance? Again, Wayne Te Brake, in addition to Ariel Salzmann whose work was also discussed above, offers useful contributions in this vein. Te Brake presents what initially seems like a familiar discussion of persecuted religious groups as trust networks, but his story takes an unusual turn. Te Brake argues that in Reformation and Post-Reformation Europe religious toleration moved upward from local trust networks, not downward from rulers as is often claimed. His portrait has important differences and similarities from the emergence of tolerance in the medieval world depicted by Salzmann. Salzmann shows us how tolerance came to predominate in the Mediterranean Islamic world, partly as a result of a publicly established, social covenant, enshrined in state institutions, early on in the Muslim conquest, which regulated inter-religious attitudes. In contrast, Te Brake goes beneath the level of European state politics where religious beliefs were sometimes imposed on all subjects to a local world where religious diversity might flourish. The mechanisms that preserved diversity were numerous. Sometimes sustainable agreements were made among local communities before the ultimate religious settlement adopted by rulers was in place. Negotiation came more easily where treaties regulating local practice allowed some leeway for maneuver. Occasionally religious toleration emerged in an easygoing, everyday world where people did not inquire too deeply into their neighbor’s religious practices. In other places diversity was preserved where priests were protected from murderous attack
xxx
Introduction
by solidary peasant communities. Looking at people and at states, Te Brake reveals how the concept of religious toleration evolved from violent religious encounters through pragmatic local negotiations by local communities. Te Brake develops his argument beautifully by examining the physical sites of diversity and looking at how it was sustained. He looks at the Cathedral Church of St. Peter in Bautzen, Germany, shared by Catholics and Protestants for centuries; the Mennonite chapel in Lutheran Friesland that continues as a legacy of the PostReformation compromise; as well as Irish Mass rocks that served as foci of community spirituality and secret sites of religious practice when it was publicly suppressed. Te Brake argues that, in some but not all situations, interstate agreements ultimately followed the trends in diversity preserved by local level agreements worked out by mediation and negotiation or simply carried out clandestinely. One of the difficulties with Tilly’s idea of the trust network is the great variation among such networks. On the one hand trust networks include relatively small mercantile networks based on personal contact, and on the other they include Indian castes and religious groups embracing hundreds of millions. They include “outsider” networks far from the centers of power, which particularly attracted Tilly’s, Fainstein’s, Salzmann’s, and Te Brake’s attention, but as Blockmans, Clemens, and Shin describe, they also include “insider” networks of well-positioned elites. The wide-ranging essays making up this collection span a large slice of this variation. By examining network origins and the degree and nature of networkstate and network-society linkages across this diverse spectrum, they teach us about variation, but also help make the case for common elements in trust networks. Out of this wide-ranging set of discussions, we have selected Te Brake, Davis, Auyero, and Giugni to make up the part on trust networks.
Democracy and inequality Not surprisingly, this set of essays about cities and states has a great deal to say about inequality and democracy, and the relationship between the two. This is to be expected because Charles Tilly wrote extensively about those subjects (notably in Tilly 1998, 2007). Though Tilly’s introduction to Cities and states in world history does not directly analyze democracy or inequality, its preoccupations with the locus and forms of power, and the importance of trust networks, echo themes in his writing on these topics. Equally importantly, inequality and democracy command attention in explorations of cities and states simply because they are issues of great current concern. In broad terms, the authors in this collection make four main points about democracy and inequality. First, they point out that ex post redistribution is only a small part of how states act on inequality, and that in fact all rights are, to a greater or lesser extent, redistributive. Carmenza Gallo reminds us that democratic political rights, property rights, and civil rights all facilitate or bar various kinds of redistribution. Indeed, the very concept of “ex post” redistribution misleads because it posits a particular
Introduction
xxxi
“state of nature” that in actuality includes many products of state action, such as a stable distribution of assets. Gallo goes beyond this observation to argue that it is more difficult to institute rights that are more directly redistributive (thus engendering opposition from vested interests) and that require a denser set of rules (and thus demand greater state capacity). Based on this framework, she hypothesizes that electoral democracy (limited redistributive implications, modest regulatory demands) should be easier to implant than civil rights (which require a denser net of state regulation for support) and especially property rights (highly distributive and high maintenance). She bolsters this argument with evidence from the recent history of Colombia, where electoral democracy thrives but property rights and civil rights to freedom of speech, assembly, and even freedom from violent attack have all weakened under assault from armed groups, often in concert with local elites. Ariel Salzmann and Hwaji Shin also join this conversation, affirming that citizenship itself is a crucial redistributive right. States typically set criteria for citizenship in ways that ratify preexisting categorical inequality, for example, discriminating based on ethnicity or national origin (Shin) or creed (Salzmann). This in turn conditions individuals’ access to livelihood, rights to hold property, and even their right to continued residence within a nation-state’s territory. Salzmann in particular traces a complex interplay between citizenship rights for minority religions and states’ (redistributive) confiscation of their resources. Whereas in Muslim central Eurasia rulers taxed minorities for broad redistribution in a relatively stable arrangement, in the Christian West higher levels of state-sponsored plunder of Jews and Muslims undermined these groups’ usefulness to national elites, with destabilizing consequences that often culminated in expulsion. A second point emerging from these essays is that though democracy constrains the domination of capital, concentrations of capital also constrain the operation of democracy. Though stated in this way the point hardly seems contentious, in fact it significantly complicates the relation between democracy and inequality, as contrasting strands in this set of articles attest. Let us trace this complicating trajectory. As a starting point, Patrick Heller and Peter Evans offer a first-order statement of the relation between democracy and inequality: increases in democracy reduce inequality. They ground this proposition in Charles Tilly’s (2004, p. 128) definition of democratization as movements toward “greater categorical regularity, breadth, equality, binding consultation, and protection,” pithily summarizing the relationship as follows: “Democratization is best understood as an expansion in the quality of citizenship, which is about the institutionalized quality of a subject’s relation to government and its authority, which in turn exists in inverse proportion to the degree to which a subject’s relations to government are mediated by categorical inequalities.” As we have stated, Heller and Evans primarily examine the relationship between national and local democracy. But even setting aside the national/local disjunction, there is an evident limitation with using this logic to understand the relationship between democracy and inequality: Tilly, Heller, and Evans incorporate reductions in the impact of inequality into the definition of democratization, which risks rendering the relationship tautological.
xxxii
Introduction
While this broad definition of democracy is satisfying in many ways, it does not tell us much about how a more narrowly defined democracy is likely to affect inequality. Elisabeth Clemens adds a level of complexity. Her account of the role of business in local US systems of charity demonstrates that democratization of urban politics drove businesses to get involved in charity. But businesses’ strategic approach to charity limited the redistributive impact of this shift. Businesses used their involvement in giving to win legitimacy and to control the flow of resources directed toward social problems, forestalling more extensive redistribution that might challenge their interests. In short, the linkage between democracy and inequality is mediated by the strategies of key actors—in this case elites, in other cases social movements. Diane Davis, Javier Auyero, and Carmenza Gallo point to darker possibilities, emphasizing that even in circumstances of formal democracy, those controlling capital can short-circuit attempts at equalization by funding coercion independent of the state. As we have noted, Gallo uses the Colombian case to demonstrate that rights to property and even life are harder to ensure than democracy. Though we tend to think of insecurity of property rights as particularly affecting the rich, Gallo notes that Colombia’s dissolution of rural property rights has fallen most heavily on the poor, with 1.5 million peasants displaced in the 1990s. Auyero offers a more general reflection on how organized violence nominally outside the state, but often overtly or covertly supported by it, can be used by elites to consolidate their power and weaken democracy. His description applies to dirty wars in Latin America, but also to communal violence in India and white race riots in the USA. Diane Davis depicts another pattern of extrastatal coercion, limning symmetrical processes at work in countries like Mexico: on the one hand, new accumulations of capital through illicit activities such as drug trafficking, kidnapping, and contraband sales give criminal entrepreneurs the wherewithal to organize paramilitary forces; on the other hand, the wealthy assemble their own private armies to insulate themselves from attack. In both cases, impunity mounts. Davis emphasizes that these corrosive processes are taking place in stable democracies—the degree of democracy is debatable in the case of Mexico, but Brazil meets even Heller and Evans’s exacting definition. Democracy does not necessarily offer sufficient tools to curb capital-driven coercion. In the cases Davis examines, such coercion in turn degrades democracy by marginalizing the state, implicating it, or feeding repression and surveillance. Broadening the frame beyond local and national states to encompass empires additionally complicates matters. Hwaji Shin stretches the democracy–inequality connection still further, turning Heller and Evans (and Charles Tilly) on their heads by exploring a case in which democracy and equality moved in opposite directions. In Japan’s shift from pre–World War II empire to postwar parliamentary democracy, Japan’s relation to other Asian nationalities morphed from imperialist, exploitative inclusion to democratic exclusion. Democracy set the framework for hardening of categorical inequalities. Miguel Centeno and Elaine Enriquez, also analyzing empires, observe that the USA forged an inclusive democracy out of empire via a combination of genocide and the spread of Eurasian epidemic diseases that essentially eliminated the original denizens of the country’s territory—echoing the
Introduction
xxxiii
construction of citizenship on the basis of mass expulsion of “others” in Salzmann’s account of European history. Centeno and Enriquez add that accentuation of inequality between metropole and periphery may underpin reductions in inequality in the parent state (see also Korzeniewicz and Moran 2009). After all, apartheid, one of the most notorious expressions of categorical inequality, resulted from Afrikaners’ opportunity-hoarding attempt to overcome their subordinate status within white South African society. Many of this collection’s authors also make a third observation about democracy and inequality: the relationship between the democratic state and inequality is two-edged. The dual nature of the state is not a new idea: Karl Polanyi’s (1967) “double movement” oscillating between liberalization and regulation and James O’Connor’s (1973) twin imperatives of legitimation and accumulation anticipate some of the arguments advanced here. But this group of social scientists and historians offer fresh and forceful formulations of the issue. Michael Katz makes the basic point most directly: asking whether the state is the problem or the solution as regards social equality, he replies that it is both. He couches his discussion in a wry contrast between earlier left critiques of US systems of education, welfare, and urban policy, and more recent left defenses of the same systems in the face of conservative onslaught. The state is both a defender of inequality when compared to more radical alternatives, and an equalizing force when compared to more neoliberal ones. Katz calls on scholars to more clearly state their criteria for “success” or “failure” of government, since different criteria call for distinct responses to failure. He points to the need for scholars on the left to move beyond critiques, which may be harnessed to a conservative anti-government discourse, to a “comprehensive and coherent counter-narrative.” Davis’s and Gallo’s analyses also speak to the two faces of the state. Any social scientist or historian of Latin America must recognize that the state can shore up inequality—the recent history of dictatorships closely tied to economic elites makes a prima facie case. But both articles show how inadequate state capacity and the breakdown of the state’s monopoly on organized force can also have dramatically disequalizing effects. But not all the issue’s authors line up behind a dual conception of the state. Peter Marcuse determinedly marches to a different drummer. His essay depicts a capitalist state that, despite concessions to social movements, remains committed to defending economic privilege and heading off redistribution. While endorsing struggles for rights and reforms and conceding that opportunities for revolution by means of force are rare to nonexistent, he expresses skepticism about the electoral and policy battles that absorb the attention of many of the other authors. A fourth and final point about democracy and inequality is that while trust networks are building blocks of democracy, distrust may also play a productive role. Here Spotlighter Ann Mische raises a lone voice, but a compelling one. Drawing on her research on contemporary activists in Brazil, she argues for the importance of competition between parties and factions—hence, distrust—in building a healthy democracy and moving forward struggles against inequality. Trust and distrust function constructively at different scales: trust within a political grouping, distrust among groupings that spurs debate and mobilization. Writ large, this simply sings the
xxxiv
Introduction
virtues of contention, a tune familiar to Tilly and other scholars in the field, but Mische describes how even factionalism among oppositional forces energized activists and sharpened discussion. Indeed, she laments the unifying advent of Workers Party (PT) hegemony on the left as shifting left partisan politics back toward habitual, stagnant clientelist routines.
Concluding remarks Charles Tilly will never write his book on “Cities and states in world history,” and that loss gives us one more reason to mourn his passing. But as this collection demonstrates, the study of cities, states, contention, and trust networks is in good hands. These articles build on and extend Tilly’s analyses geographically and temporally, particularly by addressing the global South. They scrutinize important phenomena to which he devoted little attention, informing us about empires and their aftermath, and about elite trust networks as well as outsider ones. They include challenges to Tillyan generalizations, pitting geohistory against historicism, posing rescaling against a hypothesized trend toward national state dominance, and revealing disjunctions between equalization and democratization pace Tilly’s argument about the linkage of the two processes. And they break entirely new ground, surfacing questions, puzzles, and hypotheses about structure and contingency, state-making, city-state relations, trust networks, and the interplay between democracy and inequality that, like Tilly’s own work, will occupy scholars for generations to come. Charles Tilly would doubtless have responded to this collection with a combination of applause, hard questioning, vociferous counter-argument, and the formulation of new research agendas informed by the essays’ insights. We hope the readers will respond similarly.
References Appadurai, A. (2002). Deep democracy: Urban governmentality and the horizon of politics. Public Culture, 14(1), 21–47. Barkey, K. (2008). Empire of difference: The Ottomans in comparative perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Castells, M. (1983). The city and the grassroots. London: Edward Arnold. Centeno, M. A. (2003). Blood and debt: war and the nation state in Latin America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Engels, F. (1970) [1880]. Socialism, Utopian and scientific. In Marx/Engels selected works (Vol. 3, pp. 95–151). New York: Progress Publishers. Fagan, B. (1999). Floods, famine, and emperors: El Nino and the fate of civilization. New York: Basic Books. Hanagan, M., & Tilly, C. (2010). Cities, states, trust, and rule [Special Issue in Memory of Charles Tilly, 1929–2008)]. Theory and Society, 39(3–4). Katznelson, I. (1981). City trenches. New York: Pantheon. Korzeniewicz, R. P., & Moran, T. P. (2009). Unveiling inequality: A world historical perspective. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Introduction
xxxv
McAdam, D, Tarrow, S., & Tilly, C. (2001). Dynamics of contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Connor, J. (1973). The fiscal crisis of the state. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Polanyi, K. (1967) [1944]. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon. Stave, B. M. (1998). A conversation with Charles Tilly: Urban history and urban sociology. Journal of Urban History, 24, 184–225. Tarrow, S. (2004). From comparative historical analysis to ‘local theory’: The Italian city-state to the modern state. Theory and Society, 33(2004): 443–471. Thompson, E. P. (1964). The making of the English working class. New York: Pantheon Books. Tilly, C. (1964). The Vende´e: A sociological analysis of the counterrevolution of 1793. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tilly, C. (1965). Migration to an American City. Newark, Delaware: Division of Urban Affairs and School of Agriculture, University of Delaware. Tilly, C. (1974). An urban world. Boston: Little, Brown. Tilly, C. (Ed). (1975). The Formation of national states in Western Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tilly, C. (1978). From mobilization to revolution. Reading: Addison-Wesley. Tilly, C. (1985). War making and state making as organized crime. In P. Evans, D. Rueschemeyer, & T. Skocpol (Eds.), Bringing the state back in (pp. 169–187). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. (1986). The contentious French. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Tilly, C. (1990). Coercion, capital, and European states, A.D. 990–1990. Oxford: Blackwell. Tilly, C. (1993). European revolutions, 1492–1992. Oxford: Blackwell. Tilly, C. (1995). Globalization threatens labor’s rights. International Labor and Working-Class History, 47, 1–23. Tilly, C. (1996). What good is urban history? Journal of Urban History, 22, 702–l719. Tilly, C. (1997). How empires end. In K. Barkey & M. von Hagen (Eds.), After empire: Multiethnic societies and nation-building: The Soviet Union, and the Russian, Habsburg and Ottoman Empires (pp 1–11). Boulder: Westview. Tilly, C. (1998). Durable inequality. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tilly, C. (2003). The politics of collective violence. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. (2004). Social Movements, 1768–2004. Boulder: Paradigm. Tilly, C. (2005). Trust and rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. (2007). Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C., & Blockmans, W. P. (Eds.) (1994). Cities and the rise of states in Europe, A.D. 1000 to 1800. Boulder: Westview Press. Voss, K. (1998). Claim-making and the interpretation of defeats: The interpretation of losses by American and British labor activists, 1886–1895. In M. Hanagan, L.P. Moch, & W. Te Brake (Eds.), Challenging authority: The historical study of contentious politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wallerstein, I. (1974). The modern world-system 1: Capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world-system in the sixteenth century (pp. 16–17). New York: Academic.
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Michael Hanagan and Chris Tilly
vii
Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
xli
1
Cities, states, and trust networks: chapter 1 of Cities and States in World History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Charles Tilly
Part I
Historicism and Historical Legacies
2
SPOTLIGHT: Historicism, theory, and method. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rod Aya and Lynn Eden
3
Is there a moral economy of state formation? Religious minorities and repertoires of regime integration in the Middle East and Western Europe, 600–1614 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ariel Salzmann
4
5
1
Unanticipated consequences of “humanitarian intervention”: The British campaign to abolish the slave trade, 1807–1900. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marcel van der Linden Colonial legacy of ethno-racial inequality in Japan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hwaji Shin
19
27
43
61
xxxvii
xxxviii
Part II 6
Contents
State-Making, Remaking, and Unmaking
The French Revolution, war, and state-building: making one Tilly out of three . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sidney Tarrow
79
7
Legacies of empire? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Miguel Angel Centeno and Elaine Enriquez
8
Nation-states and national states: Latin America in comparative perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 Fernando Lo´pez-Alves
9
Industrial welfare and the state: nation and city reconsidered . . . . . . . 129 Smita Srinivas
10
Party governments, US hegemony, & a tale of two Tillys’ Weberian state . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Antonina Gentile
11
SPOTLIGHT: Terrorism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Jeff Goodwin
Part III
95
City-State Relations
12
SPOTLIGHT: Urban social movements, citizen participation, and trust networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 Susan S. Fainstein
13
From city club to nation state: business networks in American political development. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 Elisabeth S. Clemens
14
Inclusiveness and exclusion: trust networks at the origins of European cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 Wim Blockmans
15
Cities and states in geohistory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 Edward W. Soja
Contents
Part IV
xxxix
Trust Networks and Commitment
16
The contentious politics of religious diversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Wayne Te Brake
17
Irregular armed forces, shifting patterns of commitment, and fragmented sovereignty in the developing world . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249 Diane E. Davis
18
SPOTLIGHT: A gray area . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 Javier Auyero
19
Political opportunity: still a useful concept? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271 Marco Giugni
Part V
Democracy and Inequality
20
Institutions and the adoption of rights: political and property rights in Colombia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287 Carmenza Gallo
21
Taking Tilly south: durable inequalities, democratic contestation, and citizenship in the Southern Metropolis . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305 Patrick Heller and Peter Evans
22
Was government the solution or the problem? The role of the state in the history of American social policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 Michael B. Katz
23
The forms of power and the forms of cities: building on Charles Tilly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339 Peter Marcuse
24
SPOTLIGHT: Distrust in democracy: complex civic networks and the case of Brazil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355 Ann Mische
Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367
Contributors
Javier Auyero Department of Sociology, University of Texas at Austin, 1 University State A1700, Austin, TX 78712-0118, USA
[email protected] Rod Aya Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, OZ Achterburgwal 185, 1012 DK Amsterdam, The Netherlands
[email protected] Wim Blockmans Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Wassenaar, Netherlands
[email protected] Wayne Te Brake School of Humanities, Purchase College, State University of New York, 2006 HUM Building, Purchase, NY 10577, USA
[email protected] Miguel Angel Centeno Sociology and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
[email protected] Elisabeth S. Clemens Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
[email protected] Diane E. Davis Department of Urban Studies, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA
[email protected] xli
xlii
Lynn Eden Center for International Security and Cooperation, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-6165, USA
[email protected] Elaine Enriquez Department of Sociology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA Peter Evans University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA
[email protected] Susan S. Fainstein Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, 48 Quincy St., Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
[email protected] Carmenza Gallo Department of Sociology, Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA
[email protected] Antonina Gentile Cariplo Fellow, Facolta` di Scienze Politiche, Dipartimento di Studi del Lavoro e del Welfare, Universita` degli Studi di Milano, Via Festa del Perdono 7, 20122 Milan, Italy
[email protected] Marco Giugni Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Geneva, 40 Boulevard du Pont d’Arve, CH-1211 Geneva 4, Switzerland
[email protected] Jeff Goodwin Department of Sociology, New York University, 295 Lafayette Street, Room 4115, New York, NY 10012-1106, USA
[email protected] Patrick Heller Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
[email protected] Michael B. Katz History Dept., University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
[email protected] Contributors
Contributors
xliii
Marcel van der Linden International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
[email protected] Fernando Lo´pez-Alves Professor of Sociology, Global and International Studies, Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, 93106 CA, USA
[email protected] Peter Marcuse Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning, Columbia University, New York City, USA
[email protected] Ann Mische Department of Sociology, Rutgers University, 54 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, 08854 Piscataway, NJ, USA
[email protected] Ariel Salzmann Department of History, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada
[email protected] Hwaji Shin Department of Sociology, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CAUSA
[email protected] Edward W. Soja Department of Urban Planning, School of Public Affairs, University of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CAUSA
[email protected] Smita Srinivas Urban Planning Program and Technological Change Lab (TCLab), Columbia University, New York, NYUSA
[email protected] Sidney Tarrow Cornell University, 102 McGraw Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-7601, USA
[email protected] Charles Tilly Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1478, USA
[email protected] Cities, states, and trust networks: chapter 1 of Cities and States in World History Charles Tilly
# The Author(s) 2010. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Abstract An introduction to a vast but uncompleted survey of world history, this article argues that the study of the changing relationships among cities, states and trust networks can help us understand key elements of the emergence of our modern world. Beginning in ancient Uruk in modern-day Iraq, roughly five thousand years ago, the essay defines each of its central categories: city, state and trust network. It poses four questions to be pursued throughout the rest of the study. What determines the degree of segregation or integration of cities and states? What determines the relative dominance of cities and states? What determines the extent of separation or integration between cities or states, on one side, and trust networks on the other? What difference do these variable configurations make to the quality of ordinary people’s lives?
The now-small Iraqi city of Al Warka lies about 300 km south of Baghdad, not far from where the joined Tigris and Euphrates rivers empty into the Persian Gulf. The Bible calls the place Erech, but five millennia ago local people knew it as Uruk. Within a few hundred years after 3600 BCE, it grew into a dynamic power center, a center of long-distance trade, and a religious magnet. At its height, Uruk was probably the world’s largest city, with 50,000 inhabitants or more living in 6 square kilometers of walled area. For centuries, rulers of Uruk dominated the area of southern Mesopotamia then called Sumer. As the city grew, hinterland populations abandoned peripheral settlements and moved closer to the dominant metropolis (Adams 1972, p. 739). City and hinterland taken together, Uruk has a claim to have been the world’s first C. Tilly (*) c/o Chris Tilly, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1478, USA
M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_1, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
1
2
C. Tilly
substantial state. Some time between 2800 and 2500 BCE a great king named Gilgamesh ruled Uruk. Soon after Gilgamesh’s time, the region’s people were remembering him as a god and reciting visionary, often violent stories about him. Scribes eventually recorded those stories on clay tablets as different versions of the Gilgamesh epic. In one version of the epic, Gilgamesh boasts about his city: See if its wall is not as straight as the architect’s string, Inspect its...wall, the likes of which no one can equal; Touch the threshold-stone—it dates from ancient times. Approach the Enna Temple, the dwelling of Ishtar, Such as no later king or many will ever equal. Go up on the wall and walk around, Examine its foundation, inspect its brickwork thoroughly, Is not its masonry of baked brick, Did not the Seven Sages themselves lay out its plans? (Postgate 1992, p. 73) The first texts of the epic that archaeologists have—literally—unearthed date from around 2100 BCE, some 500 years after Gilgamesh actually ruled Uruk. The stories pit their flawed hero Gilgamesh against the anti-hero Enkidu, against the monster Humbaba, and against the avenging Bull of Heaven. At first, tyrannical, restless Gilgamesh behaves like a young punk, molesting Uruk’s young women and attacking its young men. The gods answer Uruk citizens’ exasperated prayers by sending a brutish giant, Enkidu, to check Gilgamesh’s excesses. But Gilgamesh subdues wild man Enkidu. He does so not by means of armed combat, but by sending out the whore Shamhat to tame him. Shamhat seduces Enkidu, teaches him about civilization, and brings him into the city, where Gilgamesh and Enkidu wrestle to a draw, then form a fearsome alliance. From their urban base, the heroes conquer enemies in the surrounding mountains and plains. They also go out to fetch great cedars for construction of Uruk’s temples. When Gilgamesh spurns the goddess Ishtar, Uruk’s protectress, Ishtar sends the Bull of Heaven to destroy Gilgamesh along with his city. He and Enkidu vanquish the magic bull and save Uruk, but the outraged gods condemn Enkidu to die. Gilgamesh wanders mourning his lost friend until he reaches the wise Utnapishtim in Dilmun— most likely today’s Bahrain, in the Persian Gulf. The sage relates the story of a great flood remarkably like the Bible’s later account of Noah’s adventures. Utnapishtim then tells aging, grieving Gilgamesh about a plant that gives eternal youth. Gilgamesh dives into the sea, retrieves the plant, but loses it to a serpent. Disconsolate Gilgamesh returns to Uruk and dies. The Gilgamesh epic, however mythical, lifts some of the heavy clouds that obscure the first emergence of cities and states. It emphasizes that cities and states first formed together: rulers based in substantial, socially differentiated, and commercially active settlements conquered hinterlands and drew on hinterland resources (remember those great cedars Gilgamesh and Enkidu fetched!) to reproduce their rule. It underlines the importance of religious claims for early rulers’ legitimacy. Notably in the form of that massive wall, it dramatizes the constant threat of invasion and destruction by rebels from the hinterland or (more often) rival kings based in other cities. These distinctive features of early cities and
Cities, states, and trust networks: chapter 1 of Cities and States in World History
3
states deserve our attention because now cities and states interact very differently. These days, cities and their surrounding states often struggle with each other, citysustaining resources typically come from across the world rather than from the cities’ immediate surroundings, and few rulers of cities or states make serious claims to speak for the gods. No longer do states typically consist of a single city’s grip on its hinterland. The Gilgamesh epic also takes some unpacking that the ancient scribes did not provide. Implicitly, it distinguishes three kinds of connection between rulers and subjects, as well as among subjects: coercion, capital, and commitment. Coercion involves the threat or use of force, capital the deployment of goods and services, commitment the operation of ties that facilitate mutual recognition and coordination. The earliest cities and states would never have formed at all without substantial coercive connections; think of how young tough Gilgamesh treated his fellow citizens of Uruk. But no city or state can last long without renewing its supplies of goods and services, its capital. And some form of shared commitment connecting rulers with subjects as well as subjects with subjects—although not necessarily cults of living, jealous gods such as Ishtar—sustains every viable system of rule. A system of rule is a set of social relations among subjects and between rulers and subjects that a) reinforce subjects’ compliance to rulers’ directives and b) reproduce relations between rulers and ruled. Both cities and states have their own systems of rule, sometimes closely coordinated, sometimes at swords’ points with each other. Systems of rule vary from brutally authoritarian to gently democratic, but throughout the range reinforce compliance and reproduce ruler-ruled relations. Within systems of rule, we can usefully distinguish between relatively impersonal and relatively intimate connections among persons. For reasons that will become clear in a moment, I call the relatively intimate connections trust networks. One of this book’s major themes stresses the crucial importance of trust networks for the texture and efficacy of systems of rule.
A look across human history Cities and States in World History examines how cities, states, and trust networks have interacted during the five millennia for which we have clear evidence concerning the existence of cities and states. It spans from about the time of Gilgamesh to the present. Sketching and schematizing furiously, it leaps across continents and centuries in search of principles that help explain the enormous variation of cities, states, trust networks, and their interactions. It serves poorly as a sourcebook for detailed history. But it clarifies how and why momentous changes occurred. For changing relations among cities, states, and trust networks have caused some of the largest alterations in the quality of human life across the centuries. If you need detailed histories of cities, states, or trust networks in one part of the world or another, you have generations of historians to choose from. Historian-critic Lewis Mumford, for example, wrote a magnificent series of urban panoramas, culminating in his The City in History (1961). For a long time, general histories in all parts of the world concentrated largely on states and their rulers (see, e.g., Finer 1997, Hall 1986). For the millennium after 990 CE, I have tried my own hand at a
4
C. Tilly
synthetic history of European states (Tilly 1992). Historians of war (e.g., Gat 2006; Glete 2002) inevitably center their accounts on states, which are both the chief executors and principal products of warfare. Histories of trust networks come thinner on the ground as such, but in the guise of kinship, long-distance trade, local solidarities, or religion often appear in general histories (see, e.g., Agulhon 1970; Curtin 1984; Marques et al. 2001; Pastor et al 2002; Raggio 1990; Wheatley 2001). The earlier the period, the thinner the available evidence concerning trust networks. Nevertheless, the value of seeing cities, states, and trust networks interact justifies the risk of stretching the evidence toward informed speculation. In the timetables of human history, cities and states soon followed the invention of agriculture. The “invention of agriculture” means a shift to full-fledged, durable domestication of plants and animals as a way of life. So far as the archaeological record can tell us, that happened first in Southwest Asia, by around 8500 BCE. Along the Mediterranean’s east coast, global warming caused a dramatic spread of wild grains after 12,000 BCE. Their abundance allowed hunter-gatherers to form more permanent settlements than before. Between 9000 and 8000 BCE, however, cold, dry weather reduced the availability of grain, inducing villagers to plant and cultivate field grains they had previously simply gathered. Then: By 8000 [BCE], when conditions again became more favourable, these first farming communities had grown in size and number and they began to spread into other suitable areas. Initially these new economies combined cultivated cereals with wild animals, but around 7000 [BCE] domesticated sheep and goats began to replace gazelle and other wild game as the main source of meat (O’Brien 2002, p. 18). All such dating is risky, for two reasons. First, subtle differences in definitions of agriculture (the first humanly controlled growth of plants? the full complement of farms, plants, and domesticated animals?) produce dating differences of a millennium or more. Second, new archaeology almost never pushes the dates of innovations forward, but regularly pushes them back. Nevertheless, all currently available estimates place the emergence of agriculture in Eurasia within a few thousand years after the global warming that almost certainly did occur around 12,000 BCE. China had developed agriculture by 7500 BCE, the Indus Valley (most likely through diffusion from Southwest Asia) by 7000 BCE, New Guinea (most likely through independent invention) and Mesoamerica (surely by independent invention) likewise by 7000 BCE, then Egypt and Western Europe (diffusion!) after 6000 BCE (Diamond 1998, p. 100; Smith 1995, pp. 6–7; with some disagreement between the two). To be sure, any detailed chronology requires much more nuance. In Great Britain, for example, people started practicing mobile slash-and-burn agriculture with its temporary settlements widely around 4000 BCE, but did not often found permanent agricultural villages until about the time when metalworking spread toward 2500 BCE (Hayes 1993, pp. 41–52). Between the two dates, inhabitants of the British Isles began constructing ceremonial centers with their spectacular megaliths, of which Stonehenge provides the best known example (Pollard 2002). In Britain and elsewhere, settled agricultural villages compounded into larger and more differentiated political units. The growth process proceeded rapidly, according
Cities, states, and trust networks: chapter 1 of Cities and States in World History
5
to anthropologist Robert Carneiro; full-fledged states soon emerged (Carneiro 1994, p. 14). Cities formed initially as part of the same growth process. It happened first in the Middle East, but the rest of Eurasia and the Mediterranean did not lag far behind. Cities are human settlements combining significantly denser resident populations than their surrounding territories, differentiation and inequality within the resident populations, some central authority, and nodal locations within extensive networks of communication. Because archaeological evidence leaves us to judge differentiation, inequality, central authority, and nodal locations from physical remains, we can’t be sure when cities, thus defined, first appeared in human history. Jordan’s Jericho, for example, had a concentrated settlement, substantial walls, and at least a thousand residents toward 7000 BCE. But Jericho could still have been essentially a large farming village. In that case, unlike Gilgamesh’s formidable Uruk rampart, Jericho’s early wall could have served mainly to protect stored crops from surrounding groups of hunter-gatherers or simply to keep out invading water (Gat 2006, pp. 170– 172; Smith 1995, p. 3). Similarly, the excavated levels of Turkey’s Chatal Huyuk site (from between 6859 and 6300 BCE) contain remarkably decorated rooms suggesting religious shrines as well as the remains of enough houses to accommodate 5,000 inhabitants. Yet the site does not yield enough other evidence of central authority, differentiation, inequality, or nodal location to qualify Chatal Huyuk unambiguously as a full-fledged city (Roaf 1990, pp. 43–46). Only after 4000 BCE, can we be confident that differentiated cities were operating and exerting wide-ranging power. Once they emerged, however, new city-builders could imitate the models established by their predecessors or try to improve on them. Gilgamesh boasted about the superiority of Uruk’s city, wall, temple, and king to its predecessors and rivals. Cities, then, first appeared in the same periods and regions as states. Like cities, states can only exist in symbiosis with agriculture that produces enough to support significant non-agricultural populations. Cities differ from strictly agricultural settlements, furthermore, by virtue of substantial populations, differentiated and specialized activities, and location as nodes in far-reaching networks of trade and political coordination. Cities and states maintain ambivalent relations: urban merchants and intellectuals seek the protection that states can provide, but resist the extraction and control that states’ rulers impose on them. Rulers of states, on their side, commonly try to combat urbanites’ independence, but also seek to benefit from concentrations of resources in cities as well as from the relative defensibility of compact cities as compared with scattered rural populations. What of the state? A state is a structure of power involving four distinctive elements: 1) major concentrated means of coercion, especially an army, 2) organization that is at least partly independent of kinship and religious relations, 3) a defined area of jurisdiction, and 4) priority in some regards over all other organizations operating within that area. Although the four elements had existed separately for some time, no one put all four of them together before the Middle East’s creation of both cities and states. No states existed anywhere in the world before 4000 BCE. By the era of Gilgamesh’s Uruk, however, full-fledged cities and states were flourishing across significant parts of the Middle East, and possibly forming in other parts of Eurasia as well. Over the next millennium, states became
6
C. Tilly
permanent fixtures across much of Eurasia. Once they existed, furthermore, existing states provided models for emulation by other rulers and conquerors. Then and now, cities and states vary in their relative emphasis on coercion, capital, and commitment. Predatory states such as Mongol empires of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries CE got their way largely through the threat and use of armed force, as did Russian frontier fortress towns of the seventeenth century CE. The rich civilizations of South Asia’s Indus Valley (roughly 2500–1900 BCE) left little trace of armies, but seem to have thrived on a combination of intensive trade and unifying culture. Although Italian city-states of the Renaissance usually backed their commercial enterprises with militias and mercenaries when necessary, their patrician merchants centered their connections with each other and their subjects on sizeable applications of capital. Cities and states therefore vary in their relations to each other. Figure 1 sketches the most obvious of those variations: in dominance and integration. In some regions and eras, cities dominate states, either because the cities enjoy autonomous resources or because they subordinate states to their own priorities. Cities and surrounding states also vary from greatly segregated (little interplay between one and the other) to highly integrated (intensive interaction and mutual shaping between them). Four extreme types mark the limits of variation: autonomous cities, city-states, centralized states, and nomadic empires. In our own time, the Vatican and Hong Kong represent something like autonomous cities despite their extensive external connections, Singapore operates more like a city-state within its compact hinterland, China counts as a formidable example of a centralized state, but nomadic empires have disappeared except for scattered remnants in Central Asia and East Africa. To trace cities and states in world history, then, is to examine change and variation in a given region’s location within the space described by Fig. 1. With many a wiggle, the overall trend in city-state relations follows the arrow in the figure: from cities dominant to states dominant and (especially) from segregated to integrated. Later, however, we will see evidence that great cities such as Tokyo, London, and New York are now regaining some of the dominance they lost over most of history. The inventions of cities and states enormously expanded human capacities for accumulation, innovation, and coordination. Cities created settings in which diverse Fig. 1 Variable relations between cities and states
Cities, states, and trust networks: chapter 1 of Cities and States in World History
7
populations could interact without incessant warfare while connecting with their counterparts in distant locations. They promoted complementarities among human activities, and facilitated the production of collective goods such as secure public spaces and reliable supplies of water. States, on their side, established large zones in which people could move freely, exchange their goods, and even call on authorities to protect their property. Eventually they freed the bulk of humanity from living in small, closed, weapon-heavy population clusters. In these ways, cities and states multiplied human power for collective action. They did so at a cost, sometimes a terrible cost. In cities, either rampant capital or flagrant coercion gave tycoons and rulers the means of imposing their wills on reluctant people who had contrary projects of their own and of subjecting inhabitants to living conditions more deadly and demoralizing than most hunters and gatherers had ever experienced. In states, arbitrary power and unwanted warfare intermittently devastated routine lives, substituting new, more massive forms of uncertainty and death for the daily struggles that beset every locality before the invention of states. In both cities and states, human experience felt the powerful effects of increasing scale.
Trust networks Cities and states did not act alone. Every city and every state interacts with and to some extent depends on an ever-present form of commitment-maintaining connection: the trust network. Seen in two-person terms, trust is a relation in which at least one party places a valued enterprise at risk to the malfeasance, mistakes, or failure of another party. Trust is often, but not always, mutual; in the mutual case, Amy trusts Betty, while Betty also trusts Amy. Trust sometimes connects larger numbers of people who are carrying on some weighty, high-risk, long-term collective enterprise such as procreation, long-distance trade, political conspiracy, workers’ mutual aid, or clandestine religious practice, and placing the enterprise at risk of members’ malfeasance, mistakes, or failure. When that happens, members can typically call on each other for aid on the simple basis of shared membership. In such a case, let us identify the connections among the members as a trust network. Trust networks existed across the world millennia before the emergence of cities and states, and significantly affected the operation of cities and states once cities and states emerged. Big-game hunting parties, kin groups, and (most likely) sworn brotherhoods, for example, all played significant roles in human life long before cities and states existed. In general, they qualified as trust networks. Just as cities and states fall far short of exhausting or even representing all topdown structures of power—think of corporations, churches, and international organizations—trust networks form only one part of social life’s bottom-up structure. Neighborhoods, communities, markets, voluntary organizations, and ethnic groups often contain or overlap trust networks, but rarely constitute them. In watching the interplay of cities, states, and trust networks, we are simply on concentrating on three distinctive forms of social organization whose interactions significantly affect the quality of human life.
8
C. Tilly
Like cities and states, trust networks vary in their relative emphasis on coercion, capital, and commitment: some punish defection with death, and others make defection unattractive by providing their faithful members with reliable incomes, even if all rely on substantial commitment, expressed in common languages, secret lore, distinctive communication lines, and other reinforcers of trust. Binding commitments can take the form of shared religion or ethnicity, trading ties, work-generated solidarities, communities of taste, and much more. They have the common property of promoting trust. Over the long run of human history, trust networks, rather than cities, states, firms, churches, or other organizations, have formed the social basis for most weighty, high-risk, long-term collective enterprises (Tilly 2005). Ethnic trading networks, for example, have sustained long-distance trade from the origins of cities and states onward (Curtin 1984; Stein 1999). Only rarely and (on the whole) recently have such arrangements as social insurance and labor unions connected risky, valued, popular collective enterprises directly with cities and states. Indeed, prudent members of trust networks have generally tried to insulate them from predation or incorporation by cities and states. Struggle between existing trust networks, on one side, and cities or states, on the other, has therefore gone on unceasingly, as for example when states try to conscript for military service young men who bear the hopes of their kin groups or when states seek to annihilate dissident religious sects. If we want to understand historical change and variation in cities and states, then, we have no choice but to take this distinctive form of organization—the trust network—seriously. Despite great historical variation in the relative prominence of capital, coercion, and commitment as forms of connection, on the average cities, states, and trust networks each give greater emphasis to one of the three. Whatever else they do, states place significant weight on coercion. Cities serve as storehouses and headquarters for capital. Trust networks rely heavily on commitment: operation of ties that facilitate mutual recognition and coordination. To an important extent, encounters of cities, states, and trust networks therefore involve struggles for priority among capital, coercion, and commitment. As later chapters of the book will show in detail, members of trust networks have historically engaged in those struggles by means of four main strategies: evasion, resistance, patronage, and integration. Evasion ranges from staying secret to dissimulating your character, masking your connections, and hiding your assets. Resistance, almost always dangerous, consists of confronting the capital and coercion of rulers or would-be rulers with forceful counter-claims. Resistance has often led to patronage, as powerful intermediaries have provided protection from rulers in return for tribute and loyalty. Integration has occurred in two different ways: as members of trust networks (for example, conquering religions such as Islam) have become rulers themselves, and as leaders of trust networks have bargained, however asymmetrically, with rulers, for assured places in the system of rule. Twentieth-century totalitarian regimes forcibly integrated some trust networks into their systems of rule, but democratic regimes have also achieved some partial integration of trust networks through systems of social security and worker representation. Over the five millennia surveyed by this book, however, integration has rarely occurred. In general, relations between trust
Cities, states, and trust networks: chapter 1 of Cities and States in World History
9
networks and rulers (whether of cities or of states) have taken the form of evasion, resistance, or patronage. Cities and States in World History traces the dynamics of interaction among cities, states, and trust networks from the first traces of cities and states to the present. In a single small book, I have no hope of providing comprehensive descriptions of cities and states in all world regions across known human history. The long-term history of trust networks, furthermore, remains to be reconstructed and reported; I will simply refer to trust networks as part of my explanations for the operations of cities and states. Instead of providing a continuous chronicle of the world’s cities, states, and trust networks, this book examines and explains essential features of variation and change of cities and states in four main regions—Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe—on the way to thinking about how interactions between cities and states have been changing in the contemporary era. History has performed a rough but valuable natural experiment in relations among cities, states, and trust networks. Cities and states first emerged in Eurasia, including Europe, and within a thousand years or so all their major sites across the Eurasian land mass were communicating with each other. North and East Africa soon joined the same connected complex, followed much later by western, central, and southern Africa. On that side of the experiment, we have a history of extensive mutual influence. On the other side, the Americas provide a case of absolutely independent invention: even though the original human inhabitants of the Americas crossed the Bering Strait from Asia, we have no reason to think of America’s pre-Columbian cities, states, or particular forms of trust networks as offshoots of their Eurasian counterparts. Meanwhile, New Guinea and other parts of the Pacific region where agriculture developed early have so far not yielded enough evidence on the long run of cities, states, and trust networks to permit their effective integration into the comparison. To a lesser degree, the same is true of western and southern Africa. Our strong comparison therefore sets off the Americas from Eurasia. Moreover, it looks as though agriculture, cities, and states initially grew up independently in two separate American sites: central Mexico and the Andes. (Agriculture also seems to have begun independently in eastern North America, but without the subsequent independent development of substantial cities and states [Smith 1995]). Despite some earlier forays of Europeans across the North Atlantic to America, the Eurasian and American histories of cities, states, and trust networks proceeded in essential independence until European exploration and colonization began in 1492. Thus we can think of similarities in the initial emergence of cities, states, and trust networks in Eurasia and the Americas as stemming from parallel causal processes rather than from diffusion. What processes? Radically simplified, they run like this: Cities: accumulation and coordination of capital States: accumulation and coordination of coercion Trust Networks: accumulation and coordination of commitment In each case, “accumulation” refers to an increase in sheer quantity, “coordination” to the approach toward a single connected set of interpersonal connections exerting collective control over the relevant activities. Cities depend on a region’s
10
C. Tilly
passing of some threshold in the sheer quantity of available capital as well on the formation of a nucleus controlling a significant share of that capital. In parallel, states depend not only on the presence of substantial coercive means but also on concentration of a significant share of those means under the control of a bounded territorial organization. (Conversely, if coercive means multiply without coordination, small fighting bands multiply rather than states.) Likewise, trust networks require both the proliferation of risky relations (those in which persons are participating jointly in significant collective enterprises that are at risk to their participants’ failures, mistakes, or malfeasance) and the creation of larger sets of interpersonal connections that exercise collective control over the enterprises. Capital, coercion, and commitment reproduce themselves according to different logics. Capital renews itself through production of goods and services in sufficient abundance to provide for the next round of production. Cities reflect that reproductive cycle by nurturing institutions for the storage of capital: banks, warehouses, wealthy households, and more. Reproduction of coercion occurs through an openly competitive process in which wielders of coercive means use those means to deprive rivals and potential rebels of their own access to coercion. To the extent that coercive means involve expensive weapons, massive manpower, extensive food supplies, and substantial forms of transportation, to be sure, reproduction of coercion also entails sustained access to capital, either through direct application of coercion or through exchange of already accumulated wealth for coercive means. Reproduction of commitment proceeds in quite a different manner: via recruitment and birth. New members of trust networks arrive through person-by-person enlistment or through birth within households already belong to the network. These differences in reproduction generate contradictions among the dynamics of capital, coercion, and commitment. Storage of capital offers incentives for coercionwielders to seize it for their own advantage, but the possession of capital allows capitalists to buy off coercionists and thus divert them from their pursuit of raw power. Person-by-person recruitment to webs of commitment operates less freely in the face of counter-pressures from coercion and capital. The relative dominance of capital, coercion, and commitment therefore creates marked variation in the qualities of ordinary people’s lives. In all three cases, other causal processes initiate the accumulation and coordination in question. As we have already seen, the growth of productive agriculture on a relatively large scale stands behind the emergence of both cities and states, just as the expansion of trade promotes the formation of cities. In the case of trust networks, initiating causes vary by type of network; they include the spread of religious cults, the growth of long-distance trade, growing opportunities for the placement of offspring, rising threats from neighboring populations, and (for crafts) intensifying competition or exploitation. All of them simultaneously increase threats to valued collective enterprises and the returns from increased coordination of such collective enterprises. These principles apply both to the vast web of Eurasian cities and states and to the spheres where cities and states emerged independently of the Eurasian experience, notably in the Americas. History’s natural experiment generated both similarities and differences. The more separate the cluster of cities and states, the more distinctive the patterns of cities, states, and trust networks. Through diffusion, interaction, and mutual modeling, cities, states,
Cities, states, and trust networks: chapter 1 of Cities and States in World History
11
and trust networks of the vast Eurasian system acquired some common properties that set them in contrast to the long-isolated cities, states, and trust networks of the Americas. Zapotec areas of Central Mexico, for example, produced a strikingly distinctive pattern of mountaintop cities dominating adjacent valleys, grouping together ceremonial and administrative structures, but not specializing in commercial, agricultural, or craft activities (Marcus 2003, p. 358). Given that pattern, we can be fairly certain that their trust networks had distinctive properties as well. Following the work of paleoanthropologists Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery, Charles Mann describes Zapotecan civilization as one of four or five complexes that made the transition to cities and states during the second millennium BCE: The Zapotec were based across the mountains from the Olmec, in Oaxaca’s high Central Valley—three forty-to-sixty-mile-long bowls that intersect in a ragged Y. By about 1550 [BCE], they were abandoning the life of hunting and gathering to live in villages with defensive palisades. These early villages had wattle-and-daub houses, fine pottery, and some public architecture. They were controlled by “big men,” the social scientist’s term for the alpha male who is able in such informal settings to enforce his will through persuasion or force. Within a few hundred years, the big men acquired rank—that is, they began to wield power not only because of their personal charisma, but also because their societies had given them an elevated official position (Mann 2005, pp. 211–212). Soon the whole region consolidated into three chiefdoms, each a state centered on a city. In Zapotec territory, agriculture rapidly led to accumulation and coordination of coercion, capital, and commitment.
The Silk Road On the Eurasian continent, a much larger scale of accumulation and coordination had already developed two millennia earlier. The Silk Road illustrates the connectedness of the Eurasian system. The name Silk Road only dates from the Baron von Richtoven’s writing about it in 1877 (Wood 2002, p. 9). By then, however, the phenomenon itself was already two thousand years old. From China’s Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) onward, that skein of east-west strands has carried precious goods, missionaries, and adventurers between eastern China and the Middle East, and thence into Europe. All strands counted, the Silk Road ran roughly from Chang’an (Xi’an) in northeastern China to Tyre and Antioch on the Mediterranean. In today’s political terms, portions of the road transited China, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, with offshoots into adjacent countries. Although the conquests of Alexander the Great (334-323 BCE) included the western segment of the road, we should probably not speak of it as an East-West thoroughfare until early Han emperors began deliberately sending out mercantile missions as far as the Ferghana Valley (now in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan) during the second century BCE. Soon after then, Chinese silk became a known and much admired commodity in Rome. Jade likewise traveled westward from China. Although the road brought many products into China from intermediate points, regions at and beyond the western terminus sent amber, pearls, red coral and, of all things, the chair
12
C. Tilly
(Wood 2002, pp. 85–86). Yet it took centuries before people at the road’s eastern and western extremities had a clear idea of what lay at the other end. In Antioch, where he finished his own long, dangerous journey from east to west, travel writer Colin Thubron described beliefs about the road two millennia earlier: And still the Romans did not know the land the silks came from. Somewhere edging the easternmost sea, they heard, the country of the Seres escaped the influence of the stars, and was guided only by the laws of its ancestors. Mars never drove its people to war, nor Venus to folly. They had no temples, no prostitutes, no crimes, no victims. The king’s women—seven hundred of them— rode in golden chariots drawn by oxen. But this land of Serica, by some divine spell, was impossible to reach. Meanwhile the Chinese, in mirror-image, came to believe that in a great city to the west—Rome, Alexandria or Constantinople—the people were ruled by philosophers, peacefully elected. Their palaces rose on crystal pillars, and they travelled in little white-draped carriages, and signalled their movements by the shaking of bells (Thubron 2007, p. 343). Yet exchanges along the Silk Road eventually built up a steady stream of trade, and increasing mutual awareness. With many an interruption and deviation resulting from struggles for control of the territories between Rome and China, caravans have been plying the multiple silk roads in both directions ever since. Technologies and beliefs likewise traveled the Silk Road. Gunpowder and Nestorians provide only two examples of the Silk Road’s importance as a conduit. Gunpowder (probably invented in China during the ninth century CE) arrived first in Muslim lands and then in Europe between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. By that time, Nestorian Christianity, a version of the faith originating in the Middle East, had been spreading in China for about six centuries. When European missionaries arrived to convert the Mongols or Chinese about the same time that gunpowder was heading west, they often encountered well established Nestorian priests and congregations. The reports of two 13th century CE European voyagers to the East— William of Rubruck and Marco Polo—illustrate the large extent of Silk Road connections between East and West. When Flanders-born Franciscan missionary William of Rubruck traveled to Karakorum, the Mongol capital, in 1254 CE, he encountered a number of Europeans, as well as an entrenched Nestorian priesthood, who looked like heretics to him. Of Karakorum itself, William reported: There are two quarters in it; one of the Saracens in which are the markets, and where a great many Tartars gather on account of the court, which is always near this (city), and on account of the great number of ambassadors; the other is the quarter of the Cathayans [Chinese], all of whom are artisans. Besides these quarters there are great palaces, which are for the secretaries of the court. There are there twelve idol temples of different nations, two mahummeries [mosques] in which is cried the law of Machomet, and one church of Christians in the extreme end of the city. The city is surrounded by a mud wall and has four gates (Saad 2005, p. 89).
Cities, states, and trust networks: chapter 1 of Cities and States in World History
13
At the time, Mongols controlled most of the territory from Moscow and Kiev south to Baghdad and east to Korea. They ran the largest contiguous land empire that has ever existed. Karakorum’s profusion of coercion, capital, and trust networks reflected its position as a center of large-scale coordination, now facilitated by Mongol control of almost the entire Silk Road. Instead of building a tight perimeter around their conquered territories, the Mongols drew tribute from trade (Barfield 1989). After Muslim expansion began in earnest during the seventh century CE, trading Europeans found themselves blocked from direct contact with the East. The rise of the Mongols gave traders new opportunities. By drawing on those opportunities, Marco Polo made himself Europe’s most famous medieval traveler along the Silk Road. The irony is that even today we can’t be sure how much of what Polo described he witnessed directly, how much he invented, and how much he pieced together from other travelers’ tales. If we believe the stories he dictated to a fellowprisoner in 1298, however, he and his family made fabulous voyages to the East. In 1298, Venice had once again gone to war against its great commercial rival, the city-state of Genoa. From the Venetian viewpoint, the war’s worst moment arrived with the Battle of Korčula, a Dalmatian island controlled by Venice. After sacking Korčula, a Genoese fleet trounced its Venetian enemy and captured many galleys, including one outfitted and commanded by Marco Polo. The Genoese put Marco in prison, where a fellow captive, Rustichello, wrote down Marco’s Description of the World, a mixture of memoir and travel guide. In his account, Marco offered vivid images of China’s wealth and technical advancement over Europe. With wonder, he noted China’s coal, paper currency, iron manufacturing, road networks, great canals, beautiful women, and magnificent cities. Marco Polo’s father and uncle had traveled widely in Persia and Central Asia. Then they had gone to the court of the great Mongol khan Qubilai (often called Kublai Khan), grandson of Genghis Khan. Drawing on Mongol legend, Marco wrote a surprisingly benign retrospective portrait of Genghis: Some time after the migration of the Tartars to [Karakorum], and about the year of our lord 1162, they proceeded to elect for their king a man who was named Chingis-khan, one of approved integrity, great wisdom, commanding eloquence, and eminent for his valour. He began his reign with so much justice and moderation, that he was beloved and revered as their deity rather than their sovereign; and the fame of his great and good qualities spreading over that part of the world, all the Tartars, however dispersed, placed themselves under his command. Finding himself thus at the head of so many brave men, he became ambitious of emerging from the deserts and wildernesses by which he was surrounded, and gave them orders to equip themselves with bows, and such other weapons as they were expert at using, from the habits of their pastoral life. He then proceeded to render himself master of cities and provinces; and such was the effect produced by his character for justice and other virtues, that wherever he went, he found the people disposed to submit to him, and to esteem themselves happy when admitted to his protection and favour (Polo 2006, p. 81). By the time that Marco’s father and uncle met Qubilai, different groups of Mongols controlled a major chunk of Eurasia, and Qubilai’s forces were conquering
14
C. Tilly
southern China as well. The elder Polos may have reached Changdu (Xanadu to later Europeans), the khan’s summer capital, from 1264 onward. Qubilai asked the brothers to return home so they could encourage the pope to send back oil from the lamp at Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulcher as well as a hundred men “acquainted with the Seven Arts” who would teach his people about Europe. As a safe conduct, the Polos carried a 30 cm.long golden tablet from the khan, inscribed “By the strength of the eternal Heaven, holy be the khan’s name. Let him that pays him not reverence be killed.” It worked. They reached Italy safely in 1269. When the Polos set off again in 1271, 17-year-old Marco accompanied them. They originally planned to go east by ship from Hormuz on the Persian Gulf, a departure point for South and East Asia already well known to Arab seafarers. They abandoned that plan when they saw the leaky vessels that were supposed to carry them, “wretched affairs... only stitched together with twine made from the husk of the Indian nut.” They shifted to an overland journey through Afghanistan, across Kashmir and Pamir, via the great Takla Makan desert, then along the steppe’s southern edge back to Changdu. The Polos traveled and traded widely in China, advised the khan, and accompanied him in his yearly migrations between Changdu and the khan’s winter residence in Cambulac, later known as Beijing. On their return trip to Venice, they traveled by sea to Indochina, Indonesia, India, and back to Hormuz. They lost most of their accumulated riches when officials in the Byzantine state of Trebizond, at the southeast corner of the Black Sea, seized their goods. After seventeen years in China plus seven years of longdistance travel, the Polos reached Venice in 1295. By that time, 41-year-old Marco had spent more than half his life on his momentous Asian journey. As of 1295, the Silk Road was dangerous, but thriving. It was connecting Asia’s cities, states, and trust networks with those of Europe. The Mongols ran their own distinctive variety of state, but other formidable states intersected the path from Xi’an to Baghdad. Despite their origins as nomadic predators, the Mongols sustained and benefited from the long string of commercial cities that a thousand years of East-West interaction had built up along the Silk Road’s broad path. European priests and merchants benefited from the long reach of their trust networks along the thoroughfare. By the thirteenth century CE, Eurasian cities, states, and trust networks were interacting over vast distances. No one would then have mistaken Venice for Karakorum. Yet in some regards a connected Eurasian system of cities, states, and trust networks had formed. It extended into Africa as well as into the Indian and Pacific Oceans. After many mutations, it still exists today. Fig. 2 Interactions of cities, states, and trust networks
Cities, states, and trust networks: chapter 1 of Cities and States in World History
15
Both in Eurasia and elsewhere, the long-run historical story of cities, states, and trust networks features rising connectedness through ties of coercion, capital, and commitment. As the case of the Mongols has already suggested, fluctuations and reversals often occurred. But once European imperialism flourished during the fifteenth century CE, increasing—and increasingly asymmetrical—connectedness prevailed. We live in an incomparably more connected and more unequal world than our ancestors of a thousand years ago. Figure 2 schematizes the interactions and changes we are analyzing. Sometimes we concentrate on relations between trust networks and cities, sometimes on relations between trust networks and states, sometimes on relations between cities and states, and sometimes—but more rarely—on the whole triangular set of interactions. We are, furthermore, tracing long-term transformations in those interactions. Over the long run, we want to know how our incredibly connected world emerged from the oncefragmented relations among cities, states, and trust networks. The process of fluctuating but finally increasing connection sets the problem for Cities and States in World History. The problem falls into four parts: 1. What determines the degree of segregation or integration of cities and states? 2. What determines the relative dominance of cities and states? 3. What determines the extent of separation or integration between cities or states, on one side, and trust networks, on the other? 4. What difference do these variable configurations make to the quality of ordinary people’s lives? Pursuing these four questions, the rest of my book will follow the Eurasian system and its American counterparts from early in history to the present. Chapter 2 provides an overview of cities, states, and trust networks from their origins onward. Chapters 3 to 6 close in successively on Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Chapter 7 considers cities and states in the age of capitalism. Finally, chapter 8 looks at the futures of cities, states, and trust networks in the light of their long, turbulent history. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
Appendix: Contents as planned in 2008 for Cities and States in World History Preface Chapter 1. Cities, States, and Trust Networks Chapter 2. Historical Lives of Cities, States, and Trust Networks Chapter 3. Asia Chapter 4. Africa Chapter 5. The Americas Chapter 6. Europe Chapter 7. Capitalism, Cities, and States Chapter 8. Futures of Cities and States References Index
16
C. Tilly
References Adams, R. M. C. C. (1972). Patterns of urbanization in early southern Mesopotamia. In M. J. Ucko, R. Tringham, & G. W. Dimbledy (Eds.), Man, settlement and urbanism. Cambridge: Shenkman. Agulhon, M. (1970). La vie sociale en Provence intérieure au lendemain de la Révolution. Paris: Société des Études Robespierristes. Barfield, T. J. (1989). The perilous frontier, nomadic empires and China. New York: Blackwell. Carneiro, R. L. (1994). War and peace: Alternating realities in human history. In S. P. Reyna & R. E. Downs (Eds.), Studying war. Anthropological perspectives. Langhorne: Gordon and Breach. Curtin, P. (1984). Cross-cultural trade in world history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Diamond, J. (1998). Guns, germs, and steel. The fates of human societies. New York: Norton. Finer, S. E. (1997). The history of government from the earliest times. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gat, A. (2006). War in human civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Glete, J. (2002). War and the state in early modern Europe. Spain, the Dutch Republic, and Sweden as fiscal-military states, 1500–1660. London: Routledge. Hall, J. A. (Ed.) (1986). States in history. Oxford: Blackwell. Hayes, A. (1993). Archaeology of the British Isles. New York: St. Martin’s. Mann, C. C. (2005). 1491. New revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York: Knopf. Marcus, J. (2003). A synthesis of the cultural evolution of the Zapotec and Mixtec. In K. V. Flannery & J. Marcus (Eds.), The cloud people. Divergent evolution of the Zapotec and Mixtec civilizations. Clinton Corners: Percheron Press. revised edition. Marques, M. M., Santos, R., & Araújo, F. (2001). Ariadne’s thread: Cape Verdean women in transnational webs. Global Networks, 1, 283–306. Mumford, L. (1961). The city in history. Its origins, its transformations, and its prospects. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. O’Brien, P. K. (Ed.) (2002). Oxford atlas of world history. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pastor, R., Pascua, E., Rodríguez-López, A., & Sánchez-León, P. (2002). Beyond the market. Transactions, property and social networks in monastic galicia 1200–1300. Leiden: Brill. Pollard, J. (2002). Neolithic Britain. Princes Risborough: Shire Publications. Polo, M. (2006). The travels of Marco Polo. New York: Cosimo Classics. Postgate, J. N. (1992). Early Mesopotamia. Society and economy at the Dawn of History. London: Routledge. Raggio, O. (1990). Faide e Parentele. Lo Stato Genovese visto dalla Fontanabuona. Turin: Einaudi. Roaf, M. (1990). Cultural atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East. New York: Facts on File. Saad, R. (Ed.) (2005). William of Rubruck’s account of the Mongols. Rockville: the editor. Smith, B. D. (1995). The emergence of agriculture. New York: Scientific American Library. Stein, G. J. (1999). Rethinking world-systems. Diasporas, colonies, and interaction in Uruk Mesopotamia. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Thubron, C. (2007). Shadow of the Silk Road. New York: HarperCollins. Tilly, C. (1992). Coercion, capital, and European states, 990–1992. Oxford: Blackwell. Revised edition. (2005), Trust and rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. (2005). Trust and rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wheatley, P. (2001). The places where men pray together. Cities in Islamic Lands seventh through the Tenth Centuries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wood, F. (2002). The silk road. Two thousand years in the heart of Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Charles Tilly (1929–2008) held faculty appointments at Delaware, Harvard, Toronto, Michigan, and the New School University, and finished his career as the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University. His work focused on large-scale social change and its relationship to contentious politics, especially in Europe since 1500. His over 50 books and monographs included a number quite relevant to the essay in this issue, such as An Urban World (1974), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (1975), Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D. 990–1990 (1990), Cities and the Rise of States in Europe, AD 1000–1800 (1994), Expanding Citizenship, Reconfiguring States (1999), Trust and Rule (2005), and Democracy (2007). Tilly served as Senior Editor of Theory and Society for many years. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Ordre des Palmes Académiques, he received numerous international prizes and honorary degrees.
Part I
Historicism and Historical Legacies
SPOTLIGHT: Historicism, theory, and method Rod Aya Lynn Eden
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
Abstract Is historicism for Tilly a fact or a framework—the fact of history’s “contingent complexity” or the framework of his social thought? And how does he explain social and historical facts? With models whose elements are people trying to make the best of their situation as they see it? Or with causal mechanisms different from rational choice under specified situational constraints? Does his rejection of rational choice and methodological individualism contradict his own theoretical method? Or does it reflect a creative tension between historical explanation and sociological theory? These questions provoke an intense but amicable debate between kindred spirits who studied with Tilly yet have divergent opinions on theory and method. Argument is risky and unpredictable, therefore educational. —Christopher Lasch (1995, pp. 170–171) The argument here is a critical but cordial dialogue between two old friends about Charles Tilly’s historicism and issues of theory and method it raises. Our format is like history as Tilly views it: unscripted, unrehearsed, interactive, openended, and cumulative. Where the argument will lead, we do not know—and will not know until we get there. Argument is volatile not only because it can be lost through errors of fact and logic, but also because it can arrive at surprise R. Aya (*) Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, OZ Achterburgwal 185, 1012 DK Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail:
[email protected] L. Eden Center for International Security and Cooperation, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-6165 e-mail:
[email protected] M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_2, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
19
20
R. Aya and L. Eden
conclusions and change minds. In a Platonic dialogue, the author works the speakers as a ventriloquist works puppets. In this one, the authors are the speakers and speak for themselves: each tries to persuade the other, and both risk being persuaded in turn. RA: To preclude misunderstanding, I think we should say what we mean by historicism, then say what issues of theory and method we will discuss. LE: It’s your party—you roped me into this . . . RA: Historicism for Tilly means the opposite of what it means for Popper. For Tilly, historicism is a fact—the “uniqueness of sequences, unrepeatable in their contingent complexity” (Gould 2002, p. 102). He invokes Gould in an interview he gave Daniel Little five months before dying.1 For Popper, historicism is a theory—the “fraudulent theory of historical prediction” whereby supposed laws of history or social development warrant prophecy of “what the future will bring” (Popper 1998, p. 57). Martin Jay—great man, nice guy—says Popper’s terminology is passé.2 He is probably right about academic discourse. Look what happened to essentialism, Popper’s word for Platonic realism.3 But prophecy—especially self-fulfilling prophecy (Merton 1968, pp. 475–490)—is rampant in world politics today. LE: I hate to be disagreeable so soon into our discussion, but I disagree. I don’t think it’s a correct reading of Tilly to say that for him historicism is a fact. What were facts for Tilly? Tilly was entirely consistent in his stance: historians aren’t allowed to—and other social scientists certainly should not, though they are somewhat prone to—“make up” facts, to construct them as they please. Tilly was a realist, but he never thought that his vast interpretive apparatus was “fact.” For him, all interpretation is subject to revision, as we discover new archives or other new sources, or devise new methods, or, most important, change our minds because further investigation and thinking is likely to lead—if one is as openminded as Tilly—to a different understanding of causal mechanisms and processes at play. The Tilly of From Mobilization to Revolution (1978) with its interest-based economic style of analysis is not exactly the Tilly who later emphasized relational analysis, the importance of mechanisms, the role of trust, and the trouble with and importance of stories. We can summarize Tilly’s prefaces and introductions to his many books as: when I wrote this, I did not fully understand x, and therefore overemphasized y, and understated the importance of z. In the interview with Little, Tilly explains his many “errors” in The Vendée (1964) and his several changes of mind since he first thought about the French counterrevolution. Tilly did this throughout his intellectual life. So, I’m arguing that for Tilly, historicism is not a fact; it’s a framework that drives the questions to which he sought answers. Tilly was committed to it because of its 1
Go to www.changingsociety.org and click interviews. E-mail to RA, 26 November 2009. 3 “Realism . . . is the Platonic doctrine that universals or abstract entities have being independently of the mind; the mind may discover them but cannot create them” (Quine 1980, p. 14). 2
SPOTLIGHT: Historicism, theory, and method
21
efficacy in addressing the range of problems and processes he studied. You invoke Tilly’s quotation of Gould as evidence that for Tilly, historicism is fact. I have a hunch that Gould, and Tilly, are working with the idea of historicism as approach, not as fact. Tilly was extracting from Gould’s fuller statement: “History presents two special problems: (1) frequent absence of evidence, given imperfections of preservation; and (2) the uniqueness of sequences, unrepeatable in their contingent complexity, and thereby distancing the data of history from such standard concepts as prediction, and experimentation” (Gould 2002, p. 102). However, if someone convincingly demonstrated that some sequences were repeatable, then Tilly would have taken that on board. He would still have been a historicist, but he would have revised his understanding of history and historical process. RA: If you prefer to give Tilly’s interpretive framework the label historicism and to give complex, unique, contingent, unrepeatable sequences another label (say, historicity) be my guest. The labels do not matter if they do not confuse. But the distinction between historicism-as-theory and historicism-as-fact (or historicity) does matter. Tilly’s take on the history of state-making (1975, 1990, 2006) refutes modernization and political development theory, that is, American historicism (in Popper’s sense) devised to answer Marxist-Leninist historicism. Tilly is an antihistoricist historicist in that sense. For the rest, you describe Tilly as the ideal-untypical scientist. I cannot disagree: I never met anyone so willing (even eager) to revise own ideas in view of evidence. He hewed to the code implicit in these four questions: Are conclusions to be consistent with premises (maybe even follow from them)? Do facts matter? Or can we string together thoughts as we like, calling it an “argument,” and make up facts as we please, taking one story to be as good as another? (Chomsky 1992, p. 52) Tilly answered the first two questions yes, the last two no. “Consistency and responsibility to fact” (Chomsky 1992, p. 52) were his ground rules. You are right about his intellectual attitude. LE: But, Rod, even your description of Tilly contra modernization and political development theory—an attack by him on too-neatly repeatable sequences, or “stages”—can at least as easily be read as historicism as approach or framework, not as “fact.” You refer to Tilly’s “take” and modernization “theory.” What are takes and theories if not frameworks of interpretation of historical process? Anyway, why don’t we move on? What issues of theory and method are you getting at anyway? RA: In the same interview that cites Gould, Tilly also cites Stinchcombe—in particular his book on how social theory explains history (1978). Tilly ran that book in the Social Discontinuity series, commends it in print (1981, pp. 7–12), and laments its neglect by colleagues in the interview with Little. Stinchcombe says history’s “infinitely branching tree of causal sequences” (historicism-as-fact) “looks queer” from a “generalizing social science theory” point of view, though social theorists (as a rule) do theory best when they explain history—not when they theorize abstractly—and they all explain history the same way: they break it up into “theoretically
22
R. Aya and L. Eden
understandable bits,” that is, social actions; they explain social actions by “what people want and what they think they have to do to get it,” that is, motivating reasons; and they recombine understood actions into a “cumulative causal model” (1978, pp. 2, 13, 17, 64, 119). A historical explanation is a model whose elements are people trying to make the best of their situation as they see it over time. Stinchcombe on historical explanation describes the “méthode des modèles” (Boudon 1992, pp. 229–230) ruling social science and historiography since classical antiquity.4 This theoretical method involves figuring out “what is to be done” in the situation people face on the rationality principle that they do what they think will get what they want—the result they prefer among the likely results of feasible actions. On that principle, which is the (usually tacit) major premise of explanatory argument, people’s situational constraints—the actions they think they can take, the results they think these actions will have, and the result they think they will like best—are the reasons that motivate their choice of action. Concluding by invitation a book of Tilly’s essays in the sociological explanation of social history, Stinchcombe says, “Tilly’s key proposition about history” is “people are intentional and calculating animals, who build history out of their pictures of the future,” which are “always wrong,” thereby making historians indispensable (1997, p. 387). Tilly says Stinchcombe not only “has it right” but “has done it again,” expounding theory “more effectively than the author” (1997, pp. 12–13).5 Tilly also called Stinchcombe “one of the two living geniuses in sociology.”6 But Stinchcombe’s argument on historicism, theory, and method, which Tilly accepts, assumes rational choice and methodological individualism, which Tilly rejects (1997, pp. 7–9).7 LE: Ha! That’s interesting. So, we could accept this and say that Tilly’s caught up in a very bad contradiction. Or we could say that Tilly’s work embodies a tension between two sensibilities, which is manifest in his foci and even his styles of writing: he did see contingency, in which people work to make the best of their situations, and he did want to generalize, and he did so very powerfully. However, just because Tilly, not surprisingly, had a very high regard for Stinchcombe does not mean that Stinchcombe has fully characterized Tilly’s thinking as a historian-social scientist. I think it’s more accurate to say that Tilly’s view of human intention, building history out of frequent error is only part of what Tilly saw. The other part that Tilly saw, and tried to account for, was enduring structures and their effects. This “structural Chuck,” the historian as engineer (who usually saw three possible answers for every question), focused on the enduring and large-scale social institutions built over time by collectivities of people which greatly affected the range of choice available—social structures or institutions such as states, economies, revolutions, social protests, and wars. It is true that Tilly often emphasized how such enduring institutions constrained. As quoted by Michael Hanagan and Chris Tilly in the introduction to this book, 4
The argument is sketched elsewhere (Aya 2001, 2005, 2006, 2009). He adds, “Read Stinchcombe to learn how uncertain representations of the future derived from past experience constrain present social interaction” (1997, p. 13). 6 Table talk in Amsterdam, 3 June 2006. 7 Homans spotlights the assumption of rational choice in a brilliant review (1983). 5
SPOTLIGHT: Historicism, theory, and method
23
Tilly in 1996 argued that “past social relations . . . —material, ideological, and otherwise—constrain present social relations, and consequently constrain their products as well” (emphasis added). At the same time, for Tilly, structure does not only constrain. For him, structure is process, iterated and reiterated interactions over time that both provide stability and are subject to both gradual and, in some cases, rapid discontinuous change. By this logic, so-called structure is as enabling as constraining—enabling by opening new avenues of calculation, action, and sensibility. For Tilly, as for Stinchcome and, of course, Marx, people make their own history—if inadvertently and by often or always reading the future wrongly. But, as important, for Tilly, and of course, Marx, is that people do not make history just as they please. And yet, the circumstances in which history is made, shaped by both the past and present, do not simply constrain, but equally enable by providing social connections, resources, repertoires, and the stuff of changing sensibilities. So, we can see Tilly as caught in a serious contradiction. Or we can see him as more capacious, and to see his accounts of human action, big structures, and large processes as both constraining and enabling. RA: The contradiction is between the theoretical method Tilly deploys when explaining social facts and social history, namely, the “méthode des modèles,” and his rejection of rational choice and methodological individualism, which the “méthode” entails. 8 The tension is between the “explanation of a particular case and the search for generalizations” (Moore 1966, p. xvii). Contradiction and tension are not the same thing. The contradiction shows when Tilly insists on causal mechanisms and the primacy of social relationships, but the causal mechanisms are just rational choice under different situational constraints, and relationalism (as he calls it) is just exchange theory or transactionalism—to use labels from sociology and anthropology in the 1960s.9 The tension is the logical difference between explanation and generalization—between explaining facts and discovering theories (Popper 2002, pp. 540–541). Stinchcombe says social theorists usually explain better than they generalize, and the theory they actually use—the one that animates the explanatory model—is often different from the one they propound. As for social action constituting social structures and structures constraining action, I quote an old friend: “Structures are only persons doing structure” (Gouldner 1980, p. 102). Terminate the rewards and punishments that constrain people to keep “doing structure,” and structures vanish like snow on a warm spring day. Constraint (as defined above) and enablement are two words for the same thing: I agree with what you say. LE: I like what you say about tension, but I’m hesitant to agree with what you say about contradiction, particularly as you quote Moore. I think the problem lies in your statement that “causal mechanisms are just rational choice under different situational constraints” (emphasis added). What is “just” rational choice? For Tilly, “rational choice,” or better, choice, is best understood as a social phenomenon, shaped not 8 The “méthode” stipulates (1) “considérer tout phénomène collectif comme le produit d’actions individuelles” and (2) “interpréter l’action individuelle comme rationnelle” (Boudon 1992, pp. 282–283). 9 The then-standard authors (Homans 1974; Barth 1981) both rejected these labels as misleading.
24
R. Aya and L. Eden
only by constraints but by repertoires, past and present, and by future opportunities. I think you’re squeezing Tilly’s understanding of the primacy of the social into a box of individuals maximizing interests. So, we’re left with either a lack of clarity and/or a disagreement on how to characterize historicism in Tilly’s work; a more serious disagreement on the degree to which Tilly was, or was not, engaged in methods of rational choice that cut against his emphasis on the social; and we are in entire agreement on what a beautiful mind Tilly had. RA: One last shot at clarity. Let me try some synonyms. Nisbet prefers to call historicism-as-theory developmentalism (1969). Stinchcombe prefers to call it grand theory of history or epochal theory, and calls for “tossing out the epochal garbage to get at the causal core” (1978, p. 13). Tilly does that throughout his oeuvre, which is why Stinchcombe takes up “one of Tilly’s masterpieces,” and says studying masterpieces teaches most about the “integration of theory and research that constitutes methodology” (1997, p. 408). Historicism-as-fact occasions another Gould one-liner: “The law of gravity tells us how an apple falls, but not why that apple fell at that moment, and why Newton happened to be sitting there, ripe for inspiration” (1989, p. 278). If you prefer to call Tilly’s explanatory models historicism, go right ahead. But historicism-as-fact is what the models explain. The only logical difference between sociological and historical explanation is chronology. To many, rational choice and methodological individualism appear absurd or obscene because of a big mistake—the “ungeheure Mißverständnis” of confusing them with rationalism and individualism as political ideologies (Weber 1968, pp. 557–558). There is nothing unsocial about rational choice or methodological individualism. To say Tilly’s causal mechanisms are “just” rational choice under different situational constraints is to say his explanatory models have no other animating principle. Tilly (like everyone else who makes good sense of society and history) cannot help but be a rational-choice theorist and methodological individualist. You are too in your Merton Award–winning book—Tilly called it a classic—on official underestimation of the devastation nuclear war would cause (Eden 2004). Repertoires and opportunities are situational constraints, as defined above. Maximizing interests? Better to say satisfying interests—take Simon’s Nobel Prize–winning point (1997). But consider that “interests and passions” may coincide (Smith 1981, p. 630). A beautiful mind? Absolutely. Powerful, acute, lucid, creative, and erudite. Despite his gigantic talent and awesome oeuvre, however, Tilly was disarmingly modest. Unpretentious and devoid of envy, he treated students and colleagues as equals: he never tried to overawe them in argument, much less pull rank, though he could not abide a prima donna. Immensely generous with intellectual and practical assistance, he enjoyed intellectual camaraderie, but disliked cliques. Typically, when he named sociology’s other living genius, it was not himself. Bismarck said the measure of a person is intelligence minus vanity (Brenan 1975, p. 269). By that standard, Tilly was off the charts. He had only two proud boasts: he never gave his books subtitles, and he never was chairman of a university department or president of an academic professional association.
SPOTLIGHT: Historicism, theory, and method
25
References Aya, R. (2001). The third man; or, agency in history; or, rationality in revolution. History and Theory, Theme Issue 40, 143–152. Aya, R. (2005). Theory of revolution from Thucydides to Tilly. In M. Kousis & C. Tilly (Eds.), Economic and political contention in comparative perspective (pp. 89–98). Boulder: Paradigm. Aya, R. (2006). Theory, fact, and logic. In R. E. Goodin & C. Tilly (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of contextual political analysis (pp. 114–128). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Aya, R. (2009). Rationality and relativism. In M. Cherkaoui & P. Hamilton (Eds.), Raymond Boudon: A life in sociology (Vol. 2, pp. 49–66). Oxford: Bardwell (4 vols.). Barth, F. (1981). Process and form in social life. London: Routledge. Boudon, R. (1992). L’idéologie ou l’origine des idées reçues (2nd ed.). Paris: Fayard. Brenan, G. (1975). Personal record, 1920–1972. New York: Knopf. Chomsky, N. (1992). Rationality/science. Z Papers, 1(4), 52–57. Eden, L. (2004). Whole world on fire: Organizations, knowledge, and nuclear weapons devastation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gould, S. J. (1989). Wonderful life: The Burgess Shale and the nature of history. New York: Norton. Gould, S. J. (2002). The structure of evolutionary theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gouldner, A. W. (1980). The two Marxisms: Contradictions and anomalies in the development of theory. New York: Seabury. Homans, G. C. (1974). Social behavior: Its elementary forms (2nd ed.). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Homans, G. C. (1983). Review of Theoretical methods in social history, by Arthur L. Stinchcombe. Theory and Society, 12, 681–684. Lasch, C. (1995). The Revolt of the elites and the betrayal of democracy. New York: Norton. Merton, R. K. (1968). Social theory and social structure (3rd ed.). New York: Free Press. Moore, B., Jr. (1966). Social origins of dictatorship and democracy: Lord and peasant in the making of the modern world. Boston: Beacon. Nisbet, R. A. (1969). Social change and history: Aspects of the Western theory of development. New York: Oxford University Press. Popper, K. R. (1998). The world of Parmenides: Essays on the Presocratic enlightenment. London: Routledge. Popper, K. R. (2002). The open society and its enemies (5th ed.). London: Routledge. Quine, W. V. (1980). From a logical point of view (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Simon, H. A. (1997). Administrative behavior: A study of decision-making processes in administrative organizations (4th ed.). New York: Free Press. Smith, A. (1981). An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. Indianapolis: Liberty. Stinchcombe, A. L. (1978). Theoretical methods in social history. New York: Academic. Stinchcombe, A. L. (1997). Tilly on the past as a sequence of futures. In C. Tilly (Ed.), Roads from past to future (pp. 387–409). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Tilly, C. (1964). The Vendée. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tilly, C. (Ed.). (1975). The formation of national states in Western Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tilly, C. (1978). From mobilization to revolution. Reading: Addison-Wesley. Tilly, C. (1981). As sociology meets history. New York: Academic. Tilly, C. (1990). Coercion, capital, and European states, AD 990–1990. Oxford: Blackwell. Tilly, C. (1997). Roads from past to future. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Tilly, C. (2006). Why and how history matters. In R. Goodin & C. Tilly (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of contextual political analysis (pp. 417–437). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weber, M. (1968). Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (3rd ed.). Tübingen: Mohr.
26
R. Aya and L. Eden
Rod Aya took a buyout from the University of Amsterdam. Articles and reviews of his appear in American Anthropologist, American Journal of Sociology, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, History and Theory, International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, International Review of Social History, Irish Journal of Sociology, Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, Revue française de sociologie, and Theory & Society. Lynn Eden is senior research scholar and associate director for research at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan. Eden’s current work focuses on U.S. nuclear weapons policy in historical perspective, public and private rhetoric, narrative, jokes, and euphemism.
Is there a moral economy of state formation? Religious minorities and repertoires of regime integration in the Middle East and Western Europe, 600–1614 Ariel Salzmann
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Abstract This article asks how state formation processes informed the normative frameworks of late-Medieval and early-Modern Latin European and Muslim Middle Eastern regimes. The question at hand is not why pre-Modern regimes discriminated against religious minorities (as well as other groups) during the pre-Modern period, but why Western European states consistently engaged in mass expulsions of their non-Christian subjects from the late thirteenth century onward and the neighboring states of the Middle East did not. Rather than addressing these peculiar policies as a function of religion, culture, or law the article adopts a comparative, contextual method. With the aid of Charles Tilly’s theoretical perspectives it isolates critical variables in pre-Modern Middle Eastern state formation. These variables are then used to shed light on the circumstances and relationships that led to Latin Europe’s mass expulsions of Jews and Muslims between 1290 and 1614. A marvel of Renaissance technology, the ornate astrological clock on the Old Town Hall dominates the central square of historic Prague. It is flanked by two pairs of partially moving figurines that date from the seventeenth century. On the right side, a skeletal Death rings in the hour. His partner, a turbaned Turk, holds an oud, a lute-like Middle Eastern stringed instrument. On the left side is the figure of a “miser” holding a bag of specie. His figure, which before its postwar rehabilitation might have been more readily recognized as a Jew, is paired with Vanity, preening before a golden mirror. Prague’s promotional brochures and tourist guides may attribute these figures to the moral fears and the mortal dangers of Bohemian Christians during the violence of the Wars of Religion. But a scholar of early-Modern Mediterranean state formation might consider this iconography in more prosaic terms. These masques of war and taxes, death and luxury—or what Charles Tilly (1990) would have called coercion and capital—suggest that religious classifications and confessional A. Salzmann (*) Department of History, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada e-mail:
[email protected] M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_3, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
27
28
A. Salzmann
identities played an intimate role in shaping the infrastructure of states as well as the terms of political commitment under different religious regimes. Indeed, with xenophobia and racism directed toward Europe’s new, often non-Christian citizens on the rise, the question of whether there is a peculiar moral economy of state formation—that is, whether a normative order determining the exclusion of religious minorities took shape with the rise of the Western European state from the medieval period onward (Moore 2007)—holds more than antiquarian interest. Both the anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish platforms of many parties in the new European Union Parliament and religious fundamentalisms within and outside the West have spurred new research on the topic of religion, politics, and violence that enlists sociological, anthropological, psycho-analytical, and literary theories (Pahl 2003; Asad 2003; Fassin 2005). For those like Samuel P. Huntington, who subscribe to “holistic” arguments, religious civilizations are molds containing immutable cultural and political characteristics that play out in inter-cultural contact and geopolitical rivalries (Huntington 1996; Tilly 2003:7). Although the “clash of civilizations” represents an extreme position on this spectrum, most social scientists still accord an integral place to religion in the evolution of cultural identities and political processes, including nationalism (cf. Giddens 1987:72–74; Rae 2002; Marx 2003). Indeed, few social scientists relegate religious or cultural affiliations to simply one identity among many; or, as a recent study of religious party affiliation in Turkey, to a conservative, political posturing that serves to consolidate the “politics of reputation” (cf. Toprak et al. 2009; Tilly 2005b:17). Yet, the presentist focus of many social scientific studies contributes to a rather reductionist approach to religion and the blurring of important distinctions in historical political practices and policies that led to the modern state. Historically, discrimination on the basis of religious affiliation was widespread on both sides of the Mediterranean. Both Muslim Middle Eastern and Latin Christian states slaughtered enemies of different faiths. Religious minorities in both regions suffered institutionalized liabilities and mistreatment, as evidenced by unequal taxation, forcible conversion, loss of life, expropriation, and flight. In the early-Modern period, Catholic and Muslim states uprooted, relocated, and confined religious minorities within cities and lands under their sovereignty; after 1500, they engaged in long intra—religious, sectarian wars that are still reflected in the borders of modern political maps. But the emerging territorial system of Latin Christendom did something that their neighbors, including Christian Byzantium (cf. Bowman 2006) and more importantly, the Muslim Middle East, to the south and east did not: from the late thirteenth century to the eighteenth century, they repeatedly expelled their non-Christian subjects en masse from their borders (cf. Kedar 1996). If the social scientific literature offers little to explain this peculiar facet of the Western European past, it may also owe to the way that the question of relations between state and religion have been posed. Instead of asking why Latin Christian Europe persecuted its religious minorities and expelled them with such regularity, perhaps we should ask why their contemporaries across the Mediterranean, especially the religiously and ethnically heterogeneous Muslim societies of the Middle East, from the seventh century Umayyads to the seventeenth century Ottomans, did not treat their Christian and Jewish subjects in a similar fashion? Can the difference between these regional regimes be explained by reference to legal status, religious doctrine, and culture alone?
Is there a moral economy of state formation
29
(Kymlicka 1985; Cohen 1994) Or did the very process of state formation in the pre-Modern Muslim Middle East shape a distinctive form of accommodation that allowed religious majorities and minorities to coexist without recurrent mass murder and mass expulsion? In approaching the question of Western Europe’s historic exclusion and the Middle East’s historic inclusion in terms of a “moral economy” (Thompson 1971), my goal is twofold: to problematize the terminology of investigation and to prod scholarly reflection on inter-cultural and inter-religious violence toward a new conceptual terrain. Focusing on the normative grid or framework governing unequal treatment prevents reduction of norms and practices to often reified notions of religious belief—its doctrines, dogmas and interpretations (Cornell 2008). The absence of a common category of analysis, one that explicitly addresses the norms governing negotiations between ruler and ruled also tends to reinforce assumptions that political developments east and west were incommensurate and hence, remain incomparable. Rather than attributing Western European intolerance to Christian theology or cultural traditions (cf. Kaplan 2007) or ascribing Muslim “tolerance” to a legal convention owing to the Qur’anic concept of “ahl el-dhimma” (that protected communities had the right to practice their religion so long as they paid tribute to the Muslim state), a common unit of analysis permits us to focus on the actual hierarchies of privilege and patterns of redistribution as they affected religiouslydifferentiated groups. Beyond offering a new category for comparative analysis, the proposition that a moral economy may have been a by-product of state formation itself, and thus concomitant with inter-group negotiations and regime integration, challenges researchers to account for religious discrimination as a facet of long-term statesociety relationships. If E. P. Thompson’s use of the term (1971) to account for the economic claims of workers in early-Modern England is worthy of further discussion, a new model for framing and formalizing the role of the moral economy is not possible without a more analytical grasp of political processes and social structure. Without discarding discursive evidence and other narrative references to norms, this article departs from Charles Tilly’s perspectives on state formation and regime integration: a comparative approach to state formation, in particular, the dialectic of coercion and capital (Tilly 1990) and reflections on “trust networks” as critical parties in regime-building as well as contentious and non-contentious politics (Tilly 2005a, b, 2006), inform our approach. Medieval and early-Modern Middle East historiography on state formation and non-Muslim communities offers a unique opportunity to map out in the most general terms the variables that will also help us investigate Latin Europe’s peculiar history comparatively. The longue durée of Middle Eastern state formation highlights the importance of foundational compacts or commitments between subjects and states, networks and regimes. It also points to the way that such commitments structured, preserved, or were undermined by the “infrastructural power” (Mann 1986), that is, the institutional capacity of states and changing socio-economic conditions. Multireligious societies endured in the pre-Modern Middle East, this article maintains, because the relative institutional capacity of early regimes with respect to the resources (demographic, technical, and economic) of non-believers led to commitments that brought minorities directly into the polity and shaped the state’s
30
A. Salzmann
institutions and property relationships. From this perspective, the “moral economy” should not be seen as independent variable, but as the cumulative effect of capacity (institutions of administration, mediation and mobilization of resources) and capital (general economic conditions, levels of urbanization, and community resources) that shaped the terms under which regimes and networks negotiated power, participation and inclusion. These dimensions of Middle Eastern state formation help explain the continued inequality and subordination of their non-Muslim subjects as a group, without the unsustainable exploitation and ultimately rejection en masse (deportation and liquidation/general redistribution of their remaining resources) of Jews and Muslims that became one of the hallmarks of regime integration in late-Medieval and early-Modern Western European territorial states.
Capacity, capital, and commitment: the foundations of a moral economy? By opening a discussion concerning the treatment of Medieval and early-Modern religious minorities with a concept like “moral economy,” this article acknowledges the contested legacy of E. P. Thompson’s inquiry into the forms of solidarity and notions of equity informing protest in the pre-Modern period (Thompson 1993; Randall and Charlesworth 2000). Thompson’s claims on this concept were never exclusive (cf. Scott 2000, 2005). Moreover, as Tilly pointed out, Thompson was inconsistent in his own usage (Tilly 2000). On the one hand, he referred to the moral economy of groups such as the mentalité of the English working classes that he attempted to document between the eighteenth and nineteenth Centuries. And on the other hand, in a manner that more closely approximates this article’s usage, Thompson cited it as shorthand for an unwritten constitution, or “paternalistic ethos” that guided political interactions between elites and subalterns (Tilly 1995:7–36). Yet, Thompson’s inconsistencies may be less important than his recognition that structural accounts of social and political change tend to ignore or misplace normative frameworks (by freighting notions like “religion” or “tradition” with much of their ideational content). Attributing these forms of negotiation of power and inequality to a generic paternalism, or as Tilly (2000) described it, to “traditional rights and customs” does not resolve this problem; indeed, contextual and transactional analyses should specify what tradition meant as well as when and where customs carried the force of rights (claims). Given the variances of time, place, and circumstance, no generic Gemeinschaft suffices to explain principles by which power, goods, and resources were distributed. (Arnold 2001). Whether we consider the moral economy as bonds of social solidarity or as the underlying, often unspoken, understanding between subordinates and elites, what Tilly would call “commitment” between groups and organizations (Goodin and Tilly 2006:429; Tilly 2005b:31, 50–51) requires that we account for its specificity and to the extent possible, explain its continuity and change. Tilly did not entirely avoid these questions. In his essay Trust and Rule (2005b), he may have circumvented questions of commitment. However, in postulating a meta-theoretical approach to politically significant groupings or networks and the resources that enabled them to bargain for inclusion in regimes, he unpacked new pieces of a complex puzzle. Avoiding Thompson’s self-limiting category of class, he
Is there a moral economy of state formation
31
distinguished between types of networks on the basis of investments: kinship, shared risks, long term goals, and penalties of membership built trust into networks. (Tilly 2005b:12) Rather than accepting the declaration of a belief, emotion, or central doctrine as the defining feature of these groupings, he attempted to document the internal cohesion, collective resources, and investments by describing form, connections, and membership—particularly those features that gave these groups endurance and made them prey to or partners in regimes, and hence, state formation processes. Persecuted religious groups, as well as merchant companies or credit unions, served as the paradigmatic examples of “trust networks.” Although Tilly assumed the existence of commitment among members of a network without examining the specificities of belief, his theoretical argument to some degree hinged on the larger sense of commitment as an underlying set of norms connecting networks to regimes and to other social sites. The foundational agreement that united parties and participants in regimes was not entirely malleable; it could be the source of rivalry between trust networks (such as dissidents from established churches or ideologies) and a decisive barrier to integration within regimes. This larger sense of the meaning of commitment brings us beyond a model that relies solely on cost calculation or political opportunity, but toward an examination of the bargains struck in political processes, the trust networks that are included and excluded, and relevance of their ties to other organizations. It seems appropriate to approach the sense and reference of commitment among social sites, networks, and regimes not simply as an unwitting cognate to Thompson’s notion of the moral economy as ethos. Rather, it is a problem that demands we approach it as Tilly did in his examination of the “trust” in trust networks. That is, we should be able to document the emergence of compacts and commitments as an outgrowth of political processes—that they represent, over time, shared investments, the interests of constituent groups, and terms of alliances. Indeed, it is the heavy weight of past commitments and the entrenched relationships that sustains them and makes them so difficult to transform. A successful revolution, as Tilly discussed with respect to the relationship between trust networks and the French Revolution (2005b), necessarily eliminates competing networks in order to create new institutions and new social norms (cum democratic ideals and republican constitutions.) However remains to be explained how the commitments of religiously-identified regimes first emerged and why they constrained bargains among networks, social sites, and entire populations for centuries. It is here that recent research in early-Modern Middle Eastern history might offer some guidance. Given the abundance of Ottoman administrative documents, scholars have given considerable thought to the relationship between forms of “commitment” and institutional change. Linda Darling has reexamined narratives about just rule, in particular the so-called “circle of justice,” a trope concerning the need for equitable rule that is widely cited in pre-Modern political literature in both Muslim and nonMuslim West Asia and North Africa (Darling 2002, 2007). Ascribed to classic Greek philosophy at times, the extended metaphor stresses the presumed mutuality of interests that sustain a polity: subjects pay the taxes that provide salaries for the soldiers and bureaucrats who protect them while the sovereign assures equitable treatment of all through mediation, enforcement of law, and redress. Given her research on sixteenth and
32
A. Salzmann
seventeenth-century Ottoman practices, Darling’s appreciation of the trope as a shared vocabulary between ruler and ruled does not stop at the discursive level: she demonstrates how this peculiar form of political “commitment” was reflected in and refracted through revenue collection and resource distribution (Darling 1996). Bringing her research on commitment and capacity together with Tilly’s emphasis on the negotiation between trust networks and regimes may furnish an analytical approach to the formation and endurance of “moral economies” over the longue durée of state formation. With respect to the historical relations between Muslim states and their non-Muslim subjects, contemporary narrative is also useful because it guides us to focus on certain aspects of the historical interaction between important trust networks and early state formation. For example, the contents of the “Pact of Umar,” one of the foundational texts upon which both non-Muslim demands and Muslim legal disputation concerning minority religious rights has been based, provides important clues about the nature of this commitment. The “pact” traditionally refers to the special dispensation granted the Christians of Palestine that was purported concluded between the second caliph, ‘Umar ibn Khattab (d. 644) and the patriarch of Jerusalem in the mid-Seventh Century CE/ First Century AH, that was later extended to all the “peoples of the book.” (Tritton 1930). In its various renditions, it extrapolates from a limited number of Qur’anic passages bearing on the subject to construct an administrative model: in exchange for tribute (special taxation, sumptuary codes, restrictions on the public expression of religion, and prohibitions on the use of weapons and other acts of deference to the majority) religious minorities were assured of a place within the polity, protection of their lives and property, and rights to practice their faiths. Recent research on the first half-century of Islamic rule reveals that Muslim administrative and fiscal policies lacked consistent application. In fact, the codification of many administrative laws, including those affecting non-Muslims, only took place during the early Abbasid period, that is, during the eighth and ninth centuries (Donner 2005; Wilfong 1998; Dennett 1950). Nevertheless, the survival and replication of the “pact” in multiple manuscripts, from Medieval Egypt to early-Modern Syria, in both Muslim and non-Muslim traditions remains meaningful in and of itself (Cohen 1999). It reminds us that for more than a 100 years, even as Islamic institutions took shape, a new state came to terms with a majority population of non-believers (Bulliet 1979). Whatever accommodation that was reached necessarily took into account the relative bargaining power (and support) of non-Muslim trust networks and especially the large, literate, and urbanized communities of Christians, Zoroastrians, and Jews in Syria, Egypt, and Iraq (Donner 1981; Robinson 2000; Choksy 1997). No less importantly, because regime integration, state formation, and formation of a new religious organization were coeval events, any compromise struck by non-believers with the “state” was coextensive with the early Muslim community as a whole. However the interpretation and application of the “pact” may have differed among Muslim states, it set forth the basic terms of indemnities and the beneficiaries. The direction and form of taxation, notably the graduated cash poll taxes (jizya) levelled on minority wealth paralleled zakat (the tithe paid by Muslims), both of which contributed, in theory, to the commonweal (bayt al-mal) rather than the privy purse of caliphs or sultans. By the ninth century, Hanafi jurists determined that conquered non-Muslim lands also constituted public resources. Christian tenants
Is there a moral economy of state formation
33
who remained on the land paid their rent or taxes to Muslim soldiers who became the collection agents of such tax grants (iqta); as such non-Muslim resources were broadly distributed among the dominant religious group. (Cahen 1977) Although some of these conventions may have had precursors in Sassanid and late-Roman practices (Rabie 1972), other demands on non-Muslim communities reflected the commercial orientation of the Meccan elite and “court societies” engaged in conspicuous consumption (Richards 1970; Rodinson 1978). A growing corpus of Islamic law on contract and partnership, emerged along with a tiered tariff system that accorded Muslim traders a fiscal advantage over non-Muslims, albeit privileging both groups economically with respect to foreign merchants (Goitein 1960; AmitaiPreiss and Morgan 1999). Without any pretense of doing historical or analytic justice to a millennium of complex and interdependent changes in Middle Eastern law, society, and political economy or neglecting notorious episodes of anti-minority persecutions under Muslim rule during the late-Middle Ages (particularly in North Africa and Iberia), this schematic approach highlights certain features that may have sustained the status of non-Muslim communities in Middle Eastern states long after Islam became the majority faith. Despite institutionalized discrimination, relative freedom to participate in other social, cultural, and economic activities fostered the articulation of multiple social ties and shared identities (Cohen 1982a, b; Greene 2000). Although some early-Modern North African cities did have minority quarters, such as the Jewish mellah of Marakesh (Gottreich 2003), residential quarters in eastern Mediterranean cities after the Ottoman conquest of early sixteenth century became more religiously diverse. In part, this was the product of policies of forced, internal relocation of populations, including Iberian Jewish refugees and Muslim tribes. The growing burden of cash taxation (including the jizya) on Ottoman Jews and Christians may have also driven urbanization (Inalcık 1993). At the same time as conditions for minorities deteriorated in the West, emerging regimes like the Ottoman not only struck new bargains with large, affluent, and literate Christian and Jewish populations but also articulated a new relationship between mosque and state. Inspired by Seljuk antecedents, the Ottoman judicial hierarchy or ilmiye curbed the autonomy of Muslim scholars and lawyers (Zilfi 2006). Perhaps more consequential for quotidian inter-faith relations was the profound transformation of Muslim piety and religious practice following the Mongol invasions. Mystical networks, the Sufi tariqat, formed around spiritual guides who eschewed the legalism of the Baghdadi schools (Karamustafa 1994; Meri 2002) A syncretistic “middle ground” of belief was given physical expression in an infrastructure of shrines and meeting halls across the Balkans and the Black Sea region (Barkan 1942; Lowry 2008). To summarize the relevant points: if we are to make any sense of an overarching normative grid, a “moral economy,” that took shape along with state formation, it must be considered the result of foundational relationships between parties (trust networks) and early regimes. Their negotiations and resolutions were determined by the relative resources or capital of politically significant religious communities and the relative capacity of incipient states. Early commitments were consequential and durable to the extent a): that they patterned state infrastructure and property relations (by locking in subordination while minimizing points of social and political friction)
34
A. Salzmann
and b): that economic conditions overall allowed religious minorities to renew resources and thus, renegotiate the terms of commitment from one regime to the next. Middle Eastern state formation of the Medieval and early-Modern period reproduced forms of legal and social inequality without the extremes of exclusivity found in the states of the contemporary Latin West.
Distrust and rule: late state formation, competing networks, and offshore capacity This schematic, long term view of the history of minorities and state formation of the pre-Modern Middle East certainly runs counter to the more recent historiography of pre-Modern inter-faith relations in Western Europe which has adopted more microhistorical and ethnographic approaches (cf. Nirenburg 1998). Although this scholarship wisely cautions against unwarranted generalizations and teleological extrapolations (cf. Netanyahu 1992), the weight of research continues to support the thesis of R. I. Moore’s classic essay, the “Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western European, 950–1250 (first edition, 1987).” State formation in Latin Christendom from the first millennium onward was the crucible in which institutionalized distrust was put to the service of power. Violence against lepers, heretics, and religious minorities spurred the institutionalization of new organizations of surveillance, coercion, and control, from the inquisition to the crusade and the ghetto. Marginalized in Pauline and Augustinian theology or targets of religious wars, Jews and Muslims living under Christian rule became victims of mob violence and institutionalized persecution by the majority religious community, churchmen, and the emerging state. Yet, a moral economic perspective highlights another set of factors that may have been decisive in destabilizing minority integration in medieval Christian society. Long before the rise of territorial polities, Rome’s former imperial hinterland including the peoples north of the Pyrenees and west of the Elbe underwent a cultural colonization by monks and priests (Bartlett 1993). Distance from competing intellectual networks of the Mediterranean preserved the Latin clergy’s monopoly over literacy and education. It also assured them of a central role in developing political structures and integration in the feudal economic order. But princes came to view this dependency on the church differently. Charlemagne’s invitation to Jewish settlement in his realms secured sources of luxury commodities and new cash revenues; this “trust network” also offered the keys to greater institutional autonomy from the church. Although this arrangement between a minority religious trust network and Carolingian princes proved, at least initially, mutually beneficial, Jews operated at an inherent disadvantage: they remained late arrivals in a political setting in which ideologically and institutionally dominant networks like the Christian clergy had established the terms of commitment between ruler and ruled (Blumenkranz 2006; Chazen 2007). Legally, too, Jewish status was tenuous: not subjects of a state, they were the personal “chattel” of a lord (Moore 2000:154). Associated with the premier territorial power, they were resented by lesser lords, who as in the case of thirteenth century England, feared that the king would use his feudal claim over his serfs’ property to call in debts and take over collateral. Given their role in the extension of
Is there a moral economy of state formation
35
state power and the collection of taxes, as well as their association with the cash economy, Jews furnished a convenient, confessional masque over a more intrusive state apparatus (Moore 2000:156). If heresies like Cathars prompted the institutionalization of violence and the categorization of difference in the Crusades and the Medieval Inquisition, (Hamilton 1999), it was Jewish networks whose administrative skills posed the greater long term challenge to clerical influence in temporal authority (Moore 2007:143). It was the crusades against Islam that unleashed a torrent of violence against the Franco-Jewish communities of the Rhineland. Although the murder and plunder carried out by predatory armies and mobs led by anti-Jewish preachers has been well documented (Chazen 1987; Cohen 1982a, b), the impact of these incursions into the Mediterranean undermined the structural conditions that had supported minority communities in Latin Christendom. In contrast to Iberia’s “clergy of the sword” who renewed claims on regimes in Christian Spain during and after the conquest of al-Andalus, the French and English princes who participated in the overseas crusades actually wrested greater autonomy from the church and found replacements for their minority clients. Defense of the “true faith” entitled noblemen to church indulgences, justified the imposition of the new taxes by Louis of France (1214–1270) (Jordan 1979), and permitted lords to renegotiate debts with Jewish bankers (Lasker 1999:28). Returning crusader nobility retrieved new techniques of statecraft (Lopez 1955). The Normans of Sicily built their states upon the preexisting foundations of Arab rule (Mathew 1992). Not only did the crusades against Islam enhance the capacity of these states, but they also compromised the privileged access to markets that Jewish merchants had enjoyed (cf. Tilly 2003:10). Crusader plantations in Cyprus and Palestine produced valuable commodities like sugar cane; Christian raids on Muslim shipping yielded slaves and ransom for captives (Prawer 1972; Verlinden 1970). The merchants of Venice commandeered the armies of the Fourth Crusade (1202–1204) to advance their interests in the Eastern trade. With Latin rule established in Constantinople and Venetian domination of the entrance to the Black Sea, Genoese merchants turned westward, replacing Jewish bankers in England, France, and, later, Spain. By the early thirteenth century, the crusades had realigned the protection system between territorial states and Mediterranean merchants (Abu-Lughod 1991). Although the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) called upon Christian rulers to segregate Muslims and Jews in city quarters and to severely restrict their occupations, canon law merely sanctified earlier princely decrees (Chazen 2007:146). Mob violence, segregation, new financial demands, limited occupational opportunities, as well as the reorganization of Mediterranean trade networks stripped Jewish communities of their livelihood. Long before their deportation in 1290 and 1492 respectively, the Jews of England (Chazen 2007:125; Mundill 1998) and the Jewish subjects of Castile and Aragon (Kamen 1988:33) had been impoverished by these conditions. The 1306, deportation of French Jews provided a pretext to seize remaining assets; subsequent threats of exile or the promise of return became a means of extorting money. Expulsion provided a windfall to local Christians, when with the decrees of 1492 and 1609, Spain’s Jews and Muslims were forced to liquidate their property in haste. In the Italian cities, the threat of exile hung over refugees: the charters governing the Venetian ghetto were premised on residence of
36
A. Salzmann
limited duration; improvement or deterioration in their terms owed to community wealth and the interests of the oligarchic state (Ravid 2002). Religious stigma, economic distress, pandemics, and cultural distrust hardened popular attitudes toward Jews and Muslims during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Nevertheless, expulsion of minorities remained a “royal prerogative” (Stow 2005:217). In the multi-sided political struggles in the realms of the Holy Roman Empire, princes deported Jews from Austria (1420–21) and Bavaria (1442– 50); burgers and prelates expelled them from Cologne (1424); Salzburg (1498), and Reginsburg (1519). King Manuel I’s 1497 ultimatum of conversion or exile to Portugal’s Jews and Muslims, which fulfilled Queen Isabella of Castile’s prenuptial condition for the betrothal of their children, epitomized the use of expulsion as a repertoire of regime integration. Although Spanish treatment of its religious minorities has often been considered exceptional and excessive even by the standards of its neighbors, the treatment of the Iberian Jews under the rule of the united kingdom of Castile and Aragon, and later under the Spanish Habsburgs, conformed in large measure to the precedents established north of the Pyrenees. What distinguished the Iberian pattern from the rest of Latin Europe was the use of forced, mass conversion, deemed irreversible for the Jews of 1390s and for the Muslims of the 1520s, that allowed elites to retain the resources and labor of large minority populations. Yet conversion complicated relations between the aristocracy and the Old Christian clergy who bitterly opposed converso assumption of ecclesiastical and government offices (Kamen 1965). They leveraged intermarriage with New Christians against the “reputation” of the nobility. Nonetheless, the spoils of the victims of the new inquisitions, founded in the 1480s in Castile and Aragon, which initially targeted Jewish conversos, especially those affiliated with the state, (Rawlings 2006:68–69), but that after 1540 overwhelmingly prosecuted Muslims (Contreras and Henningsen 1986; Haliczer 1990), flowed into both the inquisition administration and state coffers. It is Catholic Spain’s policies toward its Muslim populations that represents a notable departure from earlier, European patterns of minority religious expulsion. Given the size of these communities, varied occupations (from silk merchants and soldiers to tenant farmers), and multiple ties to Christian societies, as well as to foreign powers (Protestant princes and sultans), Muslims possessed greater social and economic resilience than the Jews before 1492 or the Jewish conversos. Despite concession of a writ of tolerance from the United Kingdom to Grenada’s Muslim elites after the conquest, the suppression of Islam across the peninsula over a quarter century paralleled the Spanish Habsburg state’s protracted territorial integration. Yet it was not merely a different cult that challenged Christian rule, but the sheer diversity of Muslim societies that mirrored the fissured infrastructure of a state still compromised by a potent provincial nobility and conflicting jurisdictions. It would take nearly a century of mob violence, catechization campaigns, rebellion, internal exile, and branding via the “violent rituals” (Tilly 2003:81) of the inquisition and imperial legislation, such as Philip II’s infamous 1567 decree that criminalized dress, cuisine, burial rites and language, to impose a unified legal identity (morisco) on Iberian Muslims (Harvey 1992:224). Andrew Hess argued that the expulsion of the moriscos—the largest deportation of a religious minority in Europe’s early modern history—was an inevitable
Is there a moral economy of state formation
37
consequence of their real or imagined collaboration with Spain’s Muslim foes (Hess 1978). Yet its occurrence almost a century after this population’s formal conversion to the dominant faith sets off this event from expulsions from those that had preceded it. Post-Tridentine clergy and certain members of the aristocracy had waged a concerted campaign to forge a consensus of the necessity to dispatch New Christians and their baptized children toward “infidel” states (Ehlers 2006). In the end, domestic worries may have been at least equal to fears of foreign intervention. The Royal Council issued the deportation decree in 1609 on the same day that it concluded the 12 Years’ Truce with the Dutch estates. The deportation began with the hardworking morisco tenant-farmers of the Aragonese and Valencian nobility. The deployment of an army and bureaucracy necessary to carry out the order was a monumental demonstration of state power: after clerks duly registered the possessions of thousands of deportees, over the course of 5 years, and most within the first two, soldiers marched 300,000 to 330,000 moriscos to the coastline.
Conclusion: expulsion as moral economy or repertoire of regime integration? This article began with two questions: how might social scientific and historic research benefit from addressing discrimination and violence against religious minorities in the pre-Modern period in terms of the moral economy that emerged with state formation processes? Can such an approach help us to compare the important differences in the treatment of religious minorities among pre-modern state systems and especially Latin Christendom’s recurrent tendency to expel its Jewish and Muslim communities? In attempting to provide an answer to the second question, this article made an unorthodox methodological decision: by turning the question around and, putting aside the often legalistic or doctrinal explanations for the relative inclusiveness of the pre-Modern Middle East, we asked why Muslim regimes did not expel their nonMuslim subjects. Using discursive, socio-political, and institutional lenses through which to decipher the impact of the historic “commitment” between religious minorities and religious regimes, the record suggests that despite substantial restrictions and liabilities, Christians and Jews in the medieval and early-Modern Middle East were able to recover sufficient resources to renew their subordinate but well integrated place in the social and political order. These insights helped to refocus our attention on other factors involved in state formation that may have accounted for why religious minorities fared so differently in the emerging political order of Latin Europe. Key differences emerge. First, unlike the coeval evolution of state and religious institutions in the Muslim Middle East, limited state capacity in Western Europe allowed the Latin clergy to play a critical and enduring role in feudal polities. Second, while the non-Muslims who formed the majority of the population when caliphal dynasties were established were able to negotiate the terms of inclusion (commitment) within first Muslim polity, religious minorities in the West, notably the Franco-German Jewish communities, entered after such commitments were made and at the discretion of princes. Third, while religious minorities in the late medieval and early modern Middle East continued to practice a wide range of occupations and
38
A. Salzmann
interact closely with Muslims, increased restrictions on the residence and occupation of the Jews and Muslims in the Latin West coupled with the reorganization of markets and state finance during and after the anti-Islamic crusades sped social marginalization and undermined sectoral dominance. Finally, as the Ottoman emirs emerged from Anatolia and struck new compacts with large Christian populations in the early fourteenth century, Latin Christian princes and burgers had begun expelling religious minorities in order to extort resources, assert territorial sovereignty, or facilitate regime integration. Having established these comparisons between the treatment of religious minorities in the pre-Modern Middle East and Western Europe in terms of capacity, capital, and commitment, the initial question remains: Do these patterns of treating religious minorities in the context of state formation, demand recognition of the specificities of these “moral economies” as a contingent or as an independent variable? On the one hand, Tilly’s approach to state formation and political processes provides an analytical framework with which to document the interactive, contextual, and organizational facets of what might otherwise be attributed to norms, doctrines, prejudices, and cultural stances. On the other hand, even taking into account relative state capacity, minority resources, and formative commitments does not fully explain the persistence of such policies in anomalous situations. Did the Habsburg decision to expel the prosperous morisco population from Spain a century after their conversion to Catholicism owe to a moral imperative alone? Perhaps. It is not only the Habsburg persecution and expulsion of the moriscos, but also the Ottoman response to it that suggests that quite disparate moral economies prevailed within the Mediterranean throughout the early-Modern period (Salzmann 2008). As the Spanish crown imposed Catholicism throughout its realms in the 1520s, Iberian Muslims directed pleas for assistance to the southern Mediterranean (Harvey 1992: 208; Van Koningsveld and Wiegers 1999). Facing persecution and the prospect of deportation, they requested that the Ottoman sultan threaten to retaliate in kind by expelling the Christians of newly conquered Syria. While Ottoman authorities followed the plight of Spain’s Muslims closely, dispatching soldiers to assist in the ill-fated second revolt of the Alpujarras (1568–70) and hiring Venetian vessels to transport the morisco exiles of 1609–1614, there is no record that the imperial divan ever contemplated expulsion as a policy option (Temimi 1989). Instead, they advised their beleaguered co-religionists to join forces with the Protestants of the Low Countries who were also fighting the tyranny of the Catholic emperor (Harvey 2005).
Acknowledgments The author thanks Linda Darling, Michael Hanagan, and Adnan Husain for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
References Abu-Lughod, J. L. (1991). Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Amitai-Preiss, R., & Morgan, D. O. (Eds.). (1999). The Mongol Empire and its legacy. Leiden: Brill. Arnold, T. C. (2001). Rethinking moral economy. The American Political Science Review, 95, 85–95.
Is there a moral economy of state formation
39
Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Barkan, Ö. L. (1942). Les fondations pieuses comme méthode de peuplement et de colonisation. Les dervisches colonisateurs de l’époque des invasions et les convents (zaviye). Vakıflar Dergisi’nin Yabancı Dil Bölümü, 2, 59–65. Bartlett, R. (1993). The making of Europe: Conquest, colonization and cultural change, 950–1350. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Blumenkranz, B. (2006). Juifs et chrétiens dans le monde occidental, 430–1096. Paris: Louvain. Bowman, S. (2006). Jews in Byzantium. In S. T. Katz (Ed.), The Cambridge history of Judaism. The late Roman-Rabbinic period (vol.4 ch.39). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bulliet, R. (1979). Conversion to Islam in the Medieval period: An essay in quantitative history. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cahen, C. (1977). Les peuples musulmans dans l’histoire médiévale. Damascus: Institut Études arabes de Damas. Chazen, R. (1987). European Jewry and the First Crusade. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chazen, R. (2007). The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom, 1000–1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Choksy, J. K. (1997). Conflict and cooperation, Zoroastrian subalterns and Muslim elites in Medieval Iranian society. New York: Columbia University Press. Cohen, M. R. (1994). Under crescent and cross, the Jews in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cohen, M. R. (1999). What was the pact of ‘Umar’? A literary-historical study. Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, 23, 100–157. Cohen, A. (1982a). On the realities of the Millet System: Jerusalem in the 16th century. In B. Braude & B. Lewis (Eds.), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, (vol. 2, 7–14). New York: Holmes & Meier. 2 vols. Cohen, J. (1982b). The Friars and the Jews. The evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Contreras, J., & Henningsen, G. (1986). Four-four thousand cases of the Spanish inqusition (1540–1700). Analysis of an historical database. In G. Henningsen & J. Tedeschi (Eds.), The inquisition in early modern Europe: Studies in sources and methods (pp. 100–129). Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Cornell, V. J. (2008). Theologies of difference and ideologies of intolerance in Islam. Religious tolerance in world religions west (pp. 274–296). Conshohocken: Templeton Foundation. Darling, L. (1996). Revenue-raising and legitimacy: Tax collection and finance administration in the Ottoman Empire, 1560–1660. Leiden: Brill. Darling, L. (2002). ‘Do justice, do justice, for that is paradise’: Middle Eastern advice for Indian Muslim rulers. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 22, 3–19. Darling, L. (2007). Islamic empires, the Ottoman Empire and the circle of justice. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 49, 329–357. Dennett, D. C. (1950). Conversion and the poll tax in early Islam. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Donner, F. M. (1981). The early Islamic conquests. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Donner, F. M. (2005). The Islamic conquests. In Y. M. Choueiri (Ed.), A companion to the history of the Middle East (pp. 28–50). Hoboken: Wiley. Ehlers, B. (2006). Between Christians and Moriscos: Juan de Ribera and religious reform in Valencia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fassin, D. (2005). Compassion and repression: the moral economy of immigration policies in France. Cultural Anthropology, 20, 362–387. Giddens, A. (1987). The nation-state and violence: Vol. 2 a contemporary critique of historical materialism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Goodin, R. E., & Tilly, C. (2006). Oxford handbook of contextual political analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goitein, S. N. (1960). The unity of the Mediterranean world in the ‘Middle’ Middle Ages. Studia Islamica, 12, 29–42. Gottreich, E. (2003). On the origins of the Mellah of Marrakesh, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 35, 287–305. Greene, M. (2000). A shared world: Christians and Muslims in the early modern Mediterranean. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Haliczer, S. (1990). Inquisition and society in the Kingdom of Valencia, 1478–1834. Berkeley: University of California Press.
40
A. Salzmann
Hamilton, B. (1999). The Albigensian Crusade and heresy. In D. Abulafia (Ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History c.1198-c.1300 vol. 5 (pp. 164–181). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harvey, L. P. (1992). The political, social and cultural history of the Moriscos. In S. K. Jayyusi & M. Marín (Eds.), The legacy of Muslim Spain. Leiden: Brill. Harvey, L. P. (2005). Muslims in Spain, 1500–1614. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hess, A. C. (1978). The Moriscos: An Ottoman fifth column in sixteenth century Spain, American Historical Review, vol. 74 (pp. 1–25). Huntington, S. P. (1996). The clash of civilizations and the remaking World Order. New York. Inalcık, H. (1993). “Osmanlilar’da Cizye.” Turkiye Diyanet Vakfi: Islam Ansiklopedisi, vol. 8 (pp. 45–48). Istanbul: Turkiye Diyanet Vakfi. 35 vols. (1988–2008). Jordan, W. C. (1979). Louis IX and the challenge of the crusades: A study in rulership. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kamen, H. (1965). The Spanish inquisition. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Kamen, H. (1988). The Mediterranean and the expulsion of Spanish Jews in 1492. Past and Present, 46, 30–55. Kaplan, B. J. (2007). Divided by faith: Religious conflict and the practice of toleration in early modern Europe. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Karamustafa, A. T. (1994). God’s unruly friends: Dervish groups in the Islamic later middle period, 1200–1550. Salt Lake: University of Utah Press. Kedar, B. Z. (1996). Expulsion as an Issue of World History. Journal of World History, 7, 165–180. Kymlicka, W. (1985). Multicultural citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lasker, D. J. (1999). The impact of the Crusades on the Jewish-Christian debate. Jewish History, 13, 23–36. Lopez, R. S. (1955). East and West in the early Middle Ages: Economic relations. In S. del Medioevo (Ed.), Relazioni del X Congresso Internazionale di Scienze Storiche. Roma. Vol. 3 (pp. 112–163). Florence: Sansoni. Lowry, H. W. (2008). The shaping of the Ottoman Balkans, 1350–1550: The conquest, settlement & infrastructural development of Northern Greece. Istanbul: Bahçeşehir University Publications. Marx, A. W. (2003). Faith in Nation: Exclusionary origins of nationalism. New York. Mann, M. (1986). The sources of power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2 vols. Mathew, D. J. (1992). Norman Kingdom of Sicily. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meri, J. W. (2002). The Cult of the Saints among Muslims and Jews in Medieval Syria. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moore, R. I. (2007). The formation of a persecuting society: Authority, deviance in Western Europe, 950– 1250 (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Moore, R. I. (2000). The first European revolution, 970–1215. Oxford: Blackwell. Mundill, R. R. (1998). England’s Jewish solution: Experiment and expulsion 1262–1290. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Netanyahu, B. (1992). The origins of the inquisition in fifteenth century Spain. New York: Random House. Nirenburg, D. (1998). Communities of violence: Persecution of minorities in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pahl, J. (2003). Violence from religious groups. In W. Heitmeyer & J. Hagan (Eds.), International handbook of violence research (pp. 323–338). New York: Springer. Prawer, J. (1972). The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: European colonialism in the Middle Ages. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Rabie, H. (1972). The financial system of Egypt, A.H. 564–741/A.D.1169–1341. London: Oxford University Press. Rae, H. (2002). State identities and the homogenisation of peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Randall, A., & Charlesworth, A. (2000). The moral economy: Riots, markets and social conflict. In A. Randall & A. Charlesworth (Eds.), Moral economy and popular protest: Crowds, conflict and authority (pp. 1–32). London: MacMillan Press, St. Martin’s Press. Ravid, B. C. I. (2002). An Introduction to the Charters of the Jewish Merchants of Venice. In E. Horowitz, M. Orfali (Eds.), The Mediterranean and the Jews: Society, culture, and economy in early modern times (pp.203–241). Ramat Gan, Israel: 203–241. Rawlings, H. (2006). The Spanish inquisition. Oxford: Blackwell. Richards, D. S. (Ed.). (1970). Islam and the Trade of Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rodinson, M. (1978). Islam and Capitalism, trans. Brian Pearce. Austin: University of Texas Press. Robinson, C. F. (2000). Empire and elites after the Muslim conquests: The transformation of Northern Mesopotamia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Is there a moral economy of state formation
41
Salzmann, A. (2008). The moral economies of the pre-modern Mediterranean. Preliminaries to the study of cross-cultural migration during the long 16th century. In V. Costantini & M. Koller (Eds.), Living in the Ottoman ecumenical community: Essays in Honour of Suraiya Faroqhi (pp. 453–478). Leiden: Brill. Scott, J. C. (2000). The moral economy as an argument and as a fight. In A. Randall & A. Charlesworth (Eds.), Moral economy and popular protest: Crowds, conflict and authority (pp. 187–208). London: MacMillan Press, St. Martin’s Press. Scott, J. C. (2005). “Afterword” to “Moral economies, state spaces, and categorical violence.” In “Focus: Moral economies, state spaces, and categorical violence: Anthropological engagements with the work of James Scott.” American Anthropologist, n.s. 107:395–402. Stow, K. R. (2005). Expulsions: High Middle Ages. In R. S. Levy (Ed.), Antisemetism: A historical encyclopedia of prejudice and persecution (pp. 216–218). Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. Temimi, A. (1989). Le Gouvernment ottomane e le probleme morisque, Zaghouan Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Ottomanes, Morisques, de Documentation et d’Information. Tilly, C. (1990). Coercion, capital, and European States, AD 990–1992. Cambridge: Blackwell. Tilly, C. (1995). Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tilly, C. (2000). Review of Adrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth, moral economy and popular protest: crowds, conflict and authority. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 31(2), 259–260. Tilly, C. (2003). The politics of collective violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. (2005a). Identities, boundaries, and social ties. Boulder: Paradigm. Tilly, C. (2005b). Trust and rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. (2006). Regimes and repertoires. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thompson, E. P. (1971). The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century. Past & Present, 50, 76–136. Thompson, E. P. (1993). Customs in common: Studies in traditional popular culture. New York: Merlin. Toprak, B., Şener, N., Morgül, T., & Bozan, İ. (2009). Turk Türkiye’de Farklı Olmak Din ve Muhafazakârlık Ekseninde Ötekileştirilenler. Istanbul: Metis. Tritton, A. S. (1930). The Caliphs and their Non-Muslim subjects: A critical study of the covenant of ‘Umar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van Koningsveld, P. S., & Wiegers, G. A. (1999). Appel des Maures au sultan mamelouk et à son homologue de la cour ottomane: analyse de texte, contexte et arrière-plan historique au sens large. Al-Qantara, 20, 161–189. Verlinden, C. (1970). The beginnings of modern colonization: Eleven essays with an introduction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wilfong, T. (1998). The non-Muslim communities: The Christian communities. In M. W. Daly & C. F. Petry (Eds.), The Cambridge history of Egypt. Islamic Egypt, 640–1517, vol. 1 (pp. 175–197). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2 vols. Zilfi, M. C. (2006). “The Ottoman Ulema.” The Cambridge history of Turkey.Vol. 3 The later Ottoman Empire, 1603–1839 (pp. 209–225). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 4 vols. Ariel Salzmann currently holds the position of Associate Professor of Islamic and World History at Queen™s University (Canada). In addition to teaching in universities in North America between 1994 and 2000, she helped found New York University™s graduate and undergraduate program in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. Her publications address topics in the political economy of Ottoman state formation, the culture of early capitalism, the cartography of West Asia, and the history of citizenship in the Mediterranean.
Unanticipated consequences of “humanitarian intervention”: The British campaign to abolish the slave trade, 1807–1900 Marcel van der Linden
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Abstract Building on Robert Merton’s theory of unanticipated consequences of purposive action and Charles Tilly’s theory of error correction, the present article presents a stylized narrative about the British campaign to abolish the trading in African slaves, from its beginning in 1807 until the end of the nineteenth century. In the end, this campaign was largely successful, though it required error corrections that had extremely far-reaching consequences. The colonization of Africa was, to a certain extent, a second-degree unanticipated consequence. This case study suggests that three sorts of error correction can be distinguished, namely (a) measures that are taken to facilitate the effective implementation of the purposive action; (b) measures that are taken to minimize unintended consequences, after the purposive action has been carried out; and (c) new purposive actions that widen the objective and are more far-reaching than the original purposive action. We all have the tendency to interpret developments in the past more rationally than they in fact were. But historical processes that at first look “logical” and driven by necessity, at closer inspection, often seem significantly less straightforward. Even the most well thought out and carefully planned social actions are somewhat erratic if observed from nearby (Watter 1996, p. 22). Robert Merton raised an important aspect of this problem when he pointed out, in his famous article published in 1936, on the “Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Action,” that actions don’t always lead to the objectives that have been set. We do not know enough to gain a picture of all their implications; we assume, incorrectly that actions that were successful in the past, will also be successful in the future; we allow short-term evaluations to weigh more heavily than long-term concerns; we let ourselves be led by basic values that incite us to take immediate action, even though we have not considered the consequences thoroughly enough; or we rely for our actions on a forecast of what M. van der Linden (*) International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail:
[email protected] M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_4, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
43
44
M. van der Linden
will come, that influences the course of things, and by so doing, is self-defeating (Merton 1936, pp. 895–896).1 While Merton’s analysis points to the reasons why actions do not lead to the desired result, sixty years later, Charles Tilly has raised the question of the other half of the problem: how is it possible that sometimes, despite all the unanticipated consequences, purposive social action leads, nevertheless, to the desired results? “All life,” Tilly claimed, “is filled with erroneous interactions, therefore with unanticipated consequences. But life also teems with error correction and responses, sometimes almost instantaneous, to unexpected outcomes” (Tilly 1996, p. 594). Such responses to error are, says Tilly, “neither instinctual nor random; they draw on historically accumulated shared understandings, from culture. They also take place within constraining webs of previously established social relations, and, in the process, alter those webs incrementally” (Tilly 1996, p. 598). It is the combination of Mertonian unexpected outcomes and Tillyan error corrections that gives us a proper understanding of social processes, and allows us to withstand the seductive power of “ex post facto rationalization” (Tilly 1996, p. 600). The campaign: Phase I In the present article, I build on the work of Merton and Tilly, using a stylized narrative about the British campaign to abolish the slave trade. This campaign started on 25 March 1807, when the “Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade” received Royal Assent. My reconstruction stops at the end of the nineteenth century, when the British campaign had gained broad international support—support that was consolidated in 1919 with the establishment of the League of Nations and the International Labor Organization, two institutions meant to universalize the fight against trading slaves and slavery. From 1 May 1807 onwards, the “Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade” prohibited British citizens from participating in the purchase, sale, and transfer of African slaves— with the exception of ships that had left Britain before that date, and delivered slaves in the West Indies up to March 1, 1808. Just exactly what the motivation was for this Act is a matter of ongoing and passionate controversy, but it is clear that it definitely made the whole of the Atlantic slave trade illegal for British citizens, and, in that sense, it represents a real milestone in the history of human rights. This, in itself, should be both remembered, and studied critically.2 Note, that “unanticipated” and “unintended” are not exactly the same, even though these concepts are often taken to be congruent. Purposive action can have unintended, though anticipated consequences (for example, in a situation where a general undertakes a military action, although he knows that there will be “collateral damage” that, in principle, he would rather avoid), or intended but unanticipated consequences (for instance, when someone faced with a hopeless situation, does something in desperation without having any confidence at all that the action will be successful). Even the best of us sometimes lose sight of this difference. So, for example, do Tilly and Goodin (2006, p. 22 and 30), who maintain that Merton was writing about “unintended consequences.” 2 A few weeks earlier, on 2 March 1807, the US President, Thomas Jefferson, had signed the internationally much less well-known “Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves,” that determined from 1 January 1808 onwards that, “it shall not be lawful to import or bring into the United States or the territories thereof from any foreign kingdom, place, or country, any negro, mulatto, or person of color, with intent to hold, sell, or dispose of such negro, mulatto, or person of color, as a slave, or to be held to service or labor.” However, contrary to the British situation, in the United States at that time, the overseas slave trade was not so very extensive (Goldfarb 1994). Later in the century, however, it would resurface as illicit smuggling. 1
Unanticipated consequences of “humanitarian intervention”
45
The “Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade” was the pinnacle of a 20-year campaign by abolitionists, probably “the world’s first social movement” (Tilly 2004, p. 33; Tilly 2005, p. 173, 199). Already, in the first months of it being established in 1787, the committee that had played a key role in this decided that, in its campaign in the years to come, they would not target slavery as such, but only the slave trade. At a later date, Thomas Clarkson, one of the co-founders of the committee, summarized the arguments behind this decision. Two considerations turn out to have been of overriding importance. In the first place, they assumed that after the abolition of the slave trade, slaves’ living standards would improve. For, the planters and others being unable to procure more slaves from the coast of Africa, it would follow directly, whenever this great event should take place, that they must treat those better, whom they might then have. They must render marriage honourable among them. They must establish the union of one man with one wife. They must give the pregnant woman more indulgencies. They must pay more attention to the rearing of their offspring. They must work and punish the adults with less rigour (Clarkson 1808, vol. I, pp. 284–285). In the second place: They would not incur the objection that they were meddling with the property of the planters, and letting loose an irritated race of beings, who, in consequence of all the vices and infirmities, which a state of slavery entails upon those who undergo it, were unfit for their freedom. By asking the government of the country to do this, and this only, they were asking for that, which it had an indisputable right to do; namely, to regulate or abolish any of its branches of commerce; whereas it was doubtful, whether it could interfere with the management of the internal affairs of the colonies, or whether this was not wholly the province of the legislatures established there (Clarkson 1808, vol. I, pp. 286–287). From the beginning, the British State realized that abolishing the slave trade would have no effect, if Britain were the only country to do so. The other European slave-trading nations would then simply take over the British share of the trade, so that, in the end, Britain would just be helping its competitors economically, to its own disadvantage. Therefore, it was of great importance to convince France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and other slave-trading nations to stop trading too. The negotiations to achieve this objective often proceeded very laboriously. Tactics such as offering enticements were tried, for instance in 1814, by offering France “a West Indian Island or a sum of money” in exchange for immediate abolition, or by offering Spain large subsidies if it would restrict its slave trade to the area south of the equator and abolish the trade completely in 5 years time (Nelson 1942, pp. 195–196). The first symbolic success was booked when the Congress of Vienna of 1815 added an appendix to the agreement made there in which the undersigned agreed that the trade in “negro slaves” “has been seen by all just and enlightened men of all times as repugnant to principles of humanity and universal morals” (Berding 1974; Frowein 1994, p. 361). Although the practical implications of these words in Europe seemed to be limited, this declaration had a
46
M. van der Linden
deep impact on the freedom fighters in Latin America. This partly explains why a number of anticolonial governments in Latin America abolished slavery and the slave trade between 1810 and 1830 (King 1944, pp. 388–389; Corwin, 1967). After Vienna, other agreements, the purpose of which were much the same, followed (Paris 1815, Aix-la-Chapelle 1818, Verona 1822), but these did not have much effect. The other European states mainly considered it as a pretext allowing Britain to dominate the Atlantic Ocean as a kind of international policeman (Coursier 1960, p. 442; Adams 1925, pp. 609–611). There was no significant decline in the slave trade in the Atlantic region after 1807–8, and that is putting it mildly. The volume of the trade was temporarily reduced because of the Saint Domingue revolt (1791–1804) and the Napoleonic wars (1803–15), but then it revived again. During the years 1801–10, 683,000 slaves were transported across the Atlantic Ocean, during the years 1811–20 the number decreased to 599,600, but during the years 1821–30 it increased again to 694,400 (Lovejoy 2000, p. 146). At the same time, all sorts of reports reached Britain that seemed to indicate that the treatment of slaves in the Americas was getting worse. In the 1820s, veteran abolitionists published critical surveys intended to prove that slave mortality was extremely high, that slave families lived under very difficult conditions, and that religion was suffering damage. In particular, in the West Indies, the exploitation of the remaining slaves appeared to be on the increase. The price of cane sugar decreased between 1815 and 1834, after the Napoleonic Wars, which led the planters to try to maintain their profit margins by enlarging overall production. As a result, the quality of life for the slaves involved became even worse (Blackburn 1988, p. 421, 428). Despite the initial ineffectivity of the campaign, it was also rigorously continued in the years that followed. But a complementary campaign came into being at the same time, that had more radical objectives. An escalation of objectives: toward a second type of purposive action According to many abolitionists, the tactics agreed on in 1787 had obviously not worked well enough, and in their opinion, that was why it was now necessary to go a step further and work on the gradual abolition of slavery as such. From 1823 onwards, they set a new campaign in motion that appeared to be widely supported by the British public. Various factors contributed to the fact that, in 1833, an “Act for the Abolition of Slavery” was passed that, from 1 August 1834 onwards, forbade slavery in the West Indies, Cape of Good Hope, and Mauritius. One factor was that West Indian agriculture had slumped; sugar could be obtained easily from other parts of the world; and the Jamaican slave revolt of Christmas 1831 had made a great impression on the public. Trying to abolish slavery as such, marked the beginning of a new phase in the struggle. People no longer directed their efforts on the symptoms, but on the disease itself. The campaign rapidly developed its own dynamics. It spread to other parts of the Empire, especially to India (Banaji 1933, pp. 333–404), and it gained support from abolitionists in other countries, which became evident, for example, during the “World Anti-Slavery Convention” (London 1840), in which also American and French abolitionists took part (Maynard 1960). With this escalation, entirely new anticipated and unanticipated consequences arose, which, in turn, led to new error corrections. But that is another story.
Unanticipated consequences of “humanitarian intervention”
47
Table 1 The abolition of the slave trade and right-of-search treaties by various states, 1802–1862 Date
Slave trade abolished by
1802
Denmark
1807
Great Britain, United States
1813
Sweden
1814
The Netherlands
1815
Portgual (north of the equator)
1817
Spain (north of the equator)
Portugal, Spain
1818
France
The Netherlands
1820
Spain
1824 1830
Right-of-search treaty with Great Britain, made by
Sweden Brazil, Portugal
1831–33
France
1833–39
Denmark, the Hanse towns
1841
Austria, Prussia, Russia (Quintuple Treaty)
1844
Texas
1845
Belgium
1862
United States
W.E.B. DuBois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America 1638–1870 (1896), in: Dubois, Writings (The Library of America, DuBois 1986), p. 145. (Corrected).
The campaign: Phase II Despite its initial difficulties, the campaign gradually gained impetus. In 1839, Pope Gregory XVI published his apostolistic letter In Supremo in which he declared the slave trade from then onwards to be sinful, even though slaves who had already been sold or who were born in the New World should not be released, providing they were treated mercifully (Quinns 2004; Priesching 2008). Gradually, more and more countries also joined the British campaign, at first through bilateral agreements, and later also through multilateral ones (see Table 1). Bribes often featured in these arrangements. Spain, for example, received payments amounting to £1,134,179 up to 1853 and, in that same year, Portugal had received a total sum of £2,850,965 (Lloyd 1949: 45). In this, however, the problem arose that there was no supranational authority that could check whether the various states that had agreed to stop trading slaves were actually keeping their promises. This was why, in many of these agreements, a “right-to-search” clause was included—in fact, this was an extension into peace-time of war legislation—by which the contractual partners claimed the right to stop ships in international waters and search them for slaves.3 Formally, every state that had signed a “right-to-search” agreement with Britain could themselves search British 3
Legally, the British distinguished between the right to visit (for verification: by inspecting the ship’s papers, and establishing the nationality of the vessel) and the right to search a ship. In practice, of course, there was “little or no difference” between the two principles (Van Alstyne 1930, p. 38; Lloyd 1949, pp. 53–57). The United States did not recognize the British right to visit (Wilson 1950, p. 516).
48
M. van der Linden
ships, but in practice, it was almost always the British who searched the ships of other nations, the British navy being much more powerful than the navies of other states (Fischer 1957, p. 72). Agreements of this kind were not only made with a large number of less important countries, but, in the course of time, also with all the important slavetrading nations—the last of which to sign was the United States, in 1862. There were two kinds of right-to-search agreements. In the first kind of agreement, the crew of slave ships were tried by so-called Mixed Courts, composed of judges from both countries. Between 1819 and 1871, a number of such courts were established at Freetown, Luanda (Angola), the Cape of Good Hope, Surinam, Havana, New York, and other places. It is estimated that the courts condemned over 600 slave vessels and liberated nearly 80,000 slaves (Bethell 1966, p. 79; Emmer 1981; Martinez-Fernandez 1995). In the other kind of agreement, captured vessels were handed over to a tribunal of the country under whose flag they were captured (Adams 1925, pp. 611–612). Implementing the right-to-search meant that the Royal Navy stationed a permanent detachment off the coast of West Africa, with the task of seizing the slave ships of like-minded states. Error correction 1 According to the first right-to-search treaties, British cruisers could only capture a ship, if there were actually slaves on board. This slowed the campaign down enormously, because, as noticed by a contemporary observer: Under the defects of these treaties, the slave dealer could bring his vessel fully equipped with slave-decks, water-casks, and provisions; could land the merchandise required in his barter for slaves; could collect at leisure his complement of Negroes on the shore; could send out empty vessels to decoy away any cruiser in the offing; and could thus take measures for effecting security from chase and capture: so that all the vigilance and zeal of the preventive squadron was effectually baffled by the cunning of the slave traders (Smith 1848, pp. 6–7). Moreover, under these conditions, slave ships were tempted to unload their illegal cargo quickly, somewhere on land, or even to throw slaves into the sea. This was why, step by step, the conditions in the treaties were tightened up, first by also making ships that had actually had slaves on board liable, and later on, by including ships that had obviously had the intention to transport slaves under these conditions too. Indications for this last mentioned situation included the presence of shackles, bolts, or handcuffs, and also extraordinarily large supplies of drink and food, such as large numbers of water casks, an unusually large boiler, or an extraordinarily large amount of rice. An Equipment Clause such as this was included for the first time in a treaty with Spain, in 1835, and later in the Quintuple Treaty between Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, among others (Lloyd 1949, pp. 46–47). Error correction 2 Despite all these additional conditions, it turned out to be difficult to block the slave trade. So the idea of “legitimate trade,” first advanced during the late eighteenth century, was revived: if the African slave traders could be persuaded to develop morally acceptable and yet lucrative economic activities, then there would be no incentive any more for them to hunt and sell people. There were all sorts of products that could be grown in West Africa and sold for profit in Europe, such as palm oil, a product that was being used increasingly for making soap and
Unanticipated consequences of “humanitarian intervention”
49
lubricants. James McQueen published this idea in 1821, in A Geographical and Commercial View of Northern and Central Africa, but it took another two decades before the idea found some resonance. At the initiative of Thomas Fowell Buxton, and with the support of the British government, in 1841–42 the first attempt was made to put this idea into practice. An expedition along the river Niger would have to promote commercial agriculture in inland Africa by encouraging the local population morally and economically to grow cash crops for the European market. The expedition became a complete failure (Temperley 1991; Gallagher 1950). Many abolitionists continued to see legitimate trade as a proper method to fight the slave trade, however. The set of incentives that the British introduced in the decades after 1807 became quite varied over the course of time. In the end, it contained all the variants that Charles and Chris Tilly (1998, pp. 74–75) have identified: commitment (ideological endorsement by other European and American powers), coercion (the right to search, punishment), and compensation (bribes and legitimate trade).
The campaign’s consequences In the end, the campaign succeeded. During the period 1841–50, the number of slaves traded across the Atlantic amounted to 435,300, but by the period 1851–60, this had declined to only 179,100, and between 1861 and 1867, the number dropped even further to 52,600 (Lovejoy 2000, p. 146). The consequences of this success for the slaves who were already in the Americas appear to have been overwhelmingly positive. Indeed, just as the abolitionists had hoped, there is evidence that in many cases they were treated better. In the large majority of slave zones native slave populations began to experience endogenous growth (Klein 1999, p. 194). But there were also several unanticipated consequences. Unanticipated Consequence 1 Insofar as the British interventions were ineffective, they led to the emergence of intense competition between slave traders and abolitionists. The more sophisticated the prosecution techniques became, the more they came up against equally ingenious smuggling methods. The turn-around times of ships on the African coast were shortened, to evade the patrols operating along the coast. This led to the necessity of maintaining full-time representatives whose job it was to gather large groups of slaves over a long period of time so as to be ready for rapid loadings when the American slavers arrived. African traders or resident American business representatives now remained on the coast over many years and developed full-time facilities to accumulate slaves in large permanent pens so that their slave ships could be loaded rapidly and leave the African coast in days instead of the traditional months that had been the norm in previous years (Klein 1999, pp. 199–200). The export was also decentralized. Faster slave ships that could traverse shallower waters were built for the purpose; slaves were disguised as members of the crew; new forms of risk-financing were introduced; and foreign flags were fraudulently
50
M. van der Linden
hoisted on the slave ships to fool the abolitionists (Campbell 1989, p. 22; Klein 1999, p. 200). Unanticipated Consequence 2 There are strong indications that, as the cross-border slave trade declined, the domestic slave trade in the Americas increased. In Cuba, the United States, and Brazil, slaves were transferred from declining to rising branches of the economy. In the United States, a significant slave trade between the Lower and the Upper South developed. The more settlers moved to the South and West to grow cotton and sugar, the more the flow of slaves increased. A similar tendency could be observed in Brazil and Cuba (Anon 1946, p. 92; Herbert Klein 1971a, p. 567; Klein 1999, p. 194). Unanticipated Consequence 3 The reduced supply of slaves also had a perverse effect: the occurrence of the deliberate breeding of slaves. That there were US plantations where this happened was made very plausible by Richard Sutch (1975). Because, what other reason could there have been for having mainly female slaves living on such plantations, who each bore and raised a large number of children?4 Unanticipated Consequence 4 It was only in some cases that the growth of the “legitimate trade” led to a decrease in the slave trade. In fact, “the end of the slave trade [...] did not cause the rise of ‘legitimate trade’. This happened simultaneously and independently; and the slave trade within Africa flourished long after the export trade had ended” (Curtin 1981, p. 96). In some cases, the transition to cash-crop production (palm oil, peanuts, rubber, etc.) gave an independent income to people of slave origin, but in other cases, it was the slaves who could no longer be sold to Europeans who were used to produce the cash crops (Hopkins 1973; Klein 1971b; Law 1995; Korieh 2000; Austin 2009). In Cameroon, for example, the internal demand for slaves increased, because the production of palm oil and palm seeds was extraordinarily labour-intensive (Wirz 1972, p. 63). Similar situations arose in many other parts of West Africa (Lynn 1997, p. 52). For the Bight of Biafra, there is evidence that the trade in slaves increased right up to the 1830s, in alignment with the growth of the palm-oil trade. Moreover, “The greatest increase in the palm-oil trade did not come as a result of Africans switching to it from the slave trade, but from British ships being freed for this trade by the prohibition of their participation in the slave trade after 1807 and the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars and the 4
Deliberate slave breeding is, certainly in respect to a more distant past, very difficult to prove, although some parts of the United States were known as “breeding states” (Lloyd 1949, p. 42). Therefore, even in systematic studies of the reproduction of slaves, attention is hardly ever given to this (see, for example, Gautier 1986). However, there are strong indications that, in several places in the world, slave-holders bred slaves when they couldn’t buy any, or not enough, slaves any more. This happened, for example, in Ethiopia, even at the end of the 1920s, where the prices for slaves, due to decreasing supplies, had risen to incredible heights (Edwards 1982). In the journal of the International Labor Organization at that time, one can read about it: “In fact, just as livestock is placed in favourable conditions for breeding, so a male may be assigned to a female slave in order that their offspring may add to their owner’s property. [...] The owner has theoretically the right to dispose of the child from the moment of its birth; he can take the baby from the breast and sell it. As a matter of fact, it is clear that the owner’s interest demands that the newborn child should live under the best possible conditions, so that he may be a fine specimen if sold young or that he may develop normally and become a vigorous worker. These two reasons usually prevail to prevent the child being taken from his mother until he is weaned” (Griaule 1931, p. 194).
Unanticipated consequences of “humanitarian intervention”
51
blockade” (Northrup 1976, pp. 358–359; also Williams 1973). As late as about 1900, at least a million and perhaps even as many as 2.5 million slaves lived in the Sokoto Caliphate (in Northern Nigeria). In comparison: in 1860, approximately 4 million slaves were living in the United States (Lovejoy 1979, 1981; Lovejoy and Hogendorn 1993, p. l). Unanticipated Consequence 5 While the campaign reduced the transatlantic slave trade further (measured over the whole of the nineteenth century, the volume was 42% of the trade in the eighteenth century), the trade in slaves within Africa itself, and from Africa to Europe and Asia, not only remained intact, but increased (Lovejoy 2000, p. 142). It was typical that, even in the colony of Sierra Leone, Britain’s most important African base in the fight against slave trading, coastal slave traffic continued as before, because the demand for slaves from inland areas carried on, and even grew (Howard 2006). In the Ottoman Empire, during the nineteenth century, the demand for African slaves increased, partly because the Russian occupation of Georgia and the Caucasus brought about stagnation in the transport of slaves from those areas, and because the opening of the Suez Canal made transport from Africa much easier (Moore-Harell 1999, pp. 410–411). In addition to the trans-Atlantic routes, there were three other great trading routes, the trans-Saharan trade, the Indian Ocean trade, and the trade from Ethiopia across the Red Sea (Table 2). Unanticipated Consequence 6 In addition, it seems that especially along the western regions of Africa, slaves became also objects of conspicuous consumption. Rulers in Yorubaland, Congo, and elsewhere expressed their political authority, especially after 1850, by accumulating slaves as prestige objects (Graham 1965; Johnston 1988, p. 14; Kiernan 1972, p. 215). These sorts of slaves were sometimes offered up at funerals—this was, in fact, an older tradition, but previously there had been fewer victims to it. “The number, sex, and age of slaves killed at funerals of slave-holders depended on the wealth, influence and instructions of the deceased, their relations and social expectations” (Ojo 2005, p. 386). These ritual killings had the underlying effect of disciplining the other slaves by fear, particularly those who did plantation and similar work. As a result of diminishing exports, the number of slaves within Africa had increased. Their large numbers were a threat to their masters, especially because several recent rebellions in the Futa Jalon, the Niger Delta, and among the Table 2 Slave exports from Africa 1400–1900
1800–1900
Trans-Atlantic
10,308,213 (65.8 %)
3,466,000 (61.9 %)
Trans-Saharan
3,124,435 (19.9 %)
1,200,000 (21.4 %)
Red Sea
1,305,404 (8.3 %)
492,000 (8.8%)
Indian Ocean Total
939,504 (6.0 %)
442,000 (7.9 %)
15,677,556 (100.0 %)
5,600,000 (100.0 %)
For 1400–1900: Nunn 2008, Table II; for 1800–1900: Lovejoy 2000, Table 7.1.
52
M. van der Linden
Yoruba had occurred (Collins and Burns 2007, p. 211). King Kwaku Dua I (1833– 67) justified the practice to a missionary: “If I were to abolish human sacrifices, I should deprive myself of one of the most effectual means of keeping the people in subjection” (Collins and Burns 2007, p. 211, quoting Freeman 1844, p. 164).
Responses The abolitionists at that time were unaware of the full extent of all these consequences. Nevertheless, it was certainly obvious to them that the measures that had been taken were insufficient to achieve their aim fully. Moreover, outside the Empire, the escalation strategy (the campaign against slavery as such) was still not successful enough. Therefore they felt obliged to develop additional strategies. Two kinds of response emerged. Response 1 To expand the campaign to include East Africa and the Indian Ocean. Already since the capture of Mauritius in 1810, the British had attempted to curb the slave trade in the region, but for a long time hardly to any avail. The most important slave trade centers were the port city Kilwa and the island Zanzibar, both belonging to the Empire of Seyyid Said, the Imam of Muscat. The number of slaves exported from the region grew from roughly 6,500 in 1834 to between thirteen and fifteen thousand in the 1840s (Iliffe 1979, 42). Several agreements with Seyyid Said remained ineffective, although 1845 seemed to mark a turning point, when the sultan agreed to prohibit the slave trade within his empire, and allowed the British Navy to seize and condemn any slavers found in any seas as if they were British ships. But again, the agreement largely existed on paper. Only when Britain consolidated its rule in the Sudan and East Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, the Arab slave trade began to experience serious problems. In 1873 the sultan of Zanzibar was forced to abolish immediately his entire domestic coastal slave trade, to close down all public slave markets, and to make impossible all transit slave trade. Similar treaties were made with Egypt in 1877, the Ottoman Empire in 1880, and Persia in 1882 (Wilson 1950, pp. 520–521; Toledano 1982; Clarence-Smith 2006). But even then, the campaign was not over, since measures did not show durable effect. The Anglo-Egyptian Convention of 1877, for instance, seemed to signal a change because the Khedive Ismail was forced to appoint the Brit Charles Gordon as governor-general of the Sudan, and Gordon immediately began to suppress the slave trade. In 1879 Gordon’s troops defeated an alliance of slave traders, after which the trade decreased for a while. But a few years later the trade began to recover, since the local elite had no interest in total abolition (Moore-Harell 1998, 1999, pp. 417– 420). Only at the beginning of the twentieth century the campaign´s success became clearly visible. Response 2 A second reaction was to move the stage on which the struggle was being waged from the Atlantic Ocean to mainland Africa. If they could not succeed in ending the slave trade by taking action on the high seas, then they would have to go ashore and try to intervene directly, preferably in a peaceful manner (by convincing and by making treaties), but if necessary by force. The Niger expedition
Unanticipated consequences of “humanitarian intervention”
53
of 1841–42 had been a first attempt along these lines. Various methods were used in attempts to induce local African rulers to make the slave trade impossible. In this, they were not afraid of using force, nor did they hesitate in threatening to use it. Local rulers were put under great pressure and forced to sign treaties and accept heavy sanctions should they break these agreements. In the 1840s, more and more agreements were made with local rulers that included sanctioning clauses in addition to material incentives. For instance, it is stated in the “Treaty with the Kings and Chiefs of Bonny,” signed in 1844, that the leaders of Bonny (Bight of Biafra) agree that Great Britain was permitted to “put down the trade by force” and to carry out “severe acts of displeasure” against them and their subjects, if it turned out that the export of slaves had not been stopped completely and that the slave pens had not been burnt (Wilson 1950, p. 515). Acting on these kinds of “unequal” treaties, the British intervened, and did use force, as, for example, in 1840, when Commander Denman signed an agreement with the Chiefs of the River Gallinas, and “destroyed the property of the Spanish slave merchant there, rescuing and liberating the human chattels” (Wilson 1950, p. 514). An additional influence on African affairs was the Christian mission. Encouraged by the British authorities (and, later on, also by the authorities of other “civilized” European countries) more and more Christian missionaries gradually began to establish themselves in West and Sub-Saharan Africa. Because they were dependent on supplies from overseas, they usually began by setting up stations along the coast. The Church Missionary Society, the Wesleyan Methodists, and the Baptists were amongst the earliest of these arrivals (Jakobsson 1972, pp. 62–130), but most of the church societies arrived during the 1840s, and thereafter. Helped by the introduction of quinine, that protected them from the previously fatal fevers (Headrick 1981, pp. 58–79), they dispersed rapidly into the hinterland, with the idea of not only spreading the Christian belief, but also of helping to replace trading in slaves with legitimate trading. For the missionaries, the religious and the economic aspects were often “two sides of the same coin,” as is evidenced by Livingstone’s slogan “Commerce and Christianity” and Buxton’s “The Bible and the Plough” (Johnson 1967, p. 177; Cole 1961; Stanley 1983). Initially, the evidence is that missionaries were particularly successful with “the aliens, the foreigners, the uprooted” (Sundkler and Steed 2000, p. 88)—and among these were also many (ex-)slaves. Missionaries frequently offered shelter to people from these groups, finally establishing Christian villages where ex-slaves and escaped slaves could find refuge.5 Father Joseph Lutz, an Alsatian member of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, who worked in Onitsha, Nigeria from 1885 onwards, founded Christian villages not unlike the Jesuit Reductions of 17th and 18th century Paraguay where liberated slaves, purchased from slave markets by the 5
For those who operated the campaign, deciding what to do with the freed slaves was a problem from the beginning. Take, for example, Sudan at the end of the nineteenth century: “Caring for these slaves had both social and economic aspects; in the conditions prevailing in northern Sudan at the time, there was no convenient way to assure either their assimilation into local society or their prospects of employment. [...] While some prospect of employment existed for male slaves, however minimal, there was no solution for women and children” (Moore-Harell 1999, p. 419).
54
M. van der Linden
missionaries with charitable funds donated in Europe, could live Christian lives separate from the local people. Many of these liberated slaves, in any case, were not the local people but the hapless victims of slave-raiding further north, along the Niger and the Benue Rivers (Ryan 2006, p. 197). Protestant missionaries often tried to do the same, although the management of these kinds of villages was sometimes rather dubious: Since freed slaves had usually lost their tribal ties, this labour force was also somewhat movable; for example, workers were sent from Zanzibar to Masai, about one hundred miles inland from Lindi, by the Universities Mission to Central Africa, and to Freetown and Rabai near Mombasa by the Church Missionary Society (Johnson 1967, p. 178). Both the treaties and the missions contributed to the fact that, in the second half of the nineteenth century, more and more land in Africa came under the direct control of the British. This is not to say that the work of the missions was used as a direct “instrument” for colonization (see, e.g., Porter 1993), but more that, in many regions “the missionaries obtained an ascendancy over the native populations, which could easily be turned into control exercised by political officials and magistrates” (Reinsch 1916, p. 45). Concurrently, however, the British came to the conclusion that, in their battle against the slave trade, they could not rely on treaties with the chiefs, because they kept breaking them, which meant that they had to be reestablished again with policing expeditions. During several of these military campaigns, it became clear that the straightforward subjection of the local population was a more effective method. The little forts on the West Coast of Africa, retained to suppress the slave trade, became the starting-points of a great inland expansion into Ashanti and the Northern territories, while Lagos, acquired in 1861 to put down the slave trade on the Oil Rivers, led to the expansion into Southern and Northern Nigeria by which 367,928 square miles were added to the Empire—a region more than three times the size of the United Kingdom (Knowles 1924, p. 78). A third factor encouraged this movement: the turbulent economic growth in Britain itself, coupled with the ever-increasing demand for African raw materials (palm oil, etc.). There was a growing desire among British enterprises to control the production of raw materials locally, which meant penetrating and subordinating the African hinterlands to an ever greater extent (Wylie 1973, p. 215). So we see that Chris and Charles Tilly’s three types of incentives all worked towards the same end in this situation: coercion (the enforcement of treaties), commitment (missionary work), and compensation (legitimate trade) all helped to further the colonial subjection of Africa. The consequence of this was that the slave trade dwindled more and more. The Imperial British East Africa Company, formed in 1888, helped to bar the great slave route to Zanzibar on the east coast. France annexed between 1883 and 1896 Madagascar, which had been the great receiving depot for slaves, and thus put a serious obstacle in the way of the sea traffic in slaves. When the British took over Uganda and established a Protectorate in Nyasaland, they cut
Unanticipated consequences of “humanitarian intervention”
55
off two great sources of the supply of slaves. Kitchener conquered the Sudan in 1896, and put an end to the slave trade there, i.e. the southward and northward routes were both closed (Knowles 1924, p. 169).
Conclusion In the end, the British campaign against trading in African slaves was largely successful, even though it has still not been entirely wiped out, even today. During the African conferences in Berlin (1884–85) and Brussels (1890), it was evident at last that all the important Western powers had reviewed their thinking on the slave trade and now wanted to give high priority to banning human trafficking. But the success of the campaign that, by then, had gone on for more than 80 years had caused side-effects of enormous proportions that no one in 1807 could have foreseen: the escalation of support for anti-slavery as such, and the takeover of a large part of the African continent by Britain and other powers. It is certainly conceivable, and even probable, that, even without the campaign against the slave trade, Africa would have been colonized. But the manner in which this colonization took place, and the way in which it could be legitimized by Britain and other European powers was, to a large extent, determined by the campaign. The General Act adopted in July 1890 by the Brussels Conference for the Abolition of the Slave Trade “cloaked the entire conquest of Africa in a humanitarian guise by presenting European rule and capitalist enterprise, including the employment of freed slaves, as anti-slavery measures. Thus, the ideology of the anti-slavery movement became part and parcel of the European mission to civilize Africa” (Roberts and Miers 1988, pp. 16–17). The abolition of the slave trade underlines Charles Tilly’s (1996: 592) proposition that, despite unexpected outcomes, “purposive social action nonetheless produces systematic, durable social structure.” At the same time, my case study shows that the error corrections that were needed for this had extremely far-reaching consequences. The colonization of Africa was, to a certain extent, a second-degree unanticipated consequence of the campaign against the slave trade. That the campaign had such far-reaching unanticipated consequences is probably due to the fact that it was all about an “absolute innovation” (Hadari 1989, p. 146). There had been other attempts at abolition, such as when the Dutch West India Company in 1738 decided not to take any more slaves to Surinam, or when Denmark forbade trading in slaves in 1803—but, in the first case, the motivation for abolition had been based purely on economic considerations (Jungman 2008), and in the second case, for Denmark, it only involved a minor European power (Johansen 1981). The British campaign, in contrast with these two earlier attempts, was not, in the first place, driven by economic motives and Britain was the “super power” of those days. In an underdetermined, and thus open, system, it is impossible to predict the consequences of a radical innovation such as the abolition of the slave trade. After all, “because we do not know ex ante which mechanisms will actually be at work (and perhaps have no knowledge of their mode of articulation) events are not deductively predictable” (Bhaskar 2008, p. 119; also Boudon 1985, pp. 165–190).
56
M. van der Linden
This case study suggests that three sorts of error correction can be distinguished, namely (a) measures that are taken to facilitate the effective implementation of the purposive action (e.g., the introduction of legitimate trade); (b) measures that are taken to minimalize unintended consequences, after the purposive action has been carried out (such as the agreements with local chiefs and the activities of the missionaries); and (c) new purposive actions that widen the objective and are more far-reaching than the original purposive action (the anti-slavery campaign). Moreover, the case study indicates that the logic of error correction is not as simple as it sometimes appears to be (see Fig. 1). Karl Popper’s proposition for dealing with erroneous outcomes is to reduce the unnecessary insecurity of actions by not taking large steps, but by effecting the desired change “little by little” (Popper 1959, p. 75, 87); in that way, it should be possible to react faster and more adequately to unexpected outcomes, and easier to minimize unanticipated consequences. The British authorities seem to have done exactly what Popper advised, and yet the process went in a direction other than the one they had anticipated. An important, but dubious, assumption emerges in Popper’s argumentation. Imagine that a person (an actor) has set herself a certain objective. Within that framework, this “actor” has recently carried out action A1. The person now wants to proceed to
Implementation of purposive action
Error Correction I
Success
Yes
No
Action aborted
New purposive action Unanticipated consequences Error Correction II
No
Yes
Fig. 1 Purposive action, consequences, and corrections
Unanticipated consequences of “humanitarian intervention”
57
action A2, to bring the objective closer. Piecemeal engineering assumes then, that before beginning on A2, the actor will know what the consequences of A1 are, because, only then can that actor make considered decisions about whether to repeat or intensify A1, or to amend and change A1 for another kind of action. It is possible, however, that not all the consequences of A1 will be evident until long after A2 has taken place—because information about it is not yet available; because the consequences are cumulative and so they could not all be identified at first; or because the consequences have been very late in appearing (Plé 1997, p. 183). In such cases, it is not evident why piecemeal engineering should be more effective than a more drastic intervention, based on Machiavelli’s (1994, p. 76) motto: “it is better to be headstrong than cautious.” Knowledge and error are reciprocally linked. “It is a paltry illusion to believe that they can be separated simply, clearly, neatly. It is an equally paltry illusion to believe that anything goes” (Castoriadis 1984, p. xiii.) Acknowledgments I am grateful to Mike Hanagan, Peyman Jafari, and Alice Mul for critiquing an earlier draft of this article.
References Adams, J. E. (1925). The abolition of the Brazilian slave trade. Journal of Negro History, 10(4), 607–637. Anon. (1946). Slave trade, the American. In Dictionary of American History Vol. V, (2nd ed) (pp. 91–93). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Austin, G. (2009). Cash crops and freedom: export agriculture and the decline of slavery in colonial West Africa. International Review of Social History, 54(1), 1–37. Banaji, D. R. (1933). Slavery in British India. Bombay: D.B. Taraporevala Sons & Co. Berding, H. (1974). Die Ächtung des Sklavenhandels auf dem Wiener Kongress 1814/15. Historische Zeitschrift, 219, 265–289. Bethell, L. (1966). The mixed commissions for the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade in the nineteenth century. Journal of African History, 7(1), 79–93. Bhaskar, R. (2008). A realist theory of science. London: Verso. Blackburn, R. (1988). The overthrow of colonial slavery 1776–1848. London: Verso. Boudon, R. (1985). La place du desordre. Critiques des théories du changement social. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Campbell, G. (1989). The East African slave trade, 1861–1895: The ‘Southern’ complex. International Journal of African Historical Studies, 22(1), 1–26. Castoriadis, C. (1984). Crossroads in the labyrinth. Brighton: Harvester. Clarence-Smith, W. G. (2006). Islam and the abolition of slavery. London: Hurst & Co. Clarkson, Th. (1808). The history of the rise, progress and accomplishment of the abolition of the African slave trade by the British parliament, 2 vols. London: Longman. Cole, A. H. (1961). The relations of missionary activity to economic development. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 9(2), 120–127. Collins, R. O., & Burns, J. M. (2007). A history of sub-Saharan Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Corwin, A. F. (1967). Spain and the abolition of slavery in Cuba 1817–1886. Austin: University of Texas Press. Coursier, M.H. (1960). L’évolution du droit international humanitaire. Recueil des Cours de l’Académie de droit international. I, 357–471. Curtin, Ph D. (1981). The abolition of the slave trade from Senegambia. In D. Eltis & J. Walvin (Eds.), The abolition of the atlantic slave trade. Origins and effects in Europe, Africa, and the Americas (pp. 83–97). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. DuBois, W. E. B. (1986). The suppression of the African slave-trade to the United States of America 1638–1870 (pp. 1–356). In W. E. B. Dubois (Ed.), Writings. New York: The Library of America.
58
M. van der Linden
Edwards, J. R. (1982). Slavery, the slave trade and the economic reorganization of Ethiopia 1916–1935. African Economic History, 11, 3–14. Emmer, P. C. (1981). Abolition of the abolished: The illegal Dutch slave trade and the mixed courts. In D. Eltis & J. Walvin (Eds.), The abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. Origins and effects in Europe, Africa, and the Americas (pp. 177–192). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Fischer, G. (1957). Esclavage et droit international. Revue générale de droit international public, 60, 71– 101. Freeman, T. B. (1844). Journal of various visits to the Kingdoms of Ashanti, Aku, and Dahomi (2nd ed.). London: Mason. Frowein, J. A. (1994). Reactions by not directly affected states too breaches of public international law. Recueil des Cours de l’Académie de droit international, IV, 345–437. Gallagher, J. (1950). Fowell Buxton and the new African policy, 1838–1842. Cambridge Historical Journal, 10(1), 36–58. Gautier, A. (1986). Traite et politiques démographiques esclavagistes. Population (French edition), 41(6), 1005–1024. Goldfarb, S. J. (1994). An inquiry into the politics of the prohibition of the international slave trade. Agricultural History, 68(2), 20–34. Graham, J. D. (1965). The slave trade, depopulation and human sacrifice in Benin history. Cahiers d’études africaines, 5(18), 317–334. Griaule, M. (1931). Labour in Abyssinia. International Labour Review, 33(2), 181–202. Hadari, S. A. (1989). Unintended consequences in periods of transition: Tocqueville’s ‘recollections’ revisited. American Journal of Political Science, 33(1), 136–149. Headrick, D. R. (1981). The tools of empire. Technology and European imperalism in the nineteenth century. New York: Oxford University Press. Hopkins, A. G. (1973). An economic history of West Africa. London: Longman. Howard, A. M. (2006). Nineteenth-century coastal slave trading and the British abolition campaign in Sierra Leone. Slavery and Abolition, 27(1), 23–49. Iliffe, J. (1979). A modern history of Tanganyika. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jakobsson, S. (1972). Am I not a man and a brother? British missions and the abolition of the slave trade and slavery in West Africa and the West Indies 1786–1838. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells Boktryckeri. Johansen, H. C. (1981). The reality behind the demographic arguments to abolish the Danish slave trade. In D. Eltis & J. Walvin (Eds.), The abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. Origins and effects in Europe, Africa, and the Americas (pp. 221–230). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Johnson, H. B. (1967). The location of Christian missions in Africa. Geographical Review, 57(2), 168–202. Johnston, G. (1988). Of God and maxim guns. Presbyterianism in Nigeria, 1846–1966. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Jungman, A. (2008). Waarom stopte de WIC de slavenhandel op Suriname in 1738? OSO: Tijdschrift voor surinamistiek en het Caraïbisch gebied, 27(2), 252–265. Kiernan, V. G. (1972). Lords of human kind. European attitudes to the outside world in the imperial age. Revised edition. Harmondsworth: Penguin. King, J. F. (1944). The Latin-American Republics and the suppression of the slave trade. HispanicAmerican Historical Review, 24(3), 387–411. Klein, H. S. (1971a). The internal slave trade in nineteenth-century Brazil: a study of slave importations into Rio de Janeiro in 1852. Hispanic American Historical Review, 51(4), 567–585. Klein, M. (1971b). Slavery, the slave trade, and legitimate commerce in late nineteenth century Africa. Etudes d´histoire africaine, 2, 5–28. Klein, H. S. (1999). The Atlantic slave trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knowles, L. C. A. (1924). The economic development of the British overseas empire. London: Routledge. Korieh, C. J. (2000). The nineteenth century commercial transition in West Africa: the case of the Biafra Hinterland. Canadian Journal of African Studies, 34(3), 588–615. Law, R. (Ed.). (1995). From slavery to legitimate commerce: The commercial transition in nineteenth century West Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lloyd, Ch. (1949). The navy and the slave trade. The suppression of the African slave trade in the nineteenth century. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Lovejoy, P. E. (1979). The characteristics of plantations in the nineteenth-century Sokoto Caliphate (Islamic West Africa). American Historical Review, 84(4), 1267–1292. Lovejoy, P. E. (1981). Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate. In P. E. Lovejoy (Ed.), The ideology of slavery in Africa (pp. 11–38). Beverly Hills: Sage.
Unanticipated consequences of “humanitarian intervention”
59
Lovejoy, P. E. (2000). Transformations in slavery. A history of slavery in Africa (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lovejoy, P. E., & Hogendorn, J. S. (1993). Slow death of slavery. The course of abolition in Northern Nigeria, 1897–1936. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lynn, M. (1997). Commerce and economic change in West Africa. The palm oil trade in the nineteenth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Machiavelli, N. (1994). The Prince. In: Machiavelli, Selected political writings. Edited and translated by David Wootton (pp. 5–80). Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett. Martinez-Fernandez, L. (1995). The Havana Anglo-Spanish mixed commission for the suppression of the slave trade and Cuba’s Emancipados. Slavery and Abolition, 16, 205–225. Maynard, D. H. (1960). The world’s anti-slavery convention of 1840. The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 47(3), 452–471. Merton, R. K. (1936). The unanticipated consequences of purposive social action. American Sociological Review, 1(6), 894–904. Moore-Harell, A. (1998). Slave trade in the Sudan in the nineteenth century and its suppression in the years 1877–80. Middle Eastern Studies, 34(2), 113–128. Moore-Harell, A. (1999). Economic and political aspects of the slave trade in Ethiopia and the Sudan in the second half of the nineteenth century. International Journal of African Historical Studies, 32(2/3), 407–421. Nelson, B. H. (1942). The slave trade as a factor in British Foreign Policy 1815–1862. Journal of Negro History, 27(2), 192–209. Northrup, D. (1976). The compatibility of the slave and palm oil trades in the Bight of Biafra. Journal of African History, 17(3), 353–364. Nunn, N. (2008). The long-term effects of Africa’s slave trades. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 123(1), 139–176. Ojo, O. (2005). Slavery and human sacrifice in Yorubaland: Ondo, c. 1870–94. Journal of African History, 46(3), 379–404. Plé, B. (1997). Das Problem der unbeabsichtigten Folgen menschlichen Handelns: Zur Fokussierung eines bleibenden Problems (mit Ansätzen zu einer Typenbildung. Geschichte und Gegenwart, 16(3), 179–191. Popper, K. R. (1959). The poverty of historicism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Porter, A. (1993). Religion and empire: British expansion in the long nineteenth century, 1780–1914. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 20(3), 370–390. Priesching, N. (2008). Die Verurteilung der Sklaverei unter Gregor XVI., im Jahr 1839. Saeculum, 59(1), 143–162. Quinns, J. E. (2004). Three cheers for the abolitionist Pope! American reactions to Gregory XVI’s condemnation of the slave trade, 1840–1860. Catholic Historical Review, 90(1), 67–93. Reinsch, P. S. (1916). Colonial government. An introduction to the study of colonial institutions. New York: Macmillan. Roberts, R., & Miers, S. (1988). The end of slavery in Africa. In S. Miers & R. Roberts (Eds.), The end of slavery in Africa (pp. 3–68). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Ryan, P. J., SJ (2006). In my end is my beginning: Muslim and Christian traditions at cross-purposes in contemporary Nigeria. In B. F. Soares (Ed.), Muslim–Christian encounters in Africa (pp. 187–220). Leiden: Brill. Smith, G. (1848). The case of our West-African cruisers and West-African settlements fairly considered. London: Hatchard. Stanley, B. (1983). ‘Commerce and Christianity’: providence theory, the missionary movement, and the imperialism of free trade, 1842–1860. Historical Journal, 26(1), 71–94. Sundkler, B., & Steed, Ch. (2000). A history of the church in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sutch, R. (1975). The breeding of slaves for sale and the westward expansion of slavery, 1850–1860. In S. L. Engerman & E. D. Genovese (Eds.), Race and slavery in the western hemisphere: Quantitative studies (pp. 173–210). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Temperley, H. (1991). White dreams, black Africa: The anti-slavery expedition to the Niger, 1841–42. New Haven: Yale University Press. Tilly, C. (1996). Invisible elbow. Sociological Forum, 11(4), 589–601. Tilly, C. (2004). Social movements, 1768–2004. Boulder: Paradigm. Tilly, C. (2005). Popular contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834. London: Paradigm. Tilly, C., & Goodin, R. E. (2006). It depends. In R. E. Goodin & Ch. Tilly (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of contextual political analysis (pp. 3–32). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
60
M. van der Linden
Tilly, C., & Tilly, C. (1998). Work under capitalism. Boulder: Westview. Toledano, E. R. (1982). The Ottoman slave trade and its suppression, 1840–1890. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Van Alstyne, R. W. (1930). The British right of search and the African slave trade. Journal of Modern History, 2(1), 37–47. Watter, P. (1996). A critique of production. Pittsburgh: Dorrance. Williams, D. M. (1973). Abolition and the re-deployment of the slave fleet, 1807–11. Journal of Transport History, New Series, 2(2), 103–115. Wilson, H. H. (1950). Some principal aspects of British efforts to crush the African slave trade, 1807– 1829. American Journal of International Law, 44(3), 505–526. Wirz, A. (1972). Vom Sklavenhandel zum kolonialen Handel. Wirtschaftsräume und Wirtschaftsformen in Kamerun vor 1914. Zurich: Atlantis Verlag. Wylie, K. C. (1973). The slave trade in nineteenth century Temneland and the British sphere of influence. African Studies Review, 16(2), 203–217. Marcel van der Linden is Research Director of the International Institute of Social History and Professor of Social Movement History at the University of Amsterdam. His recent books include Western Marxism and the Soviet Union. A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates since 1917 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007); and Workers of the World. Essays toward a Global Labor History (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008).
Colonial legacy of ethno-racial inequality in Japan Hwaji Shin
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Abstract This essay challenges anti-historicist accounts that sever the link between the colonial past and present, replacing them with a more historically nuanced understanding of Japan’s immigration policies and their relation to ethno-racial inequality. Contrary to the dominant view that transnational immigration is new to Japan, this article shows that Japan already had a history of immigration in the early twentieth century, and this history generated a lasting impact on postwar immigration policies and their integration. While recognizing the impact of structural and individual factors, this essay underscores a path-dependent approach that demonstrates how colonial exclusion led to the formation of a durable structure of inequality against low skilled labor immigrants, and thus how such a colonial legacy has continued to limit the life chances and integration of subsequent immigrants in Japan since the 1980s.
In the spring of 2009, the New York Times reported that the Japanese government was offering money to Latin American foreign workers to return to their home countries (Tabuchi 2009). These foreign workers mostly came from Brazil and Peru to fill a labor shortage in the manufacturing sector in Japan. They came via a special visa issued only to descendants of Japanese emigrants. The government strategically selected these ethnic Japanese emigrants, commonly called Nikkeijin, on the grounds that their Japanese lineage would not disturb Japanese ethno-racial homogeneity (Yamanaka 1996). Japan is widely viewed as a country of non-immigration and ethno-racial homogeneity, but this was not the first time that Japan imported cheap external labor and then later disposed of them when labor demand evaporated. After Japan’s defeat in WWII, a few million Korean colonial labor immigrants, who were brought to
H. Shin (*) Department of Sociology, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA e-mail:
[email protected] M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_5, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
61
62
H. Shin
Japan—sometimes forcefully—to fill the labor vacuum, faced a similar fate as the Nikkeijin; they were also encouraged to repatriate. Although these immigrants’ experiences are separated by time, individual demographic factors, and political contexts, they nevertheless present a striking resemblance. This resemblance serves as an important analytical window for us to explore the colonial legacy in immigration policies and ethno-racial inequality in Japan. This paper unravels how the country’s colonial past influenced the postwar immigration policies and ethno-racial inequality toward immigrants. In doing so, this article challenges the anti-historicist approach which denies or minimizes the impact of the colonial past on the present immigration policies (Bleich 2005; Freeman 1979). The disintegration of colonial institutions and the absence of coherent colonial models are often cited as supporting evidence for the antihistoricist argument that the present immigration policies in former empires like the British or the French contain few legacies from their own colonial past. Though their efforts at questioning the assumed direct connection between the past and present is valuable, a careful look at historical records from Japan yields strong evidence against the anti-historicist account. When we examine the internal network and function of the newly-established institutions that replaced the old colonial ones, we find the survival of colonial trust networks continues to influence the content and practice of immigration policies in the post-colonial era. Although this article argues that history matters to the present immigration policies and ethno-racial inequality, it does not argue that the link between the past and present is deliberate or direct. Instead, it follows a path-dependent pattern. In other words, the series of decisions and events in the past contingently shaped or constrained the repertoire of paths and decisions that the succeeding policy makers and immigrants could choose. Existing immigration studies have underscored the importance of individual factors (i.e., socio-economic status, language skill, educational attainment, exposure to the host society, age upon arrival, gender, and length of residency) as well as structural ones (place of residence, family’s class background, ethno-racial status, occupational opportunities), arguing that the interaction between these two kinds of factors is the key to understanding immigrant integration in a host society (Zhou 1997). While recognizing these contemporary factors, this article extends the analysis by demonstrating a path-dependent approach with historical evidence (Mahoney 2000). In the following section, we see how, under the strict gaze of the American occupational forces, the postwar Japanese government was under more pressure than other former empires to demolish its colonial institutions. However, its efforts to reconstruct the nation inadvertently led postwar Japanese policy makers to reinforce their exclusionary policy against the colonial immigrants during their democratic transition. Their failed imperialism prompted postwar Japanese intellectuals and policy makers to replace their past imperialist self-image as an ethno-racially hybrid, pan-Asian empire, with a homogeneous national self-image. This postwar self-image in turn further justified their continuing exclusion and discrimination against their remaining colonial subjects. This article then unravels how institutional discrimination against those of colonial origin was extended to subsequent immigrant populations, reproducing a familiar yet renewed pattern of durable inequality in Japan in a new context of a global economy. The article applies two Tillyan
Colonial legacy of ethno-racial inequality in Japan
63
analytical concepts, durable inequality and trust networks, to demonstrate how the exclusionary immigration policies of the past led to the formation of a durable structure of inequality against low-skilled labor immigrants, and how this colonial legacy has continued, albeit indirectly and contingently, to limit the life chances and integration of the wave of new immigrants since the 1980s.
History matters, but how? Since the 1980s, the debate over citizenship and immigration has become heated in developed industrial countries that continue to experience a large influx of immigrants. Embedded in this debate is the assumption that the country’s past, especially the colonial practices and beliefs, influences the present immigration integration policies (Joppke 1999; Soysal 1994). However, there are scholars who deny any direct historical connection between colonial experiences and the current integration of immigrants into contemporary European societies (Bleich 2005; Freeman 1979). Most recently, Erik Bleich, convincingly argues for narrower and more limited legacies of colonialism on contemporary immigration integration in the British and French cases. He severs the direct link between the colonial past and present immigration policies by demonstrating: 1) neither British policy, commonly classified as indirect ruling and ethnic pluralist, nor French policy, often characterized as indirect ruling, and assimilationist, had internally consistent and coherent colonial models, but instead they employed various and sometimes contradictory models depending on time and place; 2) many colonial institutions disintegrated after the fall of their empires and very few elements of the colonial institutions were transmitted to the post-colonial immigration offices and laws; 3) France and Britain derived their post-war integration strategies from other places than their own colonial past: For France, “lessons from the Revolution, Republican, and Vichy eras played a prominent role in debates surrounding integration policy making”1, while “British policy experts and political leaders turned repeatedly to North American laws and policies for inspiration.”2 Hence, “there is no broad connection between the colonial past and the integration present implied by many observers.”3 This anti-historicist thinking was not confined to studies of immigration, but also prevalent in many sociological and historical inquiries, as Charles Tilly succinctly put it: Anti-historicist thought often appears in historical analysis, for example in great swaths of economic history. A fine example of antihistoricist thinking in urban history comes, indeed, from Lewis Mumford. In Mumford’s City in History, the prevailing conjunction of political and economic power largely determines the activity and form of cities, regardless of the paths by which they have arrived at their present condition.4 1
Bleich (2005), p. 189. Bleich (2005), p.,189. 3 Bleich (2005), p., 174. 4 Tilly (1996), p. 709. 2
64
H. Shin
Proving the lasting legacies of the past on the present is a complicated task. However, it is an equally cumbersome burden to show that present practice is independent of past trajectories. This essay argues that we gain more if we direct our focus toward exploring the circumstances and ways in which history matters (or sometimes does not). The path that Japan took in the course of the twentieth century suggests that the past indeed matters, but it does so not directly or intentionally, but rather incrementally and contingently. Japan’s colonial past, particularly its experience of labor immigration from Korea, shaped the contour of its later immigration policies and integration. The exclusive immigration laws and institutional discrimination that many immigrants currently face in today’s Japan are not simply the result of either Japan’s lack of experience with ethnic diversity or the particular characteristics or behavior of these new immigrants. Instead, it is the historically specific trajectory that Japan took since the early 20th century that ultimately led to the construction of such exclusionary policies and a harvest of durable inequality against the nonJapanese population. Those who know even a slice of Japanese postwar economic development may find such an argument impossible because Japan was often held in contrast to other industrial countries for its exclusive reliance on the domestic labor force for its growth. Although a small number of immigrants continued to enter its territory, the postwar Japanese state managed to sharply restrict both legal and illegal immigrants. Up to the 1980s, Japanese cultural homogeneity was cited as a key for Japan’s socioeconomic stability. Although such a cultural explanation became increasingly unpopular in recent years, many scholars including those who study immigration in Japan continue to treat Japan as a non-immigration country that escaped from dealing with any immigration related issues until very recently (Mori 1997; Sellek 2001). They also regard Japan’s colonial immigration as an historical anomaly rather than something that has had a systematic lasting effect on Japanese policies, psyche, culture and structure. Thus, the period between the mid-1940s and the 1980s is largely regarded as “blank space” as historian Morris-Suzuki poignantly states (Morris-Suzuki 2006a).5 Beginning to fill this blank space in history and connecting the colonial past and the present immigration experiences in Japan are the goals of this article. To be clear, my argument is neither that the current structure of inequality and institutional discrimination against recent immigrants “directly” resulted from Japan’s colonialism nor that the current Japanese immigration policies are the deliberate reflection of their past colonial practices. Instead, I argue that the current inequality and institutional discrimination against immigrants was a result of incremental changes—much of which can be traced back to the Japanese colonial experiences. Rather than arguing the direct or deliberate causal link or the lack thereof, I cautiously argue that Japanese ethno-racial inequality has deep historical roots in its colonial experience, underscoring the path dependent approach. Two Tillyan concepts are particularly useful in this endeavor. One is durable inequality (Tilly 1998), while the other is trust networks (Tilly 2005). Empirical 5 There are exceptions to this trend. For example, Morris-Suzuki has unraveled Japan’s immigration issues in the early postwar period (2006).
Colonial legacy of ethno-racial inequality in Japan
65
evidence in this article follows Tilly’s relational account of how pre-existing categorical inequalities are incorporated into new social settings through four modes of causal mechanisms—exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation and adaptation. This article also extends Tilly’s argument, suggesting that durable inequality can be transferred not only from one organizational structure to another or from one generation to another within the same group, but also from one group to another. Another analytical concept, trust networks, also helps us to explain this transferrable nature of durable inequality. Tilly explains that trust networks “consist of ramified interpersonal connections, consisting mainly of strong ties, within which people set valued, consequential, long-term resources and enterprises at risk to the malfeasance, mistakes, or failure of others” (Tilly 2005: 12), and he argued that society shifts between democratization and de-democratization, depending on the type of relationship between the rulers and trust networks. This article applies this concept to understand how a trust network from the colonial period survived in postwar Japan, and shows how this network helped institutionalize an asymmetrical relationship between citizens and immigrants. In the next section, I present a series of key historical factors and events, producing an unintended yet intimate linkage between Japan’s colonial past and the ethno-racial inequality that the recent immigrant endures today. A missing link, as shown below, is the treatment of Korean labor immigrants and their descendants. The dynamic and contentious history of Korean labor immigrants’ struggle for integration in Japanese society combined with Japan’s drastic economic transformation inadvertently created distinctions within the immigration laws and a division of the general perception of “foreign workers” in Japan. These differences in turn make it difficult to see the historical connection between the past and the present injustices and weaken the solidarity between old and new immigrant groups in Japan.
Colonialism and immigration Before proceeding to the discussion of the colonial legacies of Japan’s ethno-racial inequality, this essay will briefly sketch out how modernized Japan experienced labor immigration and how colonial experiences paved an important path for postwar immigration integration (and dis-integration) policies. Moving away from a relatively secluded position in the international community, Meiji Japan quickly modernized the nation, state and military, largely driven by fear that they would fall prey to Western Imperialism like their Asian neighbors. Japan strategically became Imperialist and colonized the external territories in order to expand its geopolitical power, taking lessons from Western colonial success and mistakes. Japan succeeded in its endeavor, at least initially, as they colonized Taiwan, Korea and other AsiaPacific regions. Victories against two Far East giants, Russia and China, yielded a needed sense of superiority for Japan. Many prewar Japanese intellectuals and policy makers subscribed to a Social Darwinian idea and viewed the West as unquestionably superior to the Asian East (Oguma 1998). Unlike European imperialists who viewed their colonies as their inferiors, Imperial Japan was conquering its cultural mentors whose civilization and culture it had emulated over a millennium. To justify its
66
H. Shin
superiority and the legitimacy of its rule over Korea, China, and Taiwan, Imperial Japan promoted its unique discourse of nationhood. That is, Japan distinguished itself from Western Imperialists and Asian neighbors by its hybrid culture—a mixture of different Asiatic races and cultures.6 Using such a hybrid national selfimage, prewar policy makers in Japan justified their colonial expansion; they claimed that Japan was not a conqueror, but a unifier, protecting Asia from the Western menace. The following quote made in October, 1915 by the Colonial General, Takeuchi Masatake summarizes this point. Our annexation is different in its content from the European colonization of under-developed and inferior ethnic groups…. The relationship between Japan and Korea is very different from the European colonial relationships. Not only are we geographically close to one another, we also share the common interests and our cultures and customs have little difference. Therefore, under the same sovereignty, the amalgamation of these two cultures and nations is hardly an intricate matter.7 Under imperial slogans such as “Do-so Do-shu (Same Origin, Same Race)”, the Japanese government granted all colonial subjects Japanese citizenship status regardless of their class, ethno-racial origin, religion, language, age and/or gender. This enabled the colonial population to enjoy some limited privileges as Japanese citizens. The Japanese colonial penetration displaced many rural peasants in Korea and Japan’s industrialization transformed the labor structures within the empire, leading the large number of colonial immigrants—mostly unskilled labor—to Japan. By the 1920s, many Korean workers began to settle on the mainland (Nishinarita 1997). Contrary to the official rhetoric emphasizing ethno-racial proximity between Japanese and Koreans, the Japanese general public increasingly developed negative sentiments against these newly arrived labor immigrants from their colonies. Japanese prejudice was quickly translated into hostility especially after the mass anti-colonial protest known as the March 1st Movement in Korea in 1919. After this well organized resistance against Japanese colonial rule, the Japanese government reinforced the assimilation policies toward its colonial subjects. Upon entering WWII, in order to fill in the labor vacuum created by the military draft of Japanese males, the government forcefully conscripted colonial subjects in Korea and forced them to work in mines, factories and other manual labor sites in Japan like slaves, for they had neither salary nor freedom to leave. This atrocity continued until the end of WWII.
Survival of the colonial network The defeat of Japan in WWII led to various structural changes including a new constitution, dismantling of the military, land reform, disintegration of Zaibatsu, and 6
Competing national self-images existed in prewar Japan, but the hybrid image became dominant as Japan began its colonial invasion in Asia. See Oguma (1998) for the details. This quote from p. 196, in Oguma (1998).
7
Colonial legacy of ethno-racial inequality in Japan
67
release of leftist activists and politicians, just to name a few. Under American auspices the pan-Asian empire metamorphosed into an ethno-racially homogeneous nation-state. The United States, the single most influential voice among the Allied Powers in restructuring postwar Japan installed a series of democratic reforms to ensure Japan’s divorce from its militant imperial past. However, the American led occupation was guided by its strong geopolitical and economic interests in East Asia in the context of the Cold War. Hence, the Americans maintained a significant degree of continuity to ensure a smooth and quick reconstruction of postwar Japan. One of the most notable continuities was that bureaucrats remained in their influential positions in the postwar Japanese government, and few were purged for war crimes despite intimate involvement in various wartime atrocities. As is shown shortly, this continuity allowed for survival of the colonial trust network that linked the colonial past and the postwar democratic transition, despite the disintegration of key colonial institutions. Soon after the end of WWII, the Japanese government and American authority (Supreme Commander of the Allied Power—henceforth, SCAP) encouraged nearly two million Korean immigrants in Japan to return to their homeland. Their priority was to absorb millions of Japanese repatriates and soldiers from their colonies and battlefields overseas. Most Koreans, especially the forcefully conscripted laborers, rushed back to Korea, leaving behind about 600,000 Koreans, most of whom had come to Japan decades earlier and were already settled with their family members. However, severe political instability in post-colonial Korea, as evidenced in the civil war which divided the country into North and South, also pushed many Koreans back to Japan. Although SCAP prohibited their re-entering Japan, many Koreans nevertheless returned to Japan. Despite the discrimination, they made their living through desperate means such as illegally selling the state’s food distributions and unlicensed liquor on the black market. Many working-class Koreans supported a Communist ideology that was gaining popularity not only among Koreans but also among the unleashed Japanese leftist intellectuals who had been silenced under the strict censorship of the prewar military state. The United States, in trying to turn Japan into its Far East Asian hub against Red China and USSR, was particularly concerned about the growing penetration of communist ideology in postwar Japan and viewed Koreans as potential carriers of such an ideology. It was in this context that under the close guidance of the American occupational authority, the Japanese government drafted their new immigration laws (Kim 1997; Morris-Suzuki 2006b; Onuma 1978). These immigration laws directly reflected the negative perception that SCAP and the Japanese state had toward Koreans. SCAP’s perception of Koreans fused with the Japanese prejudice against them when it dealt with the fierce resistance of the remaining colonial subjects and realized the difficulty of repatriating them. This unexpected fusion of erstwhile enemies allowed the birth of exclusionary immigration policies against the non-Japanese population, which had considerable lasting impact on how foreign immigrants were viewed and treated in Japan for years to come. As preparation toward full-scale control over the colonial subjects by soon-to-beenacted immigration laws, the Japanese state issued the Alien Registration Ordinance on May 2nd, 1947. This allowed the state to register all colonial subjects in Japan as aliens while they still retained their Japanese citizenship, against which
68
H. Shin
many Koreans refused to register out of fear of losing their Japanese citizenship status. On April 19, 1952, the Japanese government announced that as of April 28 when the San Francisco peace treaty was to be enacted, all former colonial subjects would lose their Japanese citizenship. Then on August 1, the Immigration Bureau was established within the Ministry of Justice and served as the main agent for controlling the remaining colonial immigrants in Japan. Scholars who argue for the historical discontinuity between the colonial past and post-colonial immigration integration cite the disintegration of former colonial institutions as the moment of total break. As in other European empires, almost all the colonial institutions were dissolved as Japan lost its colonial territories. The new Immigration Bureau was placed under the Ministry of Justice in postwar Japan, while colonial immigrant related affairs were previously administered by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. These shifts seemingly fall in line with the antihistoricist arguments. However, the evidence shows that despite the formal disintegration of institutions, continuity of function was maintained especially in the case of immigration control in postwar Japan. Although the colonial offices were closed after the war, individuals who worked for such offices were absorbed into new offices which served almost the very same functions as before. A transcribed discussion among the key administrators in the Alien Registration department in postwar Japan suggests that key officials had an intimate connection with the colonial offices in Korea. One experienced civil servant in this discussion even referred to himself and his colleagues as “Korean” because of their intimate ties with colonial Korea. I was born in Korea when my father was relocated from the Ministry of International Affairs to the Korean colonial government. So I am ‘made in Korea’, so to speak, although my nationality is Japanese. In fact, Mr. Hayashi and Mr. Minematsu [his other colleagues] have also lived in Korea for a long time. Thus, all these folks here are Koreans, so to speak.8 Historical records indicate that many Japanese repatriates including these administrative officers are a part of what Tilly identified as a trust network—a network consisting of very strongly connected personal relationships, within which people set major, long-term resources and enterprises at risk to misconducts or mistakes of members of the network. Many Japanese repatriates who left for the colonies with an intention to settle permanently, had very few people or assets to rely on in Japan and thus quickly formed mutual aid associations so that they could depend on their intimate colonial network for key aspects of their lives, such as finding housing, jobs, spouses, and someone to look after their families while travelling. As Tilly explained, the state frequently attempts to incorporate trust networks into their system of rule. This was true for the postwar Japanese state which quickly incorporated this colonial network into their state structure. A memoir of one former 8
This discussion appeared as a special feature series of reflections on the first Alien Registration, published across three volumes of monthly journals circulated among the local governments and the Bureau of Immigration who handled all immigration related administration. This quote appeared on page 4 in the first volume of this featured series (Gaikokujin Toroku Jimu-kyokai Zenkoku Rengokai, ed. 1964). [ ] is added by author.
Colonial legacy of ethno-racial inequality in Japan
69
colonial police officer illustrates this point. While looking for a job upon his return to Japan from Korea through his colonial network, this officer suddenly received a job offer to work for the Ministry for Foreign affairs. Director of Policy Department, Mr. Nishihiro Tadao told me out of blue to work as an administrative official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs…. Ministry of Foreign Affairs had to prepare to establish a diplomatic relationship with Korea who now became a foreign country. Under the past 35 years of colonial rule, Ministry of Foreign Affairs had never been involved with Korean affairs as Korean relations were considered as internal affairs… As a part of this preparation effort, the government decided to establish a Korean division within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and requested the colonial government to send one of their young officers with in-depth knowledge about Korean politics (Tsuboi 2004). Tilly argues that democratization occurs when trust networks are fully or partly integrated into public politics through capital or commitment (Tilly 2005). He conceptualizes democratization as a non-linear and reversible process; dedemocratization occurs even for mature liberal democracies. What we observe in postwar Japan is a direct integration of trust networks among committed former colonial officers into the system of rule. From the Japanese perspective, this integration was a part of their postwar democratization process in that Japanese repatriates regained their access to public politics. However, from the colonial immigrants’ perspective, this integration of colonial networks was a dedemocratizing process because such integration allowed the new state organizations to inherit the pre-existing colonial categories—the colonizer vs. the colonized, and to reproduce a similar categorical inequality between Japanese and the colonial immigrants. This ties into another Tillyan concept—durable inequality—the way preexisting categorical inequalities are incorporated into new settings in a society. Although the past categories (the colonizer vs. the colonized) were transformed into new categories (Japanese citizen vs. alien) in postwar Japan, these renewed categories continued to reproduce the same asymmetrical relationship between Japanese and Koreans, following the emulation mechanism which Tilly described as “reproduction of organizational models already operating elsewhere” (Tilly 1999: 95). In short, what we see at this particular historical juncture is a process in which an incorporated trust network helped to mediate this emulation process by transplanting pre-existing colonial categories into new organizational structures. The state’s official categorization of Koreans as aliens fostered both formal and informal exclusion from socio-economic opportunities and public benefits. As the state formally codified the categorical boundaries between Japanese and Koreans, various public institutions followed the state’s categorization and excluded Koreans accordingly. Consequently, Koreans were barred from becoming lawyers, teachers, nurses, bank officers, and public servants such as postal workers. They are also excluded from bank loans, scholarships, health and social benefits. Private organizations also emulated this pattern and refused to hire Koreans. Informal occupational and residential segregation, harassment by peers, teachers, and police
70
H. Shin
officers on the street became part of routine reality for Korean immigrants in Japan. As a means of survival, many immigrants submitted themselves to cultural assimilation. Many used Japanese names, a legacy of Japanese colonial assimilation policy, to disguise their ethnic identity to avoid overt racism. The marginality of these colonial immigrants and their acculturation created an illusion of Japanese homogeneity which helped to reify the new Japanese national self-image as a homogeneous nation and justified the exclusionary structure of Japanese society. However, underneath the “hegemony of homogeneity” (Befu 2001), Koreans managed to survive, relying on their own trust networks. They made their living in or near their ethnic enclaves and created their own co-ethnic banks to mutually help one another to survive in a limited opportunity structure in postwar Japanese society. The rapid economic growth in the secondary sector throughout the 1950s and 60s led to the emergence and proliferation of bourgeoisie, which also had a ripple effect for the second generation Koreans. Although Koreans had little chance to compete in existing industries which Japanese dominated, they enjoyed relative autonomy in newly striving industries such as global trading and the I.T. industry, which led to the emergence of a handful of successful Korean businessmen (Yim 2007). Though still largely confined to a limited niche of small scale selfemployment or co-ethnic occupational structure, most of them nevertheless became economically integrated in the 1960s and 1970s. By the late 1970s, most Koreans became acculturated and considered Japan as their permanent and only home. More than ninety-percent of these Koreans know only the Japanese language and many have never been to Korea. The naturalization rate and international marriage rate for Koreans are rising. Still, facing institutional discriminatory barriers, despite their acculturation, the second and third generation of Koreans started mobilizing against both the Japanese government and private companies who overtly refused to hire Koreans. Around the same time, the exclusive immigration law in Japan and apathetic attitudes toward non-Japanese were exposed internationally, when the Japanese government refused to accept political refugees from South East Asia who fled for their lives in small fishing boats. The image of emaciated Vietnamese refugees floating in a small boat in open water made international headlines (Kamm 1977). At first, officials refused to admit these refugees because Japanese immigration law does not permit the admission of political refugees. However, as both external and internal pressure heightened, the Japanese government reluctantly signed the U.N. Human Rights Treaty in 1979 and then the Refugee Treaty in 1981 with a promise to revise their immigration laws. This 1981 immigration legal reform resulted in a significant expansion of rights for the colonial immigrants and their descendants (Tsutsui and Shin 2008). It expanded some of the social benefits such as child-care welfare and the national health plan from which aliens were previously excluded. The 1981 revision and ratification of these two U.N. treaties led to several other revisions at both national and local levels. However, this change did not lead Japanese society to march directly toward multiculturalism. Instead, it inadvertently created a distinction between the acculturated and economically-integrated immigrants and the less acculturated and economically disadvantaged ones. Korean social movements in Japan, although emphasizing universal human rights, also exposed the government’s historical responsibility for making them “aliens” in the postcolonial period. Korean activists
Colonial legacy of ethno-racial inequality in Japan
71
also lobbied the South Korean government, which by then had become an important political and economic partner with Japan, to increase pressure on the Japanese state to recognize the rights of Koreans in Japan. The Japanese government cites this historical particularity to justify their differentiated treatment of the old, integrated immigrants from that of other newly-arrived immigrants. In other words, the Koreans’ social movement, although extending the boundaries of rights for the longterm foreign residents, also unexpectedly created a justification for the state to make a hierarchical classification of immigrants and to treat these classified groups differently. As a result, the colonial immigrants and their descendants were placed on the top of this hierarchy, while the other newly arrived labor immigrants were placed below them. As shown below, this hierarchical classification of immigrant populations triggered a transfer of institutional discrimination from the old colonial immigrants to the new immigrant groups, creating a vicious cycle of inequality against immigrants in Japan.
Durable inequality transferred Thus far, we have seen how the legacy of colonial institutions persisted in postwar Japan, despite the fact that the prewar organizational structure including the various colonial offices was dismantled shortly after the war. We also saw how the Korean social movement gained some successes in the 1980s, but their success was not extended to other new immigrant groups. In this section, we see how the immigration policies designed mostly for Koreans has created a system of durable inequality that continued to affect new immigrants to Japan, even those who have little or no involvement in Japan’s colonial past. By the late 1980s, Japan had become a more urban, middle-class and older society, a common trajectory for developed countries (Pempel 2008). New challenges for late 20th century Japan included population decline and labor shortage particularly in the so-called 3 K jobs—Kitsui (Demanding), Kitanai (Dirty) and Kiken (Dangerous). As early as the 1970s, the Japanese government was under pressure from economic lobbyists, such as Keidanren (Japan Federation of Economic Organization which became the Japan Business Federation) to admit cheap foreign laborers to work for jobs that the well-educated native-born people no longer choose. Regardless of the government’s no-immigration policy, the rising number of illegal labor immigrants has already become vital to many mid- and small-sized manufacturing companies in Japan by the 1980s. The Japanese government, however, remained largely reluctant to openly admit immigrants in any form, but they nevertheless allowed a highly-controlled flow of foreign labor in several ways. Following the 1981 reforms, the Japanese government once again significantly revised their immigration law in 1989 and 2009. These revisions rearranged the admission status and created a clear classification of immigrants by their statuses which closely correspond to ethno-racial categorical lines. This new classification essentially produced a hierarchical order among immigrant groups. On the top of the hierarchy are the colonial immigrants and their descendants, so called “Zainichi” Koreans and Chinese who enjoy the most secure legal status in Japan. The middle stratum is Nikkeijin (the descendants of Japanese emigrants) from
72
H. Shin
Latin America or the Philippines who enter Japan under a special family visa which is given only to blood relatives of Japanese citizens. They are the largest class of unskilled labor immigrants in Japan today and have less restricted rights to work, reside and obtain access to social benefits in Japan. The bottom stratum contains students, trainees and entertainers, who have very limited rights in Japan. Most but not all are from developing East or South East Asian countries. To be clear, this revised immigration law does not openly admit these categories of immigrants as “labor immigrants.” These new categories are created by the government to include a substantial number of cheap labor immigrants without having any official commitment to admit labor immigrants. Furthermore, the state also had a very clear racial motivation behind this revision. By creating a differentiated visa category exclusively for Nikkeijin, the Japanese state attempted to maintain its national self-image as a racially and ethnically homogeneous nation. One member of the then dominant political party (LDP) explains this motive in the following way. Admitting Nikkeijin legally will greatly help to ameliorate the present acute labor shortage. People who oppose the admission of the unskilled are afraid of racial discrimination against foreigners. Indeed, if Japan admitted many Asians with different cultures and customs than those of Japanese, Japan’s homogeneous ethnic composition could collapse. However, if Nikkeijin were admitted, this would not be a problem…. Nikkeijin, as relatives of the Japanese, would be able to assimilate into Japanese society regardless of nationality and language.9 We detect a parallel optimism of Japanese policy makers regarding assimilating new groups in both the above quote by a Japanese policy maker in 1989 and the earlier remark by the Colonial General of Korea in 1915. Despite being separated by nearly 75 years, both use the Japanese self-image to justify their position. Whereas contemporary Japan uses its homogeneous self-image to justify admitting its coethnic Nikkeijin, Imperial Japan believed in its hybrid national self to validate acquiring different ethnic groups. This parallel is an important key to understanding the path-dependent nature of Japanese immigration policy development. As discussed earlier, this hybrid self-image led to an extensive absorption of different Asian groups during the colonial era. Postwar Japanese intellectuals and policy makers renewed national self-image by negating their imperial past including the previous failed attempts to absorb non-Japanese groups (Oguma 1998). Postwar Japan underscored its ethno-racial homogeneity as its essential cultural core. This self-image as a homogeneous nation was reified through the postwar adaptation of exclusive immigration policies, marginalizing the remaining colonial immigrants, encouraging their acculturation which essentially turned their existence invisible in the dominant discourse. Facing an acute labor shortage, Japan had to resolve its dilemma—a desire to sustain its self-image while satisfying its labor-force requirements. The solution for this dilemma was to select Nikkeijin among the vast pool of candidates for cheap labor for their unique distinction—Japanese blood lineage. However, Nikkeijin did not integrate into Japanese society as easily as policy makers initially imagined, but they instead faced ethno-racial discrimination and 9
This passage is from page 76 in Yamanaka’s article (1996).
Colonial legacy of ethno-racial inequality in Japan
73
quickly became marginalized as outsiders (Tsuda 1999). Their marginality is evident in many reports indicating a high degree of residential segregation and alarmingly low school enrollment among Nikkeijin children (Onai 2008). The situation is the same, if not worse, for other foreign labor populations in Japan with even more restrictive legal statuses in Japan than the Nikkeijin. The Japanese public tends to blame their individual characteristics such as language skill and unwillingness to adapt to Japanese culture for their failed incorporation into society. However, what is overlooked is the serious challenge posed by the institutional arrangements in Japanese society for these immigrants. No Japanese public institutions, including the local government, the Immigration Bureau, schools, companies, hospitals, and police, are designed to accommodate or serve non-Japanese populations. There is no anti-discrimination law to stop rampant racism in housing and the job market. Japanese society at large views the immigrants as a source of social ill as obvious in the Japanese media’s negative coverage of foreigners, associating the increase of foreign populations with increasing crimes in Japan, despite the lack of any supporting official statistics (Nakajima 2007). This exclusive institutional arrangement is no reflection of Japanese ethno-racial homogeneity, but rather a result of historically accumulated institutionalization of asymmetrical social relations between Japanese citizens and immigrants. As discussed thus far, ethno-racial inequality toward immigrants has its roots in the colonial period when Japan experienced a large scale exploitation of cheap labor from its colonies. The postwar Japanese state reproduced this asymmetrical hierarchical relationship between Japanese and immigrants through the incorporation of colonial trust networks among former colonial bureaucrats into its new state structure. As the state officially codified this hierarchical order in its immigration law, excluding immigrants from the state benefits and politics, other organizations in society also followed this official code and excluded non-Japanese population, institutionalizing this categorical inequality at various corners of society. This categorical inequality against immigrants did not disappear when Koreans became socio-economically and culturally incorporated into Japanese society. Instead, it was transferred to new immigrant groups. Koreans’ successful collective activism to pressure the state to revise its immigration law unexpectedly allowed the state to create a distinction between old and new immigrants, making this transferring of categorical inequality from one group to another possible. And this legal distinction in immigration law which divides between privileged and unprivileged immigrants makes it extremely difficult for people to see that the discrimination and inequality that they face in fact has common colonial roots. Consequently, this difficulty to see the colonial legacies in the present immigration policy and discrimination serves to separate rather than bring together all the immigrants in Japan, reinforcing this ethno-racial inequality.
Conclusion This article presents a historically nuanced understanding of immigration policies and ethno-racial inequality in Japan. Contrary to the anti-historicist account that severs the link between the colonial past and the present immigration integration, a
74
H. Shin
close examination of the experiences of Twentieth-Century Japan reveals deep legacies of the colonial past on the present. The historical data shows not only that Japan did have a large influx of immigration during the first half of the twentieth century, but also that their experience dealing with colonial immigration shaped the ways in which they drafted and enforced the postwar immigration policies. Thus, to say Japan is not a country of immigrants is to ignore a half century of contentious dynamics of immigrants’ struggles. However, it is not always obvious to see this link. As we have seen, Japan’s colonial organizational structures were dismantled under the American gaze, which could be interpreted as a discontinuity from the colonial past. However, a closer look at the historical record also reveals that the colonial network nevertheless survived not only within the colonial immigrant community but also within the Japanese state. Postwar Japanese state incorporated colonial trust networks among the former colonial officers and bureaucrats, and this trust network helped reproducing the same asymmetrical relationship between Japanese and Koreans and served to perpetuate categorical inequality against immigrants in postwar democratized Japan. This network continued to shape the practice of new laws as well as new organizational functions. In other words, what we found underneath the so-called democratic transition and de-colonization was in fact “old wine in a new bottle.” The historical records from Japan also demonstrate that the lasting effects of colonial legacies were not deliberate or direct. Rather, these effects were largely manifested in a contingent and incremental fashion. Postwar Japan’s exclusive immigration policies developed only when erstwhile war enemies, the U.S. and Japan, unexpectedly began to merge their political interests and share the common sentiment against Koreans in the context of the Cold War. Despite informal and formal discrimination, marginalized immigrants relied on their own trust networks to find an occupational niche within their ethnic enclaves and become socioeconomically integrated into Japanese society. Meanwhile, postwar intellectuals and policy makers embraced a homogeneous national self-image image as a repentant reaction to its imperial expansionist past that nearly destroyed the country. This homogeneous self-image further justified the exclusive immigration policies and ethno-racial marginalization in turn further reifying this homogeneous selfimage. Postwar Japan followed a process of emulation which Tilly identified as one of the key mechanisms to transplant existing social relations from one setting or organization to another. Many organizations— public and private—emulated the state’s hierarchical relation between Japanese citizen and immigrant, and developed exclusionary organizational structures, reproducing durable categorical inequality against immigrants. However, toward the end of the twentieth century, this national self-image posed a new dilemma for Japan as it faced an acute shortage of manual labor. The timing of Japan’s quest for a new source of exploitable labor and the Korean immigrants’ social movement against Japanese immigration policies collided. The Korean’s appeal for a unique standing in the colonial history eventually instigated Japan to construct new hierarchical categories of immigrants to whom new ethno-racial inequality and exploitation were transferred. This hierarchical classification of foreign populations in Japan prevents the marginalized population from recognizing the link that connects all the immigrant populations in Japan. This elaborates Tilly’s
Colonial legacy of ethno-racial inequality in Japan
75
account of durable inequality as it shows inequality can be transferred not only from one setting or generation to another, but also from one particular group to another group. One should not reduce a complex mechanism of immigration policy making and ethno-racial inequality to a simplified historical narrative. Individual factors (i.e., socio-economic status, language skill, educational attainment, exposure to the host society, age upon arrival, gender, and length of residency) also matter along with structural ones such as place of residence, family’s class background, ethno-racial status, and occupational opportunities. The interaction effects between them are perhaps even more important. However, the historical insight underscored in this essay enhances our current inquiries, for it forces us to see the parallels (or sometimes the lack thereof) between the past and the present excluding superficial or temporal variables. Such insights in turn help us to understand why the variation in immigration policies and integration patterns emerges across time and space. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Michael Hanagan for his helpful editorial feedback and Michael Schwartz, Daniel Levy, Kiyoteru Tsutusi, Harumi Befu, Ryoko Yamamoto, Jane Yamashiro, and Matthew Augustine for their insightful suggestions on earlier versions of this essay.
References Befu, H. (2001). Hegemony of homogeneity: anthropological analysis of Nihonjinron. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Bleich, E. (2005). The legacies of history? Colonization and immigrant integration in Britain and France. Theory and Society, 34(2), 171–195. Freeman, G. P. (1979). Immigrant labor and racial conflict in industrial societies: the French and British experience 1945–1975. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gaikokujin Toroku Jimu-kyokai Zenkoku Rengokai, ed. (1964). Zadankai: Ano toji no Gaikokujin-toroku o kaerimite (I). Gaijin Toroku, 84, 1–8. Joppke, C. (1999). Immigration and the nation-state: the United States, Germany, and Great Britain. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Kamm, H. (1977). Vietnam escapees wait in limbo as the world turns a deaf ear. New York Times. June 8. Kim, T. (1997). Sengo Nihon seiji to Zainichi Chosenjin Mondai: SCAP no tai-Zainichi Chosenjin Seisaku 1945–1052. Tokyo: Keiso Shobo. Mahoney, J. (2000). Path dependence in historical sociology. Theory and Society, 29(4), 507–548. Mori, H. (1997). Immigration policy and foreign workers in Japan. New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc. Morris-Suzuki, T. (2006a). Invisible immigrants: undocumented migration and border controls in early postwar Japan. The Journal of Japanese Studies, 32(1), 119–153. Morris-Suzuki, T. (2006b). An act prejudicial to the occupational forces: migration controls and Korean residents in post-surrender Japan. Japanese Studies, 24(1), 5–28. Nakajima, S. (2007). “Chian akka” to sukeipu-gohto to sareru gaikokujin. Keizai, 147, 77–83. Nishinarita, Y. (1997). Zainichi Chosenjin no Sekai to Teikoku Hokai. Tokyo: Tokyo University Press. Oguma, E. (1998). Nihonjin no kyokai: Okinawa, Ainu, Taiwan, Chousen Shokuminchi-shihai kara Fukkoku-undo made. Tokyo: Shinyo-sha. Onai, T. (2008). Gaikokujin no kodomo no kyoiku mondai: kako, genzai, mirai. Jurist, 1350, 38–44. Onuma, Y. (1978). Shutsu nyukoku kanri-housei no seiritsu katei. In H. Terasawa et al. (Eds.), Kokusai hogaku no saikochiku (pp. 257–328). Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai. Pempel, T. J. (2008). Learning to lose is for losers: Japanese LDP’s reform struggle. In E. Friedman & J. Wong (Eds.), Political transitions in dominant party systems: Learning to lose (pp. 109–126). London and New York: Routledge. Sellek, Y. (2001). Migrant labour in Japan. New York: Palgrave.
76
H. Shin
Soysal, S. (1994). Limits of citizenship: migrants and postnational membership in Europe. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Tabuchi, H. (2009). Japan pays foreign workers to go home. April: New York Times. 22. Tilly, C. (1996). What good is urban history? Journal of Urban History, 22(6), 702–719. Tilly, C. (1998). Durable inequality. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tilly, C. (2005). Trust and rule. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tsuboi, Y. (2004). Aru Chosen Sotokufu Keikan Kanryo no Kaiso. Tokyo: Soshisha. Tsuda, T. (1999). The permanence of “temporary” migration: the “structural embeddedness” of JapaneseBrazilian immigrant workers in Japan. The Journal of Asian Studies, 58(3), 687–722. Tsutsui, K., & Shin, H. (2008). Global norms, local activism, and social movement outcomes: global human rights and resident Koreans in Japan. Social Problems, 55(3), 391–418. Yamanaka, K. (1996). Return migration of Japanese-Brazilians to Japan: The Nikkeijin as Ethnic minority and political construct. Diaspora, 5(1), 65–97. Yim, Y. (2007). Zainichi Korian kigyoka no keieikatsudo to nettowahku no tenbo. Ohara Shakai-mondai Kenkyujo Zasshi, 588, 44–60. Zhou, M. (1997). Segmented assimilation: issues, controversies, and recent research on the new second generation. International Migration Review, 31(4), 975–1008.
Hwaji Shin is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of San Francisco. She was also a Visiting Assistant Professor and Japan Fund Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies at Stanford University (2008–2010) where she worked on a book on the history of Japan’s citizenship and immigration policy making. She has also published articles on Korean social movements in Japan. Her areas of expertise include historical and comparative sociology, immigration, citizenship, nationalism, race, and ethnicity.
Part II
State-Making, Remaking, and Unmaking
The French Revolution, war, and state-building: making one Tilly out of three Sidney Tarrow
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
Abstract In this chapter, Tilly’s work on revolutions and state-building are connected to each other to show how state building and contentious mechanisms combined to produce both the terror and the foundation for the people’s army and other foundations for mass politics. Revolution, war, and state-building: three terms that—as much as any other—bracketed Charles Tilly’s career, and for three reasons: their uncertain but tantalizing location between structure and action; their uneasy position between democratization and tyranny; and their long-term impact on human affairs. Yet apart from the work of a very few scholars, like Tilly himself, the three terms have provoked largely distinct literatures: Revolutions have been largely seen as a form of social movement, a term Tilly used in a more restricted way (Tilly and Wood 2009); War has largely been studied as a subfield of international relations, but Tilly actually saw it as the most extreme form of contentious politics1; State-building has been seen as a largely administrative process, linked to warmaking, to be sure, but far removed from contentious politics except for the
This text draws on the annual Tocqueville lecture at the University of Colorado, Boulder, on the Max Kampelman lecture at the Hebrew University, the Harry Eckstein lecture at University of California at Irvine and a seminar at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Organisation in Paris. I am grateful to Steven Kaplan, whose footprints are all over it, to Peter Katzenstein, Meyer Kestnbaum, Dominick LaCapra, Camille Robcis and Bill Sewell for their sensitive comments on earlier versions, to Jason Frank, who alerted me to the Republican roots of citizen armies and to Roger Masters, who remains, malgré lui, a consummate political theorist and student of France. 1 When Doug McAdam and this author began to work on Dynamics of Contention (2001) with Tilly, he argued for the inclusion of war as a form of contention. He lost, two against one—the only battle he lost against his usually timid collaborators. S. Tarrow (*) Cornell University, 102 McGraw Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-7601, USA e-mail:
[email protected] M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_6, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
79
80
S. Tarrow
struggle over territory. Tilly knew better: he argued that state-building is a protection racket, just like many forms of politics (Tilly 1985, 1990). Why this division of labor, when revolution, war, and state-building are so often conjoined in history and similar in violence? One reason is because wars are generally condemned—even by those who pursue them—while revolutions produce divisions of opinion between enthusiasts and opponents, and state-building is seen as the inevitable result of men and women trying to live together in comity (Strayer 1970). Another is because of the differences in the historiographies each specialty has produced: from the largely technical and diplomatic histories of warfare to the socially and ideologically inflected histories of revolution and to the macro-historical models of state-building. A third reason is the overspecialization that haunts the contemporary social sciences, against which Tilly fought valiantly until his death. Yet although Tilly’s oeuvre ranged broadly over all three subjects, he tended to deal with war and state-building on the one hand and with revolution on the other. Consider the first chapter of his intended final opus: States, Cities, and Trust Networks: while there are four mentions of “war” and three of “warfare,” a rapid search for the term “revolution” turns up only one reference, and that one is in the bibliography. This paper challenges that division, or rather, it seeks to find the implicit links in his writings between revolution and contentious politics, on the one hand, and war and state-building, on the other. It argues that rulers not only fight wars and build states on their ruins; revolutionaries also build states, never more forcefully than when they have to defend themselves in war. When we turn to the literature on the French Revolution, we find that the bulk of the historical literature ignores the concatenation of revolution, war, contention, and statebuilding. While a mid-century literature, inscribed in a Republican-Marxist tradition, focused on the social bases of the Revolution (Soboul 1958; Lefebvre 1947), a newer revisionist literature has shifted the focus from the social to the ideological and cultural (Baker 1990; Chartier 1991; Hunt 1984). That shift has freed the Revolution from the rigidities of Marxist social history but left the processes that surrounded the building of a new revolutionary state in the shadows. Indeed, revisionist historians of the Revolution looked down their noses at “circumstances” altogether. Tilly knew better: he saw revolutions as part of the political process, and thus susceptible to examination using the tools he had developed as a student of contentious politics. But he did not take the final step: linking the political process within the revolution to his interest in war and state-building. This chapter attempts to explore that linkage, drawing both on Tilly’s work on revolutions and contentious politics and on his largely distinct work on war and state-building. I argue that the revolutionaries’ responses to the crises of the early 1790s were episodes in the construction of a new state. But first, I briefly summarize the two traditions that Tilly was implicitly writing against in his work on the French Revolution: the Marxist–Republican synthesis and the work of his friend François Furet. The Republican/Marxist tradition Too much has been written about the French Revolution’s social origins to require much attention here. From the Third Republic on, historians struggled to understand its ambivalent relationship to different social classes. The sociological interpretation
The French Revolution, war, and state-building: making one Tilly out of three
81
of the Revolution was never simple, but even scholars who disagreed about which class had made it were convinced that there was a social basis to the Revolution. The culmination of the sociological interpretation came in the mid-twentieth century (Baker and Kaplan 1992). Particularly in the decades bracketing World War II, as intellectual Marxism made its way into the academy, Marxism was employed as a tool to cut through the complexities of the revolutionary decade. The most controversial of the Marxist historians was Albert Soboul, who deconstructed the class basis of the Parisian sans-culottes, and found there a tenuous proletarian presence and a majority of artisans (1958).2 For Soboul it was the pressures of the sans-culottes on the Convention that led, in May 1793, to the imposition of a national maximum on the price of grain and thus to the most advanced social legislation of the Revolution (Gough 1998, pp. 36–37). But the most gifted spokesman for the class interpretation of the Revolution was Georges Lefebvre, who periodized it according to the prominence of its four most important classes. “The aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the urban masses and the peasants, each independently and for reasons of its own, initiated revolutionary action,” writes R.R. Palmer in the preface to The Coming of the French Revolution (1947: xiv). However penetrating the analyses of Soboul and Lefebvre, they were bound to lead to a reaction. One partial step away from Marxist orthodoxy came with Theda Skocpol (1979). In the traces of her great teacher, Barrington Moore Jr., she looked at rural class relations as the central cleavage that triggered the Revolution. But the fundamental rejection of the Marxist model of the Revolution had to await the 1980s, when the decadence of Marxism in the academy was joined by its eclipse in French politics. This takes us to the crucial work of François Furet and his followers. The intellectual/cultural alternative Although he is best remembered for the structuralist conceit that the French Revolution only re-created the centralization of the Old Regime state, it was Alexis de Tocqueville who was the originator of the idea that the Revolution had intellectual origins in the Old Regime. When he asked why it spiraled from the relatively liberal phase of 1789 to the dogmatism and violence of the Terror, Tocqueville saw the fault in the intellectuals who were the Regime’s lumières. These, he proposed, laid the philosophical groundwork for the abstract notions of popular sovereignty that would characterize French revolutionary thought and would drive the Republic to the practice of terror.3 2
Recent interpreters have denied that Soboul was a crude Marxist analyst. William Sewell saw him rather as a pioneer in the study of the political culture of the Revolution (1994, p. 249). Sewell shows that the sans-culottes, whose class composition was heterodox, believed that bread prices were the order of the day. “Hunger,” Soboul wrote, “was the cement which held together the artisan, the shopkeeper, and the workman, whose common interest united them against the great merchant, the entrepreneur, and the noble or bourgeois speculator” (Soboul, p. 454, quoted by Sewell, p. 250). 3 As Tocqueville writes of their theories:
Quelque séparés qu’ils soient dans le reste de leur cours, ils se tiennent tous à ce point de départ : tous pensent qu’il convient de substituer des règles simples et élémentaires, puisées dans la raison et dans la loi naturelle, aux coutumes compliquées et traditionelles qui régissent la société de leur temps (1988, p. 230).
82
S. Tarrow
Intellectual historian Daniel Mornet also traced the Revolution to the influence of France’s eighteenth-century philosophers (Mornet 1989). Mornet saw the Revolution as a block and the Enlightenment as its necessary condition (Chartier 1991, chap. 1). He did not deny the importance of politics to the origin of the Revolution, but it was “intelligence” that drew out and organized its consequences, intelligence diffused from great minds to writers of second and third degree; from men of letters to those who were not part of the métier; from the cultivated class to the bourgeoisie, the petite bourgeoisie, the people; from Paris to the most distant provinces (Mornet 1989, p. 24). As Marxism declined in the 1970s and 1980s, both as a secular faith and as a paradigm of history, historian François Furet took up Tocqueville’s and Mornet’s claims and led an intellectual charge against the sociological interpretation. His timing was not accidental. Although he had been moving away from the class-based history of the Revolution since he left the Communist party in the 1950s, it was the approach of the Bicentennial of the Revolution that offered him a platform for a radical reinterpretation of France’s constituent moment. First in his Penser la Révolution française (1978), and then, with his collaborator, Mona Ozouf, in a massive compendium of 99 articles (Furet and Ozouf 1992), Furet made a linkage from the lumières to the Jacobins and from there to modern totalitarianism.4 (Furet 1992, p. 313). The Revolution was the incarnation of the prerevolutionary philosophical tradition and the Terror its ultimate expression. If this sounds like Tocqueville it was no accident. Furet was an avid admirer and critic of his nineteenth-century predecessor. Of course, Tocqueville never imagined the horrors of the Gulag, and Furet had the advantage of seeing first-hand how theory had twisted the mentality of his former Communist comrades. Yet the two had this in common: neither was very interested in the circumstances within the Revolution that led the Republicans to the practice of totalitarian democracy. Indeed, Furet looked down his nose at those who interpreted the Revolution as the result of mere “circumstances” (1992, p. 312). To better understand these circumstances, we turn to the work of Charles Tilly. Tilly on war and state-building In his well-known aphorism that “states make war and war makes states,” Tilly famously argued that states were the product of war-making and of the mechanisms it unleashes.5 In Coercion, Capital and European States, Tilly made three main points about war-making and its influence on the formation of modern states:
4
For Furet, the ideology of the Revolution was related to several traditions of ideas:
La première est celle de la régeneration de l’homme, par quoi la Révolution française s’apparente à une annonciation de type religieux sur un mode sécularisé. Les acteurs des événements ont en effet pensé leur propre histoire comme une émancipation de l’homme universel. [La Révolution] a vécu sur l’idée d’une nouvelle souveraineté absolue et indivisible, qui exclut le pluralisme de la représentation, puisqu’elle suppose l’unité du peuple. (1992, p. 312). The aphorism first appears in his “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime” in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (1985), and in more systematic form in Coercion, Capital and European States (1990).
5
The French Revolution, war, and state-building: making one Tilly out of three
83
First, with respect to capital: from a presence hovering in the background of state-building, capital advanced to a partnership role—now stronger, now weaker—with state makers who needed its contributions for war-making and state-making (1990, pp. 17–19); second, depending on the relative concentration and accumulation of capital and coercion, the form of state that emerges will vary substantially (p. 27)6; third, he begins to elaborate the implications of the theory for citizenship in the modern state. Tilly began with the processes of war-making, state-making, extraction, and protection—but he eventually added a number of “civilianizing” processes that followed from them: adjudication, distribution, and production: From the nineteenth century to the recent past…all European states involved themselves much more heavily than before in building social infrastructure, in providing services, in regulating economic activity, in controlling population movements, and in assuring citizens’ welfare; all these activities began as byproducts of rulers’ efforts to acquire revenues and compliance from their subject populations, but took on lives and rationales of their own (p. 31; emphasis added). “War-making,” “state-making,” “extraction,” and “protection” eventually produced a bargained relationship between coercion and capital, the mediation by the state of social cleavages, the state’s role in guiding the economy, and the diffusion of the citizen army. And this takes us back to France, where we find the origin of many of these changes. What does any of this have to do with the French Revolution, its involution into the Terror, and the invention of a citizen army? We can only answer this question after we turn to a second aspect of Tilly’s work: his understanding of contentious politics and revolutions. Both the war-linked and civilizing processes he deduced in Coercion, Capital and European States came from struggle—contentious, collective, and sometimes revolutionary struggle. The long-term processes of statebuilding intersected with shorter-term ones, linking rulers and people in more or less intense episodes of contentious politics. And this takes us to the second main facet of Tilly’s work: his theory of contentious politics.
6
Where capital was stronger and rulers weaker, he argued, rulers had to rely on capitalists to rent or purchase military force, and thereby could make war without building large and expanding state structures. The result was the renaissance city-state, not only in northern and central Italy but along the Baltic and in the belt of commercially based cities running diagonally from the low countries through western Germany and Switzerland (1990, pp. 143–151). Where coercion was more intensive than capitalist development— as in Brandenburg-Prussia and Russia—rulers squeezed the means of war from their own populations. In fact, in extreme cases, like Czarist Russia, rulers left few resources for capitalists to accumulate and depended more on foreign loans than they did on domestic capitalists (pp. 137–143). It was where capital and coercion grew up in rough balance, as in France and England, that holders of capital and possessors of the means of coercion needed one another, bargained over rights and resources, and produced fully fledged national states (pp. 151–160). The relatively greater war-making and state-making capacity of this “capitalized coercion” mode made it more successful than the other two. From the seventeenth century onward the capitalized coercion form proved more effective in war, and therefore provided a compelling model for states that had originated in other combinations of coercion and capital.
84
S. Tarrow
Tilly on contention and revolution While Tilly was developing his idea of state-building as a form of protection racket, he was also developing his concept of contentious politics. This phrase he employed to mean “interactions in which actors make claims bearing on someone else’s interests, in which governments appear either as targets, initiators of claims or third parties” (Tilly 2008). Although the term is sometimes used as a synonym for “social movements,” Tilly used it to mean much more: he applied it to forms of contention ranging from small-scale isolated episodes of contention to protest campaigns, strike waves, revolts, civil wars, and revolutions. Three observations about the meaning and implications of this broad choice are particularly relevant to the French Revolution:
first, if contention encompasses episodes of contention ranging from protest campaigns to strike waves, revolts, civil wars, and revolutions, that means that some of the mechanisms that drive revolutions can also be observed in “lesser” forms of contention both within and without revolutions; second, and an obvious corollary of the first observation, different forms of contention overlap, intersect, and interact in the same historical periods— including during periods of revolution (Goldstone 1998). Third, despite the apparently exceptional quality of revolutions, the mechanisms that drive them “chiefly concern the routine operation and transformation of states” (Tilly 1993, p. 8). What kind of mechanisms? Tilly argues that a revolutionary situation is triggered by a finite and repetitive series of mechanisms:
the appearance of contenders, or coalitions of contenders advancing incompatible claims to control the state commitment to those claims by a significant segment of the citizenry the incapacity or unwillingness of rulers to suppress the alternative coalition and/ or commitment to its claims (Tilly 1993, pp. 10–11). These intra-revolutionary mechanisms are only different in degree from those that drive other forms of contention, like social movements. Take mobilization: it is the best studied process in the field of social movement studies; or commitment, which social psychologists and sociologists have identified as keys to contention under a variety of different names; or defection/collapse, like the mechanism that Tilly described in his From Mobilization to Revolution as “facilitation” (1978). These mechanisms are found wherever social actors make claims, big or small, on states and states respond to them, including within revolutions. But such mechanisms are only the starting point for revolutionary processes, which are the result of an additional set of mechanisms. Some of these are familiar from the vocabulary of contentious politics: mechanisms like the diffusion of mobilization from early risers to those who identify with them; the formation of new or broadened coalitions as the revolutionary process impinges on others’ interests and offers new opportunities; the appropriation of existing institutions and organizations for new and bolder purposes; or a shift in scale from the local to the national level or back again.
The French Revolution, war, and state-building: making one Tilly out of three
85
Other mechanisms come into play as revolutionary gains are contested, modified, and implemented. Revolutionaries who seize and hold onto power for any length of time create new units of state administration and control; when their aims are bold, they have to suppress or co-opt internal countermovements that spring up in response to their reforms; when they are challenged from outside, they build armed forces, levy taxes to pay for these armies, and organize production around their war aims; with all these tasks, they need to provision the armed forces they have conscripted and distribute food to cities they are trying to control. From a set of short-term mechanisms familiar from the study of contentious politics, we have shifted to the longer-term mechanisms that Tilly outlined for the building of states: war-making, state-building, extraction, production, distribution, and protection. Tilly never explicitly connected these longer-term mechanisms to revolutions; for example, he absentmindedly published on European Revolutions, based on his theory of contentious politics, two years after Coercion, Capital and European States without explicitly noting that the revolutionaries were engaging in both contention and state building. But putting these two books together gives us an alternative process-based approach to both the structural accounts of the Republican/ Marxist synthesis or to the idea-driven account of Furet. Building a state amid contention: France, 1789–1794 Of course, revolutionaries who seize power differ from the state-makers that Tilly studied in Coercion, Capital and European States in the shorter temporal compass of their tasks, their relative inexperience at governing, and the ferocity of their opponents. They also differ in the concentration of political threats and opportunities that their revolution creates and exposes, which others are quick to exploit. But because revolutions are liminal events that transform structure in a highly condensed form,7 their task is not appreciably different from that of the long-term state-builders in Coercion, Capital and European States: they are not only making a revolution; they are rebuilding state machinery, extracting taxes, conscripting soldiers, organizing production, distributing food, and adjudicating disputes among citizens, all in the context of threats from within and without. Pace Furet, these are “circumstances” that profoundly condense and intensify the task of state-building.8 The key mechanisms that unrolled during the first half of the revolutionary decade involved the processes of state-building, war-making, and distribution, inflected with almost constant political contention. State-building In The Old Regime and the French Revolution Tocqueville famously argued that in terms of state-building, Napoleon invented little that was new, simply picking up on 7
Students of French social history will note that I am extending William Sewell’s insightful interpretation of the taking of the Bastille as a event that transformed structure into an interpretation of the revolution as a whole as an event that condensed and accelerated the process of state-building into a short temporal compass. See Sewell 1994. 8 Even Furet admits this, though only in passing: “Au printemps,” he writes, “les échecs militaries…, le déclenchement de la guerre de Vendée et les difficultés économiques à Paris ouvrent la route à cette surenchère” (1992, p. 297).
86
S. Tarrow
and refining the centralization he inherited from the Old Regime (1955, p. 202).9 As in many of his other claims, Tocqueville was half right: Napoleon did inherit a centralized administrative structure, but it was one that the Revolution had invented. The Old Regime state was actually littered with intermediaries: “landlords, seigneurial officials, venal office-holders, clergy and sometimes municipal oligarchies as well” (Tilly 1993, p. 167). As they swept the crazy-quilt of provinces from the map and replaced it with départements, districts, cantons, and communes, while sending out représentants en mission (p. 168), they were applying direct rule for the first time. These transformations are usually described in purely administrative terms by political scientists (Chapman 1955), who often point out how artificial they were. But they had profound implications for the struggle for power within the provinces and between center and periphery of a rapidly evolving political system. First, they raised the status of some provincial cities while lowering that of significant others, challenging the independence of those who had emerged in the Federalist revolts of the early 1790s (Lepetit 1988). Second, they transferred local power from provincial elites to patriot coalitions, drawn mainly from the provincial middle class and then replacing many of these with more reliable administrators. Third, they stripped away the tissue of ancient liberties and exemptions that many localities had enjoyed for centuries (Tilly 1993, p. 168). Needless to say, these reforms triggered resistance, especially from people and localities that had been exempt from taxation. “Resistance and counterrevolutionary action followed directly from the process by which the new states established direct rule,” concludes Tilly (p. 171). War-making The revolutionaries were at war almost constantly after Louis XVI’s attempted flight. The key turning points came from the Brissotiens and then from the Girondins (Blanning 1986). Wars with Austria, Prussia, and eventually, Great Britain, followed in rapid succession. By 1793 France was in a constant state of war that would last, with only brief interludes, for two decades (Lynn 1984). Stephen M. Walt provides evidence on the close relationship between the Revolution and war (1996). Walt focuses on the reasons why external powers were incited by the weakness of the revolutionaries to make gains at France’s expense. His approach also turns on how war became a driving force for internal politics. The urge to go to war was multiplied by other states’ perceptions about French intentions and by the French leaders’ preoccupation with the danger of counterrevolution “based on suspicions of treason, rumors of aristocratic plots, and the possibility of foreign interference” (p. 46). Walt is right that the perception of danger is as powerful a motive for going to war as the danger itself. But like Furet (1992, p. 292), he understates the extent to which the Revolution really was in danger. The revolutionaries were threatened on three Tocqueville’s memorable phrase is “that since 1789 the administrative system has always stood firm amid the debacles of political systems. There might be dynastic changes and alterations in the structure of the state machine, but the course of day-to-day affairs was neither interrupted nor deflected.” Old Regime, 1955, p. 202.
9
The French Revolution, war, and state-building: making one Tilly out of three
87
fronts—four if one includes the threat from the sea.10 It was against the threat of military defeat that the Committee of Public Safety was set up, newspapers critical of the Revolution were closed down, political disagreements began to be framed as treason and volunteerism gave way to true conscription (Lynn 1984, chap. 3). Far more than the writings of Rousseau or the rhetoric of the Abbé Sieyès, the need to protect the Revolution from its enemies drove the Republicans toward the Terror. Contentious politics Mobilized local elites and opportunistic foreign neighbors were one thing; what pushed the revolutionaries hardest toward the adoption of terror was internal rebellion. In the west, taxation, conscription, and the conflict over church and state produced a massive counterrevolution; in the south and southwest, Federalist rebels occupied Marseilles, Lyon, and Bordeaux; throughout the country, there were pockets of resistance to taxation, conscription, and centralization of control—David Andress identifies at least nine of them in 1793 alone (2005, p. x). Between them, as Gough concludes, “war and political conflict … played a major role in pushing the revolution from crisis to terror” (Gough 1998, p. 31). The Vendée Rebellion and its savage repression were archetypical of this process. As Donald Sutherland writes; “The risings [in the West] revealed an opposition to the revolution that was massive, popular and dangerous” and genuinely counterrevolutionary (Sutherland 1994, pp. 100–101). Back in Paris, faced by the dual threats of war and rebellion, there was “irrefutable proof that the Vendean leaders were negotiating with the British for arms and that they were prepared to attack a port to permit the British to land desperately needed arms and other war materials” (p. 102). Irrefutable or not, external war and internal rebellion intersected to produce growing repressiveness by the state. Not only were the rebels known to be dealing with the British; the campaign that the French were planning in Belgium required the rapid transfer of troops that were currently tied down in the West. If the army strove to end the rebellion in the West brutally it was not due to the inherent savagery of the revolutionaries but because “the Republic did not have the resources to continue into 1795” (Sutherland 1994, p. 105). “The impulse to exact revenge, the sense of limitless and ubiquitous betrayal, and military imperatives,” writes Sutherland, “combined to drive the terrorists toward a merciless repression” (Sutherland 1994). The provisioning crisis State-building, war, and civil war were the most dramatic sources for the adoption of draconian measures against dissent. But there was also a continuing crisis surrounding the provision and price of food through the half-decade after 1789. The crowd that surged into the Convention in September 1993 was calling both for bread and for death to counterrevolutionaries (Furet 1992, p. 293). True, the harvest had improved since the devastating dearth of 1789; but rebellion in the provinces and the provisioning needs of the military reinforced fear of famine in the capital. Grain 10
At one point the British sailed into Toulon harbor and were welcomed by the locals who were in revolt against Paris (Blanning 1986).
88
S. Tarrow
seizures and fear of plots to provoke famine were endemic in prerevolutionary France (Kaplan 1982); the Revolution exacerbated the problem of provisioning the cities at prices that people could afford. This not only triggered repeated grain seizures and demands for bread at a “just price”; it was one of the demands of the Parisian sans-culottes throughout the years 1792–1793 that tipped the scales away from institutional politics. Whether there was grain in the capital or not, it was the pressures of the sans-culottes on the Convention that led, in May 1793, to the imposition of a national maximum on the price of grain (Gough 1998, pp. 36–37). This was not all it led to: In September a mass march of sans-culottes erupted into the Convention, demanding the creation of a “revolutionary army” to patrol the provinces in search of food and political suspects (Cobb 1987). That “army” fanned out into the countryside, spreading terror and requisitioning grain, while, in Paris, the Convention passed the General Maximum to control the price of food (Sewell 1994, pp. 257–258). The combination of sans-culotte pressure, Montagnard ability to exploit it, and fear of dearth in Paris combined to produce the atmosphere of crisis that brought the Jacobins to power and launched the Terror. The subsistence crisis and its political correlates combined with fear of invasion and with the threat of counterrevolution in the provinces to produce an inexorable pressure toward dictatorship. I cannot do better than quote William Sewell’s synthesis in its entirety: French forces suffered serious reverses in the low countries, leading to the evacuation of French forces from Belgium on 18 March. By then, riots against conscription had broken out in the Vendée and Lyon was in open revolt against the Convention. In an atmosphere of military peril abroad and civil war at home, the Enragés and the sections renewed their demand for price controls and the Montagnards and Jacobins, who were by then involved in a death struggle with the Girondins, hurried to take up the cause (Sewell 1994, p. 266). The basic lesson of Tilly’s theory of contentious politics is not only that revolutionaries face the same problems that confront state-builders in “normal times,” but that they do so in a context that produces rapid mobilization, equally rapid countermobilization, the rapid diffusion of conflict, the repression of some dissenters and co-optation of others, and a host of other mechanisms familiar from the study of contentious politics. But these outcomes were ambivalent with respect to the future: just as the Jacobin state indiscriminately rooted out sedition, it also laid the foundation for the machinery of the modern secular state, with its dual implications for democracy and dictatorship. We can see this ambivalence, and the conjoined influence of theory and circumstances, in one of the signal innovations of the revolutionary state: the citizen army. The double meaning of the citizen army11 While the revolutionaries created the citizen army in response to a military threat, that invention was also in a direct line of thought from Republican theory. From 11
This section is much in debt to the fundamental work of Meyer Kestnbaum on the origins and construction of conscription-based modern armies. See, in particular, Kestnbaum 2000, 2002, 2005.
The French Revolution, war, and state-building: making one Tilly out of three
89
Renaissance Florence onward, theorists had seen the enlistment of active citizens in the defense of their fatherland as a source of virtue. For example, Leonardo Bruni thought that virtue “requires the fullest participation in the life of the city” and this included participating directly in its defense (Pocock 1975, pp. 86–88). The decline of Florence, in Bruni’s view, came from the decision of the citizens to stop bearing arms. “As a result, the effective control of policy fell into the hands of a few, rich enough to possess the resources out of which mercenaries were paid and disposed to employ statecraft rather than arms as the instruments of power” (Pocock 1975, pp. 89–90). In the same way, Machiavelli, after losing power, urged on the rulers of Florence the development of a civil militia.12 Rousseau wrote in a direct line of thought from Bruni and Machiavelli. Railing against mercenary soldiers, he favored citizen militias as the preferred way to develop Republican virtue. Military mobilization, for Rousseau, was not only valuable as a way to defend the state; it was a way to create Republican citizens (1978, pp. 101–120). He might have been counseling the French revolutionaries how to respond to the threats on their borders when he wrote: As soon as public service ceases to be the main business of the citizens and they prefer to serve with their pocketbooks rather than with their persons, the State is already close to its ruin. Is it necessary to march to battle? They pay the troops and stay home (1978, p. 101). Rousseau too was a source of Republican theory about the virtues of the citizen army. Listen as he counsels the Poles on how to defend themselves against their aggressive neighbors: (T)he state’s true defenders are its individual citizens, no one of whom should be a professional solider, but each of whom should serve as a soldier as duty requires. That is how they handled the military problem in Rome; that is how they handle it now in Switzerland; and that is how it should be handled in every free state … . A good militia, a genuine, well-trained militia – is the only solution to your problem (1972, p. 81). If Republican theory informed the revolutionaries’ pragmatic response to circumstances, it did not determine it. In reality, the revolutionary army combined elements of a new citizen army with the remnants of the Old Regime army. The first response to the threats on their borders was through voluntarism. When that did not work, the levée en masse was decreed in August 1793, when the Republic was threatened by foreign incursions and in response to sans-culotte pressure. But instead of the “spontaneous mobilization” of the street, the Convention “declared the entire male population liable for requisition for the war effort, but restricted its practical effects to single men between the ages of 18 and 25” (Gough 1998, p. 37). The new recruits brought a revolutionary enthusiasm to the front that was lacking in the Old Regime army, but enthusiasm could not make up for their lack of experience and indiscipline. Not only resistance to conscription but defection and malingering were rife. Nor were class cleavages absent from this 12
The classic statement is in The Prince (1977, pp. 35–42, 59–63).
90
S. Tarrow
“citizen” army—any more than they were absent from French society. While the predominantly middle-class artillerymen stayed with the army, the more aristocratic cavalrymen resigned their commissions. These artillerymen brought with them use of mobile, massed field artillery they had developed under the Old Regime. Without them, the raw new recruits, mainly of lower class origin, would not have produced the military successes of the revolutionaries or of Napoleon— himself an artilleryman.13 The combination of mass voluntarism and conscription began before the height of the Terror. Already in November 1792, the National Convention had set forth a theory of total war through total mobilization: “The women will make tents or serve in the hospitals; the children will shred used linen for bandages; old people will be paraded in public to stimulate the warriors’ courage, to preach the hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic” (quoted in Winock 2002, p. 47). But the circumstances of the Terror shaped both the contraction and expansion of democratic space. As Isser Woloch concludes: As initially demanded by popular societies and sans-culotte militants, the mass levy of August 1793 marked the image of an entire nation in arms, throwing itself at its enemies and intimidating them by sheer mass and determination….The resonance between the army and the home front created a novel and significant democratic space in the era of the Terror (1994, pp. 316, 317). The citizen army had a direct role in producing both modern citizenship and its inequalities. French history teachers were once fond of declaring that revolutionary soldiers invaded foreign countries with copies of the Declaration of the Rights of Man on their bayonets. That may not have been quite true but the trope captures the combination of assertive nationalism and citizen mobilization that explains much of the success of the French military. No less than direct administrative rule over the provinces, the citizen army was a mechanism that tied (male) citizens to the state and to each other through improved education, geographic and social mobility, the integration of new immigrants and, more than anything, the inculcation of a sense of belonging to a common community (Lynn 1984, chap. 6). The obligation for adult males to serve in the military was the counterpart, in the military realm, of the public school, and the expansion of the suffrage, in the civilian one. Finally, the citizen army was and remained ideologically polyvalent. If in France the citizen army was part of a fundamental democratization of French society that Napoleon called “the career open to talents,” in Prussia it was the counterpart of the state-led nationalism that Bismarck used to unify Germany under authoritarian auspices. Even in France the transformation of the citizen army into a professional caste in the second half of the nineteenth century showed the dangers of authoritarian involution. Not only in France, other new democracies under threat have experienced the combination of social unity, centralization of power, and militant nationalism we see 13
I am grateful to Michael Hanagan for pointing out these ambiguities in the character of the citizen army.
The French Revolution, war, and state-building: making one Tilly out of three
91
in the French Revolution. Citizen armies are the classical response of new states, and as such, they reflect the values and the conditions of these states. How they emerged from that conjunction depended on the enemies they faced, the configuration of domestic power, and the nature of the guiding ethos of their elites.14
Tilly and the ambivalences of history Why go to such lengths to show how much is buried in the scholarly production of a figure like Charles Tilly? There are basically three reasons: “For Tilly”—praise for a great thinker; “Against Tilly”—a willingness to criticize him that he would have welcomed; and “Beyond Tilly”—using Tilly’s contributions to sharpen our appreciation for the ambivalences of history. For Tilly: although I am scarcely the first to note this, I hope this essay demonstrates the vast range of Tilly’s contributions to history and the social sciences. Contemporary sociology alone is made up of a number of specialized subfields— the ASA recognizes no fewer than 46 of them. He made important contributions to no less than nine subfields of sociology, not to mention his contributions to history and political science. Against Tilly: But Tilly’s very ecumenism and his habit of working simultaneously on several projects had its costs: as he was putting together the materials for European Revolutions, he was also constructing, on a parallel but largely independent track, his picture of Coercion, Capital, and European States. While we can deduce from these books that the Revolution was an exercise in statebuilding and that both occurred through contentious politics, we have to deduce it, because Tilly never explicitly put the two projects together. Beyond Tilly: The real message of Tilly on war, state-building, and revolution is that history is the combination of structurally knowable and contingent-unpredictable factors that we can only understand through an attentive unpeeling of the political process. That process does not boil down to structural determinants; nor does it evaporate into the thin ether of “agency”; it lies buried in and is recoverable by a careful examination of the mechanisms in the political process. That does not mean that all of history is predictable but it does mean that the ambiguities and contradictions that lie buried in history can be uncovered by an analysis of its processes. Take the institution of the citizen army: it was informed by theory and it contained within it the germ of democratic citizenship but it developed through the circumstances the revolutionaries faced and it did not take long before the army Think of the Israeli “people’s army,” formed when the new state was—like revolutionary France— surrounded by enemies. Its leaders—especially David Ben-Gurion attempted to instill a sense of nationhood into a plethora of refugees from Hitler’s Europe, the Maghreb, and the Middle East. The IDF, like the Armée du Nord in 1791–1794, became a tool for the socialization of citizens, helping to turn, not peasants into Frenchmen, but immigrants into citizens. In the vast literature on the Israeli military experience, I have only found one scholar, Uri Ben-Eliezer, who has noted the striking parallels between the French and Israeli experiences. See his 1997 essay, "Rethinking the Civil-Military Paradigm.”
14
92
S. Tarrow
came to reflect a fundamental characteristic of the French society of Tocqueville’s century: its highly stratified character. In fact, in contrast to the Republican impetus that infused the army in the early 1790s, the officer corps became an insulated caste, hostile to the Republic and to Republican values—not to mention to Jews and Germans. In a final irony, the army that liberated Europe in the name of the rights of man and the citizen ended up sending Alfred Dreyfus to Devil’s Island. The same army that helped to invent Republican citizenship went on to conquer North Africa and parts of Southeast Asia with the help of the mercenary force of the Légion Étrangère. The ambivalent heritage we see in the citizen army was true of other aspects of the revolutionary process. After 1789, centralization was a weapon against obscurantism and in favor of universal education, but it was also the armature for police surveillance and electoral manipulation. Equally ambivalent: the same impulse that produced the dictatorship of the Jacobins also produced 4,800 primary assemblies that appear to have been reasonably open and free (Woloch 1994, pp. 312, 313). And although the free press was closed down during this period, “encouraged by representatives on mission, district officials, and established urban clubs, citizens founded numerous new clubs, especially in the rural bourgs of the North and the Center of France” (p. 313). Finally, in the period of the full flowering of the Terror, free public schools were established, and bienfaisance was increased both in the provinces and the capital (pp. 319–323). This is not to claim that under its ferocious carapace, the Terror was fundamentally democratic; that is no more true than the Furetian conceit that under their democratic costumes, the Republicans were Stalinists in training. The revolutionary experience contained both the germ of authoritarian populistnationalism and the ideal of the virtuous citizen. If that seems contradictory, think of the following parallel: the rag-tag citizen army that crossed the Delaware with George Washington eventually produced the massacre of My Lai and the abuses of the prison of Abu Ghraib. But that, of course, is a different story.
References Andress, D. (2005). The Terror. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Baker, K. M. (1990). Inventing the French revolution: Essays on French political culture in the 18th century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baker, K. M. & Kaplan, S. L. (1991). Introduction to Roger Chartier The Cultural origins of the French revolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ben-Eliezer, U. (1997). Rethinking the civil-military relations paradigm: The inverse relation between Militarism and Praetorianism throught the example of Israel. Comparative Political Studies, 30, 356–74. Blanning, T. C. W. (1986). The origins of the French revolutionary wars. London and New York: Longman. Chapman, B. (1955). The prefects in provincial France. London: Allen and Unwin. Chartier, R. (1991). The cultural origins of the French revolution. Durham: Duke University Press. Cobb, R. (1987). The people’s armies: Instrument of the terror in the departments, April 1793 to Floreal year II. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. de Tocqueville, A. (1955). The old regime and the French revolution. Garden City: Doubleday. de Tocqueville, A. (1988). L’Ancien régime et la révolution. Paris: Flammarion. de Tocqueville, A. (2007). I. Kramnick (Ed.), Democracy in America. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company.
The French Revolution, war, and state-building: making one Tilly out of three
93
Furet, F. (1978). Penser la révolution française. Paris: Gallimard. Furet, F. (1992). Terreur. In F. Furet & M. Ozouf (Eds.), Dictionnaire critique de la revolution française. Evenements (pp. 293–315). Paris: Flammarion. Furet, F., & Ozouf, M. (1992). Dictionnaire critique de la Revolution française. Paris: Flammarion. Goldstone, J. A. (1998). Social movements or revolutions? On the evolution and outcomes of collective action. In M. Giugni, D. McAdam, & C. Tilly (Eds.), From contention to democracy. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield (chap. 6). Gough, H. (1998). The terror in the French revolution. New York: St. Martin's. Hunt, L. (1984). Politics, culture and class in the French revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kaplan, S. L. (1982). The Famine Plot Persuasion. The American Philosophical Society. Kestnbaum, M. (2000). Citizenship and compulsory military service: The revolutionary origins of conscription in the United States. Armed Forces and Society, 27, 7–36. Kestnbaum, M. (2005). Mars revealed: The entry of ordinary people into war among states. In Adams, J., E. S. Clemens, & A. S. Orloff (Eds.), Remaking modernity: Politics, history and sociology (pp. 249–285). Durham and London: Duke University Press. Kestnbaum, M. (2002). Citizen-soldiers, national service and the mass army: The birth of conscription in revolutionary Europe and North America. Armed Forces and Society 20. Lefebvre, G. (1947). The coming of the French revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press (trans. R.R. Palmer). Lepetit, B. (1988). Les villes dans la France moderne, 1740–1840. Paris: Albin Michel. Lynn, J. A. (1983). The Bayonets of the Republic: Motivation and tactics in the army of revolutionary France, 1791–1794. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Machiavelli, N. (1977). The Prince. New York: Norton and Co. (trans: Robert M. Adams). McAdam, D., Tarrow, S., & Tilly, C. (2001). Dynamics of contention. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mornet, D. (1989). Les origines intellectuelles de la Révolution française, 1715–1787. Lyon: La Manufacture. Pocock, J. G. A. (1975). The Machiavellian moment: Florentine political theory and the Atlantic Republican tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rousseau, J.-J. (1972). The government of Poland. Bobbs-Merrill: Indianapolis and New York. Translated by W. Kendall. Rousseau, J.-J. (1978). On the social contract with the Geneva manuscript and political economy. New York: St. Martin's. Translated by J. R. Masters. Sewell, W. (1994). The sans-culotte rhetoric of subsistence. In K. M. Baker (Ed.), The French revolution and the creation of modern political culture (The Terror, Vol. 4). Oxford and New York: Pergamon. Skocpol, T. (1979). States and social revolutions: A comparative analysis of France, Russia and China. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Soboul, A. (1958). Les sans-culottes parisiens en l’An II; mouvement populaire et gouvernement révolutionnaire, 2 juin 1793-9 thermidor An II. Paris: Libraire Clavreuil. Strayer, J. R. (1970). On the medieval origins of the modern state. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sutherland, D. (1994). The Vendee: Unique or emblematic. In K. M. Baker (Ed.), The French revolution and the creation of modern political culture (The Terror, Vol. 4). Oxford and New York: Pergamon. Tilly, C. (1978). From mobilization to revolution. Reading: Addison-Wesley. Tilly, C. (1985). War making and state making as organized crime. In P. Evans, R. Deitrich, & T. Skocpol (Eds.), Bringing the state in. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. (1990). Coercion, capital, and European states, AD 990–1992. Cambridge: Blackwell. Tilly, C. (1993). European revolutions, 1492–1992. Oxford: Blackwell. Tilly, C. (2008). Contentious performances. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C., & Wood, L. (2009). Social movements, 1768–2008. Boulder: Paradigm Press. Walt, S. (1996). Revolution and war. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Winock, M. (2002). L'appel des armes. L’histoire no. 267. Woloch, I. (1994). The new regime: Transformations of the French civic order, 1789–1820s. New York: W.W. Norton and Co. Sidney Tarrow teaches Government and Sociology at Cornell University. His most recent books are Power in Movement (Cambridge, 2011), The New Transnational Activism (Cambridge, 2005) and (with Charles Tilly), Contentious Politics (Paradigm, 2006). He is currently interested in activism on behalf of human rights.
Legacies of empire? Miguel Angel Centeno Elaine Enriquez
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Abstract Using methods and themes from Charles Tilly’s work, this paper presents a number of propositions related to empire-to-state transformation. We argue that variations in national state development from imperial metropole origins can be explained, at least in part, by variations in imperial administration, finance, development, identity, and inequality. Capacity is a critical determinant of the results of state transformation, while decisions about finance and investment are both economic and political. Identity and inequality are inextricably linked to empire, and our exploration of these concepts demonstrates that they are the outcomes of variable processes linked to concrete, if inadvertent, lines of imperial decisions. Charles Tilly’s sociological appetite was omnivorous: his interests spanned such broad topics as inequality, history, the sociology of knowledge, bureaucracy, macro-structural transformation, and violence. When asked to contribute to this collection, we challenged ourselves to pay tribute by producing a Tillyan perspective on a topic unexplored or, at least, under-explored by him. This seemingly impossible challenge found its answer in a surprising topic given Tilly’s interests: empire. Consider the Tillyan possibilities. Is there a more durable form of inequality than that born of empire? Have any other political entities faced as significant a form of socially mobilized opposition?
M. A. Centeno (*) Sociology and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA e-mail:
[email protected] E. Enriquez Department of Sociology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_7, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
95
96
M.A. Centeno and E. Enriquez
Although fascinated by the relation between city and state, Tilly rarely brings empire into his discussion.1 This article suggests ways in which Tilly might have approached the sociological phenomenon of empire, using his characteristic forms of inquiry2 and interests to suggest links between imperial phenomena and national state outcomes. We appeal to a broad set of historical references that were a Tillyan specialty, producing a series of possible causal mechanisms that might have intrigued him. Sadly, if at all successful, the article can only make us wistfully imagine yet another wonderful book lost because of the death of our friend and mentor.
General definitions We begin, as Tilly liked to begin, by defining the phenomenon in question. Tilly’s general definition of states as “... coercion-wielding organizations that are distinct from households and kinship groups and exercise clear priority in some respects over all other organizations within substantial territories” (1992, pp. 1–2) simply differentiated governments from other authoritative institutions. His definition, by admission, includes city-states, empires, and theocracies, but it was in fact the national state3 in which he was most interested. Tilly’s generality of definition but specificity of application allows us to exploit and extend his work to empires. Our strategy is to focus on how the mechanisms of empire may have led to the institutional foundation of states. Tilly sought to understand and develop a discourse around state transformation,4 and it is in that spirit that we press his ideas further, asking whether the institutions of bureaucracy, finance, development, inequality, and identity can be used to explain the path of conversion of imperial metropoles into modern states. Any comparative analysis of empires must confront the simple question, what counts as one? Empires are characterized by size, diversity, inequality, and conquest.5 1
There is one piece that explicitly addresses empire: Tilly’s introduction to Barkey and von Hagen (1997). Like many of Tilly’s articles, there are enough questions and suggestions for empirical research there to exhaust a graduate program for a decade. 2 On the use of history in sociological inquiry, see Tilly (2007). On the utility and possibility of detecting and studying mechanisms, see McAdam et al. (2008). 3 Nation-states are, according to Tilly (1992), a rare subset of national states. A primary characteristic of nation-states is the shared linguistic, religious, and symbolic identity among the inhabitants, which is not necessary, and even rare, among national states. As Tilly himself does, we use the term “state” as short hand for “national state” from this point on. 4 See especially Tilly (1994b). We begin to see the cost of generality of definition here. Tilly engaged in a career-long “dialectic” regarding the historical development of modern macrosocial political structures, and when he talks about state transformation here he implies both national state development as well as the transformation of political authority throughout the history of governance. 5 See, for example, Reynolds (2006). Obviously, empires vary on any number of axes. Primary classifications begin with historical era (ancient or modern), method of expansion (by land or by sea), region (East Asian, European, Middle Eastern, etc), and duration. Other classifications include “mission” of the empire (land acquisition, prosletyzing , etc), relationship to the periphery (settler, non-settler), and metropolis polity (aristocracy, dictatorship, etc.). A major variable is size, which can be measured any number of ways, including by land mass, population, and economy. Finally, empires may be classified by territorial continuity with major distinctions between continental empires such as the Russian or Chinese, and transoceanic ones such as the British and Spanish. With this in mind, this article focuses on a broadly inclusive form of empire, specifying distinctions only as the relate to significant consequences in national state outcomes.
Legacies of empire
97
Two key characteristics of empires seem to be their multiethnic composition and their clear asymmetries of power. An empire “is a large, composite, multiethnic or multinational political unit, usually created by conquest, and divided between a dominant centre and subordinate, sometimes far distant, peripheries” (Howe 2002, 30).6 We recognize that such distinctions as “empires” and “states” are artificial, imposed upon what is clear only in hindsight, and that the distinction may have not made much sense to anyone even as late as the nineteenth century. Even the etymological roots of the word “empire” make it difficult to differentiate it from “state”: the Latin imperium refers to authority, command, and domination and we have not been able to locate any significant difference in usage for many centuries of historical and political analysis.7 We might best say that all European states began as empires, but not all empires became nation-states.8 One could argue that the great divergences between Europe and the rest of the globe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was precisely the transition to a system of competing nation-states born out of the failure of a unitary empire.9 Other than size (a technologically and historically variable measure), what distinguishes empires from other forms of state is domination by one ethnic or unified cultural group (Spanish over Mexica, Romans over Celts, and Persians over Greeks). Following Lieven (1995, p. 608), one could say that the management of multiethnicity is the major task of empire. Note, however, that the distinction between conqueror and conquered is subject to historical change and can be a matter of perception. The distinction between “metropole” or parent-state and “periphery” or colony was often an amorphous one; at times some empires emphasized it, at others the distinction withered as expansion and absorption made differentiation nominal.10 After 212 AD, for example, all freemen living under Roman rule became citizens. Did the elimination of the distinction make the Roman Empire less imperial?11 More recently, for a Basque, Spain is still more empire than “state,” much less a nation. The British Isles may be seen as the paradigm case of nationstate, but also as an English empire dominating Scots, Welsh, and Irish.12 The domination of Catholic Bavarians and Rhinelanders by the Protestant Prussians is at
6
For a good discussion of the definition of empire with an emphasis on control, see Doyle (1986, pp. 30–47). More specifically, imperium was associated with the power of the state to make war, providing a nice parallel to the classic Weberian notion of a state. See Richardson (1998). 8 See Howard (1991, pp. 33–35). Such a view may not be popular. Certainly in the United States, the notion that “manifest destiny” was an imperial project is not fashionable in many circles. A fascinating and very Tillyesque project would analyze why some very successful empires did not consolidate into states (e.g., from the Venetian Empire to an Adriatic Republic). 9 See Elliott (1992). Indeed, a long-standing research question of Tilly’s was why such structures as empires failed to become the dominant form of political organization in Europe (Tilly 1992, p. 32). 10 In some cases, the “empire” was a much better representation of the “state” than was the “nation.” See comments by DeGaulle in Cooper (2005, p. 153). 11 See Miles (1990). Interestingly, the granting of citizenship may have been a way of increasing the reach of taxation. 12 Tilly (1992, p. 3) argued that though Britain is often identified as an example of a nation-state, it was, in fact, due to the varied and strongly self-identifying ethnicities within its territory, a national state. 7
98
M.A. Centeno and E. Enriquez
the very heart of contemporary German history.13 In any case, for many inhabitants of empires, the “ethnicity” of the ruling elite was never as salient to imperial identity as membership in a much smaller group with a familial lineage (the aristocratic empires) or where the identity of the ethnicity in question kept changing (as in the Chinese case). Thus, the best general definition of empire might simply be the political domination of a variety of groups and territories, where distinctions are made between privileged ruling people and a mass who owes allegiance to the ruling elite, but who may not expect reciprocity. It would still be difficult to distinguish consistently between such an entity and many non-democratic states.14 The transition from empire to contemporary state is perhaps best characterized by Colley et al. (2005, p. 203) as the successful effort to devise ways of cementing together a wide diversity of peoples over a territorial expanse. This distinction also draws attention to a possibly critical characteristic of successful empire: continued expansion. One may well tease out the implication that empires develop the “positive” characteristic of bureaucracy and fiscal generation while they expand, but the rot develops when this expansion ends. From this perspective, states are the core residue left after imperial expansion has ended and the corresponding imperial collapse has finished.15 States, then, may be seen as the result of imperial expansion and maintenance. The focus here is on the way in which the metropole, as proxy for the ruling elite, developed systems of extraction, development, and identity in response to the needs of imperial survival. We argue that the resulting institutions have direct correlates in modern states. However the consolidation of national identity and the expansion of citizenship were not consciously designed and pursued,16 but instead were products of long strings of decisions and institutional development. Thus, empires were “fetal” states, historical gestations of the modern state system. Abernethy (2000) points out that a great deal of attention has been devoted to studying the political consequences of empires on the states arising from colonies, and here we counter by focusing on their effect on the metropole. This follows recent historiographical calls (notably Hopkins (1999)) to reintegrate imperial and national history and to end the intellectual segregation between analysis of political and economic developments at home and those in the colonies. In many cases the distinction made between imperial and domestic politics is a false one. Can one understand nineteenth-century British parliamentary politics without reference to the Irish question? The collapse of the French 4th Republic without knowing about
13
The geography of domination was reversed after 1989. Germany may be the clearest case of an empire creating a state. Prussia’s success in first defeating alternative imperial centers, then co-opting the nationalist sentiment, and, following 1871, imposing itself as prima inter pares, led to the creation of contemporary Germany whose borders would not have appeared at all “natural” or inevitable in 1815. 14 Similar concerns would prevent using the amount of violence required for rule as an indication of imperialness. Further, the definition does not explicitly exclude such entities as the European Union, Commonwealth of Independent States, or even, arguably, some transnational entities such as the International Monetary Fund. 15 Thus, the stability of entities such as contemporary Russia may simply come down to whether one can be certain that the process of imperial shrinkage has stopped. 16 Tilly (1992) notes that “it is all too easy to treat the formation of states as a type of engineering...” (p. 25). “Struggle over the means of war produced state structures that no one had planned to create, or even particularly desired” (p. 117).
Legacies of empire
99
Algeria? Or American politics without including the struggles over western expansion and slavery, isolationism, the Cold War, or the “War on Terror”?17
Propositions: the legacies of empire The following propositions develop “Tillyesque” processes linking imperial mechanisms of rule, finance, development, identity, and inequality with modern state outcomes (see Fig. 1). For each process we outline a dichotomous variation across empires that led to distinct structures during state transformation. The first three propositions are developments of administration and bureaucracy as functions of forms of periphery rule, finance method, and resource mobilization toward the metropole. These propositions suggest that, as Tilly argued, the complex development of contemporary state bureaucracies is in part the result of histories of political domination, financial extraction, and resource allocation. The final two propositions center around identity and inequality, each leading to varieties of nationalism that exist today. Imperial administration to national bureaucracy P1: Empires require complex administrative structures to maintain hegemony over distance, which lead to equally complex state bureaucratic structures (direct rule leads to complex bureaucracy). Alternatively, the administration of vast territories sometimes produced diffuse control that undermined the development of a state bureaucratic system (indirect rule leads to imperial disintegration). Tilly (1992, p. 20, 103ff.) argued that the first paradox of conquest is the administrative obligation to manage and sustain the land and people conquered. Referencing Machiavelli, Tilly (1994b, p. 2) notes that whether choosing direct rule, indirect rule, or annihilation, “... the prior existence of a coherent government in a conquered city poses a political problem as well as a political opportunity” for the new rulers. Consider the challenges of ruling expanding empires: they tend to be larger than any other political agglomeration of similar technological capacity; there are fewer “natural” or organic links tying the subject populations together than with other political entities; and, as the very purpose of most empires is some form of wealth extraction, they require an administrative apparatus capable of generating and managing revenue. Thus, rather than a bureaucracy driving an expanding empire, we suggest that imperial needs lead to the creation of bureaucracy.18 Where local governments are absent or destroyed, or where imperial expansion is accompanied by an incorporation of peripheries into the metropole, we can expect a boost to bureaucratic expansion caused by the new demands on the existing bureaucratic
17
An added scholarly benefit to exploring the link between empire and state-building is to vastly expand the number of cases for comparative analysis in the lines of work of Samuel Finer and Michael Mann. 18 Of course, the organizational capacities of the Europeans, particularly as applied to violence, contributed to empire. The pattern of bureaucracy following empire appears practically universal, however. See Adas (1998).
100
M.A. Centeno and E. Enriquez
Fig. 1 Variations in processes of transformation between imperial and state structures
apparatus. In other words, the development of a flexible but metropole-centered administrative system leads to complex but long-lasting state bureaucracy, whereas wholesale use of indirect rule, for whatever reason, undermines the translation of imperial administration and success into state development. The most stable and long-lasting empires in history certainly witnessed this process. In the Roman case, the expansion of territory, the diversification of the people under its control and the consolidation of imperial authority helped bring about a bureaucratization of rule in Rome. So political authority in the Late Republic was more systematized than in its early counterparts, and in turn the Empire became more bureaucratized as it grew, culminating in the “Dominate”19 of the late third century AD. In the empire’s “second life” as Byzantium, Antonio (1979) and Kiser and Kane (2007) argue that the expansion of bureaucratic authority increased. Justinian’s celebrated codification of the laws (529–534 AD) was very much a part of his efforts to reconsolidate Roman authority throughout the Mediterranean. China’s oft-noted civil service tradition (Kiser and Cai 2003) can be dated back to the Qin centralization. The challenges of uniting the warring kingdoms certainly contributed to the creation of a meritocratic path to power. This was not the last time that the needs of imperial conquest for efficiency and effectiveness would produce administrative reform and the continual process of imperial maintenance kept the bureaucracy in political center stage.20 Even as ephemeral an entity as the Mongol Empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centures required the creation of an elaborate
19
After a period of domestic strife and foreign aggression the Dominate period saw a shift to a highly centralized and bureaucratic, if despotic, era of rule beginning in 284 AD. See, for example, Luttwak (1979). For a fascinating comparison between the Roman and Chinese cases and the links between empire and bureaucracy, see Scheidel (2009), particularly the chapter by Rosenstein (2009). The essays in this book suggest that much of the divergent historical progress from the 5th century AD on in the regions covered by the two empires may be explained by their differing administrative structures.
20
Legacies of empire
101
bureaucratic-military apparatus (for example, a postal system). The construction of what many now recognize as the prototypical modern state, Napoleonic France, may have had much more to do with imperial needs than with the legacy of the Enlightenment, the momentum of Revolution, or Bonaparte’s preferences.21 Alternatively, the use of local authorities and loose centralization may hinder the development of an autonomous bureaucracy in the metropole.22 The very diffusion of imperial decision making discourages the creation of autonomous bureaucratic agents in the metropole as local authorities do not communicate with them but with the more personalized representatives of the ruler. In the case of Spain, for example, the very process of creating a vast imperial bureaucracy designed to impose central control and, most importantly, assure that the crown received its “cut” of the wealth arguably led to the diffusion of power and the creation of a bureaucratic dead-weight over political decision making as well as economic development (Stein and Stein 2003; Elliott 2007). The Spanish imperial bureaucracy was also rife with corruption, which Quiroz (2003) argues infested the metropole with the same fiscal disease. The fiscal capacity of empires is also obviously linked to bureaucratic development. In the Ottoman Empire, for example, relative decentralization and bureaucratic limitations severely constrained the type and amount of taxes that Istanbul could collect.23 Imperial tribute to state finance P2: Financing pressures require efficient capital-extraction systems, which lead to well-developed state fiscal structures. In some cases, however, the very efficiency of tribute systems of financial extraction characteristic of empires results in the atrophy of equivalent state mechanisms. Tilly’s (1992) second paradox of conquest is that further conquest and expansion requires financing. Furthermore, we argue that empires, even more than states, cultivate wealth accumulation for the elite. They tend to arise through the pursuit of revenues (or the strategic defense of those pursuits). Some empires have been at least partly motivated by ideological or religious expansion, but even at the core of an empire like the seventh and eighth century Caliphate, with its clear religious motivation, there was the ever increasing lure of plunder. Again, in this instance, we are less concerned with the effect on colonies and focus more on how the process of empire making and keeping affects the “fiscal physiology” of the metropolitan state. The logic here is fairly simple and an extension of Tilly’s discussion of war and states. Empires require armies and bureaucrats. At least for some period of time the empire will not be self-sustaining and will require that the metropole produce enough resources to meet immediate needs. Armed with the special mission of imperial expansion, metropole governments can turn to their populations and 21
See, for example, Bell (2007). Tilly’s discussion of the motivations and results of indirect and direct rule are extensive. See, for example Tilly (1992, 1994b, 2002). 23 See Cosgel (2005). Empires could also function with both kinds of administration. The “second” British Empire after the Napoleonic wars featured a variety of models from a simple dependence on traditional leaders to the creation of autonomous professional civil services and the granting of considerable governmental autonomy to regions. 22
102
M.A. Centeno and E. Enriquez
demand increased resources. Even when hoping for the empire to pay for itself, the metropole will need to develop sophisticated mechanisms to assure that the flow of imperial booty is appropriately guarded and spent. Whether in the metropole or in the colony, these expanding territories and populations will add to tribute systems, which will lead to an expansion of the state apparatus and particularly of its professional fiscal arms. The archetypical case for this form of imperially generated “extraction cycles” may be Hanoverian Britain. The historical link between the rise of the “first” British Empire centered on North America and the increasing fiscal capacity of that state as presented by O’Brien (1993) is very persuasive. Under different historical or geographical conditions, however, an alternative path may be taken: In these cases, empires provide so much money so quickly as to negate the need to develop a functional fiscal apparatus. Instead of needing to call upon domestic sacrifice, the metropole can use the tribute obtained to pay for any imperial costs and may even use them to reduce the obligations of metropole subjects. The flow of tribute becomes addictive and the “dog” of the metropole soon starts to be shaken by the “tail” of empire. In an imperial version of the “resource curse” (Ross 1999), obtaining easy lucre may lead to institutional underdevelopment. Similarly, the ease of enrichment may lead to the corruption of the very apparatus that one seeks to build and develop. Bureaucracies become inefficient (because they can afford to be), domestic wealth generation is ignored, and imperial grandeur increasingly obscures a hollowed state. The classic case here is post-Golden Age Spain. What are the factors that may explain the taking of one path or another? Some of the divergence may be explained by the starting conditions in the metropole. As in the case of wars and state building, already having the kernel of an apparatus may make a significant difference.24 The legitimacy of the imperial mission with the relevant domestic audience may be critical. Any effort to tax the colonizers may need to be proceeded by their willingness to pay for the empire. Another cause of divergence could simply be the military difficulties involved in conquest and subsequent maintenance of control. An empire built on annual visits by gunboats would develop differently from ones with permanently stationed legions. Finally, Tilly would no doubt urge us to examine the impact of types and location of capital. Empires comprising vast territories of agriculture with few urban centers of capital concentration, such as Russia, will rely heavily on dispersed tribute-taking systems. Empires developing out of mercantile trade, such as the Dutch, can rely most readily on direct taxation of goods. Whether empires are profitable or not is another question altogether. Sometimes the initial entrepreneurs do quite well, but the subsequent maintenance costs are too high, and sometimes colonies only start paying after a while. Imperial development and state investment P3: Exclusive access to markets and supplies found in colonies provides unique opportunities for the metropole, allowing faster development. Under some circumstances, however, empires drain wealth away from the metropole through the costs of maintenance and the opportunity costs of dominance investment.
24
See Centeno (2002) for further development of this idea.
Legacies of empire
103
It is possible, as O’Brien (2001) does, to trace the origins of the European empires founded after the fifteenth century, and especially the British and Dutch, to the pursuit of a maritime supremacy in order to support intercontinental commerce. According to A.G. Hopkins (1999, p. 205), “empires were transnational organizations created to mobilize the resources of the world.... [I]mperialism was a means of increasing the flow of resources ... by annexing rents.” Commerce at this time was a form of metropole development and is the direct precursor to state investment. Here we argue that as empires expand they become mobilizers of capital for the sake of enrichment of the metropole, and that empires varied by their strategy and success in controlling and benefiting from commercial flows. Empires could be differentiated by the strategies used to maximize these flows. Predatory empires essentially functioned as extraction mechanisms of wealth that already existed and could be easily exploited. Developmental empires sought to create opportunities for further growth through investment, often in the production of a specialized commodity. The Spanish Empire in America may serve as the best example of the first type designed as it was to extract and ensure the flow of wealth (usually in the form of bullion) from periphery to center. This form of empire did pay for a substantial amount of time (but long-term consequences were less benign, as per below). The British Empire was arguably more developmental creating new forms of wealth generation. Note, however, that as benign as that may sound, it involved the creation of a slave-sugar complex that was as exploitative as the most rapacious empire. The British were also not above simple predation, as their conquest of the goldfields of the Boer Witwatersrand made clear. Wealth did not always contribute to imperial health. Crone (2006) notes that the challenges of preventing “the wealth and political opportunities in the conquered lands from undermining the social and political organization of the metropoles” (p. 108) were often insurmountable. Perhaps the most dramatic case of this was the Arab Empire, the astounding success of which eroded the social order that had given it birth; the Arabs found that “in winning the world they had lost everything they treasured about it” (p. 111). The Romans feared being softened by too much contact with the Greeks and the British feared contamination by “oriental despotism.”25 Even if empires did produce wealth, the institutional leakage could drain all advantage due to the metropoles. The Spanish Empire (particularly in its second and third centuries) was the prototypical example of this, as American bullion was more likely to end up in the Netherlands or in Italy than in Spain. Kamen (2005, p. 245) quotes a Spanish official, who lamented in 1688: “America instead of being our salvation has become our perdition, for no nation profits from it less than we.” In any case, what may be most important are the “net” benefits of empire once the associated costs are taken into account. This imperial “profit and loss” estimation has been the subject of considerable debate.26
25
There is a long history of western, particularly British, political discussion of the difference between an “oriental” (Asian) tradition of despotic rule and the western tradition leading to nation-states. See Wittfogel (1957) for a classic treatment. The term is no longer in favor, due, in part, to the rejection of the term “oriental,” to say nothing of the irony of the comparison. 26 The most work has been done on the British Empire. See David and Huttenback (1986), and O’Brien (1998). See also the debate between Ferguson and others in Historically Speaking, 2003, 4(4).
104
M.A. Centeno and E. Enriquez
Empires need also be wary of imperial over-stretch. The most successful rulers of empires followed the Roman Hadrian’s example and sought to limit their rule explicitly to territory that would not cost more to defend and maintain than it could ever be expected to produce. The opposite example would be the Spanish Habsburg’s eighty-year war to retain the Netherlands, which historians agree led to the financial and military hollowing out of the Spanish empire. Identity to nationalism P4: Empires require some metropole identification by the periphery for legitimation. The process through which the colonials come to feel themselves members of the metropole determines the shape of state nationalism, whether as a single entity or multiple identities from core to periphery. In some cases, attempts to impose metropole identification can create an ethnic nationalist backlash, weakening imperial rule though strengthening future multinationalism. Alternatively, some empires had weak boundary mechanisms, which resulted in core-identity diffusion and weak nationalism. States are not simply about revenues and expenditures, but also about the creation of the belief systems collectively known as nationalism.27 Here we should distinguish between what we may call “ethnic nationalism” in which a group seeks to establish its autonomous political identity and “state nationalism” in which a political organization seeks to create a common identity among those under its control (Townsend 1992, p. 104). Tilly (2002, p. 163) called these two forms of nationalism “bottom-up” and “top-down,” referring to the direction of influence.28 The key to understanding the imperial legacy to nationalism is the extent with which empires mitigated or exacerbated tensions between these two. Perhaps the best example of a successful articulation of a “nation building” strategy in the service of state authority through an imperial project may be the Chinese case. In judging the importance of the imperial legacy for the Chinese state, one merely has to consider that the latter is a unique case in continuing a 2000-year control over a territory. While we think of the PRC as a state with a considerable degree of ethnic homogeneity (roughly 92 percent Han), the creation of that same ethnic identity and its ability to expand and maintain control over that territory were very much elite-directed, imperial projects. While the scholarship on the roots of Chinese identity is extensive and often acrimonious, there seems some consensus that the key turning point is the consolidation of Qin-Han Empire beginning in 221 BC. The resulting 2100 years of imperial history featured a simultaneous rejection of a Han chauvinism with an unmistakable “Chinese” culturalist project. Thus, the empire was able to absorb invaders and conquered and to be ruled by Mongols and Manchurians while still creating “a sense of common history with myths of origin
On the problem of anachronistic use of the term “nation” see Scales and Zimmer (2005). Earlier he discussed “state-led” vs “state-making” nationalism in Durable Inequality (1999, p. 175ff ). It is clear that the top-down model of nationalism is a homogenizing, agglomerating force originating with the political and cultural elites, while the bottom-up model is an individuating force, a form of statemaking that creates political identity from popular cultural identity. 27 28
Legacies of empire
105
and descent; a distinctive written language ... and a core political elite” (Townsend 1992, p. 125). The differing administration of the “inner” and “outer” regions (roughly corresponding to Han penetration) allowed the imperial authorities to balance the need for a common form of cultural communication with recognition of some local autonomy. Only in the nineteenth century with the consolidation of a sense of “Han” nationality and the resulting conflict between the definition of the state and the nation did this multiethnic order begin to break down, according to Rawski (1995). The case of the United States offers a parallel lesson. Unique among empires, it was able to transform imperial conquests into inherent parts of the nation and the state; to create what Renan ([1882] 1990) called the “moral consciousness” of nationalism out of violence. In part, this was thanks to the virtual elimination of the previous inhabitants (a similar process could be said to have happened in Australia). The naturalization of waves of immigrants allowed for the simultaneous creation of a myth of national inclusion in a territory acquired through genocide and exclusion.29 Most empires play out on a larger arena the balance of inclusion and exclusion,30 which is at the heart of nation making.31 In the most obvious process, parent states use the exclusion of the conquered to emphasize the inclusion of the home population. Empires serve to consolidate the sense of nation of the metropole by offering an identifiable (and conveniently defeated—and thus inferior—other). The construction of “Britishness” is so tightly linked with the imperial mission as to make distinction between the two almost impossible. The Victorian Diamond Jubilee (1897), the nationalist commemoration of victory (or tragic defeat as in the case of Gordon in Khartoum) certainly wove together an imperial identity.32 Over and above any sense of national pride, the shared experience of facing the colonial enemy helped forge the sense of an imagined imperial community. Similar to the relationship observed between conscription and war, the military needs of conquest (exclusion) may also provide opportunities for the bargaining necessary for inclusion in the conquering population; empires may be a road to democracy for those at the top of the imperial heap. The cases of the Athenian navy and the Roman legions may offer the best early examples of exchanging service in imperial militaries for greater political rights.33 However, imperial wars—particularly ones meant to hold an empire together—may actually weaken state-nationalist legitimacy. The Algerian war almost split France in two while Portugal’s attempts to stay in Africa sparked a revolution. In other cases, empires begin to include the previously conquered within the imperial identity. Of course, creating more accessible identities may weaken any real 29
The place of African-Americans remained a political problem because they could be neither completely excluded nor included de facto. The already existing Mexican population was small enough as not to present much of a problem. 30 For Tilly’s discussion of inclusion and exclusion in citizenship and identity politics, see Tilly (1994a). Characteristically, and correctly, Tilly argues that nationality and citizenship are both relational social categories, which only have meaning in respect to others. 31 For a summary of this discussion, see Scales and Zimmer (2005, pp. 22–23). 32 Hobsbawm noted that empire “made good biological cement” (Pagden 2001, p. 137). On the creation of British identity see Colley (1994). 33 See Kier and Krebs, eds., In War’s Wake, forthcoming.
106
M.A. Centeno and E. Enriquez
meaning that they have. A particular obstacle to multiethnic nationalism for overseas empires is the post-Westphalian association of citizenship with territory and the fact that the new imperial citizens may be asked to celebrate absurdly fictitious antecedents.34 Alternatively, the expansion of identity may increase its inherent value. This can involve three processes: First, the commitment on the part of the colonials to the new national identity increases its attraction (“If others want it, then it must be good”). Second, the expansion in size of the national group gives the identity greater impact or influence and thus increases appeal. Third, the process of including new co-nationals possibly creates negotiating space to increase the relative benefits of citizenship and a subsequent nationalist response. One imperial strategy to deal with some of these dilemmas, which has not received appropriate attention, is emigration from the core to the periphery. Empires as different as the Roman, Chinese, Spanish, and British “exported” core membership to the colonies through emigration. The British Empire witnessed a wide variety of equilibriums between an ideology of political and economic liberalism and the socially regressive practice of imperial domination, largely based on supra-national racial identity as described by Gorman (2002). The British maintained a fairly open version of inclusion in the white “settler” colonies of North America and Oceania. This produced a fascinating combination of nationalist sentiment within the individual peripheries combined with a form of imperial patriotism. Thus Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders created their own national communities, but also participated in wars far from their shores in the defense of the metropole.35 Contrast this with much more exclusive relationship practiced in most of Africa and India (but on both cases, “natives” were also forced to die for “King and Country”). Whether out of an inherent weakness or from other structural obstacles to choosing a dominant identity, some empires do not favor a single “nation.”36 This, in turn, weakens the identification of the metropolitan population with its own ethnicity. Rather than creating a universalistic imperial identity,37 such a strategy may create more of an imperial “mish-mash.” The Islamic empire begun in the seventh century faced this dilemma. While Islam (or at least acceptance of its hegemony) united the various parts of the empire within the ummah, or community of believers, the specifically “Arab” cultural component was diluted to the point where the imperial center no longer had any geographical meaning. The absence of a dominant ethnicity provided innumerable opportunities for dismemberment. Alter-
Most famously, in French colonial textbooks, where Africans were taught about “Our ancestors the Gauls.” Achebe (1987) gives an illuminating description in his Anthills of the Savannah. 35 The three suffered a total of 488,000 dead and wounded in World War I—a struggle that had little geographic salience for any of them. This is much higher than the totals for the US, which had 8 times the population. Perhaps no better example exists of this phenomenon than that of Jans Smuts, who began commanding Boer commandos against the British and ended serving in the (British) Imperial War Cabinets of both world wars. 36 Or they shift in strategy depending on the situation. the Soviet Union initially celebrated its (supposed) non-ethnic identity, but then switched to a Russian chauvinism in the face of the Wehrmacht, and then slipped back to a more universalistic rhetoric in the 1950s. 37 Surprisingly, some empires have come close to this. For many of the ethnic groups of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires (and especially those living in “mixed” areas or where they were a minority), imperial membership offered their best political protection. 34
Legacies of empire
107
natively, failures to treat the various parts of the empire equally or colonial perceptions of the privileging of the metropolitan identity may lead to crises of faith in imperial legitimacy. It may be that one of the most trying periods for empires is when they are trying to balance the demands of two constituencies: central and peripheral.38 Attempts to impose a single identity then can produce proto-nationalist sentiments in the various peripheries. This challenge was a feature of what have been called “aristocratic empires”39 such as the Romanov and Habsburg empires. Consider Pipes’s (1994, p. 216) definition of the Russian Empire in 1917: “a fragile, artificial structure, held together not buy organic bonds connecting rulers and ruled, but by mechanical links provided by the bureaucracy, police, and army.” The empire’s vast population’s collective identity was primarily focused on the immediate village community and at best defined by loyalty to the Tsar40 as a father figure. The empire largely failed to create any sense of political nationalism even among the Russian majority.41 Similarly, the Ottoman Empire, even as early as the fifteenth century, was linked by the official adherence to Islam personified in the person of the Caliph and the loyalty to the Ottoman ruling house.42 The ethnic identity of the latter was diffuse and amorphous thanks to the diversity of the imperial harem. There were few attempts to consolidate sub-imperial ethnic identities to a broader whole. The late Ottoman Empire was torn between the desire (especially among the relatively well to do non-Muslim communities) for a multiethnic polity and both Islamic and Turkish particularism. The Habsburg case was even more complicated. The empire was created as a family business and possessed little coherence other than that created by the person of the emperor/empress.43 In the nineteenth century, the empire was torn between attempts to negotiate with non-German elites (especially Hungarian and Polish) resisting any efforts to Germanize. Simultaneously, some German speakers felt that Berlin should be the true capital of the Deutschen Volk. The empire was literally torn between calls for greater cosmopolitanism and greater ethnic chauvinism. The result was a disaster where no single identity could unite or serve to distinguish the ruler, but where each group also felt imposed upon. Imperial inequality: cause or result? P5: As a function of both resource extraction and identity, empires create distinctions between metropole and periphery, thereby creating and exagger-
38
For how this played in Latin America, see Adelman (2006). These can be in turn differentiated between those where ethnically defined elite used the empire for their enrichment and those where the empire itself led to the creation of multiethnic imperial elite. 40 Who was not even ethnically Russian, just as George V was not English. 41 The original meaning of rossijskij denoted membership in the Russian Empire, but not necessarily ethnicity. During the last half of the nineteenth century, Russian and non-Russian groups began to assert their identities and claims often in reaction to each other, and the appeal of the universality of the empire become more fragile. 42 See Imber (2004). 43 This was a consistent pattern through the 400 years of great power status of the Habsburgs. Pagden (2001, p. 44) describes the empire of Charles V (Charles I of Spain) as more a “multinational corporation than a state.” 39
108
M.A. Centeno and E. Enriquez
ating inequality between the two. That very process may also reduce inequality within the parent state. Inequality is ultimately related to identity and its resultant nationalism. Tilly (2003) made clear that all governing systems play a role in inequality.44 Inequality develops along lines of identity and boundaries, thus formation, reaction against, or diffusion of identity over the course of imperial expansion and development have long-lasting consequences.45 In almost all empires a clear distinction is made between those with a claim to membership in the dominant group and those who have been “conquered” in one way or another. All classic empires, for example, made this distinction between citizens of the polis, and even allied cities or regions (much less barbarians under military control).46 This can also be expressed through an ethnic distinction (Han, non-Han) and most obviously after the fifteenth century, through race. (Indeed, race may be a product of empire; the historical link between contemporary Western racism and European empire building is very strong.) The distinction may become formalized through the granting of “citizenship” to those born in the metropole (at least those in the metropole belonging to the right gender and race) and the creation of elaborate paths to citizenship for those in the periphery potentially capable of becoming “civilized.” On the one hand, attempts to create the notion of a single “imperial family” (Anna 1998) usually fail in the face of differing agendas and privileges. On the other hand, too much emphasis on a racialist unequal differentiation, however, can fatally weaken imperial efforts. Thus, for example, the Japanese emphasis on kokutai or their national uniqueness made it impossible for them to construct the kind of pan Asian nationalism implicit in the Co-Prosperity Sphere. Yet, precisely because of the distinction between conquered and conqueror, empires may also have the paradoxical effect of leveling distinctions within the parent state and within colonized regions. Since Athens and Rome, the “people” have been often made to feel that the empire was “theirs.” In the metropole, the notion of belonging to the imperial elite provides both perceived and real opportunities for those on the bottom. First, they now belong to a “master race” and can share that identification with those far higher on the domestic social pyramid. Likewise, empires may also provide the potential for socio-economic mobility through entrepreneurial activities or through bureaucratic postings.47 In the periphery, the arrival of imperial authority may lead to a flattening of distinctions in the subjugated population as the local social and economic status quo disappears. We see here that empires create and exaggerate inequality between core and periphery,
“All governments, democratic or otherwise, inevitably intervene in the production of inequality. The do so in three distinct ways: by protecting the advantages of their major supporters; by establishing their own systems of extraction and allocation of resources; and my redistributing resources among different segments of their subject populations” (pp. 37–38). 45 On how categories of social relation, including national identity, play a role in durable inequality, see Tilly (1999). 46 Beginning with Trajan, however, the Romans were arguably successful in creating an “imperial poeple.” See Cooper (2005, p. 159). By the early third century, the distinction between citizen and noncitizen had largely disappeared with the empire (except, of course, for women and slaves). 47 The character of Ronald Merrick in the Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet is a perfect example of the type. 44
Legacies of empire
109
but within each segment of the empire social (if not fiscal and political) inequalities may be, perhaps artificially, reduced. Alternatively, imperial profits may lead to greater distinctions in the metropole society. The use of peripheral sub-groups as imperial representatives may also worsen inequality in the colonies. Empires may also provide support in a variety of ways for the metropolitan elite or aristocracy providing it with an “artificial” lifeline with which to maintain its status and wealth differentials. For those well enough connected, investment in imperial enterprises could create considerable legacies of wealth.
Conclusion The central challenges for empires (and the consensus on most likely reasons for their fall) are the a) creation of an administrative system able to pass information and money in one direction and commands and coercion in the other, and b) legitimation of this rule either by a consistent delivery of services (peace, wealth, etc.) or the creation of an imperial identity. Thought of this way, the rise and fall of empires offers some critical lessons for states. First, while the notion of overstretch is usually used to analyze (and criticize) imperial pretensions, it is also useful when contemplating domestic action by any state. What characterizes over-stretch is not necessarily a simple expansion of bureaucracy, costs, or territory. Rather it is the mismatch of capacity with ambition. Perhaps the fatal flaw in the Spanish and Russian empires was the issuance of decrees and commands that the imperial administration had no power to enforce. Such attempts raised hopes (among the potential “winners”) that would inevitably be dashed, while angering and frightening potential “losers” (who rather than being relieved by the apparent ease of non-compliance noted the fragility of the imperial regime). Second, the generation of wealth, whether through taxation or more direct forms of exploitation, is not simply an economic act, but a deeply political one. The establishment of flows, their maintenance, and the subsequent expenditure may be measured in imperial or national aggregates, but the asymmetries are perceived and acted upon locally. That some classes and locales may benefit from empire (or from state action) is obvious, as is the fact that others will lose (or feel that they have lost, which is politically the same thing). Thus, for example, the conflict between the imperial fiscal vision and that of the 13 Colonies led to the loss of a large part of the “first” British Empire. The economic benefits of India later led to the expenditure of arguably offsetting costs in securing them. In some cases, apparent surpluses of wealth end up weakening all parts of the regime, as the Spanish Empire beginning in the seventeenth century. Third, empires and states both manage boundaries involving inclusion and exclusion. In a globalized world, states have to make the same decisions that dogged empires: how to assign membership in the collective in a politically inclusive manner without “cheapening the currency.” If some polities have much greater power than others in determining global fates, is it not a contradiction of basic democratic theory that only a small percentage of humankind can vote within them?
110
M.A. Centeno and E. Enriquez
How is a system of states to manage the contradictions between territorially defined nationalism and citizenship and global interactions and influence? Where might Tilly have taken these ideas? We suspect that he would call for a systematization and concretization of the ideas in the article.48 One course of inquiry could examine each of the propositions discussed above independently, surveying particular bounded eras of history in which the process of bureaucratization or national identity formation occurred. As we have done here, each process could be explored through comparisons of cases that exemplified variation. This approach would highlight the historical specificity of each process. Another course would attempt the creation of a grand historical database with imperial and national attributes and analyzing the relationship between them. This would be particularly suited to testing the hypotheses developed from our conclusions. A third and more challenging course of inquiry, one particularly favored by Tilly, would be to examine the processes describe in this article not independently but in interaction. That is, to ask whether and how each of the processes affected one another and what the specific and systematic outcomes of particular interactions produced. Whichever direction, we hope that in this homage to the man and his work we have provided a sketch of an entire research agenda that awaits us.
References Abernethy, D. (2000). The dynamics of global dominance: European overseas empires, 1415–1980. New Haven: Yale University Press. Achebe, C. (1987). Anthills of the Savannah. London: Heineman. Adas, M. (1998). Imperialism and colonialism in comparative perspective. The International History Review, 20(1). Adelman, J. (2006). Sovereignty and revolution in the Iberian Atlantic. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Anna, T. E. (1998). Spain and the breakdown of the imperial ethos. In D. Armitage (Ed.), Theories of empire 1450–1800. Aldershot, England: Ashgate. Antonio, R. (1979). The contradictions of domination and production in empire. American Sociological Review, 44, 895–912. Barkey, K., & von Hagen, M. (Eds.). (1997). After empire: Multiethnic societies and nation-building: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg empires. Boulder: Westview. Bell, D. A. (2007). The first total war: Napoleon’s Europe and the birth of warfare as we know it. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. Centeno, M. A. (2002). Blood and debt: War and the nation-state in Latin America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Colley, L. (1994). Britons: Forging the nation, 1707–1837. New Haven: Yale University Press. Colley, L., Stephens, S., Kamen, H., Wilcken, P., Schultz, K., Auerbach, J., et al. (2005). Imperial trauma: The powerlessness of the powerful. Common Knowledge, 11(2), 198–214. Cooper, F. (2005). Colonialism in question: Theory, knowledge, history. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cosgel, M. M. (2005). Efficiency and continuity in public finance: The Ottoman system of taxation. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 37, 567–586. Crone, P. (2006). Imperial trauma: The case of the Arabs. Common Knowledge, 12(1), 107–116. David, L. E., & Huttenback, R. A. (Eds.). (1986). Mammon and the pursuit of empire: The political economy of British imperialism, 1860–1912. New York: Cambridge University Press.
48
Perhaps the clearest indication of his thinking on how to develop a research agenda, particularly on the topic of historical macroprocesses, is Tilly (1984).
Legacies of empire
111
Doyle, M. W. (1986). Empires. Ithica: Cornell University Press. Elliott, J. H. (1992). A Europe of composite monarchies. Past and Present, 137, 47–71. Elliott, J. H. (2007). Empires of the Atlantic world: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gorman, D. (2002). Wider and wider still? Racial politics, intra-imperial immigration and the absence of an imperial citizenship in the British empire. Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 3(3), 1– 24. Hopkins, A. G. (1999). Back to the future: From national history to imperial history. Past and Present, 164 (1), 198–243. Howard, M. (1991). Lessons of history. New Haven: Yale University Press. Howe, S. (2002). Empire: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Imber, C. (2004). The Ottoman empire, 1300–1650: The structure of power. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kamen, H. (2005). Depriving the Spaniards of their empire. Common Knowledge, 11(2), 240–248. Kiser, E., & Cai, Y. (2003). War and bureaucratization in Qin China: Exploring an analogous case. American Sociological Review, 68, 511–539. Kiser, E., & Kane, D. (2007). The perils of privatization: How the characteristics of principals affected farming in the Roman Republic and Empire. Social Science History, 31(2), 191–212. Lieven, D. (1995). Russian Empire and Soviet Union as imperial polities. Journal of Contemporary History, 30(4), 607–636. Luttwak, E. N. (1979). The grand strategy of the Roman Empire from the first century AD to the third. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. McAdam, D., Tarrow, S., & Tilly, C. (2008). Methods for measuring mechanisms of contention. Qualitative Sociology, 31(4), 307–331. Miles, G. B. (1990). Roman and modern imperialism: A reassessment. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32, 629–659. O’Brien, P. K., & Hunt, P. A. (1993). The rise of a fiscal state in england, 1485–1815. Historical Research, 66(160), 129–76. O’Brien, P. K. (1998). The costs and benefits of British imperialism, 1846–1914. Past and Present, 120(1), 163–200. O’Brien, P. K. (2001). Metanarative in global histories of material progress. The International History Review, 23(2), 345–367. Pagden, A. (2001). Peoples and empires. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Pipes, R. (1994). Did the Russian Revolution have to happen? American Scholar, 63(2), 215–239. Quiroz, A. W. (2003). Implicit costs of empire: Bureaucratic corruption in nineteenth-century Cuba. Journal of Latin American Studies, 35, 473–511. Rawski, E. S. (1995). Reenvisioning the Qing: The significance of the Qing period in Chinese history. The Journal of Asian Studies, 57(1), 123–155. Renan, E. ([1882] 1990). What is a nation? In Bhabha, H. K. (Ed), Nation and Narration (pp. 8–22). Routledge, New York. Reynolds, S. (2006). Empires: A problem of comparitive history. Historical Research, 79(204), 151–163. Richardson, J. S. (1998). Imperium Romanum: Empire and the language of power. Brookfield: Ashgate/ Variorum. Rosenstein, N. (2009). War, state formation, and the evolution of military institutions in ancient China and Rome (pp. 24–51). New York: Oxford University Press. Ross, M. (1999). The Political Economy of the Resource Curse. World Politics, 51(2), 297–322. Scales, L., & Zimmer, O. (Eds.). (2005). Power and the nation in European history. New York: Cambridge University Press. Scheidel, W. (Ed.). (2009). Rome and China: Comparative perspectives on ancient world empires. New York: Oxford University Press. Stein, S. J., & Stein, B. H. (2003). Apogee of empire: Spain and New Spain in the age of Charles III, 1759–1789. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Tilly, C. (1984). Big structures, large processes, huge comparisons. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Tilly, C. (1992). Coercion, capital, and European states, AD 990–1992. Cambridge: Blackwell. Tilly, C. (1994a). Citizenship, identity, and social history. In C. Tilly (Ed.), Citizenship, identity, and social history, pages 1–18. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. (1994b). States and nationalism in Europe 1492–1992. Theory and Society, 23(1), 131–146. Tilly, C. (1999). Durable inequality. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tilly, C. (2002). Stories, identities, and political change. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
112
M.A. Centeno and E. Enriquez
Tilly, C. (2003). Inequality, democratization, and de-democratization. Sociological Theory, 21(1), 37–43. Tilly, C. (2007). History of and in sociology. American Sociologist, 38(4), 326–329. Townsend, J. (1992). Chinese nationalism. Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, 27, 97–130. Wittfogel, K. A. (1957). Oriental despotism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Miguel Angel Centeno is Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University. He has written extensively on Latin America, globalization, and state development. Centeno is currently working on a book on the link between war and social change as well as a study of liberalism and state formation in the nineteenth century. Elaine Enriquez is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. Her research explores economic sociology, political sociology, and crime and punishment.
Nation-states and national states: Latin America in comparative perspective Fernando López-Alves
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
Abstract What were the particularities of nation state making in Latin America? The article takes Tilly’s European-rooted definitions of the national state and the nation-state and applies them to Latin America. It argues that, in comparison to Europe, the region almost exclusively produced nation-states rather than national states or large powerful states that could rule over many nations. It also submits that in constructing an imagery of the nation Latin America, unlike Europe, placed an enormous emphasis on the future of the nation rather than on its past. In order to illustrate this last point, the paper makes brief comparison between Latin America and the United States.
Charles Tilly saw war as the prime mover of European state-making. The reasons are apparent: war facilitates what states need to grow and survive: extraction, protection, production, and distribution. However, as we know, there is much more to Tilly’s work on the state than war. Coercion, Capital, and European States (1992) addresses the fundamental question of how the concentration of authority occurred in history and why it culminated in the triumph of the national state over other state forms such as city-states and systems of loosely articulated regional empires. The dominant outcome in Europe up until WW II, Tilly argued, was the national state, rather than the nation-state. Indeed, for Tilly, the nation-state and the national state were very different things: “Through most of history, National States, states governing multiple contiguous regions and their cities by means of centralized, differentiated, and autonomous F. López-Alves (*) Professor of Sociology, Global and International Studies Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara 93106, CA, USA e-mail:
[email protected] M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_8, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
113
114
F. López-Alves
structures—have appeared only rarely. Most states have been non-national: empires, city-states, or something else. The term national states, regrettably, does not necessarily mean nation-state, where people share strong linguistic, religious, and symbolic identity. …[V]ery few European national states have ever qualified as nation-states. Great Britain, Germany, and France—quintessential national states—certainly have never met the test” (Tilly 1992, pp. 2–3). Tilly’s argument raises important comparative questions about the connections between processes of state-building leading to either national states or nation-states. Is the national state a prerequisite for the nation-state? What would happen if states in other regions of the world would, from their beginnings, try to construct themselves as nation-states rather than as national states? Ex-colonies of European powers are promising places to look for answers. In the rest of this paper, I concentrate on these specific questions. I do so by a brief compare-and-contrast exercise between Latin America, Europe, and the USA. Brief references to other new nations are also made. I argue that the characteristics of the Latin American process of nation-building call for a fresh reconsideration of the concepts of nation-state and national state, as Tilly and others defined it. In these Spanish ex-colonies, states were weaker (Centeno 2002; López-Alves 2000). Yet movement toward constructing a nation-state was more rapid, and proceeded steadily. As Tilly suggested, national states took a long time to build and were not, historically, frequent occurrences. As he also suggested, nation-states were even rarer. This makes a comparison with the Latin American cases all the more interesting. Among other things, in the postcolonial period the emergence of nation-states, rather than national states, had to do with the way in which state-makers conceptualized and “imagined” their nations. Other actors, in addition to the nation-state, contributed of course to the conceptualization and imagining of the nation (subaltern identities, grassroots organizations, immigrants, Creole interest groups, etc.). Yet there is consensus that in Latin America, the state was the most important nation-builder. States built nations rather than the other way round, as in, e.g., Germany. All states, somehow, “invent tradition” (Hobsbawm 1983), foster a certain “conceptualization” of the nation (López-Alves 2009), or favor a particular kind of “imagining” of the nation (Anderson 1983). In Spanish America, a variety of desired and actual nations emerged. What distinguished the region was that, in most cases, the process of constructing the nation and imposing some conceptualization of it on the popular imaginary included the future of the nation. Conceptualizing, planning, and defining the nation, therefore, was an intrinsic part of the reason why nation-states rather than national states emerged in Latin America. In Europe, things were different. Let us go back to Tilly: “Rarely did Europe’s princes have in mind a precise model of the sort of state they were producing, and even more rarely did they act efficiently to produce such a model state” (1992, p. 25). In nineteenth-century Latin America, the construction of nation-states involved precisely the consideration of different models of state-building and the conscious effort to create “a nation” with a specific set of characteristics. Unlike Europe, there were no serious attempts on the part of indigenous peoples or powerful immigrant lobbies to create parallel projects of nation-building. Only today a number of indigenous communities defined as nations are successfully claiming that right and, in most cases, they do so under the observation and guidance of the central state (Ecuador, Bolivia, Mexico).
Nation-states and national states: Latin America in comparative perspective
115
Constructing national states and/or nation-states The construction of nation-states, rather than national states, includes: 1. The emergence of a particular relation between states and nations that, for the most part—and as Tilly argued—is not to be found in national states and premodern states. Indeed, the very notion of a nation-state begs the question of what particular linkages unite state institutions with given “nations,” however defined. 2. The idea that one state represents (or rules over) one nation, and one nation only. 3. To grant nations, as Hobsbawm (1990) and others have pointed out, the status of sovereign communities. Thus, when a state “possesses” its own nation, it is sovereign not only as a state but also as a nation-state. For its part, a stateless nation can also aspire to have its own state, i.e., a set of public institutions that would, ideally, represent its particular interests. In Europe, the process of nationstate-building gained momentum after WW I (Tilly believed that it was only after WW II), in a complex fashion in which states crafted their own nations but nations also created their own states. These considerations call for yet another reading of modernity. Did modernity really mean the consolidation of the one state–one nation formula, as opposed to the one state–many nations formula, as in empires, national states, or strong larger states able to subdue different nations? Tilly believed that it did not. National states were already “modern.” Therefore, if we follow this argument, what we see in Latin America are modern states that constructed linkages between nation and state in a very distinct way. National states were neither a prior step to the formation of nation-states nor, in the minds of the elites, a viable model. They went straight from colonial to postcolonial and to republics that adopted the nation-state formula; thus, a different kind of modernity. It all depends, of course, on what we understand “modernity” to mean. David Apter surmised that it was “a special kind of hope. Embodied within it are all the past revolutions of history and all supreme human desires. The modernization revolution is epic in its scale and moral in its significance. Its consequences may be frightening. Any goal that is so desperately desired creates political power, and this force may not always be used wisely or well” (1965, p. 1). Apter was obviously referring to the 1960s expansion of capitalist development, from core to periphery, but his description captures most of what a number of Latin American state-makers had in mind when they wished to build nation-states as part of an attempt to “civilize” their societies. The emphasis of a promising future in the definition of the nation and the emphasis of Latin American states on the construction of one desired nation, offers a correction to existing (and huge) available literature on national identity, nationalism, and the nation (Anderson 1982, 2005; Greenfeld 1992; Kamenka 1973; Hobsbawam 1983, 1990; Luckacs 2005, Tamir 1992; Renan 2006). Most literature has emphasized history and past collective experiences as the binding element that creates a sense of belonging and thus constructs the nation, that is, what Max Weber long defined as a “community of sentiment.” Yet, as we shall see, weak Latin American states could not rely on the past to create national sentiment; hence their emphasis on the promises of the future rather than the glories of the past. Nation-building is also about the creation of imaginaries. The construction of one homogeneous nation faced important obstacles. It took place in a postcolonial
116
F. López-Alves
context where different images of power connected to the global and the local met, where sovereignty was fragmented, and where subaltern views and cultures possessed strong roots (Mallon 2002; Mignolo 2000). Tilly defined fragmented sovereignty in Europe as the formation of “temporary coalitions and consultative institutions (that) played significant parts in war and extraction but little durable state apparatus emerged on a national scale” (Tilly 1992, p. 21). In many ways, postcolonial Latin America presented a similar scenario. A major difference was that in this context of fragmented sovereignty, nation-makers tried to centralize power by integrating heterogeneous populations into one nation. Fragmented sovereignty rapidly became proto-states that, in about a century’s time, became nation-states.
Tilly and nation-states in Europe and Latin America In Latin America, a major goal was to create a more homogeneous and whiter nation ruled by one state. In Europe, despite efforts in the same direction, the outcome was a mix of empires, national states, and some—according to Tilly—nation-states like Great Britain, Germany, and France that most times, however, failed to meet the nation-state “test.” That the Latin American path was different would not come as a surprise to Tilly: “Not that the states of Africa or Latin America are now recapitulating the European experience. On the contrary: the fact that European states formed in a certain way, then imposed their power on the rest of the world, guarantees that non-European experience will be different. But if we pinpoint the durable characteristics of the system Europeans first built, and identify the principles of variation within European experience, we will be better placed to specify what is distinctive about contemporary states, under what historically-imposed constraints they are operating, and what relationships among characteristics or states are likely to hold in our own time” (1992, p. 16). As I have argued elsewhere, the new Latin American republics, which emerged in the early part of the nineteenth century and struggled to build their institutions up until the 1930s and beyond, reproduced, in part, what Tilly called “the durable characteristics of the system European states first built” (Tilly 1992; López-Alves 2000). By the nineteenth century, this European “experience” was a most influential model. Yet, as indicated, Latin America did not go the national state route. One could argue that during the colonial period something resembling national states had emerged in Mexico and the other viceroyalties. Yet they did not have the war powers and expansionist drive that Tilly found in some national states in Europe. Thus, unlike Europe, no Latin American state tried empire-building. Latin American nation-states encouraged patriotism, as did national states in Europe. This is not, however, an exclusive feature of modern states; one of the defining features of the Elizabethan state, for instance, was to try to “consolidate patriotic feeling” (Mandler 2006, pp. 14–15.) And we know that starting in the late seventeenth century European states resorted to all means at their disposal to inculcate patriotism and nationalism, waging “patriotic” wars on one another. Yet premodern states and national states did not prioritize the creation of consensus about the “national character” or the characteristics of the nation upon which they were to rule. Latin American states did. While they encouraged patriotism, they also worried about homogenizing the “national community.”
Nation-states and national states: Latin America in comparative perspective
117
In Europe, the “national community,” unlike Latin America, remained comprised of many groups self-defined as nations which either by force or negotiation were incorporated into larger and stronger states. Premodern and national states could traditionally rule over many nations and perceived this as part of a natural order. These nations endured for centuries and most of them exist to this day. Figure 1
Indo-European Germanic Northern Icelandic
Romanic Western French and Wallon
Faroese
Romansh
Norwegian Swedish
Catalan and Franco-Provençal Portuguese and Galician
Welsh Manx Breton
Kashubian, Silesian
German
Italian, Sardinian and Monégasque
Sorbian
Dutch
Romanian, Moldovan and Aromanian
Czech Slovak
Frisian English
Uralic Finno-Permian
Southern Slovenian
Lithuanian
Iranian Persian, Ossetic, Kurdish,Tat
Other Indo-European Greek
Bulgarian and Macedonian
Armenian
Khanty and Mansi
Lapp
Hungarian
Basque
Latvain and Latgalian
Serbo-Croatian
Ugric
Maltese
Baltic
Albanian
Finish, Karelian, Veps, Mordvinic and Man Estonian
Irish and Scothish
Russian
Polish
Eastern
Semitic
Celtic
Ukrainian
Belarusian Castilian, Astur-Leonese and Aragonese Western
Danish Western
Slavic Eastern
Caucasian Georgian, Avar, Abkhaz, Ingush, Chechen, etc.
Altaic Turkic Turkish, Gagauz, Azerbaijani, Tatar, Bashkir, Nogai, Turkmen, etc. Mongolic Kalmyk
Fig. 1 Source: The Library of the University of Texas, Perry-Castan~eda Library Map Collection, Historical Map Web Sites
118
F. López-Alves
shows the variety, location, and character of different “national communities” in Europe as late as 1900. As Fig. 1 shows, all these nations were bound by shared ethnicities, culture, common histories, and geographical location. The contrast with Latin America is quite sharp. There, by the time of independence, some groups bound by ethnicity and culture also constituted identifiable nations. But they neither had the power nor the resources to remain independent and/or integrate themselves as “nations” into a larger “nation.” In Europe, the dominant equation was one of stronger states ruling over many nations. In Latin America, the picture was one of weaker states trying to construct one and only one nation. Thus, these European nations endured as strong political and social actors, able to survive amalgamation into empires and large states. In Latin America, they did not. Was this advantageous for European nations? Did Latin America follow more closely the fashionable arguments that, at the time, argued that many small nations should be avoided and larger nations built (Hobsbawm 1990, pp. 17–20)? What we know is that during the nineteenth century—a time of intense nation-building in Latin America—in Europe, size was an important part of the definition of a nation. It was argued that small nations had much to gain by merging into bigger ones. Otherwise, Europe would evolve into what was perceived as a hopeless “small nation model,” that is, a continent defined by nations of Lithuanians, Moldavians, Basques, etc. Strong states, therefore, emerged as the conduit by which these mergers could take place to the advantage, it was argued, of everyone involved. Real mergers among different nations, however, rarely occur, but multiethnic and multiracial national states became, in fact, unavoidable. What we also know is that most Latin American states struggled to follow the cutting-edge one state–one nation model of the time with different—and limited—degrees of success. The Latin American path In Latin America it was thought that the state needed to make a nation according to a defined plan. One may think that weaker states, like the ones in the region, would see an advantage in ruling over many nations even if this involved recognizing diversity. Yet nation-makers in command of weaker institutions feared that they could not control institutionalized diversity. They felt threatened by a population that was, in many regions, mostly composed of Africans, indigenous peoples, and mestizos. The early example of the Haitian revolution in which slaves and other people of color were able to overthrow the established white order loomed heavily in their minds. In the eyes of the ruling elites, granting the status of nations to subaltern groups would put in the emerging state jeopardy. Rather, a unified nation where multiethnic and racial differences could be disguised or eliminated altogether, and where claims to alternative national identities could be early eradicated, seemed better. The imaginary of the nineteenth century saw conflict among nations as the source of much evil and something that ought to be avoided. Thus, as some contemporary press argued, who would want to have that kind of conflict reproduced at home (La Nación 1895, 1902)? Despite all the state’s efforts at “whitening” and homogenizing the nation, these societies continued to be multiethnic and multiracial. With the (very relative)
Nation-states and national states: Latin America in comparative perspective
119
exception of a few lands of recent settlement (Argentina, Uruguay, Costa Rica) whose cities were populated by a majority of Europeans (who also were, themselves, nationals of different countries) states in the rest of the region were forced to accommodate large numbers of people representing different cultures, races, and ethnicities. At the end, however, states overall succeeded at imposing the idea that one state should have one nation and one nation only. It is remarkable that during the transition from colonial rule to independence, the territories of the new states of Latin America already represented a mirror image of their own future. Figure 2 pictures the very early formation (1830) of a number of nation-states in Latin America, some of them already republics. A few of the new states are still missing in this picture—Ecuador, for instance. As has been said many times, this political map has experienced only few alterations to the present day. Colonial possessions notwithstanding, the picture is quite similar to that of the twenty-first century. Up until the 1820s and 1830s, one could loosely call some of these states national states (Peru, Paraguay, Gran Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina) in the sense that, at this point, they still had not been able to comprise all their diverse populations into just one nation and that they were forced, so to speak, to accept
South America 1830 Brazil Argentina Chile Uruguay British Possessions Falkland Islands Guyana Trinidad & Tobago Paraguay Bolivia Peru Gran Colombia Suriname Dutch French Guiana
Fig. 2 (Source: The Library of the University of Texas, Perry-Castan~eda Library Map Collection, Historical Map Web Sites)
120
F. López-Alves
the idea of different groups united by ethnicity, culture, and language as independent entities. Yet their life span as national states of some sort was brief. By the 1850s an unstoppable movement toward the amalgamation of different ethnic, racial, and cultural groups into one “national community” had started. The nationstates that emerged proved to be quite enduring—almost 200 years to date. This, of course, is no guarantee that they will remain nation-states in the future. Indeed, the conceptualization and imagining of the nation has changed during those years. What has remained almost the same—with the recent exception of Ecuador and Bolivia—is the conviction that each state must rule over one nation, rather than many. Much has been said about European influence on the region. Yet none of the Latin American republics seriously thought of reproducing the European “system.” Europe was mentioned, dreamed, imagined, fantasized, criticized, and many times praised. At the same time, there existed a solid awareness that it could not really be “copied.” We should not forget that, in the eyes of Latin American republics, most of Europe did not just represent modernity: it also embodied monarchical rule, colonialism, and archaic institutions. In addition, there were obvious differences between Europe and Latin America in terms of the available tools that they possessed to conceptualize the nation and impose a given national identity. European states could rely on a wealth of longestablished traditions and strategies, as they had long attended to the demands of many ethnic, religious, and language-bound groups. Tradition, however, tied them to their past, thus, they seemed less free to innovate than the new republics, where almost the opposite was true. Rulers experienced a vacuum of glorious precedents; neither indigenous customs or lineages, nor Spanish legacies seemed appropriate. They were forced to innovate. Europe could go back to its past; Latin America could not. In Europe, a return to monarchy, empire, colonialism, and other forms of traditional aristocratic rule was both a reality and a possibility (France, Austria, Germany, Spain, Italy, etc.). These options were not available for Latin America. In a way, Francis Fukuyama’s argument of “the end of history” could apply here. Of course pro-colonial and monarchical factions did emerge in Latin America but they did not succeed. Rather, in most of the continent the new ruling elites claimed to exercise power in the name of change and newness. There surely existed honorable indigenous precedents of imperial rule. But when General San Martín argued that perhaps the best thing for the new emerging polities was to revive a “Latin American royal tradition” (as opposed to borrowing it from Europe) and thus to elect an Inca Emperor as a supreme ruler, his proposal provoked utter rejection. This was not surprising in a postcolonial context where Europeans were considered a superior race. Mexico debated whether to revert to a sort of monarchy and similar controversies can be found across the region. But in the end, the region appeared to have but one choice: different types of liberal republics or authoritarian regimes based on military rule and caudillismo. The institutional framework of nation-building (stronger monarchies and larger states in Europe, weaker proto-republics or caudillo-type regimes in Latin America) separated the two worlds. One can argue that because Latin American states were for the most part not strong enough to wage war on neighbors, their nations were described, perceived, and imagined in different ways from those in which Europeans
Nation-states and national states: Latin America in comparative perspective
121
defined theirs. As in Europe, many in the ruling elites of Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, and Mexico, envisioned a sort of colonial expansion that, theoretically, would have elevated the status of their nations. In practice, however, Latin American states remained unable to expand by war and conquest. “The masses” and identity in both sides of the Atlantic Both the Old and New Worlds confronted the task of “accommodating the masses” into politics. This is crucial to understand the differences between Europe and Latin America regarding the emergence and construction of nation-states. “The nation” that elites and government tried to build in both continents was designed, in part, to keep the masses at bay. But at the end the “masses” had to be integrated. In the late 1920s Ortega y Gasset argued that modernity made “the people” believe that it was sovereign: “To this day, the ideal has been changed into a reality, not only in legislation … but in the heart of every individual….To my mind, anyone who does not realize this curious situation of the masses, can understand nothing of what today is beginning to happen in the world” (1932, p. 23). In Europe “the masses” were surely felt as a threat. Many alleged that the mob was taking over the politics of their time (Mosse 1975, pp. 4–6). In Italy, for instance, backward peasants from the South who joined the more advanced North provoked fears of secession and revolution. Very much like today, it was believed that “the crowd” and “the masses”, especially foreigners, represented a serious threat to European culture (Eksteins 1989, pp. 66–69; Johnson 1983). Somewhat similarly, in the new republics of Latin America elites felt besieged by indigenous peoples, Africans, and the urban and rural poor. When Progressives and Liberals in both Europe and Latin America saw glorious armies of proletariats and peasants as the incarnation of self-determination and progress, they added to a widespread sense of alarm. Not surprisingly, the emerging nation was conceptualized hierarchically. In Latin America, horizontal camaraderie, as defined especially by Benedict Anderson, was hardly a part of the “imagining” of the national community. The nation was going to be status- and class-oriented. Yet, there were differences. Europe, with modern states in place and national armies fully developed, could more comfortably absorb or repress diversity and dissidence. In Latin America—as happened also in the USA, Australia, and Canada– the construction of national identity was forced to deal with the aspirations of “the masses” from the onset and in the context of institutions still in formation. Not that European states remain immune to pressures from below. As Tilly put it: “Struggle and bargaining with different classes in the subject population significantly shaped the states that emerged in Europe. Popular rebellions, for example, usually lost, but each major one left marks on the state in the form of repressive policies, realignment of classes for or against the state, and explicit settlements specifying the rights of affected parties” (Tilly 1992, p. 26). The difference was that state structures were not yet in place in Latin America, and popular rebellions did not always lose. And then, connected with the integration of the “masses,” was nationalism. Latin America, like Europe, saw nationalism as a growing problem. Because by the 1880s in Argentina and Uruguay, for instance, most urban dwellers were foreigners or
122
F. López-Alves
first-generation Creoles, the new states perceived the upsurge of European nationalism as directly affecting their urban masses. They worried about Italian immigrants who wanted to remain Italian, Spaniards who wanted to remain Spanish, and Middle Eastern immigrants who kept allegiance to Syria, Armenia, or Turkey. In other countries with lesser urbanization or immigrant presence, communities of “backwards” Native Americans also inspired fears of a subaltern nationalism. This added to the notion that to rule over many identities or many nations was difficult, dangerous, and undesirable. Lord Acton once argued that nations became stronger when possessing different centers of power represented by different nationalities and cultures: “A state which is incompetent to satisfy different races condemns itself; a state which labors to neutralize, to absorb or expel them, destroys it own vitality; a state who does not include them is destitute of the chief basis of self-government.” (Acton 1995, p. 117). By this token the states of Latin America chose to lose their vitality very early on. Therefore, the elite’s interest in forging a consensual and embracing idea of the nation was connected to fear of “the masses.” The state, in addition, could not effectively penetrate the countryside and impose, in the words of President Faustino Sarmiento of Argentina, “order and civilization” (Sarmiento 2000, vol. I, pp. 7–8). Most state-makers in Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela and Chile believed that constructing a larger and stronger “national culture” could contribute to fixing these problems. Brazil did so as well, in a different way because of its prolonged colonial period. An ideal nation could be created from above. Institution-building required bargaining between the central power and elites that often challenged the centralization of authority. This required policing, coalitionbuilding, and armies. Nations, on the other hand, seemed a bit easier to build: they could be crafted by education, immigration policy, compulsory drafts, the elimination of “uncivilized” peoples, and strong nationalist ideology. As has been amply documented, the Argentinean, Uruguayan, Peruvian, and Brazilian states aggressively used education and immigration to accomplish these ends. At many historical junctures Colombia did the same. One can argue that all these policies were associated with the imposition of a modern model of the nation that facilitated the emergence of nation-states, rather than national states. A brief consideration of nation-building in the USA will support the points made above about the different paths of modern nation-building in Europe and Latin America.
The nation and its future: Latin America, the USA, and other new nations In the USA the impulse toward constructing a nation-state rather than a national state as defined by Tilly was, like in Latin America, a part of nation-building from the beginning. Yet it teaches us different lessons from the ones already learnt. It makes us reconsider the impact of a number of variables: the role of religion, the clerical–secular cleavage, and the weight of ethnicity and race. The USA and most of Latin America also differed in the tasks that the state performed as nation-builder. It confirms, however, the importance of planning, republican institutions, and definitions of the nation when accounting for the emergence of nation-states rather than national states.
Nation-states and national states: Latin America in comparative perspective
123
Like in Latin America, the “American Nation” was conceived as a nation constructed into the future. In 1776, Thomas Paine exulted: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again” (Paine 1992, p. 58). After the French Revolution, he alleged that France, too, had started a new era for the whole of humanity. He believed he had seen “government begin, as if we have lived at the beginning of time” (Paine 1961, p. 420). Hegel also paid tribute to the USA by saying that it was a world historical phenomenon and that it represented “...the land of the future where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself” (1944, p. 86). The consciousness of having “founded” the first viable republic of modern times obviously contributed to construct a sense of national identity tied more to the future than to the past. Argentina’s emphasis on a nation defined by an open future of inviting possibilities, where immigrants were invited to play an active role, is comparable. In similar fashion, Uruguay and, to a great extent, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, and Costa Rica, created definitions of “the nation” in which the openness of the future paralleled the emphasis in the future that we find in the “American Nation.” Modernity and the importance of the future as an incentive for human action have been traditionally tied to the notion of “progress.” When defining “progress” Sidney Pollard wrote that it was “the assumption that a pattern of change exists in the history of mankind … that consists in irreversible changes in one direction only, and that this direction is toward improvement” (Pollard 1968, p. 9). Material progress is a relatively recent notion of the last 300 years or so. Moral progress was a concern of earlier times. Placing the emphasis on the material as a prerequisite for the moral or the other way round, results in very different conceptions of the nation and its future. Latin America emphasized material progress; moral progress would somehow follow. The USA placed an emphasis on moral progress; material progress would naturally follow. Latin America, therefore, looks like a later modernizer, the USA like an earlier one. In Latin America, no particular religious belief or eschatology was attached to this nineteenth-century notion of progress as it made its way into the conceptualization of the nation. Virtue, the will and capacity to put the public interest over the private, represented indeed a sign of civilization and modernity. Nevertheless, most nationbuilders regarded the material basis of progress as the key prerequisite for “civilization” and, hopefully, a more virtuous polity. Thus, it was considered that lack of economic progress hindered virtue, weakened institutions, and encouraged corruption. Here and there morals and values were mentioned as weak foundations for a healthy nation. But most contemporaries focused on economics, and this notion was built into the nation. We find something quite different in the USA, where “the politics of liberty” were associated much more with virtue than with economic development. Jefferson was adamant that manufacturing would be restricted because it “generates” much “subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” Agriculture, contrastingly, was a generator of virtue (1984, p. 290). He took an extreme position, but he was not alone. It can be argued that the American Revolution was a revolution about liberty, primarily a political and legal concept, rather than about freedom, which is more a social and psychological one. It was liberty that was associated with the politics of virtue; thus the importance of
124
F. López-Alves
institutions. In The Federalist Papers the role of institutions of government was to support virtue and provide a corrective to possible deviations. Left to their own impulses and affairs, men would very likely move away from virtue. We have here a conception of republicanism that differed from the one that later on became dominant in Latin America and in Europe. The state, unlike in Latin America, was not to build the nation; rather, institutions were supposed to reflect the values and character of an already existing nation. So here, as in some European cases, one could argue that the nation preceded the state (Greenfeld 1992). As in Latin America, neither virtue nor religion was mentioned in the US Constitution. Unlike Latin America, however, religion played an active role in the imaginary of the nation and in its future. Religion and virtue did not constitute the objects of government because they would spontaneously emerge from the “natural impulses” of society; they did not need to be in the Constitution because they were believed firmly embedded in society. Religion in Latin America did not need to be in the Constitutions because they were meant to be secular manifestoes. The role of the state was to keep Church and State separate, and when religion was mentioned, it was to strengthen this severance. The Latin American nation was conceived as a secular entity; hence the strong liberal/clerical cleavage that characterized its conceptualization. In Europe, the separation of Church and State also wrote a crucial chapter of state-building. This, however, did not make much sense in the USA. When writing half a century after the establishment of the first Republic, Tocqueville, who had often France in mind when writing on the USA, argued that the French philosophers had thought “religious zeal … will be extinguished as freedom and enlightenment increase.” The USA disproved that theory. What surprised Tocqueville was: “[A]mong us [the French] I had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom almost always moved in contrary directions. Here I found them united with one another, they reigned together in the same soil” (Tocqueville 1997, pp. 408–410). Definitely Latin America came closer to France than to the USA. And yet it was different from France and the rest of Europe in that its construction of the nation, like that of the USA, stressed more a projection into the future than the past. The list of problems that US and Latin American nation-makers perceived in their societies was rather different, and this impacted their conception of the nation they wished to have as well as the future that they attached to it. In the USA education, rather than government, appeared to provide the right channel for the diffusion of religion and virtue. Unlike in Latin America, poverty was not considered to present a serious problem; whenever it would emerge, it could be adequately relieved by charities. Literacy was not regarded as a problem either, thus more attention was paid to higher education than to elementary school improvement. All the opposite was true in Latin America. What were the major differences between Latin America and the USA in terms of how they conceived the future of the nation? In Latin America, notions of the end of history were absent. In the USA, many of those who began the so-called American experiment conceived of it as an eschatological society (Bellah 2000, p. 99, 2002, p. 266). In its more exaggerated versions, nation-building combined with eschatology to produce a distinct mixture that included a strong faith in a possible rapture, not to mention the countdown to Christ’s return to the chosen land
Nation-states and national states: Latin America in comparative perspective
125
(Robertson 1986, pp. 92, 94, 99–170, 219–269). This was a view of the future alien to the secular imagining of the Latin American nation, which promised a future that was full of possibilities but, at the same time, prone to uncertainty. Thus, the future of the nation in Latin America contemplated possible negative outcomes. Finally, there were differences in the extent to which both the USA and Latin America integrated foreign influences into the conceptualization of the nation. It has been often pointed out that an “essential” part of national identity in the USA has been “based on difference, on a tendency to define America as distinct from, even separate from, all that is foreigner” (Bender 2006, p. 45). An important part of nation-building is precisely to believe in that distinctiveness. However, when one compares the USA and Latin America, one finds that in the former the tendency to reject foreign influences was stronger than in the latter. To rebuff “all that was foreigner” formed a part of Washington’s warning about “entangling alliances” with foreign powers that could jeopardize the new Republic’s destiny and mission. In neocolonial Latin America, state-makers and the intelligentsia surely tried to guard the nation from dangerous foreign influence as well. Yet, in constructing the nation they ended up looking more outward than inward, embracing many foreign ways and cultures (López-Alves 2009). In the USA, the founding fathers did adopt a number of important ideas from the French Enlightenment. Yet what was familiar— the institutions and morals of the ex-colonizer—provided some of the most important foundations for the nation-state. Tudor Law remained accepted. And so were British philosophy and commercial culture. Did not Spanish America inherit as well the institutions of its colonizer? While one can find institutional remnants of the colony that survived as part of state institutions, the nation in Latin America was for the most part defined in defiance to, more than in accordance with, its Spanish legacy. The fact that Latin American nation-states consolidated under the strong global pressures of the so-called first wave of globalization (circa 1870–1914) contributed to the importing of various foreign influences. Even the early formative period of the nation-state coincided with major global changes: the decline of the Spanish Empire, the consolidation of Britain as a global hegemonic commercial and seafaring power, and France’s ambitions of building a land-based empire. The strong incorporation of international factors into the conceptualization of the nation, therefore, is not surprising. One can argue that the USA experienced a process closer to introspection than to an outward looking conception of the nation, which is what, to a large extent, characterized Latin America. The fact that in the nineteenth century other less developed regions reacted differently to global change emphasizes these differences. If one were to contrast Latin America with Africa and Asia during the first wave of globalization, for instance, one would find that neither Africa nor Asia chose the Republican/Liberal institutional design, nor did their elites embrace Liberal reform with the same feverish enthusiasm. It was later, by mid-twentieth century, that a number of new African republics experienced, in some ways, similar postcolonial state-building processes to the ones that Latin America lived in the nineteenth. Some of these states also tried to create their own nations either by eliminating ethnic groups or minorities or by incorporating them into some larger “national community.” Foreign influences were also strong; yet the new African states emerged in a bipolar world
126
F. López-Alves
and thus faced different options regarding available models of institution-building. The Liberal representation of institution-building, so strong in the nineteenth century, had ceased to be predominant.
Conclusions Let us recapitulate the lessons we just learned by comparatively discussing the Latin American path. First, this path suggests that we need to include the way the nation is constructed in theories of the national state and the nation-state. Latin America forces us to especially focus on the connection between state and nation. This, so far, remains a vacuum in the literature. Second, these comparisons offer a corrective and/or addendum to Tilly’s theory of the formation of national states in Europe. He spoke of nation-states only when populations shared the same language, symbolic identity, or religion—to which one can also add ethnicity. Nothing more diverse, however, than the people of Latin America by the time the nation-state emerged. One reason why unlike Europe (Fig. 1) national states did not consolidate is to be found in a colonial period that succeeded at eroding previous identities and transforming them into subaltern “nations” that had little voice and vote. Third, Latin America shows a different and faster way of constructing nation-states similar, in many aspects, to the USA. Fourth, these comparisons indicate the importance of planning and conceptualizing the nation in explaining different outcomes. This planning was weaker in Europe—at least until the late nineteenth century—and stronger in Latin America and the USA. Across the region rulers talked about a “proyecto nacional” or a “proyecto de nación.” As James Scott has claimed, states are, among other things, planners, and this involves specific notions of temporality, time, and space (Scott 1998). This applies more to Latin America than to most of modern European history. Implicit in this planning was a vision of the future of the national community. The type of future that characterized the nation and shaped the nation-state in Latin America, however, remained very different from the futures that defined the nation in the USA, and for that matter much of Europe. At one extreme, Germany, at certain points in its history, spoke of the grandeur of the German people and its destiny to dominate Europe. The US version of “manifest destiny” occupied a less extreme middle position. In contrast, Argentina, Uruguay and to an extent other countries such as Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, and Colombia, shared a very mild sense of manifest destiny because of their unshakable faith in its natural resources and a future of prosperity. Brazilians definitely thought that their nation had a special future as the largest and most powerful country in the region. However, in an international scale of the use of “manifest destinies” Argentina and much of Latin America would lie at the opposite extreme of the spectrum from Germany. The USA would follow in a sort of middle position. Thus, history handed the newly independent Latin American colonies weak states, diverse populations, and a lack of “national” historical legacies. They responded by following a distinctive path of state-driven, future-oriented nation-building. This evolution, so divergent from the canonical European examples examined by Tilly, can help us build a richer understanding of relations between nation and state.
Nation-states and national states: Latin America in comparative perspective
127
References Acton, J. (1995). In O. Dahbour & M. Ishay (Eds.), The nationalism reader. New Jersey: Humanities Press. Anderson, B. R. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Anderson, B. R. (2005). Under three flags: Anarchism and anti-colonial imagination. London: Verso. Apter, D. (1965). The politics of modernization. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Bellah, R. (2000). Civil religion in America. Daedalus, 117(3), 97–118. Bellah, R. (2002). Meaning and modernity: America in the world. In R. Madsen, W. Sullivan, A. Swidler, & M. T. Steven (Eds.), Meaning and modernity: Religion, polity, and self. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bender, T. (2006). The American Way of Empire. World Policy Journal, 23(1), Spring issue. Cardoso, F. H., & Faletto, E. (1979). Dependency and development in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Centeno, M. A. (2002). Blood and debt: War and the nation state in Latin America. University Park: The Pennsylvania University Press. de Balzac, H. (1965). Cousin Bette. London: Penguin Books. Eksteins, M. (1989). Rites of spring: The great war and the birth of the modern age. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Greenfeld, L. (1992). Nationalism: Five roads to modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1944). The philosophy of history. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Hobsbawm, E. J. (1983). Inventing tradition. In E. J. Hobsbawm & T. Ranger (Eds.), The invention of tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, E. J. (1990). Nations and nationalism since 1780: Programme, myth, reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jefferson, T. (1984). In M. D. Peterson (Ed.), Writings, notes on Virginia. New York: Library of America. Johnson, P. (1983). Modern times: The world from the twentieths to the nineties. New York: Harper Perennial. Kamenka, E. (1973). Political nationalism: The evolution of an idea. Canberra: Australia National University Press. Kohn, H. (1939). The nature of nationalism. The American Political Science Review, 33(6), 1001–1021. La Nación, Buenos Aires, 15 November 1895, p. 1; 22 October 1902, p. 1. López-Alves, F. (2000). State formation and democracy in Latin America. Durham: Duke University Press. López-Alves, F. (2009) The Novelty of Latin America: Globalizations, Futures, and National Identity Research Paper Series no 648, University of CEMA. Luckacs, J. (2005). Democracy and populism: Fear and hatred. New Heaven: Yale University Press. Mallon, F. (2002). Decoding the parchments of the Latin American nation state: Peru, Mexico, and Chile in comparative perspective. In J. Dunkerley (Ed.), Studies in the formation of the nation state in Latin America (pp. 13–54). London: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London. Mandler, P. (2006). The English national character: The history of an idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair. New Haven: Yale University Press. Mignolo, W. D. (2000). Local histories/global designs: Coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mosse, G. (1975). The nationalization of the Masses: Political symbolism and Mass movements in Germany from the Napoleonic wars through the Third Reich. New York: Howard Ferting. Ortega y Gasset, J. (1932). The revolt of the Masses. New York: Norton & Company. Paine, T. (1961). The rights of man. New York: Dolphin. Paine, T. (1992). Common sense. New York: Dolphin (Reprint of 1791 edition). Phillips, K. (2006). American theocracy: The peril and politics of radical religion, oil, and borrowed money in the 21st century. New York: Viking Press. Pollard, S. (1968). The idea of progress: History and society. London: CA Watts. Renan, E. (1996). What is a nation? In G. Eley & R. G. Suny (Eds.), Becoming national (pp. 41–55). New York: Oxford University Press. Robertson, P. (1986). America’s dates with destiny. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers. Sarmiento, D. F. (2000). Obras completas. Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de la Matanza. Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.
128
F. López-Alves
Tamir, Y. (1992). The enigma of nationalism. World Politics, 47(3), 421–423. Tilly, C. (1992). Coercion, capital, and European states, AD 990–1990. Cambridge: Blackwell. Tilly, C. (1993). European revolutions, 1492–1992. Cambridge: Blackwell. Tocqueville, A. (1997). Democracy in America, electronic edition deposited and marked-up by ASGRP, the American Studies Programs at the University of Virginia, June 1. pp. 408–410. From the 1899 Henry Reeve Translation, revised and corrected. Fernando Lopez-Alves is Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include: Globalization and Uncertainty in Latin America (with Diane Johnson), McMillan, 2007; La Formación de la Democracia y el Estado en América Latina, 1810-1830, Norma, 2003; State Formation and Democracy in Latin America, Duke University Press, 2000; The Other Mirror: Macro Theory in the Lenses of Latin America (with Miguel Centeno), Princeton University Press, 2003; Sociedades sin Destino: América Latina Tiene Lo Que se Merece?, Taurus/Santillana, 2002; Seven Scenarios for the Twentieth First Century, Sudamericana, 2006; and Between the Polity and the Economy in the River Plate, University of London. He has also published 32 articles in professional journals, and 75 articles in several media outlets.
Industrial welfare and the state: nation and city reconsidered Smita Srinivas
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Abstract Industrial welfare history presents important challenges to developmental state theories in “late” industrialization. This article expands the debate by examining how nation-states create statutory welfare by addressing institutional variety beyond markets. It is simplistic to argue linear growth of national welfare or of states autonomously regulating markets to achieve risk-mitigation. I contend that welfare institutions emerge from the state’s essential conflict and collaboration with various alternate institutions in cities and regions. Using histories of Europe, India, and Karnataka, I propose a place-based, work-based, and work-place based welfare typology evolving at differential rates. Although economic imperatives exist to expand local risk-pools, it is precisely the alternate institutional diversity that makes late industrial nation-states unable or unwilling to do so. This results in institutionally “thin,” top-down industrial welfare. Ultimately, theories that overly depend on histories of small nations, homogenous nations, or city-states, provide weak tests of the economics of industrial welfare. The state in late industrial welfare The study of capital accumulation has generated the most influential state theories of the twentieth century. In most, the state is posed against markets and acts as the development institution of last resort in specifying cost structures and mitigating risks during industrial transformation. This article examines the evolution of industrial welfare during “late” industrial development. I analyze the historical record of how states institute welfare and regulate markets, thus managing conflicts between production and redistribution. I consider several questions: Are traditional models of linear growth of welfare institutions appropriate for late industrializing states? What is the appropriate scale of the “state”: nation, city, or region? Finally, S. Srinivas (*) Urban Planning Program and Technological Change Lab (TCLab), Columbia University, New York, NY, USA e-mail:
[email protected] M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_9, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
129
130
S. Srinivas
under what conditions can and do states incorporate pre-existing institutions in statutory systems? My response is that it is simplistic to argue linearity of growth of national welfare institutions or to consider states autonomously regulating markets to do so. We have to look beyond classic market failure arguments. Instead, late industrial welfare institutions emerge from essential conflicts and collaborations between states and multiple alternate institutions, not markets alone. I emphasize here that while economic and actuarial imperatives exist for nation-states to expand local risk-pools, late industrial nation-states may be unable or unwilling to do so, resulting in institutionally “thin,” top-down industrial welfare. For reasons of space, I do not visit state ‘developmentalism’ in depth, but analyze its welfare aspects in the following sections. I define industrial welfare as institutionalized modes of state-supported social provision delivered to workers in services and manufacturing, and then propose a terminology to better distinguish comparative risk-mitigation in place-based, work-based, and work-place based industrial welfare. These may not be exclusive domains of the state (in fact rarely are). This sets up my enquiry into state rule over institutional variety. Its actions then emerge from the trust (or lack of it) vested in it by other actors. Its legitimacy can be seen through open-ended, evolving, and contested local norms. The economics of this trust and information challenge in statutory expansion require closer scrutiny. Nation-states continue to be dynamic variables in both theory and practice. However, the development aspects of nation-states remain vastly under-theorized. My task is thus more than pointing out exotic oddities from India. Rather, I consider late industrial welfare evolution and variety as presenting an important challenge to state theories. The productive side of late industrializing societies has been an extraordinarily active research area for over 30 years, but the redistributive side has largely been ignored or constituted in linear terms. This article starts to redress this imbalance. The economics of risk and industrial welfare “I propose here the view that, when the market fails to achieve an optimal state, society will, to some extent at least, recognize the gap, and nonmarket social institutions will arise attempting to bridge it…..” (Arrow 1963a, p. 947) Polanyi posed society’s dilemma as a double movement oscillating from unregulated markets (the “fictitious self-regulating market”) to social protections in order to minimize risk exposure in a fully waged economy (Polanyi 1944/1957). In his Great Transformation, the state responds to wage-dependence and insecurities of industrialization and urbanization, but is pulled in two often conflicting directions: between supporting market capitalism through industrial production, and instituting social protections to minimize its risks (see Table 1 below) often through a contested amalgam of local parish and poorhouse. In principle, workers can derive personal risk mitigation and security from: (1) wage income and occupational welfare (2) private provision of savings and insurance (3) voluntary welfare (e.g., families) (4) state intervention via labor
Industrial welfare and the state: nation and city reconsidered
131
t1.1
Table 1 Work and risk
t1.2
Typology of risks
Examples
t1.3
Low frequency
Serious illness, emergency hospitalization, loss of spouse as care-giver or income-earner
t1.4
High frequency
Minor or chronic illness, occupational hazards
t1.5
Idiosyncratic (random)
Non-communicable diseases, occupational health, loss of assets (e.g., flooding, fire, looting, confiscation)
t1.6
Covariate (randomly but affects individuals, households, community simultaneously)
Flooding, drought, inflation, riots, fire
t1.7
Repeated shocks, risk events (covariate and repeated)
Persistent drought, repeated flooding
(Adapted from Lund and Srinivas 2000, p. 47)
markets, social structures, tax financing, and expenditures (Barr 1992). Industrial welfare has historically had incentives and information characteristics manifested in cash benefits, healthcare, education, food, housing, or other services (ibid.). States may reduce transactions costs and mitigate risks (North 1987), attributes purported to strengthen as “development” occurs (indeed seen as development). However, in practice, neither states nor markets act exclusively against risks. Social institutions such as family, kinship, religion, or caste have always served as institutions of last resort. National statutory systems may mimic each other, but informal risk and care systems are regionally and culturally distinct. Nation-states must regulate markets and these institutions to expand coverage. Risk-pooling occurs when insurers aggregate similar but unrelated risks through a random selection of individuals. Private insurers often do not pool risks but cluster them to effect a desired composition of individuals and risk. Larger pools instead spread out the statistical odds against idiosyncratic risks of any individual. Moreover, states can cover risks that private markets may be unwilling or unable to provide, ensuring that welfare regimes provide efficient responses to social needs (Wilensky and Lebeaux 1965). The more compulsory the system, the better the riskpooling and higher the likelihood that states can de-link premium amounts from individual risk (ibid.). Organizational delivery may be public or private. Markets or states can generate incentives and information structures to broaden insurance and risk-pooling behaviors and minimize adverse selection, moral hazard, and information asymmetries. In principle therefore, it is efficient that risk-pools and solidarity communities grow. However, social insurance implies information and political challenges because market mechanisms may be inefficient in evening out information differences among classes of people (Arrow 1963a, b; Arrow 1972). Moreover, the state’s onus of persuasion and inclusion can be particularly high for compulsory social insurance, and non-insurance can have negative effects. Social insurance expansion is further influenced by the fact that nation-states view employers as better risks than individual workers and thus focus on employermediated institutions to mitigate risks and boost production. This may appear as a Walrasian process in which the state matches employers to workers and thus
132
S. Srinivas
facilitates production and market processes. Proletarianization therefore becomes not only a state-sanctioned process of waged work, but also of shifting risk, oftentimes incompletely, to different institutions over time. This incompleteness of shifting risk is compounded by the fact that markets are themselves fundamentally gender-uneven (Beneria 1999). Incompleteness can also galvanize states to subsidize alternate institutions such as family with state-funded income supports, thus deepening gender impacts (Orloff 1996).1 However, familiarity and locality generate their own risks. Adjacent and homogenous communities can simplify administration and generate higher voluntary subscriptions, but proximity heightens their exposure to covariate risks and repeated shocks. Factory work and factory housing historically mitigated some risks and exacerbated others through co-location. Mutual insurance was alien in some places (Platteau 1997).Consequently, risk-pooling has particular economics and financing and specific geographies and solidarities. These influence insurance failures of adverse selection (riskier individuals are selected into the pool, creating too many similar risks) and moral hazard (individuals adopt riskier behavior once insured). The state’s rationing of benefits can temper these risks but over-rationing may stymie participation and ultimately undermine the state’s legitimacy. LIs contend with all risks listed in Table 1, many simultaneously, compounded by industrial development. Nevertheless, despite the economic and actuarial imperatives to expand risk-pools, it is precisely the diversity of alternate institutions that makes LI nation-states unable or unwilling to do so.
Evolutionary states Nation-states and non-market institutions A “logic of industrialism” (LoI) predicts institutional convergence and weakly explains the rise of social protection programs and roughly similar forms of labor representation (Cutright 1965; Collier and Messick 1975; Flora and Alber 1981). It seduces in suggesting that states linearly institute systems of social supports in response to industrial development and technological change. Emphasis is on modernization, on convergent market structures, and a rise in work-place entitlements. Although empirically weak, this technologically deterministic thesis continues to dominate assessment of and policy advice to late industrializers.2 However, “lateness” generates a diversity of institutional responses to economic backwardness and a greater state role (Gerschenkron 1962). LIs have adopted statutory welfare at earlier stages of economic development relative to Europe (e.g., Hort and Kuhnle 2000) but relegated this to a thin sliver of occupations and benefits. National programs have rarely arisen by fiat but through a messy institutional consolidation of local programs that rest in other risk institutions such as family, Governments pay for this “informal” social protection in early industrializers as well. Aging, childcare, women’s labor market entry, and the collapse of extended family systems all affect care’s costs. 2 Variants extend from “catch-up” schools (Abramovitz 1986; Baumol 1986; Gerschenkron 1962), to modernization in social policy (e.g., Wilensky 1975; Flora and Alber 1981). 1
Industrial welfare and the state: nation and city reconsidered
133
caste, and religion. These include, among others, traditional funeral arrangements, crop and savings insurance and voluntary savings schemes for weddings, sickness, and productive assets. Few scale to national levels; most remain locally effective but segmented (e.g., Lund and Srinivas 2000). Tilly argues similarly that cities, states, and “trust networks” are often contemporaries but suffer an uneasy relationship of trust and domination (Tilly 2004, and 2010 in this issue). Four ideal types populate history: autonomous cities, city-states, centralized states, and nomadic empires (ibid.). I would argue that LI nation-states can be scrutinized in this manner. For example, East Asian “nation”states are contestable in scale and institutional variety: Hong Kong and Singapore were essentially city-states and entrepot economies, Taiwan a small, homogenous, primarily agricultural nation-state. In according supremacy to markets, development state models provide a historically impoverished institutional story. After all, even in “market failure,” the state can move beyond correcting markets to creating and legitimizing them through alternate institutions. Through social insurance, LIs can potentially expand markets and build demand through both markets and other institutions. They can disproportionately shape markets through network effects, enlarging economies of scale and scope, and by regulating and supplying social services. Thus, rather than markets shaping the bounds of social protection, the latter may shape the former (Srinivas 2008a). Nevertheless, to achieve social welfare maximization, they must politically lower costs and risks of decentralization and technological change. Further, by cross-pooling diverse groups, they must limit adverse selection and retain access to and coercive power over others. Essentially, this is an evolutionary exercise, often two steps forward and one step back. Despite theories of state autonomy, LI nation-states may not possess the means to control alternate institutions nor have goals of doing so. Institutional integration: state rule and local rules The state and its own institutions variously respond to this diversity and, by and large, seek power over or collaboration with local rules. Proletarianization in England and continental Europe, for example, was a process of state-induced breakdown of place-based (and especially land-based) institutions of solidarity and risk-pooling. For early industrializers, three primary national varieties of welfare capitalism exist (Esping-Andersen 1990). Liberal regimes prioritize unregulated labor markets, individualize risks and depend heavily on market mechanisms to regulate the economy. They extol “self-help” and are least likely to provide wide citizenship entitlements (e.g., the United States and United Kingdom). Social democratic regimes-classically Nordic—passively regulate labor markets by means such as unemployment insurance but limit market scope and use the nation-state as bulwark of entitlements. They offer wider socialization and coverage of risk (ibid.). “Conservative-corporatist” regimes espouse passive labor market regulation, but use mixed markets where necessary to advance Bismarckian, occupationally (not citizenship)-based social insurance. They entail compulsory risk-pooling and strong familial ties (e.g., Germany and Austria).
134
S. Srinivas
However, national typologies hide variation. Evidence indicates that national welfare effectively amounts to pay-as-you-go in several countries; most people who use the system more than pay for it. Thus, an immense cross-pooling effort by nation-states is less essential to welfare states than is often portrayed (Shaikh 2003).3 Moreover, LI dependent variables of ‘social security effort’ and per capita GDP hide the risks in economic dynamism of some cities and regions (even in important studies such as Pierson 2004; Chang 2002; Mkandawire 2004) and the local roots of social citizenship and social rights (e.g. Korpi 1989; Esping-Andersen 1990).4 This is crucial today because non-state actors are shaping welfare in dramatic ways (Lund and Srinivas 2000; Barrientos 2004; Wood and Gough 2006). Local institutions for identity, settlement, and work-status registration are especially crucial during urban densification and can reveal channels for technological dynamism in LI production. This introduces a localized bi-directionality into the usually posited causal link between industrial development and welfare states. A glance at LI cities and regions indicates that the ex-post national language derived from early-industrializing examples offers limited insights for industrial planning. Entirely new Indian, Chinese, or Korean townships have emerged for iron ore, textiles, and automobile production while older mercantile cities have been simultaneously reworked. Most LI nation-states have been poor at collaboration and decentralized planning, instead resorting to coercion and the withholding of benefits, failing to match up with any of the three standard national models. Even those East Asian states depicted as strategic omniscient planners, rested their growth in coercion, central economic controls, feminization of labor, dormitory systems, union repression, and over-reliance on family welfare (e.g., Standing 1999).
Emergence and evolution: threads of the nation Work, place, work-place Although productivity increases and industrial upgrading potentially lead to robust industrial welfare, benefits have not always evolved from upgrading, nor do workplace benefits guarantee better industrial performance. The blurring of welfare strands possibly lies in work’s essence: labor is not only different from other commodities: “labor power has to go home every night” (Harvey 1989, p. 19). Alternate social institutions share workers with industrial production in distinct ways. A focus on work-place benefits therefore distorts or even overlooks completely their evolutions, and the definition, physical location, separation (or not) of home and work, and risks shared between both. For instance, in the United States, Katznelson argues that workers “… act not on basis of the shared solidarities of class at work, but on that of ethnic and territorial affinities in their residential communities” (Katznelson 1981, p. 19).
Nations can be economically draining, even parasitic; an “economics of secession” might capture this. Single measures are misleading. Countries with almost 100% healthcare coverage may still reimburse hospital costs to only 50 percent (Beattie 2000).
3 4
Industrial welfare and the state: nation and city reconsidered
135
Yet, nation-states have been especially tempting analytical units, yielding oversimplified aggregates of populations and industrial capabilities. Jamie Peck argues that it is vital not to discard local labor market variations “ . . . as quirky deviations from the universal competitive model by orthodox economists or as “noise” around a prevailing national model by political economists” (Peck 1996, p. 12). Moreover, nation-state versus market debates often gloss over land and housing, intriguing omissions because, in the end, not nation-states, but city and regional states that usually remain closest to action and political repercussions. It is not “national” capital accumulation costs in assisting firms, designating and regulating workplaces, linking work and home, and combining transactions of land, labor, and capital; city and regional states control and collaborate with other institutions to mold migration, housing, transport, and sanitation infrastructure for future industrial transformation. Singapore and Hong Kong (and several Nordics) used housing as an essential component of industrial welfare. China’s cities have contained and encouraged swells of workers with combined regulation of migration, transportation, and factory housing. However, in addition to the state, firms in these regions nevertheless bear workplace costs in transitioning their workers from secondary to primary status (Doeringer and Piore 1971). Yet, these costs are lowered when alternate riskmitigating or pooling institutions such as state, caste, family, or religion exist (Srinivas 2009). As state regulation shifts, or given market volatility and uncertain demand, firms find ever-evolving local optima to off-load risks to workers who then turn repeatedly to existing ties outside their work-place. No general equilibrium can be determined ex-ante; optima may unpredictably co-evolve from local iterations (Sabel 1994; Srinivas 2008b, 2009), or vertical risk-mitigation from patronage (e.g., Platteau 1995). These result in oscillating degrees, not absolutes, of proletarianization. Therefore a distinction in terminology is worthwhile. Building on Table 1, a taxonomy of risk coverage can institutionally demarcate (a) territory (place) (b) labor status (work), (c) employer-dependent benefits (work-place). These describe the state’s relationships to firms and their regional risk ecology (see Srinivas 2009). The three categories therefore advance evolutionary and testable paths and timelines for the emergence and change of institutions and can make more evident gender disparities. They offer distinctive policy lenses for economic downturns when workplace benefits decline or disappear. The terms can be mulled over: national insurance based on residence or citizenship is place-based even if administered through workplaces. French nineteenth-century municipal welfare lends itself to place-based analysis mingled with some employer-driven benefits (work-place); contemporary U.S. challenges are to expand beyond work-places; India’s rural employment guarantees are work entitlements, which may (or not) eventually combine contributory benefits independent of places and work-places. The evolution of early industrializers Seventeenth-century English transformation of labor markets and trade was fundamentally a town and city phenomenon where proletarians assembled in cities of different sizes (Hohenberg and Lees 1984; Tilly 1984; Mikkelsen 2005). Other parts of Europe witnessed more rural industrialization, thus physical location overall was vital in determining the political pressures of urban-rural, religious, and ethnic
136
S. Srinivas
divides (Mikkelsen 2005). Work-place benefits have variously depended on these other institutions. Nordic “third sector” voluntarism grew out of state accommodation, subsidization, and often encouragement, of voluntary organizations as sites of ‘bridging social capital’ (Kangas and Palme 2005). These resulted in centralized wage-bargaining but locally influenced by sector: lowered profits through relatively high wages in declining productivity sectors and low wages in higher productivity, fast paced sectors, and thus increased profits (Moene and Wallerstein 2006). Moreover, increasing populations and urban re-structuring (slums, factories, townships, universities, and hospitals) fueled the shifts among place-based, work-place based, and more universal (and national) measures of work. Over a hundred-year period, German social insurance developed from small voluntary insurance schemes to state-supported and regulated compulsory insurance (Bärnighausen and Sauerborn 2002). Although U.S. welfare was anomalous in many respects, its cities too provided density of insurance coverage and benefits. However, the instituting of the Medicare Social Security Act made it more difficult to promote programs outside work-places, resulting in distrust between unions and other organizations (Berkowitz and McQuaid 1980; Rosner and Markowitz 2003). Place-based systems then ceded to work-place systems but not to further universal coverage. Three trends are visible over approximately 400 years: changes in place-based systems of care, reduction in the gaps among three types of entitlements, and a centralization of welfare administration. Yet, European rules of settlement and registration continued to provide vital eligibility and mobility missing in LIs. 1. Place-based welfare. European place-based care systems pre-date local government. Various aspects of territorial community were more congruent with government before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Wollmann 2006).5 Local self-governments in medieval England and Sweden were closely aligned with rural communities where full-scale feudalism was less common. Ecclesiastical parishes and “quasi-republic” towns in England and Germany had free status within monarchic territories and retained the freedom to define settlement and welfare (ibid.). In medieval times, the institutional complex of family, church, and growing emphasis on individualism, led to the rise of “corporations” (Greif 2005). These took on diverse regionally-based solidarities and organizational forms such as fraternities, mutual insurance guilds, universities, communes, military orders, and city-states (Greif 2004, 2005). The shift to nuclear families alongside enabled the rise of selfgovernance, individualism, and relatively arms-length relations among non-kinsmen. Thus regional risk-pooling gradually tended towards non-kin risk-sharing. The nuclear family’s dominance by the late medieval period and the fall of extended families and tribes lent impetus to new economic transactions and social solidarity
5 As Wollmann (2006) emphasizes, English “government” alludes to parliamentary and policy-making bodies and at the same time to executive and implementation. Since the nineteenth century, government refers to central and local authority. However, German Regierung, and French gouvernement, refer to central sovereign power, not local exercise of authority, and local government is primarily administrative, not political.
Industrial welfare and the state: nation and city reconsidered
137
(Guichard and Cuvillier 1996; Razi 1993). In this process, many corporations preceded European states. States, acting on shared interests with corporations, established the basis for statutory provision. 2. Closing institutional and geographic gaps. Medieval outcomes influenced later settlement rules and allegiances. English fraternities, monasteries, mutual-insurance guilds, and customary poor laws provided solidarity against sickness, disability, famine, and unemployment (Richardson 2005). Buttressed by crop diversification and grain storage, they provided fairly continuous coverage in the interstices among work, place, and work-places. This was crucial because mobility of entitlements did not always accompany labor mobility. A relatively seamless social security system was established by the mid-seventeenth century in towns, regions, and parishes of England and Wales. By contrast, even in progressive Holland, social security was patchy and largely restricted to towns (Solar 1995; Szreter 2006). Old English Poor Law and settlement rules sped up proletarianization, galvanized labor mobility, and reined in faminerelated mortality (Szreter 2006). English urbanization thus combined institutions of settlement and registration (including thirteenth century English law of alienability of land and identity registration) to provide unique risk-mitigation. Workers could move, largely assured of some security (Solar 1995). 3. Centralization and nationalization rooted in settlement. Industrialization and urbanization eventually forced local governments of Britain and Germany into multifunctional forms, creating diverse “local welfare states” before any centralization or nationalization project emerged (Wollmann 2006). Legal traditions were partly responsible; British local councils contained no community equivalent to the continental commune, kommune, or collectività (ibid.). However, modern local government in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries diverged from local government embedded in local community; rather it emphasized citizenship resting in property-dependent rights and residence. By the late nineteenth century, Britain had entirely marginalized parishes, overhauled the scope of local government, and “… had a long-term effect, in attenuating, if not extinguishing, the emotional and cognitive ties between the local population and the newly established local authorities in England” (Wollmann 2006, p. 1423). This heralded in both England and the continent a disjuncture between territorial community and local states. Thus, increasingly, risk-mitigation formerly undertaken by local governments for local community became centralized and nationalized. Yet, although the settlement and registration system came close to collapse from immense migration and the rise of urban factories that challenged cottage production, new actors initiated a return to local institutions. Independent chapels separated themselves from existing church and registers, and new classes emerged: “… growing commercial and property-owning classes in society were sufficiently well aware that identity registration was of vital importance to their dynastic economic interests…. they wanted a much improved, comprehensive, and accessible national registration system established to serve their needs” (Szreter 2006, p. 77). This state-supported national system built on these uniquely English local institutions, provided a powerful boost to labor and capital markets and a distinct
138
S. Srinivas
advantage for capitalism and knowledge transmission (North 1981; Szreter 2006). Thus, locality proved essential.
Late industrializers Effective demand––no rising tide Although England’s industrial welfare evolved from strong place-based institutions and the continent from more work-place orientation, both had far more in common than with LIs in merging institutional variety. Late industrial institutional diversity led to “thinness”; states constituted statutory programs but usually through anemic entitlements, off-loading risks to families and women. Keynes contended that laissez-faire economies generated insufficient demand. Social insurance thus paved the European road to demand and higher consumption. However, this proved more problematic in LIs. Technological prowess and the pace of industrial transformation often raised risks, but preceded widespread systems of social insurance, and provided little effective demand or consumption. Kaleckian insights were more relevant to demand under state-targeted imperfect competition during import-substituting industrialization. However, weakened by low risk-coverage, low wage rates, fragmented power-sharing, and with no greater omniscience than private actors in estimating demand, the LI state instituted or substituted for existing welfare to a very limited degree. This piece-meal approach provided little of the effective demand seen in Europe. Although early relative to their per capita income “stage,” LI welfare was limited to public sector benefits and exclusionary industrial relations. Variation—the thinning out of institutions Late industrializers have followed various paths to social insurance. In Japan, community health programs, Jyorei, were vital to risk-mitigation in the post-Meiji period and to eventual national insurance. The early eighteenth and middle nineteenth centuries marked the spread of these place-based voluntary programs, high participation rates, and grain payment options (Inoue 1979; Ogawa et al. 2003). Much later, the nation-state consolidated these century-old programs, and initiated a national community health insurance in 1933 in specific regions, later opened to all of Japan in 1935. Administration shifted to city associations and payments converted to cash. In 1961, approximately 200 years after the first Jyorei began, insurance became mandatory and universal coverage achieved. The family-corporatist hybrid welfare state now uses national community health insurance for those outside employer-driven health insurance, i.e., self-employed, farmers, shopkeepers, and the unemployed (Ogawa et al. 2003; Campbell and Ikegami 1998). The Korean state moved from productivist social policies to more universal and redistributive goals after 1980 (Peng and Wong 2008). Decades of urbanization and population growth spurred identification and registration (Carrin and James 2005). Voluntary insurance commenced in 1966 (urban populations at 36.6% of total population), grew by 1975 (48.4%) 2 years before the introduction of compulsory social health insurance. The year 1977 marked the first social health insurance for
Industrial welfare and the state: nation and city reconsidered
139
corporate workers, and state supports for older and younger family members to pool income and reduce risks; 3 years later (1980), urban populations were 57.3% of total (Carrin and James 2005). In both Korea and Taiwan, statutory policies offloaded risk to families and women (see Kwon 1998). Taiwanese wage-employment provided occupational riskpooling but was far from seamless. Small urban states such as Singapore and Hong Kong sourced foreign (and often illegal) labor and hence circumvented domestic pressure for residence-based protections, resulting in productivist approaches focused on work-places. What did this set of historical transformations mean for LIs? Most, like Japan, subordinated social policies to economic development and coerced other institutions to bear development’s costs and risks. The state’s supports of labor segmentation and control hierarchies allowed it to defray expenses through private markets resulting in lower state-spending in social security, healthcare, and public education (Jacobs 2000; Pierson 2004). Where priorities dovetailed as in Taiwan or Korea, conflict was relatively absent (Kwon 1998). In other instances, such as India (see below) of state conflict and fragmentation between multiple developmental goals— economic, security, and industrial welfare—the theoretical problematique of late industrial development remains (Boyd and Ngo 2005; Srinivas 2008a). It may be that states that retained informal social protections alongside rapid industrial transformation built more robust statutory welfare (Japan), in contrast to contexts where both states and informal programs were fragmented (India). Culturally homogenous nations may therefore result in more rapid consolidation of alternate institutions, although as Anderson points out, nationalism of the homogenous form retains a certain philosophical poverty and incoherence (Anderson 1983). Still, even where statutory programs have emerged through consolidation of “lesser” programs, rarely have they been instituted through constitutional fiat. Most commonly, evolution remains stunted and local, not merging into any grand ocean of national solidarity and industrial welfare. Tilly (in this volume) echoes this: “Only rarely and (on the whole) recently have such arrangements as social insurance and labor unions connected risky, valued, popular collective enterprises directly with cities and states. Indeed, prudent members of trust networks have generally tried to insulate them from predation or incorporation by cities and states”. But late industrialization challenges and extends his typology as a special form of evolution between cities, city-states, and nationstates. The challenge arises from the unexpected combinative strands of industrial welfare in LIs that had such systems well before the nation came into being (Srinivas 2008a), and where, unlike in Europe, many colonial nations preceded nation-states (Chatterjee 1986/1999). Indian welfare India’s 5-Year Plans (1951-present) presupposed long-term sectoral wage stabilization, targeted social assistance, growing factory-labor with work-place benefits, and an anti-urban bias for rural uplift. Yet today mandatory social insurance covers only 30 million (3% of the population) and is largely the domain of union (“organized”) labor. Although India has recently instituted historic changes to industrial welfare (in
140
S. Srinivas
2005 by extending rural employment guarantees and in 2008 by passing a Social Security Bill covering 350 million “unorganized” workers), work-place expansion have effectively stalled. In part, this is due to stunted manufacturing employment, an explosion in low-entry urban services, growing self-employment and “informality.” Place-based settlement security is absent, urban land prohibitively costly, and housing and healthcare options highly constrained. It is unsurprising that various actors have advocated universal entitlements based on work-status rather than place or work-place. Institutionally and administratively however, this has proved problematic, explainging the rapid, fragmented growth of for-profit insurance, community programs and “microinsurance” instead. 1. Liberalism and the Indian Republic. In Gandhi’s remarkable interpretation of local autonomy and self-government that so fired the imagination of Indian nationalism, risk mitigation occurred primarily without the state. Although he rejected western institutions of European urbanization and industrialization, Gandhi was no Luddite; his distrust of European history stemmed from the belief that technological dynamism and social welfare were closely woven. He saw Europe as attempting a false secular negotiation of instruments of equality and justice derived from rationality and science with little embedding in social realities (Nandy 1987). In contrast, Gandhi’s republicanism was liberal and anti-state. “Self-rule,” Swaraj, was existentially and pragmatically rule by the Self, freed from the state or large collective institutions of regulation. Villages were to be governed by internal laws and logics of truth or satya. These ideas derived in large measure from a unique amalgam of Hindu philosophies of self and social organization, western enlightenment, and pastoralism (Iyer 2000). Self-help was self-reliance, but risk was socially embedded and morally shared. Gandhian republics would likely have warranted industrial welfare in dense, localized areas rather than welfare capitalism driven by nation-states. Yet modern rural Panchayati Raj based broadly on Gandhi’s ideas and expanded by the 73rd Indian Constitutional Amendment, remained with strong state and political party influence. Neither Indian socialist rhetoric nor market capitalism was thus deeply embedded and the extent of proletarianization was contentious. In Europe, population density revealed links between large production units and urbanization (Mikkelsen 2005), but this was less obvious in India. The Indian self-employment to wage labor transition was also less critical than transitions between various forms of proletarianization with distinctive regulations over settlement (Lucassen 2005; Krishnamurthy 1983; Kumar 1992). Factory work averaged less than 10% of the population and the working majority was always rural where agricultural patronage politics often provided “vertical” risk-mitigation against worker famine (Platteau 1995). 2. Secularization of non-secular risk mitigation. While priests, pastors, and fraternities influenced Europe’s welfare alongside state-instituted programs, the Indian constitution stepped worriedly away from religious identities. Registered industrial firms provided the primary state-recognized route to industrial welfare and the state continued to be a formidable employer. Yet, ironically, affirmative action-type “reservation” policies based on caste and religious
Industrial welfare and the state: nation and city reconsidered
141
quotas formed the core of industrial welfare, resting in Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, Muslims, and Other Backward Classes of Hindus (OBCs). Despite the secular Constitution statutorily over-writing variation into a language of solidarity and welfare for six post-independence decades, alternate institutions persisted through caste, jati, religion, language, gender, and unions. Each had important occupational and technological effects: concentration of caste by sector, skills transmission through caste and family, and language hewed to geography.6 Group rights often subsumed individual labor rights, and caste created substantial limits on mobility (Kumar 1992). Gender and religion curtailed access to statutory programs and limited the spread and mobilization in home-based occupations and piece-rate work such as in garments and agarbatti (incense). A fully capitalized wage-based economy therefore poorly describes late nineteenth and twentieth century Indian labor. Urban wage-dependence was bounded by ties to neighborhoods, rural life, caste, jati, language, and religion. In the industrial metropolises of Bombay and Madras, workers depended on pragmatic risk-sharing and mitigation. From overlapping living spaces to healthcare, borrowed money, social and moral supports, and the distribution of work, water, food, even building materials, unregulated ties provided a modicum of security (Das Gupta 1994). The configuring of an urban proletariat was thus partial, distinctive, and by no means inevitable. Indeed, nation and class were not sole fulcrums of mobilization. Marxist workplace and class discourse imperfectly corresponded to social hierarchies and inevitably, new movements emerged, e.g., the Arya Samaj, the Brahmo Samaj, Baden-Powell’s Scouts, and the more militant Rashtriya Seva Samiti (Watt 2005).7 Most situated “seva” (service) beyond the exclusive scope of work-places. However, unlike European “corporations” from which firms, guilds, and eventually class solidarities took root, and despite surmounting religious, occupational, and physical segregation, neither they nor the nation-state offered a convincing universalism.8 The Backward Classes Movement emerged by the time of the 1901 and 1911 censuses objecting to the state awarding superiority to groups through caste structure counts (Srinivas 1967). Alongside, other caste associations formed the charge against the state for “reservations,” affirmative-action quota privileges in public employment. The nation-state thus rooted industrial welfare in public workplace benefits, preferentially accessed through caste and religion. 3. Royal Mysore and Republican Karnataka: contestation and stagnation of workplace entitlements. Southern histories of the autonomous princely states demonstrate further variation in place-based and work-place welfare. Kerala, for example, emphasizes path-dependency: 6
E.g., the diamond sector with the Jains has extended family systems of welfare, skills transmission, specialized global business practice, and gender roles. 7 The earlier Bhakti-movement’s religious figures similarly urged against caste distinctions. Musicians and saints preached love and devotion and dramatically different discourses of universalism and service. 8 Greif (2005) defines corporations as “intentionally created, voluntary, interest-based, and self-governed permanent associations. Guilds, fraternities, universities, communes and city-states are some of the corporations that dominated Europe. Businesses and professional associations, business corporations, universities, consumer groups, republics and democracies are some of the corporations in modern economies” (2005, p. 1).
142
S. Srinivas
advances emerged not during democratic Communist rule but from nineteenth century welfare expansion instituted by Cochin and Travancore monarchs (Desai 2005). Keen to ward off British annexation, unlike Malabar under direct British rule, they unwittingly created new solidarities of radical caste and class movements that built momentum for wider redistribution. Mysore was seen as equally socially enlightened, but its welfare much less secure. Industrial transformation followed Mysore (capital Mysore) under the Wodeyar dynasty, the kingdom’s accession under Jayachamarajendra Wodeyar to India in 1950, linguistic and political re-consolidation under the States Reorganization Act (as State of Mysore) in 1956, and further reconsolidation in 1973 (renamed Karnataka, capital Bangalore, 2008 pop. 53 million). It distinctively sowed a middle industrial path, emphasized public universities and research institutes, and generated substantial technological advances. Unlike Kerala (social exemplar), its social protection record was poor and industrial dynamism high; unlike Tamil Nadu its anti-Brahmin movement was less violent and linguistic politics less jingoistic; unlike Andhra Pradesh, it suffered less Maoist militancy and agrarian unrest. The early Wodeyars observed a secularist rule. Yet, Mysore introduced castebased quotas in the nineteenth century, due in part to wider anti-Brahmin mobilization, the aristocratic Arasu/Urs caste’s support for peasant politics, and its unease with the Brahmin-dominated bureaucracy and Dewanship (Björn 1979; Sugitha 1982).9Although inequality increased, Chamarajendra Wodeyar established the Mysore Representative Assembly in 1881, providing a forum for Brahmins, and “backward” but dominant Lingayats and Vokkaligas. In the absence of independent middle peasantry and despite reigning landlords, the symbolic Dasara festival Assembly also expanded, serving to air discussion and to limit agrarian unrest (Made Gowda 1983; Sugitha 1982). The late industrial surge instigated by Maharaja, chief advisory Dewan and engineers, resulted in a series of modernization shifts and partial stabilization of social relations. Significant capitalist transformations were underway by the early 1900s propelled by British commercialization of Mysore’s agriculture, resulting in expanded domestic and export markets and increased risks to farmers (Made Gowda 1983). The Dewan and landlords instituted agribusinesses in sugar manufactories and iron foundries (ibid., p. 197). Large agrarian populations arose in rural farm and non-farm work, general labor, and earth and masonry work. These technological changes did little, however, to dislodge the power of royals and landed gentry toward landless labor; Holageris (farm workers) were pushed further to town outskirts and coolies (head-loaders) although sometimes provided government housing, were altogether outside towns such as Chikkamagalur (ibid.). Meanwhile, non-Brahmin groups had mobilized and instituted alternate avenues to public (especially civil-service) appointments, e.g., the Mysore Lingayat Education Fund in 1905 and the Vokkaligara Sangha in 1906 (Manor 1977). By 1919, the British Miller Committee redefined public recruitment quotas and designated as “backward” all but Brahmins, Europeans, and Anglo-Indians, a characterization that continued until 1956 (Miller 1919; Sugitha 1982). 9
The southern anti-Brahmin movement was especially intense, aggravated by British divide-and-rule strategies.
Industrial welfare and the state: nation and city reconsidered
143
Royal support for the Miller recommendations leeched momentum away from mass-based industrial politics. First in mining and plantations, then textiles and steel, proletarianization emerged by 1920 mainly through migrant Tamils and hill tribes in Mysore and Bangalore districts (Sugitha 1982). Agitations for wider welfare emerged much later from the involvement of the Indian National Congress party with the Mysorean nationalist movement in the 1930s and 1940s, and their eventual confluence with regional trade union movements.10 The Trade Union Act of British India in 1926 had had limited impact and strikes continued through the 1930s and 1940s in mining and textiles. By the 1940s, World War II had boosted public industrial production in textiles, gold, and heavy industry in Bangalore and Badhravathi, yet the state (a dominant employer) determinedly ignored unions and welfare. Mysore bequeathed technological and scientific infrastructure and organizations to Karnataka and Bangalore, yet caste-based groupings remained solidly intact in the new republic. Based on elite mobilization and quota policies of the prior period, neither national nor regional states were able to re-consolidate power. Partial land reform in the 1970s provided some new impetus to re-stratification, but class politics and unionization were increasingly sidelined even after widespread public sector strikes in the 1980s (Assadi 2006). Lingayats and Vokkaligas came to dominate politics (the latter although dominant by numbers had ‘backward’ status and benefits). Conservative, incremental changes, prevented dramatic social changes and pitted several “disadvantaged” and OBC groups against each other (Manor 2007; Assadi 2006). By the 1990s, 90% of Karnataka’s population was effectively slotted into “reserved” and ‘backward’ classes (Assadi 2006). In factories, a class model of antagonism or cooperation had broken down, and alternate urban organizing sites emerged (Roy Chowdhury 2003). Sluggish unions allowed an uncontested stand-off between two dominant political coalitions, the MOVD (Muslims, OBCs, Vokkaligas, and Dalits) and the LIBRA (Lingayats and Brahmins) (Assadi 2006). Despite policy continuity, this stand-off resulted in welfare stagnation and widespread corruption (see also Kadekodi et al. 2007). Overall then, between royal and republican state changes, a remarkable regional industrial transition was underway. Yet, caste—and religion-based coalitions geared to public employment access and benefits significantly slowed work-place or other entitlements. 4. National rules to local discretion and quasi-rules. Today, the new social security Bill has made local inspection and registration rules for firms and workers vital to industrial gate-keeping (Srinivas 2008b, 2009). Karnataka’s technological changes have fueled a services boom underscoring the increasing limitations of the Factories and Boilers Act for work-place regulation. The state’s bureaucracy seeks new legitimacy and partners outside a stagnating formal economy. Although street-level bureaucrats operate amidst the contradictions of successive regulations bequeathed from British, Mysorean, and the Indian state, the ironic result of these contradictions is considerable autonomy and discretion in deciding whether (and which) workers receive industrial welfare (ibid.). The quasi-rules they 10 Arguably, the Mysore national movement comprised three periods: 1885–1920 (mobilization without organization), 1920–1937 (elite mobilization), and 1937–1947 (mass mobilization) (Björn 1979, p. 179).
144
S. Srinivas
must construct for daily functioning make welfare expansion complex and uncertain. In the absence of convincing and predictable statutory rules on the ground, there persists a constant ebb and flow of workers to alternate risk-mitigating institutions such as family, caste, religious group, even political parties. This regional ecology may be evolutionary but not necessarily progressive. Karnataka’s caste allegiances have crystallized the state’s strategy towards fragmentation rather than domination over and consolidation of other institutions. Industrial welfare has emerged in a messy overlay not of “traditional” princely Mysore versus “modern” Karnataka, but rather of two versions of institutional modernization for industrial development, first in royal, then republican periods. India’s social insurance, unlike Europe’s, has therefore been strangely dislocated from local institutions. The nation has been unable or unwilling to extend its statutory umbrella and permeate webs of local risk-mitigation or pooling. Yet, European models diffused by the ILO have further shaped Indian efforts at Bismarck- and Beveridge-inspired factory-, military- and civil-services-welfare. The remaining social assistance for the majority has little traditional risk-mitigation or participatory and contributory benefits of social insurance.
Industrial welfare and the state: nation and city reconsidered Although the “abstract rules” of western societies tie in philosophically with the notion of the invisible hand, arms length in market relations and arms length in industrial welfare are very different. While national social insurance can impersonally pool widely disparate groups and use market mechanisms, it has unevenly evolved from more personalized rules of social grouping, monitoring, continuity, and sanction. Even when states drive the process, deeply ingrained trust and welfare come neither cheaply nor, always, democratically. After all, European fascism led to durable industrial entitlements while democratic India continues without. Nations therefore are not only imagined, they thrive on existing trust, cost- and risksharing. Their territorial holds must be debated. Necessity and trust make workers oscillate between allegiances to the state and other regional institutions, many older than nation-states. These may undermine the state’s control, legitimacy, and efficiency. Rapid late twentieth and early twenty-first century urbanization and industrialization appear antithetical to the straightforward consolidation of these institutions. Accounts of industrial history often seek convergence; the seductive draw of nation-states is that they tell large, glorious stories of displacement and consolidation. However, satisfying though national pension accounts and health spending may be as measures, they provide no deeper analysis of institutional variety. As the state’s delicate (and often failing) balancing act between production and redistribution, industrial welfare can best be locally judged. The city or region can fade as a secondorder variable in some analyses, while remaining as first-order in others. Parts woven into whole fabric are to be judged at the whole, but parts unwoven and threads pulling apart have a different story to tell. The larger the whole, the bigger the holes and the more contested the tensile strength of the composite. The dynamics of industrial welfare must be judged ultimately through cities and regions, the weave of nations. “Informal” risk-pooling institutions and organizations may have shielded
Industrial welfare and the state: nation and city reconsidered
145
themselves from states where necessary, but many threw in their lot with nationstates. Understanding the weave of diverse skeins into the fabric of nationality and citizenship will require new approaches to technological change and to the shifting economics of risk-pooling. Economic linearity will thus not take us far. Late industrialization has dwelt theoretically in this tension, never fully acknowledging that the institutional diversity of latecomers might be better represented by parts rather than whole nation-states; how else to tell the uneven stories of late industrialization? No coincidence that the emphasis of such theories has rested in small nations, homogenous nations, and citystates. Ultimately however, these provide weak litmus tests for states, other institutions, and the founding economics of industrial welfare.
Acknowledgments Chris Tilly was a marvelous editor and I thank him and Mike Hanagan for their invitation. I’m delighted to participate in this volume that emphasizes Charles Tilly’s inspiring intellectual legacy. This article represents my ongoing research and two broader projects on comparative social protections and industrial governance at the Technological Change Lab (TCLab) at Columbia University. It is funded from Columbia’s Graduate School for Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), and has been recently awarded a grant from the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) at Columbia University. Both sources are very gratefully acknowledged. Some materials here are from the ISERP proposal. Several sub-themes were earlier presented at the following conferences and workshops: Universalizing Social Protection in Asia, New Delhi, Feb. 2007, Association for Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP), Fort Worth, Oct. 2007, ILO Global Production Networks and Decent Work workshop, Bangalore, Nov. 2007, Sloan Industry Studies conference, Boston, April 2008. I have benefited from questions and discussions at these venues and, in India, from scholars, managers, government officials, union members, and other workers. I thank Dr. Krishnamurthy, chief librarian, University of Mysore, Dr. Frederick Weber for his comments, and Matthew Crosby, Kyle Gerry, Mike Kolber, and Sonal Shah for compiling data for TCLab.
References Abramovitz, M. (1986). Catching-up, forging ahead and falling behind. Journal of Economic History, 46 (2), 385–406. Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities. London: Verso. Arrow, K. J. (1963a). Uncertainty and the welfare economics of medical care. American Economic Review, 53(6), 941–973. Arrow, K. J. (1963b). Social choice and individual values (2nd ed.). New York: Wiley. Arrow, K. J. (1972). Gifts and exchanges. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1(4), 363–372. Assadi, M. (2006). Karnataka: the muted anti-reservation agitation. Economic and Political Weekly, 41 (29), 3146–3150. Bärnighausen, T., & Sauerborn, R. (2002). One hundred and eighteen years of the German health insurance system: are there any lessons for middle- and low-income countries? Social Science & Medicine, 54(10), 1559–1587. Barr, N. (1992). Economic theory and the welfare state: a survey and interpretation. Journal of Economic Literature, 30(2), 741–803. Barrientos, A. (2004). Women, informal employment and social protection in Latin America, women at work: challenges for Latin America (Vol. 66). Washington DC: Inter-American Development Bank. Baumol, W. J. (1986). Productivity growth, convergence, and welfare; what the long-run data show. American Economic Review, 76(5), 1072–1085. Beattie, R. (2000). Social protection for all: but how? International Labour Review, 139(2), 129–149. Beneria, L. (1999). Globalization, gender, and the davos man. Feminist Economics, 5(3), 61–83. Berkowitz, E., & McQuaid, K. (1980). Creating the welfare state, the political economy of twentiethcentury reform. New York: Praeger.
146
S. Srinivas
Björn, H. (1979). The political economy of indirect rule, mysore, 1881–1947. New Delhi: published Ph.D. Dissertation, Göteborg. Boyd, R. A., & Ngo, T. W. (2005). Emancipating the political economy of Asia from the growth paradigm. In R. A. Boyd & T. W. Ngo (Eds.), Asian States: Beyond the developmental perspective (pp. 1–18). Oxford: Routledge/Curzon. Campbell, J., & Ikegami, N. (1998). The art of balance in health policy: Maintaining Japan’s low-cost egalitarian system. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carrin, G. & James, C. (2005). Social health insurance: Key factors affecting the transition towards universal coverage, Social Security Review, 58 (1). Chang, H.-J. (2002). Kicking away the ladder: development strategy in historical perspective. London: Anthem. Chatterjee, P. (1986/1999). Nationalist thought and the colonial world: A derivative discourse? The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. first published in 1986 by the United Nations University. Collier, D., & Messick, R. E. (1975). Prerequisites versus diffusion: testing alternative explanations of social security adoption. American Political Science Review, 69(4), 1299–1315. Cutright, P. (1965). Political structure, economic development, and national social security programs. American Journal of Sociology, 70(5), 537–550. Das Gupta, R. (1994). A labour history of social security and mutual assistance in India. Economic and Political Weekly, 12, 612–620. Desai, M. (2005). Indirect British rule, state formation, and welfarism in Kerala, India, 1860–1957. Social Science History, 29(3), 457–488. Doeringer, P. B., & Piore, M. J. (1971). Internal labor markets and manpower analysis. Lexington: Heath. Esping-Andersen, G. (1990). The three worlds of welfare capitalism. Cambridge: Polity. Flora, P., & Alber, J. (1981). Modernization, democratization, and the development of welfare states in Western Europe. In P. Flora & A. Heidenheimer (Eds.), Development of Welfare states in Europe and America (pp. 37–80). New Brunswick: Transaction Books. Gerschenkron, A. (1962). Economic development in historical perspective. Cambridge: Belknap. Greif, A. (2004). Impersonal exchange without impartial law: the community responsibility system. Chicago Journal of International Law, 5(1), 109–138. Greif, A. (2005). Family structures, institutions, and growth: the origin and implications of western corporatism. American Economic Review, 96(2), 308–312. Guichard, P., & Cuvillier, J.-P. (1996). Barbarian Europe. In Burguiere et al. (Eds.), Vol. I. A history of the family (pp. 317–378). Cambridge: Polity. Harvey, D. (1989). The urban experience. Blackwell: Oxford. Hohenberg, P. M., & Lees, L. H. (1984). The making of urban Europe, 1000–1950. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hort, S., & Kuhnle, S. (2000). The coming of East and South-East Asian welfare states. Journal of European Social Policy, 10, 162–184. Inoue, R. (1979). Chikuzen-Munakata no Jyorei (Jyorei in Munakata District, Chikuzen area) Nishi-nihon Shinbunsha (in Japanese) cited in Ogawa et al. 2003. Iyer, R. N. (2000). The moral and political thought of Mahatma Gandhi. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Jacobs, D. (2000). Low social expenditures on social welfare: do East Asian countries have a secret? International Journal of Social Welfare, 9, 2–16. Kadekodi, G. K., Kanbur, R., & Rao, V. (2007). Governance and the “Karnataka Model of Development”. Economic and Political Weekly, 42(8), 649–652. Kangas, O., & Palme, J. (Eds.). (2005). Social policy and economic development in the nordic countries. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Katznelson, I. (1981). City trenches: Urban planning and patterning of class in the United States. New York: Pantheon. Korpi, W. (1989). Power, politics, and state autonomy in the development of social citizenship. American Sociological Review, 54 (3). Krishnamurthy, J. (1983). Occupational structure. In D. Kumar (Ed.), The Cambridge economic history of India, Vol. 2, c. 1757–1970 (pp. 533–550). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kumar, D. (1992). Land and caste in South India: Agricultural labour in Madras presidency during the nineteenth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kwon, H.-J. (1998). Democracy and the politics of social welfare: a comparative analysis of welfare systems in East Asia. In R. Goodman, G. White, & H.-J. Kwon (Eds.), East Asian welfare model: welfare orientalism and the state (pp. 27–74). London: Routledge.
Industrial welfare and the state: nation and city reconsidered
147
Lucassen, J. (2005). Proletarianization in Western Europe and India: concepts and methods, in The Rise, Organization, and Institutional Framework of Factor Markets. Workshop Global Economic History Network (GEHN), Utrecht, June 23–25 2005. XXX Lund, F. & Srinivas, S. (2000, reprinted 2005). Learning from Experience: A Gendered Approach to Social Protection for Workers in the Informal Economy, International Labour Organisation. Geneva, Switzerland and Turin (2005): ILO/STEP and WIEGO. Made Gowda. (1983). A Formative Period of an Indian state: Modern Mysore 1881–1902, A Study of the Elite, Polity and Society, Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, University of Mysore. Manor, J. (1977). The evaluation of political arenas and limits of social organization: the Lingayats and Vokkaligas of Princely Mysore. In M. S. Srinivas et al. (Eds.), Dimensions of social change in India. Bombay: Allied. Manor, J. (2007). Changes in Karnataka over the last decade: villages and the wider context. Economic and Political Weekly, 42(8), 653–661. Mikkelsen, F. (2005). Working-class formation in Europe and forms of integration: history and theory. Labor History, 46(3), 277–306. Miller, L. (1919). Report of the Committee appointed to consider steps necessary for Adequate Representation of Communities in the Public Service, Bangalore. Mkandawire, T. (Ed.). (2004). Social policy in a development context. Houndmills: Palgrave. Moene, K. & Wallerstein, M. (2006). The Scandinavian model and economic development. Development Outreach, World Bank Institute, February, 18–35. Nandy, A. (1987). Traditions, tyranny, and Utopias: Essays in the politics of awareness. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. North, D. C. (1981). Structure and change in economic history. New York: Norton. North, D. C. (1987). Institutions, transaction costs and economic growth. Journal of Economic Inquiry, 25 (3), 419–429. Ogawa, S., Hasegawa, T., Carrin, G., & Kawabata, K. (2003). Scaling up community health insurance: Japan’s experience with the 19th century Jyorei scheme. Health Policy and Planning, 18(3), 270– 278. Orloff, A. (1996). Gender in the welfare state. Annual Review of Sociology, 22, 51–78. Peck, J. (1996). Work-place: The social regulation of labour markets. New York: Guilford. Peng, I., & Wong, J. (2008). Institutions and institutional purpose: continuity and change in East Asian social policy. Politics and Society, 36(1), 61–88. Pierson, C. (2004). Late industrializers and the development of the welfare state. UNRISD, United Nations Program Papers on Social Policy and Development, September. Platteau, J.-P. (1995). An Indian model of aristocratic patronage. Oxford Economic Papers, 47, 636– 662. Platteau, J.-P. (1997). Mutual insurance as an elusive concept in traditional rural societies. Journal of Development Studies, 33(6), 764–96. Polanyi, K. (1944/1957). The great transformation: The political and economic origin of our times. Boston: Beacon. Razi, Z. (1993). The myth of the immutable english family. Past and Present, 140, 3–44. Richardson, G. (2005). The prudent village: risk-pooling institutions in medieval english agriculture. The Journal of Economic History, 65(2), 386–413. Rosner, D., & Markowitz, G. (2003). The struggle over employee benefits: the role of labor in influencing modern health policy. Milbank Quarterly, 81(1), 45–73. Roy Chowdhury, S. (2003). Old classes and new spaces: urban poverty and new trade unions. Economic and Political Weekly, 38(50), 5277–5284. Sabel, C. F. (1994). Learning by monitoring: The institutions of economic development. In N. Smelser & R. Swedberg (Eds.), The handbook of economic sociology. Princeton: Princeton University Press and Russell Sage Foundation. Shaikh, A. (2003). Who pays for the “Welfare” in the welfare state? A multi-country study. Social Research, 70(2), 531–550. Solar, P. M. (1995). Poor relief and english economic development before the industrial revolution. Economic History Review, 48(1), 1–22. Srinivas, M. N. (1967). Social change in modern India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Srinivas, S. (2008a). Urban labour markets in the 21st century: dualism, regulation, and the role(s) of the state. Habitat International, Special Issue on Urban Labour, 32(2), 141–159. Srinivas, S. (2008b). Labour regulation and inspection: An Indian or Karnataka model? Technological Change Lab discussion paper, Columbia University.
148
S. Srinivas
Srinivas, S. (2009). Cost, risk, and labour markets: The state and sticky institutions in global production networks. Indian Journal of Labour Economics, Special Issue on Global Production and Its Implications for Indian Firms and Labour, 52 (4). Standing, G. (1999). Global feminization through flexible labour: a theme revisited. World Development, 27(3), 583–602. Sugitha, S. (1982). Dewanship of Sir Mirza Ismail in Mysore State (1926–1941), Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, University of Mysore. Szreter, S. (2006). The right of registration: development, identity registration, and social security—a historical perspective. World Development, 35(1), 67–86. Tilly, C. (1984). Demographic origin of the European proletariat. In D. Levine (Ed.), Proletarianization and family life. Orlando: Academic. Tilly, C. (2004). Trust and rule. Theory and Society, 33(1), 1–30. Tilly, C. (2010) Cities and States in World History (this issue). Watt, C. A. (2005). Serving the nation: Cultures of service, association, and citizenship in Colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Wilensky, H. L. (1975). Welfare state and equality. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wilensky, H. L., & Lebeaux, C. N. (1965). Industrial society and social welfare. New York: Free. Wollmann, H. (2006). The fall and rise of the local community: a comparative and historical perspective. Urban Studies, 43(8), 1419–1438. Wood, G., & Gough, I. (2006). A comparative welfare regime approach to global social policy. World Development, 34(10), 1696–1712.
Smita Srinivas is Assistant Professor in the Urban Planning program and Director of the Technological Change Lab (TCLab) at Columbia University. She is trained in economics and economic development planning and her interests lie in comparative economic and industrial history, technological innovation, and institutional theories of development and planning. This year is a welcome research leave in India, to complete a manuscript on comparative international regulation of health technologies and health entitlements, and; a second project on technological innovation and taxonomies in industrializing countries. Srinivas is co-author of two earlier books published Learning from experience: A gendered approach to social protection for workers in the informal economy (2000, ILO) with Frances Lund, and Women Organizing for social protection (2001, ILO). Lund and Srinivas was reprinted in 2005. Her research has appeared in numerous journals such as World Development, Regional Studies, and Technology and Society, book chapters, and in various official publications of the UN and sister agencies.
Party governments, US hegemony, & a tale of two Tillys’ Weberian state* Antonina Gentile
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
Abstract This paper notes that Charles Tilly’s “Globalization threatens labor’s rights” is distinguished by the author’s uncharacteristic pessimism concerning the continued salience of the national state and the domestic arena of contention, and the ability of ordinary people to resist large scale processes that threaten their rights. This study seeks to explain this paradox. It argues that a key commonality between “polity model Tilly,” “statist Tilly,” and the briefly appearing “globalization Tilly” is a fundamentally Weberian conception of governments, the state and the international state system which precludes the detection of key agents of capitalist regime change and worldscale ordering: party-governments and a hegemonic state. Political parties are critical agents of neo-liberal regime change, a process which involves a reformed or new party-government’s political and institutional decategorization of labor as an organized member of the polity, forcing labor to hat-switch to the category of citizen in order to survive the anti-labor order. Such a process is not new to the era of globalization: Hegemonic USA has promoted labor-decategorizing regimes of capitalism—whether the authoritarian or neo-liberal variant—since at least the end of WWII. Focussing on the historical push towards neo-liberalism in OECD, the paper argues that the hegemon’s neo-liberal, labor-decategoring projections have been limited by: a) the existence of a labor-related party in a party-government system; b) that labor-related party’s ability to capture government; and c) that same party’s
I gratefully acknowledge comments by Michael Hanagan and Chris Tilly; Margaret Levi and Sydney University's US Studies Centre for an office at which to complete this paper; and Richard Katz and Sidney Tarrow for their critiques of an earlier version. A. Gentile (*) Cariplo Fellow, Facoltà di Scienze Politiche Dipartimento di Studi del Lavoro e del Welfare, Università degli Studi di Milano, Via Festa del Perdono 7, 20122 Milan, Italy e-mail:
[email protected] M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_10, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
149
150
A. Gentile
maintenance of familial ties with organized labor. As such, neo-liberal regime change has not been invariant, nor has capitalist regime change been uni-directional towards the neo-liberal variety. Just as parties have been critical for labor’s decategorization, historically and today they are a key to labor’s struggle for recategorization. Introduction Chuck Tilly liked telling stories. In fact, both Chuck Tillys did—the polity model Tilly of contentious politics fame, read largely by sociologists and comparative political scientists, and the statist Tilly of war-making and state-building fame, read (and misread?) largely by international relations scholars. But both Tillys told stories of political processes and social change; they loved the gerund—mobilizing, alliance building, claim making, state-building, and so forth. Normatively, both Tillys were always concerned about the rights of ordinary people vis-a-vis holders of power and keepers of capital. And both Tillys positively loathed Modernization Theory and elite perspectives, especially when these combined to produce misconceived stories of European political and social history, and linear models that policy elites then sought to (force-) feed to the peoples of “deviant” regions of Europe and new, postWWII national states. Of course neither Tilly always escaped the traps of Modernization Theory. But, great scholar and humanist that he was, Charles Tilly was often the first to notice a problem and to encourage his students and collaborators to work with him to resolve it. He did this time and again. Though far from possessing the story-telling abilities of the two Tillys, I will try to tell a story of my own; one concerning the two Tillys and an apparent third: the Tilly of “Globalization Threatens Labor’s Rights” (1995). Why a third? Let me backtrack to the last paragraph. Did you notice the “-al” in “national states”? Neither of the two Tillys was keen on ideology, thus they long avoided the “nation” state just as they were now to avoid “neo-liberal” globalization. And they preferred national states to capitalist states, so political economy’s types of states (e.g., the liberal and corporatist regimes of capitalism) did not preoccupy the statist Tilly, while the question of where and how capitalists fit into a polity—as members, challengers, or something else—was not clear in polity model Tilly. For both Tillys, states and governments were at heart defined in Weberian terms, despite modifications to their definition over time. Ultimately, whatever else they were, states and governments were organizations that concentrated the means of coercion within a defined jurisdiction. This had its strengths. But, flowing from this, one also finds in statist Tilly that political parties barely rated a mention, while, in polity model Tilly, they were polity members or challengers that related to governments much like other organizations rather than as organizations that constituted “party-governments” (Castles & Wildenmann 1986; Katz 1987), inflected with class, religious, or ethnic biases. Second, one finds in statist Tilly a quasi-pluralist international system of states that is hard-pressed to detect the multifaceted power of a hegemonic state1 and its allies to intervene in international institutions and in the politics and economic My use of “hegemonic” state and “hegemony” is Arrighian, which in turn builds upon Gramsci’s conception of supremacy exercised by coercive means against challengers, and through the intellectual and moral leadership of its allies (Arrighi and Silver 1999, p. 26).
1
Party governments, US hegemony, & a tale of two Tillys’ Weberian state
151
development of vulnerable states and to, consequently, give rise to new or to alter older international and national political orders. These Weberian-derived aspects of the 1995 paper made it vaguely more familiar to this student of the two Tillys. But that commonality is, I suggest, the key to resolving the paradox of the uncharacteristically pessimistic Tilly, who appeared fleetingly in 1995 in “Globalization Threatens Labor’s Rights” to specify the Race to the Bottom thesis. For here was a Tilly who veered toward an end-of-history thesis regarding the national state, the domestic arena of contention, and the era of “rightsestablishment.” Here was a Tilly who nearly despaired of ordinary peoples’ ability to create new repertoires and new rights domains both at the national and international levels, and to use old ones in new ways. In the larger study that this paper draws upon, I focused on the repertoires and social categories that OECD labor avails itself of in the empirical variety of capitalist states that coexist in this age of neoliberal globalization (cf. Gentile 2010; Gentile and Tarrow 2009). Here I limit myself to the process of political change within the state and hone in on two critical actors that Tilly’s state and state system missed: political parties and hegemonic states. I argue that: 1. Neoliberal globalization entails a process of domestic regime change, in which political parties are critical agents. 2. From labor’s perspective, a neoliberal regime is characterized by organized labor’s exclusion from the polity, while citizens and their respective domain of rights remain inscribed within it. This decategorization of labor is signaled politically by the ending of routine corporatist “political exchange” (Crouch & Pizzorno 1978a, b) between party-governments and labor, and, institutionally, by new laws that restrict labor rights and create government bodies that enforce that antilabor order. At the same time, a neoliberal regime is characterized by capital’s stronger inclusion in the polity, such that capital routinely accesses government and contributes to industrial and social policy making. 3. Since the Washington Consensus,2 neoliberal regime change in OECD has not been universal nor has regime change always been unidirectional from laborcategorizing corporatist regimes to neoliberal ones. Nor is neoliberal regime change unique to the Washington Consensus period. It was evident in post-WWII Italy when the rising hegemon, the USA, and its allies intervened in the domestic politics of southern European countries3 and stacked the power of conservative political parties to help establish or maintain labor-decategorizing regimes, including authoritarian regimes, which decategorize both labor and citizens. 4. Just as parties are critical to labor’s decategorization, they have been critical to its recategorization. In those early labor-decategorizing polities, union movements availed themselves of pivotal cycles of national contention to strengthen their power at the workplace and they used openings in government, signaled by the electoral victories of labor-related parties, to achieve greater political and institutional categorical power. Though a contested term, I here use the “Washington Consensus” to denote the period from the 1980s to the present, when economic policy prescriptions in international institutions and many governments assumed more Hayek and Friedman, and less Keynes. 3 Greece, Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal. 2
152
A. Gentile
5. The very possibility of labor’s recategorization via labor-related parties separates most polities from the standard-bearer of neoliberalism, the USA, which has no labor-related party to broker labor’s political empowerment, although the 1990s’ emergence of Third Way labor parties in some countries is producing the functional equivalent of the labor-partyless US system and its chronically decategorized labor movement. 6. Generally, after WWII, the power of hegemonic USA was critical for promoting both neoliberal regimes in southern European polities, and in creating institutions that limited the workplace mobilizing power of otherwise labor-categorized northern European polities. Cold War competition froze further neoliberal regime change, but, with the end of the Cold War, the push was resumed. After glossing Tilly’s thesis of “Globalization Threatens Labor’s Rights,” I will consider the cases of recently neoliberalizing Britain and Australia, and then pass to Italy’s postwar neoliberalization before turning briefly to postwar Germany and couching these cases in a story of US hegemony, party-governments, and OECD labor movements’ postwar struggles for categorization as labor. “Globalization threatens labor’s rights” by Tilly No. 3 In his 1995 paper, Tilly did us the great service of specifying the—until then— nebulous Race to the Bottom thesis. With the rise of capital and supranational bodies that strongly reflect the interest of capital, Tilly held that the immediate loser under globalization was the state. This bode ill for workers in class struggles; for, the development of labor movements over the last 150 years had been intimately related to the development of the national state in which they had become embedded. Without the state’s enforcement of rights, and without the state as a site structuring political contention, labor seemed doomed to weakening unless it were to jump scale to an international arena. Workers would need “to invent new strategies at the scale of international capital” (1995, p. 5), while the guarantors of worker rights would need to be international agencies or consortia of states. But casting his eye around the world of the early 1990s, Tilly found that new internationalist strategies were not emerging. The causal flow of Tilly’s argument ran from globalization through to the reduction of state capacity to control stocks and flows and to pursue social policies, and ended with the dependent variable of his paper: diminished labor rights. At first, it seems that weakened state capacity is an intervening variable of the causal flow; but, on closer reading, the relation between capital and the state is one where the two are not only independent but are also in a zero-sum relationship, producing an endof-history argument characteristic of the Modernization Theory Tillys 1 and 2 so fully detested. The thesis’ assumptions are:
Globalization is innocent of state agency. The state is in part in the business of protecting labor rights and disciplining capital. The state’s enforced withdrawal from labor protection leaves a policy and legal vacuum.
Party governments, US hegemony, & a tale of two Tillys’ Weberian state
153
The state’s loss of power is across the board of policy areas and across all categories of polity members.
To students of Tilly’s enormous oeuvre, Tilly’s readiness to relinquish the state and domestic political processes tout court in this 1995 article came as some surprise. Labor’s embeddedness in the state varied by state and institutions, he noted briefly (p. 13), but this variation-pleading observation, loaded with questions about the history of contention, was not pushed. So, what to do? “Test him!” said his comrade-in-contention, Sid Tarrow. I did. To do so, I selected a series of OECD4 docker campaigns, starting with the sacked Liverpool Dockers’ international campaign for reinstatement; because they represented a “most likely case” to support Tilly’s expectations of a powerless domestic arena and, conversely, a “least likely case” to strongly challenge them. Though ports form part of domestic infrastructure, they have in recent decades experienced a major concentration of ownership by multinational shipping and stevedoring companies, and are subject to ships’ and shippers’ “shopping” for port services within and between national borders (Dombois and Heseler 2000). Situated at the cutting edge of the domestic and international arenas of contention, dockers tell us much about each and the relationship between the two. The initial problem to tackle, however, was: While it might follow logically from Tillys 1, 2, and 3 that, if workers’ rights developed through a political process involving a government, then the demise of the state and domestic politics meant the demise of workers’ rights, the question was whether the state and domestic politics truly had ended, or had they instead simply changed? And if it was a case of change, a Tillyan pace Tilly No. 1 needed to ask, who are the agents, what processes are involved, and what do they change from and to? Returning to Tilly’s assumptions, one would not expect to see government agency in labor’s demise and capital’s rise, nor the emergence of new legal restrictions against labor, much less the state’s enhanced powers to enforce those new antilabor laws. And yet, close observers would not argue that the first prominent neoliberalizing state in Europe in recent decades, the British state, became an institutional vacuum, nor would they describe Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government as a passive actor in the process of neoliberalizing the British state. Ethnographic- and archive-based process tracing needed to take center stage, as Tilly No. 1 and his associates rightly urged (McAdam et al. 2001).
Parties, neoliberal regime change, and the decategorization of labor: Britain and Australia Britain’s Conservative Party entered a period of considerable crisis after it lost the national elections twice in 1 year. Ted Heath’s leadership was on the brink. When a strong challenger, Keith Joseph, made a controversial recommendation for birth 4
Out of the OECD countries listed for 1995–1997—the period of the Liverpool Campaign—those pertinent to this project: had ports with direct container trade with Liverpool: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the USA.
154
A. Gentile
control among the lower classes, the party was forced to rule him out as its potential savior. But Joseph redirected his formidable power base toward one Margaret Thatcher, whom he had found in tune with his Hayekian criticisms of both labor and conservative parties’ postwar preferences for a social state. That year, not only did Thatcher win the party room vote, but Joseph founded a new right wing think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, with the aim of “converting the Tory party to economic liberalism.”5 Together, Thatcher and Joseph and their allies within the party and without so changed the Conservative Party’s policy prescriptions it would have been unrecognizable to its founders and postwar leaders. Once achieving executive power in 1979, Thatcher’s reconfigured Conservative Party proceeded to cut organized labor out of the routine consultation that had characterized postwar processes of political exchange. Between 1984 and 1992, there were no prime ministerial meetings with the Trades Union Council, and the signature corporatist institutions of tripartite bargaining, in particular, the Manpower Services Commission and the National Economic Development Council, were laid to rest (Howell 1999). New laws were passed. The Employment and Trade Union Acts and related acts of 1980, 1982, 1984, 1988, 1990, and 1993 shot down one by one the many labor rights that organized labor had fought for and won over the previous century.6 Political and solidarity strikes were banned, and picketing was restricted. Workers could only take strike action against their immediate employers, while the actual number of “immediate employers” multiplied—at least on paper—following legal changes that encouraged complex restructurings. Trade unions’ common law immunities from prosecution were also removed and punitive fines were introduced. Indeed, unions could now only evade liability by disavowing their members’ dispute (!). But for their part, employers could now reward workers who did not join a union. Finally, the last of the employment acts provided citizens with the right to sue for damages caused by industrial action—and “citizens,” it bears noting, implied propertied citizens or ordinary worker-citizens that did not challenge an antiunion order. But laws alone did not consolidate an antiunion, neoliberal regime. Political showdowns, which the Conservative government won, were critical in defeating labor, making it cower, and convincing it that future challenges were doomed to failure. Mrs Thatcher’s use of the police to bludgeon one of the strongest unions of the country, the National Union of Mineworkers, and her readiness to galvanize a union-hostile media so as to alienate unions from the “citizenry” was to haunt the British union movement for years to come. Once the miners were defeated, other industrial sectors of capital drew up their plans for their own showdowns, capitalizing on what one such plan called the “miners’ style defeat.”7 Thus, the port industry, another stronghold of the British labor movement, experienced its own “miners’ strike” in 1989, following the 5 http://www.cps.org.uk/index.php?option=com_cpshistory&Itemid=19 Last downloaded 1 September 2010. 6 The principle sources for this list of changes to industrial law is Howell (1999) and a submission to the ILO by John Hendy QC on behalf of the Liverpool Dockers. 7 Hendy et al., Legal Submissions by the Applicants in the Port of London Shop Stewards vs PLA case to the Industrial Tribunal: Personally compiled Liverpool Dockers Archives, 1997.
Party governments, US hegemony, & a tale of two Tillys’ Weberian state
155
government’s announcement on 6 April of its plan to abolish the National Dock Labour Scheme (NDLS). Established in 1947 after a wave of successful dock strikes, the NDLS had statutorily enshrined dockers’ right to secure employment and to the equal distribution of their work through a system of worker registration. The process that led to the abolishment of this institution is indicative of the shifts in political alliances in a neoliberalizing polity: In a clear departure from the postwar practice of at times symbolic and at other times meaningful consultation with trade unions, the policy was formulated by an informal workgroup drawn from the inner circle of the Cabinet and announced after an early morning Cabinet meeting, catching the Transport and General Workers Union totally unawares (Turnbull et al. 1992, p. 118). But the announcement was less of a surprise to elements of the National Association of Port Employers (NAPE), which was waiting in the wings to avail itself of new antilabor laws and powerful allies. In a 1990 speech to his Australian counterparts, the former head of the NAPE, Sir Nicholas Finney, illustrated vividly the flurry of his organization’s political activity and its privileged access to the corridors of power during the period leading up to the abolishment of the NDLS: The campaign was conducted through parliament by using every possible parliamentary device. Early day motions, adjournment debates, etc. We had three MPs who really acted as our voice in Parliament. They did all the hard work, they talked to the other MPs, they introduced briefing materials into the House of Commons, and we made sure that they were always well supplied with appropriate material. […] It was too serious an issue to just leave to transport or employment ministers. We know [sic] that it would be a Cabinet decision; we knew we had to get people like the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Foreign Secretary on our side. So we used every political body which had influence…. (Nicholas Finney, Speech, Australia 1990, MUA Archives, Sydney)8 The speech, however, does require some qualification: While the triumphant and proselytizing speaker conveys the view that port employers had become the Cabinet’s “executive committee,” one must note that the NAPE had existed for as long as the NDLS itself, and that it had not hitherto proposed abolition, but rather reform (Turnbull et al. 1992). What had changed were the alliances with and political preferences of the Tories. Neoliberal regime change was not isolated to Britain. In the 1990s, Australia’s Antipodean Corporatism9 was also to undergo transformation. But by comparison to 8 Recorded in: the Appendix, p. 12 of Mersey Port Shop Stewards Committee, The Case for the Reinstatement of the Sacked Liverpool Dockers: The need for a Public Inquiry into the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company, 1 July 1997. Also available on http://www.labournet.net/docks2/9706/ndls.htm, last downloaded 30 November 2009. 9 For nomenclature I have borrowed from the practice of welfare state typologists of capitalism who discerned the distinct “Antipodean” welfare state regime of Australia and New Zealand, noting the characteristically strong labor movements and high levels of social protection that set them apart from the more liberal-pluralist system of the USA (Castles & Mitchell 1993; Huber & Stephens 2001). The hallmark of this labor-categorizing system was a complex system of federal and state level labor courts for industrial arbitration and conciliation, enhanced, under the 1983 Labor government by corporatist political exchange with the union movement.
156
A. Gentile
the British case and due to a series of cabinet documents leaked to unionists and journalists, we have even stronger evidence of the agency and centrality of reformed political parties that achieve cabinet incumbency, and details about the networks that linked neoliberalizing party elites to segments of capital, and de-linked the union movement from the process of industrial and social policy making. The origins of that new, neoliberal regime involved a historic realignment of the Liberal Party during the equally historic long reign in government of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) between 1983 and 1996. That period saw the establishment of a series of “Prices and Incomes Accords” between the ALP-led government and the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), drawing the union movement into the social policy formation process. The shock of its landslide ousting from government in 1983 and the sight of organized labor’s political incorporation nearly tore the Liberal Party asunder and fuelled a struggle for power between the old establishment economic “Wet” faction and a rising economic “Dry” faction, led by John Howard. Intra-party contention meant a series of party leadership challenges, sometimes in a revolving-door pattern; but following Howard’s second ousting of his “Wet” rival and Leader of the Opposition, Andrew Peacock, Howard drove the Liberal Party to electoral victory in 1996. The Dries were strongly networked beyond the party with New-Right think tanks and some segments of capital whose perceived interests lay in new economic opportunities offered by Australia’s internationalizing economy. Once the Dry-led parliamentary Liberal Party and its coalition partner, the National Party, assumed government, it used selectively tendered subcontracts—in the name of “smaller government”—to bring its network of New Right intellectuals and businessmen into the policy formation process as “consultants” for industrial relations and port reform, cancelling formal agreements with the union movement. A close-up look at the contracting process helps us detect how and by whom new antilabor laws central to institutionally decategorizing Australian labor were drafted, and how and by whom the political showdowns designed to cement the new order were strategized.10 Soon after the new government assumed power, to draft the new Workplace Relations Act, the Minister for Industrial Relations, Peter Reith enlisted the assistance of one Paul Houlihan, who was both a founding member of the Right Wing think tank, the H. R. Nicholls Society, and the founding industrial director of the National Farmers Federation (NFF), the historical nemesis of the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA). The NFF, in turn, was closely allied with the Liberal Party’s coalition partner, the National Party. Shortly after this consultancy was completed, Houlihan was subcontracted by ACIL Economics, which had just been contracted by the government to develop a waterfront reform strategy. In January 1998, he would emerge into the public domain as the director of Producers and Consumers Stevedoring (PCS), a new stevedoring company established by the NFF to provide Patrick Stevedores with nonunion labor to replace its MUA workforce. For advice on maritime affairs, the Minister for Transport, John Sharp, recruited the former executive of the Australian Council of Shipping, Greg Bondar. Together with other ministerial advisors, they decided to outsource the task of waterfront reform assessment and strategic planning, but by means of selective tendering. Out 10
The principle source of Australia’s government–capital nexus is Trinca and Davies (2000).
Party governments, US hegemony, & a tale of two Tillys’ Weberian state
157
of the four selected contenders for the contract, ACIL Economics, under one David Trebeck, was successful. Trebeck had previously worked for John Howard during the latter’s first period as Leader of the Opposition. He, like Houlihan, had an NFF history, specifically as its deputy director in the early 1980s. During that period, according to Trinca and Davies (2000, p. 29), Trebeck had sought to shift farmers’ agendas from “traditional farm issues of agricultural subsidy and drought relief to other barriers to getting Australian commodities to market efficiently.” “Barriers,” I note, included unions, especially strong ones like the MUA, empowered by a “closed shop” system, national coverage, and no competing union. Once awarded the government waterfront strategy contract, Trebeck linked up with Houlihan by subcontracting him into the process. Under the firm leadership of the ministers for Industrial Relations and for Trade, those allies and others they drew in for problem solving devised and activated a political strategy—released only to the Cabinet, which in turn approved it— designed to trigger a dispute with the MUA. One cannot better their documents’ own words to describe their strategic aims: – Removal of MUA/ACTU control over the waterfront and therefore its use as a political/industrial weapon. – To demonstrate the effectiveness of the Government’s industrial relations and transport reforms, which will have a flow on effect into other sectors of industry. (Cabinet-in-Confidence, Waterfront Strategy—Supplementary Paper for Cabinet consideration [Approved 7 July 1997], MUA Archives, Sydney) The government’s strategy required that stevedoring and shipping capital by-pass the now diminished industrial relations courts and take full advantage of the new Workplace Relations Act.11 But stevedoring capital and port users were reluctant to make the first move. Thus the ministers and their contracted policy advisors conducted a series of secret meetings and brokered others so as to: (1) win the cooperation of existing stevedores; (2) create a new stevedoring company that could train and provide a nonunion workforce for the existing stevedores to use as strike breakers; and (3) build bridges between the two existing stevedores and the new entrant, such as to convince the former that the latter would only serve as a stalking horse and be dissolved after the union was defeated. The last half of 1997 saw several government-backed attempts to provoke the union into applying the now banned performances from its labor repertoire—strikes, sympathy strikes, and industrial pickets—and thus face legal sanction, deregistration, and bankruptcy. The first two failed due to leaks from the bureaucracy to the union. But, once Peter Reith secretly provided Patrick CEO Chris Corrigan with a long-awaited assurance of government-subsidized redundancy packages, Corrigan set off a chain of company restructurings and financial maneuvers that led to a dramatic midnight nationwide lockout in April 1998 and the mass dismissal of all Patrick employees and their replacement by the NFF’s PCS, led by Paul Houlihan. Unlike the shell-shocked British movement, the MUA responded creatively to the many traps Reith on one side and Corrigan on the other had set in the industrial 11
Department of Industrial Relations, Minute from D. Gillespie / M. Menthorpe, 10 March, 1997 MCU Ref No: 97/151. MUA Archives, Sydney.
158
A. Gentile
arena: the union “hat-switched” to the category of citizen and shifted to the citizen arena, using a citizen repertoire and the civil law to fight back. By availing itself of the one politically and institutionally protected category left to workers in a neoliberal state, the union survived as an organization. But the MUA and the ACTU did not achieve labor’s recategorization into the polity until the ALP returned to power in 2007. Even then, however, as with Britain under Tony Blair’s “New Labour,” recategorization was partial. The ALP had turned toward labor-estranging Third Way politics, leaving many of the more coercive aspects of the Howard era’s antiunion laws in place. The post-1978 and post-1996 experiences of Britain and Australia, thus suggest the following: 1.
2.
3.
At the domestic level, neoliberalization is a political process in which intraparty contention takes center-stage. It becomes nationally relevant when a proneoliberal faction wins the party room battle or forms a new party, and it stands to produce domestic regime change when that transformed (or new) political party achieves electoral victory. The neoliberalizing party-government changes the polity’s structure of conflict by terminating corporatist political exchange, legislatively rolling back workers’ rights, and erecting legal barriers to workers’ right to organize, bargain, and act collectively, hence severing the post-WWII corporatist compact between the state, labor, and capital. At the same time, the neoliberalizing government strengthens its compact with capital. To seal the process, the neoliberalizing government and allied elements of capital specifically target workers with high control of the supply of labor, resulting in an episode of contention in which now legally decategorized labor seeks alternative repertoires and legal arenas to fight from.
Postwar labor decategorizing regimes, US hegemony, and parties: Neoliberal Italy? The Varieties of Capitalism12 literature has amply shown that neoliberal regime change has not been as common as those who resorted to the TINA mantra wished it to be. Whereas liberal economic reforms have become more common in all OECD, they have not always involved labor’s decategorization; indeed, the decentralization The original typology of “Liberal Market Economies” (LMEs) and “Coordinated Market Economies” (CMEs) by Hall & Soskice (2001) and Soskice (1999) distinguished between those institutional regimes of capitalism in which firms resolve their coordination problems via competitive market mechanisms (in LMEs such as the USA and the UK), and those that do so via nonmarket institutions (in CMEs such as Germany and Sweden). Despite expectations of convergence upon the LME regime in the 1990s, the fundamental institutional differences between the two has persisted, because each regime offers firms distinct comparative advantages. Pontusson (2005), developing a more labor-focused typology and renaming CMEs “Social Market Economies,” is broadly of the same tradition, but focuses on the variance in inequality in each regime. For a series of critiques of Varieties of Capitalism in tune with this paper— i.e., Varieties’ overemphasis on actor coordination and neglect of actor conflict, its neglect of the commonalities of capitalism, and its neglect of the origins of the regimes and of US hegemony—see Coates, Ed. 2005. 12
Party governments, US hegemony, & a tale of two Tillys’ Weberian state
159
of bargaining has at times been brought about in concertation with organized labor (Traxler 1995). Most significantly, the 1990s also saw a shift toward corporatist political exchange in countries which had little experience with it, namely in southern Europe (Rhodes 2001). But a shift from what? Southern European polities shifted from labordecategorizing regimes that were established during the period of hegemonic ordering following WWII: In the cases of Spain, Portugal, and Greece, those regimes were authoritarian regimes, characterized by the effective decategorization of both labor and citizens. Following major democratization in the 1970s, citizens at least made the grade. In Italy, on the other hand, the postwar polity came to bear all the hallmarks of a neoliberal polity: strongly inscribed citizen rights alongside the decategorization of organized labor from the political process and an institutional order that severely hampered union’s capacity to access, represent, and mobilize the workplace. In the process of polity creation at that critical postwar juncture, however, not only the role of political parties is evident, but the role of the rising hegemon and its allies also comes to the fore. First, for a snapshot of the postwar Italian polity and its institutional makeup, and finally, the hegemonic origins of its boundary drawing: A detailed analysis by Joseph La Palombara in the 1950s and 1960s, based on an extraordinary array of interviews with representatives of major Italian interest groups, gives a vivid picture of the groups that mattered in the polity, and provides analytical labels to describe their relationship to the Christian Democratic-led government, and to the state bureaucracy. La Palombara (1964) identified the large employer association, Confindustria, as the most influential group, deriving power from its clientela relationship with the state’s (barely reformed Fascist) bureaucracy, particularly that of the Ministry of Industry. Much like the relationship between capital and the Howard-led government in 1990s Australia, Confindustria’s power was neither institutionalized, nor transparent, but the bond took overwhelming precedence over any relationship between the bureaucracy and labor, and between the government executive and labor. The second most influential actor in the polity was the umbrella interest group, Catholic Action, whose political power derived from its relationship of parentela13 with the Christian Democratic Party (DC). Catholic Action’s overriding aim was the political exclusion of the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) from government and Italians’ associational life. Alongside its parish-based work, it formed its own labor confederation, the Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori (CISL), with the aim of attracting workers away from the PCI-associated Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL). CISL, by contrast to CGIL, held some degree of what La Palombara calls “respectability” within the bureaucracy and had regular access to the Ministry of Labor. But that ministry was very low in the hierarchy of ministries, and certainly subordinate to the Ministry of Industry, which Confindustria dominated. CISL was further limited by Catholic Action itself, for parentela power with the DC also varied according to a hierarchy within Catholic Action. Consequently, CISL was not as much considered by DC governments as were nonlabor groups in Catholic Action, and it was further sidelined by the Vatican-created and (then) ultra13
Translates as “familial.”
160
A. Gentile
conservative Associazione Cristiana di Lavoratori Italiani whose raison d'être was not only to keep workers away from CGIL, but also to keep an eye on CISL. And institutionally? How can the postwar Italian polity be classified a neoliberal polity when the opening clause of the republic’s constitution hailed Italy “una Repubblica democratica fondata sul lavoro,”14 when key clauses endowed Italian citizens with the individual right to strike, and when two articles—Articles 39 and 40—established the right to workplace representation? One cannot overstate the fact that those two last articles had not been transposed into operative laws (Regalia et al. 1978). Individual citizens’ constitutional right to strike was of little value while the organization of those individuals was hampered. Significantly, that failure to operationalize Articles 39 and 40 was a function of the ruling DC government’s determination to deny legitimacy to any organization associated with the PCI. Because CGIL was the largest of Italy’s union confederations, the operationalization of an article affording rights to “representative” unions would have achieved just that. Thus, in postwar Italy, and by contrast to many northern European states at the time, the government established an anti-Keynesian, deflationary and strongly economically liberal and export-led path to growth (Lange et al. 1982; Salvati 1972). Low wages, sustained by massive south to north labor migration, easy dismissal processes, and newly divided and weak unions became organized capital’s boon, but the exclusion from government of the major union confederation’s party in parentela, the PCI, its imperative. What were the origins of this decategorization of Italian labor? History is clear on this question—hegemonic intervention and hegemonic forces’ Cold War preferences against Italy’s and the region’s strong Left contenders for power. The postwar boundary drawing of domestic polities cannot be reconstructed in theoretically fruitful ways without attention to the world-scale juncture that involved super powerful actors’ blurring of national and international politics through intervention and selective “non-intervention.” Intervention was overt in Greece, where a revolutionary situation prompted the declaration of the Truman Doctrine. In Franco’s Spain, the rising hegemon opted initially for nonintervention, followed by tacit financial support as world-scale polarization widened (LaFeber 2008, p. 134). But from the hegemon’s perspective, Italy (and France) was a more complex case to reorder given the very real possibility of Italy’s communist party entering government through the electoral process. As the hawks within the State Department gained ascendancy over those with milder policies and the US government’s Cold War policies consequently acquired form and resolve, so too did the amount of support—financial, organizational, and propaganda—that it provided to Italy’s DC, giving the latter the confidence to oust the PCI (and the smaller socialist party) from the postwar unity government in 1947, and helping to tip the scales in the DC’s favor at the pivotal 1948 elections. As summarized by Ginsborg: American intervention was breath-taking in its size, its ingenuity and its flagrant contempt for any principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of 14 Costituzione della Repubblica Italiana, Articolo 1. www.senato.it/documenti/repository/istitutzione/ costituzione.pdf Downloaded 12 November, 2009.
Party governments, US hegemony, & a tale of two Tillys’ Weberian state
161
another country. The US administration designated $176 m of ‘Interim Aid’ to Italy in the first three months of 1948. After that, the Marshall Plan entered into full operation. James Dunn, the American ambassador at Rome, made sure that this massive injection of aid did not go unobserved by the Italian general public. […] Whenever a new bridge or school or hospital was constructed with American help, there was the indefatigable ambassador traveling the length of the peninsula to speak in the name of America, the Free World and, by implication, the Christian Democrats. […] And just in case the message was not clear enough, on 20 March 1948 George Marshall warned that all help to Italy would immediately cease in the event of a Communist victory (Ginsborg 1990, p. 115). The US State Department and allied states such as Britain were not the only elements of a fast forming hegemonic coalition of intervention: Cold warriors within the US labor movement, namely, the American Federation of Labor’s “Free Trade Union Committee,” led by Irving Brown and Jay Lovestone, together with some international organizations of labor, led by the International Transport Federation’s (ITF) General Secretary, J. H. Oldenbroek, cooperated with US consular attachés to split the labor movements of Italy and France. They mobilized local contacts to break strikes, and they policed the region through the ITF’s specifically formed Vigilance Committee against Communism in the Mediterranean (Cox 1977; Lewis 2004). The international hegemonic bloc’s backing of preferred domestic political elites helped split Italian and French unitary labor movements—namely, the CGIL and CGT respectively—such as to create one of today’s distinguishing features of southern Europe’s regime of labor: ideologically competing union confederations. The dominant parties in government maintained those highly representative union movements’ exclusion from the polity until major opportunity for change was seized by the unions—at least, in Italy. In Italy, during the 1960s cycle of contention, the ideologically divided union confederations jumped aboard wildcat strikes at the workplaces where, dating back to the Left-excluding 1948 elections, all unions had held little direct workplace mobilizing power. New union engagement with the rank and file during those boundary-busting wildcats served to reestablish and even expand the worker repertoire (Crouch and Pizzorno 1978a, b; Lange et al. 1982; Tarrow 1989). But with small but significant government shifts toward left parties in government, Italy’s protest cycle was also answered by the party-government system, which had admitted the Italian Socialist Party into a coalition government. [T]he scale of labor insurgency forced the center-left government to pass the Statuto dei Lavoratori of 1970, drafted by the Socialist lawyer Giugni, which stands to this day as the most pro-union industrial relations act in Western Europe (Abse 1994, p. 194). The new Workers Statute laid the basis for workers’ institutional categorization in the polity, if not yet its political categorization through stable political exchange processes. Political categorization took more time, because the PCI’s Compromesso Storico failed to produce stable and meaningful results in the parliament. Eventually,
162
A. Gentile
it took not simply greater cooperation between the unions, but the end of the Cold War and the polity-shaking reforms to the party-government system in the early 1990s to render unions’ strategy of political unionism more sustainable results, i.e., enhanced political categorization and a New Competitive Corporatism (Rhodes 2001).
Hegemony and postwar capitalist regime boundary drawing: OECD In postwar Italy and in southern Europe generally, we have seen a pattern of labor decategorization. Behind the phenomenon was a large process that began with the intense period of postwar US-led hegemonic boundary drawing. That process involved international intervention by a fast evolving bloc of powerful governments and international labor organizations aligned with the rising hegemon, the USA. Intervention contributed to the domestic polarization of emerging democratic Italy, France, and Greece, and tipped electoral outcomes toward the more antilabor parties, thereby playing its significant part in the boundary drawing of new postwar national polities that would institutionalize antilabor regimes with varying degrees of democratic citizen rights. In the already existing antilabor, authoritarian regimes of Spain and Portugal, international intervention assisted the government by allowing the regime autonomy of action and boosting it with tacit financial support as world-scale polarization intensified. There, both labor and citizens suffered decategorization. In response to their decategorization, southern European union movements turned to or reinforced their existing political unionism in the hope of establishing the government-level conditions to increase their political and workplace power. National cycles of contention, however, served to shake up the labor-decategorizing regimes (both the neoliberal and the authoritarian) from below, and proved a boon to union workplace and legal institutional power to the extent that union leaderships turned to support those popular uprisings. Over the longer term, however, the success or failure of political unionism to politically categorize labor was contingent on the cabinet incumbency of union movements’ familial parties. Viewed from today, the US-led hegemonic bloc’s postwar intervention in the affairs of southern European states was most dramatic and even brutal, and certainly it has not gone unrecorded by historians and political scientists. But international intervention followed by distinctive outcomes for the reemerging domestic political systems of northern Europe and the Antipodes was also the order of the day. The critical distinction is that, where the process led to the decategorization of labor in the more hegemonically challenging southern Europe (with strong communist and anarchist parties), in northern Europe and the Antipodes it produced or reinforced labor-categorizing regimes, but with new institutions that restricted unions’ mobilizing power at the workplace—statutorily autonomous works councils that limited unions’ power to directly access the workforce, strike laws that restricted striking to bargaining periods, bans on political strikes and often even on solidarity strikes. The workplace power restricting process was most evident in Allied Occupied Germany. Accessing recently released government and private archives, Carolyn Woods Eisenberg (1983, 1996) describes the postwar institutional boundary
Party governments, US hegemony, & a tale of two Tillys’ Weberian state
163
drawing of Germany by the occupying military governments, led by the USA, in conjunction with elements of the AFL and the CIO that had been drawn into the Labor Relations Branch of Military Government. Recalling the militance of works councils during the Weimar Republic, planning within this branch often centered on the question of how to limit potential works council power, and how to reorganize works councils’ relation to the unions. The drawn-out and internally contentious process, together with the hegemon’s support for the Christian Democratic Party and suspicion of the Social Democrats, eventually contributed to the Christian Democratic government’s passing of the 1952 Works Constitution Act on a day the emerging Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (DGB) was to describe as “‘a black day in the development of democracy’ in Germany” (Müller-Jentsch 1995, p. 54). The Works Constitution Act was the US-backed Adenauer government’s and employers’ response to “a politically united union movement that advocated nationalization of basic industries and full codetermination in line with their anticapitalist Munich Program of 1949” (Müller-Jentsch 1995, p. 54). Creating a distinctive “dual system of representation” (Müller-Jentsch and Sperling 1978) it statutorily divided works councils from unions, obliging the former to accept a nostrike clause and to refrain from bargaining activities. Strike powers, though limited, and bargaining rights, were granted to the unions, as were limited codetermination rights; but their direct access to the workplace was impeded by the works councils, limiting not only unions’ power to call effective strikes, but also their membership drives and the construction of democratic linkage between union leadership and workers. Not until the election of Willy Brandt’s Social-Liberal coalition in 1972, the first postwar Social Democrat dominated coalition government, was the Works Constitution Act to be amended, granting unions greater access to the workplace and greater opportunity to build the works councils into the unions’ local, regional, and national structures. With this success behind it, the DGB continued to maintain relations with all future governments in a form of “etatist” parentela, engaged by the fact that it reserved a number of key positions within its organization for members of each of the major parties of the Christian center and left. In sum, much as southern European labor turned to political unionism to create conditions for their recategorization, unions in Germany, northern Europe, and the Antipodes turned to or reinforced their political unionism in their efforts to reverse, ameliorate, or compensate their workplace power impeding losses. A union movement’s political strategy for union re-empowerment involved relations of parentela with labor-related parties and it was generally successful to the extent that those labor-related parties ranked high over the years in cabinet incumbency, though success was tempered where a union confederation’s labor-related party was a Christian democratic party, which typically had a broader field of interest groups to bargain with. In stark contradistinction to the closure of opportunity to labor in the US partygovernment system, the political arena was particularly opportune for all OECD European and Antipodean labor due to the existence of labor-related parties there. In fact, as the American exceptionalism thesis has long maintained, the very existence of labor-related parties categorically separates (neoliberal) USA from the rest (Marks
164
A. Gentile
1989). Consistent with this are US unions’ characteristic reliance on their strong syndicalist power at the workplace (Kimeldorf 1999), on their citizen rights and the category of citizen in the public arena (Gentile and Tarrow 2009), and on social movement unionism as a strategy to revitalization (Turner et al. 2001). But also consistent with this is the USA’s low level of social protection for all workercitizens.
Neoliberal globalization and labor’s struggles for categorical power: a Tillyan alternative to Tilly No. 3? In the 1960s–1970s, most OECD union movements experienced a major wave of rank-and-file revolt, an explosion of worker power whose outcome was heavily determined by the unions’ strategic decisions. To the extent that unions (a) availed themselves of that militancy to strengthen ties with the workplace, and (b) utilized political openings in their party-government systems, unions forged greater categorical power in their respective polities. But in response to that popularly led process came an elite-led counter movement for political neoliberalization, beginning in Britain with the victory of Mrs. Thatcher’s considerably revolutionized Conservative Party, and gaining worldwide momentum with the election of Ronald Reagan to the White House and the appointment of his path breaking administration. Together with the substantial policy failings of the eastern bloc, the Reagan Administration’s “military Keynesianism” brought the Cold War to an end and delivered the world one hegemon. The field was now open to neoconservative elites and international institutions to promote neoliberal globalization, which, translated into domestic politics, meant the institutional and political decategorization of organized labor from neo-corporatist polities, thereby promoting the creation of neoliberal polities in the image of the hegemon’s own, complete with its preference for “liberal” rather than “social” or “social Christian” democracy. As with the immediate postwar period of reconstruction, however, at this critical world-scale juncture the international and domestic arenas interacted. Contrary to the Race to the Bottom thesis, neither the state nor domestic contention, and certainly not political parties and electoral politics were irrelevant to the process of regime change or resistance to it. Neoliberal regime change occurred where there was a prior transformation of conservative party politics toward neoliberal policies and a weakening of parentela linkage between unions and their labor-related parties, i.e., those which transformed into what Katz and Mair (1995) have called the “cartel party,” signaled by a Third Way politics. As Lipset and Marks (2001) have argued, the USA has become “less exceptional.” Noting this tendency, however, some newly decategorized union movements have also deployed their now key citizen rights to survive decategorization as organizations and to pull their respective familial parties back to considering their priorities in subsequent electoral campaigns. Though their successes have thus far been mixed at best, this very option for regaining categorical power as labor rather than remaining interminably locked in the category of citizen distinguishes them from the more endemically citizen-rights-dependent US labor movement. To the
Party governments, US hegemony, & a tale of two Tillys’ Weberian state
165
extent that a union movement’s familial party turns down the Third Way route and ossifies for the long term, and that labor fails to use its new citizen alliances to create new party entrants into the party-government systems, labor in recently neoliberalized states faces the functional equivalent of a labor-partyless capitalist state, complete with the loss of “labor” as a political category and the diminution of social rights for all worker-citizens. This story of the domestic arena of contention and labor’s struggle for categorical power when threatened by neoliberal globalization differs markedly from Tilly No. 3’s, but it does hold Tilly No. 1’s focus on changing polity members, challengers, and power alliances; his acknowledgment of contingency and his attention to the repertoires ordinary people create and deploy rationally to meet threats in particular types of political regimes. What it does beg of a Tillyian when studying the domestic arena, however, is to consider party-governments, the domestic polity alliances that constitute various regimes of capitalism, and the particular repertoires, categories, and powerful allies labor turns to in each capitalist regime of the world. But the story also begs a new, Tillyian look at the power of hegemonic states and their allies to intervene in domestic and international contention and create self-projecting world-scale orders, regimes of capitalism, regions of regimes, and durable inequality. The Weberian state cannot easily get us there. Nor can an orthodox Marxist one, though, on the above evidence, using Tillyian research methods and concepts, the party-governments of the neoliberal variant of capitalism closely resemble the “executive of the bourgeoisie.”
References Abse, T. (1994). Italy: A new agenda. In P. Anderson & P. Camiller (Eds.), Mapping the West European left. London: Verso. Arrighi, G., & Silver, B. J. (1999). Chaos and governance in the modern world system. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Castles, F. G., & Mitchell, D. (1993). Worlds of welfare and families of nations. In F. G. Castles (Ed.), Families of nations: Patterns of public policy in western democracies. Aldershot, UK: Dartmouth Publishing Group. Castles, F. G., & Wildenmann, R. (Eds.). (1986). Visions and realities of party government. Berlin: de Gruyter. Coates, D. (Ed.). (2005). Varieties of capitalism, varieties of approaches. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cox, R.W. (1977). Labor and Hegemony. International Organization, 31(3). Crouch, C., & Pizzorno, A. (Eds.). (1978a). The resurgence of class conflict in Western Europe since 1968 (Vol. I). London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press (National Studies). Crouch, C., & Pizzorno, A. (Eds.). (1978b). The resurgence of class conflict in Western Europe since 1968 (Vol. II). London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press (Comparative Analyses). Dombois, R., & Heseler, H. (Eds.). (2000). Seaports in the context of globalization and privatization. Maritime studies No. 1. Bremen, Germany: Universität Bremen. Eisenberg, C. (1983). Working-class politics and the cold war: American Intervention in the German labor movement, 1945-49. Diplomatic History, 7(4), 283–306. Eisenberg, C. (1996). Drawing the line: The American decision to divide Germany, 1944–1949. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gentile, A. (2010). Historical Varieties of Labor Contention and Hegemony in Transnational Docker Campaigns. Doctoral dissertation submitted to the Johns Hopkins University.
166
A. Gentile
Gentile, A., & Tarrow, S. (2009). Charles Tilly, globalization, and labor’s citizen rights. European Political Science Reivew, 1(3), 465–493. Ginsborg, P. (1990). A history of contemporary Italy: Society and politics 1943-1988. London: Penguin Books. Hall, P. A., & Soskice, D. (Eds.). (2001). Varieties of capitalism: The institutional foundations of comparative advantage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Howell, C. (1999). Unforgiven: British trade unionism in crisis. In A. Martin, G. Ross, L. Baccaro, A. Daley, L. Fraile, C. Howell, R. M. Locke, R. Mahon, & S. J. Silvia (Eds.), The brave new world of European labor: European trade unions at the millennium. New York: Berghahn Books. Huber, E., & Stephens, J. D. (2001). Development and crisis of the welfare state: Parties and policies in global markets. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Katz, R. S. (Ed.). (1987). Party governments: European and American experiences. Berlin: de Gruyter. Katz, R. S., & Mair, P. (1995). Changing models of party organization and party democracy: the emergence of the cartel party. Party Politics, 1(1), 5–28. Kimeldorf, H. (1999). Battling for American labor: Wobblies, craft workers, and the making of the union movement. Berkeley: University of California Press. LaFeber, W. (2008). America, Russia and the cold war 1945–2006. New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing. Lange, P., Ross, G., & Vannicelli, M. (1982). Unions, change, and crisis: French and Italian union strategy and the political economy, 1945-1980. London: George Allen & Unwin. La Palombara, J. (1964). Interest groups in Italian politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lewis, H. (2004). Smoke, Mirrors and Spooks: The International Transport Workers’ Federation Vigilance Committees, 1949-1953 Historical Studies in Industrial Relations. 17. Lipset, S. M., & Marks, G. (2001). It didn’t happen here: Why socialism failed in the United States. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company. Marks, G. (1989). Unions in politics: Britain, Germany, and the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McAdam, D., Tarrow, S., & Tilly, C. (2001). Dynamics of contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Müller-Jentsch, W. (1995). Germany: From collective voice to co-management. In J. Rogers & W. Streeck (Eds.), Works councils: Consultation, representation, and cooperation in industrial relations. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Müller-Jentsch, W., & Sperling, H.-J. (1978). Economic development, labour conflicts and the industrial relations system in West Germany. In C. Crouch & A. Pizzorno (Eds.), The resurgence of class conflict in Western Europe since 1968 (Vol. I). London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press (National Studies). Pontusson, J. (2005). Inequality and prosperity: Social Europe versus Liberal America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Regalia, I., Regini, M., & Reyneri, E. (1978). Labour conflicts and industrial relations in Italy. In C. Colin & P. Alessandro (Eds.), The resurgence of class conflict in Western Europe since 1968 (Vol. I). London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. National Studies. Rhodes, M. (2001). The political economy of social pacts: ‘Competitive Corporatism’ and European welfare state reform. In P. Pierson (Ed.), The new politics of the welfare state. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Salvati, M. (1972). The Impasse of Italian Capitalism. New Left Review, 76 Nov.–Dec. Soskice, D. (1999). Divergent production regimes: Coordinated and uncoordinated market economies in the 1980s and 1990s. In H. Kitschelt, P. Lange, G. Marks, & J. D. Stephens (Eds.), Continuity and change in contemporary capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tarrow, S. (1989). Democracy and disorder: Protest and politics in Italy 1965-1975. Oxford: Clarendon. Tilly, C. (1995). Globalization threatens labor’s rights. International Labor and Working-Class History, 47, 1–23. Traxler, F. (1995). Farewell to labour market associations? Organized versus disorganized decentralization as a map of industrial relations. In C. Crouch & F. Traxler (Eds.), Organized industrial relations in Europe: What future? Aldershot: Avebury. Trinca, H., & Davies, A. (2000). Waterfront: The battle that changed Australia. Milsons Point, NSW, Australia: Doubleday. Turnbull, P., Woolfson, C., & Kelly, J. E. (1992). Dock strike: Conflict and restructuring in Britain’s ports. Aldershot: Avebury. Turner, L., Katz, H. C., & Hurd, R. (Eds.). (2001). Rekindling the movement: Labor’s quest for relevance in the twenty-first century. Ithaca and London: ILR Press.
Party governments, US hegemony, & a tale of two Tillys’ Weberian state
167
Antonina Gentile A former broadcast journalist and community development worker in Australia, Italy, and Palestine, Antonina Gentile completed her PhD in political science at the Johns Hopkins University in 2010. Winner of Australia’s 2001 Freda Bage Award, she has also held fellowships at Cornell and Mannheim University, and guest status at the Hans Böckler Stiftung. Her research interests include transnational labor movements, the hegemonic origins of varieties of capitalism, and anti-mafia movements of the Mediterranean.
SPOTLIGHT: Terrorism Jeff Goodwin
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
Abstract Why would a rebel group decide to attack ordinary, “innocent” people (civilians or noncombatants) in furtherance of its political objectives? Armed movements typically use violence against civilians who (1) directly or indirectly support the state the insurgents are fighting (politically, economically, or militarily), (2) routinely benefit from the actions of that state, and/or (3) have a substantial capacity to influence that state. Attacking such civilians is an indirect way of attacking an enemy state.
Why would an oppositional political group decide to attack ordinary, “innocent” people (civilians or noncombatants) in furtherance of its political objectives? What explains “terrorism” in this sense? When insurgent groups attack civilians, it is important to note, they do not attack just any civilians. In fact, insurgents are also usually interested in winning the active support of civilians, that is, to develop a mass base of supporters. So who are the “bad” civilians whom armed groups attack? In a word, politically or economically “complicitous” civilians. Armed movements typically regard civilians as complicitous insofar as the latter (1) directly or indirectly support the state the insurgents are fighting (politically, militarily, or economically), (2) routinely benefit from the actions of that state, and/ or (3) have a substantial capacity to influence that state. Attacking such civilians is an indirect way to attack an enemy state. Social structures that blur the distinction between an enemy state, including its armed forces, on the one hand, and the citizens of that state, on the other, tend to encourage terrorism, which rests upon the
J. Goodwin (*) Department of Sociology, New York University, 295 Lafayette Street, Room 4115, New York, NY 10012-1106, USA e-mail:
[email protected] M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_11, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
169
170
J. Goodwin
insurgents’ refusal or inability to draw a moral or even conceptual distinction between an enemy state and “its” citizens, or some subset of them. Factors that brighten the distinction between states and citizens (or subjects), on the other hand, discourage terrorism by dissociating ordinary people from enemy states and their policies. Insurgents, for example, generally do not attack civilians who are politically excluded or violently repressed by the state—these are usually potential allies. But why violently attack complicitous civilians? Oppositional terrorism is usually intended to induce such civilians to stop supporting, or to proactively demand changes in, certain government policies, or the government itself. Oppositional terrorism, in other words, mainly aims to apply such intense pressure to complicitous civilians that they will demand that “their” government change or abandon policies the insurgents oppose. Terrorism may also be intended to avenge acts of violence by the state or by complicitous civilians themselves, to provoke a violent overreaction by the state that will ultimately benefit the insurgents, to seize territory from the state, or to undermine efforts at peace or reconciliation between the state and competing oppositional groups. Armed groups that have employed a strategy of terrorism are usually drawn from, and claim to act on behalf of, national or ethnic groups that have suffered extensive and often indiscriminate state repression (think of French Algeria, the West Bank and Gaza, Sri Lanka, Chechnya, or, to some extent, Northern Ireland). In these cases, there also was (or is) a perception by insurgents that civilians “on the other side” (European settlers, Israelis, Sinhalese, Russians, and British, respectively) substantially supported, or at least tolerated, that repression. In fact, the governments that carried out the repression in these cases had or have a substantial measure of democratic legitimacy among the dominant ethnic group. Democratic rights and institutions in general, in fact, are often effective at creating among insurgents the impression that there exists substantial solidarity between citizens and “their” states. To be sure, there have been many situations in which populations without effective democratic rights may become the targets of terrorism, as the recent history of Iraq demonstrates. Insurgents may view those civilians as “complicitous” who collaborate with or support nondemocratic regimes or foreign occupations or who belong to “alien” ethnies or “heretical” religious groups. When extensive and indiscriminate state violence is seen to be supported by civilians, it is hardly surprising that armed movements would tend to view both repressive states and the civilians who seem to stand behind them as legitimate targets of counterviolence, typically justified as self-defense. Nor is it surprising that retribution for state violence would be directed at such civilians as well as the state’s armed forces. And it would also be reasonable under these circumstances for insurgents to conclude that attacking civilians might cause the latter to put substantial pressure on their political leaders to change their ways. Extensive state terrorism, in other words, begets extensive oppositional terrorism when the state has popular support, usually because the dominant ethnic group has significant democratic rights and political influence. Democratic “ethnocracies,” in fact, would appear to be a common breeding ground of—and target for—extensive oppositional terrorism. In more authoritarian or autocratic contexts, by contrast, one generally finds much less terrorism (but not necessarily less violence): Most
SPOTLIGHT: Terrorism
171
ordinary civilians do not support or benefit from the state, or have much capacity to influence it, so insurgents would view them as potential allies, not enemies. In these contexts, insurgents would employ violence against state forces and perhaps the elite sectors of the population who support and benefit from them (although the latter are usually well protected). They would turn to guerrilla warfare, in other words, not terrorism. Another social-structural factor that encourages terrorism is the weakness or absence of a history of political alliance and cooperation between insurgents and their mass base, on the one hand, and complicitous civilians, on the other. Where one finds this particular type of political disconnection, together with mass-supported state violence, it is not uncommon to find among the victims of that violence ideologies and cultural idioms that depict complicitous civilians as inherently cruel, evil, or even inhuman. Of course, such ideologies and idioms themselves encourage terrorism. By contrast, terrorism is discouraged when—more rarely—we find significant political alliances or forms of cooperation between insurgents and dissident complicitous civilians. When an insurgent group and its mass base, that is, have a history of collaborating politically with civilian groups “on the other side,” they are not likely to classify complicitous civilians as such as enemies. To attack such civilians would jeopardize politically valuable alliances and the resources and legitimacy attached thereto. I believe that this last factor is extremely important for understanding why the African National Congress, the leading antiapartheid movement in South Africa, rejected a strategy of terrorism. The ANC eschewed terrorism even though there was very extensive and often indiscriminate state violence against the opponents of the apartheid regime and their supporters. This violence, moreover, was accepted and even applauded by large segments of the white, especially Afrikaner, population. The white population elected the Nationalist Party governments that unleashed the security forces against the apartheid state’s enemies. So why did the ANC adhere to an ideology of “multiracialism” and refuse to view whites as such as enemies? The answer lies, I believe, in the ANC’s long history of collaborating with white South Africans—as well as with Indian and “colored” (mixed race) South Africans—in the antiapartheid struggle. Especially important in this respect was the ANC’s long collaboration with whites in the South African Communist Party. Tellingly, an important, long-time leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC’s armed wing, was Joe Slovo, a white Communist. (Try to imagine an Israeli Jew leading Hamas’s armed wing, or an American Christian directing Al Qaeda’s armed operations!) For the ANC to have indiscriminately attacked South African whites would have soured this strategic relationship, which, among other things, was essential for securing significant aid for the ANC from Western Europe and the Soviet Union. In short, given the long-standing multiracial—including international—support for the antiapartheid movement, a strategy of indiscriminate terrorism against complicitous (white) civilians made little strategic sense. There is much more to be said, of course, about oppositional terrorism—not to mention state and criminal terrorism. But these thoughts point toward the type of state practices and state-society relations that encourage rebels to use deadly violence against certain civilians. Certainly, there is some truth in the saying that terrorism is the “poor man’s air force.” But it would be truer to say that terrorism is
172
J. Goodwin
the heavy artillery of ethnonationalist groups that are oppressed by states supported by other, privileged ethnonationalist groups. Jeff Goodwin is Professor of Sociology at New York University. He is currently finishing a book titled Choosing Terrorism (Russell Sage Foundation). His book No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945–1991, won the Outstanding Book Prize of the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section of the American Sociological Association.
Part III
City-State Relations
SPOTLIGHT: Urban social movements, citizen participation, and trust networks Susan S. Fainstein
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
Abstract Urban social movements, whether on the left or the right of the political spectrum, typically share the aim of grass-roots empowerment and are, in Charles Tilly’s terms, trust networks. Their apogee in the United States and Western Europe occurred during the 1960s and 1970s. Subsequently their appearance has been episodic. So far they have not reversed the trend toward greater economic inequality that is structuring capitalist societies in the present epoch. Nevertheless, they have increased the level of democratic participation in governance, heightened environmental consciousness, and, in many places, produced higher levels of diversity and tolerance in social life.
Urban social movements (USMs) are non-state actors that mediate the relationship between city, state, and civil society. They are, in Charles Tilly’s terminology, trust networks. Usually but not always based in geographically defined communities, their members perceive themselves as engaged in resistance to injustice. Along with movements for feminism, environmentalism, and ethnic recognition, they are often referred to as “new social movements” to distinguish them from class-based initiatives of the past. Although much of the literature on USMs assumes that they are progressive in orientation, some of the most potent have, in fact, been right-wing efforts directed against immigrants and taxation. Whether on the left or the right of the political spectrum, however, they typically share the aim of grassroots empowerment. They are, as Tilly emphasizes when speaking about trust networks, quintessentially bottom-up endeavors.
S. S. Fainstein (*) Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, 48 Quincy St., Cambridge, MA 02138, USA e-mail:
[email protected] M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_12, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
175
176
S.S. Fainstein
The apogee of urban social movements in the United States and Western Europe occurred during the 1960s and 1970s. Subsequently their appearance has been episodic. Predominantly issue-specific, they tend to become co-opted by either state-led participatory mechanisms, common in the United States and the United Kingdom, or party initiatives in continental Europe. In the 1960–1975 period they arose in response to destructive urban renewal projects, racial discrimination, and the bureaucratic authoritarianism evidenced in educational, housing, and welfare programs (Fainstein and Fainstein 1974; Pickvance 1976). Now neoliberalism is the ideological context that shapes their demands, while new processes of state rescaling constitute the political-institutional framework in which they operate (Brenner 1999). According to Chris Pickvance, the popularity of the term “urban social movement” among social scientists derives from its symbolic repudiation of established political parties and the potential for radical transformation embodied in noninstitutionalized urban political action (Pickvance 2003, p. 104). Scholars who study USMs broke from the ecological approach characterizing traditional urban sociology and the consensus orientation of early analyses of urban politics. Analysts sympathetic to USMs as transformative agents were usually among the radical wings of their disciplines, viewed cities as sites of conflict, and considered that only through conflict could beneficial change be achieved (Purcell 2008; Mouffe 2000; Sennett 1970). Probably the most influential scholarly work dealing with USMs is Manuel Castells’s The City and the Grassroots (1983). In this study, Castells proposes a transhistorical, cross-cultural theory of social change achieved by USMs mobilized around the three goals of collective consumption, cultural identity, and political selfmanagement (Fainstein and Hirst 1995, p. 185). His mode of analysis leads him to locate the success of movements in their strategies rather than in the methods of their opponents. Thus, his approach strongly differs from that argued by Charles Tilly, who, as noted by Hanagan and Tilly in this volume, stresses the importance of historical context. If, as Tilly contends, past social relations constrain both present relations and their products, then the effectiveness of social movements depends only partly on their own capabilities. Rather they exist in a dialectical relationship to the forces that they are combating and the dominant discourses of their times. Because local governments have responded to earlier pressure for community participation, they are susceptible to co-optation into partnership arrangements. As indicated above, the currently dominant discourse is neoliberalism, within which the market is idealized as the most efficient allocator of resources. For the market to work, state action that distorts prices and interferes with rewards to investors must be minimized. Within metropolitan areas, functions once considered the prerogative of elected officials become the activities of public–private partnerships and quasiautonomous authorities. This shift in the institutional locus of resource allocation privatizes, insulates, and impersonalizes distributional decisions, causing the targets of movement activities to become obscure (Mayer 1994; Marcuse this volume). Manuel Castells in The Urban Question (1977) argued that cities were the sites of collective consumption, and hence, USMs were directed at the governmental organizations dispensing consumption resources.1 In The City and the Grassroots 1
He saw movements oriented toward collective consumption as constituting a shift from class-based movements that attacked the owners of the means for production.
SPOTLIGHT: Urban social movements, citizen participation, and trust networks
177
he enlarged the scope of their intentions to include the assertion of identity and the changing of consciousness. Now we see that they have become increasingly hybrid in their aims. They often name a vaguely defined and elusive globalization rather than any particular entity as the cause of injustice, and may transcend previous splits between community and labor organizing, on the one hand (Katznelson 1981), and local versus the national levels on the other (Pendras 2002). Thus previous schisms begin to dissolve, and we see activism that combines struggles around consumption combined with anti-employer moves, as in the efforts Sites (2007) describes to block the construction of Wal-Mart stores in Chicago, community-based living wage movements in a number of American cities (Soja 2010), pro-immigrant organizing within European cities (Nicholls 2008), and the mounting of social forums first in Brazil, later in many other countries (Marcuse 2005; Novy and Mayer 2009). This changing character of USMs and their variation can only be understood through the lens of Tilly’s historicism, while their continued rootedness in place arises from the development of trust based on proximity. At the same time, neither history nor movement cohesiveness in itself allows us to predict with any precision the likelihood of whether or not a movement will succeed in its objectives. The most important variables include the organizational and financial resources available to participants and the extent to which opposition is unified in countering their aims. Ultimately success is measured by the capture of authoritative positions—the seizure of the state or party apparatus or at least part of it. When this occurs—as in participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre or the participation of European green parties in red-green coalition governments—movements may indeed achieve some amount of structural transformation, even while formalizing their identities and discarding movement tactics. Then the question arises as to whether their victories can endure. We can identify the lasting effects of nineteenth-century urban progressivism in American cities, but also the fading of working-class control by Europe’s red municipal governments. Contemporary theorists, including Anthony Giddens (1990), David Harvey (1990), and Manuel Castells, have seen in social movements rather than political parties the principal agents of deliberate social change. USMs, however, are only one of the forces that are reconstructing the social world. So far, except in a very few places where left parties have gained control of South American governments, the transformations produced by popular movements have not reversed the trend toward greater economic inequality that is structuring capitalist societies. Nevertheless, they have increased the level of democratic participation in governance, heightened environmental consciousness, and, in many places, produced higher levels of diversity and tolerance in social life. They can thus be considered highly influential even while failing to transform the political economy.
References Brenner, N. (1999). Globalization as reterritorialization: The re-scaling of urban governance in the European Union. Urban Studies, 36(3), 431–451. Castells, M. (1983). The city and the grassroots. London: Edward Arnold. Fainstein, S. S., & Fainstein, N. I. (1974). Urban political movements. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
178
S.S. Fainstein
Fainstein, S. S., & Hirst, C. (1995). Urban social movements. In D. Judge, G. Stoker, & H. Wolman (Eds.), Theories of urban politics (pp. 181–204). London: Sage. Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Harvey, D. (1990). The condition of post-modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Katznelson, I. (1981). City trenches. New York: Pantheon. Lowndes, V. (2001). Rescuing Aunt Sally: Taking institutional theory seriously in urban politics. Urban Studies, 38(11), 1953–1971. Marcuse, P. (2005). Are social forums the future of social movements? International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29(2), 417–424. Mayer, M. (1994). Post-Fordist city politics. In A. Amin (Ed.), Post-Fordism: A reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Mouffe, C. (2000). The democratic paradox. London: Verso. Novy, J., & Mayer, M. (2009). As “just” as it gets? The European city in the “just city” discourse. In P. Marcuse, J. Connolly, J. Novy, I. Olivo, C. Potter, & J. Steil (Eds.), Searching for the just city (pp. 103–119). London: Routledge. Pendras, M. (2002). From local consciousness to global change: Asserting power at the local scale. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 26(4), 823–833. Pickvance, C. (Ed.). (1976). Urban sociology. London: Tavistock. Pickvance, C. (2003). From urban social movements to urban movements: A review and introduction to a symposium on urban movements. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27(1), 102–109. Purcell, M. (2008). Recapturing democracy. New York: Routledge. Sennett, R. (1970). The uses of disorder. New York: Knopf. Soja, E. W. (2010). Seeking spatial justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Susan S. Fainstein is a professor in the urban planning program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She previously taught at Columbia and Rutgers Universities. Her teaching and research have focused on comparative urban public policy, planning theory, and urban redevelopment. Her most recent book is The Just City (Cornell University Press, 2010).
From city club to nation state: business networks in American political development Elisabeth S. Clemens
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Abstract Although cities were given no role in the constitutional order of the United States, the new nation posed the same potential threats to the accumulation of capital and wealth as European monarchs posed to long-powerful urban centers. In mobilizing for self-protection and advancement, American business developed new practices and discourses of citizenship that sustained a central role for the community as the locus of social provision. The strategy combined opportunityhoarding through restricted membership in civic groups and obligation-hoarding through the alignment of diverse networks of voluntarism with this civic core. The linkage of business interests to this hybrid charitable-civic configuration constituted a source of resistance to nationalizing tendencies driven by demands for social protection. This alternative model of social provision and civic organization sustained a distinctive pattern of political membership and state development. By fiercely defending the capacity of privately governed civic networks to provide substantial social support, this history of business influence through community organizations lives on in the partial and fragmented character of the American welfare state. In theories of the state, cities figure in at least three distinct ways: as sites of capital accumulation, as seats of government, and as distinctively civic polities central to classical political theory with their oft-cited claim that “Stadtluft macht frei.” Where all three coincide, cities have provided a stage for political contests over how and when capital will be harnessed to state-making and what liberties will be secured for citizens. Yet these three elements do not necessarily co-exist: economic power may be rooted in agriculture or extraction, government may be located in ceremonial cities, and urban residents may lack the standing of citizens. As Charles Tilly argued in Coercion, Capital and European States, A.D. 990–1992, different configurations of these elements have produced distinctive forms of state. E. S. Clemens (*) Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail:
[email protected] M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_13, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
179
180
E.S. Clemens
According to Tilly, “cities shape the destinies of states chiefly by serving as containers and distribution points for capital” (Tilly 1992). To the extent that cities succeed in the competition to become prominent nodes in networks of trade and investment and to the extent that rulers are able to gain access to that capital as a resource for state-building, urban growth will strongly mark the developmental trajectories of the modern nation state. Where cities are able to resist the claims of would-be rulers on their accumulated capital, different political formations predominate. From the perspective of capitalists and the broader category of businessmen, however, towns and cities are much more than simple containers for capital. They are also locales of social interaction, economic exchange and competition, and, potentially, political mobilization. Following Tilly’s emphasis on configurations of factors, the forms of business organization within cities may influence the shifting organization of political power within nations. In the case of the United States, this relation between organized capital and the configurations of political power poses an interesting puzzle. While American cities were unquestionably key sites for capital accumulation, they were multiply handicapped as sites for the mobilization of political power. The constitutional framework—adopted when cities such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia barely counted as urban in contemporary terms1—recognized only the federal government and the states. So whereas the growth of large cities preceded the formation of modern states in much of Europe, the sequence was reversed in the United States.2 Cities developed as major centers of capital accumulation within an institutional framework that provided few footholds for the political role of economic enterprise. While many of the founders were intent on protecting the rights of property, their concern was not the concentrated property of urban commerce and industry. This lack of concern for urban capital was not a matter of simple oversight. Political choices deliberately blocked the possibilities of developing political leverage from the spatial concentration of investment and capital accumulation. State constitutions often severely limited the autonomy of cities, fueling long struggles over municipal home rule. Symbolically, the new nation’s capital was removed from the prominent cities of New York and Philadelphia to a newly created (and, to this day, politically disempowered) place, the District of Columbia. The first major policies directly linking cities to the national government were adopted only in the 1960s and, even then, programs such as the Model Cities circumvented municipal government to establish direct ties to Community Action Agencies and other nonprofit organizations. As a consequence, and not surprisingly, many of the most important accounts of the development of the American state have attended to cities only as locations for important events.
Using the threshold of 2,500 residents, the United States could boast 24 “urban places” as of 1790. Only five topped 10,000, led by New York City at 33,000. At this time, the population of Paris had exceeded half a million while that of London was approaching one million. 2 Tilly (1990: 61) uses a sequence argument to explain how it was possible for a powerful English state to emerge despite the existence of London, specifically that London became a trading power after the consolidation of the monarchy and parliament. 1
From city club to nation state: business networks in American political development
181
American cities were not handicapped solely by the lack of a place within the national political framework. They also represented a challenge of a new sort. As Harvey Warren Zorbaugh, a pioneering urban sociologist, explained: Our political system is founded upon the conviction that people who live in the same locality have common interests, and that they can therefore be relied upon to act together for their common welfare. This assumption, as it turns out, is not valid for large cities. The difficulty of maintaining in the city the intimate contacts which in the small town insured the existence of a common purpose and made concerted action possible is certainly very great. Particularly is this true of those parts of the city where people live in hotels or lodging houses, where few people own their homes and most people are transient dwellers. Under such circumstances, all the traditional forms of local government fail or break down altogether (Zorbaugh [1929] 1976, p. xix). Local government posed significant challenges, but the requirements of defending urban resources from state and federal governments were greater still. A solution was urgently needed as capital itself took on increasingly national and transnational scale, further threatening the capacity of local industry and commerce to control their own destinies.3 So how did American business, concentrated in cities, become a power within an institutional framework that hobbled the influence of the locales within which it often developed? There are two parts to the answer, one of which has already been well told. The familiar account traces the process of class formation among the privileged in a society marked by great mobility and an absence of an established aristocracy and status order. As local businessmen confronted a host of challenges in the rapidly industrializing nineteenth century, they engaged in collaboration as well as competition. Sometimes this collective work involved creating the infrastructure for their own activities, founding mercantile exchanges, and promoting the development of transportation. Recent contributions to economic sociology and business history have documented how capitalists organized themselves as a class through new economic arrangements such as stock markets and investment pools as well as social clubs and city-level networks (Roy 1997; Sklar 1988). The imagined communities of late nineteenth-century businessmen were decidedly municipal, as were many of the causes which mobilized progressive reformers. These organizations promoted ties among members and allowed for mobilization to contain or suppress threats from other urban residents, most notably dissatisfied workers (Isaac 2002). Capitalists and entrepreneurs often coordinated their efforts to control both the terms of trade and the locations within which they operated. Just as workers, in the classic Marxist analysis, had to undergo a transition from being a class in itself— defined by a common position in relation to production—to a class for itself, so too “business” had to be constituted as a meaningful identity and basis for collective action. In an era when the economic fate of municipalities could be determined by
3
For an extended discussion of the centrality of survival and insulation, as opposed to profit maximization, in economic sociology, see Fligstein (2001).
182
E.S. Clemens
the decision to lay this track rather than that one, to make a product rather than to import it from elsewhere, this capacity for collective control of opportunities could determine the ascent or decline of commercial communities. In many cities, the path to a self-conscious “business class” began with industryspecific efforts but then moved through a set of cultural and civic societies before giving rise to recognizable institutions of a dominant and cohesive city leadership, embodied in the peak commercial clubs. In a rich comparison of business organization in Cincinnati and San Francisco, Jeffrey Haydu demonstrates that business class formation took significantly different forms (Haydu 2008). In Cincinnati, we find the expected pattern with elite social organization reinforcing the categorical boundary between the elite and others, between business owners and workers. This set up a local politics of exclusion and conflict. In San Francisco, however, a different set of economic and political pressures led to sustained and often highly cooperative engagement between the leaders of business and labor. In this case, a great deal of status-defining activity still went on in the cities’ private clubs and cultural institutions, but that did not necessarily translate into a starkly oppositional politics. Many of these activities exemplify what Tilly characterized as opportunity hoarding, “which operates when members of a categorically bounded network acquire access to a resource that is valuable, renewable, subject to monopoly, supportive of network activities, and enhanced by the network’s modus operandi” (Tilly 1998). Social formations such as clubs, clans, and guilds exemplify this Weberian principle of social closure. The principle is embodied in the by-laws of a new kind of businessmen’s club for the middling orders, Rotary. Established by a lonely Chicago lawyer in 1905, Rotary brought together single members from a wide range of occupations and required members to patronize one another’s businesses. Each member, effectively, was to monopolize the others’ demand for services in a particular line of work in the hope that this would strengthen the position of all.4 No doubt a similar sentiment could be found within the more elite businessmen’s clubs even if these provisions were not explicitly included in the by-laws. Given the considerable advantages that could flow from membership in such a network-generating club, the question of who would be allowed to join took on great importance. In the upper reaches of the social order, the result was a nesting of economic class within status group. New institutions and social technologies—the elite club, the Social Register, the selective private school—developed to certify membership and to purge it of at least some commercial residue (Beisel 1997). As G. William Domhoff has argued, these institutions served as a matrix for the development of an elite business network that extended beyond the limits of any 4 Charles, Service Clubs, p. 9. This same principle of patronizing the businesses of fellow members was well-established in the world of American voluntary associations, ranging from the Grange to the Ku Klux Klan, and was perpetuated in service clubs such as Rotary, Kiwanis, and the Lions. As Lloyd Warner observed (1949, p. 121), “Friendliness and informality are the keynotes, yet friendship is not an end in itself, but a device for giving the members a sense of community and an awareness of the common interests and common problems they face. The activities emphasize the need for cooperation and advancement in the business world and charge the members with their collective responsibility, creating a sense of group solidarity among the businessmen of the community.”
From city club to nation state: business networks in American political development
183
given city (Domhoff 1967). But to the extent that the standing of any given individual also turned on the prominence of their locale, this configuration coupled group status to the promotion of particular cities. Thus far, the analysis of social closure complements Tilly’s understanding of cities as “containers for capital” that determine the capacity of capitalists themselves to protect their accumulated resources from appropriation by an increasingly powerful national state. But at a time when the ability of local elites to retain control over that capital no longer depended substantially on raising civic militias5 but on the mobilization of a democratic polity, the challenges for local business elites shifted. In a polity in which power is held by democratically-elected representatives, the formation of a shared identity and durable advantages for businessmen could not guarantee their success within popular elections (however imperfect or corrupt), local governance, and public opinion. The puzzle here is that a process of social closure, namely the formation of a self-recognized social or business elite, coincided with the elaboration of claims by members of this exclusive group to represent a broader community that did not necessarily share in the same economic and status benefits. In a polity that was periodically swept by waves of populism, businessmen had much to gain from securing the loyalty of at least the “middling classes” to a unifying civic identity as opposed to the polarization of class-based politics (Johnston 2003). How did American businessmen establish themselves as both a locally advantaged class and as leading citizens?6 The answer—and the second, less familiar, part of the explanation—lies in what might be termed “obligation hoarding.” Local elites were not simply competing against local non-elites for control of political power and access to commercial transactions. Many businessmen also sought civic influence. To this end, closure alone was not sufficient. It was also necessary to cultivate loyalty, trust, respect, and gratitude among those outside the self-constituted business class. In this effort, local business faced substantial competition from others who sought to harness the “culture of obligation” to other projects and different visions of political membership (Capozzola 2008, p. 6). The stakes were significant as inhabitants might volunteer in a national war rather than continue to work in local industry. The citizens of Cincinnati or Cleveland might be moved by foreign wars and earthquakes, or the ever-present need to convert the heathen, and send their small contributions overseas rather than to the circuits of local charity that supported—among others—the widows and orphans and elderly parents of the local workforce. Whereas the burghers of early modern Europe mobilized militias and mercenaries to defend their independence from centralizing states, their descendants in the burgeoning cities of the United States sought to nurture and retain the civic and political loyalties of their co-residents.
But see Isaac, “To Counter ‘The Very Devil’ and More.” Tilly argues that “at a scale larger than a single organization completely bounded categories are rare and difficult to maintain, that most categorical inequality relies on establishment of a partial frontier and defined social relations across that frontier,” Tilly, Durable Inequality, p. 7. So the puzzle is how the identities that stabilize the partially closed network articulate with those used to mobilize cross-frontier relationships. 5 6
184
E.S. Clemens
From social closure to good citizenship To this end, business organizations increasingly adopted a language—and practice— of service that provided a counter-balance to the resentments fueled by social exclusivity. Although strategies of social closure could bring significant economic advantage, they generated resentment from those who were excluded. Even within networks of mutual advantage, there was often a discomfort that signaled the illegitimacy of this combination of the forms of civic association and self-interest narrowly construed. Rotary, which began with a self-conscious strategy of selfinterested social closure, soon embraced an ideology of “service” to the broader community.7 This shift was paralleled in more elite civic circles. As one of Zorbaugh’s informants on Chicago’s Gold Coast explained, “Since the [first world] war, playing the social game is not so terribly important as it was before. Everyone still wants to be ‘in,’ of course, but many are getting off into something else, too. It’s not the thing to do just to be a social butterfly any more. And many social leaders are really busy women; nor is it just a matter of teas. Social recognition is increasingly secured through political, civic, and philanthropic work.”8 This call for service represented an important shift from the initial use of social closure to sustain a new identity as a business class. A doubling or nesting was required to embed exclusive social organization within a broader identity premised on membership in a community defined by common location.9 Social closure of status groups (whether elite members of the city club or the solid business class of Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions) had to be articulated with organization of the entire community, such that businessmen could be seen as representing or acting in the interests of all. This mattered not only for the interests of business, narrowly construed, but also for the economic fate of the city given that the well-being of Cleveland was indeed determined by its ability to compete with Chicago or St. Louis. Materials for constructing this bridge between class-based membership and civic leadership were provided by a series of organizational inventions of the late nineteenth century. Of course the idea that the better-off had some obligation to help those in need was far from new. Rooted in both Christian doctrine and a sense of the traditional status order, the nineteenth century offered many examples of efforts to discover new and more effective ways of lifting up the poor (Boyer 1978). Endowments, friendly visiting, charity organization societies, and philanthropic foundations were among the many new forms of civic organization and activity found in most cities of the time. While some of these efforts were geared to national and international efforts—notably the spread of Christianity (Young 2006)—many were firmly located in specific communities of place, faith, and ethnicity (Beito 2000). All depended, in some way, on gifts of time and money (Zelizer 1997).
7
Charles, Service Clubs. Zorbaugh ([1929] 1976, p. 61). Participation in service-oriented civic organizations could also serve as a vehicle for the displacement of older elites by an ascendant upper middle class (Davis et al. 1941). 9 As many of the classic community studies noted, the old elites—W. Lloyd Warner’s “upper uppers”— did not usually engage in this sort of activity. 8
From city club to nation state: business networks in American political development
185
Gifts and the practice of charity provided a method for defining relationships that crossed the “partial frontier” of social closure and class identity.10 But this method was fraught with difficulties, not least the extent to which charity was understood as potentially demeaning to the recipient. In the nineteenth century, paupers were disenfranchised and commentators feared the capacity of well-intentioned gifts to inflict moral damage on the recipient.11 The means of averting this danger was personal contact between donor and recipient, a relationship of individual engagement—or, in the language of the day, “friendly visiting”—that would allow for careful judgment of the aid appropriate to the need. This also limited the utility of charity as a social practice that could bridge the frontiers of status groups. If donors needed to exercise individual judgment, it was difficult to see how charitable practice could be expanded to encompass even a single community much less the nation as a whole. The solicitation of gifts took a decisive turn in the last decades of the nineteenth century with a trio of social inventions that fundamentally altered how charity and gifts were embedded in the overlapping networks of America’s cities. First, reformers worked to bring all the diverse efforts at social relief into a single, coordinated system of registration: the Charity Organization Society. Anyone in need would be required to register at a central bureau that would then assign that case to a particular charitable agency. Intended to prevent double-dipping, fraud and inefficiency, this new arrangement also broke the direct relationship between donor and beneficiary. Charitable gifts still crossed social frontiers, but their path was now mediated by proto-professional charity workers. The second key invention was “the campaign model,” developed by a small cadre of men raising funds for the Young Men’s Christian Association.12 The key attributes of the model are familiar: a preestablished goal, a large initial gift, a clock or thermometer to track progress toward the goal, and intensive solicitation based on existing networks of church, work, club or voluntary association to meet the goal by an already announced deadline. This proved to be an enormously successful model and one that was easily replicated. Soon all sorts of groups were engaged in fund-raising campaigns and the rising number of requests to give was transformed into an experience of harassment and resentment on the part of those who were asked. The response to this sour mood forged the third key link between the world of civic responsibility and the self-organization of business within communities. Just as wouldbe beneficiaries were now organized through a single point of registration, so too donors might be “immunized” from all but a single annual request. This model of “financial federation” promised to concentrate all those individual charitable campaigns into one single drive. This solution, however, raised new puzzles. Which charitable organizations would be designated as beneficiaries of this consolidated fund-raising? To answer this question, it was necessary not only to judge the honesty and competence of charitable groups, but also to define a “community interest” that would be legitimately financed by a single annual drive. Support of religious activities, it was clear, should remain an
10
Tilly, Durable Inequality, p. 7. Elisabeth Clemens, “Nationalizing Reciprocity: Alignments of Charity and Citizenship in American Governance,” under review. 12 Cutlip. Fund raising, p. 26. Pierce (1938). 11
186
E.S. Clemens
individual decision. Other established groups13—notably national groups such as the American Red Cross—refused to subordinate themselves to community control. But even with these exclusions, the distinction between particular good causes and the community interest remained unclear. At this juncture, business leaders extended control over the organized networks of charitable giving and positioned themselves as pillars of the community. Because businessmen were well-represented among those who were asked to give, they had already faced the question of which causes were legitimate and which would generate “good will” for their enterprises. The intensity of these solicitations had led some organizations, notably the local Chambers of Commerce, to establish “charities endorsement committees” that vetted potential recipients. Not surprisingly, these committees were obvious candidates to perform the same role for the new consolidated fund-raising campaigns that would become known as “Community Chests.” Perhaps more importantly, their control of the certification of charities as legitimate gave them leverage to impose a significant reorganization of fund-raising. Rather than each separate organization cultivating its own network of donors, those charities approved by the endorsement committee would be integrated into a single annual effort in the name of the community as a whole. Typically, only a portion of a city’s charities were included in the federated drive, notably in areas such as health, family welfare, recreation, and character building that “reflected both the conservative interests of the business community and that appealed to the general population” (Barman 2006, p. 23). At the same time, the category of organizations receiving funds through the Community Chest steadily expanded, as the goal of giving came to encompass “social welfare” as well as charity. This fundamentally altered the way in which the networks of obligation within communities linked donors and beneficiaries: “Formerly, those interested in social work were confined to two classes—the wealthy who supported the agencies and the ‘poor’ whom the agencies supported or at least helped. The Chest movement has tended to lessen the gap between these two extremes by deepening the top layer of subscribers, and also by thickening the lower level of beneficiaries so that now only the thinnest partition divides the two.”14 In the place of the ties of gratitude and obligation cultivated between elite donors and individual organizations and their clientele, networks of giving and reciprocity increasingly mapped onto a specifically civic culture and identity. As The Survey observed, “the way people speak the name of a thing often betrays their conception of the thing itself. For instance, some say community chest, and we catch their thought in terms of dollars; others say community chest and thus reveal their sense of fellowship. . . . In Cincinnati the accent is ever on community—community of responsibility, community of effort, community of life.”15
13 These included religious groups, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association, that were understood as civic rather than denominational. 14 “Community Chest Corollaries,” The Survey (June 15, 1925), p. 344. With this expansion, community chests partially transformed from vehicles for the provision of those in need to a means of the selfprovisioning of the middle class. As one commentator noted, “Many large gifts in practically every chest are predicated pretty directly upon the inclusion of the Y.M.C.A., the Y.W.C.A., and the Boy Scouts in the campaign, to say nothing of health agencies and hospitals” (Borst 1930). 15 “Ten Years of Federation in Cincinnati,” The Survey (February 15, 1925), p. 591.
From city club to nation state: business networks in American political development
187
Contributions to All Community Chests Studied, 1920-1929 (Source: Cutlip, 1965, p. 323) Contributions (millions)
70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1920
1923 Total ($m)
1926
1929
Non-Corporate ($m)
Fig. 1 Contributions to all community chests studied, 1920–1929 (Source: Cutlip 1965, p. 323)
By the late 1920s, business elites in many cities had gained critical leverage over civic organizations. As many of the separate fund-raising campaigns were consolidated into annual drives for the Community Chest, business organizations gained still greater centrality within the networks of giving and receiving (Fig. 1). Because the Chambers of Commerce adjudicated which agencies and services were in the community interest, businessmen also gained influence over veteran philanthropists and charity workers in the organization of community services. For example, charities were expected to conform to businessmen’s understandings of what constituted a well-run organization. The requirements of the National Investigation Bureau, established to evaluate charities during the First World War, exemplify both normative and coercive isomorphism.16 Their minimum requirements for certification were: 1. An active Board of Directors (both American and foreign for foreign organizations) of at least five unpaid responsible people holding meetings at least quarterly. 2. A necessary purpose with no unnecessary duplication of the work of another efficiently managed organization. To be determined after investigation by the Bureau. 3. Reasonable efficiency in conduct of work, management of institutions, etc. and reasonable adequacy of equipment for such work, both material and personal. To be determined after investigation by the Bureau. 4. No solicitors on commission or other commission methods of raising money. No street soliciting or selling of buttons, tags, etc. except during drives. 5. Non-use of “remit or return” method of raising money.17
16
DiMaggio and Powell 1983. Contemporary discussions of the potential for member agencies to be dominated by the Community Chest suggest that this was a live concern (Bookman 1932). 17 This method involved sending a gift—typically a token such as a pencil—to a potential donor with the request to return the item or to make a contribution.
188
E.S. Clemens
6. No entertainments the expenses of which exceed 30 per cent of the gross proceeds. 7. Complete audited accounts, both American and foreign, prepared by a Certified Public Accountant or the foreign equivalent, showing receipts and disbursements classified and itemized in detail for a six or twelve month period. . . . 8. Itemized and classified budget estimate for succeeding or current six or twelvemonth period (Cutlip 1965, p. 143). These efforts also provided an access point for national corporations and chains to demonstrate that they were good citizens of each individual community, despite their far-off corporate headquarters. Chain stores were advised to follow the practice of “setting aside and maintaining a definite budget for civic and charitable work of recognized merit” and that “local employees be given the widest opportunities and encouragement for active personal participation in all recognized community activities, to the end that they will merit recognition as good citizens as well as good merchants” (Russell et al. 1931). Taken together, these developments contributed to the consolidation of a distinctive and durable model of “localized” good citizenship, one that combined the performance of civic virtue with a method for urban social control (Barman 2006, p. 19). The Community Chest “made giving less an act of personal charity than a form of community citizenship, almost as essential as the payment of taxes.”18 But unlike taxes, control over the expenditure of these funds lay in the hands of private committees, often dominated by members of the business elite rather than of the social workers and reformers who often figure prominently in histories of social welfare. Beyond the controlling committees themselves, this configuration of obligation diffused broadly into community networks and practices. As one ethnography of a small southern city observed: “In their organizational activity there is a moral note. It is one’s ‘duty’ as a member of the community to function actively in the Rotary Club, the Women’s Club, the Parent-Teacher Association, or in some association concerned with ‘bettering’ present conditions” (Davis et al. 1941, p. 78). Although criticism persisted, from the 1910s through the 1940s, civic charity was established as a script for the enactment of good citizenship.
Urban social control and trajectories of state development Thus far, much of this account can be subsumed within a standard understanding of urban social control. Faced with the potential for disorder and disruption by aggrieved employees and the poor, property owners organized to provide a modest measure of relief as well as to cultivate norms of civic loyalty. These efforts complemented commitments to capital accumulation, which presumably would advantage urban elites in their ongoing competitions with other claimants to political power and control of resources. As circuits of charitable giving were linked to a centrally-organized business network, the character of both was transformed and new grievances were generated. 18
Robert Bremner 1960, p. 141.
From city club to nation state: business networks in American political development
189
Business, obviously, gained support for its claim to serve the community interest. Charitable efforts also benefited, inasmuch as the addition of new fund-raising techniques generated unprecedented levels of donation. But this reordering threatened the understanding of charity as voluntary, as a gift freely given. As many commentators observed, the process of fund-raising could be coercive. Solicitors were said to have lists of the amounts expected from each local business or individual (Todd 1932). The intensified fund-raising within institutional settings and workplaces transplanted the “voluntary gift” into a domain of authority, increasing “the number of the comparatively poor from whom money is obtained. . . . Raising money in the schools is forbidden in Boston except for the Red Cross. It should be absolutely forbidden everywhere, for it means a hold-up.” At a basic level, this undermined the social logic of using charity to generate moral obligation to community: “the element of free choice which is the essence of giving is excluded.” Nor was the claim of businessmen to represent the community uncontested. Critics rejected efforts to characterize this private support of social work as local democracy in action, arguing that “plutocracy” would be a more apt description: The community chest resembles democracy in that under it the people pay a tax. But there is taxation under all forms of government. Democracy consists in the people’s control of the expenditure, directly or through their representatives. Control by businessmen and representatives of existing social agencies is something different. Taxation without representation best describes it.19 Even before industrial unemployment and declining agricultural prices became what we now know as the Great Depression, these arrangements were under strain. The very gains in the efficiency of fund-raising that were the defining advantage of federated fund-raising undercut the aura of voluntarism. Giving came to be experienced as something very close to taxation. In addition, as more employees were drawn into these webs of contribution and relief, they understood this arrangement as something like the forms of mutual-benefit insurance that had been an important feature of urban life through much of the nineteenth century (although they were in the process of being steadily displaced by commercial insurance in the twentieth). And if community chest arrangements involved something like taxation and something like social insurance, the question was repeatedly raised: Why should this system be under the non-democratic control of business leaders in the community? Moved by a different set of concerns, many professional social workers joined the growing critical conversation. Business leaders, it turned out, had a strong preference for spending on relief when needed, even at the expense of the family-based casework that defined social work as a profession. As economic conditions deteriorated in the late 1920s, well-established agencies that had long histories prior to the founding of Community Chests might be handed a budget that was contingent on cutting their own salaries as well as the proportion of resources directed to case 19
Lee (1928); see also Kelso (1932). Not surprisingly, a part of the backlash involved a call for—and in some places a turn to—new public agencies to control relief. “What Happened in Columbus,” The Survey (May 15, 1926), pp. 261–263. In other cities, including Cincinnati, the community chests had “refused to organize the factories and workshops of our city for solicitation,” preferring to solicit house-to-house until the development of a system of industrial solicitation that eliminated undue pressure (Bookman 1932).
190
E.S. Clemens
work. In some quarters, social workers began to argue that relief should be recognized as a responsibility of public agencies—fully funded by taxes—while voluntary fund-raising should be reserved for support of the kinds of intervention that were distinctly the domain of private social work agencies. Such grievances would help to fuel struggles for control over the harnessing of charity to citizenship. These rumbles of criticism notwithstanding, the arrangements linking chambers of commerce to organized charity provided at least partial protection of accumulated capital and business income from the threats of increased taxation and intensified reform. To the extent that leading businessmen within communities were able to make the case that these partially private, civic arrangements promoted the wellbeing of all, pressures for explicitly public responses to social problems could be deflected. But such deflection became more difficult as these arrangements themselves generated greater resistance.
The contest for obligation Christopher Capozolla has characterized turn-of-the-century America as a “culture of obligation” (Capozzola 2008). But obligation to what or to whom? A multitude of answers might be given to this question: to family, to church, to ethnic or fraternal society, to community, to country. Consequently, a part of the organizational transformation that played out over the first decades of the century involved efforts to capture and consolidate these loyalties in support of particular interests, identities, or imagined communities.20 New organizational technologies such as the Community Chest had allowed business to stake a claim for leadership of the broader civic landscape within their communities. This model of citizenship was local in scale and civic in character. But this accomplishment in itself did not guarantee that businessmen would be the only ones seeking to leverage the powerful bonds of reciprocity and obligation. Although the national government rarely declared open war on local networks of obligation, nationalizing efforts were often intended to capture the mobilization of sentiment within cities and the consequent control of resources. The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake provided a vivid example of this dynamic. The immediate response to the disaster showed American voluntarism in its finest form. In the East Bay, residents of Berkeley and Oakland took in refugees and donated to relief centers. Within the partly ruined city itself, survivors organized camps and soup kitchens in Golden Gate Park. Citizens and the military in Los Angeles took the initiative, dispatching shiploads of troops and supplies to the north within far less time than it took to federal government to relieve New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. And, once the immediate response was in place, a citizens’ committee was organized to receive and coordinate the relief funds that all expected to flow in from the rest of the nation, just as they had done in the wake of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and the Galveston Hurricane. Urban networks and identities were to be the key node in this system of relief and rebuilding. Floyd Hunter’s classic community study, (1953) identifies “obligation” as the currency that makes the municipal bureaucracy function.
20
From city club to nation state: business networks in American political development
191
President Theodore Roosevelt, however, had a different idea. He dispatched a representative of the American Red Cross, at the time a small and demoralized organization in the wake of the ouster of Clara Barton 4 years earlier. In the words of their official historian: The President’s proclamation created consternation in San Francisco. There had been promptly set up in that city a Committee of Fifty to meet the emergency, and the proposal that public contributions for relief were to be sent to the still little-known Red Cross rather than to this local agency was deeply resented. The San Francisco Chronicle declared it to be a reflection on the integrity of the city to have an outside agency handle relief funds, and outspokenly attacked the Red Cross for meddling. . . . It was only as a result of the most careful tact that a co-operative program was worked out whereby all contributions for relief, except the congressional appropriation, were to be pooled and jointly administered (Dulles 1950, pp. 103–104). This episode illuminates the complex struggle to capture the networks of obligation constructed in cities and towns throughout the country. On one side were the civic leaders themselves, who struggled to maintain the local community as the primary locus for giving and receiving. In the opinion of businessmen organized municipally, through clubs and chambers of commerce, each city should take care of its own, sending contributions beyond its boundaries only in case of natural disaster and war. This mapping of civic mobilization was decentralized, enhancing the control of local elites over civic capacities. But within cities, this arrangement enhanced the role of business in relation to individual donors (although individual donors were still disproportionately represented in the total receipts).21 In contrast to local and civic understandings of obligation, a variety of nationalizers sought to strengthen and elaborate a distinctively national, patriotic identity embedded within civic networks of formally private organizations. These efforts could produce oxymoronic turns of phrase drawn from the domains of private charity and public requirement as when contributions to the war chest drives of the First World War were described as “this voluntary tax.” In the United States, even the central state-building activity of making war involved mobilizing voluntary gifts. Contributions to these wartime funds represented “a democratization of giving . . . which make the largest possible number of people definitely linked up to the war in a benevolent and philanthropic manner. The industrial workman is given his opportunity to participate as never before.” The claim for inclusion went beyond class to encompass race and faith: “All former lines of cleavage and barriers have been broken down. All work for all. Protestant and Catholic, Jew and Gentile, black and white, all work together for the common good. . . .” (Lloyd 1918) But participation in such projects could lead to contests for control of these elaborated networks of membership and obligation. By breaking down “all former lines of cleavage,” these efforts could also erode the loyalty of individuals to their local communities and, specifically, to the business leadership of that community.
A 1929 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research documented that “charitable organizations in non-chest cities fared less well at the hands of corporations” (Todd 1930).
21
192
E.S. Clemens
A stark contrast to this model was provided by the national civic organizations such as the Red Cross, as we have seen a charitable network closely linked to presidential authority. This tightly controlled, self-reproducing organization privileged a network of national elites over those local elites that controlled the Chambers of Commerce and Community Chests. This particular conflict played out regularly in communities across the country as Community Chests and the American Red Cross engaged in heated epistolary conflict over ownership of particular seasons for fund-raising. Defending the advantages of its national drive in the fall, supported by promotional campaigns and presidential statements, the American Red Cross recognized that if local chapters joined the Community Chests they could be jolted out of this organizational rhythm, weakening the unifying impact of a decentralized but nevertheless national campaign.22 The stakes in these conflicts were high, inasmuch as the relationships within which obligations were embedded could be linked to broader political identities at the scale of either community or nation. Mobilization in both local and national fund-raising efforts was built upon preexisting relationships and conducted in established membership organizations. Responding to disappointing enrollments in the late 1920s, the national leadership of the American Red Cross instructed chapter membership committees that “in places of business one of the office force [is] to be appointed by the employer at the request of the Roll Call Committee direct or preferably through a Chairman of a business group of which that firm is a unit, to canvass his fellow employees. People should be asked to join by those they believe have a right to ask them.”23 Annual drives would appoint chairmen to serve as liaisons to particular target groups: unions, women’s clubs, and above all workplaces. In this way, calls to participate in a community or national drive could be embedded within immediate networks (and, indeed, relations of authority). Where such relationships existed, the returns could be impressive, as evidenced by a report from A.C. Sprague, the Employment Manager of the B.F. Goodrich Company in Akron, Ohio.24 To assure 100% contacts with our employees we carried out the following steps for our Roll Call: 1. Printing of pledge cards stating the pledge in these words ‘I authorize my employer to deduct from my next regular pay, the sum of One Dollar to be paid to the American Red Cross as my enrollment for 1932 as a member of The American Red Cross or I attach One Dollar for my membership in the American Red Cross for 1932. 2. A footnote on the pledge card itself stating in these words ‘This card is presented to you to enable you—if you wish—to enroll as a member of The Red Cross. You will not be solicited in the plant beyond the presentation of this card. If you wish to enroll, sign the deduction authorization or pin a dollar bill to the “Big City Roll Call Conference,” 11th National Convention, April 11–14, 1932. Records of the American National Red Cross, 1917–1934, American Red Cross, RG II, Box 90, Folder 104.507, National Archives and Records Administration. 23 McFadden 1929. Records of the American National Red Cross, 1917–1934, RG II, Box 87, Folder 104.502, National Archives and Records Administration. 24 Sprague 1933. Records of the American National Red Cross, 1917–1934, RG II, Box 90, Folder 104.502, National Archives and Records Administration. 22
From city club to nation state: business networks in American political development
193
card. Hand it to your foreman or department head. He will forward it thru proper channels and you will receive a membership button at an early date. 3. These cards were run thru the payroll addressing equipment for each person on our rolls—from President to Office Boy and from Superintendents to Sweepers. 4. The cards were delivered to department heads and distributed to the individual employees. 5. The employee followed his own judgment—no pressure—no sales talk—no coercion—no follow-up. If he turned the card in he was thanked. If not, no questions were asked. These cards went to 10,000 members of The B.F. Goodrich organization. The program resulted in 4,110 members enrolled from Goodrich in The American Red Cross. This result was definitely more than ten times as effective as the general plan of having Red Cross workers solicit Roll Call members from booths at the entrances of other plants. To give a more definite indication of the effectiveness of this plan, consider these figures. The entire roll call for the Summit County Chapter reached 9,350 in an industrial district. Our plant contributed 44% of that total roll call. Very little of any one person’s time was expended in carrying thru this program. Roll Call workers were left free to call the roll in the downtown section of the city where a plan such as we instituted was not feasible. It may be that the outstanding success of this plan at Goodrich lies in the fact that we are ‘group minded’. Our people participate in a contributory Group Life Insurance plan, and in contributory Group Sickness and Accident Insurance. We are uniformly successful in group support of our local Community Chest year after year. We use our group purchasing power in making it possible for our people to purchase coal from any qualified coal dealer on credit at a cash price. Wherever the group buying power can be exercised without disturbing regular channels of trade, we use it. The fund-raising campaign at the Goodrich plant embodied both the strengths and the stakes in this method of mobilizing social networks. As Mr. Sprague made clear, one of the virtues of this arrangement was that it both built on and contributed to the “groupmindedness” of his employees, reinforcing their relationship to the company even in the service of aiding those in need far away and potentially overseas. This pattern of recruiting and harnessing local business networks would be repeated in later crises and moments of intensified state-building, notably Hoover’s response to the Depression and the mobilization for World War II. Yet local business networks resisted full incorporation in the national state, preferring arrangements in which any resources raised at the municipal level stayed at home rather than being redistributed to address needs elsewhere in the nation or abroad. Both the arrangements of economic relations and social provision reflected persistent struggles between the nationalizing efforts of presidential administrations (particularly under FDR) and the determination of local business elites to maintain control within their own familiar networks. The result was a system of governance in which the power of accumulated capital,
194
E.S. Clemens
originally mobilized through municipal networks, became implicated in the arrangements of governing but not necessarily in formal institutions.
Community networks in the nation state The arrangements represented by the Community Chests functioned like an efficient but generic motor, one that could be harnessed to different projects and controlled in different ways. Alternatively, such a motor could be set aside in favor of other social technologies. With the onset of the Great Depression, all these options were possible. For the first years of the national economic crisis, President Herbert Hoover insisted that the challenges could be met by using these private configurations of civic and business efforts on a larger and more sustained basis than ever before. His signature initiatives— the President’s Emergency Committee on Employment, which was superseded by the President’s Organization on Unemployment Relief—embodied this commitment to generating relief from the very system of employment and production that was shuddering under the strains of the depression. And, although it is often lost in the later history of the New Deal programs, the initial private responses were impressive. But, ultimately, these efforts foundered, largely due to the simple fact that locally-oriented arrangements were ill-matched to a fully national crisis. Hoover’s response to the Depression can be characterized as an effort to organize these local arrangements into an encompassing “associational” response to rapidly escalating need. Once the Roosevelt administration came into power, its reorganization of federal relief efforts began with a dramatic decoupling of public funds from private control through subsidies to charity. At this point, a narrative of the role of these hybrid business-civic networks in the development of the nation state might be assumed to come to an end. Hoover’s unstinting effort to mobilize these networks into a non-governmental response adequate to the crisis had been utterly unequal to the challenge. In the wake of this effort, the civic arrangements of charitable provision were discredited and politicized (Clemens 2010). This settlement, however, represented only a partial retreat. While private responsibility for relief was undermined by the very magnitude of the Depression, resistance to government expansion continued to call upon the capabilities of private organizations to do what was needed. There were even some calls for the American Red Cross to administer Social Security, once it was clear that something like national social insurance would pass. More significantly, by the late 1930s, local networks of charity and business converged around a new set of issues that marked the frontier of government social provision: health and medicine. Both as a response to the unfinished character of the New Deal and in hostile anticipation of future initiatives for public health insurance, private social agencies and business networks regrouped. As John D. Rockefeller Jr. warned a gathering of the Greater New York Fund in 1938, “failure to support adequately these privately operated health and welfare agencies may mean ultimately the taking over by government of their functions—an eventuality to be avoided at all costs.”25 Rockefeller Archive Center, OMR, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Personal Speeches, “Cooperation and Stewardship,” 02/24/1938 111 2 Z, B4, F166. “Address introducing the Mayor at the opening rally of The Greater New York Fund in the Center Theater, Thursday evening, February 24, 1938.”
25
From city club to nation state: business networks in American political development
195
With the sustained criticism of business in the wake of the collapse of the stock market and growing conflicts between the wealthy and Roosevelt, business leaders faced the challenge of restoring their claim to be leading citizens. Since early in the depression, their standing had come under fire: Nobody bothers much in these days about whether a corporation has a soul or not. In such matters as taxation, wages, or responsibility for employee health and safety, law and public opinion make it behave as if it had, and that suffices for all practical purposes. But public opinion touched by social awareness tends to go much further and begins to enquire whether corporations have ‘bowels of mercy’ in the sense of a disposition to support community enterprises for social welfare. Two different questions seem to be current: Does the corporation assume its fair share of the community burden of social need? Does the corporation dominate philanthropic methods and policies? Another question persists in the offing: Is corporation giving a screen behind which individuals may dodge their community responsibilities? (Todd 1930) Unlike their counterparts a few decades before, businessmen of the 1930s came to this with new opportunities. Rather than supporting the community interests as well-intentioned individuals, changes in the tax laws now allowed business leaders to channel substantial corporate resources into community welfare.26 The seemingly discredited Community Chests mounted their own national relief campaigns, under the banner of the “Mobilization for Need.” And, perhaps most importantly, theorists of the large corporation—a troubling new phenomenon—increasingly invoked corporate charitable giving as the signal of the benign and virtuous character of big business. Whereas community contributions had once functioned as a sign of good citizenship for individuals, this linking of charity to citizenship now held for corporations as well (Clemens 2009). Although local control over fund-raising had been disrupted by the multiplication of national campaigns during the depression and Second World War,27 in the aftermath corporations moved to reimpose the discipline and centralization of the Community Chest movement. Displeased by the constant disruption and inefficiency generated by a succession of charitable drives within plants and workplaces, corporate leaders lent their support to the organization of what would be known as “United Funds.” This also entailed a return to the central control over what sorts of activities should be supported as part of the community interest. As Emily Barman has argued: At stake in the struggle to control workplace giving is not just a rivalry between nonprofit organizations; instead, in question is what kind of “community” should be the proper target of charitable activity and hence reap the benefits of giving in
26
An amendment to the federal revenue law of 1935 codified the deduction of corporate contributions to charity up to five percent of total corporate income. 27 These included the Committee to Celebrate the President’s Birthday, now known as the March of Dimes. Fewer efforts could signal more strongly the challenge that national fund-raising posed to the dominance of local elite networks over the definition of good citizenship (Sills 1957).
196
E.S. Clemens
the American workplace. In this sense, to track the struggle over workplace charity is also to track a series of contests and conflicts over the meaning of community (Barman 2006, pp. 4, 33). Even as this locally-controlled settlement was reestablished, strains were building. The primacy of the community chest model, sustained and often controlled by local business, was increasingly challenged by a growing number of national health and medical voluntary associations. The American Red Cross had long contested the efforts of the Chests to monopolize citizen philanthropy. The 1940s brought new competition for community-based citizen philanthropy with the establishment of the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, and other groups that might fund some local services but aimed at national-scale research programs to win wars against specific diseases. Yet even at the moment when its disorganization became clear, the legacy of local civic configurations left its mark on the trajectory of national state-building. As the 1960s brought another burst of major national policy innovation, those new initiatives recognized a landscape of non-profit, professionalized service agencies and community hospitals (Smith and Lipsky 1993) as well as a political culture in which tax-deductible charitable donations had become linked to good citizenship. The result was a period of robust policy expansion without centralized statebuilding, a configuration in which greatly expanded federal funding flowed through an ever more complex web of nonprofit entities and public-private partnerships. Although cities were given no role in the constitutional order of the United States, this new nation posed the same potential threats to the accumulation of capital and wealth as European monarchs posed to long-powerful urban centers. Thus in mobilizing for self-protection and advancement, American business developed new practices and discourses of citizenship that sustained a central role for the community as the locus of social provision. The linkage of business interests to this hybrid charitable-civic configuration constituted a source of resistance to nationalizing tendencies driven by demands for social protection. In combination with the institutional power of states to resist the federal government, this alternative model of social provision and civic organization sustained an alternative model of political membership and state development. This vision has persisted through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, in celebrations of “points of light” and calls to volunteer. By fiercely defending the capacity of privately governed civic networks to provide substantial social support, this history of business organizations through community organizations lives on in the partial and fragmented character of the American welfare state.
References Barman, E. (2006). Contesting communities: The transformation of workplace charity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Beisel, N. (1997). Imperiled innocents: Anthony Comstock and family reproduction in Victorian America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
From city club to nation state: business networks in American political development
197
Beito, D. T. (2000). From mutual aid to the welfare state: Fraternal societies and social services, 1890– 1967. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Bookman, C. M. (1932). The Cincinnati community chest. Social Forces, 10(4), 488–493. Borst, H. W. (1930). Community chests and relief: a reply. The Survey (October 15), p. 74. Boyer, P. (1978). Urban masses and moral order in America, 1820–1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bremner, R. H. (1960). American philanthropy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Capozzola, C. (2008). Uncle Sam wants you: World War I and the making of the Modern American citizen. New York: Oxford University Press. Clemens, E. S. (2009). The problem of the corporation: Liberalism and the large organization. In P. Adler (Ed.), Handbook of organizational studies and classical social theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Clemens, E. S. (2010). In the shadow of the New Deal: Reconfiguring the roles of government and charity, 1928–1940. In E. Clemens & D. Guthrie (Eds.), Politics and partnerships: Voluntary associations in America’s political past and present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cutlip, S. M. (1965). Fund raising in the United States: Its role in America’s philanthropy. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Davis, A., Gardner, B., & Gardner, M. (1941). Deep south: A social anthropological study of caste and class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DiMaggio, P. J., & Powell, W. W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48, 147–160. Domhoff, G. W. (1967). Who rules America? Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Dulles, F. R. (1950). The American Red Cross. New York: Harper and Brothers. Fligstein, N. (2001). The architecture of markets: An economic sociology of twenty-first-century capitalist societies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Haydu, J. (2008). Citizen employers: Business communities and labor in Cincinnati and San Francisco, 1870–1916. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hunter, F. (1953). Community power structure: A study of decision makers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Isaac, L. (2002). To counter ‘The Very Devil’ and more: the making of independent militia in the gilded age. American Journal of Sociology, 108(2), 353–405. Johnston, R. D. (2003). The radical middle class: Populist democracy and the question of capitalism in progressive era Portland, Oregon. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kelso, R. W. (1932). Banker control of community chests. The Survey (May 1), p. 117. Lee, J. (1928). The chest and social work. The Survey (March), pp. 749–50. Lloyd, H. G. (1918). The war chest plan. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 79, 290–292. McFadden, J. F. (1929). Permanent membership committees for Red Cross chapters, April 25. Pierce, L. L. (1938). Philanthropy: a major big business. The Public Opinion Quarterly, 2(1), 140–145. Roy, W. G. (1997). Socializing capital: The rise of the large industrial corporation in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Russell, F. A., Lyons, R. W., & Flickinger, S. M. (1931). The social and economic aspects of chain stores. The American Economic Review, 21(1), 32. Sills, D. L. (1957). The Volunteers: Means and Ends in a National Organization. Glencoe: Free. Sklar, M. (1988). The corporate reconstruction of American capitalism, 1890–1916. New York: Cambridge University Press. Smith, S. R., & Lipsky, M. (1993). Nonprofits for hire: The welfare state in the age of contracting. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Sprague, A. C. (1933). The roll call in industry. 12th Annual Convention, April 24–27, pp. 1–2. Tilly, C. (1992). Coercion, capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (p. 51). Cambridge: Blackwell. Tilly, C. (1998). Durable inequality (p. 10). Berkeley: University of California Press. Todd, A. J. (1930). Corporations as givers. The Survey (August 15), pp. 424–425. Todd, A. J. (1932). Some sociological principles underlying the community chest movement. Social Forces, 10(4), 476–484. Warner, L. (1949). Democracy in Jonesville: A study of quality and inequality. New York: Harper. Young, M. (2006). Bearing witness against sin: The evangelical birth of the American social movement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zelizer, V. (1997). The social meaning of money: Pin money, paychecks, poor relief, and other currencies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zorbaugh, H. W. ([1929] 1976). The gold coast and the slum: A sociological study of Chicago’s near North side. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
198
E.S. Clemens
Elisabeth S. Clemens is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago and Master of the Social Sciences Collegiate Division. Building on organizational theory and political sociology, her research has addressed the role of social movements and voluntary organizations in processes of institutional change. Her first book, The People’s Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–1925 (1997) received the Max Weber Award for organizational sociology and the award for the best book in political sociology. She is also co-editor of Private Action and the Public Good (1998), Remaking Modernity: Politics, History and Sociology (Duke, 2005), and Politics and Partnerships: Voluntary Associations in America’s Past and Present (2010). She is currently an editor of Studies in American Political Development and is completing Civic Nation: Voluntarism and the Making of the American State.
Inclusiveness and exclusion: trust networks at the origins of European cities Wim Blockmans
# The Author(s) 2010. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Abstract In Western Europe, cities grew fast between 1000 and 1300. This article looks at how the migrants moving to these emerging cities melded into communities and defended their collective rights in violent and hostile environments. It discusses a number of trust networks that were developed to meet the successive collective needs of particular social layers in rapidly changing urban societies. When a trust network became well-established and too large to allow face-to-face relations among all its members, institutions were created that operated under different rules.
In his last manuscript, Charles Tilly developed the concept of trust networks as organizations mediating in the long-term transformation from urban to state domination in world history. Trust networks can be defined as specific patterns of human relationships in which shared interests, values and norms facilitate communication and collaboration and thus reduce transaction costs. Trust networks are based on commitment, coordination, and recognition which often, but not always, are mutual. Membership of a trust network entails a “relation in which at least one party places a valued enterprise at risk in the hands of the other.… Prudent members of trust networks have generally tried to insulate them from predation or incorporation by cities and states (Tilly 2010).” In this article, I show how trust networks emerged and became established in the cities of Europe between about 1000 and 1600 CE. In my view, community building in the first stage of urban growth rested essentially on personal ties, formalized by oaths of loyalty. These were at the origin of the sense of belonging expressed in the first communes, the groupings that fought for their independence vis-à-vis the established feudal and ecclesiastical powers. As the European cities grew, these networks needed to organize themselves as public institutions, which allegedly changed their character W. Blockmans (*) Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Wassenaar, Netherlands e-mail:
[email protected] M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_14, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
199
200
W. Blockmans
fundamentally. This transition process from personal ties to institution building deserves special attention as this was the time when new unprecedented forms of social organization came into being. They determined the rise of urban ways of life, capitalism, and Western concepts of human rights. Instead of taking a traditional approach that focuses on concepts such as juridical categories, social class, and market structures, I put forward the idea that trust networks can provide a better understanding of the emergence and further development of these European urban communities. At the same time, I examine where the limits lie of the efficiency of personal trust networks, with regard to the scale of the organizations they were supposed to run, and the internal conflicts of interest that arose within the cities, between cities, and between cities and states. The most general and effective form of a trust network is kinship which typically bound members of aristocracies, and which surely also played a major role in the formation of urban elites. Property rights on ground parcels were at the basis of their domination, and these rights were transferred through inheritance and marriage. Within the Catholic Church, networks based on belief, lifestyle, and education evidently functioned in a relatively wealthy elite on a very wide geographical scale. These were partly urban (the bishops’ seats, the parishes and, from the thirteenth century onwards, the mendicants’ orders) and largely rural in the traditional monastic orders. Trust networks were also present within the aristocracies in the form of kinship groups sharing a common chivalric life style and by feudal bonds organizing groups of loyal armed followers. I argue that the emerging cities of Europe were home to several new forms of trust networks that strengthened the social cohesion within as well as between these urban communities. However, when in the thirteenth century the cities reached their medieval peak in population (Clark 2009), their sheer size and internal conflicts required institutions in which trust was no longer the selfevident basis of operation.
Six types I now discuss the successive types of trust networks that came into being within and between urban communities. In the current literature, they have been described as distinct features having various names in different cities, without the link being made with regard to the similarity of their internal structure and their functional basis. A first type that comes to mind is that of traveling merchants seeking protection within horizontal associations such as guilds and hanses. From the eleventh century onwards, when the cities were in their phase of rapid growth, these associations offered many opportunities to people from all sorts of social backgrounds. Inclusion and social mobility were vital factors that promoted urban expansion. The administration of the cities was firmly in the hands of the local merchants’ family clans and associations, which I will consider as the second type of trust network. A third type emerged when artisans began to organize themselves in confraternities and craft guilds and challenged the merchants’ monopoly on economic, juridical and political power. In Italy, extensive trust networks of a fourth type were created as capital was accumulated on an ever growing scale in joint-stock companies that had agents in nodal cities from Palestine, Egypt and the Black Sea to the North Sea. In
Inclusiveness and exclusion: trust networks at the origins of European cities
201
regions where the landed aristocracy held residence in the cities, they introduced their organizational pattern based on kinship and clienteles, which in the urban setting created a fifth type of trust network, that of the parties or even gangs struggling for local power. At the same time, a different process led to the formation of consolidated states. Their traditional elites belonging to the Church and the aristocracy merged into the new officialdom. In their midst emerged a sixth type of trust network that overarched the older ones and grew steadily. By this time, the older networks were already largely exclusive. All these networks were primarily located in cities, but the networks of servants of the state no longer primarily served the urban interests, although they may have mediated between cities and states. I focus on the most urbanized regions in Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century. For the first sections of my article, most data will be produced for the Southern Low Countries, one of the earliest and most urbanized regions, for which the available information is not easily accessible. I clarify the ways in which the incipient urban communities succeeded in creating, almost from scratch, entirely new forms of social attitudes and relations. I think this issue has not been adequately dealt with even though its relevance is clearly apparent. Indeed, it is too easily taken for granted that emerging urban communities displayed a spirit of solidarity and held common values from the very outset. Not only does this seem highly unlikely in view of the rapid migrations that occurred and the frequent use of violence reported in the early cities. We have a number of sources that clearly demonstrate awareness of the need to impose new norms. These generally aimed at the internal pacification of the urban community and the external protection of its members. The norms changed incrementally as they gradually emerged over the centuries under the influence of measures taken to address urgent practical problems. There were no historical models or theoretical blueprints to fall back on in dealing with the challenges these growing urban communities had to face in Western Europe from the eleventh century onwards. Therefore, the outcomes of this incremental process varied greatly from one place to another. This was largely a new phenomenon in world history. The levels of urban autonomy and selfgovernance, combined with the protection of the rights of individual citizens and their property, are generally seen as the key elements that drove economic growth and particularly the development of commercial capitalism (Mielants 2007). This is what distinguishes the urbanization process in medieval Europe from all its precedents and sets it apart from the earlier developing cities of Asia.
The search for liberty What did it mean in the first stage of urban growth for a landless laborer or serf to run away, try to escape the limitations to his personal freedom, but at the same time giving up the protection his lord had provided him within a domain structure? The earliest urban charters of liberty dealt with this matter. The oldest in the Low Countries is that of the town of Huy on the river Meuse, dating from 1066. Several articles deal with the position of serfs who fled their domain to go and work in the towns. If the lord of the domain came to claim his return and was able to prove his case, he could require the serf to continue performing his traditional duties for him
202
W. Blockmans
(Joris 1959). This situation may have prevailed for some time in predominantly rural areas, but larger urban communities soon bought off the rights by which the landlords still limited their personal freedom. This was already the case before 1100 in places where the local lord was a bishop or an abbot, as in Cambrai, Utrecht, Tournai, and Nivelles. In the 1110s, the larger cities of Arras (1111), Ypres and Douai followed suit. In 1067, the count of Flanders, wanted to attract inhabitants to his newly-founded town of Geraardsbergen, strategically located on a hill on the border with the duchy of Brabant. He did this by promising independent jurisdiction by the aldermen. Freedom from judicial interference by the landlords meant a solid guarantee for the inhabitants of new towns, which would probably have been preferable to protection from their landlord. A further step was to ensure the legislative authority of these aldermen. The oldest documented right to create new urban law was granted to the small town of Aire-sur-la-Lys between 1093 and 1111. In 1127, the larger cities of Bruges and Saint Omer made clear that their support for a candidate-count would depend on his recognizing their right to modify their local customary laws in accordance to their needs. However, all this did not yet imply that all inhabitants of these cities would be considered as free men. King of France Louis VI (1098–1137) first orally granted personal freedom to citizens if they had been residents for at least one year and one day, a right that was acknowledged by his successors. In England, the oldest mention of these rights was in 1155, and in the Low Countries it first appeared in the foundation charter of the harbor town Nieuwpoort, dating from 1163. As in Geraardsbergen, a century earlier, rulers granted new privileges in the hope to see their own foundations grow (van Caenegem 1994; IDEM 1968).
Merchants’ associations The unity of jurisdiction, legislation, and later also of equality in personal freedom, must have created some degree of homogeneity, social cohesion, and law and order within the cities, where masses of disgruntled migrants came together. Moreover, the urban liberties created relatively small isolated areas within an overall rural world still firmly dominated by feudal powers. Looking at the content of the oldest urban charters, the most general concern was that of the preservation of peace by sound jurisdiction, if necessary against everybody, including the count himself. As such, the citizens saw themselves as being united in defense against a world where violence was omnipresent. In the charter for Saint Omer, dated 1127, the newly-inaugurated count even recognized the sworn commune of the city, which had formed the core of the solidarity movement against all kinds of feudal restrictions. Citizenship was thus acquired on the condition of swearing an oath of loyalty to the community, which implied the observance of rules. The aldermen strove to limit violence within the city walls by ruling against fighting and feuding and by imposing restrictions on foreigners. They had to leave their arms at the city gate. Criminal justice grew increasingly detailed and aimed at controlling private violence through the prescription of peace-making procedures. Breaking a sworn peace was heavily fined. Before cities had written charters, the core of cohesion among citizens was laid down at the level of the social elite, which consisted mainly of merchants. Their
Inclusiveness and exclusion: trust networks at the origins of European cities
203
wheeling-and-dealing required various forms of organization to protect their vital interests in a world that was still dominated by feudal powers. The oldest documents informing us about the self-organization of traveling merchants designate their associations using terms such as amicitia, friendship, guild and hanse. The merchants of Valenciennes on the river Scheldt established a caritet: a charity or confraternity. In their statute, dated between 1050 and 1070, love of God, the observance of common religious services and solidarity among all brethren formed the basis of this group. The confraternity arranged funeral and memorial ceremonies for deceased brethren. The membership fee was used in charitable works for mutual support as well as for other inhabitants. Banquets and drinking parties, libationes were held to foster a sense of community. All these niceties were inspired by the material need for this solidarity group: members had to travel safely to markets and being armed and in a group was an effective way to protect and support each other. Conflicts between members had to be mediated by the other members. Similar statutes have been preserved of the merchants’ guilds of Saint Omer and Arras, both situated in the county of Flanders, dating from 1072/1083. They are more explicit about the settlement of conflicts arising after too much drink. The deans of these associations not only mediated for guaranty for the members; they were even granted jurisdiction over the citizens. The gradual transition from private associations into public authorities is apparent in the charter for the amicitia of Airesur-la-Lys, dated before 1111. Twelve judges from their midst ruled over the town, applying laws they were entitled to amend themselves. The 1127 charter for the city of Saint Omer extended certain privileges exclusively to the members of the merchants’ guild. It granted its members the freedom not to pay tolls and the revenue from the local mint was assigned to the maintenance of the guild (Blockmans 1999). One can thus conclude that in the eleventh century civilized behavior needed to be rigorously imposed upon the merchants’ elite through compulsory adherence to the association. That performed charitable works, religious ceremonies, convivial meetings, and the peaceful mediation of conflicts between members. This socialization process formed the condition required for the solidarity needed to protect trade beyond the city walls. In the course of the twelfth century, the merchants took the lead in forming what would become the public authority in the cities, and restricted certain material and judicial privileges to themselves. Their associations clearly functioned as trust networks, essential for the organization of the urban communities and for the trade between cities.
Merchants’ guilds as urban governments Which new juridical regulations needed to be developed to enable the economic activities which would bring about the ongoing and self-sustained urban growth? Apart from a concern about peace and justice, urban charters abounded with advantages granted to the citizens of a particular city, such as freedom from paying tolls or taxes. Litigation concerning commercial affairs was only possible before the local aldermen, who were the experienced specialists in these matters. Their jurisdiction needed to be fast and efficient. Therefore, they introduced evidence on the only basis of sound testimony by trustworthy fellow citizens. In the 1127 charter
204
W. Blockmans
for Saint Omer, we come across the concept of trust among some citizens who needed a quick settlement of disputes in relation to their trade, especially in cases of debt. The sworn commune thus formed the basis of a trust network, whose members were exclusively eligible for public office in the city. Their relations facilitated commercial transactions, and gradually their network extended to the government of the cities. The sometimes ferocious resistance by the feudal powers against the emerging communes helped to foster their cohesion, based on oaths of allegiance and reliability; the external threats strengthened the internal solidarity. As soon as urban magistrates had seen their autonomy and legislative powers recognized, including their exclusive judicial competence over their burgesses, they firmly strove at supporting the economic interests of their own core group, that of the associated merchants and entrepreneurs. Personal freedom, the guarantee of property rights and secular jurisdiction by one’s peers were at the basis of this endeavor. A case in point is the abolishing of trials by ordeal, as first documented in the charter for Ypres in 1116. Further steps were the restrictions on the use of private violence and the protection of private property against confiscation. Mediation by experts came to replace the reliance on irrational factors for the settlement of conflicts. Urban charters steadily contain exemptions, extended to entire territories, from tributes, tolls, and other taxes charged on trade. Standardization of the quality of products, measures, weights, and currency was equally a major concern. The physical protection of the traveling merchants and their goods that had first been organized by their private associations was now taken over by the cities’ public authorities. They concluded treaties with foreign rulers in order to ensure the security and trading facilities of their own citizens abroad. This implied that urban magistrates could also undertake diplomatic action in cases of a violation of their citizens’ rights. If disputes could not be settled by negotiation, urban magistrates would decree retaliations against the subjects of the foreign authority, as a way to pressure them into being more lenient. The arrest of merchants and confiscation of their goods was ordered by municipalities. However, such measures often triggered an escalation of the conflict, which then lasted longer and caused further damage to economic relations. Because of this, individual cities sought alliances with cities that had similar trading interests in order to extend the level of protection and increase their capacity to counteract. Originally, these urban leagues were private organizations set up by the merchants themselves. Depending on the flow and extent of urban development, public authorities took over this role and the principalities were to become the framework of their organization. The latter happened in the county of Flanders in the course of the thirteenth century (Blockmans 1994). The most prominent late example of such a transition is the German Hanse, which emerged as an association of merchants and did not become a league of cities until 1356 and continued to operate beyond the territories of the relatively weakly developed monarchic states in Northern Germany. Even if the merchants’ interest groups managed to organize themselves at a supralocal level, the diversity and fragmentation of urban judicial spheres severely limited their capacity to protect their citizens beyond their own walls. The most extraordinary system of regional protection that developed in Northern France and Flanders in the twelfth century was that of the fairs. These were initiated by local authorities trying to attract merchants from abroad by offering them protection, not
Inclusiveness and exclusion: trust networks at the origins of European cities
205
only in the city where the fair was held, but also along their journey. It was the coordination of a calendar of fairs throughout the year in a region protected by a single powerful ruler that created huge economies of scale. Fairs held on set dates improved the capacity to plan transactions in the long term, increased the intensity and speed of information exchange, and thus considerably reduced transaction costs. The counts of Champagne were the undisputed champions of this new regional system of fairs that linked Northern and Central Italy through Northern France, including Paris, with the cycles of fairs held in Flanders and Southern England (Pohl and Pohle 1991). The Lille fair is the oldest documented event in Flanders, mentioned in 1127. Yearly cycles developed in the course of that century. It became possible for merchants to plan journeys traveling from one fair to another, and from one region to the next. Increased revenue from local duties, dispute settlement and coinage were profitable for the authorities. The merchants appreciated the stabilization of the conditions protecting and facilitating their trade, which thus became more calculable. These regular and predictable meetings brought about the development of international trust networks. About 8,000 contracts drawn up at the fairs of Ypres during the second half of the thirteenth century have been preserved and reveal regular transactions between merchants from Italy, England, Flanders, and France. Flemish merchants made agreements in Ypres to finance future fairs in the Champagne cycle with partners from England and Italy. This trust network now extended to the whole of Western Europe, and commercial credit became the foundation of all transactions from Italy to England via Champagne and Flanders (Blockmans 2001). Trust flourished under the protection of the local and regional judicial authorities, but probably even more through the sanction of exclusion that could be imposed by the highly profitable trust networks.
Craft guilds From the mid-thirteenth century onwards, artisans in the most industrialized regions in Italy and the Low Countries started to organize themselves, following the model of the merchants’ guilds. Cities then reached the peak in their demographic growth and became exclusive. Their confraternities similarly were embedded in religious ceremonies such as funeral and memorial services, the cult of a patron saint via an altar or a chapel and processions. Charitable care for the sick and elderly members as well as for their widows and orphans was equally imitated from the merchants’ guilds, as were the dinners in common. As the large industrial towns like Arras, Douai, Ypres, Ghent, and Bruges grew increasingly divided by class conflicts, the merchants and entrepreneurs who monopolized the city administration strongly opposed the evolution of artisans’ confraternities into professional corporations supporting the social and economic interests of a particular sector (Najemy 2006; Wyffels 1951; Keene 2006; Rosser 2006). The class conflicts, just as well as frictions with other, mutually-exclusive professional groups’ common interests and rituals, living in the same neighborhood, incorporated in the urban militias as a distinct entity behind their own standard: all these factors fostered the sense of community within the craft guilds. In the cases
206
W. Blockmans
where they acquired a share in the city’s government, such as in Flanders after 1302, the relations between the members shifted from mutual trust and charitable support vis-à-vis common enemies towards the sheer defense of material interests. Some of the largest corporations in the textile sector counted several thousands members, which is a size to which the concept of trust network can no longer be applied (Prevenier 1983). Entrepreneurial patterns based on putting-out and subcontracting undermined the alleged equality and brotherhood among the guild members. Nevertheless, it has been suggested for Paris and other European cities from the late Middle Ages to the end of the Ancient Régime that “most trades were organized around complex networks of informally constituted co-operative arrangements involving varying combinations of partnership, patronage, and clientage (Sonenscher 1989, As cited by Lis and Soly 2008).” Evidently, the role of the corporative movement in the formation of the urban communities cannot be neglected. The growing complexity of the urban societies was stabilized by its corporative structure; each of its components found its origins in a trust network.
Merchants’ companies The system of international fairs described above was one of the many scenes on which the fourth type of trust network operated, namely the companies of merchants from cities in Northern and Central Italy. In the mid-thirteenth century, they appeared in contracts under the name of a particular family based in a particular city, with their partners. These joint-stock companies had grown from a family association into a larger organization attracting other investors and agents. They sent their junior partners as their representatives in their various locations as well as to the major fairs. Given the large scale of the operations and the huge investments and risk involved, trust must have been the basis of these commercial companies, which extended their network from one Italian city to many others in the Peninsula, around the Mediterranean and in Western Europe. Family ties stood at the origin of these trust networks while other shareholders and agents were bound by the high professional standards of these companies. New accounting techniques such as double booking-keeping guaranteed permanent control of the transactions. Agents abroad had to keep close contact with the headquarters through intensive correspondence of letters and bills of exchange (Hunt 1994; Hunt and Murray 1999).
Party clans Not all cities and towns were dominated by merchants, nor did craft guilds generally acquire political participation. These relations obviously depended on the local development as an export-oriented economy of a substantial size. And even in Northern and Central Italy, where this was clearly the case, the balance of power between the merchant class and the aristocracy living in the cities as well as in the countryside was more complicated. Venice may have been the clearest case of a merchants’ republic, but in most land-locked cities the rivalry between popes and
Inclusiveness and exclusion: trust networks at the origins of European cities
207
emperors, from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, dragged the aristocracy into the formation of antagonistic clans (Crouzet-Pavan 1997; IDEM 2001, 2002, 2009). Their conflicts continued to dominate the political culture even beyond the original controversies, as the parties absorbed and re-oriented all controversies in the urban community towards their own goals. Mutual exclusion from power and banishment of the losers from the city perpetuated the tensions and exported them into the countryside. This pattern has been described for the Italian and Catalan cities as well as for the Northern Low Countries (Heers 1977; Najemy 2006; Curull 2009). At the origin, parties and clans were based on the loyalty of family bonds. Their appearance seems bound to the presence of the aristocracy in the cities, which introduced there the type of power struggles and the organization based on clienteles. Their extension brought the inclusion of friends and clients whose social status may have been much lower. Parties were rather vertical organizations, in which differences of social class were superseded by the sheer strife for power.
Officialdom The sixth and last type of network, that of state officials, mainly recruited citizens as experts in the centralization of statecraft. An early case is that of Castile where urban oligarchies were dominated by the caballeros, the lower nobility living in the cities and living off their landed properties acquired during the Reconquista. Their military service for the king and counts yielded them spoils of war. From the twelfth century onwards, they represented the cities in the Cortes. By this accumulation of power, they could keep down the political weight of merchants and craftsmen (AsenjoGonzalez). While state personnel had traditionally been recruited from the clergy and the aristocracy, since the fourteenth century, the growth of central institutions attracted university-trained lawyers and financial specialists from urban origins. Socialization with the prevailing aristocratic values implied that burgesses devoted their skills less in favor of urban development than for the strengthening of state domination over the cities. On the other hand, states increasingly used their supremacy to appoint their officials in the cities and gradually extend their powers (Reinhard 1996; Asenjo-Gonzalez 2009, 35–45). This was the period, after 1300, which the late Larry Epstein characterized by the cities’ “institutional inefficiency” as a consequence of the “jurisdictional fragmentation” and the “parcellization of sovereignty (Epstein 2000).” In my opinion, his interpretation of “Freedom and Growth” is only correct from the viewpoint of public institutions. On that level, monarchic states indeed proved often more efficient than regional states under urban hegemony. They balanced countervailing powers within larger territories. However, one should not overlook the lasting cases of Venice, the United Provinces, and the Swiss Confederation. Nor should the efficiency of monarchies be overestimated. Until the end of the sixteenth century, the complex balances between cities and states left room for mutual bargaining and support, as well as for hostilities and increasing state domination. Urban elites, seated in the nodes controlling territories, often negotiated private privileges including control of the countryside in exchange for financial, military, and strategic services (Isaacs and Prak 1996; Hart 1994; Blickle 1997; Blockmans et al. 2009).
208
W. Blockmans
Functions and limits In the preceding pages, a number of trust networks have been observed and classified into six types. Each of them fulfilled particular functions in a specific period of the development of cities. Proximity facilitating frequent personal contacts, situations of open competition or even of external threats over and again were the most favorable contexts to see trust networks actively engaged in social change. Some of them lost their functions over the course of time. Merchants’ associations were successfully able at some point in time to civilize their companions, to organize their collective self-defense, to have them protected during their journeys as well as privileged by consolidated states, and to negotiate with foreign authorities on trade regulations. From the fifteenth century onwards, the protection, jurisdiction, and negotiation about trade relations increasingly became concerns the territorial states claimed to fulfill. However, private corporations of merchants continued to take care of these primordial issues in regions where states were weak as well as on the maritime routes beyond the jurisdiction of any state. One may think of the chartered companies that organized most of the colonial trade until the early nineteenth century. Internal pacification and the generalization of the rule of law by the sixteenth century led in most European cities to the extinction of armed conflicts between private gangs or parties who took the law in their own hands. However, even nowadays the weakness of state power in Southern Italy and Eastern Europe still gives this phenomenon contemporary relevance. In most cases, the local merchants’ guilds had to give up ruling their city exclusively. The arbitrariness and abuse of power by their monopolistic governments from the thirteenth century onwards led to revolts that triggered the intervention of the territorial rulers who imposed a division of power among contending factions (Blockmans 1989; Boone and Prak 1995; Boone 2007; Curull 2009, 10). From a structural viewpoint, one may also argue that cities had simply grown too large and had internally become too diversified to be ruled by a merchants’ trust network. Institutions and professionals took over and created a more formalistic type of government in which countervailing powers were kept in balance. Cities may still have been ruled by oligarchies, but these could no longer function on the basis of trust networks alone. A similar reasoning applies to the craft guilds that, by growing and getting involved in the participation of some forms of local government, became formal institutions applying rules rather than relying on the mutual trust between their prominent members. Roberto Michels’s iron law of oligarchization fully applied to guilds and crafts. The same can be said about the trust networks that in the early stage of state building, could act as mediators between cities and states. However, the growth and professionalization of state bureaucracies increasingly limited their impact. State officers gradually became recruited more on the basis of merit than that of friendship and trust. This mechanism equally applied to trading companies: the larger they became, the more they had to develop as formal institutions applying rules. Obviously, these tendencies are far from absolute: even in the present day, trust networks play a role, also in large organizations. What we could observe was that various types of trust networks were essential in transitional stages, before the formation of new institutions: they fostered the sense of community among particular groups in the emerging cities; they helped to create systems to protect
Inclusiveness and exclusion: trust networks at the origins of European cities
209
and regulate regional and international trade; they were at the basis of systems of social security and the defense of workers’ rights; they were at the core of joint stock companies operating on an intercontinental scale; they were intermediaries between aristocratic, municipal, and state power systems. In all these situations, trust networks were needed to create new activities and social relations. Once these communities became successful and grew, they required institutionalization and reduced the trust networks to possibly influential but no longer determining organizations, resisting “incorporation by cities and states,” as noted by Charles Tilly. For my purpose here, however, it is essential that in the very long term the fourth trust network type—the international trading and entrepreneurial companies— continue to prove the extraordinary adaptive capacity of capitalism. These networks grew to a scale that outclassed that of most modern states—even if at this very moment states come to rescue some of them. But this exactly supports my point: the originality of the medieval commercial trust networks continued to create freedom as well as growth, at least for their privileged members.
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
References Asenjo-Gonzalez, M. (2009). Structuring urban system as bonding process in Castilian oligarchic society in fifteenth-century. In M. Asenjo-Gonzalez (Ed.), Oligarchy and patronage in late medieval Spanish urban society (pp. 29-50). Turnhout: Brepols. Blockmans, W. (1999). Regionale Vielfalt im Zunftwesen in den Niederlanden vom 13. bis zum 16. Jahrhundert. In K. Schulz (Ed.), Handwerk in Europa (pp. 51–63). Munich: Oldenburg Verlag. Blockmans, W. (2001). Transactions at the Fairs of Champagne and Flanders 1249–1291. In Simonetta Cavaciocchi, ed., Fiere e mercati nella integrazione delle economie europee secc. XIII–XVIII—Atti delle Settimane di Studi 32 (pp. 993–1000). Prato: Le Monnier. Blickle, P. (Ed.). (1997). Resistance, representation, and community. Oxford: Clarendon. Blockmans, W. (1989). Alternatives to monarchical centralisation: the great tradition of revolt in Flanders and Brabant. In H. G. Koenigsberger (Ed.), Republiken und Republikanismus im Europa der frühen Neuzeit (pp. 145–154). Munich: Oldenburg Verlag. Blockmans, W. (1994). Formale und informelle soziale Strukturen in und zwischen den großen flämischen Städten im Spätmittelalter. In P. Johanek (Ed.), Einungen und Bruderschaften in der spätmittelalterlichen Stadt (pp. 1–15). Cologne: Böhlau Verlag. Blockmans, W., Holenstein, A., & Mathieu, J. (Eds.). (2009). Empowering interactions. Political cultures and the emergence of the state in Europe 1300–1900. Farnham: Ashgate. Boone, M. (2007). The Dutch revolt and the medieval tradition of urban dissent. Journal of Early Modern History, 11, 351–375. Boone, M., & Prak, M. (1995). Rulers, patricians and burghers: the great and little traditions of urban revolt in the low countries. In K. Davids & J. Lucassen (Eds.), A miracle mirrored. The Dutch Republic in European perspective (pp. 99–134). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, P. (2009). European cities and towns 400–2000 (p. 25). Oxford: Oxford University Press. 37, 116. Crouzet-Pavan, E. (1997). Venise: une invention de la ville, XIIIe–XIVe siècle. Seyssel: Champ Vallon. Curull, F. S. I. (2009). Oligarchies and social fractures in the cities of late medieval Catalonia. In M. Asenjo-Gonzalez (Ed.), Oligarchy and patronage in late medieval Spanish urban society (pp. 1–27). Turnhout: Brepols. Epstein, S. R. (2000). Freedom and growth. The rise of states and markets in Europe, 1300–1750 (pp. 30–37). London: Routledge.
210
W. Blockmans
Hart, M. T. (1994). Intercity rivalries and the making of the Dutch state. In C. Tilly & W. P. Blockmans (Eds.), Cities and the rise of states in Europe, A.D. 1000 to 1800 (pp. 196–214). Boulder: Westview. Heers, J. (1977). Parties and political life in the medieval west. Amsterdam: North-Holland. Hunt, E. S. (1994). The medieval super-companies. A study of the Peruzzi company of Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hunt, E. S., & Murray, J. M. (1999). A history of business in medieval Europe, 1200–1550. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. IDEM. (1968). Coutumes et Législation en Flandre aux XIe et XIIe siècles. In Les Libertés urbaines et rurales du XIe au XIVe siècle (pp. 245–279). Brussels: Crédit Communal, Pro Civitate. IDEM. (2001). Enfers et Paradis. L’Italie de Dante et de Giotto. Paris: Albin Michel. IDEM. (2002). Venice triumphant: the horizons of a myth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. IDEM. (2009). Les villes vivantes: Italie XIIIe–XVe siècles. Paris: Fayard. Isaacs, A. K., & Prak, M. (1996). Cities, bourgeoisies, and states. In W. Reinhard (Ed.), Power elites and state building (pp. 207–234). Oxford: Clarendon. Joris, A. (1959). La ville de Huy au moyen âge (pp. 479–484). Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Keene, D. (2006). English urban guilds, c.900–1300: The purposes and politics of association. In I. A. Gadd & P. Wallis (Eds.), Guilds and association in Europe, 900–1900 (pp. 3–26). London: Centre for Metropolitan History. Lis, C., & Soly, H. (2008). Subcontracting in guild-based export trades, thirteenth-eighteenth centuries. In S. R. Epstein & M. Prak (Eds.), Guilds, innovation, and the European economy, 1400–1800 (pp. 81–113). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mielants, E. H. (2007). The origins of capitalism and the rise of the West. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Najemy, J. M. (2006). A history of Florence 1200–1575 (pp. 57–87). Oxford: Blackwell. Pohl, H., & Pohle, M. (Eds.). (1991). Frankfurt im Messenetz Europas. Erträge der Forschung. Frankfurt am Main: Historisches Museum. Prevenier, W. (1983). La démographie des villes du comté de Flandre aux XIVième et XVième siècles. Etat de la question. Essai d’interprétation. Revue du Nord, 257, 255–275. Reinhard, W. (Ed.). (1996). Power elites and state building. Oxford: Clarendon. Rosser, G. (2006). Big brotherhood: Guilds in urban politics in late medieval England. In I. A. Gadd & P. Wallis (Eds.), Guilds and Association in Europe, 900-1900 (pp. 27-42). London: Centre for Metropolitan History. Sonenscher, M. (1989). Work and wages: Natural law, politics and the eighteenth-century French trades (p. 138). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. (2010). Cities, states, and trust networks: chapter 1 of Cities and States in World History. Theory and Society. doi:10.1007/s11186-010-9119-z. van Caenegem, R. C. (1994). Considerations on the customary law of twelfth-century Flanders. In L. Milis et al. (Eds.), Law, history, the low countries and Europe (pp. 97–106). London: Hambledon. Wyffels, C. (1951). De oorsprong van de ambachten in Vlaanderen en Brabant (pp. 124–142). Brussels: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Wetenschappen. Wim Blockmans is Rector of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and Professor of History at Leiden University. He has published extensively on state formation in pre-industrial Europe, including A History of Power in Europe. Peoples, markets and States (1997), and edited with Charles Tilly, Cities and the Rise of States in Europe AD 100–1800 (1994).
Cities and states in geohistory Edward W. Soja
# The Author(s) 2010. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Abstract In his last major work, Charles Tilly presents a schematic history of the development of cities, states, and trust networks over the past five millennia. I reconfigure his “look across history” from a more assertively spatial perspective, pushing back the starting point of the geohistory of cities another 5,000 years to what is presented as the first of three “urban revolutions.” From this geohistorical viewpoint, cities and states do not emerge together de novo in Sumeria but the state is seen as being generated from earlier urbanization processes or what can be described as the stimulus of urban agglomeration. The generative power of cities or urban spatial causality, rarely addressed in the social science literature, is being re-discovered today as a primary source of societal development, technological innovation, and cultural creativity. In my schematic geohistory, the stimulus of urban agglomeration is traced over 10,000 years from its early role in the development of full-scale agriculture and the remarkable artistic creativity emanating from Çatalhöyük, the largest of the earliest urban settlements; through the formation of politically charged city-states and city-based empires; to the city-generated Industrial Revolution and the origins of urban industrial capitalism; ending in a look at the contemporary reconfiguration of cities and states and the shift from metropolitan to regional urbanization. To begin his last major work, Cities and States in World History, Charles Tilly takes the reader back nearly 5,000 years to the thriving city-state of Uruk, near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. At that time, Uruk was already well established as one of the first fully formed city-states and probably the world’s largest urban agglomeration as well, with 50,000 people living within its walls. Uruk’s ruler during part of this era was the great king Gilgamesh and Tilly uses the clay tablet inscribed Gilgamesh epic to open up his own “look across history.” Sketching and schematizing furiously, as he described it, Tilly presents a highly E. W. Soja (*) Department of Urban Planning, School of Public Affairs, University of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail:
[email protected] M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_15, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
211
212
E.W. Soja
personalized overview of the development of cities, states, and trust networks over the past five millennia, since what he and most experts consider to have been the original moment of city and state formation.
Spatializing Tilly What I propose to do here, also sketching and schematizing energetically, is add a more assertive and explanatory spatial perspective to the story Tilly tells, to look at the intertwined development of cities and states across geohistory. This infrequently used term, geohistory, represents much more than adding an extra dose of geography to the writing of history or simply recognizing that “space matters.” As I see it, geohistory is indicative of a radically different way of looking at history and geography together, treating them as mutually formative and co-equal in their interpretive power. (Soja 1989) Such a balanced view runs against the prevailing grain of a powerful social historicism that, since at least the mid-nineteenth century, has intellectually prioritized time over space and interpretively privileged the historical and sociological imagination over geographical or spatial perspectives. My aim in spatializing Tilly’s look across history is to build on a critique of this social historicism to enrich his fundamental arguments and, more ambitiously, to open up potentially new and innovative avenues for investigating cities, states, and their coordinative networks of trust. The need for such spatialization of even the best historical writings arises from what can be described as the Great Ontological Distortion that took place in Western scholarship in the last half of the nineteenth century. Almost entirely unnoticed in the mainstream literature was an intellectual fixation on temporal and historical perspectives that would inject a socio-historical bias into the then emerging social sciences as well as into Marx’s historical materialism. Foregrounding historical interpretations of social relations, social will, and societal development, while decidedly insightful, essentially subordinated space to time, geography to history, creating an ontological predisposition that would carry over to affect epistemological debate, theory formation, and empirical analysis in all the human sciences. Cities and states, for example, came to be studied literally and figuratively “through history” while their geography or spatiality was reduced to a neutral background environment, a container of social life and history, a stage for a social drama unfolding primarily across time and only incidentally across place and space.1 One of the few to recognize this ontological distortion was Michel Foucault (1986), who quizzically asked why is it that we have come to think of time as dynamic, process, movement, development, dialectic while space tends to be seen as fixed, dead, extra-social background, or environment. Did it start with Bergson, he ponders, curious as to how such a peculiar imbalance could have developed between time and space, seemingly co-equal dimensions of both the physical and social worlds. Expecting this social historicism to be easily recognized and repaired, Foucault would move on to demonstrate in practice a more balanced and mutually causal spatio-temporal or geohistorical perspective in his major writings. Only in the past 10 years, however, has this re-balancing of historical and geographical thinking 1
For more on this ontological historicism, see Edward Soja 1989, 1996, 2000.
Cities and states in geohistory
213
begun to occur through what some have been calling a “spatial turn” in the human sciences, as nearly every discipline and subject area has been experiencing some degree of provocative spatialization (Warf and Arias 2009). Geohistory as it is used here carries with it an ontological re-balancing of the social, the historical, and the spatial, with no one of them given priority or privilege over the others. Given the persistence of social historicism, however, a compensatory emphasis on critical spatial thinking will need, at least temporarily, to be given primary attention no matter what the subject may be. What follows then is the product of a strategic foregrounding of a spatial perspective, exploring how it might add new insights into the study of cities and states. At the core of this look across geohistory is an emphasis on urban spatial causality, how cities as spatially organized social formations actively shape social relations and help to stimulate societal development. Cityspace in this sense is not just a place in which social life unfolds and major events occur but is also an affective and consequential context. From what can be described as the stimulus of urban agglomeration emanates a generative force that has played a powerful but almost entirely unnoticed role in societal development as a source of accumulation, innovation, coercion, hierarchy, and cultural creativity. Jane Jacobs in The Economy of Cities (1969) was among the first scholars to recognize the generative effects of urban agglomeration and her work is used here to begin our revised look at the geohistory of cities and states.2
Pushing back the origin of cities Tilly’s look across history is rich with insights, especially with regard to the conceptualization of trust networks as integrative mechanisms holding together the intertwined evolution of cities and states. In his creative excursion, however, he is occasionally led astray by the fundamentally historicist writings of others, and— despite his unusually fertile geographical imagination—by his own intrinsic privileging of time over space, history over geography, especially in the realm of social causality. The subordination of urban spatial causality in Tilly’s interpretation of the development of cities and states begins with the debate on urban origins. Rather than beginning with the thriving city-state of Uruk and the Gilgamesh epic, the story of urban geohistory needs to be taken back another 5,000 years or more to Çatalhöyük and its even more ancient predecessors.3 Following Jane Jacobs (1969) rather than Lewis Mumford (1961), it can be argued that the world’s earliest urban settlements took place in the highland belt running through southern Anatolia to present day Iran and south into the Levant rather than in the so-called Fertile 2
The Economy of Cities has inspired a growing field of geographical economics dealing with “urbanization economies,” the positive and negative effects that arise from urban agglomeration. Jacobs argued that without cities, we would all be poor, we would have remained hunters and gatherers as we were throughout nearly all of human existence. Some economics textbooks (see McDonald 1997) now call these effects “Jane Jacobs externalities” and argue that such urbanization economies are now the primary force behind economic development and technological innovation in the world. 3 This alternative view of the origin and geohistorical evolution of cities is developed in detail in the first three chapters of Soja (2000).
214
E.W. Soja
Crescent of alluvial Mesopotamia. Tilly refers to “Chatal Hoyuk,” and also the even older Jericho, but bows to the canonical literature in dismissing these settlements as not yet “full-fledged cities,” owing to a lack of central authority, signs of inequality and hierarchy, and an elaborated division of labor, not to mention an alphabet, the key to what the time-minded call “written history” and city-based ”civilization.” The debate about whether Çatalhöyük and Jericho were truly cities is entangled in a kind of Catch-22 that brings into question nearly all existing histories of the origins of cities and states, including Tilly’s. So fixated is the literature on the Sumerian city-states such as Uruk and Ur that the definition of a city becomes confusingly conflated with the definition of the state. That is, if a settlement does not express the key features of a centralized and hierarchical state, then it cannot be a true city. Adding to the confusion, large-scale agricultural development is thrown in as essential to the formation of both cities and states, with cities as well as states seen as evolving from expansive agricultural villages through an increasing social division of labor. That cities as permanent and generative urban agglomerations can form without states is generally ruled out, as is the even more audacious possibility that urbanization preceded—and stimulated—full scale agricultural development. The deeply held belief that the production of a social surplus, primarily in food, was essential to the formation of cities was turned upside down by Jane Jacobs in The Economy of Cities. Building on excavations at Çatalhöyük in the late 1960s (knowledge unavailable to Mumford when writing The City in History), she claimed that cities came first, before the Agricultural Revolution, implying that cities were essential to the production of a social surplus rather than the other way around. She argued, to the ridicule and dismissal of most prehistorians and paleoanthropologists, that the first substantial human settlements were stateless cities formed by egalitarian bands of hunters and gatherers well before the development of “full-fledged” agrarian societies. They were, in essence, Neolithic cities, an impossible and contradictory phenomenon to most scholars of antiquity. Cities almost surely did not precede the domestication of plants and animals and there were people who knew how to farm in the first cities. But what is clearly suggested from contemporary archeological evidence and the logic of distanceminimizing human spatial behavior is that urbanization and agricultural development evolved together in a mutually causal and symbiotic relationship. The creation of an agricultural surplus played a key role in stimulating the development of cities, but just as important (and often overlooked entirely), urbanization played a generative role in the Agricultural Revolution. Understanding this mutual causality, which, as we will see, can also be applied to the development of the state, builds upon the recognition that the first true cities were formed around 12,000 years ago in Southwest Asia and that this epochal commitment to living densely and permanently together in one place rather than maintaining a roving nomadic existence marked a kind of “big bang” in the development of human societies. Once humans decide to settle in one place, as one of the excavators of Jericho put it (Kenyon 1960), all else follows: the geohistory of societal development begins. The settling down into permanent urban clusters was perhaps the most revolutionary event in the history of human society, following after at least 2,000,000 years of existence as small nomadic bands of fewer than a hundred members. Almost surely, these first cities could never grow to much more than 10,000 inhabitants, but this
Cities and states in geohistory
215
was an explosive leap in societal scale and complexity. Environmental factors played an important role in these changes, as a period of global warming melted back continental icecaps and encouraged the intensification of traditional hunting, gathering, and fishing technologies in the well watered zone from the Mediterranean to southern China. Permanent urban settlement, however, is better understood not as environmentally induced but as a rational and specifically spatial choice. While knowledge of farming existed—there is evidence of plant domestication going back 18,000 years—the vast majority of inhabitants of the first cities were hunters and gatherers. There is no clear evidence of early agricultural villages that somehow grew into cities. Indeed, the idea that reasonable people would cluster together in permanent dwellings to farm does not make sense, especially when defense against outsiders was not a factor. If anything, the reverse was more likely, that urban agglomeration led to the spawning off of the first agricultural villages and small settlements of livestock keepers, initially to serve the needs of the urban population although later seeking greater autonomy as a rural peasantry and nomadic pastoralists. So what led hundreds and in some cases thousands of people to create the first permanent urban settlements? Not farming or rearing livestock (which were possible to practice 12,000 years ago), nor hunting and gathering, but trade and exchange, probably through some means of reciprocity. There is evidence that long-distance trade existed in Southwest Asia and the eastern Mediterranean 15,000 years ago and may have created ancient trade routes that would later evolve into the famous Silk Road Tilly writes about, stretching across Eurasia to connect with another wellspring of urbanization in the loess plains and river valleys of northern China. Trade then was the primary urbanizing force, especially in the Neolithic or New Stone Age, when the main commodity was workable stones such as flint and obsidian, the volcanic glass that was most closely associated with the growth of Çatalhöyük. Choosing an actual site probably was influenced by natural factors such as the availability of water supplies, including lakes and marshes with abundant wildlife, but gathering together thousands of inhabitants was mainly a logical and efficient response to the trade of heavy goods, especially in comparison to delivering them to scattered nomadic encampments. This also meant that there were probably many smaller trading centers along the main routes. From the start then, urbanization probably took the form of a network of settlements of various sizes rather than isolated and insulated cities.4 Çatalhöyük, perhaps the major metropolis of the Neolithic, lasted for nearly 2,000 years, shifting about on two mounds and probably rising and falling in size before being abandoned. Its generative power was impressive, leading to expanding agricultural development, innovative architecture and urban design, a form of highly egalitarian and family based religion, and the greatest burst of artistic creativity in human geohistory up to that time. The most brilliant of earlier cave paintings almost always represented hunting scenes or elaborate geometric patterns. A few wood or
4
Whether forms of identity and trust coincided with these urban networks we may never know, although the egalitarian character of the first cities suggests a strong family focus and household autonomy rather than a large scale community identity.
216
E.W. Soja
stone sculptures of what are thought to be fertility goddesses have been found, but what happened in Çatalhöyük was extraordinary. Hundreds of goddess-like sculptures were produced (possibly stimulated by the gradual shift from hunting to agriculture), metal including copper was worked into elaborate designs, the first known textiles and rugs were woven, obsidian was cut and polished into the first hand-crafted mirrors, and beautiful murals were painted, including one that almost surely is the first known example of a cityscape, a depiction of dozens of houses spreading out in front of a distant twin-peaked volcano seemingly erupting with the invaluable obsidian the city depended upon. Here then was abundant evidence of the transformation of nature into socialized cityspace, representing the “cooked” rather than the “raw” in Levi-Strauss’s terms. In the previous 2,000,000 years of homo sapiens existence, there was nothing to compare with the urban generated artistic and cultural revolution that took place in and from this remarkable Anatolian city.
Emerging polities: the city and the state combined Derived from this radically revised view of societal development is the idea that cities and the urbanization process have provided perhaps the most important generative force behind every major breakthrough in human geohistory, from the agricultural to the industrial revolutions to major bursts of artistic creativity and technological innovation. From about 8,000 to 5,000 years ago, the stimulus of urban agglomeration also played a key role in the formation of the state and centralized authority, the emergence of hierarchies of differential social power, the rooting of this hierarchy of power in gender, kinship and cultural ties, and the rise of class divisions based largely on the ownership of property. So closely tied were urban development and state formation that what emerged during this period is called the city-state or, from the Greek, the polis, which some dictionaries define as meaning either city or state. Recent excavations in Anatolia as well as northern Syria and Iraq suggest that the earliest stateless or acephalous cities evolved over thousands of years into the citybased states of Mesopotamia and probably also the Nile and Indus Valleys. Çatalhöyük had no formidable walls around it and there was no evidence of any political or religious centrality within the settlement. Households were roughly similar, with few shared walls so that one family could remain in the same home site for many generations, each one buried atop the others. (Hodder 2006) After around 8,000 BP, however, before the flowering of the Mesopotamian city-states, evidence of walled settlements has been found showing signs of increasingly centralized authority and growing hierarchy, with some buildings much larger than others and with urban spaces possibly devoted to ceremony and/or exchange. Interestingly enough, no evidence was found at these sites of written language. What this suggests, as noted earlier, is that urbanization and state formation grew together symbiotically, very much like the mutually stimulating development of cities and agriculture that was also continuing to occur in the new environments of the great river valleys of Eurasia and northern Africa. That state formation and large scale irrigated agriculture influenced urban development is not a new idea, but there
Cities and states in geohistory
217
is very little written that emphasizes on at least an equal basis that cities generated states and all their appurtenances, from centralized royal and religious authority (with the skyscraping ziggurat its synecdoche), class stratification, expanding patriarchal power, military force, and empire-building impulses. The state was not only reflected in the built environment and social geography of the city, it emerged from the urban context or habitat. It truly was a city-generated-state or, just as descriptive, a state-generated-city. To make one generative process more important than the other, or to see either as developing separately, is to distort what happened. To be clear, I am not claiming that urbanization explains all aspects of societal development or state formation, although I am purposefully emphasizing the importance of urban spatial causality largely because it has been virtually invisible in the existing literature and, in particular, in the writings of historians and social scientists on states and cities. I hope that at least a glimmer of these ideas was behind Tilly’s frequent challenges to urban historians to find more exciting and interesting things to say about cities than simply chronicling events, but I cannot be sure. Just as it is widely assumed that the agricultural revolution preceded and led to the rise of the first cities, so too do the majority of scholars see state formation (and written language) as pre-requisites for the growth of true cities. As I have been arguing, the reverse is much more likely, with urbanization preceding and leading to (or coevolving with) the transformative processes associated with the rise of agrarian societies and the formation of the centralized state. The stimulus of urban agglomeration began to have an effect 12,000 years ago, reached an early peak in Çatalhöyük, and would explode again in Sumeria with the formation of city-states, which would subsequently spread or be independently invented in many different regions around the world. Tilly picks up the story in Uruk and the Gilgamesh epic. While he is almost surely correct in stating that “no states existed anywhere in the world before 4,000 BCE” or 6,000-plus years ago, he is almost surely wrong in accepting the argument that cities first appeared in the same periods and places as states, as depicted in a canonical and historicist literature that muddles together the definitions of city, state, and even more Eurocentrically biased, civilization. For the most part, Tilly avoids this definitional confounding in his commentary on the “ambiguous” and variable relations between cities and states as distinctive entities, but he develops a typology and a “main historical trend” (see Figure 1 in Tilly’s article in this issue) that confuses more than clarifies these relations. The trend line expresses the familiar idea that the world has moved from a time when cities dominated to a time closer to today when centralized states became more powerful than cities. There may indeed be a trend toward increasing state versus urban power, but the coordinates of Tilly’s diagram confound how this trend is framed and interpreted. In the upper left corner of the diagram is the “autonomous city,” a remarkably empty but seemingly originating category that Tilly awkwardly exemplifies in contemporary Hong Kong and the Vatican, but not Singapore, which is more like the (non-autonomous?) “city-state” appearing at the more “integrated” upper right hand corner. The city-state represents an extreme of urban dominance, while the centralized state (China is described as a formidable example) is planted at the other lower right and culminating extreme, when states were dominant. Left over in
218
E.W. Soja
the lower left corner (states dominant but “segregated” rather than integrated) are nomadic empires. What is buried under this Autonomous Cities, City-States, Centralized States, Nomadic Empires classification is the constant generative force of cities, the possibility that all human societies have been urbanized societies for the past 12,000 years. First of all, no cities are ever autonomous, from nature, from state power when it exists, or from networks of trust. Furthermore, city-states are also centralized states. They may not be nation-states, but this is another story. And while nomadic empires may be less urbanized and centralized than other empires, few if any are entirely disconnected from important cities and their generative effects. Yes, nation-states have become more powerful bastions of coercion and social control than city-states, but they have always ruled through cities and the accumulation of national wealth has always hinged primarily—but never exclusively—on the stimulus of urban agglomeration. Tilly’s diagram and discussion of the rise of national state power, earlier in Europe than elsewhere, reflects and reinforces the conventional social historicist view that has led to the submergence of urban spatial causality and the privileging of socio-historical processes as opposed to a more balanced socio-spatial and spatiotemporal dialectic. After Westphalia, the story goes, cities become less important while the state grows in social power, leading too easily to the idea that with the formation of the nation-state scholars can henceforth forget about urban spatial causality, the generative power of cities, and urbanization as the driving force behind economic development. Cities were mummified in Western social and political theory, especially as causal factors (with a few exceptions, such as the old Chicago School). Things happen in cities but not because of cities. Even the urban in urban industrial capitalism, part of another major city-generated revolution, disappears from view and hence from systematic analysis in socialist theory. The existence of the national state as a fundamentally spatial or territorial form also tends to be forgotten as states become abstracted from cities and the urbanization process. There is much more to be explored in the co-evolution of cities and states between 5,000 and 300 BP, the onset of the industrial revolution and the rise of new urbanization processes, but I focus briefly here just on the concept of politics. As there was no evidence of an organized polity or centralized authority, it can be said that there was no true politics in the earliest cities, although some degree of social regulation was needed and probably existed to maintain a permanent urban settlement, even if only derived from a gender or inter-household division of labor. Almost by definition, however, we can claim that politics emerges in conjunction with the formation of the city-state. In his provocative genealogy of the concept of citizenship, Engin Isin (2002) roots his analysis of “being political” in the urbanization process, in the generative forces that arise from the socio-spatial agglomeration or clustering together of urban communities.5 Following Aristotle, Isin argues that politics are essentially urban 5
I have used the term synekism to refer to the stimulus of urban agglomeration, borrowing it from the Greek synoikismos as used by Aristotle and Thucydides to describe the formation of the city-state. (Soja 2000) Synoikismos refers to social groups coming together to live interdependently in one home space, oikos meaning home, the root of economics and ecology as well as ekistics, the study of human settlements. It also means to wed, to live interdependently together.
Cities and states in geohistory
219
generated, intrinsic to the city-state or polis, and reflective of deepening inequality of power and wealth. Without a sense of urban spatial causality, this argument becomes incomprehensible and almost impossible to understand and accept. Yet it is a vital part of what was happening in the eastern borderlands of the Mediterranean starting 8,000 years ago, as peaceful and egalitarian stateless cities became politically charged city-states. This mutually formative relation among cities, states, and politics is blurred and fractured in most of the literature shaped by social historicism, which tends to avoid any hint of urban spatial causality. The connections, however, are clearly expressed in language and our urban-related vocabulary. The city-state or polis gives us policy, polite, police, polity, and, of course, politics; while the Latin civitas is linked to civil, civic, citizen, civilization, and city. The Greek word to distinguish the urban dweller from the barbarian outsider or rural idiotes (hence Marx’s lament about the “idiocy” of rural life) is polites, a term redolent of the link between being urban and being political. Although it would require a great deal more research than has been done or that I can do to demonstrate conclusively, I would not be surprised if this interdependency among cities, states, and politics was fairly well understood by philosophers and historians before the mid-nineteenth century rise of social historicism. It is also likely that these interdependencies have subsequently been buried, distorted, or overlooked, indeed made to appear inconceivable to modern scholars. Explicitly recognized, however, they give new meaning to what happened in that second urban revolution. Emerging was a pronounced differentiation of social and spatial power, the creation of hierarchy based on kinship ties, gender, property ownership or class, and place of residence, not just urban vs. non-urban but also location within the more centralized and less egalitarian built environment, all sustained by new forms of coercion and social control. New populations entered the city and the urban fabric. A religious and political elite, increasing its powers of coercion and control, settled in the most favored places; a merchant class entered the city and took control of their turf; the military were given a place to live and work, as were other groups such as city-managers or bureaucrats and slaves. Cities grew in size to more than fifty thousand and competition for resources, trade, and plunder led to empire-building, as one city-state attempted to control other city-states to receive tribute in labor and goods. Geographically uneven development and globalization began to intensify, at least in the Old World, while city-states also multiplied in New World regions. City-based states and trust networks grew together, stimulating the spatial concentration of power over the accumulation of wealth and the coordination of Tilly’s three Cs: capital, coercion, and commitment. These concentrations of wealth and power were not social abstractions but were concretely expressed in spatially organized citystates/state-cities, symbolically and physically punctuated by palaces, markets, castles, and churches. Trade continued to be a vital part of urban development, as it had been from the start, but the largest transformative factor in the expansion of the city-state was more connected to the geographical efficiency of centralized territorial administration. Coercion, coordination, and commitment do not operate only in the abstract but in organized nodal spaces taking advantage of unusually intense “urbanization
220
E.W. Soja
economies” of administration and the wielding of power. Managing much larger scale urban societies increased the pressure to innovate not just in coordinating labor for expanding agricultural production but for maintaining imperial control over increasingly far-flung tributary territories.6 The growth of individual cities as well as the population size of city-based empires increasingly hinged upon administrative and managerial capacity and innovativeness.
The industrial capitalist city: a third urban revolution? The city-state and city-state based empires evolved in many different directions from their earliest forms. For many (Western) scholars, the medieval city represented a particularly inspired version of urbanized society, while others saw new freedoms emerging in the mercantile cities of Europe, signified in the Hanseatic League motto stadt luft macht frei. With the possible exception of the Greek philosophical discourse on democracy, this association of freedom with the city was a relatively new idea, reflecting the emergence of merchant based rather than state based cities. The rise and globalization of mercantile cities, many without significant state functions, had another geographical effect, leading to a rapidly growing coastal urbanization process, as port cities and long distance trade routes connected the littoral of all the worlds inhabited continents and contributed to the relative decline of some city-states located deeper inland. The urbanization process and the stimulus of urban agglomeration changed dramatically with the Industrial Revolution. As recent research in geographical economics has been telling us, the human activity that benefits most from urban agglomeration and urbanization economies is factory-based manufacturing or large scale industrialization. The Industrial Revolution accordingly triggered an exponential surge in urbanization unlike any that preceded it. The proportion of the world’s population that lives in cities remained very low, probably well under 1%, for the first 6,000 years of societal development. It rises only slightly over the next 5,000 years through the age of the city-state, but explodes in the late eighteenth century, when some states such as Great Britain and the Netherlands became predominantly urban for the first time as a third mode of urbanization emerged in association with the growth of the industrial capitalist city. By 1800, something remarkable had happened to the urbanization process. In the new kind of city, industrialization, capitalist economic development, the expanding power of the centralized nation-state, and what scholars began to call “modernization” became inextricably linked to urbanization. The macro-geography of this third urban revolution was quite different from the first two, with their origins primarily in Southwest Asia. Although there was a tendency to Europeanize the global development of the city-state, favoring Greek and Roman experiences (something Tilly assiduously avoids), industrial capitalist urbanization in its initial stages was 6
Among the largest urban agglomerations before the rise of the nation-state were Teotihuacan in present day Mexico, Xi’an (Sian) in China, Angkor in Cambodia, and, with perhaps as many as a million inhabitants, dynastic Alexandria and imperial Rome. There is still very little known about why some cities grew faster and were more generative than others. The literature addressing this question is sparse.
Cities and states in geohistory
221
decidedly focused on northwest Europe, at the outer edges of the old Roman empire in the British Isles and Euro-lowlands. The great imperial and commercial centers of London and Amsterdam would feel the effects of industrialization on a grander scale than most other cities, but perhaps the “purest” expression of the radically new urbanization processes took place in Manchester, which, from a small market town, grew by 1850 to over a million inhabitants as the second largest English city, after London. Manchester’s (like London’s and Amsterdam’s) industrialization was in large part a product of the globalization of mercantile capitalism and the formation of trading networks along the inhabited coasts of all the world’s continents. Manchester illustrates paradigmatically the intertwined co-evolution of urbanization and industrialization in a chicken and egg dynamic resembling what happened earlier with regard to agricultural development and state formation. Stated differently, the industrial revolution and the expansion of urban industrial capitalism were generated and carried forward in and from cities. The conventional wisdom barely recognizes or totally rejects this possibility. After all, the historians say, weren’t the first factories built along rural streams where rapids helped to generate needed power? But just as it can be said that, while some settlers in the first cities knew how to farm, the full-fledged Agricultural Revolution grew out of the urbanization process and the stimulus of urban agglomeration, so too can it be argued that the expansive Industrial Revolution could not have developed as it did without the generative force of urban spatial causality. A brief look at the internal geography reinforces this view. Urban growth was fueled primarily by the entry of three sizeable populations that were not present in preindustrial cities to any significant degree. First was the industrial bourgeoisie, the factory owners, who with their growing economic power could take up the most favored locations both in the center (often displacing the mercantile petit bourgeois residents) and outside the core city, in rural manors and villas once the exclusive preserve of the aristocracy. Much larger in numbers was the urban proletariat, torn away from the possibility of making a living other than by selling their labor in the city. Adding to this highly centralized urbanization process was a free-floating population (Marx’s lumpenproletariat) that provided both a labor reservoir and, in their miserable conditions, an effective tool to keep the working class from challenging the new economic system too vigorously. For the first time in geohistory, urban slums, poverty, and inequality served positive accumulation and integration functions. In the first phase in the development of the industrial capitalist city, the workers, the jobless, and the majority of machine-driven factories were overwhelmingly concentrated around the city center, where the stimulus of urban agglomeration was at its peak. Centripetal forces were enormous, as industrial producers gorged on the urbanization economies welling up in the city centers. Strong tendencies toward concentricity helped to shape the sociospatial order of the city, creating the geographical regularities noticed first by Engels in Manchester and later conceptualized by the spatially oriented Chicago School of Urban Ecology. (Soja 2000) By the end of the nineteenth century, such dense centrality spawned political unrest and sparked a selective and centrifugal decentralization that would continue to the present in the form of metropolitan urbanization and suburbanization.
222
E.W. Soja
The evolution of the state and state theory over the past two centuries is usually treated separately from the geohistory of urban industrialization, or marked with a triumphal note proclaiming the decline of urban social and spatial power. From a contemporary spatial perspective, however, it may be more accurate to say that the state consolidated around a multi-scalar and hierarchical national urban system that wove together administrative functions, the provisioning of services, commercial interaction and trade, and the surging growth of urban industrial production. In some states, all these hierarchies converged at the top in such dominant cities as London and Paris. In many others, the major political and economic cities differed. In all cases, however, it would be misleading to say that cities and urban power were simply subordinated and subsumed by the state. Citizenship was no longer defined by the city region of residence but it functioned and was sustained by an urban focused legal system and the overarching power of the iconic “capital” city. Continuing to sketch and schematize furiously, the industrial capitalist city and state can be seen as developing together through a remarkably regular series of lengthy boom periods, such as that which followed after 1848 and the Second World War, and equally long periods of what can be called crisis-generated restructuring, when new forms of capitalist development and urbanization took shape. Until roughly around 1970, national states consolidated their political and economic power and sovereignty so powerfully that the world seemed to consist only of state actors, now expanded in number through de-colonization. The flat map of the international state system took hold of the academic and popular imaginations to such a degree that nearly all other sources of political power and authority seemed to disappear and alternatives were almost inconceivable. The contemporary reconfiguration of cities and states7 Over the past 30 years, as almost everyone agrees, the sovereignty and power of the nation-state has come under greater challenge than at any other time since the establishment of the nation-state system. This has certainly not led to the end of the nation-state, as some writers prematurely presumed, but it has involved a profound restructuring or reconfiguration that has become the subject of a growing new literature. As these past 30 years have also seen a marked spatial turn in the social sciences and humanities, it is not surprising to find that an important segment of this new literature on state restructuring has emphasized a highly salient critical spatial perspective (Brenner 2004; Fraser 2008). During the same period, the urbanization process and urban theory have been experiencing an equally profound restructuring. Many are proclaiming an emergent new urban age, drawing encouragement from the UN announcement that the majority of the world’s population, more than 3.3 billion people, now live in cities. Others, with the same “end of” exaggeration applied to the nation-state, argue that cities are becoming obsolete 7
I have only read the first chapter of Tilly’s Cities and States in World History, so do not know how he would deal with the past two centuries. In his continuing connection of accumulation, coercion, coordination, commitment, and trust, there is at least the suggestion that our views of capitalist urbanization and state formation are not entirely incompatible. In this concluding section, however, I try to clarify the main source of our differences and to illustrate further the new ideas that are generated by emphatically spatializing Tilly’s look through history.
Cities and states in geohistory
223
with the distance-compressing new information and communications technologies. So what can we say about this profound reconfiguration of cities and states? How different from their predecessors have cities and states become? There has been broad agreement that three interactive forces have been primarily responsible for the restructuring of cities and states in the contemporary era. The new technologies have played a facilitative role in fostering an accelerated globalization of capital, labor, and culture and the formation of what is summarily called a “New Economy,” variably described as postfordist, information intensive, flexible, and global. While evidence of the effects of these three forces can be found nearly everywhere to some degree, they combine in unique ways in every city and state to pose new challenges to interpretation, comparative analysis, and theory-building. Faced with this complexity of outcomes and in keeping with my assertively spatial emphasis, I focus here on two closely related aspects of the contemporary restructuring of cities and states: rescaling and regionalization. Rescaling refers to the re-organization of the spatial scales and hierarchical structures through which cities and states operate. Scale has conventionally been seen as rigidly defined and almost naturally given. Influenced by the spatial theories of Henri Lefebvre, many geographers conceptualize scale as socially produced and capable of being reorganized in many different hierarchical arrangements. Particularly important are the relations between the national and supranational scales on the one hand and urban, metropolitan, and regional scales on the other. The notions of rescaling and regionalization in this sense provide a specifically spatial framework for understanding the co-evolution of cities and states. Three distinct scales of government are usually associated with the nation-state. At the top is the national government, with clearly defined and almost always superior powers of coercion, accumulation, coordination, and the maintenance of national trust, using Tilly’s terms. Local government (or the local state) has its own distinct responsibilities, with cities and municipalities often given additional functions and autonomy. In between, depending on many geohistorical variables, are regions, provinces, states, and other “mesogeographical” authorities. At each of these levels, there are designated capital cities and administrative headquarters where power is geographically concentrated to varying degrees. For more than a century, these territorial hierarchies remained relatively stable in most states, adjusting only slightly if at all to changing political, economic, and cultural conditions. Over the past 30 years, however, these governmental structures have become more fluid, leading some to speak of simultaneous processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, whereby some longstanding territorial authorities experience significant changes while at the same time new and different territorial forms begin to emerge (Brenner 2004). While economic restructuring at the global scale has been extensive, however, the governmental structures of the territorial state have tended to change much more slowly, giving rise to a multi-scalar series of what many perceive to be crises of governance.8 8 The growing use of the term “governance” rather than government is itself a reflection of state restructuring and rescaling. To the degree that rigid governmental structures continue to resist significant changes, the relations between the political and economic organization of the state tend to become increasingly dysfunctional. Rather than trying to change existing governmental systems, attention often shifts to creating alternative forms of regulatory governance that are more flexible and adaptive.
224
E.W. Soja
While manifested most clearly in the hierarchal structures of the nation-state, crises of governance can be identified at many different geographical scales, from the global to the local. Intensifying environmental challenges arising from climate change and global warming as well as worsening political problems linked to global geopolitics and economic crises have focused attention on the weaknesses of existing international authorities such as the United Nations and the World Bank. Similar but much smaller scale problems have been on the rise with local government, as existing structures seem no longer to be able to handle increasing problems of poverty, infrastructure repair, and public health and safety. The rescaling and regionalization of state power is a response to these global and local tensions. As the global economy becomes more integrated and reconstituted around a new hierarchy of global or world cities and city regions, national boundaries become more porous and the territorial exclusivity of the nation-state, its ability to act without challenge on what happens within its boundaries, is diluted. We have not yet reached a “borderless world” or the “end of the nation-state,” but profound changes have been taking place globally, nationally, regionally, and locally. Among the most important effects of globalization and economic restructuring has been a resurgence of regionalism above and below the normal scale of operations of the nation-state. Building on the model of the European Union, the first confederation of industrialized states in geohistory, has been a proliferation of multistate trading blocs such as NAFTA, MERCOSUR, ASEAN, and many others, filling in what 50 years ago was a virtually empty supranational scale, between the national and the global. Similarly, there has been a worldwide resurgence of subnational regionalisms, from Quebec and Catalonia to Eritrea and Aceh. The metropolitan regional scale also seem to be changing rapidly with the growth of expansive, polynucleated city regions increasingly asserting themselves as driving forces in the global geopolitical economy (Scott 1998, 2001). This has given new meaning to such terms as the city-state or, in a more recent invention, the “region-state” to describe such quasi-autonomous entities as Quebec or Catalonia. It is important to note, however, that supranational and subnational regionalization have not necessarily weakened the power of nation-states. As notably exemplified in the resuscitated nationalisms (or perhaps statisms is a better word) of some members of the European Union, the state may not be losing power but enhancing it through rescaling its activities, that is, continuing to be in control of supranational developments while also using decentralization and devolution policies to maintain rather than transfer authority over its internal urban and regional governments. What is clear is that we cannot generalize about whether the state is gaining or losing power and sovereignty in the current era, but we must realize that the nation-state system is no longer what it used to be and requires new modes of understanding and analysis. Similar processes of rescaling and regionalization have been affecting the modern metropolis. In Postmetropolis (2000), I described this crisis-generated urban restructuring as a product of globalization, the new economy of flexible capitalism, and the revolution in information and communications technology. Hedging somewhat, I described what was happening as the postmetropolitan transition. More recently, I have emphasized the emergence of a new development process I have called regional urbanization (Soja 2009, 2010).
Cities and states in geohistory
225
Regional urbanization began at least 30 years ago, layering into what has been for more than a century a process of metropolitan urbanization. Metropolitan urbanization has become so familiar and intensely studied that, like the nationstate, it is frequently considered to be the only conceivable form of urban development. The stereotypical modern metropolis tends to be monocentric, annular in the sense of having some identifiable concentricities, most notably a pronounced dualism between an urban core and various rings of suburbanization. There is almost always a steep density gradient, dropping off from a highly centripetal central business and government district, and flattening out in a much less dense suburbia, consisting of many municipalities the majority of whose working residents commute to employment centers in the urban core. Urbanism and suburbanism represent very different ways of life, the former more culturally and racially heterogeneous, and filled with galleries, museums, high crime rates, widespread drug use, and thick layers of social interaction while the suburbs are more homogeneous, monotonous, healthy—you know the rest. All this has begun to change with regional urbanization. The metropolis has become increasingly “unbound” in an urban variation of deterritorializationreterritorialization. The once clear border between urban and suburban is blurring significantly as the density gradient begins to flatten through a paradoxical urbanization of suburbia and a selective hollowing out of the inner city, in some cases to be refilled with flows of immigrants from around the world. It seems as if the city is being turned inside-out and outside-in at the same time. As inner boundaries blur, so too does the outer boundary of the regional city become less distinct, as the urban reaches outward to a global scale. The “postmetropolis” becomes more polycentric, enmeshed in a larger network of cities, and a new urban form, the global city region, emerges in between the subnational and metropolitan scales.9 The unbounding of the modern metropolis, as in part the product of the globalization of the urban, creating the most culturally and economically heterogeneous cities the world has ever seen, has been at the same time leading to the urbanization of the entire globe. It is this extension to its limits of processes begun hundreds if not thousands of years ago that is driving the rescaling and regionalization of cities, states, and their networks of trust, coercion, regulation, and identity formation. It both concludes our look through geohistory and opens up challenging new avenues of investigation.
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
9
To mention just two extreme cases of these changes, the expanded city region of Shanghai, covering most of the Yangtze River delta, has recently been estimated to contain 82 million inhabitants and several other megacity regions or megalopolitan regions (both new terms) now exceed 50 million. Just as startling, the urbanized area of Los Angeles (a relatively new census category roughly coincident with what was called the built-up area) passed Greater New York as the densest in the country, as millions of immigrants concentrate in the urban core while LA’s classic suburbia becomes increasingly urbanized.
226
E.W. Soja
References Brenner, N. (2004). New state spaces: Urban governance and the rescaling of statehood. New York: Oxford University Press. Foucault, M. (1986). Of other spaces. Diacritics, 16, 22–27. Fraser, N. (2008). Scales of justice: Re-imagining political space in a globalizing world. New York: Columbia University Press. Hodder, I. (2006). The Leopard’s tale: Revealing the mysteries of çatalhöyük. New York: Thames and Hudson. Isin, E. (2002). Being political: Genealogies of citizenship. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jacobs, J. (1969). The economy of cities. New York: Random House. Kenyon, K. (1960). Archeology in the holy land. London: Ernest Benn. McDonald, J. F. (1997). Fundamentals of urban economics. New York: Prentice Hall. Mumford, L. (1961). The city in history. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Scott, A. J. (1998). Regions and the world economy. New York: Oxford University Press. Scott, A. J. (2001). Global city-regions. New York: Oxford University Press. Soja, E. W. (1989). Postmodern geographies: The reassertion of space in critical social theory. London: Verso. Soja, E. W. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Oxford: Blackwell. Soja, E. W. (2000). Postmetropolis: Critical studies of cities and regions. Oxford: Blackwell. Soja, E. W. (2009). Regional planning and development theories. In N. Thrift & R. Kitchin (Eds.), The international encyclopedia of human geography. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Soja, E. W. (2010). From metropolitan to regional urbanization. In A. Loukaitou-Sideris & T. Banerjee (Eds.), Urban design: Roots, influences and trends. London: Routledge. Warf, B., & Arias, S. (Eds.). (2009). The spatial turn: Interdisciplinary perspective. London: Routledge. Edward W. Soja is Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA and occasional visiting professor in the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics. His major books include Postmodern Geographies (1989), Thirdspace (1996), and Postmetropolis (2000). His most recent book is Seeking Spatial Justice, an analysis of labor-community coalition building and struggles over the right to the city in Los Angeles, published in 2010 by University of Minnesota Press.
Part IV Trust Networks and Commitment
The contentious politics of religious diversity Wayne Te Brake
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
Abstract Though Charles Tilly’s scholarship did not treat the disintegration of Latin Christendom during and after the Protestant Reformation as one of the “Big Changes” in European history, his work is nevertheless supportive of the current effort to describe and account for the very contentious origins of religious diversity in Europe. From his work on contentious politics and collective violence to his work on durable inequalities and rights, Tilly’s theoretical precept and scholarly example continue both to inspire and to provoke new historical and social scientific research beyond the range of his own vision. His broadest challenge to his critics was and continues to be to go beyond criticism of his work to provide a better causal account of large-scale historical change, specifying the mechanisms and processes that recurrently alter the relations among historical actors.
To say that religion was not Charles Tilly’s strong suit as a scholar is probably a serious understatement. Though he wrote with a great deal of authority about the history of Europe from the Middle Ages to the present, the disintegration of Latin Christendom as a consequence of the Protestant Reformation did not rank among the “Big Changes” that, like state formation and the diffusion of capitalist economic relations, dominated his accounts of the European history. Likewise, religious reform movements and religious conflict rarely entered into his study of collective action or his enumerations of contentious political events. Still, it is striking that, as culture
This essay is an adaptation of my presentation to “Contention, Change and Explanation: A Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly,” co-sponsored by Columbia University and the Social Science Research Council, October 5, 2008. I wish to thank the participants in the conference for their generous suggestions for improvement. W. Te Brake (*) School of Humanities, Purchase College, State University of New York, 2006 HUM Building, Purchase, NY 10577, USA e-mail:
[email protected] M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_16, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
229
230
W. Te Brake
became an increasingly important focus in his later work, the Waldensians, a secretive religious sect in late-medieval Provence and the Dauphiné, served as the critical example of a “network of trust” with which he began his important book on Trust and Rule (Tilly 2005). As was so often the case, Tilly was acutely aware of his own blind spots, but he invariably challenged those of us who nevertheless pointed them out to follow our critiques with the elaboration of a better alternative. For the better part of a decade now, I have been trying to rise to one of those classic Chuck Tilly challenges. My work on religious coexistence in post-Reformation Europe grew out of an earlier extended conversation with Tilly on the role of ordinary political actors in the history of European state formation. I had been uncomfortable with two dimensions of Tilly’s work on early modern Europe: (1) the top-down dynamic of his warmaking and state-making model; and (2) his closely linked portrayal of popular politics prior to the nineteenth century as largely reactive and inconsequential—at best a useful tracer of the effects of state formation (see, for example, Tilly 1969; Tilly 1985; Tilly 1990). As I set out to offer an alternative account of how ordinary political actors could become the consequential allies of a variety of competitive rulers within composite states in the early modern period, I was struck by how the most consequential and durable of such alliances were based on religious solidarities, both during and after the Reformation (Te Brake 1998). Though I think that Tilly agreed that ordinary political actors could be deeply consequential in the early modern period and that they are an essential element in any account of the varieties of state formation, I rather doubt that he was convinced that we should take early modern religious movements as seriously as he took the early social movements of the nineteenth century. Still, before I could complete that first challenge, the powerful explosion of religious nationalism in the Balkans and the emergence of religious terrorism around the world convinced me that my next project would have to focus on the nature and consequences of religious conflict in European history. If we were entering into a new era of religious war, as some suggested (Juergensmeyer 2000; Sullivan 2001), it seemed to me that a focus on the Post-Reformation era in Europe could tell us a great deal about how religious conflict and war actually ends. From the beginning, Tilly was very supportive of my work on religious conflict and coexistence, though he warned me that I would be on my own. Nothing could be farther from the truth, however, because his work continued to provide the theoretical tools with which I could take on this enormous task. Here I would like to suggest how his work on a stunning range of critical issues is helping to reshape our understanding of the post-Reformation era or, more precisely, the religious peace that followed the age of religious wars.
From religious conflict to religious coexistence When I first began to do research on religious conflict, the best work—like that of Natalie Zemon Davis and Denis Crouzet (Davis 1975; Crouzet 1990)—was focused on the dynamics of community-level competition, often violent, between Protestants and Catholics during the Reformation era, but our understanding of the postReformation era as a whole was dominated by the so-called confessionalization
The contentious politics of religious diversity
231
paradigm (Reinhard 1983; Schilling 1995). Briefly stated, historians use the term “confessionalization” to describe the process by which European rulers, Protestant and Catholic alike, sought to build national churches and discipline the faithful, along the lines of sectarian “confessions” or statements of faith, as a means of building state capacity. As such, the confessionalization paradigm comports well with Charles Tilly’s early accounts of European state formation in the sense that during the post-Reformation era, official religious intolerance was the cutting edge of the political absolutism of aggressive state makers, such as the Austrian Habsburgs and Louis XIV of France. Like the traditional wisdom on state formation in general, however, the historical literature on confessionalization betrays an excessive deference to the well-documented goals and aspirations of intolerant rulers to the extent that it confuses the intentions of rulers with actual outcomes (Lotz-Heumann 2001). What it misses in its narrow focus on the official story is what James Scott would call the hidden transcript of religious dissent and, by extension, the largely hidden history of religious diversity in post-Reformation Europe (Scott 1990). Discovering that hidden transcript and documenting that largely hidden history is a daunting challenge, of course, but I have benefitted enormously from the collaboration of a new generation of religious historians who are busy uncovering and retelling stories of the survival of religious diversity all across Europe north of the Alps and the Pyrenees (Kaplan 2007; Luria 2005; Schwartz 2008; Barkey 2008; Parker 2008; Kooi 2000; Carroll 1995; Head 2005). The essential building blocks of a new account of religious diversity or coexistence in post-Reformation Europe are the stories of resistance, perseverance, and survival that dissidents gladly tell about themselves. Since the official archives of intolerant rulers are invariably informed by the closely related ideals of religious purity and political unity, it is most often necessary to look beyond the official archives of aggressive state makers and privileged or public churches to find the other side of the contentious historical interactions that produced and reproduced religious diversity in Reformation and post-Reformation Europe. Here the essential clues for the historian-detective are the many sites of dissident historical memory that serve as emblems of religious coexistence in an officially “confessional” world. Consider the following examples. I begin with one of my favorite emblems of religious coexistence in early modern Europe: The Cathedral Church of St. Peter in Bautzen, Germany (see Fig. 1). The reason this church is so significant to me is that St. Peter’s has been shared by Protestants and Catholics for almost 500 years, since the 1520s (Thiemann 2002). In the early sixteenth century, seeing the town of Bautzen and the surrounding territory of Upper Lusatia turn decisively toward Lutheran religious reforms, the Catholic Bishop responsible for this Cathedral (Dom) Church, invited the Lutherans in the community to share “his” magnificent worship space, in defiance of his superiors in the Catholic hierarchy who forbade all accommodations with the Lutheran “heretics.” The Lutherans and Catholics began their experiment in local accommodation of their religious differences in 1524, and in 1543, in the midst of the increasing religious competition in Germany more generally, they agreed to a formal contract to share St. Peter’s—a contract that still governs the division of the space and the times of worship to this day. (See Fig. 2) The German word for a church such as this is simultankirche or simultaneous church. Even today,
232
W. Te Brake
Fig. 1 St. Peter's Church, Bautzen, Germany, which has been shared by Protestants and Catholics since the 1520s (Photo by Wayne Te Brake)
Fig. 2 The times of worship for Protestants (10:30) and Catholics (9:00) at St. Peter's, the “simultankirche” (simultaneous church) in Bautzen (Photo by Wayne Te Brake)
The contentious politics of religious diversity
233
simultaneous or shared churches can be found in towns and villages scattered throughout Germany, Switzerland, and eastern France (Alsace). The significant differences in both theological belief and ritual practice that have divided the people of Bautzen since the sixteenth century are literally written all over St. Peter’s Church. The interior worship space is divided in the middle where the nave of the Church takes a slight bend. By this division the Catholics have the front portion of the nave plus the choir, with its side chapels, and there one finds a very prominent, highly decorated Baroque altar, dating from the period after the division first took place. By contrast, the other end of the nave, the Lutheran end, has very little adornment or decoration, and the focus is on the pulpit—the current one is new, but designed very much in the old style—as befits the Protestants’ liturgical focus on the preaching of the Word. What I find to be especially symbolic of this long and successful religious peace in Bautzen is the actual dividing line between the two parts of St. Peter’s Church. Today, a small railing has replaced a higher screen, which was originally about 3 m high, and there are two separate side entrances on either side of the railing (see Fig. 3). But above this symbolic division, there is a
Fig. 3 Dividing, and uniting, the worship space in St. Peter's Church, Bautzen (Photo by Wayne Te Brake)
234
W. Te Brake
Fig. 4 The “hidden” Menmonite Church, built around 1600, in Pingjum, Friesland, the Netherlands (Photo by Wayne Te Brake)
nineteenth-century painting of the Last Supper, which connects the two sides of the divided Church and unites the two worshipping communities iconographically. Another emblem of religious diversity in post-Reformation Europe, again a favorite, is in the small village of Pingjum in the northern Dutch province of Friesland (see Fig. 4). Behind a typical residential facade, under the back section of the roof, there is a small “Doopsgezind” or Mennonite Church, which is for all practical purposes invisible or hidden. Clearly this “hidden” Church, which was built around 1600, not far from where Menno Simons had been a pastor more than 50 years earlier, was intended for a small congregation (see Fig. 5). Indeed, the Mennonites were a small minority within the Dutch Republic, which was in the 80-year process winning its independence from Catholic Spain. Though the followers of Menno Simons were pacifists, they were considered dangerous radicals who denied the efficacy of infant baptism and refused to take oaths or take up arms. Consequently, in many parts of Europe, the Mennonites (or more generically the Anabaptists) were feared and actively persecuted. Given that this “hidden” Mennonite Church stood in close proximity to the official Reformed Church in the center of Pingjum, it is obvious that it was hidden only in the token sense that it was made to look like something other than a house of worship (see Fig. 6). While the Lutherans and Catholics of Bautzen shared a public worship space on relatively equal terms, the Mennonites and Reformed of Pingjum shared the public space of their village on decidedly unequal terms. During the long Revolt of the northern Dutch provinces against what they called Spanish “tyranny,” the small but well-organized Calvinist or Reformed congregations, which had previously been persecuted by the Catholic Church, turned the tables and demanded, as military victors, the exclusive right to occupy all the “public” churches
The contentious politics of religious diversity
235
Fig. 5 Interior space of the Mennomite Church, Pingjum, with seating for women and children in the center and men along the sides and rear (Photo by Wayne Te Brake)
Fig. 6 The Menmonite and Reformed churches of Pingjum, in close proximity to one another for four centuries (Photo by Wayne Te Brake)
236
W. Te Brake
in the newly independent provinces. Consequently, the Dutch Reformed Church became the privileged “public” church, and all other groups—Catholics as well as Mennonites, Lutherans, and other Protestants—were required to worship in sacred spaces that did not look like churches from the outside (Kaplan 2002b). Nominally hidden churches can still be found scattered throughout the Netherlands and Great Britain, but probably the most famous “hidden” church is the one built into the top three floors of a beautiful canal house in the middle of the city of Amsterdam, in an area that is today part of the city’s infamous red-light district (see photos at http:// www.opsolder.nl/eng/home.php). This private Catholic chapel, known affectionately as “Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder” (Our Dear Lord in the Attic), was built in the 1650s and was at the time one of more than 60 hidden Catholic churches in this bustling commercial and banking center. My final illustrations of religious diversity in post-Reformation Europe are located in Ireland. I start with what Irish Catholics call a “mass rock”—a makeshift structure, usually a rock slab, that served as an altar where Catholic priests conducted religious services clandestinely under conditions of active persecution (See Fig. 7). Despite the strenuous efforts of their English Protestant rulers from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries to displace or repress Catholicism, the majority of Irish not only retained their “popish” beliefs, but they maintained rudimentary forms of Catholic worship throughout the early modern period (Carroll 1999). This mass rock, which is quite effectively “hidden” along a fence line on the farm of Tommy Devereaux outside the village of Tomhaggard, County Wexford, in southeastern Ireland, has been “modernized” to commemorate the violent death of an “illegal” priest at the hands of British “red coats” while serving Mass at dawn on
Fig. 7 The Mass Rock, hidden along a fence line, outside Tomhaggard, County Wexford, Ireland. (Photo by Wayne Te Brake)
The contentious politics of religious diversity
237
Christmas morning in 1653. It is still used annually on Christmas morning for community worship services, rain or shine. Tomhaggard is also home to a simple “penal chapel”—so called because it was constructed to shelter priests serving Mass in the eighteenth century, when local authorities began to relax their repression of Catholic religious practice under the anti-Catholic Penal Laws. Not many penal chapels or “hidden” mass houses remain in the Republic of Ireland, but the countryside is still dotted with mass rocks—like the remote altar at Dissert in Country Donegal, in the far northwest of Ireland, which is still used each year in late June by the local Catholic parish to celebrate Mass in commemoration of the years of persecution under the Penal Laws (see Fig. 8). In the absence of formal places of worship or even priestly leadership, Irish Catholics also maintained their traditional spiritual practices at pilgrimage sites and what they called “holy wells,” where they prayed and performed penitential acts without any official sanction whatsoever (see Fig. 9). This site, called St. Conal’s Well, is located near the Dissert mass rock outside Bruckless in Country Donegal and is still used as a site of popular religious devotion. Now, the mere survival of Catholic religious practices under conditions of active persecution hardly conforms to our fondest images of a “Peaceable Kingdom,” where the lion lays down with the lamb, but it is nevertheless an essential part of the “religious peace” that emerged in post-Reformation Europe. For the essential point that we need to understand is that despite the official intolerance of many early modern state makers, the official repression of religious differences was ultimately a failure in post-Reformation Europe—not just in Ireland, but also in the southern Netherlands, Switzerland, and France—in part because active repression was hard work and thus only episodic; but more fundamentally, because the immense determination and inventiveness of the “dissenters” eventually won the day.
Fig. 8 The Mass Rock, adjacent to an unofficial Catholic graveyard, at Dissert, County Donegal, Ireland. (Photo by Wayne Te Brake)
238
W. Te Brake
Fig. 9 St. Conal's Well, which is still used as a site of popular devotion, in Bruckless, County Donegal, Ireland. (Photo by Wayne Te Brake)
Each of these places—Bautzen, Pingjum, and Tomhaggard—serves as a site of historical memory that has a story to tell, and each of these experiences was deliberately hidden from view historically. But today, as I have discovered to my great amazement, each story is only a simple Google search away. Like the claims of authoritarian rulers and their authoritative apologists, however, the stories of “heroic survival” under conditions of “religious tyranny” that the sites of dissident historical memory commemorate are incomplete, selective, and partial. They are incomplete in the sense that the numerous commemorative sites that exist today clearly represent only the tip of a much larger iceberg, most of which will likely remain obscured under the water line of incomplete documentation and limited memory. They are also selective in the complex way that they commemorate some events and eras, but not others. And they are partial in the crucial sense that they, too, tell only one side of a much more complicated tale, albeit from the bottom-up as opposed to the more prevalent top-down perspective. The stories of dissident survival are nevertheless an essential complement to the “official” story of unity and purity. Somewhere between the official narratives of unity and purity and the dissident stories of resistance and survival, we can reconstruct a contentious political history of religious conflict and coexistence in Reformation and post-Reformation Europe. Just as religious conflict was pervasive in early modern Europe, so also was a durable pattern of religious coexistence. But rather than polar opposites on a theoretical scale or alternative experiences in temporal sequence, conflict and coexistence must be seen as complementary elements of a contentious political process that engaged a broad range of rulers and a bewildering variety of subjects in the historical process of accommodating religious differences. The history of religious diversity in Europe is, therefore, a composite history that encompasses the myriad stories of determined
The contentious politics of religious diversity
239
confessionalization and heroic resistance embedded in official archives and sites of dissident memory, respectively.
The varieties of religious diversity The emblems of coexistence in Bautzen, Pingjum, and Tomhaggard illustrate three of the most common forms of religious coexistence (Te Brake 2009, p. 76). In Bautzen, we encounter an example of confessional parity in which multiple religious groups share responsibility for and access to the public domain. Besides the shared churches of Germany, Switzerland, and France, we can find additional examples of confessional parity on the scale of whole communities in bi-confessional cities in Germany and bi-confessional territories in Switzerland. The principle of confessional parity also operated at the imperial level among the members of the German Reichstag and at the national level among the constituent members of the Swiss Confederation. In Pingjum, we encounter an example of confessional privilege in which a dominant religious group—an established or “public” church—enjoys exclusive or privileged access to the public domain and authorities impose restrictions or costs on “dissenters” without enforcing ritual or theological conformity through active repression. Confessional privilege was characteristic of both the Dutch Republic and Great Britain—that is, England, Scotland, and Wales, except under the Commonwealth in the 1550s—and of some constituent parts of the German Empire and the Swiss Confederation. In Tomhaggard, we encounter the secretive forms of coexistence that were necessary under conditions of active religious repression. This, the most profoundly hidden form of religious coexistence, was characteristic of the Habsburg domains in Austria and the southern Netherlands, Ireland, France after 1685 and some of the constituent parts of the German Empire and the Swiss Confederation. To these, the most common, types of religious coexistence, we should add a fourth, which I call ad-hoc tolerance. Throughout a large swathe of southeastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire offered specific communities of Orthodox Christians and Jews—though not generally Roman Catholics—a relative freedom of religious worship and a significant degree of self-regulation as so-called People of the Book (Barkey 2008). Similarly, a variety of rulers in post-Reformation Europe granted specific communities of Jews a limited degree of self-regulation in walled-off ghettos, as in Italy, or as more visible exceptions to the general rule of Christian uniformity in places such as Metz, Hamburg, and Amsterdam (Miskimin 2002; Whaley 1985; Bodian 1997). In addition, throughout early modern Europe, the widespread phenomenon of embassy chapels—formal diplomatic arrangements to protect religiously different foreign delegations in political capitals as well as market centers—functioned as discrete exceptions to the general exclusion of religious minorities (Kaplan 2002a). These instances of formally chartered “privileges” and protections accumulated dramatically in the course of the early modern period, especially as some of Europe’s prominent state makers sought to attract the economic dynamism they associated with diverse religious traditions and trust networks. Altogether, the varieties of religious diversity that are illustrated by the histories of Bautzen, Pingjum, and Tomhaggard represent the kind of historical problem that
240
W. Te Brake
exclusive
CULTURAL POLITICS OF RULERS
inclusive
high Confessional Privilege
SALIENCE OF RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES IN PUBLIC POLITICS
Confessional Parity
Ad-hoc Tolerance
Repression
Political Integration
low Fig. 10 Variable Patterns of Religious Co-existence in Early Modern Europe
Charles Tilly reveled in, but in studying historical variations, both his precept and example make plain, it is critically important to specify clearly the range of variation that one seeks to understand (Tilly 2008). The different forms of religious diversity that early modern historians have begun to describe vary, it seems to me, along at least two dimensions: the cultural claims of rulers, on the one hand, and the public visibility and/or political salience of religious differences, on the other. As Fig. 10 suggests, the public politics of early modern European rulers varied with regard to the formal inclusion or exclusion of multiple religious groups; at the same time, the experiences of ordinary political subjects varied considerably with regard to the salience or visibility of their religious identity differences in public politics. In these ranges of variation, then, we can locate the confessional parity of Bautzen in the upper-right (inclusive/visible) quadrant, the confessional privilege of Pingjum in the upper-left (exclusive/visible) quadrant, and repression and secrecy of Tomhaggard in the lower-left (exclusive/invisible) quadrant. By my reckoning, ad hoc tolerance of specific religious groups can be located in the center of the diagram’s ranges of variation on both the inclusion and the visibility scale. By extension, I use political integration, in the lower-right (inclusive/invisible) quadrant, to denote situations, such as modern French laïcité or modern Turkish secularism, in which rulers are inclusive of multiple religious groups but do not admit their religious differences as a salient feature of public politics; that such experiences were exceedingly rare in post-Reformation Europe is, of course, an important feature of the historical problem that Fig. 10 represents. Describing historical variation is one thing; accounting for that variation is quite another. But before we turn to matters of historical explanation, it is important to underscore how in this new account of the religious struggles of the Reformation and
The contentious politics of religious diversity
241
post-Reformation eras the object of our explanations has changed. To start, the focus has shifted from conflict to coexistence; instead of asking primarily why (violent) religious conflicts occur, we are asking what happens as a consequence, when and where they do occur. Similarly, the object of our explanation is a new or changing set of political-cultural relations among Europe’s politically diverse rulers and their religiously diverse subjects. Thus, rather than cataloging a set of fixed characteristics in particular regimes—for example, the “success” or “failure” of religious reform movements within particular polities, or the “winners” and “losers” in Europe’s succession of religious wars—the “problem” of religious diversity requires us to explain a variety of historical trajectories through and beyond often violent religious conflict, both within and among the various polities of post-Reformation Europe. Indeed, composite states like the German Empire, the Swiss Confederation, the Dutch Republic, and the British monarchies clearly incorporated multiple forms of religious diversity. Even the cultural absolutism of Louis XIV formally accommodated Lutherans in Alsace and Jews in Metz at the same time as, in 1685, it revoked the Edict of Nantes, which since 1598 had granted legitimacy, self-regulation, and protection to Huguenots (Calvinists) elsewhere in France. So how, then, are we to account for the variations in religious diversity evident in post-Reformation Europe? Charles Tilly’s broadest work on contentious politics, in collaboration with Doug McAdam and Sidney Tarrow, challenges us to demonstrate how a limited set of recurrent mechanisms and processes can account for durable forms of religious coexistence, though our complementary goal should be “to show how different settings, sequences, and combinations of mechanisms produce contrasting political processes and outcomes” (McAdam et al. 2001, p. 83). Here the stories of heroic resistance and survival that dissidents tell about themselves give us valuable clues, and in recent work on what I consider the most difficult cases of religious diversity, I have identified a set of relational and cognitive mechanisms (see Fig. 11) that were recurrently evident in the histories of dissident survival under conditions of active repression: not just in Ireland, but also in France (after the
mechanism
type
effect
Secrecy
Relational
Hides group differences, either of necessity or to keep up appearances
Dissimulation
Relational
Protects individuals from detection/prosecution
Casuistry
Cognitive
Relieves group members from strict norms
Private Education
Cognitive
Counteracts official ideology and reaffirms group identity
Indifference
Relational
Protects “others” from detection
Connivance
Relational
Undercuts official prosecution
Toleration
Cognitive
Defends diversity and its effects
Fig. 11 Mechanisms in the “Survival” of Religious Diversity
242
W. Te Brake
revocation of the Edict of Nantes), in the southern Netherlands under Spanish and Austrian Habsburg rule, and in parts of the Swiss Confederation (Te Brake 2009, p. 73). These mechanisms recurrently altered the relations among historical actors—in this case, principally, repressive rulers, dissenting subjects, and their “neighbors”— in identical or closely similar ways, but in different settings, they nevertheless produced distinctive stories of survival for Irish Catholics, French and Flemish Calvinists, and Swiss Anabaptists. In order to explain the other types of religious diversity, we would have to identify different sets or combinations of mechanisms. As we move toward the top of Fig. 10, for example, secrecy and dissimulation would naturally become less a recurrent part of the story, though private devotions and private education will be recurrently evident in many of the histories of diversity. With the increasing visibility and salience of religious identities in public politics, ongoing bargaining, both formal and informal, among the principal actors becomes more evident, and in situations of ad hoc tolerance, formal bargaining is essential to the stories. As we move from exclusion to inclusion of religiously distinct groups, identity-boundary maintenance mechanisms, such as the discouragement or prohibition of interfaith marriages, might become more prevalent in order to counteract any contrary tendency toward simple assimilation or amalgamation of the competing “confessions.” Clearly, a fuller specification of the variant combinations of mechanisms that may be said to produce and reproduce all of the distinctive histories of religious diversity in particular settings is not possible within the compass of this short essay. But as important as these stories are as the building blocks of a new account of European cultural history, they are not the whole story; nor are they discrete or selfcontained pieces of history. Another equally important challenge—and, by extension, opportunity—represented by the larger body of Charles Tilly’s work is to offer a better account of the Big Changes in European history. In this case, Tilly’s challenge is to show, on a larger comparative historical scale, what difference the emergence and survival of religious differences in Reformation and post-Reformation Europe actually made. In order to complete the analytic process, then, historians of religious diversity need to find ways to incorporate the local and parochial stories of religious diversity into larger and better accounts of political and cultural change in early modern Europe, and the place to start, it seems to me, is with the history of war making and state making during and after the Reformation.
Toward a comparative history of religious diversity In order to connect the contentious politics of religious diversity with the traditional narrative of European war making and state formation, we must necessarily begin with a description of the increasingly destructive religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the settlements that eventually brought them to an end. Though it is perhaps conventional to define religious war in terms of the motives of those who prosecute them, what makes these wars religious, from the relational perspective of contentious politics, is that (1) the forces in conflict identified their enemies in terms of their religious beliefs, practices, or affiliations; and (2) mobilization for the conflict invoked broader networks of support and
The contentious politics of religious diversity Religious War
243 Military Outcome or Peace Settlement
Kappel Wars (Switzerland) (1529, 1531)
National Peace [Landfrieden] of Kappel (1529), Second National Peace of Kappel (1531)
Schmalkaldic Wars (Germany) (1545-1555, intermittently)
[Peace of Nürmberg (1532)], Augsburg Interim (1548), Treaty of Passau (1552), Religious Peace [Religionsfriede] of Augsburg (1555)
Civil/Religious Wars (France) (1562-1627, intermittently)
Separate Edicts ended each of the nine wars; the most successful was the Edict of Nantes (1598), which was revoked by Louis XIV (1685)
Eighty Years’ War (Low Countries) (1568-1648)
The Pacification of Ghent (1576), Peace of Religion (1578), Twelve Years’ Truce (1609-1621), and the (first) Treaty of Münster, which was part of the Peace of Westphalia (1648)
Thirty Years’ War (Germany) (1618-48)
The Treaty of Osnabrück and the (second) Treaty of Münster, which were part of the Peace of Westphalia (1648)
Civil Wars (Scotland, Ireland, England) (1638-53)
No formal settlement; war ended in England with the capture, trial, and execution of Charles I (1649); war ended in Ireland and Scotland with Cromwell’smilitary campaigns (1650-53); monarchy restored in 1660.
Fig. 12 Europe's Religious Wars and their Settlements
solidarity rooted in religious identities. Figure 12 catalogues the most important clusters of religious war in early modern Europe; it underscores in its broad outline the fact that there was religious war somewhere in Europe north of the Alps and Pyrenees almost continuously for well over a century between 1529 and 1653.
244
W. Te Brake
Though Charles Tilly did not work on religious war in particular, his more general work on the politics of collective violence allows us to see the problem of religious violence and war in a larger comparative context (Tilly 2003). Situating and explaining the incidence of coordinated destruction within an integrated analysis of the politics of collective violence, Tilly emphasized shades of variation rather than hard and fast boundaries among such heavily freighted concepts as war, genocide, and terror. (Distinctions among these categories, he suggested, rest on the relative degree of inequality among the contestants.) With regard to Europe’s civil and religious wars, then, Tilly’s work alerts us to the family resemblance among different sorts of coordinated destruction without requiring that we choose between terms such as “war” and “civil war,” or even “low-intensity conflicts.” What started out as a civil war in France in 1562, for example, easily escalated into an interstate war in the coming years as many of the actors sought and received the help of external allies, but it also frequently settled locally or regionally into low-intensity conflict or even veered off into something like a campaign of annihilation, as in the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres in 1572. Nationally, however, we can safely say that France’s violent religious conflicts remained in or near the realm of coordinated destruction, with notable interludes of relative peace following negotiated truces, for decades to come (Jouanna et al. 1998; Holt 1995). Like his collaborative work on contentious politics, Tilly’s relational approach to collective violence, in general, and war, in particular, shuns universal explanations of closely defined categorical phenomena; instead, he focuses on the causal mechanisms and processes that help us to account for the complexity of specific historical developments. Following Tilly’s lead, then, my own work on religious war identifies the mechanisms and processes that, in various combinations and under widely varying circumstances, recurrently led to the emergence of politically salient religious identities and, by extension, to religious conflicts, violence and wars that activated those identities as markers of enmity. But if we really want to improve on Tilly’s own narratives of European war making and state formation, we need to move beyond the incidence of religious war and focus as well on the settlements that eventually brought the wars of religion to an end. For to describe and account for the outcomes that these settlements validated and preserved is to measure the differences that conflicts over religion—both domestic and international—made in the emergence of modern European politics and culture. For the purposes of this brief discussion, let me suggest just a few important addenda or improvements that the comparative history of religious diversity might offer. To begin, Fig. 12 indicates that five of the six principal clusters of religious war ended in a political settlement expressed in a truce, a treaty, or an edict, and even in the exceptional case—the civil wars in Scotland, Ireland, and England— unambiguous winners and losers are hard to find, inasmuch as the failure of the revolutionary Puritan regime resulted in the restoration of the monarchy in 1560. But if the bulk of the religious wars ended in some kind of negotiated compromise, it was certainly not without difficulty. Between the first shocks of the Kappel Wars in 1529 and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, many attempted settlements went wrong and gave way to renewed violence and war, but in the process of trying and failing, the forces in conflict were able to strike a series of political compromises that made enduring peace possible. Though peace was obviously difficult to achieve, we can
The contentious politics of religious diversity
245
say in retrospect that the essential elements of durable peace were already evident in the first Swiss Landfrieden in 1529: (1) the mutual recognition of religiously distinct and antagonistic groups; (2) the provision of physical security for all parties to the agreement; and (3) the creation or revitalization of formal political or legal processes to resolve, short of the recourse to violent means, the disagreements that would inevitably arise in the future (Strickler 1876, pp. 1478–1483). The difference between the relatively successful and unsuccessful agreements was not so much the presence or absence of one or more of these essential elements—though the documents certainly became more complex over time—but rather, the grudging consent of otherwise intolerant actors to compromises, both political and religious, that they considered less than desirable, if not downright abhorrent. Given the difficulty of accepting compromise on all sides, it is also clear that the peace settlements did not so much create new circumstances, which we might call peaceful; rather, the negotiated settlements validated existing circumstances, which the combatants were reluctant to accept. To be sure, the depredations of war could alter religious and political facts on the ground, but neither the wars nor their settlements brought into being the essential facts of religious diversity that all the agreements validated and the successful ones preserved. Here is where we find the principal intersection between the ongoing contentious politics of religious diversity and the episodic history of religious war. It was the contentious political interactions of rulers and subjects that brought diversity into being, but it was the successful implementation of elite political settlements that made enduring peace possible by validating religious differences and providing for security for all parties to the agreements. The fact that these agreements among elite actors frequently entailed nonreligious incentives—pensions for warlords, new territories for dynasts, and the like—to make durable compromises acceptable should neither undermine the importance of the political-cultural outcome—religious diversity as the rule rather than the exception in post-Reformation Europe—nor should it obscure the very consequential role of ordinary political actors—subjects as opposed to rulers— in producing this stunning cultural transformation. Although neither treaties nor military victories produced religious uniformity, even in the polities of aggressively repressive rulers, the survival of religious diversity could certainly be costly. While the immediate benefits of a variegated peace might be obvious to those who suffered most from the depredations of war, the long-term costs of religious diversity quite reliably accumulated in the form of what Charles Tilly called durable inequalities (Tilly 1998). At the beginning of the process of religious differentiation that the early Reformation era represented, the differences between the adherents of different sects might be primarily or even exclusively religious, but over time, as rulers moved to enforce their demands for religious conformity, as communities moved to share access to the public domain, and as dissenters came to accept the conditions of their subordination to an official or public church, religious differences came to coincide with other social and political differences that made their differences or inequalities much more durable. For this reason, the myriad stories of religious diversity in early modern Europe often gave rise to stories of resentment, grievance, or estrangement that so often fuel new or resurgent conflicts in the modern world (Sells 1996).
246
W. Te Brake
The stories of resistance, perseverance, and survival, with which I began this exploration of the contentious political history of religious diversity, are invariably the heroic stories of groups or networks of dissidents, and in turn, the forms of diversity that were validated and preserved under the religious peace that emerged in the post-Reformation era were experienced collectively by congregations, communities, and even whole polities. But in the succession of agreements that eventually made enduring peace possible, we can also see the fascinating historical development of something much more individual: the articulation of the individual’s freedom of religious conscience. I see the beginning of that thread in the slightly awkward language of the first article of the first Swiss Landfrieden in 1529: “...since no one should be coerced into faith, that therefore the Orte [Territories] and their subjects should also not be coerced” (Strickler 1876, p. 1479). It reemerges in the more famous Religionsfriede of Augsburg (1555) when it assures the individual subjects of otherwise intolerant rulers that they may leave for another jurisdiction, “and on our honor and faith shall in no way be punished” (Vedder 1901, p. 7). It appears again in the Fourth Article of the Edict of Amboise, which ended the first French War in 1563; following a specification of the limited opportunities for collective worship by French Protestants this crucial article asserts: “Nevertheless, everyone may live and dwell everywhere without being pursued or molested, forced or constrained for matters of conscience” (Potter 1997, p. 83). It also figures prominently in the Union of Utrecht (1579), which served as the founding document of the Dutch Republic; among other things, Article 13 provides that “each inhabitant enjoys freedom of religion and no one is persecuted or questioned about his religion” (Kossmann and Mellink 1974, pp. 179–80). Against this background, then, we can say that the freedom of religious conscience emerges full-blown in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Article V, par. 28, of the Treaty of Osnabrück stipulates that anyone who “...shall profess and embrace a Religion different from that of the Lord of the Territory, shall in consequence of the said Peace be patiently suffer’d and tolerated, without any Hindrance or Impediment to attend their Devotions in their Homes and in private, with all Liberty of Conscience, and without any Inquisition or Trouble....” After declaring that no one shall “...be despised anywhere upon account of their Religion...,” the paragraph concludes “...that in these and all other the like things they shall be treated in the same manner as Brethren and Sisters, with equal Justice and Protection” (Parry 1969–1981, vol. 1, pp. 228–229). Recall that the Peace of Westphalia had been negotiated over a period of 5 years by representatives of more than 180 self-regulating polities, including all of Europe’s most significant states. To be sure, the Treaty of Osnabrück, which was concluded by the German Emperor and the King of Sweden, plus his Protestant allies, is less well known than the companion Treaty of Münster, which was concluded by the German Emperor and the King of France, plus his Catholic allies. But the religious provisions of the Treaty of Osnabrück—including the freedom of religious conscience—were simply incorporated into the Treaty of Münster and were thus an integral part of this unprecedented international agreement, which many consider the founding document of the modern state system (Repgen 1998). Now, in principle, a story about how the “right” of free religious conscience emerged from the protracted struggles over religion in early modern Europe comports well with Charles Tilly’s important work on democratization and human
The contentious politics of religious diversity
247
rights (Tilly 2007). Indeed, in a seminal, though somewhat obscure, essay entitled “Where Do Rights Come From?” Tilly linked his notion of rights as “enforceable claims” that citizens/subjects make on governments to his historical assertion that “citizenship rights came into being because organized members of the general population bargained with state authorities for several centuries....” (Tilly 1992, p. 10). But my reading of the Peace of Westphalia clearly runs counter to the traditional wisdom of the last century or so, inasmuch as the Peace of Westphalia is usually said to have confirmed the thoroughly authoritarian principle of cuius regio eius religio (whose the rule, his the religion). Even Tilly, using the history of religious rights in Europe as an example of how rights can be lost, asserts in that same essay that after the peace settlements of 1648, “[t]he rights of religious minorities declined through much of Europe, as rulers sought the organizational advantages of cultural homogeneity and exemplary intolerance” (Tilly 1992, p. 27). Some 20 years later, I would like to think that I could have convinced Tilly to agree with my reading of that very contentious history, but, at the very least, I am sure he would agree that viewed from the perspective of religious diversity, the history of European war making and state formation takes on decidedly different hues.
References Barkey, K. (2008). Empire of difference: The Ottomans in comparative perspective. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Bodian, M. (1997). Hebrews of the Portuguese nation: Conversos and community in early modern Amsterdam. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Carroll, M. P. (1995). Rethinking popular Catholicism in Pre-famine Ireland. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 34(3), 0354–0365. Carroll, M. P. (1999). Irish pilgrimage: Holy wells and popular Catholic devotion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Crouzet, D. (1990). Les guerriers de Dieu: la violence au temps des troubles de religion (vers 1525–vers 1610). Seyssel: Champ Vallon. Davis, N. Z. (1975). Society and culture in early modern France. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Head, R. (2005). Fragmented dominion, fragmented churches: The institutionalization of the Landfrieden the Turgau, 1460–1600. Archiv Für Reformationsgeschichte, 96, 117–144. Holt, M. P. (1995). The French wars of religion, 1562–1629. New approaches to European history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jouanna, A., Boucher, J., Biloghi, D., & Le Thiec, G. (1998). Histoire et dictionaire des Guerres de Religion. Paris: Robert Laffont. Juergensmeyer, M. (2000). Terror in the mind of god: The global rise of religious violence. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kaplan, B. J. (2002a). Diplomacy and domestic devotion: Embassy chapels and the toleration of dissent in Early Modern Europe. Journal of Early Modern History, 6, 341–361. Kaplan, B. J. (2002b). Fictions of privacy: House chapels and the spatial accommodation of religious dissent in early modern Europe. The American Historical Review, 107, 1031–1064. Kaplan, B. J. (2007). Divided by faith: Religious conflict and the practice of toleration in early modern Europe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kooi, C. (2000). Liberty and religion: Church and state in Leiden’s Reformation, 1572–1620. Leiden: Brill. Kossmann, E. H., & Mellink, A. F. (Eds.). (1974). Texts concerning the revolt of the Netherlands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lotz-Heumann, U. (2001). The concept of “confessionalization”: A historiographical paradigm in dispute. Memoria y Civilizacion, 4, 93–201.
248
W. Te Brake
Luria, K. (2005). Sacred boundaries: Religious coexistence and conflict in early-modern France. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America. McAdam, D., Tarrow, S., & Tilly, C. (2001). Dynamics of contention. New York: Cambridge University Press. Miskimin, P. B. (2002). One king, one law, three faiths: Religion and the rise of absolutism in seventeenthcentury Metz. Westport: Greenwood Press. Contributions to the Study of World History, 90. Parker, C. H. (2008). Faith on the margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Parry, C. (Ed.). (1969–1981). The consolidated treaty series. 231 vols. Dobbs Ferry: Oceana Publications. Potter, D. (Ed.). (1997). The French wars of religion: Selected documents. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Reinhard, W. (1983). Zwang zur Konfessionalisierung? Prolegomena zur einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalter. Zeitschrift für historische Forschung, 10, 257–277. Repgen, K. (1998). Negotiating the peace of Westphalia: A survey with an examination of the major problems. In K. Bussmann & H. Schilling (Eds.), 1648: War and peace in Europe. Vol. 1, Politics, religion, law and society (pp. 355–372). Münster/Osnabrück: Veranstaltungsgesellschaft 350 Jahre Westfälischer Friede. Schilling, H. (1995). Confessional Europe. In T. A. Brady, H. A. Oberman, & J. D. Tracy (Eds.), Handbook of European history, 1400–1600. Vol. 2, visions, programs and outcomes (pp. 641–681). Leiden: E. J. Brill. Schwartz, S. B. (2008). All can be saved: Religious tolerance and salvation in the Iberian Atlantic world. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sells, M. (1996). The bridge betrayed: Religion and genocide in Bosnia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Strickler, J. (Ed.). (1876). Amtliche Sammlung der älteren Eidgenössischen Abschiede. Vol. 4, part 1b, Eidgenössischen Abschiede aus dem Zeitraume von 1529 bis 1532. Zürich: J. Schabeliz. Sullivan, A. (2001). This is religious war. The New York Times Magazine, 7 October. Te Brake, W. (1998). Shaping history: Ordinary people in European politics, 1500–1700. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Te Brake, W. (2009). Emblems of coexistence in a confessional world. In S. Dixon, D. Freist, & M. Greengrass (Eds.), Living with relgious diversity in early modern Europe (pp. 53–79). Alderschot, UK: Ashgate Publishing. Thiemann, M. (Ed.). (2002). Von Budissin nach Bautzen: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Stadt Bautzen. Bautzen: Lusatia Verlag. Tilly, C. (1969). Collective violence in European perspective. In H. D. Graham & T. R. Gurr (Eds.), The history of violence in America: Historical and comparative perspectives. New York: F. A. Praeger. Tilly, C. (1985). War making and state making as organized crime. In P. B. Evans, D. Rueschemeyer, & T. Skocpol (Eds.), Bringing the state back in. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. (1990). Coercion, capital, and European states, AD 990–1990. Studies in social discontinuity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Tilly, C. (1992). Where do rights come from? In L. Mjøset (Ed.), Proceedings from Vilhelm Aubert Memorial Symposion 1990. Vol. 2, contributions to the comparative study of development (pp. 9–36). Oslo: Institute for Social Research. Tilly, C. (1998). Durable inequality. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tilly, C. (2003). The politics of collective violence. Cambridge studies in contentious politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. (2005). Trust and rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. (2007). Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. (2008). Explaining social processes. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Vedder, H. C. (Ed.). (1901). The peace of Augsburg. Historical leaflets, no. 5. Chester: Crozer Theological Seminary. Whaley, J. (1985). Religious toleration and social change in Hamburg, 1529–1819. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Irregular armed forces, shifting patterns of commitment, and fragmented sovereignty in the developing world Diane E. Davis # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Abstract Historically, the study of state formation has involved a focus on the urban and national conditions under which states monopolize the means of coercion, generate legitimacy, and marshal sufficient economic resources to wage war against enemies while sustaining citizen allegiance through the extension of social programs, new forms of national solidarity, and citizenship. In Charles Tilly’s large body of work, these themes loomed large, and they have re-emerged in slightly reformulated ways in an unfinished manuscript that reflected on the relationship between capital and coercion in which he also integrated the element of commitment—or networks of trust—into the study of state formation. This article develops these same ideas but in new directions, casting them in light of contemporary rather than historical developments. Taking as its point of departure the accelerating rates of criminal violence and citizen insecurity in cities of the developing world, this essay suggests that random and targeted violence increasingly perpetrated by “irregular” armed forces pose a direct challenge to state legitimacy and national sovereignty. Through examination of urban and transnational non-state armed actors who use violence to accumulate capital and secure economic dominion, and whose activities reveal alternative networks of commitment, power, authority, and even self-governance, this essay identifies contemporary parallels with the pre-modern period studied by Charles Tilly, arguing that current patterns challenge prevailing national-state forms of sovereignty. Drawing evidence primarily from Mexico and other middle income developing countries that face growing insecurity and armed violence, the article examines the new “spatialities” of irregular armed force, how they form the basis for alternative networks of coercion, allegiance, and reciprocity This essay is dedicated to the memory of Charles Tilly, a valued former colleague at the New School for Social Research and a great source of inspiration during my 14 years of teaching there. His writings and insights have stimulated much of my own work on the relations between cites and state formation. Portions of the research for this article, particularly those sections focused on private police and police corruption, were undertaken with support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Direct all inquiries to:
[email protected] D. E. Davis (*) Department of Urban Studies, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA e-mail:
[email protected] M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_17, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
249
250
D.E. Davis
that challenge old forms and scales of sovereignty, and what this means for the power and legitimacy of the traditional nation-state. Urban violence as challenge to the state’s monopoly of coercive power Anyone who knows cities of the developing world in recent years is aware that a major concern of both elected officials and citizens is the explosion of everyday violence, both random and targeted (Moser 2004; Koonings and Kruijt 1999). This is especially so in Latin America, a region that hosts three times the world average in death by firearms as well as among the highest homicide rates in the world (Cohen and Rubio 2007; Koonings and Kruijt 2007; Rotker et al. 2003).1 In some of the most violence-prone cities, unprecedented levels of police corruption and impunity have contributed to rising public insecurity (Hinton and Newburn 2009; Davis 2007), thus producing outposts of urban violence marked by accelerating levels of robbery, assault, and kidnapping (McIlwaine and Moser 2001). In certain locales, of which several cities in Mexico are among the most notorious, organized gangs equipped with a sophisticated cache of arms and advanced technologies for protection and detection against law enforcement raids have blatantly attacked police and military as well as the citizens who report them to the authorities (Astorga 2007). As larger numbers of armed actors in cities of Latin America show capacities to marshal weapons and other coercive means that can parallel if not exceed or undermine those available to the nation-state, governments find their legitimacy steadily eroding away (Arias and Goldstein 2010). With trust in the coercive apparatus of the state and its administration of justice system declining, citizens have been known to take matters into their own hands—either through vigilante acts or, more commonly, through the standard route of hiring private security guards who act on behalf of individuals and communities but not the larger public (Goldstein 2003). The state’s declining capacity to monopolize the means of coercion in the face of both everyday violence and the privatization of security is the subject of this essay. Conceptually central to this discussion are “irregular armed forces”—or non-state armed actors who wield coercive capacity that either parallels or challenges that held by the state, and whose deployment of violence undermines the state’s monopolization of the means of coercion. Studies of these forces and their impact on politics and state formation are few. My own prior work emphasized this lacuna and sought to fill the void by examining police, paramilitaries, and veterans (Davis and Pereira 2004). But those particular actors had a direct connection to the state in ways that urban-based organized gangs, citizen militias, vigilante groups, criminal mafias, and private security guards in cities of the developing world do not. Thus the question is whether these particular non-state armed actors also are significant for national politics and state formation. We consider this possibility not just because these particular actors and their contributions to violence and insecurity constitute a serious challenge to governance and livability, but also because they have remained off the intellectual drawing board of most work on national politics and state formation, despite their potential to 1
Colombia, El Salvador, Venezuela, and Brazil hold the highest homicide rates in the world (Cohen and Rubio 2007).
Irregular armed forces, shifting patterns of commitment
251
impact the state’s monopoly of the means of coercion. Developed primarily by political scientists with an interest in national security, the existent literature on nonstate armed actors almost completely ignores urban-based forces, and tends to focus on rural rebel movements, terrorists, and guerillas (Huber and Reimann 2006; Reno 2004). In addition to its anti-urban bias, this literature builds around two basic assumptions: that non-state armed actors are most likely to emerge in poor and authoritarian countries where institutions of governance are illegitimate or under siege (Collier et al. 2003; Fearon and Laitin 2003); and that the target of their activities is the state, state power, or regime-change (Coletta and Cullen 2000; Jackson 1990). But the focus on Latin America shows that non-state armed actors also exist in relatively stable middle income democracies of the developing world, their activities are not always motivated by anti-government ideals or regime change, their targets of action are not primarily the state and state power, and in the contemporary period they are as likely to be urban-based as rural. At least that is so with respect to armed private guards and security personnel who protect civilians, firms, and communities from violence, with citizen militias, and with mafia organizations or pirating forces that operate in both urban economies and through transnational networks of trade structured around clandestine networks of capital accumulation. As civil-society based actors involved in both licit and illicit activities, these particular non-state armed actors use coercive force to protect themselves, monitor or restrain movement in space, or secure access to capital by controlling commodity chains, networks, or the supply of goods, spaces, and activities for economic survival. Unlike the rebel groups and guerrilla forces whose object of violence is the state and who have historically predominated in rural areas, their reference points are civil society and the market, and they operate in delimited urban spaces as much as the countryside. To the extent that a growing number of these forces take on security and policing functions, even if only for their circumscribed communities or clients, they hold the potential to erode the state’s monopoly over the means of coercion. When such trends occur in a context of growing urban violence associated with uncontrolled criminal activity, as in much of Latin America, citizen dissatisfaction with the state plummets and the state’s monopoly over coercive force is further undermined, fueling the vicious cycle of security privatization and government de-legitimization. The result is an urban terrain filled with competing and at times overlapping state and non-state armed actors, some acting defensively and some offensively, whose combined activities generate insecurity and the routine deployment of violence. Such developments not only lay the groundwork for challenging the traditional functions, legitimacy, coercive capacities, and territorial logic of the nation-state. They also may signal the rise of new networks of loyalties that link urban-based, non-state armed actors to a variety of communities or constituencies with varying economic and social agendas that direct their attention locally and trans-nationally more than nationally. At times, their sub-national and transnational activities form the basis for new imagined communities of allegiance and alternative networks of commitment or coercion that territorially cross-cut or undermine old allegiances to a sovereign national state. In the remainder of this essay, I argue that the proliferation of a wide range of non-state armed actors organized around overlapping and territorially diverse networks of commitment and coercion can be considered both product and producer
252
D.E. Davis
of the changing nature of states and sovereignty in the developing world. Using a closer examination of middle income late developers in Latin America, primarily Mexico but also Brazil and with occasional reference to other countries of the global south, I trace the source and nature of these developments to urban and global dynamics, both historical and contemporary, as well as to political legacies of late development. I argue that these factors laid the foundation for both accelerating violence and new “spatialities” of non-armed state action, which in turn reinforces alternative networks of allegiance and coercion that challenge the power and legitimacy of the traditional nation-state. Over time, these dynamics lead to a situation of fragmented sovereignty that holds the potential to undermine national state-based sovereignties in the developing world.2
Armed force, state formation, and sovereignty in theory and practice Fragmented sovereignty finds its origins in patterns of coercion, capital accumulation, and their distribution across cities and states. Much of our knowledge of these relationships comes from Charles Tilly, who argued that to defend or to establish national sovereignty states engaged in armed warfare, with inter-state violence fueling both the domestic monopolization of the means of coercion and modern state-formation. To wage and win wars successfully the state created new institutions (government bureaucracies), new revenue sources (taxes), and new avenues for securing legitimacy (citizenship rights), which then allowed it to extract funds and moral support from the citizenry to employ armed actors, in the process building stronger state-society connections. These institutions, revenues, and legitimacy claims formed the basic building blocks of the modern nation-state, whose capacity to endure and strengthen its sovereignty rested on its capacity to monopolize the means of violence. Cities in particular played a key role in generating both allies and revenues for mounting and monopolizing armed force on the state’s behalf, making city-based commerce and other related urban economic dynamics key to successful war-making and to the establishment of the nationstate as the modal form of sovereignty in the modern era (Tilly 1990). And in a recent updating of these ideas, Tilly (2008) underscored the importance of trust relations in cementing the dynamics of cooperation or conflict between cities and states. In cities of the developing world today a parallel drama appears to be unfolding, albeit in non-state domains and with different sovereignty outcomes, in which urban armed actors—ranging from private security guards and citizen militias to mafias— also engage in struggles to wield coercive capacity and accumulate capital. This partly owes to the fact that in recent years, democratization and decentralization have shifted the locus of citizen claim-making from the modern national state to the city or other sub-national scales of determination. As a result, many urban residents become less connected to national states as a source of political allegiance or social 2
Drawing on a definition offered by Nir Gazit (2009, p. 1), I conceive of fragmented sovereignty as the existence of “multiple, localized, and relatively autonomous cores of power,” rather than an “allcompassing structural and centralized modality of control,” a more standard form of sovereignty associated with the modern nation-state.
Irregular armed forces, shifting patterns of commitment
253
and economic claim-making (Sassen 2007; Devetak and Higgott 1999; Linklater 1993), and more prone to identify with alternative “imagined communities” or networks of loyalties built on locally-based but spatially-circumscribed allegiances and networks of social and economic production and reproduction as well as new transnational activities (Sparke 2005; Keck and Sikkink 1997). To the extent that sub-national and transnational communities of allegiance also provide new forms of welfare, employment, security, and meaning, they often operate as the functional equivalents of states, thus encouraging new forms of “nonstate” sovereignty that contrast to the real or imagined communities that sustained modern nationalism and traditional patterns of national-state sovereignty along the lines articulated by Benedict Anderson (1983). For example, private police working for community clients often build a general sense of civic solidarity, especially if they self-define their aims as protecting larger values in society, as occurred in South Africa after the end of apartheid rule,3 or as is now current among private police and citizen security patrols in Mexico City who see themselves on the fault lines of “war” against criminal forces who threaten to destroy the nation (Davis et al. 2003). Mafia and forces involved in transnational struggling and drug trade do not so easily capture the hearts and minds of citizens, but they often count on strong community loyalties in both local and global arenas. Evidence from the Mexican industrial city of Laredo, in the Northern state of Nuevo Laredo not far from the USMexican border, shows the strength of such community-transnational mafia ties. A renowned global drug cartel called the Zetas hung a banner on a downtown pedestrian bridge calling for “military recruits and ex-military men … seeking a good salary, food, and help for their families” to join them and support their activities. The banner promised no more “suffering maltreatment or hunger,” while a local phone number was posted for contact. The hubris of a drug mafia publicly announcing efforts to recruit new loyalists (ex-military personnel to boot) to a countervailing social and political project defined in direct opposition to a sovereign state and its rule of law, but using the same enlightenment principles of welfare reciprocity, would have been almost unimaginable a decade ago. But in the cities of Latin America transnational crime networks are often as visible as national states, producing a sense of community among citizen supporters whose lives become spatially or socially embedded in these powerful criminal orbits (Arias 2004). Charles Tilly’s recent writings on commitment and networks of trust may help us understand these developments, especially to the extent they shed light on the “struggle between existing [citizen] trust networks, on one side, and cities or states, on the other” (Tilly 2008). In the region of Mexico where the Zetas waged a battle for the hearts and minds of citizens, longstanding patterns of police corruption and military abuse formed a backdrop for local willingness to side with the non-state armed forces like the Zetas. After decades in which the state’s military and police personnel destroyed networks of trust between citizens and the state, residents had little commitment to the state or those coercive forces acting on its behalf. When the Zetas offered new and alternative bonds of community solidarity by offering employment, building parks and 3
Much of this owed to the fact that private police were seen as a mainstay of white protection, harkening to the values of Afrikaaner dominance of the past, in the era of political transition in which the new South African Police (SAP) were empowered and legitimized to represent the new South Africa.
254
D.E. Davis
playgrounds, or providing goods that the local residents needed, advertising these services at the level of the city, many citizens responded positively. To be sure, some of these responses may have owed to direct coercion from the Zetas, and to the fact that some citizens may have had little choice but to accommodate mafia desires. The Zetas also were known to pay citizens to protest on their behalf; but so too did Mexico’s ruling party employ similar tactics on behalf of the national state. Further parallels are demonstrated by the fact that the Zetas offered armed protection to those citizens who pledged loyalty—the same type of bargain national states offer their citizens, a fact that led Tilly (1985) to term state formation as another form of protection racket. And in the Mexican case, these developments were unfolding in a regionalized context where citizens in northern Mexico had already seen themselves as distant from the political objectives of a national state whose leaders had long crafted their strongest relationships with forces in the center of the country. To a certain extent, elements of this situation hark back to medieval, absolutist, and pre-modern periods before national state formation, described by Perry Anderson and others, when princely elites, regional warlords, or other territorially circumscribed power brokers wielded control of territories, markets, and subjects. Both then and now, non-state armed actors in imagined communities pose a challenge to national-state sovereignty and to the state’s capacity to monopolize the means of coercion. Scholars like Arjun Appadurai (2003; see also Agnew 2007) have already argued that we are living in a world of new sovereignties, and Dennis Rodgers’s recent work (2006) on “social sovereignty” further attests to the fact that the formal national state may not necessarily lay at the center of these new arrangements of power and authority. But what most distinguishes the contemporary situation in Latin America from the premodern, before the rise of the modern state, is that a multiplicity of non-state armed actors are struggling for new forms of sovereignty—defined in terms of varying territorial scales of power, authority, governance, and citizen reciprocity—in an environment where traditional institutions of national sovereignty and the power of the nation-state exist and must also be reckoned with. Stated simply, such alternative imagined communities do not exist in an historical vacuum. They co-exist and overlap with the modern state without trying to replace it, and by so doing have a feedback effect on “old” imagined communities (e.g., the national state) and their relationship to society, by virtue of their capacity to delegitimize, weaken, or challenge political allegiance to the nation-state, if not infiltrate it directly. And it is the proliferation of a wide range of competing and overlapping communities, with their own armed forces of protection and own allegiances, that leads to contested geographies of citizenship—and thus fragmented sovereignty—in much of the developing world (see Litzinger 2006; Kraxberger 2005). In this environment the dominion of a single nation-state is challenged but not defeated, while coercive capacity, rule of law, and citizen loyalties are divided, not shared, albeit within and across the formal territorial bounds of the nation-state.
Transnational dimensions of fragmented sovereignty In prior epochs, when state armed actors monopolized the means of violence, sovereignty used to be about asserting and legitimizing political power over a unified
Irregular armed forces, shifting patterns of commitment
255
and fixed territorial domain that established the same national boundaries of allegiance for citizens and state alike. Capital, whether global or local, was relevant mainly as a source of funds for arming state actors who engaged in war to protect those national boundaries and the citizens within them. States frequently made alliances with local capitalists to support the state’s territorial sovereignty and warmaking aims; in return they protected markets, or local capitalists, so that flows of resources could be guaranteed for state activities, war-related or not. In today’s world, non-state armed actors are as likely as states to rely on global and local capital for their activities, and by so doing they diminish the legitimacy and resource-extraction capacities of states even as they relocate the territorial domain and reach of protection rackets to other scales, both sub-national and international. Such trends and their implications for fragmented sovereignty are evident by focusing on the main purveyors of violence in cities of the contemporary developing world and by highlighting the spatiality of their activities. Two or more decades ago, the military, paramilitary, police, and others acting on behalf of national states tended to monopolize the means of violence in Latin America and other middle-income late developers, using repressive actions against rebellious citizens identified with warlike terminology as “enemies of the state” (Huggins 1998). Much of this conflict centered in rural areas or in regions excluded from the urban-based or elite dominated developmental gains that accompanied late development. Today, although civil wars and agrarian or rural-based rebel movements still persist in a select subset of countries in Latin America and elsewhere, violence and “warfare” are more likely to unfold in large cities, including those that are not capitals (Landau-Wells 2008). They also are just as likely to be associated with the activities of drug cartels, mafias, non-state militias, citizens acting as vigilantes, and private police (providing protection for “firms” in both the liberal and illiberal economy), as with political insurgency. Moreover, whereas in the past rural settings hosted much of the armed violence associated with roaming rebel or guerrilla opposition, in today’s world non-state armed actors often site their command and control functions in urban locales, whether in squatter settlements or bustling commercial neighborhoods where the prevalence of informality can hide clandestine activity. This means that many political communities of reciprocity are fixed in urban space and structured around quotidian solidarities that are no longer bounded by the nation in the same way as before. These urban spaces are also likely to generate forms of mobility and connection that exist in transnational space, as new technologies and trade connections tie citizens and their activities to each other, despite the distances covered. Whether through boundary-crossing migrant networks or international smuggling rings, these activities lay the basis for new networks of citizen allegiance that extend in space from the local to the global (Maimbo 2006; Simone 2006). Several of these dynamics are embodied in the activities and identities of a transnational gang called the Mara Salvatrucha, known widely as “los Maras,” a trans-nationally organized network of Spanish-speaking youth who are linked via their origins in Los Angeles, through Mexico, down into the major cities of Guatemala and El Salvador in a self-identified community of loyalties and commitments. What is most significant about the Maras is not so much their selfidentified gang status but their origins as a self-identified group of city-based youth
256
D.E. Davis
who turned to criminal activity because of the lack of employment alternatives in the large metropolitan areas of California, Mexico, and Central America. Both the urban and employment aspects of their formation as a transnational network speak loudly to the prevalence of city-based, non-state armed actors all over the burgeoning metropolises of the global south (Rodgers 2007). The violence generated by these transnational non-state armed actors may be as debilitating and threatening to the institutional capacities and democratic character of the state as were the more conventional non-state armed actors (guerrillas, rebels, etc.). This has been clearly shown in Mexico, in the actions of globally-operating drug mafias and other armed actors who have waged war against local police and military, in an ongoing battle that has pushed the state to introduce authoritarian measures and legislation that limit general civil liberties and concentrate power in a small circle of high-level officials (Davis 2006a, b; Bailey and Godson 2000). Such patterns are also clear in other countries or regions of the world, with Brazil, Argentina, Russia, and South Africa only a few of the many nations where global smuggling rings that rely on armed protection have come into violent conflict with the state or citizens. Additionally, in most of these settings the power and influence of mafias has at times been so great, owing to the huge sums of money involved, that mafia elements directly infiltrate those state’s agencies charged with coercion (Lacy 2008). Infiltration or rampant rent-seeking—built on clandestine forms of reciprocities—further limit the state’s capacity to reduce overall violence and insecurity. With inside knowledge of the state’s strategies and intelligence gathering breached, and old networks of trust no longer viable, the state cannot function as a single sovereign entity, nor is it capable of upholding a rule of law, despite its democratic status and electorally legitimate hold on power. Fragmentation of the state’s power, generated from within by its own ranks, is one result. Another is growing cynicism and a renewed sense of hopelessness in civil society about both the future and the potential of a democratic political system to deal with extra-legal violence and impunity. Instead of letting elected officials and their regulatory agents fight the problems of crime, growing numbers of citizens reject formal political channels and look for their own answers to the problems of insecurity in everyday life, relying on themselves or privately contracted armed guards rather than the state. The upside of this trend may be that by citizens mobilize among themselves or become directly involved in civil society efforts to monitor crime and reduce insecurity. In one community in northern Mexico called LeBarón, citizens fed up with police corruption and mafia violence organized collectively to provide their own police services, asking the state governor for resources to fund their own security services in replacement of the local police (La Jornada 2009a, b). But there also are downsides. In the LeBarón case, two of the local leaders of the community responsible for organizing a citizen police force were assassinated by drug lords. Such events underscore why anxiety about the urban security situation and the state’s inability to guarantee order has become so extreme that some communities have turned to violence themselves—whether in the form of lynching and other acts of vigilantism, seen as a last-gasp measure for achieving some sense of citizen justice, or whether by self-arming or other forms of protection to establish some control over their daily existence (Goldstein 2003; Huggins 1991). The state’s legitimacy declines as citizens themselves take on policing functions; and even if
Irregular armed forces, shifting patterns of commitment
257
most citizens do not arm themselves, they are quite likely to hire private security guards. Either way, citizens act defensively, sometimes using violence in the process, with many guaranteeing security by barricading themselves in gated private communities, in isolation from the public. Thus we see why some of the most violent cities of the developing world have become a mosaic of fortresses, creating a fragmented civil society in which families or streets or neighborhoods create their own forms of protection, often relying on armed force (Murray 2008; Caldeira 2001). Both activities diminish reliance on the state’s coercive apparatus to provide security, and may even reduce citizen willingness to support a single, unifying state-society contract. Over time, de facto bonds of commitment develop among families and nearby neighbors, who operate as a fragmented set of constituencies each with their own coercive forces and each concerned with only their particular locality or smuggling activity. Connections and loyalties to state—or at least to the police and legal institutions charged with the de jure capacity for protection and justice— diminish. Such developments not only undermine the state’s effective sovereignty and its legitimate capacity to dispense justice and guarantee a rule of law; they also make it more difficult for the state to solve problems of violence, in no small part because it is increasingly less clear who has the legitimate right to provide security. In the shifting terrain, organized criminal elements take advantage of the breakdown in state coercive capacity, some of it fueled by intra-state tension between local and national police and military, as well as by the devolution of security services to local communities and individuals. More violence is often the result. In Mexico, for example, the number of deaths attributed to police-militarymafia violence in Mexico has reached more than 3500 in the last six months alone, even as weekly executions (i.e., cartel-related killings) reached a nationwide average of 126.5, up 13% from a prior weekly average of 112—numbers that resemble body counts from civil war battles.4 Granted, this dire state of affair is partly explained by the unique history of police and military corruption in Mexico, which has generated bonds of reciprocity between criminals and elements of the state, and which now leads to an all-out battle for coercive supremacy.5 But it is precisely this history that weakened the state, allowing mafias and other criminal forces to emerge on the scene in the first place.
Cities and fragmented sovereignty Among the historical factors responsible for fragmented sovereignty in Mexico and other middle income countries of Latin America and the developing world, rapid urbanization stands out as a significant driving force. The unchecked growth of 4
Recent evidence included a series of shoot-outs between military and mafia on one hand, and military and police on the other that led to a total of 40 deaths across various cities in Mexico in a single day this past July, racheting up the yearly rate of deaths stemming from battles over drugs to 3553. For newspaper accounts of this recent explosion of deadly violence, see, e.g., La Jornada,, July 11, 2009, p. 7. 5 For more on this history, see Davis (forthcoming). A quarterly compilation of statistics and reporting on the levels of impunity and corruption in police and military are available from the Justice in Mexico Project, www.justiceinmexico.org.
258
D.E. Davis
cities, which came hand-in-hand with import-substitution industrialization, has produced a huge set of problems. Primary among them are migration and unemployment, as well as housing scarcities, squatting, and evictions produced by government efforts to displace illegal settlers or turn old slums into high-end property development. Over time, all these changes have played a role in destroying old bonds of community and solidarity among citizens while also fueling job and housing insecurity and, at times, the resort to violence or armed force to protect livelihoods. To the extent that cities also concentrate resources and populations that can counterbalance or challenge the aims and power of national actors and institutions, owing to the history of urban primacy in the developing world, rapid and uncontrolled urbanization recasts the city-nation nexus so that the emergence of urban-based armed actors can affect the power and legitimacy of the nation-state. Key to both sets of transformations is the proliferation of informality and the reliance on illicit trade and services, both of which predominate in cities of the global south. In rapidly transforming urban environments of the global south, informal employment (in commerce and trade primarily) is a common source of livelihood, owing in part to the scarcity of formal sector jobs, low rates of education and literacy, and high rates of migration (Castells and Portes 1989). In Mexico City, for example, official estimates identify close to 70% of the urban labor force as employed in the informal sector, and within this category, petty commerce and street vending often predominate. Such employment, which barely meets subsistence needs for many stuck within it, has become ever more “illicit” as protectionist barriers drop and fewer domestic goods for re-sale are produced, and as the globalization of trade in contraband and illegal goods picks up the slack. As a result, much informal employment is physically and socially situated within an illicit commercial world of violence and impunity, if only for historical reasons. Those directly involved in the illicit activities—whether contraband products like pirated CDs, knock-off designer goods, or valuable gems (in the case of natural resource rich African cities), or high-violence activities like drugs and guns—frequently deploy their own “armed forces” for protection against the long arm of the state, whether the police or customs inspectors. These forces, in turn, fight amongst themselves for control of illicit supply chains, further creating an environment of violence (Volkov 2002; Lupsha 1996). In urban Latin America, criminal and mafia organizations offer coercive and material support in the face of other illicit competitors and the state. Much like national states, mafias often provide citizen protection in exchange for territorial dominion as well, thereby cementing relations with local communities (Leeds 2006). Like states, most mafia or gang organizations count on strong loyalties and commitments among member elements, although much of it coerced rather than freely given, partly because of the illegal nature of their activities. Thus commitments are often “guaranteed” through deployment of violence within the group, to keep loyalties strong and the likelihood of infiltration weak. These same organized gangs and criminal mafias may even participate in their own form of “foreign policy” by negotiating, threatening, or cooperating with the sovereign states in whose territory they operate. The result is often the development of clandestine connections among local police, mafias, and the informal sector, as well, which further reinforces the isolation of certain neighborhoods or territories as locations for illicit activities (Guaracy 2007).
Irregular armed forces, shifting patterns of commitment
259
Border areas between nation-states used to serve this function, making them outposts of illegality and violence. But as urbanization changes cities into dense conglomerations of peoples and activities, and as illicit trade becomes a principal source of livelihood, we see the same patterns within cities, with certain neighborhoods hosting illegal activities. In many cities, including Mexico City, these dangerous areas sit nestled against old central business districts (CBD), where local chambers of commerce face a declining manufacturing base and are eager to attract high-end corporate investors and financial services. These land use patterns lead to conflict as formal and informal commerce compete to control the same space, with the latter relying on longstanding loyalties among seller families and ever more illicit commodity chains to fuel their activities. Globalization has added even more urgency to this dynamic as real estate development and the physical creation of upscale “global cities” has brought pressures to transform downtown land use (Davis 2006a, b; Sassen 1991) and displace informal sellers (Hasan 2002). The upshot is frequently a clash or urban priorities, with armed mafia forces stepping in to protect illegal and informal activities in exchange for loyalty and territorial dominion. The violence that ensues is not conventional war-making, or at least that which led to modern state-making, because armed mafia forces are not struggling for political dominion, control of the state, or political inclusion so much as economic and sub-territorial dominion as well as the coercive capacity to control key local nodes and transnational networks that make their economic activities possible (see Campbell 2006). Yet mafia desire to control territory and space so that illicit activities can flower leads to the physical concentration of violence in locations with histories of informality, turning these neighborhoods into “no man’s lands” outside state control (Davis 2007). Their existence leads to the overall recognition that the state has lost control of parts of its territory to “competing sovereigns,” as mafias and local citizens monopolize control over movement in and through physical spaces (Rodgers 2004). The physical isolation of certain urban spaces under mafia control also draws local citizens into criminal orbits, even if they are not directly involved in illegal activities, precisely because they find it more expedient to cast their loyalties with the criminals who serve as their community “protectors” (Arias 2004) as with the state. This means that even when citizens are not directly involved in illegal or illicit work activities requiring violence, much of the urban poor find themselves coexisting in a delimited territorial context where network of obligations and reciprocities are not necessarily coincident with or loyal to the institutions of the nation-state, and where sub-local or transnational networks of reciprocity are more significant for their daily lives (McIlwaine and Moser 2001). One explanation for this involves the police, whose actions helps explain why the urban poor so frequently resort to their own armed force or continue to engage in illegality. In most cities of the developing world, the police are highly corrupt—a problem that traces to historical legacies of urbanization as well as prior patterns of state formation. The political history of late industrialization generally includes contested struggles over state power and macro-economic development models. In the face of these conflicts, most governments in the developing world exercised considerable coercive power against real and potential enemies, using the police as a
260
D.E. Davis
main force for disciplining regime opponents and internal enemies. These practices ultimately helped institutionalize police corruption and the coercive power of an authoritarian state whose pervasive use of violence and disregard for the rule of law ultimately permeated civil society as well (Davis 2010). The abusive power of the police was further extended in the age of rapid urbanization. With cities expanding ever more rapidly and hosting more informality, police found that rent-seeking with respect to this growing and vulnerable sector of society was an activity that served both the regulators and the regulated. Informal sellers would bribe officials if it meant avoiding court-based prosecution for urban violations; while the police also gained from diverting “justice” away from the higher courts, where they similarly had little influence, to the streets where face-toface negotiation with citizens usually produced some sort of agreed upon bargain (Picatto 2003). Over time, these reciprocities and networks of impunity reinforced even greater corruption in the police, delegitimized the state that deployed them, and undermined the rule of law, thus leading citizens to reduce trust in the state’s coercive forces and to find their own agents of security and protection. They also made it possible for illicit activities and organized criminality to flourish without rebuke, in no small part because corrupt police frequently either participated in these activities or cast a blind eye when the payoff was sufficient. It is no surprise, then, that citizens turned to their own armed forces for protection when violence and criminality skyrocketed out of control, thus undermining the state’s monopoly on the means of coercion. Even so, the privatization of security has not necessarily reduced violence or public police corruption, and thus the conditions for fragmented sovereignty still remain. In both Mexico City and Johannesburg, two highly violent cities, both public and private police forces—not to mention communities themselves—have been known to engage in conflict over who has the right to protect and arrest citizens. Private police often withhold evidence from public police so as to maintain the capacity to serve their clients without state oversight, and public police are more interested in protecting their own institutional authority and power than cooperating with “non-state” actors to solve crimes. Moreover, private police will work for whomever pays them, not just for citizens who need them, thus raising questions about their longer-term impact on the security situation. In certain favelas of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo citizens, still prefer to support local drug lords and their private security guards because they guarantee protection better than do police or the state (Leeds 2007). Such conditions clearly do not reduce violence, but more significantly, they hold the potential to bring a collision of commitments and a confusion of allegiances that further fragment loyalty within and between the state and citizens. The problem is not just competition between or confusion about which armed actors can be counted upon for protection or justice. In some countries the problem is the overlap, or a blurring of lines, between state and non-state armed actors. Recent research by Desmond Arias (2006) shows, for example, that armed civilian groups in Brazil interact directly with the state in identifiable social networks, providing financial or narcotic kick-backs to security forces, which in turn provide armed groups with weaponry and a modicum of unconstrained maneuverability in their respective communities. Ralph Rozema (2008) has identified a similar type of collaboration in his study of the relations between criminal networks and
Irregular armed forces, shifting patterns of commitment
261
paramilitaries in Colombia. When the same individuals or networks of armed professionals move back and forth between the state and civil society, sharing knowledge and personal relations, it is harder for citizens to leverage institutional accountability vis-à-vis the police, and the state’s abuse of coercive power is more likely to continue. Not only does this drive the vicious cycle of state delegitimization, and erode the state’s capacity to control or eliminate violence, it undermines the institutions, loyalties, and practice of sovereignty (Koonings and Kruijt 2007). These trends help fragment the public into distinct clients and interest groups—or distinct imagined communities, if you will—who neither rely on a single force to monopolize the means of coercion over the larger national territory, nor are willing to give up their rights to self-protective force by ceding security matters only to the national state.
Non-state armed actors, urban violence, and fragmented sovereignty: some concluding remarks This essay began and concludes with the suggestion that we can both understand and theorize the roots of fragmented sovereignty by adopting Charles Tilly’s groundbreaking work on the relations among capital, coercion, cities, and state formation, albeit by updating it to take into account conditions in the contemporary developing world. In many cities of the developing world, citizens suffering from extreme levels of violence and insecurity find it difficult to know whether public police, private police, the military, local vigilante groups, community members, or even criminal mafias will be most likely to offer protection from harm. In the absence of any certainty about which armed actors or state/non-state institutions are most likely to guarantee security or inflict harm, and in the face of growing violence, a multiplicity of armed actors offer their own services to ever larger but disaggregated numbers of clients, with the most complex array of coercive forces particularly visible in cities. The existence of a wide range of individuals and groups using coercive force either defensively or offensively helps to undermine the state’s longstanding monopoly over the means of coercion, even as it allows varying disaggregated networks of individuals and communities to look inward for identifying and guaranteeing their own quotidian needs. The sub-national and transnational scope of these practices further challenges the legitimacy and sovereign authority of the nationstate, leading to a situation in which the state takes seriously its mandate to monopolize the means of coercion, but runs up against alternative collectivities with different commitments and loyalties who mount their own coercive force and elude state constraint. In Mexico, these conditions have reached such dangerous heights that some foreign observers fear a “failed state” (Kurtzman 2009). Mexican governing officials have responded angrily that it was irresponsible to compare Mexico to more conventionally understood failed states like Sudan or even Iraq, because of its consolidated democracy, the strong financial system, and the strong welfare state. And on these measures of state strength, there is no doubt that Mexico surely qualifies as stable and sovereign. But if we apply a Weberian litmus test, combining
262
D.E. Davis
legitimacy and the monopolization of the means of coercion across a given and continuous territorial space, the comparison with Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq— where non-state armed actors also generate violence and fight against weak and fragile states that have not yet consolidated themselves as institutionally legitimate for all its peoples—it is clear that there are parallels. But they can only go so far. Thus we would be better served by finding a new categorical description of states like Mexico’s: characterized by fragmented rather than failed sovereignty, in which a single national-state has been unable to monopolize the means of coercion. The evidence presented in this essay suggests that this state of affairs is determined by path-dependent historical trajectories, more recent patterns of urban and economic development, and the transnational flows of people and goods facilitated by globalization. Middle income countries of the developing world with a history of urbanization-led industrialization and authoritarian rule are surprisingly vulnerable, perhaps because they may be even more susceptible than poorer developing countries to the mafia forces who traffic in goods and activities geared towards groups with moderately expendable income—whether in the form of drug use, commodities “fencing,” or even kidnapping. Still, because these problems do not stay confined to the countries from which they emanate, the problem of fragmented sovereignty is a concern for all, even those with stable, legitimate, and sovereign national-states. This is clear in the ways that US officials have expressed a concern about the overflow of Mexico’s problems into its own sovereign territory, as seen in the penetration of criminal gangs from Mexico across the border into Arizona, Texas, and California. To the extent that these non-state armed actors are causing a problem for countries beyond their host borders, then no nation-state is immune to the changes that emanate from the developing world. As such, it is worth considering that we are at risk of exiting a Westphalian world where most coercive force has been monopolized in the hands of nation-states, and entering a new epoch where local and transnational non-state actors take on those roles (Keck and Linklater 1993), be they terrorists or armed smugglers, either because the nation-state is weak or non-state actors are overly strong, or because the strength of the latter fuels the weakness of the former, and vice-versa. This pattern, which dominated in the pre-modern era before the rise of nationstates, was in later periods confined primarily to the poor and non-democratic countries and regions of the world that never fully consolidated state power. But now it is expanding in geographic scope all over the global south, in poor and middle income countries alike, some democratic and others not. To the extent that the wealthier and politically stable nations of the world, like the United States, can being pulled into this global orbit through transnational activities that cross developmental boundaries, ranging from the attacks by Al Qaeda to presence of Mexican drug smuggling gangs within US territory, then this indeed may be a global and temporal transition that affects all states, not just the developing world. In the face of these changes, new questions arise: How will security and state control over the means of coercion be guaranteed on local, national, or global domains if these scales are connected not only through transnational networks but also through new imagined communities or networks of commitment that reject standard allegiances to a single nation-state? What happens when everyday smugglers join political rebels or
Irregular armed forces, shifting patterns of commitment
263
terrorist groups to combine loyalties against sovereign national states?6 What state forms and governance structures, acting at what scale(s) of action are best suited to meet the challenges of fragmented sovereignty? While answers to these questions may remain elusive, the methodology needed to answer them is already in place, in large part because of prior work by Charles Tilly. To study these developments scholars must be able to identify and analyze new networks of trust or loyalties and how they unfold territorially, whether in cities, states, or beyond. They must also be prepared to accommodate a more nuanced understanding of the territorial underpinnings of sovereignty, precisely because the new imagined communities that non-state armed actors defend, and the battles that states in turn are forced to engage in, are likely to exist in spatial orbits that are both smaller and larger than the nation-state, at times cross-cutting cities, countries, and regions to create new networks of obligation and reciprocity that can only be understood when the spatial correlates of their action and allegiance are spelled out. This, finally, may be the greatest challenge for scholars of sovereignty and state formation: learning how to analyze the ways in which new sub- and trans-national communities and networks create new practices and allegiances that challenge the institutions, political authority, and social legitimacy of the nation-state—and with what impacts for states, cities, and citizens in the modern world.
References Agnew, J. (2007). Sovereignty regimes: Territoriality and state authority in contemporary world politics. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95(2), 437–461. Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Appuradai, A. (2003). Sovereignty without territoriality: Notes for a postnational geography. In S. Low & D. Lawrence-Zuniga (Eds.), The anthropology of space and place: Locating culture (pp. 337–349). Boston: Blackwell Publishing. Arias, E. D. (2004). Faith in our neighbors: Networks and social order in three Brazilian Favelas. Latin American Politics and Society, 46(1), 1–38. Arias, E. D. (2006). The dynamics of criminal governance: Networks and social order in Rio de Janeiro. Journal of Latin American Studies, 38(0202), 1–32. Arias, E. D., & Goldstein, D. (Eds.). (2010). Violent democracies in Latin America: Toward an interdisciplinary reconceptualization. Durham: Duke University Press. Astorga, L. (2007). Seguridad, traficantes y militares. El poder y la sombra. México, DF: Tusquets. Bailey, J., & Godson, R. (Eds.). (2000). Organized crime and democratic governability: Mexico and the US-Mexican Borderlands. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburgh Press. Caldeira, T. (2001). City of walls: Crime, segregation and citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press. Campbell, E. H. (2006). Economic globalization from below: Transnational refugee trade networks in Nairobi. In G. Myers & M. Murray (Eds.), Cities in Contemporary Africa (pp. 125–147). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Castells, M., & Portes, A. (1989). World underneath: The origins, dynamics, and effects of the informal economy. In M. Castells, A. Portes, & L. A. Benton (Eds.), The informal economy: Studies in advanced and less developed countries. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Cohen, M., & Rubio, M. (2007). Violence and Crime in Latin America (p. 5). Paper prepared for the Consulta de San Jose 2007 and presented at the Copenhagen Consensus Conference, available at: http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/.../DWSDownload.aspx?...SP%2FViolenceCrime_Cohen. 6
Some examples include Hezbollah’s reliance on Colombia drug traffickers for funds, the Taliban’s use of the opium trade for financial resources, and Somali rebels’ engagement with pirates and other criminal groups who control trade running through waters off the African coast. See Jojarth (2009).
264
D.E. Davis
Coletta, N. J., & Cullen, M. (2000). The nexus between violent conflict, social capital and social cohesion: Case studies from Cambodia and Rwanda. Social Capital Working Paper No. 23. Washington: World Bank. Collier, P., Elliott, V. L., Hegre, H., Hoeffler, A., Reynal-Querol, M., & Sambanis, N. (2003). Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil war and development policy. Washington: World Bank and Oxford University Press. Davis, D. E. (2006a). Undermining the rule of law: Democratization and the dark side of police reform in Mexico. Latin American Politics and Society, 48(1), 55–86. Davis, D. E. (2006b). Conflict, cooperation, and convergence: Globalization and the politics of downtown development in Mexico City. Research in Political Sociology, 15, 143–178. Davis, D. E. (2007). Insecure and secure cities: Towards a reclassification of world cities in a global era. Sociologia Urbana e Rurale, XXIX(82), 67–82. [Also reprinted in MITIR: The MIT International Review, Spring 2008, available at http://web.mit.edu/mitir/2008/spring/insecure.html]. Davis, D. E. (2010). The political and economic origins of violence and insecurity in contemporary Latin America: Past trajectories and future prospects. In D. Arias & D. Goldstein (Eds.), Violent democracies. Durham: Duke University Press. Davis, D. E. (forthcoming). Policing and populism in the Cardenas and Echeverria Administrations. In A. M. Kiddle, & M. L. O. Muñoz (Eds.), Men of the People: The Presidencies of Lázaro Cárdenas and Luis Echeverría in Mexico. University of Arizona Press, in production. Davis, D. E., & Pereira, A. (Eds.). (2004). Irregular armed forces and their role in politics and state formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davis, R. C., Ortiz, C., Dadush, S., Irish, J., Alvarado, A., & Davis, D. E. (2003). The public accountability of private police: Lessons from New York, Johannesburg, and Mexico City. Policing and Society, 13(2), 197–210. Devetak, R., & Higgott, R. (1999). Justice unbound? Globalisation, states, and the transformation of the social bond. University of Warwick CSGR Working Paper no. 29/99 (May). Fearon, J., & Laitin, D. (2003). Ethnicity, insurgency, and civil war. American Political Science Review, 97 (1), 75–90. Gazit, N. (2009). Social agency, spatial practices, and power: The micro-foundations of fragmented sovereigny in the occupied territories. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 22, 83–103. p. 1. Goldstein, D. (2003). The spectacular city: Violence and performance in urban Bolivia. Durham: Duke University Press. Guaracy, M. (2007). O trabalho da inteligencia no controle do crime organizado. Estudos Avancados, 21 (61), 51–69. Hasan, A. (2002). The changing nature of the informal sector in Karachi as a result of global restructuring and liberalization. Environment & Urbanization, 14(1), 69–78. Hinton, M., & Newburn, T. (Eds.). (2009). Policing developing democracies. New York: Routledge. Huber, P., & Reimann, C. (2006). Non-state Armed Actors: An annotated bibliography. Geneva: Swiss Piece Center for Peacebuilding. Huggins, M. (Ed.). (1991). Vigilantism and the State in Latin America: Essays in extra-legal violence. New York: Praeger. Huggins, M. (1998). Political policing: The United States and Latin America. Durham: Duke University Press. Jackson, R. (1990). Quasi-States: Sovereignty, international relations, and the third world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jojarth, C. (2009). Crime, war, and global trafficking: Designing international coordination. New York: Cambridge University Press. Keck, M., & Linklater, A. (1993). The transformation of political community: Ethical foundations of the Post-Westphalian Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keck, M., & Sikkink, K. (1997). Transnational issue networks in international politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Koonings, K., & Kruijt, D. (Eds.) (1999). Societies of fear: The legacy of civil war, violence and terror in Latin America. New York: Zed Books. Koonings, K., & Kruijt, D. (Eds.) (2007). Fractured cities: Social exclusion, urban violence, and contested spaces in Latin America. London: Zed Books. Kraxberger, B. (2005). Strangers, indigenes, and settlers: Contested geographies of citizenship in Nigeria. Space and Polity, 9(1), 9–27. Kurtzman, J. (2009). Mexico’s instability is a real problem: Don’t discount the possibility of a failed state next door. Wall Street Journal, January 16, 2009. La Jornada (2009). Ayer, 40 muertos, 11 de ellos en Ciudad Juarez. La Jornada, July 11, 2009, p. 7. La Jornada (2009). Descarten armar civiles en Le Barón; se creará policiá, afirma Reyes Baeza. La Jornada July 10, 2009, c.f. Justice in Mexico News Report, July 2009, p. 8, www.justiceinmexico.org.
Irregular armed forces, shifting patterns of commitment
265
Lacy, M. (2008). Officials say drug cartels infiltrated Mexican law unit. New York Times 26 October 2008, p. A9.; see also Bailey, op. cit. Landau-Wells, M. (2008). Capital cities in civil wars: The locational dimensions of sovereign authority. Crisis States Research Center, Occasional Paper 6, April 2008. Leeds, E. (2006). Cocaine and parallel polities in the Brazilian urban periphery: Constraints on local-level democracy. Latin American Research Review, 31(3), 41–83. Linklater, A. (1993). The transformation of political community: Ethical foundations of the PostWestphalian Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Litzinger, R. A. (2006). Contested sovereignties and the critical ecosystem partnership fund. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 29(1), 66–87. Lupsha, P. (1996). Transnational crime versus the nation-state. Transnational Organized Crime, 2(1), 21–48. Maimbo, S. (Ed.). (2006). Remittances and economic development in Somalia: An overview. Social Development Papers No. 38. Washington: World Bank. McIlwaine, C., & Moser, C. (2001). Violence and social capital in urban poor communities. Journal of International Development, 13(7), 965–984. Moser, C. (2004). Urban violence and insecurity: An introductory roadmap. Environment & Urbanization, 16(2), 3–16. Murray, M. J. (2008). Taming the disorderly city: The spatial landscape of Johannesburg after Apartheid. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Picatto, P. (2003). A historical perspective on criminality in Twentieth-Century Mexico. USMEX 2005-04 Working Paper Series, University of California San Diego. Reno, W. (2004). The changing nature of warfare and the absence of state-building in West Africa. In D. E. Davis & A. Pereira (Eds.), Irregular armed forces and their role in politics and state formation (pp. 322–345). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rodgers, D. (2004). Disembedding the city: Crime, insecurity, and spatial organisation in Managua, Nicaragua. Environment and Urbanization, 16(2), 113–124. Rodgers, D. (2006). The state as a gang: Conceptualizing the governmentality of violence in contemporary Nicaragua. Critique of Anthropology, 26(3), 315–330. Rodgers, D. (2007). Slum Wars of the 21st century: The New Geography of Conflict in Central America. Working Paper No. 10, Crisis States Research Centre. London: London School of Economics. Rotker, S., Goldman, K., & Balan, J. (Eds.). (2003). Citizens of fear: Urban violence in Latin America. Camden: Rutgers University Press. Rozema, R. (2008). Urban DDR-processes: Paramilitaries and criminal networks in Medellin, Colombia. Journal of Latin American Studies, 40(3), 423–452. Sassen, S. (1991). The global city. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sassen, S. (2007). Territory, authority, rights: From medieval to global assemblages. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Simone, A. M. (2006). Pirate towns: Reworking social and symbolic infrastructures in Johannesburg and Douala. Urban Studies, 43(2), 357–370. Sparke, M. (2005). In the space of theory: Post-foundational geographies of the nation-state. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tilly, C. (1985). Warmaking and statemaking as organized crime. In D. Rueschemeyer, P. Evans, & T. Skocpol (Eds.), Bringing the state back in (pp. 169–191). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. (1990). Capital, coercion, and European States, AD 990-1992. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell. Tilly, C. (2008). Cities, states, and trust networks. Chapter 1 of Cities and States in World History, manuscript, March 11, 2008, in this issue. Volkov, V. (2002). Violent entrepreneurs: The use of force in making Russian capitalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Diane E. Davis is Professor of Political Sociology in the Department of Urban Studies at MIT, and head of the International Development Group. Her books or edited volumes include Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century (Temple University Press, 1994; Spanish translation 1999); Discipline and Development: Middle Classes and Prosperity in East Asia and Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2004); Violence, Coercion, and Rights in the Americas (Sage Publications, 2000); Irregular Armed Forces and Their Role in Politics and State Formation (Cambridge University Press, 2003): and Cities and Sovereignty: Identity Conflicts in Urban Spaces (Indiana University Press, forthcoming). Current research supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation examines police, armed force, and the rule of law in Mexico and elsewhere in the developing world.
SPOTLIGHT: A gray area Javier Auyero
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
Abstract This essay defines the “gray zone of politics” as the set of clandestine connections linking established political actors and perpetrators of violence. The “gray zone” defies easy distinctions between state and society.
The empirical evidence is mounting and (increasingly) unequivocal. What Charles Tilly (2003) calls “violent specialists”—that is, actors who specialize in inflicting physical damage—play a key, though sometimes not quite discernible, role in the origins and the course of the collective violence. Some of these specialists (police and soldiers, for example) are part of the state apparatus; some others (think thugs, gangs, and vigilante groups), however, enjoy important but oftentimes clandestine connections with established power-holders. These illicit relations (or “shadowy ties” to borrow the language used by the editors of this volume) between state actors and perpetrators of violence define what in previous work I call “the gray zone of politics” and challenge the easy and simplistic state–society distinctions that most literature on collective action still takes for granted (among government agents, repressive forces, challengers, etc.). Although far from being a clearly delimited area of inquiry, the relationship between clandestine political connections and collective violence has been the subject of increasing scholarly attention. For example, research on the origins and forms of communal violence in Southeast Asia has highlighted the hidden links between partisan politics and collective violence (Das 1990). Paul Brass’ notion of “institutionalized riot systems” appositely describes these obscure connections. In these riot systems, Brass (1997, p. 12) points out that “known actors specialize in the conversion of incidents between members of different communities into ethnic
J. Auyero (*) Department of Sociology, University of Texas at Austin, 1 University State A1700, Austin, TX 78712-0118, USA e-mail:
[email protected] M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_18, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
267
268
J. Auyero
riots. The activities of these specialists, who operate under the loose control of party leaders, are usually required for a riot to spread from the initial incident of provocation.” Sudhir Kakar’s (1996) analysis of a pehlwan, wrestler/enforcer who works for a political boss, further illustrates this point: the genesis of many episodes of collective violence is located in the area where the actions of political actors and those specialists in violence secretly meet and enmesh. Steven Wilkinson’s (2004) is perhaps the most systematic study to date of the connections between party politics (electoral competition) and collective violence (ethnic riots). Wilkinson convincingly shows that Ethnic riots, far from being relatively spontaneous eruptions of anger, are often planned by politicians for a clear electoral purpose. They are best thought of as a solution to the problem of how to change the salience of ethnic issues and identities among the electorate in order to build a winning political coalition (2004, p. 1, emphasis in original). Throughout his detailed and insightful study, Wilkinson calls attention to the instances in which political elites “cause,” “foment,” or “instigate” riots “in order to win elections” (236) and brings to the fore what is often the state’s complicity in failing to prevent violence. The state’s response, he argues, is very much conditioned by the “instructions” that politicians give to other state officials telling them “whether to protect or not protect minorities” (85). Political elites and organizers often “incite” violence and prevent repressive forces from responding once riots break out. Why is such violence absent in other regions? Wilkinson’s conclusions are straightforward. Political leaders in some Indian states, “impress upon their local officials that communal riots and anti-Muslim pogroms must be prevented at all costs” (137), because of electoral incentives. Historical accounts of “race riots” in the USA also point to a similar dynamic between members of established political parties and in the instigation (or not) of collective violence. Janet Abu-Lughod (2007), for example, documents the attacks committed by the Ragen’s Colts—young party hacks who were financially supported by Frank Ragen, a well-known Democratic Cook County commissioner—on African Americans during the 1919 riots in Chicago. Years later, during the 1943 riots in Detroit, whites who attacked blacks could count “on police protection and even assistance” (148). That party leaders and/or state officials might be “behind”—rather than against— such episodes of collective violence should hardly surprise students of Latin American politics. In a detailed study of “la violencia”—the wave of political violence that killed 200,000 people in Colombia in the 1940s and 1950s—historian Mary Roldán (2002) shows that in the state of Antioquía “partisan conflict provided the initial catalyst to violence” (22). She argues that not only did state bureaucrats “promote” the violence that shocked the region but that police and even mayors themselves actively participated in the partisan attacks. Political elites, she points out, did not simply tolerate or instigate the violence; they were its perpetrators. While party members organized attacks on places and peoples, the police acted as
SPOTLIGHT: A gray area
269
partisan shock troops. Clandestine ties, Roldán demonstrates, outlast specific episodes of violence and show durable, structure-like, properties. Historian Laurie Gunst (1995) and sociologist Orlando Patterson (2001) unearth the relationships between local patronage networks in Jamaica, or what the latter calls, “garrison constituency,” and gang violence. Patterson points out how these gangs, which were “initially formed for political purposes, now also serve the drug trade … [and have] increasingly worked to generate unrest as a political tactic.” Gunst, meanwhile, argues that the origins of Jamaican drug gangs in New York can be traced to these same posses, native to Jamaica itself, which were armed by party members linked to Prime Ministers Seaga or Manley. Goldstein’s (2003) and Arias’ (2006) recent ethnographies of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (shantytowns) provide further evidence of the collusion between state actors, members of political parties, and violent entrepreneurs such as gang members who are associated with the drug trade. Finally, Luis Astorga’s (2005) historical reconstruction of the intertwining of the political field with the field of illicit drug production and trafficking in twentieth-century Mexico offers another excellent example of the (concealed and often illegal) connections between actors inside and actors outside of the official political system—relations that must be rigorously examined if we are to explain seemingly random upsurges of violence—both past and present (for further evidence, see Davis’ and Gallo’s essays in this volume). What do all these cases have in common? They all portray the activation of clandestine connections among political actors well-entrenched within the polity and others located outside of it. When faced with “gray matters,” most of the categories that we, scholars of collective action, routinely operate with (categories that are very much informed by empirical analyses carried out in the USA and Europe) proved useless, if not misleading. As much as the literature agrees that the interactions between political elites, agents of social control, and protagonists of civil disorder matter, these remain discrete entities. The imaginary political anthropology of social movement and collective action scholarship lives in a world in which there are clear boundaries between insurgents and authorities, dissidents or challengers and state actors, located in different regions of the social and political space (as in the “protest side” and the “repression side”). There is an almost complete silence about the possible participation of authorities (either elected officials or police agents) in the direct promotion of mobilization and/or the straightforward perpetration of collective violence. In part, the notion of the gray zone of clandestinity seeks to address this problem by calling attention to the existing continuities between state actions, routine politics, and extraordinary massive violence. Political analysts should do a better job at integrating “gray zone” relations into the study of “normal” politics. Inattention to these clandestine connections risks missing much of what drives political action. These obscure (and obscured) ties oftentimes concatenate into durable “trust networks.” Rather than dismissing them as aberrant phenomena or denouncing them on moralistic grounds, the challenge for a proper social scientific analysis is to feature such usually robust relations into our standard models of political action; an analytic integration that should, in turn, allow us to better incorporate violence into the study of popular politics, something that, as the late Charles Tilly argued, most political analysis still neglects. Much (theoretical and empirical) work lies ahead.
270
J. Auyero
References Abu-Lughod, J. L. (2007). Race, space, and riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. New York: Oxford University Press. Arias, D. (2006). Drugs and democracy in Rio de Janeiro. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Astorga, L. (2005). El Siglo de las Drogas. Mexico: Plaza & Janes. Brass, P. (1997). Theft of an Idol. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Das, V. (Ed.). (1990). Mirrors of violence: Communities, riots, and survivors in South Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldstein, D. (2003). Laughter out of place: Race, class, and sexuality in a Rio shantytown. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gunst, L. (1995). Born Fi’Dead: A journey through the Jamaican Posse Underworld. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Kakar, S. (1996). The colors of violence: Cultural identities, religion, and conflict. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Patterson, O. (2001). The Roots of Conflict in Jamaica. The New York Times. Roldán, M. (2002). Blood and fire: La Violencia in Antioquia, Colombia, 1946–1953. Durham: Duke University Press. Tilly, C. (2003). The politics of collective violence. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wilkinson, S. (2004). Votes and violence. Electoral competition and ethnic riots in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Javier Auyero is the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Professor in Latin American Sociology at the University of Texas-Austin. He is the author of Poor People’s Politics (Duke University Press, 2000); Contentious Lives (Duke University Press, 2000); Routine Politics and Collective Violence in Argentina (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and, together with Débora Swistun, Flammable. Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Political opportunity: still a useful concept? Marco Giugni
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
Abstract Political opportunities refer to those aspects of the political system that affect the possibilities that challenging groups have to mobilize effectively. The aim of this essay is to reflect on some of the shortcomings of political opportunity theory and point to a number of recent developments allowing the concept to remain useful as an analytical tool: discursive opportunities, specific opportunities, perceived opportunities, and the shift from conditions to mechanisms in the study of social movements and contentious politics. It is argued that, if we succeed in adapting it to the new context and incorporating ideas about multilayered opportunity structures, agency, and new forms of governance, then a revised and updated concept of political opportunity along the lines sketched here will keep all its heuristic capacity and remain useful for the study of social movements and contentious politics.
Political opportunities refer to those aspects of the political system that affect the possibilities that challenging groups have to mobilize effectively. For the good and for the bad, the concept of political opportunity has dominated research and discussions on social movements and contentious politics during the last decades. For the good, as this concept and the approach underlying it have brought important advances to our knowledge of the field. For the bad, as they have perhaps obscured alternative perspectives due to what some have called their hegemonic imprint of the field (Goodwin and Jasper 2004a). Yet the concept of political opportunity is far from being a consensual one. First of all, its very definition is subject to disagreement, or at least different authors have looked at different aspects of opportunities. Secondly, the concept is used to study and
This essay builds on a previously published article (Giugni 2009). I thank Chris Tilly for his comments on a previous draft.
M. Giugni (*) Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Geneva 40 Boulevard du Pont d’Arve, CH-1211 Geneva 4, Switzerland e-mail:
[email protected] M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_19, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
271
272
M. Giugni
explain different aspects of movements: their emergence, their development over time, their strategies, their organizational structures, their outcomes, and so forth. Finally and most importantly for our present purpose, a wide range of criticisms have been addressed both to the concept and to the broader political process approach to social movements of which it is the main analytical tool. Although Lipsky (1968) paved the way to an analysis of “protest as a political resource” and Eisinger (1973) probably introduced the concept of political opportunity structures in the field, the first comprehensive treatment of opportunities was offered by Tilly in From Mobilization to Revolution (1978). For this author, opportunities are but one aspect of a more general model made up of five components: interests, organization, mobilization, collective action, and opportunity. In this context, opportunity “describes the relationship between the population’s interests and the current state of the world around it” (Tilly 1978, p. 55) and refers to the extent to which power, repression (and facilitation), and opportunity (and threat) provides options for collective action. From there, political opportunity theory has evolved basically in two directions (Gamson and Meyer 1996; McAdam 1996; Tarrow 1996; see Kriesi 2004 and Meyer 2004a for reviews). On the one hand, researchers have focused on the more volatile aspects of political opportunities and the opening up of “windows of opportunity” that may encourage collective actors to form or join a movement and engage in protest activities. This perspective aims mainly to explain the emergence or development over time of a given movement or movement family with changes in the institutionalized political system or the configuration of power (e.g., McAdam 1999[1982]; Tarrow 1989). This includes works that focus on public policy as an important dimension of political opportunity structures (Meyer 1990, 1993). This perspective has been adopted mainly, but not exclusively, by US scholars. On the other hand, researchers have examined the more stable aspects of political opportunities and tried to account for differences in the forms, levels, and outcomes of social movements and protest activities, above all across countries (e.g., Eisinger 1973; Kitschelt 1986; Kriesi et al. 1995). This perspective has been followed above all, but not solely, by European scholars. Put boldly, we can say that, while the first approach has focused on political opportunities in a more dynamic fashion, the second, more static approach has paid more attention to political opportunity structures. The aim of this essay is not to provide even a cursory review of scholarly work on political opportunity theory, but rather to reflect on some of its shortcomings and point to a number of recent developments that in my view allow the concept to remain useful as an analytical tool: discursive opportunities, specific opportunities, perceived opportunities, and the shift from conditions to mechanisms in the study of social movements and contentious politics. Before addressing these four developments, however, I mention some of the main criticisms that have been addressed to the political opportunity concept and approach.
The criticisms and their rejoinders The political opportunity approach has been the subject of criticisms, some quite friendly, others much more antagonistic. Among the former, Gamson and Meyer
Political opportunity: still a useful concept?
273
(1996, p. 275) warned about the danger of concept stretching, stating that “[t]he concept of political opportunity structure is in trouble, in danger of becoming a sponge that soaks up virtually every aspect of the social movement environment— political institutions and culture, crises of various sorts, political alliance and policy shifts” and that “[t]he essential problem is that everyone who writes about political opportunity structure refers to different variables.” They also pointed to the multiple functions and definitions of the concept. Indeed, the latter has been used to characterize aspects of movements’ context ranging from the strength of state institutions and the number of political parties in a polity to public discourses and media frames, just to mention perhaps the aspects that are most distant from each other. McAdam (1996, p. 31; emphasis in original) offered a possible solution to this problem: “[i]f we are to avoid the dangers of conceptual confusion, it is critical that we be explicit about which dependent variable we are seeking to explain and which dimensions of political opportunity are germane to that explanation.” This means that the concept of political opportunity as such is more a sensitizing device than an explanatory tool. In other words, saying that social movements depend on political opportunities does not tell us much about the origins, development, and influence of movements. What is needed is to specify which aspects of opportunities matter for which aspect of movements and how. Another line of criticism is less on the dangers of stretching the concept of political opportunity and more on its validity (Fillieule 2006), both internal and external. On the one hand, the distinction between challengers and members inherent in Tilly’s (1978) conceptualization of the relation between social movements and the state no longer holds, at least not in such a clear-cut manner. Contemporary forms of governance point to a more subtle interpenetration of state and civil society actors, whereby the latter become increasingly embedded within the political institutions through informal relations and sometimes formal ones as well. Therefore, a narrow focus on political opportunities as emanating from the state would miss an important part of the relationship between social movements and the state, which is what the political opportunity approach is all about. On the other hand, this approach remains strongly anchored in the European and American experiences. As a result, the concept of political opportunity, as it was defined for these two continental realities, is illequipped to capture the subtleties of other, non-western political systems, perhaps precisely those in which the distinction between state and civil society is less clear-cut. We may add to that a further point of criticism going in a similar direction: in an increasingly globalized world, the centers of power multiply, leading to a system of multilevel governance which, again, makes the traditional conceptualizations of political opportunities less appropriate (Sikkink 2005). Indeed, the latter are very much geared towards capturing features of the national political system that may or may not influence movement behavior. However, today’s “complex internationalism” (Tarrow 2001, 2005) results in multilevel opportunity structures (Tarrow and della Porta 2005) that challenge traditional, state-centered conceptions of political opportunities. Yet, the most fundamental criticism to the concept of political opportunity came from Goodwin and Jasper (2004a; see also 1999). These authors decry the political process approach to social movements as being so hegemonic in the field to leave little space for alternative explanations. They address in particular a threefold criticism to this approach and its main concept: firstly, that political process theorists
274
M. Giugni
have been unable to reach a minimum consensus, leading at best to conceptual confusion; secondly, that “the political opportunity thesis is not simply tautological, trivial, insufficient, or ambiguous: it is, as an invariant causal hypothesis, just plain wrong” (Goodwin and Jasper 2004a, p. 14); and thirdly and perhaps most importantly, that the dominant paradigm has at worst overlooked the role of strategy, agency, and culture, or at best defined these concepts so that they look more like structures. In brief, they cast serious doubts on the concept of political opportunity, especially given its strong structural bias. Some of the most prominent proponents of political opportunity theory, among others, have reacted to such a critique through rejoinders included in the very same volume (Koopmans 2004; Meyer 2004b; Tarrow 2004; Tilly 2004).1 Tilly’s answer, in particular, stressed the problems relating to the “phenomenological fundamentalism” he attributes to Goodwin and Jasper’s criticism of political process theory. Instead, together with his colleagues, he proposed an alternative treatment outlined in Dynamics of Contention (McAdam et al. 2001) as well as in Contentious Politics (Tilly and Tarrow 2006): looking at processes and mechanisms rather than structures and conditions. The remainder of the essay is devoted to discussing a number of recent and less recent developments in the political opportunity literature, including the one just mentioned, which I consider as particularly promising for building a more robust version of the concept that avoids some of the problems and pitfalls that critics have pointed out. In particular, I stress the need to focus on four types of opportunities that have been often neglected, if not totally ignored, in the extant literature: discursive opportunities, specific opportunities, perceived opportunities, and dynamic opportunities.
Discursive opportunities Political opportunity theorists have traditionally focused on institutional opportunities: degree of access to the institutionalized political system, political alignments, state capacity and propensity for repression, responsiveness of political authorities, and so forth. Surely these aspects remain the fulcrum of this approach. However, a number of scholars have started to include a cultural dimension as well (e.g., Ferree et al. 2002; Gamson and Meyer 1996; see also McAdam 1994). This development can be seen as being partly a response to increasing criticisms that the political process approach was too narrowly looking at institutional aspects (see Goodwin and Jasper 2004a) and partly as a result of a broader “cultural turn” in the study of social movements and contentious politics which is best seen in the growing importance of the framing perspective (see Benford and Snow 2000 and Snow 2004 for reviews). Recent scholarship has put forward the notion of discursive opportunities as a way to capture this cultural dimension (Ferree et al. 2002; Koopmans et al. 2005). In this perspective, opportunities for mobilization, but also constraints over it, have two sides: an institutional side referring to the access challengers have to the institutionalized political system, the configuration of power, and so forth, and a discursive side relating to the public visibility and resonance, as well as the political 1
See also the response by Goodwin and Jaspers (2004b) to these rejoinders.
Political opportunity: still a useful concept?
275
legitimacy of certain actors, identities, and claims (Koopmans et al. 2005). In other words, what matters is not only the extent to which social movements face an open or closed institutional setting, but also the extent to which their claims and identities relate to prevailing discourses in the public domain. Such discursive opportunities stem from certain features of the context in which movements act, such as, for example, the historically defined prevailing models of citizenship (Koopmans et al. 2005) or the national approaches to employment policy (Giugni 2010; Giugni et al. 2009), but are not equal to them. Koopmans et al.’s (2005) study of political claim-making on immigration and ethnic relations politics illustrates such an approach more open to the cultural dimension of opportunities. According to these authors, cross-national variations in political contention over immigration and ethnic relations can be explained by the institutional and discursive opportunities stemming from different conceptions of national identity and their crystallization in country-specific integration and citizenship policies. Institutional opportunities determine the rights and duties of immigrants and the institutional resources and channels available to collective actors to make claims. Discursive opportunities related to cultural notions of citizenship and national identity determine which perspectives on the relations between immigrants and the host society are considered as sensible, which constructions of reality are considered as realistic, and which claims and collective actors are considered to be legitimate within the political system (Koopmans et al. 2005). This combination of institutional and discursive opportunities facilitates the mobilization of certain collective actors, collective identities, and specific demands, while preventing or making more difficult the mobilization of other actors and the expression of other identities and demands. Recent works on the “contentious politics of unemployment,” that is, the relationships between political institutional approaches to employment policy and political conflicts mobilized by collective actors over unemployment in the public domain, adopt a similar political opportunity approach (Giugni 2010; Giugni et al. 2009). These works try to establish a link between the prevailing conceptions of the welfare state and the intervention of collective actors in the public domain in this issue field, on the other. The underlying idea here is that the prevailing view of the welfare state and its crystallization in institutional approaches to unemployment impinge in significant ways upon claim-making unemployment politics. Both these studies aim to show how cultural or, more precisely, discursive opportunity structures may influence political contention and channel collective action, but without throwing the baby out with the bathwater, that is, without giving up institutional opportunities altogether. This approach certainly does not solve the problems some critics stressed concerning concept stretching. However, it does soften the strong institutional focus of traditional approaches and respond to the critique of structural bias.
Specific opportunities Another criticism often addressed to the concept of political opportunity is that it is too general, as if the latter would affect all social movements in the same way,
276
M. Giugni
regardless of the characteristics of the political fields and collective actors at hand (Koopmans et al. 2005). Related to the attempt to bringing culture back in political opportunity theory, another development seeks to respond to this criticism by specifying opportunities. In this perspective, political opportunities may vary from one political field to the other, from one sector to the other. In other words, political opportunities are movement-specific, field-specific, and issue-specific (Berclaz and Giugni 2005; Kriesi et al. 1995; McAdam 1996; Meyer 2004a). Better yet, one should consider both the opportunities for and constraints on mobilization stemming from the more general features of the political system and those characterizing a specific policy area or issue field. Such a specification of political opportunities has been done in two ways: on the one hand, by acknowledging that institutional actors may have different reactions to the mobilization of different movements or to challengers addressing different issues and, on the other hand, by looking at specific opportunities stemming from a particular political field. Kriesi et al. (1995) proposed a specification based on the idea that political opportunities might be more favorable or less favorable according to the issues raised by challenging groups and the policy domains they address. The authors show how political authorities and allies may provide different responses to the challenges addressed by social movements. To do so, they distinguish between high-profile and low-profile policy domains depending on how members of the polity define them based on their conception of the core tasks and interests of the state (see also Duyvendak 1995), issues addressing high-profile policy domains being more threatening for the state than issues targeting low-profile domains.2 As a result, the degree of openness or closedness of the political system varies across policy domains, being less accessible to certain challenges and more open to others. Therefore, political opportunities are more favorable for certain movements than for others: they are less favorable for movements addressing high-profile policy domains, which pose a greater threat to the state, and more favorable for movements addressing low-profile policy domains, which are less threatening for the members of the polity. Thus, rather than being constant for all movements, political opportunities may vary from one movement or type of movement to another, which helps explain within-country variations in mobilization. In addition, movement activists can react differently to the same kinds of political opportunities or shifts therein. In other words, political opportunities do not have the same relevance for social movements, depending on the very characteristics of the latter, for example, whether they are more strategically or identity-oriented.3 The idea that, in addition to the general features of the political system, there are political opportunities that characterize specific policy areas or issue fields has been put forward, for example, by Koopmans et al. (2005) in their analysis of claim-making in the field of immigration and ethnic relations politics, already mentioned earlier. In their 2
It should be stressed that Kriesi et al. (1995) relate the high-profile or low-profile character of policy domains to the politicization of political issues and how the members of the polity define the state’s core interests. 3 In order to capture this aspect, Kriesi et al. (1995) use a typology combining two dimensions: the logic of action (instrumental or identity based) and the general orientation (internal or external) of social movements. The authors distinguish between three main types or movements by combining these two criteria: subcultural, countercultural, and instrumental movements.
Political opportunity: still a useful concept?
277
perspective, the prevailing configurations or models of citizenship form a specific opportunity structure that determines the options for action in this field and channels the claim-making bearing on these issues. Since citizenship models vary from one country to the other, this in turn accounts for cross-national variations in the presence of actors in this field as well as in the content and form of their claims. As mentioned earlier, a similar view was recently applied to the field of unemployment politics (Giugni 2010; Giugni et al. 2009). The authors argue that, similar to citizenship models in immigration and ethnic relations politics, dominant conceptions of the welfare state define a specific political opportunity structure that enlarges or constrains the options for action available to collective actors intervening in this field. Again, since different countries are characterized by different welfare state regimes, cross-national variations in the claim-making on issues pertaining to unemployment can be at least in part be explained by such differences.
Perceived opportunities Few would disagree with the idea that political opportunities must be perceived in order to be considered as such. Opportunities may be out there “objectively,” but they can simply be either ignored or not perceived as such by challengers. As Gamson and Meyer (1996, p. 283), among others, have pointed out, “[a]n opportunity not recognized is no opportunity at all.” Yet scholarship, while often acknowledging that, only seldom has addressed the perception of opportunities seriously. As a result, there is a gap between at least some analyses of the impact of political opportunity structures on social movement behavior and the common understanding that opportunities should be perceived as well as seized in order to act as an explanatory factor. While often acknowledging that political opportunities must be perceived as such before one can make some use of them, students of social movements have most of the time left them out of their analyses, in a sort of black box, assuming that “objective” features of and changes in the political context are automatically perceived by social and political actors. This is not necessarily true. There are a number of reasons why movement activists do not see the opportunities existing out there. For example, they could misinterpret a given change in the configuration of power such as seizure of power by a political party sympathetic to the movements’ goals. This might be seen as the beginning of a more favorable period for reform or as a sign of the loss of a powerful ally in the oppositional camp, therefore leading either to an increase or a decline in mobilization. In addition, movement activists may well perceive opportunities, but not want to seize them. For example, they could decide not to mobilize in spite of a favorable environment for strategic reasons or because they want to focus on internal goals. The need to seriously take into account the perception of opportunities becomes particularly evident when we look at the individual level, that is, at the mechanisms and processes through which people get involved in social movements and protest activities. The different ways in which people perceive existing “objective” opportunity structures may explain why some participate and others not. In this
278
M. Giugni
regard, a social-psychological perspective to social movements can be of much help (e.g., Gamson 1992; Klandermans 1997). Although not framed in sociopsychological terms, some work in the political opportunity or, more broadly, in the political process perspective have developed some concepts that bring us closer to an understanding of how perceptions may be mediating between structural opportunities and actual behaviors. Specifically, an analysis of contention in terms of the perception of the costs and benefits of collective action as well as of its chances of success (Kriesi et al. 1995; Tilly 1978) can be seen as a first step towards taking perceived opportunities into account. These aspects have often been considered as central by rational choice theorists (e.g., Opp 1989), much less so by hard-nosed political opportunity theorists. In a less rationalist tone, the framing approach to social movements provides a useful framework for examining the perception of political opportunities (see Benford and Snow 2000 and Snow 2004 for reviews). Framing theory has developed a set of analytical tools that can be put to use for connecting the structural conditions for collective action to the psychology of those who become involved in it. As Klandermans (1997, p. 173) has put it, “[t]hrough processes of meaning construction in which movement organizations take their part, political opportunities are assessed and reacted upon.” For example, Diani (1996) argues that different types of political structures (defined by the combination of political alignments and the possibility of autonomous action within the political system) reflect different perceptions of the political environment, each favoring a certain framing strategy and collective action frame. In his study of the Italian Northern League, he shows how this party has used these different framing strategies following changes in the political opportunity structure. As he maintains, “differences in the salience of traditional identities and perceptions of opportunities for autonomous action created chances for somewhat different types of frames” (Diani 1996, p. 1066). A number of scholars have inquired more directly into the role of perceived opportunities (e.g., Alimi 2007; Banaszak 1996; Kurzman 1996, 2004; Lee 2010; McAdam 2004). For example, Banaszak (1996) shows how the differential success of the struggle for women suffrage in Switzerland and the USA depended on the choice of tactics and strategies made by movement activists which, in turn, was influenced by their beliefs and values as well as by their perception of the opportunities offered by the political system. Similarly, Kurzman (1996) stresses the role of perceived opportunities to explain the Iranian revolution of 1979 (see also Kurzman 2004). Yet, these works are still the exception and the study of perceived opportunities has still a long way to go.
From conditions to mechanisms Finally, the political opportunity approach has often suffered from too static a conception of opportunities. This applies especially to the European comparative tradition (but see, for example, Eisinger 1973, for a static approach by an American scholar). The American tradition, in contrast, has paid more attention to the impact of changes in environmental conditions on social movement behavior (but see, for
Political opportunity: still a useful concept?
279
example, Kriesi et al. 1995, for a work by European scholars looking also at shifts in the configuration of power). The main point here, however, is not so much to go beyond a static and structural perspective by connecting changes in movement behavior to shifts in political opportunities, which has often been done (e.g., Tarrow 1998), but is above all a matter of making the analysis of social movements as a whole more dynamic. In other words, the political opportunity approach has suffered from what we may call a correlational approach, whereby scholars have often contented themselves with looking for the existence of a correlation between certain features of the political system, on the one hand, and the levels, forms, and outcomes of protest, on the other. This is perhaps best seen in Eisinger’s (1973) and Kitschelt’s (1986) analyses. These works have proven decisive in pushing forward the study of the impact of the political context on protest activities. Yet they leave open many questions concerning the translation of opportunities into action following a more explanatory approach. Inspired by Tilly’s (1978) mobilization model, Kriesi et al. (1995) went a step further by specifying a number of “concrete opportunities” for mobilization as a way to bridge the gap between abstract political opportunity structures and actual movement behavior (see also Koopmans 1995). Concrete opportunities are defined as a set of derivatives of the political opportunity structures which directly affect the costs and benefits of collective action. They represent individual perceptions of these structural aspects of the political system (repression, facilitation, the reform/threat pair, and the chances of success), and the action level (extent and forms of collective mobilization). As such, they allow to specifying the mechanisms that translate social structures into individual and group actions. The most radical shift from the traditional view of political opportunities, however, came from McAdam et al. (2001). In their influential book, they proposed an alternative approach to what they called the “classic social movement agenda for explaining contentious politics.” They suggested in particular moving away from the search for the conditions favoring or preventing challengers to mobilize and focus instead on processes and mechanisms. This means going from a static to a more dynamic view of contention as a concatenation of causal mechanisms, causal processes, and contentious episodes (see also Tilly and Tarrow 2006). The key concept in this perspective is that of mechanism, defined “as delimited sorts of events that change relations among specified sets of elements in identical or closely similar ways over a variety of situations” (McAdam et al. 2001, p. 25). They then distinguish between three types of mechanisms: environmental mechanisms, which “mean externally generated influences on conditions affecting social life;” cognitive mechanisms, “which operate through alterations of individual and collective perceptions;” and “relational mechanisms, which alter connections among people, groups, and interpersonal networks” (McAdam et al. 2001, pp. 25–26). The new explanatory agenda then is threefold: “identifying contentious episodes or families of contentious episodes having some problematic feature;” “locating the processes within them that constitute or produce the problematic feature;” and “searching out the crucial causal mechanisms within those processes” (McAdam et al. 2001, p. 29). The shift from the traditional kind of analysis is clear and substantial, although some have criticized this approach precisely on the basis of the fact that it is not that
280
M. Giugni
different from what students of social movements had done until then. The authors then proceed to analyze a range of cases in different places and at different times to illustrate the proposed approach. By doing so they tentatively identify three robust processes, that is, “crucial processes that recur in roughly the same form in a wide variety of episodes of contention” (McAdam et al. 2001, p. 314): the constitution of new political actors and identities (actor constitution), the polarization of political groups, and the scale shift from local to translocal arenas and related changes in the actors and the character of their interaction. This approach has not gone unchallenged.4 In spite of legitimate doubts and criticisms, however, looking at processes and mechanisms within processes departs from a static view of political opportunities, but also from a correlational approach whereby changes in movement behavior are linked to shifts in political opportunities, especially in the configuration of power. Such a perspective therefore makes the study of political contention and, more specifically, the political opportunity approach more dynamic.
Conclusion Political opportunity has been at the core of much scholarly work on social movements and contentious politics during the last decades. However, no real consensus seems to emerge concerning the definition of the concept and even less concerning the research findings. As Meyer and Minkoff (2004) have pointed out, significant variation exists which has three origins: a broader or narrower conceptualization of the political opportunity structures, the dependent variable under study, and the underlying assumptions about the mechanisms at work. So, what should we do with all this? Concerning the definition of political opportunity, there is probably not much we can do. After all, each researcher is free to pick the definition she or he prefers, also according to the specific research question. Perhaps what can be done is to find a common ground at a general level of abstraction on which dimensions pertain to political opportunity and which do not. Koopmans’s (2004) suggestion that political opportunities refer to factors outside the mobilizing groups seems quite sensible in this respect. As for the dependent variables, again, any of us may want to try to explain whatever aspects she or he finds most relevant. What is crucial here is that analyses of the very same dependent variable converge in some way, not pointing to opposed directions, otherwise cumulating knowledge becomes difficult, to say the least. Finally, concerning the underlying assumptions about the mechanisms at work, if we buy McAdam et al.’s (2001) dynamic approach to contentious politics, then we are led to agree at least about the search for and study of a limited number of robust causal mechanisms and processes that can be observed at work in different contexts and at different moments in time.
See the “Book Symposium on: Dynamics of Contention by Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly” published in Mobilization (Volume 8, Issue 1, 2003) and the symposium on McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly’s “Measuring Mechanisms of Contention” published in Qualitative Sociology (McAdam et al. 2008) for discussions. 4
Political opportunity: still a useful concept?
281
In this essay, I have suggested four avenues to avoid or at least diminish some of the shoatcomings of political opportunity theory. Paying more attention to discursive opportunities alongside institutional ones, looking at opportunities specific to certain policy or issue fields in addition to the general features of the institutionalized political system, examining whether and how movement activists perceive and seize existing opportunities, and approaching the study of social movements and contentious politics from a more dynamic perspective focusing on causal mechanisms and processes rather than on correlations and conditions probably will not bring more consensus in the field, but they should at least bring the concept of political opportunity closer to the people for whose actions it is supposed to account. In the end, all of this comes down to paying more attention to what actors do with the opportunities and constraints yielded by the political context. Indeed, the four avenues I addressed above, in the end, are all paths towards a more consideration of agency in the study of social movements without, however, neglecting the role of structural constraints and opportunities. In addition, analyses of social movements and contentious politics following a political opportunity approach should take into account three features of the contemporary world and, more specifically, of today’s field of political contention. Firstly, we can consider what we may call a multilayered political opportunity structure, both territorially and functionally. On one hand, the context for mobilizing today is no longer a local or national one, but transcends the national borders and social movements often adapt to such multilevel opportunity structure (Tarrow and della Porta 2005), as work on transnational protest has shown (see Smith 2004 for an overview). On the other hand, in addition to this territorial dimension, different policy areas and issue fields do not necessary provide the same kind of opportunities and constraints, but exert a specific influence on collective actors within each field. Secondly, the traditional separation of members and challengers is perhaps becoming increasingly fuzzy, especially so in nondemocratic contexts (Fillieule 2006). Contemporary society sees the emergence of new forms of governance, whereby state and civil society actors often cooperate, institutional actors such as parties sometimes behave as social movements, and movement activists become part of state institutions, either formally or informally. Accordingly, the concept of political opportunity structures needs to take this new context into account in some way. Thirdly, structural constraints and social action should not be considered as necessarily opposed to each other. Social theorists have long tried to bridge the gap between structure and action (Bourdieu 1977; Coleman 1990; Giddens 1984). Students of social movements and, in particular, political opportunity theorists, need to acknowledge that opportunities are both a cause and a consequence of protest activities, thus rediscovering the place of agency in their analyses. I believe that, if we succeed in adapting it to the new context and incorporating ideas about multilayered opportunity structures, agency, and new forms of governance, then a revised and updated concept of political opportunity along the lines sketched here will keep all its heuristic capacity and remain useful for the study of social movements and contentious politics.
282
M. Giugni
References Alimi, E. I. (2007). The dialectic of opportunities and threats and temporality of contention: evidence from the occupied territories. International Political Science Review, 28, 101–123. Banaszak, L. A. (1996). Why movements succeed or fail. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Benford, R. D., & Snow, D. A. (2000). Framing processes and social movements: an overview and assessment. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 611–639. Berclaz, J., & Giugni, M. (2005). Specifying the concept of political opportunity structures. In M. Kousis & C. Tilly (Eds.), Economic and political contention in comparative perspective (pp. 15–32). Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coleman, J. S. (1990). Foundations of social theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Diani, M. (1996). Linking mobilization frames and political opportunities: insights from regional populism in Italy. American Sociological Review, 61, 1053–1069. Duyvendak, J. W. (1995). The power of politics: New social movements in France. Boulder: Westview Press. Eisinger, P. K. (1973). The conditions of protest behavior in American cities. American Political Science Review, 67, 11–28. Ferree, M. M., Gamson, W. A., Gerhards, J., & Rucht, D. (2002). Shaping abortion discourse: Democracy and the public sphere in Germany and the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fillieule, O. (2006). Requiem pour un concept: Vie et mort de la notion de structure des opportunités politiques. In G. Dorronsoro (Ed.), La Turquie conteste: Mobilisations sociales et régime sécuritaire (pp. 201–241). Paris: Presses du CNRS. Gamson, W. A. (1992). The social psychology of collective action. In A. D. Morris & C. M. Mueller (Eds.), Frontiers of social movement theory (pp. 53–76). New Haven: Yale University Press. Gamson, W. A., & Meyer, D. S. (1996). Framing political opportunity. In D. McAdam, J. D. McCarthy, & M. N. Zald (Eds.), Comparative perspectives on social movements: Political opportunities, mobilizing structures, and cultural framings (pp. 275–290). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Giugni, M. (2010). The contentious politics of unemployment in Europe: Welfare states and political opportunities. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Giugni, M., Berclaz, M., & Füglister, K. (2009). Welfare states, labour markets, and the political opportunities for collective action in the field of unemployment: A theoretical framework. In M. Giugni (Ed.), The politics of unemployment in Europe: State and civil society responses (pp. 133–149). Aldershot: Ashgate. Goodwin, J., & Jasper, J. M. (2004a). Caught in a winding, snarling vine: The structural bias of political process theory. In J. Goodwin JM Jasper (Ed.), Rethinking social movements (pp. 3–30). Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Goodwin, J., & Jasper, J. M. (2004b). Trouble in paradigms. In J. Goodwin & J. M. Jasper (Eds.), Rethinking social movements (pp. 75–93). Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Kitschelt, H. (1986). Political opportunity structures and political protest: anti-nuclear movements in four democracies. British Journal of Political Science, 16, 57–85. Koopmans, R. (1995). Democracy from below: New social movements and the political system in West Germany. Boulder: Westview Press. Koopmans, R. (2004). Political. Opportunity. Structure. Some splitting to balance the lumping. In J. Goodwin & J. M. Jasper (Eds.), Rethinking social movements (pp. 61–73). Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Koopmans, R., Statham, P., Giugni, M., & Passy, F. (2005). Contested citizenship: Immigration and cultural diversity in Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kriesi, H. (2004). Political context and opportunity. In D. A. Snow, S. Soule, & H. Kriesi (Eds.), Blackwell companion to social movements (pp. 67–90). Oxford: Blackwell. Kriesi, H., Koopmans, R., Duyvendak, J. W., & Giugni, M. G. (1995). New social movements in Western Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kurzman, C. (1996). Structural opportunities and perceived opportunities in social-movement theory: evidence from the Iranian revolution of 1979. American Sociological Review, 61, 153–170. Kurzman, C. (2004). The unthinkable revolution in Iran. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Political opportunity: still a useful concept?
283
Lee, F. L. F. (2010). The perceptual bases of collective efficacy and protest participation: the case of prodemocracy protests in Honk Kong. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 22, 392–411. McAdam, D. (1994). Culture and social movements. In E. Laraña, H. Johnston, & J. R. Gusfield (Eds.), New social movements: From ideology to identity (pp. 36–57). Philadelphia: Temple University Press. McAdam, D. (1996). Conceptual origins, current problems, future directions. In D. McAdam, J. D. McCarthy, & M. N. Zald (Eds.), Comparative perspectives on social movements: Political opportunities, mobilizing structures, and cultural framings (pp. 23–40). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McAdam, D. (1999[1982]). Political process and the development of black insurgency, 1930-1970 (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McAdam, D. (2004). Revisiting the U.S. civil rights movement: Towards a more synthetic understanding of the origins of contention. In J. Goodwin & J. M. Jasper (Eds.), Rethinking social movements: Structure, meaning, and emotion. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. McAdam, D., Tarrow, S., & Tilly, C. (2001). Dynamics of contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McAdam, D., Tilly, C., & Tarrow, S. (2008). Progressive polemics: Reflections on four stimulating commentaries. Qualitative Sociology, 31, 361–367. Meyer, D. S. (1990). A winter of discontent: The nuclear freeze and American politics. New York: Praeger. Meyer, D. S. (1993). Political process and protest movement cycles: American peace movements in the nuclear age. Political Research Quarterly, 46, 451–479. Meyer, D. S. (2004a). Protest and political opportunities. Annual Review of Sociology, 30, 125–145. Meyer, D. S. (2004b). Tending the vineyard: Cultivating political process research. In J. Goodwin & J. M. Jasper (Eds.), Rethinking social movements (pp. 47–59). Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Meyer, D. S., & Minkoff, D. (2004). Conceptualizing political opportunity. Social Forces, 82, 1457–1492. Opp, K.-D. (1989). The rationality of political protest: A comparative analysis of rational choice theory. Boulder: Westview. Sikkink, K. (2005). Patterns of dynamic multilevel governance and the insider–outsider coalition. In D. della Porta & S. Tarrow (Eds.), Transnational protest and global activism (pp. 151–173). Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Smith, J. (2004). Transnational processes and movements. In D. A. Snow, S. Soule, & H. Kriesi (Eds.), Blackwell companion to social movements (pp. 311–335). Oxford: Blackwell. Snow, D. A. (2004). Framing processes, ideology, and discursive fields. In D. A. Snow, S. Soule, & H. Kriesi (Eds.), Blackwell companion to social movements (p. 380). Oxford: Blackwell. Tarrow, S. (1989). Democracy and disorder: Protest and politics in Italy, 1965-1975. Oxford: Clarendon. Tarrow, S. (1996). States and opportunities: The political structuring of social movements. In D. McAdam, J. D. McCarthy, & M. N. Zald (Eds.), Comparative perspectives on social movements (pp. 41–61). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tarrow, S. (1998). Power in movements: Social movements and contentious politics (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tarrow, S. (2004). Paradigm warriors: Regress and progress in the study of contentious politics. In J. Goodwin & J. M. Jasper (Eds.), Rethinking social movements (pp. 39–45). Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Tarrow, S., & della Porta, D. (2005). Conclusion: ‘Globalization,’ complex internationalism, and transnational contention. In D. della Porta & S. Tarrow (Eds.), Transnational protest and global activism (pp. 227–246). Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Tilly, C. (1978). From mobilization to revolution. Reading: Addison-Wesley. Tilly, C. (2004). Wise Quacks. In J. Goodwin & J. M. Jasper (Eds.), Rethinking social movements (pp. 31–37). Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Tilly, C., & Tarrow, S. (2006). Contentious politics. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Marco Giugni is a Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations and Director of the Institute of Social and Political Research (resop) at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. His research interests include social movements and collective action, immigration and ethnic relations, unemployment and social exclusion.
Part V Democracy and Inequality
Institutions and the adoption of rights: political and property rights in Colombia Carmenza Gallo
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Abstract Citizenship rights are the result of specific political bargains between different collective actors and state authorities (Tilly Theory and Society 26 (34):599–602, 1997). The political bargains for rights are encoded in institutions, and these institutions develop independently from each other and take organizational characteristics that make certain rights easier to adopt than others. I argue that these institutions vary along two dimensions that affect the extent to which states can adopt rights successfully: one dimension is distributional and the second is the depth or extension of the rules that frame a given right. This article focuses on the institutional differences between property rights, especially land property, and political rights, and on the consequences of those differences on their adoption. I then illustrate my argument with examples from Colombia since 1980.
During the last two decades the dissonance between democracy and the granting of basic human rights, especially in newer (second and third wave) democracies, has been a matter of academic and political argument. While more countries are nominally democratic today than ever before, few would argue that respect for human rights has followed a similar trajectory. Zakaria (1997, p. 23) has forcefully advanced this point, arguing that there is a disconnection between civil and political rights. In his view, protection of basic liberties of speech, assembly, religion, and property—freedoms that he calls constitutional liberalism—are “theoretically different and historically distinct from democracy.” He adds that liberalism may have coincided with the rise of democracy, but it has not been unambiguously linked to its practice, and that while constitutional liberalism has led to democracy, democracy does not seem to bring constitutional liberalism (Zakaria 1997, p. 23, 28).
C. Gallo (*) Department of Sociology, Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA e-mail:
[email protected] M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_20, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
287
288
C. Gallo
More recently, Diamond (2002, p. 27) echoes the same point, arguing that during the “third wave” of democratic expansion both the number and proportion of democracies in the world have more than doubled. He points out that there is a dwindling proportion of politically closed regimes but that the trend toward democracy has been accompanied by an even more dramatic trend toward pseudo democracy. And Jelin and Hershberg (1998, p. 216) argue that the linear sequence of civil, political, and social rights followed by European countries bears little resemblance with the experience of Latin American countries, as in these countries rights are revoked and reversed and political rights do not imply that civil rights can be taken for granted. The persistent if not widening discrepancy between nominal democracies and respect for human rights has opened up political and academic debates in the literature about three important issues related to democracy and human rights. First is the idea, mostly implicit but until recently unquestioned, that popular and free elections would open the door to the establishment of other rights. Second, related to the first, is the issue that the historical sequence in which core democracies granted rights does not matter for the successful establishment of rights in newer democracies (Carothers 2007); with the adoption of free elections, other rights will follow. The third issue concerns the degree in which rights can be successfully adopted. By focusing on the institutions that support rights this article aims to shed light into the last of these issues: which, if any, rights can be successfully adopted, and why? An answer to this question will improve our understanding of why political rights do not necessarily lead to other rights and whether the sequence in which rights are acquired does matter. Rights are the result of specific political bargains between different actors and state authorities (Tilly 1997). Bargaining for rights is encoded in institutions that develop independently from each other and these institutions adopt organizational characteristics that make certain rights easier to establish than others. The subject of the bargaining, the conflict involved in the bargain, and the actors involved, all shape the institutions that support citizens’ rights. I propose that these institutions vary along two dimensions that affect the extent to which states can adopt rights successfully: one dimension is the extent to which institutions (re)distribute economic resources and the second is the depth or extension of the rules that frame a given right. This article focuses on the institutional differences between property rights, especially land property, and political rights (such as the rights to vote and be elected), and on the consequences of those differences for their adoption and expansion. I illustrate the elements of my argument with examples from Colombia since 1980. Colombia stands out as a country, which, since the 1990s, has expanded political rights and deepened its democracy through greater political participation, but it simultaneously has been unable to implement and expand property rights. I first look at the different approaches to the origin of citizenship rights; next I map out the different types of institutions that support rights, concentrating on the institutional differences between political and property rights, and on how those differences help understand the adoption of rights. And last, I look at how those differences played out in Colombia.
Institutions and the adoption of rights: political and property rights in Colombia
289
Approaches to the study of rights The literature on rights is rich and long and for reasons of space I cannot do justice here to either aspect. I sought responses to two broad issues: first, what is the origin of rights? Second, what are the institutional characteristics of rights and how do these characteristics affect the adoption of rights? Explanations of the origins of citizenship rights are broadly divided into three major approaches: (1) human rights, (2) democratic or political rights, and (3) bargaining. In spite of different arguments, these approaches are not always irreconcilable. The human rights approach is preoccupied with rights as the set of minimal universal rights that every human being should enjoy. It is modeled on citizens’ rights in the most advanced countries, and essentially holds that human rights should be available everywhere, regardless of economic or historical conditions (Arat 1999; Richards 2000; Sen 1999). In this approach—which informs the work of human rights activists—rights are to be gained through either popular national and local mobilization or through international pressure. That is, rights can start from the bottom or from the top. In either case, however, this model emphasizes adoption through international pressure, and through international and local organizations that oversee human rights and mobilize local communities in third world countries. The democracy or the political rights approach is not explicitly preoccupied with the origins of discrete or specific rights. First, researchers deal with rights only as embedded in democracy. Because the emphasis is on democracy—on the existence of free elections—this approach implicitly favors political over other rights, and overshadows the importance of other rights. When newer democracies lack the full set of rights that is present in older democracies, scholars in this approach discuss, normatively, the minimum or essential set of rights that must be present to call a regime democratic (Dahl 1998; Diamond 2002; Diamond and Morlino 2004; Kraxberger 2007; Rueschemeyer 2004). Second, researchers focus on the diffusion of democracy and on a series of preconditions for the establishment of a democratic regime, more than of individual rights. These preconditions are invariably complex and multiple, often favoring the convergence of internal, economic, and political conditions over international factors (Carothers 2007; Przeworski 2003). The bargaining approach focuses on the historical formation of citizenship, considers that rights are the result of bargaining between collective actors and the state, and makes explicit the collective actors’ claims and the role of power, of both states and citizens (Hanagan 1999; Mann 1987; Tilly 1999, 1997). As Hanagan (1999, p. 3) notes, “rights depend on power” and governments “must have power to enforce citizens’ claims, yet citizens must possess sufficient power to defend rights even when they impede government policy.” Two points are essential in this approach. First, because rights depend on power, and power is changeable, rights can contract and expand even in core democracies. Second, for Tilly (2007) state capacity stands in a delicate relation with citizenship rights: high levels of state capacity are dangerous for rights (as mutually binding consultation between states and citizens becomes more difficult), while low levels are unfavorable for the enforcement of rights: “democratic regimes are rare, contingent, recent creations”
290
C. Gallo
(Tilly 2007, p. 18). Balanced levels of state capacity and citizen power are best for rights and democracy. Thus, the bargaining approach offers a frame to study the development of discrete rights in a complex relationship with central states; the human rights approach contests the need for historical and structural preconditions for rights, suggesting that adoption and diffusion of rights are possible; and the democracy approach, by empirically showing that there is no fixed relationship between a set of rights and democratic regimes, underlines the need to understand the interrelationship (if any) between rights. These three approaches, however, do not look at rights in terms of the institutions that they produce and this omission has obscured our understanding of the unequal difficulties in the establishment of rights. Additionally, looking at rights individually and institutionally will help clarify the relationship between rights and the state, and the limited ripple effect that rights have on each other. I next discuss the different types of rights and institutions, with focus on property and political rights.
Institutions and rights In a famous formulation North (1990, p. 3) points out that institutions are “the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction” and structure incentives, whether political, social, or economic. More directly, Knight (1992, pp. 19–20) argues that institutions are the product of the “efforts of some to constrain the actions of others with whom they interact.” In addition, Knight (1992) makes two related relevant points: the first is that institutions are the result of bargaining, and the second is that they have distributional effects on a society. Citizens’ rights, in particular, are “mutually enforceable claims relating categories of persons to agents of governments,” and they result from bargains between state agents and collective actors (Tilly 1997). Agents of the government are the enforcers and guarantors of rights. As Holmes and Sunstein (2000, p. 44,182) argue, all rights are “positive.” Freedom of speech, or of religion, commonly understood in the United States as “negative” freedoms, as rights that seek to keep the state out, in fact entitle citizens to judicial remedies (at the cost of taxpayers) when public officials infringe those freedoms. Negative freedoms are rights insofar as they are claims to an affirmative state response. Effective rights require the state to enact, define, and maintain them, and therefore cost money. Further, all citizens rights imply a degree of redistribution of a society’s resources, but some more directly than others. For example, property rights directly pertain to the distribution of wealth and assets in a society as they entail the expropriation from one group to benefit another; while social (welfare) rights call for an indirect redistribution, through taxation and subsequent state expenditures. Although the maintenance of property rights may not involve continuous expropriation, rules initially created for that purpose are most likely maintained for defense against domestic and international threats. In addition to the direct or indirect distributive consequences, institutions supporting rights vary according to a second dimension: the density of their rules.
Institutions and the adoption of rights: political and property rights in Colombia
291
By definition, all types of rights connect collective actors and the state, but some rights regulate vertical interactions between the state and diverse social groups whereas others regulate vertical and horizontal interactions, between social groups and the state and among the groups themselves. Social rights, like unemployment benefits, or food stamps, mainly define rules between groups in a society and the state. Alternatively, property rights regulate relations among groups of citizens and between the groups and the state. Women’s rights, rights to a fair trial, and antidiscrimination (minority) rights are also in this category. Political rights, however, defy an easy placement in the above classification because they involve several dissimilar rights: popular vote or franchise, freedom of expression, and freedom of association, at a minimum. As a consequence of the diversity of rights involved, political rights form distinct institutions some of which are directly distributive (the popular vote as it grants control of the state to a few individuals), while other political rights are not. Similarly, the vote for example is implemented with a relatively sparser set of rules, while freedom of speech or of association may require a denser set of laws that not only keep the “state out” of the individuals’ preferences for speech or association, but also regulate conflicting individual preferences. Figure 1 shows the variation of institutions supporting rights. Indeed Marshall (1965) argues that the institutional apparatus supporting rights develops distinct organizational forms and distinct mechanisms to reach the groups of people they are supposed to serve. In his view, access to social rights, unemployment or pension benefits, etc., requires means testing or other easily obtainable certifications. According to this author, major obstacles to the institutional and organizational establishment of the universal vote are not insurmountable either, but institutions involving civil rights (freedom of thought and association) develop more slowly and are accessible only through the legal profession, implying litigation and greater expense. Thus, while the institutional rules and organizations supporting social rights—and to a lesser extent, voting rights—can be (and have been) successfully adopted in
Direct Indirect
Economic Distribution
Political Rights
Social Welfare Rights
Property Rights
Freedom of Association and Speech
Low Density of Rules and Regulations Fig. 1 Rights as institutions
High
292
C. Gallo
newer democracies, institutions and organizations enacting individual freedoms (of speech and association) as well as property rights, are considerably less so. The latter are less organizationally insulated and more sensitive to context and culture. Let me explain this further with focus on property and political rights. Property rights Private property is the result of political deals pressed forward by propertied classes. It is a legally constructed social relationship meaningful only if public authorities use coercion to exclude non-owners. Private property specifies, on the one hand, relations that distribute economic resources and, on the other, relations between owners and non-owners, and between them and the state. That private property rights encode the distribution of valuable resources is a well-accepted proposition (Richardson and Bogart 2008; Campbell and Lindberg 1990). And early on, Hume already argued that private property is a monopoly granted and maintained at the public’s expense (cited in Holmes and Sunstein 2000). Institutions such as property rights that are distributive and with a dense set of rules are difficult to establish for three reasons: first, they require multiple and complex regulations that lead to a bulky state; second, they rest on relatively stable power relations between losers and winners of property; and lastly, because the economic stakes are high, property owners need to trust state agents. (1) Bulky or relatively high capacity state. Distributive institutions require multiple regulations to prevent state agents from seizing private property, on the one hand, and threats from domestic and foreign interlopers, on the other. Furthermore, the defense of property, especially land, requires actual state territorial control. As a consequence, the role of the state in enacting and defending property is extensive and expensive. It must include among other entities a police and an army, criminal courts, and an extensive bureaucracy in charge of recording, surveying titles, and registering transactions, etc. (De Soto 1989). A main consequence is that property rights demand a central state able to enact and support expensive rights. To this extent, property rights are more difficult to establish and expand. (2) Stability of power relations. Farrell and Knight (2003, p. 540) argue that stability in power relations is a key factor in the stability of institutions. Since property rights define a particular balance of power valid at a given historical period, it can be argued that working and stable property rights are suited to stable and relatively egalitarian economies: those with stable power relations (Sonin 2002). Both stability and relative equality minimize political challenges to property, which reinforce trust in the law and in turn make economic transactions more automatic and less dependent on the actual use of courts and laws that regulate them. Conversely, the economic instability and high levels of inequality that usually characterize Third World countries (Rueschemeyer 2004) make property rights less legitimate and trusted, more evidently unfair, more subject to challenges, and ultimately more costly to enforce. (3) Trust. An additional related aspect to the legal frame to back up market transactions is the issue of trust. Scholars concur that market economies require
Institutions and the adoption of rights: political and property rights in Colombia
293
trust to work smoothly (Tilly 2008; Warner 1998). These authors underline that market economies conduct self-enforcing transactions with goods exchanged for other goods or for money instantly, and transactions that involve time and distance may be hampered for lack of trust. The point here is that the close relationship of private property with the market economy distinctly links private property to confidence in the state capacity to enforce the law. As Hall (1986) argues, for the market economy to work smoothly consensus must precede contract. Consequently property rights are based on delicate and comprehensive political negotiations between owners and non-owners, as well as between them and the state. Complex and multidimensional agreements are more difficult to orchestrate from above.
Political rights Three brief points are important here. The first is that popular voting creates a type of institution that is, one the one hand, narrow in its regulations and, on the other, potentially distributive. The second point is that voting, to be meaningful, has to be bundled with other rights. The third is that while the characteristics of the institution supporting the popular vote make it easier to implant, the fact that other rights are typically involved complicates its successful establishment. It is possible to define political rights in a restricted manner, as the right to vote and be elected. With this narrow definition, the rules that support political rights connect citizens and government, and the franchise rests on institutional rules that have a sparse set of regulations. Indeed, the organizational basis of voting rights is, compared with property rights, simpler: voting is periodical, predictable, and relatively (locally) centralized. Thus, only along the dimension of the scope of the rules, and if redistribution issues are not at stake, it is an institution that is easier to adopt. But political rights are potentially distributive rights. While by design the popular vote is not intended to give elected government officials the power to use the state machinery for their personal benefit or for the benefit of their own group, and in a working democracy there is a system of checks to impede their doing so, the danger is always latent. So is the danger, especially in newer democracies, to use political power to redistribute resources in the interests of the poor majority. Thus, even though property rights are designed to distribute resources and popular elections are not, they may be used to that purpose. But minimally, voting requires two accompanying rights: freedom of expression, including freedom of the press, and freedom to join and to form associations. These rights grant the ability to get the information necessary for the formation of voting preferences, as well as the ability to elect and be elected (Mainwaring et al. 2001; O’Donnell 2001; Schedler 2002). As mentioned above, these freedoms (from state interference) are freedoms only if the state itself guarantees them. And, in politically, ethnically, or religiously divided societies the legal adjudication of these rights calls for a strong state presence regulating horizontal interactions among conflicting segments of civil society. As such, the density of the rules regulating the behavior of
294
C. Gallo
individuals to preserve these freedoms is largely contingent on how politically divided a society is at a given point. In this fashion these three rights shape a mixed bundle of institutions and organizations. Voting rights rest on rules that are potentially distributive but have a narrow or sparse scope, as they define a vertical interaction between voters and the government. Yet the freedom of expression and association, while not directly distributive, contains extensive and dense rules, especially in politically divided societies. Compared with property rights, voting rights are easier to manage or, for that matter, to mismanage, and therefore these rights are easier, yet much more risky than the traditional (welfare) social rights, to establish. When combined with other freedoms, their mixed distributive and scope characteristics contribute to the explanation of why they are often imperfectly adopted. This difficulty is altogether evident in the history of US international pressures to implant the popular vote in Latin America. In this respect, Markoff (1996) argues that the end of the Cold War meant that not only international pressures for democratization increased but also the main rival alternative to democracy ceased to exist. The establishment of political rights and their expansion, at least formally, became easier. Markoff (1996, p. 111) adds that while “… in the late eighteenth century claiming that governments should derive their powers from the consent of the governed was a dramatic and daring act…[i]n the twentieth century, making such a claim is easy, but determining what reality there is to such claims is often rather difficult.” Indeed, the adoption of popular elections and the expansion of the voting franchise have been clustered in time and space (Levitsky and Way 2005). The bulk of Latin American countries adopted the popular franchise within about 50 years, from 1900 to 1949 (Tilly 2007). And the time frame for granting women the right to vote was even more condensed. Ramirez et al. (1997) show that throughout the twentieth century the influence of national political and organizational factors declined in the effort to grant women the right to vote while the importance of international links and influences became more important. They show that in Latin America female suffrage was adopted in most countries in the space of 15 years. But when exported, political rights have been slanted to benefit the elites and to decrease or eliminate the potential distributional effects of elections. This trend has been vigorously documented and does not need to be repeated here. Suffice it to say that it is particularly true in the long history of the United States’ efforts to promote democracy in Latin America. The ways that power holders decreased the potential economic (re)distributional impact of elections have been multiple and sometimes creative. Restricting the franchise, rigging elections, or intimidating voters is, for Latin Americans, just an imitation of older democracies. But other alternatives have been at hand: establishing elections without political competition, or restricting competition by, for example, ruling out the participation of third parties. Freedom of the press and of association for most of the twentieth century was literally a “bourgeois right” and often did not have to be restricted (Mainwaring et al. 2001; Schedler 2002). But military coups, resulting from electoral outcomes that risked economic redistribution, if not invented in Latin American, have been perfected there.
Institutions and the adoption of rights: political and property rights in Colombia
295
Overall, the institutional characteristics of citizens’ rights underlie their adoption. Institutions that are directly economically distributive and have an extensive and dense set of rules and regulations are more difficult to establish and expand than institutions which are non-distributive and have a sparser set of regulations. Property rights are a prime example of the former, while social rights exemplify the latter. The popular vote and the freedoms needed for the exercise of free voting are mixed institutions. Rights are therefore not equal, and as they result from political deals, some of these deals are more difficult to achieve than others. In the next section, I illustrate my argument using the case of Colombia. I first briefly introduce the political system, then discuss the expansion of political rights and the establishment of new cultural rights as agreed by the constitutional reform of 1991, and, lastly, look at the impact of strong challenges on land property.
Colombia: success with electoral democracy and failure with civil and property rights During the second half of the twentieth century, Colombia has been a land of paradoxes. It is a country characterized by violent political conflict, among the most persistent and lethal of Latin American countries, and yet it has had a continuous civilian government since 1958, conducive to one of the most stable (after Costa Rica) democracies in Latin America. In spite of its fractured and conflictive polity, Colombia has been a model of economic stability, and enjoyed relative economic prosperity since 1945. Between 1945 and 1995, its economy grew at an annual average rate of almost 5%, and escaped the deep economic recession that affected most Latin American countries during the 1980s. Still, in 1999 the country faced a deep economic crisis. In spite of a weak, or possibly even failing, state and of a dismal record in protecting political dissidents, however, the constitutional reforms of 1991 invigorated democratic practices, drastically decentralizing a historically deeply centralized state. In 1958, the leaders of the two major liberal and conservative political parties created a political accommodation, the National Front, which required the alternation of the presidency by the two parties and the equal sharing of the governmental positions for a total of 16 years (Bushnell 1993). The National Front pact that was ratified by popular referendum was responsible for the country’s remarkable political stability (by Latin American standards). Popular elections with limited party competition were stable because the National Front solved some of the most contentious economic distributional issues that could result from elections. In particular, the National Front pact addressed critically disputed issues that had bitterly divided the parties and the economic elites: use of the governmental machinery and the military to enhance the power of the party in power and the land tenancy system. Partly because the pact made the economic elites confident that state agents would not seize land or redistribute it through land reform, elections continued largely undisturbed. This situation, however, changed with the expansion of illicit economic activities that intensified in the 1980s and with rapid economic growth.
296
C. Gallo
Property rights of rural lands I have argued above that property rights institutions have distributional consequences, involve conflict, and operate through a dense set of rules and regulations. I also argued that as a consequence of these institutional characteristics, the enforcement of property rights needs a relatively efficient and bulky state, a modicum of trust in state agents, and political stability to preserve the power relations that originally configured them. Since the 1980s, Colombia has had a low capacity state, a crisis of legitimacy, and rapid economic growth that has resulted in massive changes in property and power relations in large sections of the country. Low state capacity The low capacity of the Colombia state from the 1980s to the beginning of the twenty-first century is not disputed. The Colombian state is weak because it has been unable to defeat military challenges from right- and left-wing militias; does not control significant parts of the territory under its nominal jurisdiction; and has an undermined capacity to tax, redistribute resources, and adjudicate justice (Orjuela 2000; Velasco 2007; Thoumi 1995). Guerrilla groups gained military and economic strength since the 1980s policy failure to integrate them into the political system. The main guerrilla group, FARC, grew from 600 fighters in the 1980s to about 15,000 in the 1990s; and from being ill-financed in the 1970s to an operation of $300 million dollars a year, according to some estimates, by tapping drug money (Rangel Suarez 2000). Economic resources have enabled FARC to control territories, tax, and protect populations from paramilitary forces and from military government agents. In addition, paramilitary groups connected to narcotics traffickers have also become stronger. In 2002, they had 18,000 troops, up from 10,483 in 1994 (The Economist June 1, 2002, US edition; Sanchez 2001: 15). They also tap drug money directly and indirectly through taxation of drug businesses; and they protect populations, including rich narcotics traffickers who have invested in land and cattle ranchers, from guerrilla attacks as well as from peasants who occupy private lands. Rubio (in Bejarano et al. 1997: 24–26), who studied the effects of high levels of criminality on the civil and criminal justice systems, shows that the probability that a crime was investigated was 20 to 30% for several decades (from the 1940s to the 1960s). In 1987, however, the rate was only close to 5%, and the probability of being sentenced was 3%. In fact, criminal impunity, according to Rubio, has made crime a profitable business: the average gains from a single crime committed was 3.5 million pesos, while the average annual income for licit work was 3 million. Trust and credibility From the 1980s until the beginning of the twenty-first century, there has been little argument about the lack of credibility of the Colombian state with respect to its basic functions of protecting land and property and punishment of criminal activity. Scholars variously cite a legitimacy crisis, the lack of a national integrative political project, the perception of weakness and impunity for crime, etc. (Leal Buitrago 1992; Shifter 1999). Indeed, for more than three decades state authorities were unable to establish
Institutions and the adoption of rights: political and property rights in Colombia
297
peace, either through negotiations or military victory, although different administrations tried both. The failure to control the territory under its nominal jurisdiction demonstrated the state’s weakness, which in turn decreased its credibility and supported the perception that the central state would not or could not defend life or property or adjudicate justice. Rubio (1998:17) showed that lack of credibility in the justice system was the norm: in 1994, for example, more than 50% of close relatives of homicide victims never contacted any state authorities; only 38% filed a police report. Instability of power relations Colombian scholars have recently arrived at a consensus about the close interaction among illegal activities, violence, land property changes, and economic growth (Bejarano et al. 1997; Richani 2002). Several studies analyzing the regional distribution of violent activities in Colombia show that the most violent regions are those where property rights are challenged. Challenges to property rights come from three sources: (a) colonization of marginal frontier lands by peasants displaced from richer lands; (b) illegal mining and illegal agriculture; (c) the acquisitions of land that had been settled previously by peasants without land titles (Bejarano et al. 1997; Thoumi 1995, p.77). A significant cause of changing power relations in rural parts of the country was the rapid economic growth brought about by immensely profitable illegal (coca) and some legal (banana) crops that increased the value of land very rapidly. Indeed, regions with high economic growth during the 1960–1989 period, and those where wages were at least 30% higher than the national average, presented simultaneously rapid economic growth and the highest murder rates (Bejarano et al. 1997). As mentioned, in many cases land was settled by peasants without titles and in frontier territories where the administrative and judicial reach of the state was weak. The rapid valorization of assets and the state’s weak capability to punish illegal transactions interacted closely to generate incentives to expand illegal activities and challenge property rights. Richani (2002, p. 95), for example, shows that coca plantations expanded in regions where the presence of the state was weak, sometimes not beyond a small police force of less than 15 officers stationed in the departments’ urban centers. In turn, with impunity, illicit crops expanded very quickly, about 400% between 1978 and 1998 to cover close to 100,600 ha (about 247 thousand acres). Changes in land ownership also occurred in regions with large and underutilized tracts of lands owned by traditional hacendados who, threatened by the guerrillas, would sell their property as well as the land occupied by colonos, to drug traffickers (Reyes Posada 2009, p. 120). Reyes Posada (2009, pp. 34–40) argues that the crisis of property rights brought about by rapid changes in land ownership and possession, resulted in the emergence of a new landed elite, composed of owners whose capital was illegally obtained and members of paramilitary forces who took land by force. In particular, according to Reyes Posada, the new narco-land owners were interested in land as a means to legalize capital, as a refuge, or as a territory where they could do illegal business. Crumbling property rights in the countryside expelled close to 1.5 million peasants from their lands since 1991, and killed over 35,000 in armed conflicts that
298
C. Gallo
were largely centered on the control of land (Caballero 2000:90). Recently the government began to implement several projects to protect legal ownership and to return land to owners, who because of threats and intimidation were obliged to sell or to abandon their land (Reyes Posada 2009, pp. 74–75). Once the state showed that it could not, or was not willing to defend land property, land owners created private armies to secure life and property, initiating a circle of increasing violence and criminality that overwhelmed the civil and justice system and undermined confidence in the state capacity to defend almost any kind of citizenship rights. And this in turn expanded the need and the benefits derived from counting on private armies, reinforcing the cycle of dispossession of land, etc. Sonin (2002), argues that dominant elites actually benefit from absent or weak property rights because they can dispossess peasants. This is undoubtedly the case of Colombia where a new economic elite forced its way into land ownership.
Electoral and other political rights During the 1990s many Latin American states enacted constitutional reforms with two fundamental common characteristics: first, they introduced far-reaching reforms that substantially decentralized economic, administrative, and judicial activities that were previously in the hands of the states with strong centralizing traditions; second, they introduced expanded political rights, and offered new cultural rights. Colombia’s new charter was approved in 1991. Such a reform enriched political rights, introduced new cultural rights that included the granting of considerably large tracts of land to Afro-descendant and indigenous minorities, and strengthened social rights. Decentralization in Colombia started in 1983 with laws that increased fiscal resources to municipal governments, followed by a 1986 law that allowed the redistribution of the value added tax to municipalities, and by the first popular election of mayors in that year. These reforms were followed by bolder and more comprehensive reforms consigned in a new charter. The new constitution brought changes that sought to a) increase political representation by the inclusion of new political forces, the transition to a multiparty system and increased political participation at the local level; b) strengthen the state especially justice, defense, and police; c) strengthen Congress and d) increase social expenditures expanding health, education, and social security (Orjuela 2000). The economic and administrative decentralization was based on the transfer to local governments of 45% of the state’s income, about 10% of the GDP in the year 2000. Local governments are now in charge of social services, health, education, sanitation, water, and electricity (Restrepo Botero 2001, p. 355). In terms of political rights the constitution dismantled the monopoly of the two party-system and created new institutions to promote participation in elections and decision making at the local level. In this respect, according to Bejarano (2001) new mechanisms of political participation were created to expand participation beyond the rights to vote and be elected, including plebiscites, referenda, popular consultations, town meetings, legislative initiatives, and the ability to recall elected
Institutions and the adoption of rights: political and property rights in Colombia
299
officials. With the legislative initiative, for example, citizens could participate in developing laws, ordinances, agreements, or resolutions. In addition, new electoral districts for the Senate and House were created permitting access to actors previously excluded from the political arena, including ethnic minorities. Finally there were also new mechanisms of control and accountability over public power. Analysts of the constitution are divided about its actual effects on political participation (Ahumada 1996; Bejarano 2001; Uprimny 2001). But minimally the consensus is that compared to the 1970s, the 1991 reform resulted in a significant political aperture. For instance, already during the 1980s, new leftist parties (the Patriotic Union and M19), accepted political participation, the latter fully collaborated in the process of constitutional reform. And a number of mayors and governors, not members of the traditional political parties have been elected. An example is Bogotá, where the last three elections resulted in the election of politically independent mayors. A similar phenomenon is present in Cali, Barranquilla, and other major cities (Bejarano 2001). Bejarano also points out that in contradistinction with previous periods, political campaigns are emphasizing local consensus and platforms, often underlining their differences with traditional parties and with national political programs. And voter turnout in elections has increased, to a record 59% in 1998 (The Economist 2001), which combined with greater local autonomy, has made possible, for example, the remarkable civic resurgence of the city of Bogotá. The deepening of democracy through enhanced political participation and a substantial increase in the number of government officials that could be elected was facilitated by the organizational characteristics of voting systems. The point here may be small but is worth making: government officials were elected, more people voted, and party competition for the nomination of candidates was open. Compared to the democracy with limited party competition that existed before, post-1990s elections increased democracy (Davila Ladron de Guevara 2002). The same could not be said for other political rights. Violations of freedoms of association and speech were rampant: since 1986 more than 2,515 labor organizers have been killed, making Colombia “the world’s most dangerous country for trade unionists” (Rojas 2009, p. 234); 22 journalists were killed between 1988–1989, again making Colombia the world’s most dangerous place for the press (Caballero 2000, pp. 90–91); and between 1988 and 2008, 34 academics who spoke up either against guerrillas or paramilitaries were executed (Aspu 2008). Thus, democracy consolidated while the Colombian state was unquestionably weakened by civil war, and when all other citizens’ rights were systematically violated. The gap between the formal law and its implementation was narrowest in the case of electoral reform while it remained wide open with all other rights.
Concluding remarks Because rights reflect bargains that involve class specific interests, the institutions that support them develop separately, and are able to adapt to changes in power relations to different degrees. Institutions that have direct distributional effects and develop dense networks of regulations partly to maintain unequal power
300
C. Gallo
relations are more deeply embedded in the process of centralization of power, reflect stable bargains especially over rural land, require real control of the territory under the states’ jurisdiction, and are based on some level of trust. Institutions that are indirectly redistributive and are accompanied by sparser rules and regulations, though, are easier to establish. I argued that property rights are an example of the former, while social rights of the latter. Electoral rights may potentially redistribute economic resources, but are framed by relatively simple rules, which under international pressures, and favorable internal conditions, are easier to adopt. Civil freedoms and antidiscrimination rights are indirectly distributive but are surrounded by dense and complex rules, which make them difficult to enact. That some rights can be adopted more easily than others, does not say much about the permanence of those rights. The characteristics of their institutions say little about why and when rights are diminished. That is, rights are reversible independently of their institutional characteristics. Tilly (2007, p. 12) was skeptical about the exportability of democracy. For him rights and democracy centered on a continuous struggle between citizens and states, that could not be preempted with decisions from above. “Even a conquering military power such as the western Allies in Japan and Germany after World War II must bargain extensively with citizens to create a new democratic regime where authoritarians previously ruled.” Rights map out power relations and maintaining them depends on maintaining power. This article suggests that there is no necessary connection among citizenship rights, and consequently the importance of a historical sequence of rights for a given political regime is dubious. The historical record shows that popular and upper class groups can gain rights in autocratic, democratic, or socialist regimes, and they have done so following different sequences. Furthermore, I have argued here that rights imply a relationship between collective actors and state agents, and that the enforcement of rights depends on different levels of state capacity. Empirical evidence suggests that weak central states in developing countries are unequally equipped to enforce rights. They are better, under certain conditions, at supporting voting rights, but are hampered more fundamentally when enacting rights with complex regulations that call for an extensive state apparatus. The implication from this work is thus that citizens’ rights have a variable relation to state capacity. While states in newer democracies may be sufficiently strong and independent for certain rights (those that are more easily established), they may not be strong enough to expand others. The case of Colombia suggests at least one issue for further research: clearly the enactment of a given set of rights has limited ripple effects on the creation of other rights; however, the dismantling of some rights does generate a “negative” domino effect to eliminate other rights. Citizenship rights seem to be connected to each other more on the down than the up side. In Colombia the violation of property rights generated a massive assault on all other rights, an assault that has lasted for over three decades. No similar effect, or at least not with the same intensity and duration, existed when, in the past, electoral or social rights were dismantled. Thus there may be a “hierarchy” of rights, one that maps the hierarchy of power relations in capitalist economies.
Institutions and the adoption of rights: political and property rights in Colombia
301
Acknowledgments This work was supported in part by a grant from the City University of New York CUNY Research Award Program. Previous versions of this article were presented at the Andean Forum on Broadening Citizenship, sponsored by Social Revolutions without Citizenship, SHRC of Canada; at the Bildner Center, The Graduate Center, CUNY; and at the Workshop on Contentious Politics, Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences, Columbia University. Thanks to all participants in those seminars and to Zehra Arat, Daniela Bailey, Chares Demetriou, Susan Eckstein, Eric Hirschberg, Paul Ingram, Adrienne LeBas, Roy Licklider, Behrooz Moazami, Camilo Plata, Graeme Robertson, and Cathy Schneider. Thanks also to Chuck Tilly for his comments at the Workshop, and for his teaching and generosity throughout many years. Chris Tilly gave me substantive and editorial comments that greatly improved this article. And Wendy Schwartz helped with editorial changes.
References Ahumada, C. (1996). El Modelo Neoliberal y su Impacto en la Sociedad Colombiana. Bogotá: El Ancora Editores. Arat, Z. F. (1999). Human rights and democracy: expanding or contracting? Polity, 32(1), 119–144. ASPU. (2008). Asociacion Sindical de Profesores Universitarios. Bogota, Colombia. ASPU president Pedro Hernandez G. personal communication. Bejarano, A. M. (2001). The constitution of 1991: An institutional evaluation seven years later. In C. Bergquist, R. Penaranda, & G. Sanchez (Eds.), Violence in Colombia 1990–2000. Wilmington: SR Books. Bejarano Avila, J. A., Echandia, C. C., Escobedo, R., & Leon, E. Q. (1997). Colombia: Inseguridad, Violencia y Desempeno Economico en las Areas Rurales. Bogotá: Fondo Financiero de Proyectos de Desarrollo. Bushnell, D. (1993). The making of modern Colombia: A nation in spite of itself. Berkeley: University of California Press. Caballero, M. C. (2000). The Colombian Press under Siege. The Harvard International Journal of Press/ Politics, 5(3), 90–95. Campbell, J., & Lindberg, L. N. (1990). Property rights and the organization of economic activity by the state. American Sociological Review, 55, 634–647. Carothers, T. (2007). How democracies emerge: the “sequencing” fallacy. Journal of Democracy, 18(1), 12–27. Dahl, R. A. (1998). On democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press. Davila Ladron de Guevara, A. (2002). El Frente Nacional y el Proceso Constituyente del 91. Bogota: Alfaomega Grupo Editor, Departamento de Ciencia. De Soto, H. (1989). The other path: The economic answer to terrorism. New York: Basic Books. Diamond, L. (2002). Thinking about hybrid regimes. Journal of Democracy. Diamond, L., & Morlino, L. (2004). The quality of democracy. Journal of Democracy, 14(4). Define eight elements to look at democracy’s quality. Farrell, H., & Knight, J. (2003). Trust, institutions and institutional change: industrial change and the social capital hypothesis. Politics &Society, 31(4), 537–566. Hall, J. A. (1986). Power and liberties: The causes and consequences of the rise of the west. Berkeley: UCP. Hanagan, M. (1999). Introduction: Changing citizenship, changing states. In M. Hanagan & C. Tilly (Eds.), Extending citizenship, reconfiguring states. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Holmes, S., & Sunstein, C. R. (2000). The cost of rights: Why liberty depends on taxes. New York: Norton Company. Jelin, E., & Hershberg, E. (1998). Convergence and diversity: Reflections on human rights. In E. Jelin & E. Hershberg (Eds.), Constructing democracy: Human rights, citizenship and society in Latin America. Boulder: Westview. Knight, J. (1992). Institutions and social conflict. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kraxberger, B. M. (2007). Failed states: temporary obstacle to democratic diffusion or fundamental holes in the world political map. Third World Quarterly, 28(6), 1055–1071. Leal, F. (1992). Surgimiento, Auge y Crisis de la Doctrina de la Seguridad Nacional en America Latina y Colombia. In Analisis Politico, 15 (Enero-Abril). Levitsky, S., & Way, L. A. (2005). International linkage and democratization. Journal of Democracy, 16(3), 20–34.
302
C. Gallo
Mainwaring, S., Brinks, D., & Perez-Linan, A. (2001). Classifying political regimes in Latin America, 1945–1999. Studies in Comparative International Development, 36(1), 37–65. Mann, M. (1987). Ruling class strategies and citizenship. Sociology, 21(3), 339–354. Markoff, J. (1996). Waves of democracy: Social movements and political change. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge. Marshall, T. H. (1965). Class, citizenship and social development. Garden City: Anchor Books. North, D. (1990). Institution, institutional change and economic performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Donnell, G. (2001). Democracy, law, and comparative politics. Studies in Comparative International Development, 36(1), 7–36. Orjuela, L. J. (2000). The weakness of the Colombian State in the age of neoliberalism and armed conflict. Paper Presented at the Workshop “Civil Conflicts in Colombia: the Challenges for Peacemaking and Reconciliation,” Princeton University. Przeworski, A. (2003). A flawed blueprint: the covert politicization of development economics. Harvard International Review, Spring. Ramirez, F. O., Soysal, Y., & Shanahan, S. (1997). The changing logic of political citizenship: crossnational acquisition of women’s suffrage rights, 1890 to 1990. American Sociological Review, 62, 735–745. Rangel Suarez, A. (2000). Parasites and predators: guerrillas and the insurrection economy of Colombia. Journal of International Affairs, 53(2), 577–602. Restrepo Botero, D. I. (2001). Decentralizacion y Violencia en Colombia. In A. M. Ortiz (Ed.), Economia, Crimen y Conflicto. Bogotá: Ediciones Antropos. Reyes Posada, A. (2009). Guerreros y Campesinos: El Despojo de la Tierra en Colombia. Bogota: Grupo Editorial Norma. Richani, N. (2002). Systems of violence: The political economy of war and peace in Colombia. Albany: State University of New York Press. Richards, P. (2000). Reviving social rights in Latin America: the potential role of international human rights documents. Citizenship Studies, 4(2), 189206. Richardson, G., & Bogart, D. (2008). Institutional adaptability and economic development: the property rights revolution in Britain, 1700–1830. National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 13757. Rojas, C. (2009). Securing the state and developing social insecurities: the securitization of citizenship in contemporary Colombia. Third World Quarterly, 30(1), 227–245. Rubio, M. (1998). La Justicia y el Desarrollo Economico Colombiano. Desarrollo y Sociedad. Marzo. Rueschemeyer, D. (2004). Addressing inequality. Journal of Democracy 14(4). Is there any tradeoff between political rights and inequality? Sanchez, G. (2001). Problems of violence, prospects for peace. In C. Bergquist, R. Penaranda & G. Sanchez (Eds.), Violence in Colombia 1990-2000. Wilmington, Delaware: SR Books. Schedler, A. (2002). The menu of manipulation. Journal of Democracy, 13(2), 36–50. Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. New York: Anchor Books. Shifter, M. (1999). Colombia on the Brink: there goes the neighborhood. Foreign Affairs, July/August: 14–20. Sonin, K. (2002). “Why the Rich May Favor Poor Protection of Property Rights,” unpublished Manuscript. New Economic School and CEFIR, Moscow. The Economist June 1, 2002, U.S. Edition. Thoumi, F. E. (1995). Political economy and illegal drugs in Colombia. London: Lynne Rienn Sypnowich 2000er. Tilly, C. (1997). A primer on citizenship. Theory and Society, 26(34), 599–602. Tilly, C. (1999). Conclusion: Why worry about citizenship? In M. Hanagan & C. Tilly (Eds.), Extending citizenship, reconfiguring states. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Tilly, C. (2007). Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. (2008). Cities and states in world history. This issue. Uprimny Yepez, R. (2001). Violence, power and collective action: A comparison between Bolivia and Colombia. In C. Bergquist, R. Penaranda, & G. Sanchez (Eds.), Violence in Colombia 1990–2000. Wilmington: SR Books. Velasco, M. (2007). Manifesting the People’s Will: Institutional change and Protests in Colombia. Boston University: Political Sciences Department, Unpublished PhD Dissertation.
Institutions and the adoption of rights: political and property rights in Colombia
303
Warner, C. M. (1998). Sovereign states and their prey: the new institutionalist economics and state destruction in nineteenth-century West Africa. Review of International Political Economy, 5(3), 508–533. Zakaria, F. (1997). The rise of illiberal democracy. Foreign Affairs, 76(6), 22–43. Carmenza Gallo is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her recent publications include “Tax Bargaining and Nitrate Exports in Chile 1880–1930,” in D. Brautigam, O. Fjeldstad, and M. Moore, eds., Taxation and State Building in Developing Countries: Capacity and Consent (Cambridge University Press 2008). She is interested in theories of institutional change and in citizenship rights and nation building in developing countries.
Taking Tilly south: durable inequalities, democratic contestation, and citizenship in the Southern Metropolis Patrick Heller Peter Evans
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Abstract Drawing on Charles Tilly’s work on inequality, democracy and cities, we explore the local level dynamics of democratization across urban settings in India, South Africa, and Brazil. In all three cases, democratic institutions are consolidated, but there is tremendous variation in the quality of the democratic relationship between cities and their citizens. We follow Tilly’s focus on citizenship as the key element in democratization and argue that explaining variance across our three cases calls for analyzing patterns of inequality through the kind of relational lens used by Tilly and recognizing that patterns of contestation are shaped by shifting political relationships between the nation and the city. We conclude that Tilly’s theoretical frame is nicely sustained by the comparative analysis of cases very different from those that stimulated his original formulations.
The global trajectory of twenty-first century social and political transformation is being forged in the megalopolis of the Global South. These massive urban concatenations showcase the most durable and disturbing forms of contemporary inequality. They are also homes to the most vibrant and promising forms of democratic contestation, sites for the construction of citizenship. Drawing on Charles Tilly’s work on inequality, democracy, and cities, we explore the local level dynamics of democratization across urban settings in India, South Africa, and Brazil. In all three cases, democratic institutions are consolidated, but there is tremendous variation in the quality of the democratic relationship between cities and their P. Heller (*) Brown University, Providence, RI, USA e-mail:
[email protected] P. Evans University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA e-mail:
[email protected] M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_21, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
305
306
P. Heller and P. Evans
citizens. We argue that explaining this variance calls for analyzing patterns of inequality through a relational lens and recognizing that patterns of contestation are shaped by shifting political relationship between the nation and the city. Deciphering the political contradictions of the Southern Metropolis is a challenge to contemporary social science and a new opportunity to bring the theoretical insights of Charles Tilly to bear. Tilly’s work on cities focused primarily on their historical dynamics, mostly in the global North. In this article we “take Tilly South,” applying his theoretical analysis of how inequality and democracy evolve and interact to shed light on the contemporary Southern Metropolis. We use the conceptual framework offered by Tilly’s work on inequality and democratization, noting the key differences that separate Tilly’s “relational” analysis of inequality from competing views, and testing the usefulness of the framework by embarking on condensed comparative analysis of three national arenas: Brazil, India, and South Africa. By focusing on three cases with roughly similar commitments to democratic rules at the national level, we are able to focus analytical attention on cross-national political variations at the metropolitan level. Before engaging the empirical cases, we map the theoretical terrain in three stages: first, a brief reminder of why the Southern Metropolis is such a crucial site for the examination of inequality and citizenship; then a review of Tilly’s relational perspective on inequality; and finally a summary of his argument as to why citizenship is the key element in democratization. Our comparisons reinforce three general programmatic propositions that are worth flagging in advance: 1) Tilly’s “relational” approach to inequality is a much more theoretically satisfying and heuristically effective lens for looking at inequality at the urban level as well as at the national level than competing perspectives. 2) Tilly’s vision of citizenship, which focuses on the quality of the relation between individuals and the state should be expanded to include relations with the local state at the municipal level. 3) Tilly’s (2010) heuristic strategy of focusing on the shifting power relations between cities and nation states is validated in the Global South.
The contradictory centrality of the Southern Metropolis Through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cities changed within parameters set by their political insertion into national polities and economies. The erosion of traditional forms of sovereign political control by the nation state, the transnationalization of economic activity, and the shift to a service based economy have all increased the political centrality of the city, reversing the centuries long historical trends toward the increasing subordination of urban politics to national state apparatuses (Tilly 2010). These same processes have generated new patterns of social formation and political representation that have fundamentally transformed the relationship of cities to their citizens. The transformation of urban politics and governance is particularly contradictory in the Global South. On the one hand, new patterns of social exclusion, the acceleration of the informalization of work and public services, pervasive illegalities and sharpened income differentials have created, to borrow from Appadurai (2002), “citizens without cities.” On the other hand, democratization, new social movements,
Taking Tilly south: durable inequalities, democratic contestation
307
and the expansion of transnational networks and participatory repertoires have brought new actors, new political practices, and new models for claiming rights to the city. The theoretical importance of these contradictory political processes is reinforced by the burgeoning magnitude of the sheer demographic and economic weight of the Southern Metropolis in the twenty-first century world. As of the turn of the millennium, 18 of the 21 metropolises with populations of over 10 million were in the Global South. By 2020, rural populations will be shrinking in both North and South and urban populations in the North will be growing at a slow rate. Virtually all of the world’s population growth will take place within the Southern Metropolis (see United Nations 2006). The twenty-first century “social question” is the question of the Southern Metropolis. The political economic and social centrality of the Southern Metropolis makes the old issue of the effects of scale on the dynamics of citizenship even more unavoidable. Citizenship is always geographically multi-scalar. Citizens are made not only at the national level through constitutions and elections, but also in their day-to-day engagements with the local state, which increasingly means engagement with the political apparatus of the Southern Metropolis. While developed primarily by exploring the historical evolution of inequality at the national level, Tilly’s relational view of inequality is a particularly apt theoretical tool for looking at multiscalar citizenship.
Tilly’s relational view of inequality Tilly argues that durable inequalities are a central organizing feature of all societies. He links the discussion of inequality to democracy by showing how significant moves in the direction of democratization are inextricably linked to a reduction in the political significance of durable inequalities. In Durable Inequality (1998) Tilly makes the case that social inequalities are relational and rooted in power asymmetries. He argues that most forms of inequality are organized around binary or hierarchically bounded categories such as male/female, black/white, or, in the case of hierarchical inequalities, class and caste. Building on Weber’s conception of social closure and combining it with Marx’s concern with how social relations are asymmetrically structured, Tilly argues that mechanisms of closure and exclusion are mobilized and routinized through the use of categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, or class. Categorical inequality is built on relations. Bounded categories result in durable inequality when relations across the boundary produce exploitation between categories or hoarding of resources within the dominant category. This point deserves emphasis because most analyses of inequality continue to focus on individuals and the various assets they possess. A relational perspective directs attention to how categorical inequalities work. Durable inequalities persist because socially constructed categories do the work necessary to keep them in place. Dominant groups have an interest in reproducing their privileges and do so through an “economy of practices” (Bourdieu 1984) that includes the whole range of cultural, social, and economic practices that enforce the boundaries of the privileged and ensure ongoing exclusion. This would include not
308
P. Heller and P. Evans
only reproducing caste, class, race, and gender differences through routinized practices of networking, socializing, consuming, and sharing information, but also instrumentalizing institutions and governance in general to serve those interests. The weapons of the powerful—to invert James Scott’s famous metaphor—represent a vast repertoire of techniques (material and discursive) to reproduce inequality. Tilly’s relational view stands in contrast to two competing visions of the origins of inequality, both of which are highly influential, one in policy circles and the other among critical intellectuals. The “residualist” view, influential in policy circles, sees inequality as a by-product of imperfect markets, bad policies, irrationalities, or hatreds—in sum, various historical legacies that can be removed through good policy, more complete markets, or changes in attitudes.1 For Tilly, in contrast, inequality flows from the structure of political relations between exploiters and exploited, “hoarders of opportunity” and those excluded from opportunity, not from “failures” of markets or public administrations that can be corrected simply by more intelligent policy intervention. In the relational view, better policy or more enlightened attitudes are unlikely to change inequality until the question of power is addressed. At the same time, however, Tilly’s relational view of inequality leaves far more space for agency than what might be called “structuralist” etiologies of inequality, popular among critical intellectuals. Structuralists see inequality as driven by a combination of inexorable shifts in the structure of global production managed and exacerbated by the equally irresistible global political apparatus of neo-liberal capitalism. Mike Davis’s dystopian Planet of the Slums (2006) offers an evocative illustration. For Davis, the global shrinking of manufacturing employment, driven by labor saving technologies combined with the bifurcation of the service sector between a small financial/symbolic analyst elite and a mass of poorly remunerated jobs in personal services and petty commerce, has transformed a growing share of the urban population into “surplus,” relegated to “informal” work with incomes insufficient to pay for urban housing or services. Standard forms of political agency are impotent in the face of such structural shifts. Other variations on the structuralist vision of urban inequality focus more on the ability of global capitalism to sustain itself politically irrespective of economic reversals. No longer content to mobilize resources and secure market share, global capitalism has now thoroughly penetrated the social and the political, with such creativity that “it must be acknowledged that neoliberalism has demonstrated a capacity variously to spawn, absorb, appropriate, or morph with a range of local institutional (re)forms in ways that speak to its creatively destructive character” (Peck and Tickell 2002, p. 397). Structuralist perspectives are ill-adapted to explaining variations in trajectories of political change among countries that share immersion in the global capitalist
1
As Kaplinsky (2005, p. 49) has argued, the traditional World Bank view that poverty is a result of limited participation in the global economy is a classic residualist view. Tilly explicitly contrasted his relational view to the existing literature’s narrow focus on the attributes or attitudes of individuals or groups that assumes there are “self-sustaining essences” at work rather than relational dynamics (1998:16–19). It is noteworthy that in its World Development Report on Equity and Development, the World Bank (2006, p. 21) embraced a relational view of inequality and even cites.
Taking Tilly south: durable inequalities, democratic contestation
309
political economy. While they give full play to the political implications of the contradictions of capitalism, these theorists appear to see those contradictions as inviting their own solutions. All adjustments—governance, social programs, reforms, safety nets, etc.—are seen as creative ways of managing crisis tendencies. Subaltern political agency disappears as a possibility. Local variations in democratization and citizenship appear almost irrelevant to combating the brutal inequalities of the Southern Metropolis.
Tilly’s perspective on democracy and citizenship Tilly’s relational view of inequality avoids the overestimation of possibilities for agency that is inherent in the residualist view but nonetheless focuses attention on possibilities for contesting the political hegemony of the powerful. Analyzing democracy and citizenship is an integral part of the relational analysis of inequality. Democracy is central in part because it allows subalterns to contest control of the state apparatus. Since the apparatus of the state is a key weapon in the inequalityproducing arsenal of the powerful, denying elites control over this weapon and turning it on them instead is central to any struggle against inequality. Transformation of the role of the state is at the heart of democratization and the citizenship that goes with it. For Tilly the measure of democracy is the actual character of citizenship—that is, the relation between a subject and the state. Tilly makes this argument in two steps. First, he places the type or nature of a subject’s relation to government at the center of his definition: democracy means the “formation of a regime featuring relatively broad, equal, categorical, binding consultation and protection” (Tilly 2004, p. 128). He then links this conception of democracy to a definition of citizenship: Citizenship consists, in this context, of mutual rights and obligations binding governmental agents to whole categories of people who are subject to the government’s authority, those categories being defined chiefly or exclusively by relations to the government rather than by reference to particular connections with rulers or to membership in categories based on imputed durable traits such race, ethnicity, gender, or religion. It institutionalizes regular, categorical relations between subjects and their governments (Tilly, 2004, p.128, italics added). Tilly elaborates the conditions of this democratic relationship as follows: no one is excluded (breadth); subjects have to be equal in terms of their relations with government (equality); the government must answer to regular binding public consultations (binding consultation); subjects, especially minorities, are protected from arbitrary state action (protection). He emphasizes the relativity of his definition by noting that no democracy actually lives up to this definition and that democratization should be viewed as a move “toward greater categorical regularity, breadth, equality, binding consultation, and protection, and de-democratization consists of moves away from them” (Tilly, 2004, p. 128, italics in original). We can then sum up the relationship between democracy and inequality through the concept of citizenship. Democratization is best understood as an expansion in the
310
P. Heller and P. Evans
quality of citizenship, which is about the institutionalized quality of a subject’s relation to government and its authority, which in turn exists in inverse proportion to the degree to which a subject’s relations to government are mediated by categorical inequalities. As innocuous as this definition of democratization may seem, it is tantamount to disempowering elites, which explains why efforts at democratization meet with such resistance, and the history of “reform” is littered with examples of failed land reforms and subverted decentralization initiatives. Just as importantly, this conceptualization of democratization gives pride of place to social movements. Indeed, if there is any theme that ran through all of Tilly’s work it was his insistence that contentious politics—that is, the politics of challengers confronting elites—is the engine of social change. And while Tilly recognized that not all social movements are democratic, often making demands in the name of particularized conceptions of “the people,” they nonetheless have democratizing effects: “Social movements assert popular sovereignty … the stress on popular consent fundamentally challenges divine right to kingship, traditional inheritance of rule, warlord control and aristocratic predominance. Even in systems of representative government … social movements pose a crucial question: do sovereignty and its accumulated wisdom lie in the legislature or in the people it claims to represent?” (Tilly, 2004, p. 13). This, as we shall see, is why even as transitions to democracy have become the norm in much of the South, democratization as Tilly defines it is so highly contested in the Southern Metropolis.
Taking Tilly to the Southern Metropolis The Southern Metropolis is the most important arena of the global struggle for “greater categorical regularity, breadth, equality, binding consultation, and protection.” Recent reversals in the historical trend toward privileging the nation state as the site of citizenship have helped refocus thinking on the city as a site for the construction of citizenship. So have recent shifts in the scholarship on democracy. Margaret Somers’s (1993) conception of citizenship as an “instituted process” resonates with Tilly’s definition of democratization as any move “toward greater categorical regularity, breadth, equality, binding consultation, and protection …” Focusing on the metropolitan level, Fernandes (2007) has revived Lefebvre’s classic concept of “rights to the city.” Fernandes conceptualizes the right to the city as both a “right to habitation” with “right to participation” defining it as “the right of all urban dwellers to collectively enjoy the benefits, cultural plurality, social diversity, economic advantages and opportunities of urban life, as well as to actively participate in urban management” (Fernandes 2007, p. 217). The struggle for an “instituted process of citizenship” that secures the less privileged majority’s “rights to the city” is epitomized by the current politics of the Southern metropolis. “The right to the city” in the Southern metropolis is made precarious for most urban dwellers precisely as a function of the categorical inequalities that Tilly emphasizes. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that urban struggles for citizenship are ubiquitous in the Global South. From internal migrants demanding to be treated as citizens in the urban export powerhouses of Southeast China (Lee 2007) to the green tide of protesters that recently swarmed the streets of
Taking Tilly south: durable inequalities, democratic contestation
311
Teheran (Bayat 2009), the dwellers of the Southern Metropolis are demanding the right to have rights. The extent to which urban struggles for democratization share memes and even organizational structures is striking, but as these two examples indicate, variation is as important as commonality. The three cases we have chosen as vehicles to take Tilly South share key features. Unlike China and Iran, Brazil, India, and South Africa are all national polities in which electoral democracy is thoroughly institutionalized. In addition, all have long traditions of democratization struggles at the local level. While they vary in the success of their insertion, all three are solidly bound to the neo-liberal capitalist world economy. They are all regional economic powers with acknowledged global weight, both politically and economically, telling cases for anyone trying to project the future of the Global South. Their commonalities make them telling cases, but it is the variation among our three cases that gives us theoretical leverage on the dynamics of citizenship. In both urban India and urban South Africa, the momentum of democratization appears to have foundered on the rocky shoals of entrenched privilege. Brazil stands in contrast. With no obvious advantages over the other two in terms of traditions of citizenship or the institutionalization of democratic forms of governance, it offers grounds for cautious optimism. By looking more closely at the contrasting relations between national political structures and local political ecologies in these three cases and their consequences for the contours of urban citizenship, we hope to move forward Tilly’s preoccupation with nation state-city relations and his determination to illuminate the connections between expanding citizenship and reducing inequality.
Citizens without a city in India: the clientelistic gullies of Mumbai Comparative analyses of democracy often set the pervasive fragility of democratic institutions in poor countries against India’s remarkable ability to sustain competitive electoral democracy over the more than half a century since its independence. India’s democratic norms and institutions are, indeed, impressive. Nonetheless, as has often been observed, the democratic thrust of the Indian constitution never embraced the operation of the state at the local level.2 At the local level, top down bureaucratic rule prevailed in formal administration and clientelism built around categorical inequalities of caste, community, and class was the primary foundation for the construction of political power. The possibility of building a democratic metropolis in India is further complicated by the fact that Indian cities have limited sovereign rights and almost no autonomous sources of revenue. Lacking the legal and fiscal foundations necessary for the construction of democratic institutions at the municipal level, Indian cities have fallen prey to factional politics organized primarily at the provincial state level. Consequently, democratic practices of citizenship are hard to sustain in the Indian metropolis, despite the fact that national rules of citizenship formally apply.
2
Constitutional amendments in 1992 did give village and municipal governments new formal powers, but political and bureaucratic resistance at the provincial state level has blocked effective devolution of power.
312
P. Heller and P. Evans
No one has more powerfully captured this fundamental tension—the gap between the form and the practice of democracy—than Arjun Appadurai’s (2002) description of the urban poor of Mumbai as “citizens without a city”. As Indians, they are citizens, with constitutional rights of association, speech, and due process and, of course, the right to vote and to hold their rulers accountable. But even if they are legally constituted as citizens and do indeed vote, they have limited opportunities to use their citizenship because the city in India is not a sovereign entity and because their relations to governmental officials at the city level are intermediations governed by categorical inequalities. At first glance, the recent history of Mumbai would seem to vindicate the structuralists’ focus on the destructive effects of global capitalism. In a relatively short period of time, Mumbai has become a critical node in the flow of global financial capital. The shift from Fordism to flexible accumulation that structuralists emphasize has been especially marked. Once home to a thriving textile industry dominated by powerful unions, Mumbai has experienced rapid de-industrialization in favor of finance and service sector growth,3 a dramatic peripheralization and informalization of the remnants of its manufacturing economy, and increased spatial and social inequality.4 Yet, if one were to rely solely on a structural story one would miss many of the political dynamics that are re-configuring citizenship in Mumbai. Polarization and social exclusion are as much products of India’s domestic political and social structures as they are of global forces. While the contours of inequality in Mumbai are obviously structured by market forces, they are also organized through a whole range of categorical inequalities of gender, caste, community, and ethnicity (including a complex layering of immigrant groups from different states) that overlap with, but do not simply reflect class differences. Access to a whole range of resources, including housing and services, jobs and state rents, is organized through these categorical inequalities (Zérah 2008). The particularly powerful role of intersecting categorical inequalities in undermining citizenship is compounded by the fact that, as with all Indian cities, Mumbai enjoys only the most limited governance authority and autonomy. Despite its centrality to the process of accumulation, the city itself has limited fiscal resources and in global terms an especially paltry capital budget (Sekhar and Bidarkar 1999). Although the city has control over some municipal functions, many critical sectors, including economic policy, housing, land policy, rail transport, and slum redevelopment are the purview of the state and New Delhi. Across almost every sector, from sewage to transport and public health, the level and quality of public goods and social services—which was low to begin with—has fallen further behind the pace of social and economic transformation. The incapacity of the local state is a direct outgrowth of the pattern of nation-state formation. Nation-building in India was led by a Congress Party that enjoyed great 3
The share of manufacturing in Greater Mumbai’s economy was reduced from 42% in 1980 to 23.5% in 1994 (Whitehead and More 2007, p. 2428). 4 No single statistic captures the contradiction between the use and exchange value of the city’s land than the finding that the average residential rent is 140 percent of per capita income (Whitehead and More 2007, p. 2428).
Taking Tilly south: durable inequalities, democratic contestation
313
moral authority but was organizationally very weak. To sustain itself, the Congress famously aligned with provincial state-based strongmen, giving states significant power in India’s federal system. But the power of these strongmen and their local political machines came at the expense of local governments, including economically powerful cities such as Mumbai. Cities in India have served more as sources of rents and votebanks for state-level politicians, than as bases of power in their own right.5 Although the secular Congress has a strong presence in Maharashtra, the city has been dominated by the Shiv Sena, a nativist party whose dominance in the city has been built around a noxious mix of martial nativism, muscular tactics (including close ties with organized crime), a highly sophisticated system of patronage and Hindutva-aligned xenophobic communalism, including orchestrating large scale anti-Muslim riots. This resurgence of what many loosely call identity politics has less to do, as Tilly would be quick to remind us, with cultural affinities than with putting categorical inequalities to work. The Indian urban citizen engages the local state as a client or as a member of a group, not as a rights-bearing citizen. Engagement is predicated on exchanges and loyalties, not rights. The logic of these exchanges is democratically perverse because it either privileges—and in the process reifies—primary identities or powerful lobbies, or is predicated on clientelistic relations that compromise political autonomy. Mumbai’s poor suffer from the double exclusion of a particularly hierarchical social order and a highly skewed distribution of political power, reducing them, in Appardurai’s phrase, to citizens without a city. Given that inequality is generated by the exercise of political power, movement toward greater inequality is likely to depend on building new sources of political power, which in turn will certainly depend on expanding the practices of metropolitan citizenship. The prospects for urban democratization are not quite as bleak as they might appear. Two examples from Mumbai of small spaces being carved out by local movements with global connections point to the possibilities of a new politics of citizenship. Arjun Appardurai documents an urban activist movement in Mumbai in which slumdwellers, working both with local and global NGOs not only overcame the manifold fragmentations and dependencies described above to organize themselves effectively, but also “appropriated significant parts of the means of governance” and successfully made some concrete demands on the city (Appadurai 2002, p. 24). Liza Weinstein (2009) documents the case of the redevelopment of one of Mumbai’s largest slums (Dharavi) in which a motley collection of state reformers, NGOs, and neighborhood associations were able to subject the project to important participatory controls. More broadly, Zérah argues that recent elite-dominated planning proposals that envision a market-friendly “World Class City” are being countered by a social movement that encompasses the organized poor, NGOs and various middle class segments (Zérah 2008, p. 1931).
5
It is this inter-level distribution of political power that had has derailed the effective implementation of the decentralization reforms introduced through constitutional amendment in 1992.
314
P. Heller and P. Evans
These cases demonstrate that even in a context of such extreme deprivation and power asymmetries as Mumbai, the urban poor still retain a capacity to organize and to press demands on the local state, and in the case of Dharavi, even hold powerful developers and international financiers at bay. These movements directly confronted power through the quintessential movement strategies of forging complex alliances (including inter-class coalitions), engaging the public sphere through a politics of conscience, carefully constructing local bases of support, and when necessary, using what political influence they had to pressure politicians or the state. They built creative organizational partnerships with various constituencies in local civil society and leveraged opportunities created by globalization.6 For much of the post-Independence period, urban politics in India have been dominated by clientelistic politics, middle class hegemony, and extra-local power. Accelerated urban transformation and clear signs of increased popular mobilization leave little doubt however that the urban political space is becoming more contested (Chatterjee 2004). Whether or not democratization movements in Mumbai or other Indian cities can move the urban political regime in the direction of “broad, equal, categorical, binding consultation and protection” remains an open question. But movements for urban inclusion are increasingly tenacious, sometimes winning surprising victories, and appear likely to be a persistent force in shaping the political ecology of the southern metropolis. The same proposition applies even more clearly to South African cities.
South Africa: state power versus metropolitan democratization For Tilly, as for most observers of the Global South, South Africa’s transition from the White dominated apartheid regime to a democratically elected government controlled by a radical, programmatic party in 1994 represented a signal example of how durable inequality might be undermined. In Durable Inequalities (1998, p. 228), he says, . . . that shift in political power will most likely cause some equalization in wealth, income and education, health, housing and living conditions across what had been one of the world’s starkest division of categorical inequality. Fifteen years after the fall of apartheid, it is clear that while citizenship has been fundamentally expanded in relation to the national polity, the practices of citizenship are woefully lagging at the metropolitan level. Correspondingly, as Tilly would predict, structures of privilege remain in place and the production of inequality continues unabated. Most ironically, the centralized and centralizing dominance of the African National Congress (ANC) has become one of the principal impediments to further expansion of citizenship at the level of the city. In contrast to Indian cities, South Africa’s major metropolises inherited municipal structures that, in comparative terms, enjoy significant governance capacities and
6
Appadurai argues that global networks of NGOs and social movements, and global discourses of human rights and democratization, “has provided a huge boost to local democratic formations” (Appadurai 2002, p. 25).
Taking Tilly south: durable inequalities, democratic contestation
315
fiscal autonomy, especially in the three megacities of Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban. It is even possible to talk of a local developmental state (van Donk et al. 2008). The democratic character of that state is another matter. South African citizens continue to enjoy important constitutional protections as well as the power of binding consultation that comes with elections. But, if we examine post-transition South African cities in light of Tilly’s definition of democratization—as movement toward “a regime featuring relatively broad, equal, categorical, binding consultation and protection”—then the conclusion is that South Africa is at best in a holding pattern, but may actually be experiencing de-democratization. When it to came to power in 1994 on the strength of a broad-based movement that had deep roots in community structures (most notably the township civics), the ANC officially embraced a vision of transformation that emphasized the mobilization of citizens through a range of participatory institutions. But a much more commandist and centralizing logic soon prevailed, and in the name of efficiency and more rapid delivery, the ANC quickly managerialized and insulated decision-making processes, all but excluding civil society organizations. The government in Pretoria has come to see the local state more as in instrument of delivery than a forum for democratization. A series of institutional reforms combined with tight political control over local elected officials have produced metropolitan governments that are increasingly technocratic and centralized (van Donk et al. 2008). A wide range of participatory institutions such as community development forums have been dismantled or hollowed-out, mass-based civil society organizations such as township civics have been marginalized or coopted, and municipal governance has been centralized into Unicity structures that have entrenched a bureaucratic and corporatist vision of urban governance (Beall et al. 2002). The privatization or out-sourcing of many government functions and increased reliance on consultants has virtually crowded out community structures. In South Africa, as in Mumbai, the exclusionary economic logic of contemporary global capitalism unquestionably reinforces inequality, just as the structuralists argue. The rapid opening-up of the economy that followed the ANC’s embrace of market liberalization in 1996 decimated labor intensive sectors such as textiles, and other sectors such as mining have experienced significant job loss as capital has increased investment in labor-displacing technologies. The wage gap between the formal and informal sector has risen dramatically and unemployment has grown (Seekings and Nattrass 2005). But, again as in the case of Mumbai, the structuralist analysis misses much of the action. The categorical inequalities of apartheid, deeply inscribed as they are into the socio-spatial hierarchy of the city, continue to do their work, dramatically limiting the social and economic opportunities of the black urban poor. Despite massive interventions by the state in service provisioning and public housing, the spatial hierarchy of the apartheid city remains intact (though transformed by the upward mobility of a small African bourgeoisie favored by state policies) and access to education, health services, transport, and formal housing remain massively skewed (Schensul and Heller (Forthcoming). Legacies, change and transformation in the post-apartheid City: Towards an urban sociological cartography. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research; van Donk et al. 2008). One example underscores the point: unemployment in African townships in Durban in 2001—
316
P. Heller and P. Evans
nearly 20 years after most racial barriers to mobility and employment were removed in South Africa—was still 59.6% compared to 7.8% in predominantly white areas (Schensul and Heller, forthcoming). Again, inequality is actively being produced, as the relational perspective would lead us to expect. Even more clearly than Mumbai, South Africa gives us reason to reject the residualist approach. Residualist visions in which more technocratically efficient policies are the solution to inequality are easily melded with efforts to defend political power from threats from below. Rather than providing solutions, the insulation of the local state from civil pressure seems to have compounded the already stark problems of urban inequality, while increasing political volatility. But, from the perspective of a relational theory of inequality, this same political volatility also holds the promise of positive change. The prospect of social movements playing a transformative role in re-shaping the Southern Metropolis is much easier to imagine in South Africa than in India. Tilly always emphasized the cumulative strength gained from past historical experiences of social movements. In the process of mobilization, movements develop repertoires of contention, including mobilization networks, organizational capacity, symbolic and normative resources, and strategic knowledge. Such repertoires in South Africa are especially powerful, and while they were necessarily demobilized with the transition to democracy, they appear to be reasserting themselves. Over the past 4–5 years, the rumblings of citizen discontent and localized protests have become much more public. As the full disciplinary impact of neo-liberal costrecovery measures have been increasingly felt, contentious politics have become more widespread and have taken more open and confrontational forms. In Johannesburg, the Anti-Privatization Forum, a city-wide coalition of unions, civics, and anti-liberalization groups, has organized a number of highly publicized protest actions.7 Across all of South Africa’s cities, informal and formal acts of “decommodification” including illegal reconnections and anti-eviction campaigns have become widespread (Bond 2004; Desai 2002). Beginning in 2004 there was a veritable explosion of local protests with the Minister for Provincial and Local Government reporting that 90% of the poorest municipalities experienced protests and the Minister for Safety and Security putting the number of protests in 2004/2005 at almost 6,000 (Atkinson 2007, p. 57). Overall, there is increasing evidence that after more than a decade of democracy dominated by a single party and marked by demobilization, social movements, in particular in the form of community-based movements, have become increasingly proactive.8 Most notably, as Desai concludes, these movements of what he calls “the Poors” “have come to constitute the most relevant post-1994 social forces from the point of view of challenging the prevailing political economy. The community movements have challenged the very boundaries of what for a short while after the demise of the apartheid state was seen exclusively as ‘politics’” (Desai 2003, p. 25-26). 7
Most spectacular was a march at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development that outdrew the ANC-sponsored march of “official” civil society organizations four times. 8 See in particular the series of papers produced by the “Globalisation, Marginalisation and New Social Movements in Post Apartheid South Africa” project sponsored by the Centre for Civil Society and the School of Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal. http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?5,56
Taking Tilly south: durable inequalities, democratic contestation
317
Despite the very different historical paths of the evolution of democratic institutions in South Africa and India, movement toward metropolitan democratization would seem to depend on the urban disprivileged in both countries. The other theme that unites the two cases is even more critical to the theorization of citizenship. The construction of citizenship in both cases depends as much or more on the relation between national political institutions and the metropolis as it does on the relation between the state and individual citizens. In both cases, the metropolis as a political space is disempowered and this in turn undercuts the ability of the poor to exercise their “rights to the city.” The result is not, however, an increase in the effective power of the national state apparatus but its inability to exercise “infrastructural power”9 in the urban heartlands of the national economy and the state’s increased reliance on political bosses whose interests lie in capitalizing on inequality and building their own private power. More surprising than the convergence of these two apparently dissimilar cases is Brazil’s apparent divergence from both of them in the direction of democratization, despite equally powerful inegalitarian pressures from the global capitalism and a political tradition steeped in exclusion and denial of citizenship rights.
Brazil: decentralization and local democratization In Brazil, one of the most decentralized countries in Latin America, decentralization has long been in the service of preserving privilege and preventing democratization. State and local governments were dominated by local oligarchies whose primary political agenda was building clientelistic networks that would make their economic privilege and political control unassailable. Nonetheless, in recent decades Brazil’s tradition of decentralization has turned out to contain other, contradictory possibilities. Beginning in the late 1970s, movements against military rule and the exclusionary capitalist development that it promoted became increasingly proactive in Brazil. These movements bore key similarities to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. In Brazil, however, it was much clearer that real democratization would require more than simply re-taking the citadel of the state. These new movements demanded not only political reforms, but also accountability and improved governance, mobilizing behind the slogan “the right to have rights.” Local organizations of the urban poor and pro-democracy fractions of the middle class formed common blocks and scaled-up into powerful national movements demanding housing, public transportation, and health care as social rights. The Workers’ Party, (Partido dos Trabalhadores or PT), projected itself as a vehicle for translating civil society demands into party platforms, with a commitment to democratizing state institutions (Keck 1992). In debates over the new constitution beginning in 1986, urban social movements successfully made demands for more accountable forms of city governance, calling for decentralization and citizen participation in the running of city affairs as a basic right of citizenship (Holston 2008). There is now wide 9
A la Michael Mann (1986).
318
P. Heller and P. Evans
agreement that Brazilian municipalities are the most autonomous and most resourced in Latin America (Baiocchi 2006). The most significant participatory reforms came in the form of the various sectoral councils (health, transport, education, environment) that were mandated by the constitution and are essentially neo-corporatist deliberative arenas with significant binding authority. Reforms have also consisted of innovative programs in which some form of civil society participation was institutionalized in areas as varied as municipal planning, environmental regulation and housing programs (Baiocchi 2006). These include participatory budgeting (PB), a process that involves direct involvement of citizens at the neighborhood and city level in shaping the city’s capital budget in over 400 Brazilian cities. Finally, in 2001 the Brazilian government passed new legislation—the Estatuto da Cidade (City Statute), which not only “incorporates the language and concepts developed by the urban social movements and various local administrations since the 1970s,” but requires that all urban policies be subject to popular participation and “introduces a series of innovative legal instruments that allow local administrations to enforce the ‘social function’” (Caldeira and Holston 2005, pp. 405–406). Three recent studies illustrate the significance of these reforms to “instituting citizenship” at the municipal level. First, a paired-city study of 8 Brazilian municipalities found that PB not only significantly democratized the traditional elite-driven budgetary process, but that it markedly increased the access of civil society organizations (CSOs) to the decision-making process (Baiocchi et al. 2008). Second, Holston’s (2008) long-term ethnographic study of the struggles of workers on the vast periphery of Sao Paulo showed how prosaic localized struggles to secure titles to their land and to demand social services merged into the broader stream of the democracy movement to become highly politicized struggles for citizenship. Finally, Houtzager et al. (2007) measured the degree and quality of associational engagement with the local state using original survey data from Sao Paulo, Mexico City, and New Delhi, and found that only residents of Sao Paulo act as citizens. In contrast to Delhi, where the urban poor depend entirely on political patrons to make demands, and Mexico City, where urban residents have resorted to self-provisioning, a majority of residents of Sao Paulo seek redress by directly engaging city authorities. In general, CSOs and citizens in Brazil have direct access to local government and in many cities play an active role in shaping public policy. The greater ability of social movements to engage the state and push urban governance in the direction of democratization is crucial to the dynamics of citizenship in Brazil, but the role of the national state remains fundamental to reducing inequality. The national state was instrumental in opening up and institutionalizing new participatory spaces. It has also directly attacked inequality, as in the case of Bolsa Familia program, one of the most successful redistributive programs in the world. While this program is implemented through local governments, it could not exist without capacity and political will at the national level. The apparently symbiotic relation in which movement in the direction of democratization at the local level seems to go together with increased capacity of the national government to deliver inequality-reducing policy interventions, stands in contrast to the relation between the nation and the city in both India and South Africa
Taking Tilly south: durable inequalities, democratic contestation
319
Conclusion: democratization and citizenship through an urban lens Comparative analysis of the politics of the Southern Metropolis vindicates Tilly’s theoretical perspectives in multiple ways and points toward promising possibilities for building on them. Tilly’s relational theory of the production of inequality clearly dominates the structuralist and residualist alternatives. Our comparative forays in the Southern Metropolis also confirm the wisdom of Tilly’s instinct that the shifting political relationship between the nation and the city must play a central role in the analysis of citizenship. The Southern Metropolis turns out to be a particularly fruitful arena for looking at the citizenship consequences of variant patterns of state-city political interaction. Structuralist theories that attribute the extreme inequalities that plague the Southern metropolis to the exclusionary intrusions of the global capitalist political economy are not wrong, but they are seriously incomplete. The lack of sufficient numbers of decently remunerative jobs has a devastating effect on the dwellers of the Southern metropolis. Patterns and levels of inequality are nonetheless politically produced and their contours depend on local political ecologies of privilege and categorically defined inequality, which are in turn products of specific social and political trajectories. The general capitalist dynamics that are the focus of structuralist analysis are indeed a powerfully important shared background against which the politics of privilege play out, but reducing the analysis to this shared background misses most of the action. Structuralists not only miss the politics of privilege, they also miss the politics of resistance. None of our cases is a “revolutionary situation.” The privileged are firmly ensconced in all three countries. They are likely to go on producing inequality. Movement toward democratization will be an uphill fight, subject to reversals and backsliding for the foreseeable future. Yet, the Southern Metropolis is shaped in all three countries by democratizing movements of impressive vibrancy and persistence that continue to challenge the production of inequality. Residualist theories may also contribute something to the analysis of inequality in the Southern Metropolis but they miss the central political dynamics almost completely. Even more seriously, a residualist focus misreads the connection between politics and policy, seducing policy makers into relying on technocratic fixes and tempting them to suppress the very political movements that a relational perspective leads us to believe are essential to unseating established political ecologies of privilege. If our conclusions with regard to the superiority of Tilly’s relational perspective are straightforward, our analysis with regard to the dynamics of state-city interactions is more suggestive than definitive. Our comparative analysis confirms our initial proposition that democratization driven primarily by the nation state is no longer sufficient to ensure citizenship as accepted practice and as a vehicle for the reduction of inequality, but once beyond that starting point our conclusions are more tentative. The Global South is not devolving back to city-states nor has citizenship become primarily a global affair. Formal institutionalization of national rules consistent with “broad, equal, categorical, binding consultation and protection” is still the sine qua non of citizenship, but our analysis has bracketed this background condition, much
320
P. Heller and P. Evans
in the same way that it brackets the context of global political economy that is emphasized by the structuralists. By choosing cases in which formal rules at the national level support democratization, we have highlighted the importance of variations in urban practice and politics and the ways in which the interaction of states and cities shape these practices and politics. India, South Africa, and Brazil each have their own distinctive patterns of statecity interaction and, consequently their own distinctive patterns of urban citizenship. At the local level, Indians have few, if any at all, points of meaningful interface with the state, and, to the extent local government does play a role, the mode of intermediation is exclusively through party-based patronage. In South Africa, local government and local democracy matters, but the dominance of the ANC and its embrace of increasingly technocratic modes of government have all but ruled out any form of participation. In Brazil, old tropes of decentralization have been transformed and harnessed to an agenda of urban democratization by movements from below. While struggles for citizenship in Brazil are often frustrated and their eventual outcome must be considered uncertain, the way in which local political contestation and the continued efforts by the national state to reduce categorical inequalities has supported the expansion of citizenship distinguishes Brazil from India and South Africa. Brazil’s unusual combination of political decentralization and continuing national support for “broad, equal, categorical, binding consultation and protection” has given the disprivileged of Brazil’s cities unusual leverage in their pursuit of citizenship rights. In other words, the relationship between the state and civic actors has to some degree evolved institutionally in the direction of more synergistic patterns of engagement. Contrasting patterns of democratization in the Southern Metropolis are associated with different degrees of effectiveness in the exercise of state power, both locally and nationally, but not in the way that conventional wisdom might lead us to expect. Our comparisons suggest an affinity between the nation state’s willingness to support the relative political autonomy of the metropolis and democratization of urban governance. The development of this counter-intuitive synergistic relationship characterizes the Brazilian case. South Africa illustrates the converse possibility: the effort to exert tight control over the metropolis and its residents may well be contributing to the undermining of the capacity of the nation state. Similarly in India, the long-standing determination of the Centre and the States to retain bureaucratic control over the metropolis has severely limited the capacity for local democratic governance. These are, of course, only tentative propositions, but they are certainly worth pursuing and confronting with more comparative evidence. “Taking Tilly South” has paid valuable intellectual dividends. Tilly’s theoretical framework has been sustained by the comparative analysis of cases very different from those that stimulated his original formulations, exactly the kind of confirmation that every theorist hopes for. Perhaps more important, using Tilly’s preoccupation with the evolution of state-city relations as a lens for scrutinizing the Southern metropolis has generated a set of unproved but heuristically promising propositions about the relationships among state-city relations, democratization, and state capacity, vindicating Tilly in a different, more forward looking way.
Taking Tilly south: durable inequalities, democratic contestation
321
References Appadurai, A. (2002). Deep democracy: urban governmentality and the horizon of politics. Public Culture, 14(1), 21–47. Atkinson, D. (2007). Taking to the streets: Has developmental local government failed in South Africa? In S. Buhlungu, J. Daniel, R. Southall, & J. Lutchman (Eds.), State of the nation: South Africa 2007 (pp. 53–77). Cape Town: Human Social Science Research Council. Baiocchi, G. (2006). Inequality and innovation: Decentralization as an opportunity structure in Brazil. In P. Bardhan & D. Mookherjee (Eds.), Decentralization and local governance in developing countries (pp. 53–80). Cambridge: MIT. Baiocchi, G., Heller, P., & Silva, M. K. (2008). Making space for civil society: institutional reforms and local democracy in Brazil. Social Forces, 86(3), 911–936. Bayat, A. (2009). Iran: a green wave for life and liberty posted on “Open Democracy” 7 - 07 - 2009 http:// www.opendemocracy.net/article/iran-a-green-wave-for-life-and-liberty. Beall, J., Crankshaw, O., & Parnell, S. (2002). Uniting a divided city: Governance and Social Exclusion in Johannesburg. London: Earthscan. Bond, P. (2004). South Africa’s resurgent urban social movements: The case of Johannesburg, 1984, 1994, 2004. Report No. 22, Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu Natal. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Caldeira, T., & Holston, J. (2005). State and urban space in Brazil: From modernist planning to democratic intervention. In A. Ong & S. J. Collier (Eds.), Global anthropology: Technology, governmentality, ethics (pp. 393–416). London: Blackwell. Chatterjee, P. (2004). The politics of the governed. New York: Columbia University Press. Davis, M. (2006). Planet of slums. London: Verso. Desai, A. (2002). We are the poors: Community struggles in post-apartheid South Africa. New York: Monthly Review Press. Desai, A. (2003). Neo-liberal Resistance in South Africa. Monthly Review, 54(8):16–28. Fernandes, E. (2007). Constructing the ‘Right to the City’ in Brazil. Social & Legal Studies, 16(2), 201–219. Holston, J. (2008). Insurgent citizenship. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Houtzager, P., Acharya, A., & Lavalle, A. G. (2007). Associations and the exercise of citizenship in new democracies: evidence from Sao Paulo and Mexico City. Working paper 285, Institute of Development Studies. Kaplinsky, R. (2005). Globalization, poverty and inequality: Between a rock and a hard place. Cambridge: Polity. Keck, M. E. (1992). The Workers' Party and Democratization in Brazil. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lee, C.-K. (2007). Against the law: Labor protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mann, M. (1986). The sources of social power. Volume I: A history of social power from the beginning to A.D. 1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peck, J., & Tickell, A. (2002). Neoliberalizing space. Antipode, 34(3), 380–404. Seekings, J., & Nattrass, N. (2005). Class, race, and inequality in South Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sekhar, S., & Bidarkar, S. (1999). Municipal budgets in India: comparison across five cities. Economic and Political Weekly, May 15. Somers, M. R. (1993). Citizenship and the place of the public sphere: law, community, and political culture in the transition to democracy. American Sociological Review, 58, 587–620. Tilly, C. (1998). Durable inequality. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tilly, C. (2004). Social movements, 1768–2004. Boulder: Paradigm. Tilly, C. (2010). Cities and states in world history, this issue. United Nations. (2006). Fact sheet 4: Urban and rural components of population growth. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2005 Revision. van Donk, M., Swilling, M., Pieterse, E., & Parnell, S. (Eds.). (2008). Consolidating developmental local government: Lessons from the South African experience. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press. Weinstein, L. (2009). Democracy in the globalizing city: Democratic participation in Mumbai’s megaproject development. Politics and Society, 37(3):397–427. Whitehead, J., & More, N. (2007). Revanchism in Mumbai? Political economy of rent gaps and urban restructuring in a global city. Economic and Political Weekly, 23, 2428–2434.
322
P. Heller and P. Evans
World Bank. (2006). World Bank development report: Equity and development. Washington DC. Zérah, M.-H. (2008). Splintering urbanism in Mumbai: contrasting trends in a multilayered society. Geoforum, 39(6), 1922–1932. Patrick Heller is Professor of Sociology and International Studies at Brown University. His current area of research is the comparative study of democratic deepening. He is the author of The Labor of Development (Cornell University Press, 1999) and a co-author of Social Democracy in the Periphery (Cambridge, 2007). He has written on a range of topics including democratic consolidation, the politics of decentralization, local democracy, urban transformation, and social movements. His current research is focused on the relationships among development, democracy, and civil society through a comparative analysis of India, Brazil, and South Africa. Peter Evans is Professor of Sociology and Marjorie Meyer Eliaser Professor of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His work on the comparative political economy of national development is exemplified by his 1995 book Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation. His continued interest in the role of the state is reflected in a recent series of articles on the “21st Century Developmental State.” He has worked on urban environment politics (Liveable Cities, 2001) and he is now working on “counter-hegemonic globalization” with a focus on the role of the global labor movement.
Was government the solution or the problem? The role of the state in the history of American social policy Michael B. Katz
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Abstract This article attempts to resolve a contradiction noted by Charles Tilly between my earlier writings on education and later writings on the welfare state. The earlier work on education was critical of governments’ role in constructing bureaucratic school systems that reinforced inequality; the later work on the welfare state argued for the extension of government social provision. This article shows how the contradiction poses a false dichotomy. It then uses history to show how assessments of governments’ role reflect the political context in which they are written but rest on consistent values and priorities. The article emphasizes, as well, the absence of a counter narrative to the political right’s assertion of government policy failure; the truncated and inappropriate use of “state” in much writing on public policies; and the need for historians of policy to develop means of assessing the success or failure of government policies and programs.
Several years ago, I visited the graduate social science seminar at the New School to discuss my work on the history of the American welfare state. Among the participants was Charles Tilly. After my talk, he observed that my current work on the welfare state contradicted my earlier writing on the origins of public education. What he meant was this: between the late 1960s and mid-1970s, along with other critics on the political left, I had attacked the story told in textbooks and taught to prospective teachers and administrators. In this story, public education emerged from the victory of enlightened, democratic champions of the common good over the forces of selfishness and reaction. An engine of social mobility and the noblest product of American democracy, public education, always under threat, needed vigilant defense. Our view of public education—past and present—was more M. B. Katz (*) History Dept., University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA e-mail:
[email protected] M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_22, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
323
324
M.B. Katz
complicated and a good deal darker; it called into question the capacity of governments to deliver high quality, truly democratic education that challenged, or at least did not reinforce, existing social and economic inequalities. It counterposed an earlier democratic localism to the rigid, unresponsive public bureaucracies that characterized urban school systems (Bowles and Gintis 1974; Katz 1975, 2001).1 By the 1990s, my histories of the welfare state pointed in another direction. Again, along with others on the political left, I argued that voluntarism alone never had proved sufficient to help most needy Americans. From the Colonial period onward, governments—at first local governments—played a crucial role in relief. The amelioration of poverty and dependence, in this story, required increased action by public authorities, first by state, then by national governments. Uniformity of benefits and services was the solution, not the problem. Social Security was the model, the nationalization of Aid to Families with Dependent Children the goal, a guaranteed annual income and single-payer health care the fantasy (Katz 2006, 2008). The tension between these two historical interpretations is what Tilly perceptively observed. The problem of resolving them has nagged at the back of my mind for a long time. The invitation to participate in this special issue of Theory and Society seemed to me the occasion to stop avoiding the issue. As I have worked through the tension, interestingly, its clarity has faded. It is, in fact, more apparent than real. But it is productively heuristic. For it raises the question of how historians should think about the role of government in American social policy. Mid-2009, when I write this, is an appropriate moment to put the issue front and center. Between 1981 and 2009, with the exception of Bill Clinton, American presidents told the nation that government was the problem, not the solution. Even Democrat Clinton reinforced the point with his proclamation that the era of big government was over. Now, for the first time in three decades, a new president has reversed the message, telling Americans that government can be the solution. His policies, for instance, a massive new public works program, partial nationalization of the automobile industry, re-regulation of banks and the financial industry, reflect the assumption that the nation will not emerge from its economic crisis without the guiding hand of a strong, active central government. The moment has a surreal quality: in capitalist America, respected economists advocated nationalization of the banking industry while the US government acquired a 60% and the Canadian government a 12% stake in General Motors. Bombarded with the anti-government rhetoric of the Reagan/Bush(es) years, inherently suspicious of a strong central state, Americans might understandably view President Obama’s initiatives with uncertainty and trepidation. Is government the problem or the solution? Where should they look for an answer? They should look to history. Most of the social scientists and policy analysts who try to evaluate the work of government are relentlessly present-centered. They do not look to the past, at least not in other than a cursory way. This is a mistake. The data lie in the past. The question of the role of government, if it is to move beyond theoretical abstraction, is essentially historical. None of our major institutions— 1 I developed these arguments in The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in MidNineteenth Century Massachusetts (2001) and Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools (1975). A key—and controversial—volume in this literature is Bowles and Gintis (1974).
Was government the solution or the problem?
325
school systems, the welfare state, hospitals, criminal justice—is a product of rational planning. Their current forms result from actions taken over long periods of time. They are cobbled together from loosely articulated components added by different groups at various points throughout decades, in some cases centuries. Without history, they cannot be understood or interpreted. So, how should historians take up the challenge and think about the role of government in the history of social policy? The rest of this essay offers some suggestions. It makes a few main arguments:
Assessments of government implicit in historical writing have reflected the political context in which they were created. But a consistent set of political values and priorities has underpinned what appear, on the surface, as different interpretations. Scholars on the political left have written persuasive histories of government failure in education, welfare, and urban policy. None of them has produced a comprehensive and coherent counter-narrative. Their histories unintentionally provide fodder for the anti-government right. Historians use “state” inappropriately in discussions of American government because they often fail to analyze the impact of federalism on social policy. America is a nation of many governments; frequently they work at cross purposes. Historians concerned with assessing the role of government need to develop methods for evaluating the success or failure of social policies. They should pay special attention to the contradictory criteria with which diverse groups assess the same program, policy, or institution.
Let me begin by poking a bit deeper into the alleged contradiction Tilly found in my work. The first point is that neither the education nor the welfare state story, as a number of us on the political left have told them, embodies a clear position on the role of the state. To be sure, the work on the history of public education could be read as antigovernment. Someone once told me that Milton Friedman was a fan of my first book; if true, although an unintended outcome, it does reinforce the point. Yet, at the same time, all of us so-called revisionists (I think this is a safe generalization) supported Civil Rights and applauded federal government efforts to end racial segregation; we supported the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which funneled federal money to schools that served poor children; we agreed that state legislatures should equalize per pupil funding among school districts; we would have opposed proposals to turn public schools over to for-profit firms; we supported the “public” in public education, but we wanted fundamental reforms. A similar story can be told about historians of social welfare. Their accounts of state policy were deeply critical. The foundational book in the modern historiography of welfare, Regulating the Poor by Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward (1971), presented poor relief as a mechanism for controlling labor—withdrawn when labor was in short supply, expanded in slack periods. There was nothing humanitarian about poor relief in their story, and governments acted in the interests of power and capital, not labor. In a subsequent book, Poor People’s Movements, they argued that poor people only won increased benefits through mobilization and protest, taking advantage of moments of systemic vulnerability when politicians needed their votes (Piven and Cloward 1977). Yet, Piven and Cloward knew that
326
M.B. Katz
only government could supply the resources needed by poor people; they advised the National Welfare Rights Organization’s leadership not to oppose Nixon’s controversial Family Assistance Plan; and they worked hard in the cause of voter registration. In their view, the state should act less punitively and more generously, not withdraw. My own work criticized the historic meanness of government response to poverty, which reinforced the fictive distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor. Many of us attacked AFDC for its inadequate benefits, punitive administration, and state variability—benefits were much higher in some states than in others. Yet, in 1996, we found ourselves appalled when President Clinton proposed its abolition. I remember how odd it felt, one afternoon, to find myself on a panel at Bryn Mawr actually defending AFDC instead of trashing the program for its shortcomings. The first point, then, is that the contrast between an earlier anti- and a later prostate historiography is not clear-cut. In fact, to pose the question—is government the problem or the solution?—is to construct a false dichotomy. A consistent set of political values and priorities—equity, inclusion, and participation—lay beneath the individual histories. Still, an unresolved, better an unacknowledged, tension ran through writing in each period. The strand that appeared dominant in each period took its coloration from the larger political context of the time. And these differed dramatically. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, historians could not escape the contradiction between the official history of public education and its current condition. A host of critics mounted attacks on school bureaucracies, exposed inequalities, excoriated the educational neglect of poor and minority children, and analyzed the mechanisms by which schools reproduced inequalities (Bowles and Gintis 1974; Goodman 1964; Graubard 1972). Proposals for radical school reform were everywhere. (The result, unfortunately, was many books and articles but much less action.) The question historians could not escape, unless they hid their heads in the sand, was how to square the reigning tale of public education’s past with its present. If schools had been benevolent engines of democracy, what explained the current condition and results of public education in every city across the nation? This was the underlying question in the new educational historiography. By the early twenty-first century, the politics of educational criticism had swung in curious directions. Harvey Kantor and Robert Lowe (2000) described the shift. Since the late 1980s . . . conservatives have appropriated much of this critique of bureaucracy [offered by historians of education in the 1960s and 1970s] in an effort to shrink federal intervention and privatize public education. Echoing many of the themes first voiced by critics on the left in the 1960s, these conservatives argue that public schools constitute a calcified, bureaucratic “one best system” that encroaches on classroom autonomy, stifles choice, and frustrates the educational aspirations of parents (p. 130). Who was on the left, who on the right was often not transparent. Conservative critics of public education had picked up an important strand in the earlier radical criticism and detached it from its underlying politics. They argued for breaking up public monopolies in education and for injecting competition into the system through private charter schools and funding for-profit educational providers. The existing bureaucracies, they contended, were beyond redemption (Chubb and Moe
Was government the solution or the problem?
327
1990).2 This is what I call the normalization of formerly radical rhetoric. It is a process worth some study by historians of social policy. This attack on public education evoked emotions ranging from unease to panic among school people and professors of education. Historical assaults on the political economy and bureaucratic structure of public education virtually ceased. I had not worked intensively in the history of education for some years and had given only fairly cursory attention to the field. So I was particularly attentive to new trends and directions when attending a small conference at Stanford held to honor David Tyack, one of the field’s giants, on the occasion of his retirement in 2000. What I picked up, more from remarks around the table than from the papers, was serious concern that the attacks on public education might succeed. In this situation, the implicit project became to construct a new history of education that would come to its defense. Again, Kantor and Lowe (2000), whose essay is the major exception to the trend, describe what had happened. Much of the left . . . has responded to conservative power by defending the public schools . . . that radicals themselves formerly labeled bankrupt. . . . discourse about public education has been circumscribed by the left’s abandonment of its earlier critique of the way schools are controlled and organized. . . . motivated by the perceived need to defend public education and other public bureaucracies from conservative attack, this abandonment has, ironically, allowed the right to define the main agenda for substantive educational change in cities (p. 131). By the 1990s, the political context in which progressive historians wrote had turned nearly 180°. The optimistic, sometimes romantic, radicalism of the 1960s had given way to a more conservative politics on both the right and left—some would say that the left had virtually disappeared as an effective voice. The rightward turn shaped the work of historians of the welfare state as well as of education. Historians of the welfare state found themselves joined in defensive efforts to stave off more cuts in social programs and spending. Once again, they had to write a counternarrative, only this time not directed against overly enthusiastic champions of state programs but against widely publicized historical fictions, represented notably in the work of Marvin Olasky (1992) and Charles Murray (1984), who argued that once upon a time Americans had voluntarily helped each other without money or meddling from government and that admittedly well-intentioned Great Society programs had increased dependence and failed to alleviate poverty. In this climate, I wanted to emphasize what the historical record clearly showed, namely, that voluntarism had never been able to relieve most poverty and dependence and that many Great Society-era federal initiatives had succeeded (Katz 2006).3 Without distorting the historical record, or obscuring the mean, punitive, perverse side of relief and welfare practice, I believed it possible to make a case for the expansion of the welfare state, or, at least, to contribute to efforts to stem its attrition. Urban historians were caught in a similar bind, although, like historians in other fields, they did not address it explicitly. It is not a theme, for instance, in Tilly’s well2 3
Perhaps the most important book making this argument was John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe (1990). Schwarz (1984) offers a persuasive overview of government-driven successes in the 1960s and 1970s.
328
M.B. Katz
known 1996 essay on urban history (Tilly 1996); nor have I seen it discussed in other overviews of the field. An extraordinary recent book, Mapping Urban Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City by Colin Gordon (2008), illustrates the problem. Gordon’s sympathies are with the political left. His first book examined the relations among business, labor, and politics in the 1920s and 1930s; his second book offers a sophisticated explanation for why the United States has failed to enact national health insurance (Gordon 1994, 2003). In the new book, his use of GIS and sensational maps sets a new standard for urban historians. Nonetheless, conservatives could point to Mapping Decline as evidence of the failure and futility of urban public policy—a failure shared by federal, state, and local governments. With exquisite detail, Gordon traces the implementation of policies designed to arrest blight, stem population loss, and turn around the economic fortunes of the city. None of them worked. “A half-century of urban renewal and redevelopment programs,” he writes, “not only failed to stem the decline of central St. Louis but pointedly avoided the very neighborhoods in which that decline was most palpable. . . . Most American cities emerged from the heyday of urban renewal in similar shape—central city decay punctuated by the occasional stadium or convention center; urban problems (segregation, poverty, unemployment, fiscal crisis) spilling into the inner suburbs; employment and the tax base continuing to sprawl to the outer suburbs (p. 188).” Most recent studies of public housing, highway construction, racial segregation, and suburbanization make similar arguments. The political left and right meet in the acknowledgement that urban public policy has been a disaster.4 Nonetheless, in the 1980s when the federal government began to close the funding spigot controlling the flow of federal dollars to cities, almost all the historians of urban decline on the political left, I would wager, were appalled, and with good reason. The massive withdrawal of federal aid weakened the precarious fiscal position of cities and threatened vital programs and services. In Place Matters, Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom (1994) point out, “Overall, federal assistance to local governments was cut 60%” during the Reagan and Bush administrations, “from $43 billion to $17 billion. . . . These cutbacks had a particularly devastating impact on cities with high levels of poverty and limited property tax bases, many of which depended on federal and state aid for half or more of their budgets (p. 139).” Between 1980 and 1989, the federal share of big city budgets dropped from 22% to 6% and state aid remained about the same (Dreier et al. 1994). What no one, to my knowledge, has yet attempted is a history of post1945 federal urban policy that acknowledges its perverse outcomes but, as well, analyzes its benefits and defines a strong case for federal engagement—for the federal government as part of the solution, not just a source of problems. This semicounter-narrative would trace the impact of federal dollars through new programs like Operation Headstart and Legal Services, employment in government-funded social services and on publicly-supported research projects, and the construction or expansion of “anchor institutions,” notably colleges and universities and hospitals. 4
Another prominent example is Sugrue (1996). For examples that lean more to the right, see Morris (1980) and Banfield (1970). A partial exception to this trend is emerging among historians of public housing who emphasize the early halcyon days of the projects. For a review of some of this literature, see Fairbanks (2008).
Was government the solution or the problem?
329
In all these examples, the unheralded result was money pumped through city economies, promoting purchasing power, real estate sales, and, most important, jobs. The jobs created by federal dollars spent on construction, service, and research proved crucial to the emergence of a new black middle class. Clearly, by cherry-picking events it is easy to make a case for either proposition: government is the problem, government is the solution. Beyond the banal, if valid, observation that historians should dig deep, understand issues in all their complexity, and never suppress evidence, how can historians tell stories useful in assessing the role of government in social policy? They can begin by deconstructing “government” and paying close attention to the role of federalism in the history of American social policy. This is a very complicated topic. Government, as a singular noun, is a misleading term in the American context, and state, which connotes a unitary national government, is equally diversionary. The reality is that the United States has many governments. Federalism structures every aspect of American social policy. The Constitution imposes limits on the power of the national government to mandate policies in many areas; federalism’s constraints have constituted the frame within which national administrations have designed policy. The architects of the New Deal, for example, maneuvered carefully to avoid successful Constitutional challenges to Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Old Age Assistance, and Assistance to Dependent Children (Berkowitz 1991). In many instances, the national government achieves its ends by bribing state governments, that is, by setting specific program requirements for receiving federal money. Sometimes the bribe doesn’t work, as for example when some governors have said they would reject parts of the federal stimulus money made available by the Obama administration. States, in turn, impose constraints on cities. In law, cities are creations of states (Frug 1999).5 Their autonomous capacity to initiate action or raise money has varied over time and across state lines. In areas where states do grant municipal autonomy, the result is often a myriad of different policies among cities and suburbs, which are themselves mini-governments—different tax rates, per pupil spending, and zoning ordinances, for instance. In Pennsylvania alone there are 501 school districts. Identifying the role of government becomes even more confusing when levels of government disagree. What, for instance, is the role of government in the presence of handguns and assault weapons on the streets of Philadelphia? The Philadelphia City Council passed gun control legislation; the state legislature overturned it. How do we parse the role of government in welfare reform? In the early 1990s, many state governments wanted to change their welfare regulations in ways that conflicted with federal requirements. The federal government could not order a state government to maintain a public assistance program. But it could refuse the state federal money if it did not establish a program with federally defined features. In this situation, states that wanted to innovate had to ask the federal government for waivers (Center on Social Welfare Law and Policy 1995). State governments, however, have substantial autonomy in setting educational policy. In education, tensions between state and local governments permeated nineteenthcentury politics of education. Horace Mann and other school promoters wanted to centralize local schools into larger units, wiping out small local school districts 5
See chapter 1 of Frugg (1999) on the legal basis of American cities.
330
M.B. Katz
which others saw as bastions of democracy. The conflict continued and intensified with the clash between urban reformers and rural communities over school consolidation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In the midtwentieth century, the federal government clashed with states over school desegregation. In each of these instances, answers to the question, is government the solution or the problem, would depend on location. The same would be true today if one asked the question of parents in, say, a wealthy suburb of Philadelphia like Upper Merion and in a poor and segregated district of the city itself. In the early 1990s, state officials itching to innovate in welfare policy would have seen state government as the solution and the federal government as an obstacle. Government would look different, too, from the perspective of a teacher feeling trapped by a regime of standardized tests and a state education official using test results to compare schools. Throughout American history, social policies—policies toward crime, education, welfare, poverty—have remained mainly state responsibilities. Before the 1930s, federal initiatives in these areas varied from non-existent to minimal. Not until 1875, for instance, in Henderson v Mayor of New York, did the Supreme Court grant the federal government primacy over state governments in immigration policy (Tichenor 2002). From the New Deal through the Great Society the balance shifted, tilting more, although never completely, toward federal social policy initiatives than ever before. Since the Nixon years, however, initiative and responsibility have moved back to states. Policy devolution, as an explicit federal goal, accelerated in the 1980s, making the states, as they had been in the Progressive era, laboratories for public policy (Katz 2008).6 What is the import of federalism for evaluating the role of government in public policy? How should historians go about looking for an answer? Historians of policy need to explain why some policies, like Social Security, remain at the center, uniform across the country and administered by the national government, while others, like AFDC and now TANF, were designed as federal-state partnerships with wide areas of discretion left to the states. Historians could do much more to analyze the implementation of federal policies at the local level and show how local politics modified and sometimes undercut national policy. A model here is Guian A. McKee’s superb analysis of the intersection of politics, race, and economic development in Philadelphia (2008). “Despite the growth of the federal state during the twentieth century and the attendant, if partial centralization of state authority,” wrote McKee, “local governments, policymakers, and community activists continued to exert extensive and often defining influence over the implementation and onthe-ground operation of American public policy (p. 16).” Historians might focus, as well, on moments when authority has shifted between levels of government, as when state mothers’ pensions became the state-federal program, Aid to Dependent Children, in the 1930s. They might study the ways geographic regions and state governments have bent federal programs to meet their own purposes. In When Affirmative Action Was White, for instance, Ira Katznelson (2005) describes how the “South’s representatives built ramparts within the policy 6 In The Price of Citizenship (2008), I discuss devolution throughout various branches of the American welfare state.
Was government the solution or the problem?
331
initiatives of the New Deal and Fair Deal to safeguard their region’s social organization.” They developed “three mechanisms.” The first was exclusion: wherever the law allowed, they simply left out African-Americans; second was administration: they successfully insisted that the administration of some laws, such as ADC, “be placed in the hands of local officials who were deeply hostile to black aspirations.” Third was segregation: “they prevented Congress from attaching any sort of anti-discrimination provisions to a wide array of social welfare programs.” As a result, in the South, especially, the “new national programs” enacted in the 1930s and 1940s “constituted a massive transfer of quite specific privileges to white Americans (pp. 22–23).”7 In recent years, scholars of the history of the American welfare state—an interdisciplinary group with more sociologists and political scientists than cardcarrying historians—have produced a rich and sophisticated literature embedding social policy in American government and politics (Amenta 1988; Howard 1997; Skocpol 1992; Weir et al. 1988). Their work is central to the reconceptualization of American political history, a project of an exciting, mainly younger network of scholars associated with the new subfields of American Political Development and policy history.8 As well as in books, this work appears often in two journals, Studies in American Political Development and the Journal of Policy History. Historians of education have been much slower than historians of welfare to link their subject to the project of re-thinking the history of American government and politics. (The work of Patrick McGuinn (2006) and the forthcoming work of Tracy L. Steffes are exceptions.9) They have virtually no representation among the network of social scientists affiliated with American Political Development. Civil Rights-related issues— segregation and busing, for instance—is the arena in which historians of education have engaged government and politics most directly.10 The work of sociologist Theda Skocpol illustrates how close, systematic attention to the structure of government and politics has reframed the history of social policy in America. It points, as well, to potential limits of the American Political Development approach for assessing the historical role of government in American social policy. Skocpol advocates a “structured polity” or “political process approach.” In Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (1992), her account of the origins of social policy in the years between the late nineteenth-century and the Great Depression, Skocpol asks “why maternalist forces promoting social policies for mothers and women workers were considerably more effective in U.S. politics during the early 1900s than were paternalist forces that simultaneously worked for the enactment of policies targeted on male wage-earners (p. 56).” Her exploration of the factors that resulted in this maternalist welfare state emphasizes a process she and other students of American political development call “policy feedback,” the way in which “policies, once enacted, restructure subsequent political processes (p. 58).” 7
Another book that shows how institutional structures shaped policy implementation is Robert C. Lieberman (1998). 8 An outstanding collection illustrating the new political history is Jacobs et al. (2003). 9 Steffes’s work will appear as the revision of her dissertation, “A New Education for a Modern Age: National Reform, State-building, and the Transformation of American Schooling, 1890–1933,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2007. 10 For instance, see Nelson (2005).
332
M.B. Katz
Policy feedback works in two ways: first, by transforming or expanding “the capacities of the state,” new policies “change the administrative possibilities for official initiatives in the future, and affect later prospects for policy implementation. (p.58)” Second, “new policies affect the social identities, goals, and capabilities of groups that subsequently struggle or ally in politics (p. 58).” The importance of policy feedback means that any attempt to explain social policies must be historical, “sensitive to processes unfolding over time” (p. 59). For the purposes of this article, Skocpol’s “political-process approach” (1992) has special relevance because it offers a metric for assessing the role of government. . . . a policy is “successful” if it enhances the kinds of state capacities that can promote its future development, and especially if it stimulates groups and political alliances to defend the policy’s continuation and expansion. . . . positive or negative policy feedbacks can also ‘spill over’ from one policy to influence the fate of another policy proposal. . . . Tracing these feedback processes is crucial for explaining the further development of social provision after initial measures are instituted (p. 59). Skocpol’s metric for policy success measures only one kind of outcome—a policy’s survival, institutionalization, expansion, and influence. If government is to be part of the solution, then its policies must meet these tests. But this necessary condition is not sufficient. Solution implies more than institutionalization; it means, as well, solving problems.11 Did the policy meet its objectives? Did it have unintended consequences? As straightforward as these questions sound, they are full of difficulties and pitfalls for historians and social scientists. One set derives from the problem of identifying objectives and linking them to results, difficult enough today even with the apparatus of evaluation research, but demanding special ingenuity coupled with a dose of chutzpah when applied to earlier times. There is, as well, the question, whose objectives? Those who designed policies? Clients/recipients/ the general public, whoever that may be? Should historians restrict themselves to the goals of actors at the time or is it legitimate to evaluate government action from the vantage point of our own time and priorities? These are thorny questions that deserve explicit attention from historians of policy. I have tried at various times to confront them, with mixed success. Let me illustrate with examples from the history of education and the history of the welfare state. I want to suggest that public education has had mixed success in meeting the stated objectives of its sponsors but, perhaps, greater success in delivering largely unspoken messages inherent in its design and practice. I want to suggest, too, that from the vantage point of its major historic purposes, public assistance has been a stunning success while, from the view of both its contemporary liberal and conservative critics, it has been a dismal failure. What have been the results of public education? This is a question I have thought about over the years and written about in 1987. One method is to compare the explicit purposes of public schools—a task requiring attention to shifting purposes over time—with their outcomes, insofar as these can be stimated. Another method is 11
I do not mean to imply that Skocpol would claim this outcome as the only measure of success. It is success according to the question she is posing.
Was government the solution or the problem?
333
to try to ferret out purposes from features of organizational design and pedagogy; sometimes these are explicit, at other times they need to be inferred. These two methods are complementary, not in the sense that they point in the same direction— they do not—but in the puzzles that tensions between them suggest. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, school promoters argued that public educational systems would solve five pressing problems. These were the crime and poverty that accompanied urbanization; the cultural heterogeneity resulting from the massive immigration of the famine Irish; the poor work habits of a rural population unaccustomed to governance by time and industrial discipline; the disturbing presence of idle youth evident in towns and cities when they had lost their function in workplaces but found no alternative way to occupy their time; and the anxieties of middle class parents about the futures of their children in an age of social and economic transformation. New public school systems did little or nothing to reduce crime and poverty, which continued to increase. This failure, incidentally, had almost no impact on educational rhetoric which, in America, has since this time assigned every social problem an educational solution, making education, in the words of one historian, “the imperfect panacea (Perkinson 1968).” The extent to which schools erased cultural heterogeneity is not so evident. Clearly, though, the effort was controversial, as the growth of Catholic schools attests. Early high schools, along with reform schools for the really recalcitrant, did help mop up some of the idle youth. Where schools were most successful, however, was in helping middle class parents. They offered them a means to equip their children with useful skills at public expense and to let them stay at home rather than attend expensive boarding schools. The differential advantage public schools have offered middle class parents, who made most use of them—the socialization of the cost of their children’s mobility—surely is one foundation of the American middle class attachment to public education. For many American parents, when it comes to education, government clearly has been the solution. For other parents, for instance black parents living under segregation or in inner cities where school failures help reproduce inequality, government has been part of the problem. Were these the only, or principal, purposes of public schools? Can any others be inferred from their design and conduct? Sociologist Robert Dreeben, in What Is Learned In Schools, offered one of the most intriguing answers. Dreeben argued that schools are where children learn the norms of individualism, universalism, and achievement that guide American behavior. In schools, children learn that different behaviors are appropriate in public and private settings and that in institutions and at work they should be treated as members of categories (fifth grader, for instance) rather than as individuals. These important messages, Dreeben emphasizes, are transmitted by the structure and organization of schooling, not by what teachers say or by the curriculum. My favorite example is that in schools children learn that helping their friends is cheating (it would be interesting to see if the current emphasis on teams in the workplace has altered this message). In any event, to the extent that these norms pervade, and are reproduced, in American society, schools have succeeded in one of their key goals. Historians should take away from this example the importance of analyzing the social implications of organizational details and, in education, pedagogical practice. This, incidentally, was something midnineteenth century educators understood well; they fiercely debated the social implications of pedagogical practice and motivational technique (Katz 2001).
334
M.B. Katz
One other lesson schools have taught is to blame oneself for failure. From the mid-nineteenth century forward, school officials have emphasized that promotion should be earned through achievement. Grading and examinations reinforced the message that school systems owed children nothing; they remained responsible for their own success or failure. In this way, schools taught an initial lesson in political economy: the correspondence between the distribution of rewards and ability. The distance from this conclusion to the persistent and durable distinction between the worthy and unworthy poor is not very wide (Katz 1987). The history of welfare also underscores the possibility of evaluating the role of governments by comparing the explicit purposes of institutions and programs with their results. It adds complexity, however, by asking what to conclude when purposes and practices contradict one another and how to balance the purposes of the present against those of the past. Four explicit goals have influenced social welfare practice throughout much of American history. They are the relief of misery, the preservation of social order and discipline, the regulation of the labor market, and political mobilization—that is, the use of welfare and relief to mobilize political support. The targets of mobilization occasionally were recipients but more often individuals who benefited from public spending (employers, contractors, suppliers, for instance) or voters upset by taxes, public morality, and rewarding the undeserving poor. Some policy failures leap from the data. Poorhouses were supposed to decrease the escalating cost of public outdoor relief. They did not; the cost of outdoor relief continued to rise even as poorhouses sprouted all over the country. Public relief undoubtedly relieved misery by keeping many people alive, but it did not reduce poverty, which never was its goal. More intriguing are the tensions, contradictions, and conflicts among purposes. In the nineteenth century, to take one example, prominent reformers wanted to discipline the poor and cut taxes by abolishing outdoor relief. They clashed with local employers who depended on relief to sustain their labor force during periods of seasonal unemployment and local politicians dependent on votes from poor neighborhoods. Inside poorhouses, humanitarian impulses to provide decent care conflicted with the aim of reducing costs and the doctrine of less eligibility, the belief that relief never should be preferable to paid employment. Indeed, the conflict between compassion and deterrence permeates the history of welfare. Almost always, deterrence has won. Welfare’s four explicit goals point to its underlying purposes: the preservation of life at the cheapest cost, the stigmatization of public assistance, and the preservation of social order among the most disadvantaged. By this metric, welfare has been, by and large, an outstanding success. Government, in fact, was the solution (Katz 1983). No one in the late twentieth-century, of course, listed these as their objectives. That is why, to every constituency, welfare seemed a failure. The conservative assault on welfare in the 1980s and 1990s remained the most consistent with welfare’s historic purposes. It grew out of the belief that government was the problem because welfare no longer served its fundamental mission: it cost too much, no longer stigmatized recipients, and encouraged unruly behavior, such as protests at public assistance offices based on the misguided idea that welfare was a right. More liberal observers also argued that welfare had failed, only for different reasons. It was mean, punitive, and counterproductive. Their criticism, with which I agreed, was ahistorical; welfare never, in any serious way, had been intended to be anything else.
Was government the solution or the problem?
335
Contemporary political controversy over welfare highlights how evaluations of government’s role often depend on political views and on whether historians measure with the standards of the time about which they write or of their own time. They also illustrate the obvious point that whether government was the solution or the problem depends on whose shoulder one sits and from which level of government—local, state, or federal—one looks out. This essay has argued for an historical approach to evaluating the role of government in social policy. It has stressed the importance of time, place, context, and objectives as well as close attention to the constraints of federalism and the changing structures of government. It has emphasized the importance of paying close attention to the level of government and to the different metrics that often separated their evaluation. It has warned against seeking unambiguous or consistent answers and advocated wariness about large generalizations. For nearly thirty years, the ubiquitous application of market models to social policy reflected what George Soros (1998) has called “market fundamentalism.” To market fundamentalists, the design of public policy begins with a commitment to the superiority of markets to governments. Market fundamentalism pays a lot of attention to the limits of government but none to the limits of markets. The results of this ideological intransigence are all around us, notably in a health care system plagued by runaway costs, incomplete coverage, and—in terms of comparative longevity—unimpressive results. For the first time in decades, it is not heresy for politicians to say that markets have limits. Writing about social policy from the political left does not derive from a coherent theory that, like market fundamentalism, guides action along predictable lines. In American social science, Marxism, for instance, frames the work of only a minority of scholars. No theoretical orientation commanding wide consensus has emerged in its place. The work of Keynes, roundly denounced for decades, is staging a modest comeback, but its applicability to questions of social policy is narrow. For the most part progressive policy makers find their way among issues guided more by a set of values—equity, environmental sustainability, inclusion, for instance—than by comprehensive theory (Rosen 2009).12 Rigidity roughly comparable to market fundamentalism marks the reaction of provider communities to proposals for fundamental change. For instance, many professional educators dig in their heels, defending a historically contingent definition of public education, resolutely unwilling to consider alternatives. This response is no more constructive than a market fundamentalist’s a priori rejection of any policies designed to strengthen the role of government. Neither will help us evaluate the role of government in the history or future of social policy. Blinkered responses that mistake the historically contingent for the permanent fail to grasp the dialectical character of institutions and public policy (Katz 1987).13 Nothing is fixed or permanent. Institutions and policies change the situations which provoked their creation, thereby generating new contradictions that, in turn, fuel criticism and movements for reform. Early public school systems, for instance, won acceptance by making promises that they could only partially fulfill. The glaring 12 13
See Rosen (2009) on “democratic constiutionalism” as an emerging theory of law. I have developed the idea of a social policy dialectic in Reconstructing American Education (1987)
336
M.B. Katz
contrasts between their goals and results fueled serious attacks, which, in the aftermath of the depression of 1873, congealed into a powerful national movement for change. Mental hospitals first founded in ante-bellum America changed the relation between mental illness and society and quickly showed unanticipated weaknesses that spurred a new movement for institutional change. In the 1970s, rigid, punitive, ineffective mental hospitals provoked demands for deinstitutionalization. The deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, in turn, resulted in a series of unanticipated problems that fueled demands for new policies. The details of the story vary in each instance. And the examples I have just given slide over complexities in the stories they reference, brushing aside nuance with a broad brush. My point, however, is not to offer a detailed account but, rather, to emphasize the impermanence of institutions and policies. Institutions and policy areas develop their own constituencies, people who in one way or another depend on them for their living and become very good at deflecting criticism and obscuring obsolescence and disfunction. Historians, by contrast, need to learn how to look past and underneath practiced defenses. This impermanence of institutions and policies, this constant flux, adds to the difficulties of reaching defensible evaluations of the role of government. For what was the situation at one moment, very likely has changed at another. This lack of stasis reinforces the crucial role of time and context in evaluations of the past. From this excursion into the linkages between the history of social policy and the role of government we are left with appreciation for the complexity of the task, the necessity for precision in evaluative statements, and a recognition of the validity of multiple, even contradictory conclusions. Where, then, does that leave me with respect to Tilly’s observation of a contradiction between my earlier and later work? Yes, he was correct; the earlier work can be read as tougher on government than the later. No, because a pretty consistent set of measures—equity, inclusion, participation—underpins how I have read the stories of education and welfare. To leave my response there, however, is to risk banality. Is government the solution or the problem? Well, it depends—sometimes, yes, sometimes, no. Correct as that conclusion may be, it is not very helpful or interesting. This essay has tried to show that historians can address the question systematically, differentiating carefully among perspectives, levels of government, time, and political context. By comparing purposes with results and teasing out the social implications of institutional and program design they can reach reasonable, if not definitive, conclusions about the consequences of public policy and administration. If they do it carefully and well, the results will illuminate the present as well as the past. Acknowledgments Daniel Amsterdam.
For a careful and astute reading of the first draft of this article, I am indebted to
References Amenta, E. (1988). Bold relief: Institutional politics and the origins of modern American social policy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Banfield, E. C. (1970). The unheavenly city: The nature and future of our urban crisis. Boston: Little Brown. Berkowitz, E. D. (1991). America’s welfare state: From Roosevelt to Reagan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Was government the solution or the problem?
337
Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1974). Schooling in capitalist America: Educational reform and the contradictions of economic life. New York: Basic Books. Center on Social Welfare Law and Policy. (1995). Summary of AFDC waiver activity since February 1993, Publication No. 169-2. Chubb, J. E., & Moe, T. M. (1990). Politics, markets, and American schools. Washington: Brookings Institution. Dreier, P., Mollenkopf, M., & Swanstrom, T. (1994). Place matters: Metropolitics for the twenty-first century (2nd ed.). Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. Fairbanks, R. K. (2008). Two cheers for public housing: the tenants’ view. Journal of Urban History, 34 (2), 380–386. Frug, G. E. (1999). City making: Building communities without building walls. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Goodman, P. (1964). Compulsory Mis-education. New York: Horizon Press. Gordon, C. (1994). New deals: Business, labor, and politics in America, 1920–1935. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gordon, C. (2003). Dead on arrival: The politics of health care in twentieth-century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gordon, C. (2008). Mapping decline: St. Louis and the fate of the American city. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Graubard, A. (1972). Free the children: Radical reform and the free school movement. New York: Random House. Howard, C. (1997). The hidden welfare state: Tax expenditures and social policy in the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jacobs, M., Novak, W. J., & Zelizer, J. E. (Eds.). (2003). The democratic experience: New directions in American political history. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kantor, H., & Lowe, R. (2000). Bureaucracy left and right: Thinking about the one best system. In L. Cuban & D. Shipps (Eds.), Reconstructing the common good in education: Coping with intractable American dilemmas. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Katz, M. B. (1968). The irony of early school reform: Educational innovation in mid-nineteenth century Massachusetts. New York: Teachers College Press, 2001. Katz, M. B. (1975). Class, bureaucracy, and schools (expanded ed.). New York: Praeger. Katz, M. B. (1983). Poverty and policy in American history. New York: Academic. Katz, M. B. (1987). Reconstructing American education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Katz, M. B. (2006). In the shadow of the poorhouse: A social history of welfare (10th anniversary expanded ed.). New York: Basic Books. Katz, M. B. (2008). The price of citizenship: Redefining America’s welfare state (expanded ed.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Katznelson, I. (2005). When affirmative action was white: An untold history of racial inequality in twentieth-century America. New York: Norton. Lieberman, R. C. (1998). Shifting the color line: Race and the American welfare state. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. McGuinn, P. J. (2006). No child left behind and the transformation of federal education policy, 1965– 2000. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. McKee, G. A. (2008). The problem of jobs: Liberalism, race, and deindustrialization in Philadelphia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morris, C. R. (1980). The cost of good intentions: New York City and the liberal experiment, 1960–1975. New York: Norton. Murray, C. A. (1984). Losing ground: American social policy, 1950–1980. New York: Basic Books. Nelson, A. R. (2005). The elusive ideal: Equal educational opportunity and the federal role in Boston’s public schools, 1950–1985. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Olasky, M. (1992). The tragedy of American compassion. Washington: Regnery. Perkinson, H. J. (1968). The imperfect panacea: American faith in education, 1865–1955. New York: Random House. Piven, F. F., & Cloward, R. A. (1971). Regulating the poor: The functions of public welfare. New York: Random House. Piven, F. F., & Cloward, R. A. (1977). Poor people’s movements: Why they succeed and how they fail. New York: Random House. Rosen, J. (2009). What’s a Liberal Justice Now? In New York Times Magazine, May 31. [http://www. nytimes.com/2009/05/31/magazine/31court-t.html?scp=1&sq=%22democratic%20constitutionalism% 22&st=cse] on “democratic constiutionalism” as an emerging theory of law.
338
M.B. Katz
Schwarz, J. E. (1984). America’s hidden success: A reassessment of public policy from Kennedy to Reagan. New York: Norton. Skocpol, T. (1992). Protecting soldiers and mothers: The political origins of social policy in the United States. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Soros, G. (1998). The crisis of global capitalism: Open society endangered. New York: BBS/Public Affairs. Sugrue, T. J. (1996). The origins of the urban crisis: Race and inequality in postwar Detroit. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tichenor, D. J. (2002). Dividing lines: The politics of immigration control in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tilly, C. (1996). What good is urban history? Journal of Urban History, 22(6), 702–719. Weir, M., Orloff, A. S., & Skocpol, T. (1988). The politics of social policy in the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Michael B. Katz is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and a Research Associate in the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. His work has focused on the history of education, urban social structure and family organization, poverty and welfare, and immigration. His most recent books are, with Mark J. Stern, One Nation Divisible: What American Was and What It Is Becoming (Russell Sage Foundation) and an updated edition of The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State (University of Pennsylvania Press).
The forms of power and the forms of cities: building on Charles Tilly Peter Marcuse
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Abstract Chuck Tilly’s late work on coercion, capital, and trust is provocative when applied to changes in urban form. Extending those categories for use in tracing the history of conflicts in cities about how development should be handled highlights the changing roles of economic and physical and cultural power, and the growing importance of trust in these processes. This is a speculative article with a political hope. The speculation is around the potential of using an expanded version of key categories of Charles Tilly’s to create a framework for understanding the nature of change in the form of cities over time. The political hope is to use that framework to illuminate the possibilities of social change in cities today in the direction of social justice.
I think Chuck Tilly had a tiger by the tail in his most recent writings, but never got to let the tiger go and see where it would head. It centers about three concepts: coercion, capital, and trust. With only a little massaging and perhaps a few twists, those concepts can, I think, be used to reveal some profound truths about the composition of power and the possibilities of opposition and change in today’s cities-truths Tilly did not spell out, partly because he was still tracing their descent through millennia of history, partly because his primary concern was not strategizing for political action. Yet his work has clear lessons for urban political strategies and adds a new dimension to discussions that are just beginning about the possibilities of action aimed at achieving that other world the evidence suggests is possible but that does not seem to be getting any closer. I want to move methodically to where I think Tilly’s late works might go. Put simply, it is that: The coercion of physical power and the coercive economic power of capital are today firmly in the hands of those wishing to preserve the status quo, and P. Marcuse (*) Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning, Columbia University, New York City, USA e-mail:
[email protected] M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_23, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
339
340
P. Marcuse
cannot be changed by counter physical or economic means. It is only through solidarity based on social trust, rooted in physical and economic, material and cultural needs and a broad ideological analysis, that those in opposition will have a chance of success. This conclusion rests on an interpretation of the core concepts of Tilly’s work that goes well beyond what a straightforward exegesis would warrant. To my knowledge, Tilly never directly grappled with debates about reform and structural change in an urbanizing world, which have the “right to the city” slogan and debates about the role of the World Social Forum among their manifestations. But let me exonerate Tilly from responsibility for the conclusions, and for the accuracy of the insight that I draw from a reading of his work. I am not a Tilly scholar, and what follows is provoked by the reading I make of what Tilly has written, rather than based on a careful effort to extend what he himself wished to say. I would thus like to use Tilly’s concepts as a stimulus to think through what direction the tiger might have gone in if Tilly had had the opportunity to let it go. This article proceeds as follows: It sets forth in brief my understanding of Tilly’s conceptual structure and modifies/expands those concepts to a more comprehensive formulation, focusing on issues of power; Then it applies that formulation to the history of divisions in cities, suggesting likely productive avenues for further research on social movements in cities; Finally, it comments on strategies of movements for change in urban setting in developed economies, including the right to the city movement.
Tilly’s use of coercion, capital, and trust as bases of power My reading and reformulation of Tilly’s core concepts of coercion, capital, commitment, and trust is as follows. It is based on Cities and States in World History, and I parse his terms for their use in my own analysis that follows. “Coercion,” as Tilly uses the term, I take to include not only physical coercion but any exercise of power by the more powerful over those with less power, thus any action (or failure to act of the powerful) in a way that is to their advantage and the disadvantage of those without power. It is useful, however, to disaggregate the agents and means of coercion. For Tilly, the agent of coercion is the state, although capital can also be said to exert coercive power, if not physical power. Since the state is by definition the sole repository of physical power, the key distinction I would draw from Tilly is between the coercive power of the state, ultimately physical coercion, the (softer?) economic coercive power of capital, and the (very?) soft power of cultural coercion. The three are discussed in sections below. “Capital,” in Tilly’s usage, refers to any asset whether for the immediate use of its possessor in fulfilling personal needs or desires or whether used by its owner in the process of production for the exchange value it ultimately creates. Limiting it to the latter usage more clearly links it to the exercise of power in the economic sphere, as it is used in this article.
The forms of power and the forms of cities: building on Charles Tilly
341
“Trust,” “commitment,” and “trust networks” are terms that Tilly has used to express the nature of a complex set of social relations of key importance in any sociological understanding of relations of power, that is, understanding of the processes of coercion and capital, domination and exploitation. It is again a term that might be disaggregated, to specify its agents or members, since trust networks can exist within dominating groups (as in Bourdieu’s use of social capital1 as the systems of trust the holders of capital take advantage of to strengthen their power) and oppositional groups. And “trust networks” might be expanded to include relations built on ethnic ties and prejudices, traditions, cultural habits, etc.2 Contrary to Tilly’s use,3 I use relations of trust to include such social relations. Here, largely for reasons of symmetry, I use the concepts of trust, commitment, and trust networks as characteristic of oppositional movements, rather than the holders of power. I have taken up aspects of such relations, in specific relation to the evolution of professional urban planning practices elsewhere (Marcuse, Forthcoming). “Predatory” is a term Tilly uses only in passing (Tilly 2008, p. 5) to enable him to distinguish, among the actors in any given historical tableau, between those in power and those subject to their power, between the predators and the prey, the perpetrators and the victims, those dominating and those subordinate, the exploiters and the exploited. The distinction speaks directly to relationships of power, of coercion and capital. The terms “dominant” (equivalent to Tilly’s “predatory”) and “oppositional” are used here generically for this distinction between predators and prey. It is treated as the central line of division in urban conflicts below. “City” and “cities” are perhaps the only terms used differently here, perhaps because the concern here is with the internal structure of cities rather than their external relations, to each other, their regions, and the nations of which they are a part. I would interpret “city,” when used as an actor, to mean the dominant forces in the city, making it clear that a city is not a homogeneous entity with a unitary interest.
The bases of power In what follows, I expand on Tilly’s concepts with a focus on the issue of power and urban change in conflicts over city form, with a focus on the actors in struggles over power. The actors of power Who are the actors, the agents, the groups, the classes, involved in the conflicts over power, and why do they act as they do? They divide into two, the dominant and the 1 But not Putnam et al.’s, which Bourdieu takes as the systems of trust that the holders of capital take advantage of to strengthen their power. And indeed Tilly seems to permit its use in this way too. 2 Although at other times Tilly seems to correlate “commitment” to the actions of (presumably oppositional) “trust networks.” See the interesting discussion of the phrase “the upper element” and Tilly’s preference for “ruling classes” [note the plural] in Review Forum, Trust and Rule, Tilly 2006, p.4. 3 Tilly’s definition of relations of trust is a very specific one, relations built around “weighty, high-risk, long-term collective enterprises,” (Tilly 2006, p.7, and is narrower than the one used here. Further, Tilly differentiates between cultural and social relations, and here I take cultural to be a subset of social.
342
P. Marcuse
oppositional. Described differently but with the same content, they are the predators and the prey, the holders of power and those subjected to power, the top and the bottom. Within these larger categories, there are very different actors. In this very brief sketch focusing on urban conflicts, we may distinguish among the dominant actors using the tools of state power, actors using the tools of economic power, and actors using the tools of cultural or ideological power. Oppositional actors attempt to use parallel tools. Two qualifications are necessary: first, many individuals, organizations, and institutions have aspects that support and others that oppose dominant interests (foremen in factories and many professors in academia might be examples). And in practice many seeming to oppose dominant actors in fact support their policies and power (as this is being written examples abound in the unruly debates about health care reform, calling on opposition to “big government” and strict regulation of business.). “Dominant” and oppositional” are used here on the assumption that they have an understood, actual historical content. The “why?” is both simple and complex. As to the dominant, the simple answer is, for either or both of two purposes: Exploitation, material gain, in Tilly’s terms acquiring benefits by imposing losses on others (Tilly 1998), typically the owners of capital exercising their power through the market, today operating primarily within the economic sector. Domination, acquiring and maintaining power over others, typically the holders of political power, exercising their power through agencies of the state,4 operating primarily in the political sphere. As to the oppositional, those resisting power, the simple answer is likewise for one of two reasons: to overcome the material deprivation resulting from exploitation and the domination that imposes it, and to overcome the restrictions on freedom that rely on cultural as well as material domination,5 the two joined in a basic human desire for the full and free development of one’s human capabilities. Both answers are of course enormously more complex, but for purposes of the issues raised by Tilly and the conclusion to be suggested at the end of this article, there is good reason to keep the importance of the fundamental division and its causes in the forefront.6 The instruments of power Coercion is of course the chief instrument of power, the means by which power is established and maintained. Coercion can come in many forms. It can be physical coercion, the use of violence, legitimately only exercised by the state, but also manifest in violence tacitly permitted by the state but privately executed, as by the SA in Hitler’s Germany or the Ku Klux Klan in the United States. Most state coercion has physical force only implicitly behind it, as a punishment for breaking the law, but assumes its formal structures will command compliance without resort Tilly uses the phrase “political control” as contrasted to resource extraction (Tilly 1998, p. 33). I have elsewhere described the two sources of opposition as deprivation and discontent. (Marcuse, Forthcoming). 6 I have dealt with some of the drawbacks of this simplification as applied to the phrase “divided cities” (Marcuse 1989), and it becomes apparent in the short historical discussion to follow here. 4 5
The forms of power and the forms of cities: building on Charles Tilly
343
to punishment. It can be disempowering political coercion, limiting political freedoms, rights of assembly or vote or free speech, often with the threat of physical coercion through the judicial system behind it. It can be economic coercion, exercised by employers in the labor market, or by the state through welfare-related policies, as in welfare-to-work programs, or the regulation of union activity. And it can operate in the cultural arena, as soft or cultural coercion, which can range from use of the media, many religious practices and propagated beliefs, the inculcation of patriotism, fear of terrorism, distortions of language, educational practices, presentations of history, perversions of scientific or scholarly findings, and appeals to self-interest, from financial to sexual to competitive. The propagation of an ideology legitimating existing relations of power, establishing the hegemony of the prevailing ideas of those on top,7 can be a powerful soft instrument for ensuring power. Spatial coercion is an appealing concept in an urban framework, and much work in geography is beginning to explore its meaning.8 Restrictions on the use of public space, residential segregation, restrictive zoning, and the construction of megaprojects under private control are spatial means of coercion, reinforcing power. They can be hard or soft, physical or cultural: concrete barriers, fortress-like construction, or symbols of domination and social markers of exclusion. They are particularly important when considering mechanisms of urban change, since they in general are significant obstacles to change and opposition is often centered on them. The means of resistance If the means of coercion maintain power, the opposition to power involves the opposition to those means of coercion, but can rely on a further force, that of trust, as expressed in the networks of trust of which Tilly writes. Physical opposition to hard coercion has always been manifest, from slave revolts to national liberation struggles to revolutionary insurrections to terrorist sabotage to street disorder. While it has been prominent throughout the course of urban history, it is of declining effectiveness in most countries today. Submitting to the physical aspects of physical coercion but remaining uncoerced is another option (non-violent resistance). Political opposition through the electoral system and influence on the instruments of government is both the most conspicuous, and in a sense the preferred, form of opposition– preferred by those on top in democracies, sometimes denigrated by opponents as sham. Economic opposition to capital can take two forms. Most obvious is through labor organization and, ultimately, strikes. On the consumer end, boycotts are sometimes a means of opposition. Cultural or soft resistance, it is argued below, is today of dramatically greater importance than in earlier years, as the possibilities of physical and economic opposition are reduced and mobilization for political opposition becomes the necessarily increasing thrust of opposition at the urban level. 7
See, of course, Gramsci 1978, but in US urban history, Marcuse 1978. David Harvey has pioneered in developing analysis along these lines (Harvey 1973), and there is a large body of work, much of it neo-Marxist, now pushing the issues. The current interest in the work of Henri Lefebvre and organization around claims to the “Right to the City” go along these lines. See Brenner et al. 2009. 8
344
P. Marcuse
To turn, then, to the application of this framework to an understanding of the forces that have shaped cities over time: What is presented is only a very brief overview of the approach, intended more as a provocation for real historical examination than as an already satisfactory account. It is confined to one aspect of the changing form of cities: their division into discrete parts and the establishment of the markers, the boundaries, of those divisions.
Spatial coercion and opposition in urban history What divides urban space: issues of power, of function, and of class Tracing the interplay of, the conflict between, coercion and opposition in cities, examining how the various dominant actors used varying instruments of power and how oppositional actors used varying networks of trust to resist them at varying times and varying places, is a daunting task. But it might help inform us as to what action might be taken to produce desirable urban change. It is in a sense the direction in which Charles Tilly’s work was headed. But it is far beyond what can be undertaken here. The effort here focuses on a single small aspect of that conflict: the struggle over space, and specifically the way in which divisions in cities have been used to solidify domination or enable opposition to it. And the goal is only to suggest the possibilities, in a very preliminary fashion. Divisions in cities are sometimes seen as a function of technological change, rational planning, better understanding, or better leadership, and certainly simply of the need to accommodate growth, often taken today to mean to accommodate to the need for competition with other cities on a global scale. However, I believe that history shows these are a function of struggles of power, in which coercion for purposes of domination and exploitation from above is met by opposition from below. Not all divisions in cities are the result of strategies of coercion and resistance, however. It is well to separate out those causes of division not based primarily on power, even though in fact the causes are intimately related to each other and power is a factor in each. Cities may be, and have been, divided along a number of lines. Many, but not all, of them are social: divisions brought about by the conscious acts of their residents and those who hold power over or among them. We might list the chief possibilities as divisions along lines of nationality, class, income, occupation, wealth, education, religion, income, “race,” color, ethnicity, language, age, household composition, duration of residence, personal cultural preference, life style. Other categories can no doubt be defined; indeed, one can take any single question asked in a traditional census survey and map it and speak of the resulting pattern as one of spatial division. The range of possible categories could theoretically be infinite. We believe, for purposes of policyrelevant analysis, they fall into three quite separate and distinguishable groups/ideal types: divisions by functional role, by culture, and by position in the hierarchy of power. The bases of each of the divisions will overlap with the bases of the others, and power is likely to play a role in each. What is relevant for our purposes is the role such divisions play and the means used for their maintenance within the urban fabric: are they the results of coercion, or of cultural power, or the results of resistance, based on networks of trust?
The forms of power and the forms of cities: building on Charles Tilly
345
Functional Divisions are the result of economic logic, either physical or organizational: the divisions between farms and factories and residential areas, for instance. They include separate locations for different guilds, for instance, or the separation of service from manufacturing, or wholesaling from retailing. Residentially, the need of workers in particular industries to be located in accessible relations to their places of employment may create residential divisions, an extreme example of which would be company-sponsored housing developments. Areas may be set aside for defense, and those involved in defense located there; the externalities of certain industries or occupations may require that those involved in them be near each other, or clustered along transportation routes making them readily accessible to interchange with each other. Such differences are essentially independent of cultural differences, and do not (at least essentially—power differentiations may of course arise out of functional differences) denote relations of superiority or inferiority to other functions, simply differences. Such differences are summarized under the term “functional” in the discussion that follows. Zoning is the accepted legal embodiment of such divisions. That zoning should be by function, generally defined as type of use (residential from heavy industrial from light industrial from retail from wholesaling from offices), is not as self-evident as it might seem; “performance zoning,” for instance, attempts to define permitted uses of land not by their economic nature but by their environmental impact,: traffic generated, shadows cast, air circulation impeded, green space occupied, etc. And, while “use” may separate manufacturing from retail from residential, it has never been quite clear why residential use for one family should be a different type of use than residential use by two or three families.9 Be that as it may, separation by function, by use, is generally accepted today as in general an appropriate division within a city. How divisions related to function are implemented is however necessarily related to hierarchies of power. This is not all: you cannot build a home in the middle of a road, or an automobile assembly line without a substantial occupancy of space and feasible distance from the residences of workers, nor offices in the wilderness. But roads are laid out with reference to who will use them, factories with varying concern for the convenience of workers, shops locate in reference to the economically effective demand for their goods, government offices are concerned with accessibility and protection against disruption by groups varying in power. Cultural divisions are usually easily visible: by differences in language, in costume, in architectural style, for instance. They may include divisions by ethnicity, by country or nationality or tribe of origin or parentage or descent, by religion or belief, by life-style. (I avoid using the term “race,” and see it as conflating cultural division, falsely defined, with differences of power; see Marcuse and van Kempen 2002a.) While some of these differences may appropriately be called “cultural” in the strict sense, and others may be the products of manipulation, idiosyncratic choice, or some combination of these, the key element that differentiates cultural 9
The United States Supreme Court struggled with this issue in its landmark decision legitimating zoning under the United States Constitution (Euclid vs. Ambler 1926), and some commentators today consider it to have been mistaken in accepting this particular division. Even a separation between high-rise and lowrise buildings is today often questioned, as in new developments that deliberately mix sizes and configurations for variety and aesthetic appeal.
346
P. Marcuse
divisions from functional or power divisions is that they are based neither on differences in relationship to economic production nor on relationships of power. As with functional divisions, cultural divisions are hardly separable from hierarchical divisions of power. Ghettoes and enclaves all have cultural aspects but are creatures of the distribution of power (Marcuse 2005) Divisions of Power are those that reflect and reinforce relationships of power, coercion and capital, domination and exploitation, state preference. Obvious examples of the reflection of power in space include the imperial enclave in a colonial town, or instance, or the black townships of South Africa, as extreme examples. But security-guarded luxury residences near central business districts do likewise, as do working-class quarters or “slums.” Class is a widely relevant current line of differentiation that involves power in the sense here used. Income is often a good surrogate for power, but not identical with it; the same is true of occupation, and even of the cluster of indicators generally known as SES, socio-economic status, which are simply good indicators of an underlying relationship, not descriptive of that relationship itself. Power can exist along a multitude of dimensions: military power, political power, economic power, social power, legal power (of which slavery is the extreme case) are examples. Divisions of power may also reflect or support opposition to dominance, and that opposition may be spatially clustered, as in slave quarters, ethnic enclaves, or urban social movements. These divisions both overlap and contradict each other; their intertwining is one of the fascinations of the history of cities. Cultural differences may be used to reinforce differences of power; this is notoriously the case with black/white, imperial/indigenous, Jewish/Arab differences, and those divisions often interfere with the effective lines of functional division, since groups differentiated by culture and power may need to work and be near each other for efficient production. Relations of power and function often conflict in their impact on space: employers like to have their employees close to their work, but not close to them. Cultural affinities may contradict power differences: within each group, linked by culture, there can be major differences of class as well as of economic function. Interdependence and mutual hostility often go hand in hand. Function, power, and culture, finally, were largely merged in imperial enclaves in colonial territories in the past, and may be merging again in today’s economies: as Cross and Waldinger (1972, p.173) point out, “the ethnic division of labor is, in this sense, the central division of labor in the postindustrial city.” Since functions are not neutral in the hierarchy of power, the three divisions come together. And so on. The permutations are manifold. We shall see whether, in the long view, a new pattern has emerged in the contemporary city. As a final complicating factor: the role of space is not a constant one. Space is socially created; its role shifts with shifting social constellations: cultural, functional, of power. Of course topography, geographical considerations, influences the location of spatial divisions and will often correlate to social divisions, e.g. upper classes will live in locations of higher environmental amenity. But even such correlations are fluid and subject to social and economic change: thus waterfront locations may be put to industrial use and occupied by longshore workers in one society, claimed for luxury housing and recreational use in another. Thus, historically viewed, different patterns of division are differentially reflected, fortified, contradicted, by space. The
The forms of power and the forms of cities: building on Charles Tilly
347
general truth was over-stated by Robert Park more than fifty years ago: “social relations are ... frequently and ... inevitably correlated with spatial relations,” (Park 1952). Frequently, yes; inevitably, no, certainly not directly: the slave-master relationship can coexist with slaves living next door to masters, as well as if they live in separate districts of the city. And the direction of influence is reciprocal: social relations determine spatial relations, but these in turn influence, generally but not always reinforcing, social relations. Where the underlying social relations are in flux, or where the allocation and use of space does not closely reflect those relations, there is likely to be conflict, again reflected both in disputes over space and over the underlying relationships themselves. The building of walls to create or enforce divisions may be as much a reflection of the instability of underlying relationships as of the hardness of the divisions within them (Marcuse 1997). What follows is, to repeat, only exploratory and hopefully provocative of further thought and research.10 It is put forward only to suggest two points: that the division of cities is not something new historically, although it has varied significantly over time; and that it has always included divisions directly related to relationships of power; and that divisions play a new role historically seen today. The tools of coercion and opposition in urban space Before the advent of industrial capitalism, divisions along all the lines enumerated above could be readily found: functional, separating agricultural from commercial, indigenous from foreign traders, crafts by separate products and guilds. The walls around towns, in the feudal period, themselves reflected complex relations of power between their residents and the nobility in their regions. Within towns, divisions were largely functional, separating agriculture from commerce. The divisions often reflected social status as well. The divisions reflecting power were of course, at the top, the precincts of the monarchs and the church/priesthood, and the adjacent quarters of the various ranks of nobles. At the bottom in the ancient world where slavery existed, the divisions lay in the constitution of slave quarters, although whether these were separate spatially from the residences of their masters varied. Turning to the modern period, the period of industrial capitalism, we can look at the various spaces of the city and see the instruments by which those in power established their control over them and the ways in which those in opposition attempted to thwart that control. Zoning has been a major instrument in the shaping of cities and definition of their land use patterns in the twentieth century. Its logic rests in part on the necessities of organizing the mix of activities in the increasingly dense downtowns, in which the technologies of transportation and of high-rise construction have concentrated a wide mix of activities. Zoning is often legitimated by the necessities of technological development and economic efficiency: transportation technologies create nodes at their intersections and stations where accessibility indicates intensive land use should prevail; access time to various destinations dictates their appropriate uses; pollution-generating activities should be removed from residential areas; and 10
An expanded but earlier version of much of what follows, with more detailed citation from sources, may be found in Marcuse 2002.
348
P. Marcuse
construction efficiencies determine economic heights and floor area ratios of buildings. But in fact major aspects of zoning do not reflect technological or economic necessities, but rather relations of power. Nationally, and particularly in the South in the United States, specifically racial zoning, aimed at keeping African-Americans in restricted areas and subservient to whites, was widespread until the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. In New York City, zoning was first adopted in significant part to prevent uncouth garment workers from cluttering the sidewalks of up-scale commercial areas on their lunch times. Large lot zoning in urban and suburban neighborhoods precluded less wealthy people from living next to their wealthier counterparts. Mega-project business developments receive special zoning in which small businesses would have no place. Undesired land uses, the realistically-judged NIMBY’s, are zoned for poor neighborhoods and excluded from upper-class ones. Economic coercion and state coercion have gone hand in hand in this process, with large developers and financial institutions playing a decisive role in City Planning Commission decisions favoring their own interests and enforceable in law. In its early stages, opposition to zoning was light. In New York City, it centered more on disagreements about the differential effect of different plans on property values than on the impact of those subject to the coercive limits and potentials enabled by zoning (Toll 1969) Elsewhere, conflicts about zoning were often among property owners seeking their separate advantage rather than by oppositional groups recognizing the way in which zoning was systematically subordinating them and their interests. That has changed in the post-World War II period, and today the realization that zoning is an instrument of control being used by dominant forces in their own interest, displacing, injuring, and segregating poorer people and members of specific minority groups, is widespread. Slum clearance The construction of working class housing was an early accompaniment of capitalist industrialization, necessary as technological advances led to large-scale factory production that in turn required within walking distance the army of factory workers needed to keep the wheels of production turning. It was not necessary, however, that such housing should be of lamentable quality and so densely packed, at least as production blossomed and material wealth accumulated. Measures to clear slums and improve the quality of housing were a constant source of tension in cities in the industrial era. Early slum clearance measures were put in place by the dominant forces in the economy because of concerns about the assumed health impact of slum conditions, but those concerns were not so much for the welfare of the slum residents but rather the dangers for others from possible epidemics, as of typhoid. Working class housing was razed through the coercive power of the state. “Slums” also posed a political and economic threat to dominant groups. “Slums,” or more broadly working class quarters, had always played a significant role in the opposition to power. Working class quarters in nineteenth century France were bastions of strength for resistance, including physical revolt, and their destruction and dispersion of their presumed resistant occupants was a clear component of public policy, implemented both by state and economic coercion. Baron Hausman’s restructuring of Paris had among its purposes the specific clearance of those areas in which revolutionary discontent had found its base, Moves
The forms of power and the forms of cities: building on Charles Tilly
349
for slum clearance in New York City in the early twentieth century had a similar purpose (Gordon 1984). Housing policy reveals a continuing conflict between dominant and oppositional forces. From the beginning, dominant real estate interests, in the midst of the Great Depression in the United States, fought to keep the rents charged and the eligibility limits imposed on public housing at such levels as would avoid any competition with the private real estate industry. And the ill-housed, largely led by labor union activists, opposed them, and tried to make the program as expansive and accessible as possible. Throughout its history, public housing could be used as an example of the complex conflicts around questions of whom the housing sector in the country should serve, with the outcomes dependent on the power relations between conservative and liberal dominant groups and reform groups. The same may be said for the history of housing policy generally (Marcuse 1995). Urban renewal produced what might be the most pitched battles of the conflicts around the control of urban space. The nature of the conflicting interests was very clear here: business and commercial interests looking for well-located space in which the externalities of clustering could be internalized, and the real estate interests serving and profiting from them, pressed for clearance and redevelopment. The residents, largely but not only lower-income, and small businesses subject to displacement from urban renewal projects objected mightily. And here the opposition was clearly spatially based networks of trust, neighbors already united in communities of interaction joining together in political action. Transportation policy, often presented as a technical field requiring adaptation of urban space to new technologies, has at the same time been the subject of bitter battles over the control of urban space. Robert Moses’s autocratic and heedless destruction of thousands of housing units and whole communities to push miles of highways through dense residential areas of New York City are prominent examples, but the conflicts of interests about the location and construction of roads are also conflicts of power between the top and the bottom, the top wishing every greater accessibility for business purposes and the bottom concerned about the security and in fact further existence of their homes. As with urban renewal, the networks of trust that formed the opposition were largely geographically based, as the communities threatened by displacement organized in accordance with the locations of the threats. Environmental practices While modifications of the built environment of cities to protect the environment may seem to be functional, and a technological necessity, for cities as a whole, the impact of differences in power relations runs through the story. Actual problems of environmental degradation have long existed, and sustainability has been a problem for centuries. Concern over environmental quality, broadly defined, in cities, however, is very much a function of the industrial revolution, and its specifically urban impact begins noticeably with the concern over the health conditions of slums in the late nineteenth century (Bullock and Read 1985; Marcuse 1986) A new stage in such concerns was reached in the last decades of the twentieth century, when the focus became much more significantly urban, and most recently an environmental justice movement has brought together organized networks of those directly affected by the concentration of environmentally polluting activities in neighborhoods of the poor and those culturally attuned to concerns about ecological quality of life in cities.
350
P. Marcuse
Here we might speak of the convergence of two separate networks of trust, independently organized but generally working in close cooperation with each other: one the neighborhood-based networks of the residents of the communities affected by the spatial concentration of pollution (e.g., asthma victims in Harlem), the other the more middle- and upper-class based environmental ecology movement (e.g., scientists, academics, nature lovers, principled ecologists). Suburbanization has been one of the most visible characteristics of urbanization in the last century, of increasing scope in its second half. Frequently suburbanization is taken to be a consequence of shifts in residential preferences, simply reflecting what people want: the American dream, the one-family house with a picket fence in a quiet middle-class (white) suburb. Yet that autonomous “preference” is softly coerced, both by the marketing of the “Dream” and by the neglect of any alternative. In the planning literature, the pros and cons of suburbanization vs. increased density are hotly debated, as if the empirical measure of the efficiency of each and an understanding of their respective consequences would resolve the issue and determine the shape of city development. Yet it is in reality the power of the state in advancing suburbanization through measures ranging from the interstate highway system to the guarantee of low-cost mortgages to the support for the images of the so-called new urbanism (Jackson 1985) that has supported, indeed powered, suburban development. And that support has been in the service of economic power, very visibly in the decisive role played by the real estate and financial industries that benefit from suburban building and occupancy. Suburbanization reflects the results of state and economic power and their coercive effect more than the impact of aggregated individual preferences. Once it takes place, suburbanization produces networks of residents easily mobilized to defend their own interests, and networks in opposition are not easily formed. Thus suburbanization, lacking the opposition of those harmed by it, is one of the most powerful forces affecting urban space in countries like the United States today. Gentrification, on the other hand, is a process that has succeeded in uniting the opposition to the dominant control of space perhaps more than any other single urban fact today. It is a clear conflict over the control of space, the space of working class and poor residents and small businesses in parts of the city desired by the dominant. It is accomplished both by the hard coercion of the state and the economic coercion of capital, the latter working through the real estate market to raise rents to levels leaving tenants no choice but to move. It is partially legitimated by the soft coercion of some planners, architects, economists, and business writers, all looking at the up-grading of housing and the exploitation of an under-producing market as a general and neutral benefit to all.
The implications today Some tentative suggestions may be offered about the likely impact that oppositional movements may have on conflicts over the control of urban space. As to resisting the coercion of the state, it has been a long time since physical resistance to state power was effective. Isolated examples in the last two centuries may be recalled, but they are in each case rather unique or very limited: the revolts in
The forms of power and the forms of cities: building on Charles Tilly
351
Paris in 1848 and 1871, in St. Petersburg in 1917, to some extent in South Africa against apartheid. In a small way, in disruptions of ordinary state and private business in the movements of the unemployed in the New Deal, of welfare recipients in the 1960s and more broadly in the civil rights movement and the street rebellions then in many cities and in Los Angeles later, some movements of squatters or actions to use public space (Piven and Cloward 1977; Mitchell 2003). But I think most would agree that the attempt through terrorism to resist physically the coercive power of the state, no matter how painful its results, is in the end negligible. Recent events in Gaza, in Iran, in Spain, in Belfast, do not suggest physical resistance to state coercion to be a fruitful avenue for opposition. Some forms of protest will have symbolic value, e.g., the 1999 Seattle WTO demonstrations, or the various G20 protests or mass demonstrations, protests, picketing, but the possibilities of physical resistance to violent oppression by the state are minimal under foreseeable circumstances today. What opposition to the state’s coercion, and its control over urban state, there will exist will necessarily be non-violent. Opposing the coercion of capital has a long history, often directly relevant to the control of space. Sit-in strikes challenge the ownership rights of private property; picketing and strikes challenge capital’s power over labor; boycotts under special circumstances can be effective; but economic challenges to the power of capital, e.g., cooperatives, non-profits, worker-owned businesses, while promoting certain forms of opposition and creating limited spaces free of capital’s domination, are nowhere near countering the power of capital. Globalization has substantially increased the power of capital over labor. The possibilities of resistance to economic oppression through economic or market means are present but limited today. What opposition to economic power, and its control over urban space, that will occur will necessarily be non-market. Non-violent opposition to state action and non-market opposition to economic power means political opposition. All existing democracies are imperfect: the influence of the dominant powers in the economy and in the state is substantial; the media are limited; and objectivity, if there is such a thing, cannot be expected; eligibility to vote is skewed; much of the electorate is ill informed; etc. Yet major decisions are still subject to popular influence, and the range and importance of those decisions is tremendous. So oppositional political activity will remain of major influence in what happens in cities and who controls their space. The techniques of co-optation of opposition, however, have advanced substantially in recent years. The pattern described by Herbert Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man, by which resistance to actual exploitation and domination has been flattened under the impact of consumerism, media entertainment, racial and national chauvinism, and ideological conformity, is stronger today than ever. It is the content of public policies speaking of inclusion and integration, equating representative democracy with effective popular control, and stifling militant protest under the mantel of combating, first the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and then the enemy in the War on Terror. The efforts to link opposition by those exploited and dominant economically and politically to the discontent of those limited in their capabilities culturally by the same predatory forces (to return to Tilly’s usage) makes the efforts of groups like the Right to the City Alliance, some of the global resistance movements, environmental justice movements and their allies, more difficult than ever (Marcuse 2009; and Forthcoming).
352
P. Marcuse
That leaves cultural opposition as a key potential source of strength, strongly linked to political opposition arising out of opposition to state coercion and economic capital. Cultural concerns, in the broad sense in which the term is used here, include issues discrimination against women, oppression of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transsexuals, artists affirming the critical content of art, ecologists, those subject to religious, ethnic, and racial discrimination, and those ideologically committed to the search for alternative life-styles and alternative worlds. Their impact on the dominant arrangements, and specifically on the control of urban space, will be in part political, but will also be ideologically cultural, that is, will use the instruments not only of political participation but also of cultural illumination to support and undergird and embolden political opposition. In the conflicts that determine control over urban space, then, arrayed against the dominant forces, there will be a political opposition focused on state and economic oppression, and a cultural opposition based on cultural oppression. These oppositional forces do not automatically form a single network of trust. Indeed, there is likely to be tension amongst them; their different sources of deprivation and discontent often are grounded in different class positions and different formal relations to government and different positions in the economy.11 Critical urbanists like Henry Lefebvre have suggested that the cry for the Right to the City may be one that unites those seeking a different urbanism, a different arrangement and use of urban space. In practice, increasingly in the recent past, the slogan of the right to the city has indeed been used by many groups, internationally, to bring together the various sources of opposition to the forces that now dominate urban space; in the United States, a Right to the City Alliance has been formed around exactly that concept. If the Right to the City movement takes off and goes in this direction, it may well be the tiger that Tilly wanted to unleash in his work.
References Brenner, N., Marcuse, P., & Mayer, M. (2009). Introduction. CITY: Analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 13(2–3), 176–184 (June–September). Bullock, N., & Read, J. (1985). The movement for housing reform in Germany and France, 1840–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cross, M., & Waldinger, R. (1992). Migrants, minorities, and the ethnic division of labor. In S. S. Fainstein, I. Gordon, & M. Harloe (Eds.), Divided cities: New York and London in the contemporary world (pp. 151–174). Oxford: Blackwell. Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. (1926). 27 U.S 365, 47S.Ct. 114, 71L.Ed. 303. Gordon, D. (1984). Capitalist development and the history of American cities. In: W. Tabb, & L. Sawers (Eds.). Marxism and the Metropolis, 2nd ed. New York, Oxford: University Press, pp. 21–53. Gramsci, A. (1978). Selections from Political Writings (1921–1926), translated and edited by Quintin Hoare. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Harvey, D. (1973). Social justice and the city. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Jackson, K. (1985). Crabgrass frontier: The suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.
11
I have explored this formulation: linking the concerns of the deprived and the discontent, in the context of the lessons of 1968, in Marcuse, Forthcoming.
The forms of power and the forms of cities: building on Charles Tilly
353
Marcuse, P. (1978). Housing policy and the myth of the benevolent state. In: R. Bratt, C. Hartman, & A. Meyerson (Eds.). Critical perspectives on housing. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986. Marcuse, P. (1986). Review of N. Bullock and J. Read, The Movement for Housing Reform in Germany and France, 1840–1914. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, spring. Marcuse, P. (1989). ‘Dual City’: a muddy metaphor for a quartered city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 13(4), 697–708. Marcuse, P. (1995). Interpreting ‘public housing’ history. Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, 12(3), 240–258 (Autumn). Marcuse, P. (1997). Walls of fear and walls of support. In N. Ellin (Ed.), Architecture of fear (pp. 101– 114). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Marcuse, P. (2005). Enclaves yes, ghettos No: Segregation and the state. In D. Varady (Ed.), Desegregating the city: Ghettos, enclaves, and inequality. Albany: State University of New York Press. Marcuse, P. (2009). From critical urban theory to the right to the city, and cities for people, not for profit. CITY: Analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action. 13(2–3), June–September. Marcuse, P. (Forthcoming). Three Currents in the History of Planning. Marcuse, P., & van Kempen, R. (2002). The divided city in history. In: Of states and cities: The partitioning of urban space. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, D. (2003). The right to the city: Social justice and the fight for public space. Guilford Press. Park, R. E. (1952). The urban community as a spatial pattern and a moral order. In R. E. Park et al. (Eds.), Human communities. Glencoe: The Free Press. Piven, F. F., & Cloward, R. A. (1977). Poor people’s movements: Why they succeed, how they fail. New York: Pantheon Books. Tilly, C. (1998). Durable inequality. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tilly, C. (2006). A grateful reply. Canadian Journal of Sociology Online, February. http://www.cjsonline. ca/reviews/trustrule.html Tilly, C. (2008). Cities and States in World History, manuscript, March. Toll, S. I. (1969). Zoned American. New York: Grossman. Peter Marcuse a planner and lawyer, is Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at Columbia University in New York City. He has a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph. D. in planning from the University of California at Berkeley, was Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA, and President of the Los Angeles Planning Commission and member of Community Board 9 M in New York. His fields of research include city planning, housing, the use of public space, the right to the city, social justice in the city, globalization, and urban history. He has taught in a number of universities, and published extensively in professional journals and the popular press. His recent books include, co-edited with Ronald van Kempen, Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? (Blackwell, 1999); Of States and Cities: The Partitioning of Urban Space (2Oxford University Press, 2002); and a co-edited volume, Searching for the Just City (Routledge, 2009). His current projects include a historically-grounded political history of urban planning, the formulation of a theory of critical planning, including an attempt to make urban theory useful to the U.S. Right to the City Alliance, and an analysis and proposals to deal with the subprime mortgage foreclosure crisis.
SPOTLIGHT: Distrust in democracy: complex civic networks and the case of Brazil Ann Mische
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
Abstract Trust is only one of the types of ties generated by social networks, and arguably not the most important in generating access to the state. The term “trust networks” usually refers to social formations characterized by homophily, strong ties, and dense network clustering, which generate the identities and commitments underlying mobilization and civic life. Yet the social networks literature also notes the importance of weak or “bridging” ties that span network enclaves and link heterogeneous and contending sets of actors. I argue that it is often distrust, rather than trust, that serves as the vehicle of integration of non-state actors into the democratic polity, via the intersection of partisan and civic engagement. When this is absent we run the risk of state-society relations characterized by clientelism, quiescence, stagnation and balkanization. Using the case of Brazil in the 1980s and 90s, I argue that a healthy democracy depends not just upon the integration of trustbased enclaves into the state – the historical source of corporatist politics – but upon complex civic and partisan networks in which contending institutional logics crosscut and inform each other. While these may generate conflict and tensions, they are also the source of the institutional innovation, contestation, and engagement with state politics that a strong and resilient democracy requires.
Trust is only one of the types of ties generated by social networks, and arguably not the most important in generating access to the state. Charles Tilly argues in the lead essay to this volume that “trust networks” emerge when “members can typically call on each other for aid on the simple basis of shared membership”; over history, such networks “have formed the basis for most weighty, high-risk, and long-term enterprises.” In Tilly’s scheme, trust networks appear to serve as a stand-in for what A. Mische (*) Department of Sociology, Rutgers University, 54 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, 08854 Piscataway, NJ, USA e-mail:
[email protected] M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6_24, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
355
356
A. Mische
we often refer to as “civil society.” He describes how such network enclaves variously evade, resist, are patronized by or become integrated into the state, with the implication that the integration of trust networks into the state is one of the foundations of a strong democracy. I will argue that it is often distrust, rather than trust, that serves as the vehicle of integration of non-state actors into the democratic polity, and when this is absent we run the risk of state-society relations characterized by clientelism, quiescence, and balkanization. The term “trust networks” usually refers to social formations characterized by homophily, strong ties, and dense network clustering. Scholars of social movements have argued that these kinds of network enclaves are important for the generation of collective identities and the intense commitments that these often entail. Researchers such as Roger Gould have shown us that commitments are apt to be stronger when networks of mobilization and recruitment overlap with strong ties of family and neighborhood. And yet, the social networks literature is just as clear on the importance of weak or “bridging” ties that span network enclaves and link heterogeneous sets of actors. We learned long ago from Granovetter that networks consisting only of strong and dense ties lead movements to isolation and stagnation. Movements need the oxygenation of ideas, as well as the coalition-building possibilities, generated by bridging ties that span what Ron Burt (1992) calls “structural holes.” Tilly was well aware of this, of course, as “brokerage” is one of the key mechanisms of the latecareer reformulation of his work (McAdam et al. 2001). So why this somewhat limiting focus here on “trust” as the dominant historical mechanism underlying non-state networks? As I have shown in my work on youth activist networks in Brazil (Mische 2007), overlapping memberships in a social movement field often contribute not only to increased trust and reinforced commitments but also to tensions and conflicts, as multiply affiliated activists steer themselves among competing projects and commitments, sometimes rooted in quite different institutional logics. Patrick Heller and Peter Evans argue in this volume that Brazil consists of a relatively decentralized polity in which non-state actors have, over the past three decades, gained increasing access to the state by means of new forms of popular protest and experiments in urban governance such as participatory budgeting. What is missing in their description is an account of the sheer complexity and diversity of forms of association that have blossomed since the 1970s. The young activists I studied had cross-cutting affiliations in student movement organizations, church-based groups, labor unions, NGOs, antidiscrimination movements and professional or business associations. Many of them also, non-incidentally, belonged to political parties. These partially overlapping forms of participation sometimes generated trust and reinforced commitment, but also contributed to tensions, conflict, and occasionally paralysis—often rooted in, or breeding, relations of distrust. These dynamics are especially evident when political parties enter the picture. Partisan politics are often counterposed to “civic networks,” as dominated by an instrumental, hierarchical, and competitive logic that is at odds with the more “communicative” logic of civil society. Factional politics can internally divide social movements and can alienate less politicized members of the population who see partisan practices as dirty and manipulative. And yet, what are parties but a means of access to the state? Political scientists have long noted the importance of strong links
SPOTLIGHT: Distrust in democracy
357
between parties and the population for a healthy democracy, and they have criticized Brazil’s historically weak and clientelistic party system, which has largely been incapable of maintaining the loyalties of voters or politicians (i.e., Mainwaring 1999; Avritzer 2002). The Workers’ Party (PT) in the 1980s and 1990s seemed to buck this trend; Heller and Evans point to the important role of the PT in the support of urban popular movements as well as in the institutionalization of innovative forms of participatory governance (see also Keck 1992; Baiocchi 2003, 2005). Likewise, I argue in my work that activists from the PT and other left parties in the 1980s played a critical brokerage role in linking otherwise dispersed and localized movements together and giving them an overarching narrative of politicized citizenship. Political parties also mobilized grassroots activists through the energy and solidarity of a competitive struggle, as a series of municipal, state, and federal elections followed each other in quick succession during the 1980s and 1990s. Given these overlapping logics, it is hard to describe the complex civic-partisan field that I studied in the late 1980s and 1990s as dominated by “trust,” or by Tilly’s picture of solidarity-based network enclaves resisting, patronized by, or integrating with the state. At the same time that young activists were fighting to democratize the universities and secure state funding for schools, sanitation, and health care in poorer neighborhoods, they were also engaged full throttle in the sometimes thrilling, sometimes dispiriting luta interna within the PT, as well as in the PT’s battles with other left-leaning parties that reemerged with the return to multiparty rule in 1980. It was sometimes hard to see whom they distrusted more—the authoritarian and clientelistic elites who still dominated most government politics, or the companheiros of their own (or rival left) parties divided along fine lines of ideology, political practice, and local bases of support. Certainly, this factional struggle often caused problems for the other movements in which activists were involved, as a number of scholars have documented, and may have contributed to a backlash against partisanship in general. Distrust, however, is not necessarily demobilizing. When activists from that period look back on the highly partisan dynamics of the 1980s, they tend to remember an exhilarating sense of forward movement, of learning and debate, and of the possibility of structural change that impregnated their practices and sustained them through the day-to-day, self-sacrificial grind of meetings, tasks, travels, and mobilizations. This aura of possibility contributed to the expanding electoral victories of the PT, as well as to the highly influential experiments in urban democracy that its governments have fostered over the past two decades. Here, we see partisan commitments contributing in at least three ways to state–society integration: (1) as a source of brokerage, debate, and collective framing in a complex social movement field; (2) as a source of emotional energy for mobilization, via the urgency and excitement of competitive struggles; and (3) as a source of access to the state, via electoral victories and the opportunities for new kinds of institution building that broaden participation in local decision making. Since the 1990s, the danger for democratic participation has not been too much partisanship (with the distrust and competition that this breeds), but too little. The consolidation of democratic institutions was accompanied in Brazil, as elsewhere, by the advent of economic policies oriented toward liberalization and privatization— and with it, a tendency to split off “civic” from “partisan” participation. As I argue in my book, this was paradoxically reinforced by the outpouring of youthful
358
A. Mische
participation in the civic mobilization for the impeachment of President Collor in 1992. Whereas in the 1980s young activists wore their partisan badges on their chests as a symbol of their commitments to democratic citizenship, in the 1990s, many student leaders had to hide or suppress their partisan sympathies, or risk marginalization and defeat in the varied arenas of student politics. Likewise, scholars such as Evelina Dagnino (2005) have noted that the explosion of NGOs in the 1990s and 2000s has been accompanied by a shift in the meaning of “citizenship” and “participation,” in which a highly privatized and managerial focus negates the more critical political project of expanding substantive equality and sharing power between state and civil society. The past decade of political scandals has intensified popular skepticism about political parties—including the PT—even while the popularity of President Lula himself remained high. This has arguably reinforced the disconnection between the population and the state, even as experiments in participatory governance have struggled forward. A strong and healthy democracy needs both trust and distrust, although perhaps at different scales. Trust is important within communities, organizations, and factions; it can also support coalition-building, although often in a more fragile, weak-tie manner. However, distrust is constitutive of the systemic level, in which competition between parties and factions—as well as overlap in institutional forms—can lead to lively debate, struggle, and the challenging of stagnant and exclusionary political formations. A healthy democracy depends not just upon the integration of trust-based enclaves into the state—the historical source of corporatist politics—but upon complex civic and political networks in which contending institutional logics (including partisan ones!) cross-cut and inform each other. These may generate tensions, conflict, and, yes, distrust—but such tensions are also the source of the institutional innovation, contestation, and engagement with state politics that a strong and resilient democracy requires. Certainly, too much distrust can be destructive and divisive, especially when it serves as the shadow side of strong-tie trust, fostering in-group/out-group conflict. Yet I propose that the generative tension between trust and distrust—particularly when embedded in cross-cutting “weak-tie” organizational networks—can deepen democratic engagement and carve out new pathways of access to the state.
References Avritzer, L. (2002). Democracy and the public sphere in Latin America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Baiocchi, G. (2003). Radicals in power: The Workers’ Party (PT) and experiments in urban democracy in Brazil. London: Zed Books. Baiocchi, G. (2005). Militants and citizens: The politics of participatory democracy in Porto Alegre. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Burt, R. S. (1992). Structural holes: The social structure of competition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Dagnino, E. (2005). Citizenship and the Social in Contemporary Brazil. Paper prepared for After Neo-liberalism? Consequences for citizenship, Workshop #2 in the series Claiming Citizenship in the Americas, organized by the Canada Research Chair in Citizenship and Governance, Université de Montréal. Keck, M. (1992). The workers’ party and democratization in Brazil. New Haven: Yale University Press.
SPOTLIGHT: Distrust in democracy
359
Mainwaring, S. (1999). Rethinking party systems in the third wave of democratization: The case of Brazil. Stanford: Stanford University Press. McAdam, D., Tarrow, S., & Tilly, C. (2001). Dynamics of contention. Cambridge studies in contentious politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Mische, A. (2007). Partisan publics: Contention and communication across Brazilian youth activist networks. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ann Mische is Associate Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. Her work combines interpretive and network-analytic approaches to the study of political communication in social movements and democratic politics. In addition to her book, Partisan publics: Communication and Contention across Brazilian youth activist networks (Princeton 2007), she has written more general theoretical articles on networks, culture, time and agency.
Afterword Michael Hanagan Chris Tilly
The closing note to a volume is an apt place to take stock of what this particular collection has and has not accomplished. In general we find our contributors a pugnacious lot: disputatious, argumentative, feisty, sometimes nitpicking, always challenging, impossible to please, and never satisfied. In short, they are just the kind of contributors that we had hoped to assemble. We are convinced that Charles Tilly would have felt likewise. But there is more to say. In our Introduction, we traced the themes of historicism, state-making, city-state relations, trust networks, and democracy and inequality. These common threads, we argued, stitch together the various essays, sometimes yielding a harmonious tapestry, at other times perhaps rendering something closer to a crazy quilt. In this Afterword, we take a less analytical, more descriptive look at the contributions’ reach. In essence, we use as a yardstick Charles Tilly’s apparent ambition in his never-completed book. His goal, it appears, was to consider cities, states, and the global totality, and in so doing to traverse the long arc of human history, to address regions around the globe, and to do so in a way that spoke to scholars of society across varied disciplines. None too modest a goal, and an unlikely one for any one book to satisfy, but certainly a useful set of metrics for sizing up a volume’s reach. We thus organize this Afterword around four themes: (1) disciplines, (2) historical periods, (3) geographic scales, and (4) geographic settings.
Disciplines Charles Tilly delighted in transgressing disciplinary boundaries and was proud of teaching in departments of history and political science as well as sociology. We, ourselves a pairing of a historian and an economist, sought to assemble an appropriately interdisciplinary band of authors. Our claim in the Introduction to have achieved exuberant interdisciplinarity must be tempered by the fact that by our count 13 of the 25 authors (excluding Tilly and us) are in fact sociologists (along with five historians, four urbanists and geographers, and three political scientists). But the real
M. Hanagan and C. Tilly (eds.), Contention and Trust in Cities and States, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0756-6, # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
361
362
Afterword
measure is the extent to which the ideas in the essays themselves spill across disciplinary frontiers. By this measure, we judge the collection satisfactorily transgressive. Five sociologists (Aya and Eden, Centeno and Enriquez, Clemens) contemplate historical topics; in turn historian Katz mulls current developments. Urbanists Fainstein and Marcuse discuss power relations in cities, but so do sociologists Clemens, Davis, Evans, and Heller, as well as historian Blockmans. On the other hand, the remaining urbanists look well beyond city limits: Srinivas to the construction of national welfare states, Soja to the full range of scales of human activity. And the great bulk of both sociologists and urbanists address political topics. Of course, the most critical disciplinary differences are grounded not in topic, but in approach. Based on this standard as well, many of these scholars are successfully fuzzing frontiers. Consider the three political scientists and their frameworks in cross-disciplinary perspective. Political scientist Lopez-Alves's viewpoint on statemaking, combining structural constraints with available ideological tropes, has much in common with those of sociologists Gallo and Centeno and Enriquez, as well as with that of historian Blockmans. The accounts of partisan struggles, policy development, and construction of hegemonic ideologies emanating from political scientist Antonina Gentile bear family resemblances to the accounts fashioned by historian Katz, urbanist Marcuse, and sociologists Clemens, Giugni, and Mische. And Tarrow, the last (alphabetically) of the political scientists, straddles history, sociology, and political science so seamlessly as to be virtually unclassifiable. As another indication of how, among these authors, intellectual approach does not map back to discipline in linear fashion, consider the most “sociological” of these essays, those examining how trust networks negotiated relations between religious and/or national groups. Sociologist Shin contributes one of these articles, but the other two come from historians Salzmann and Te Brake. None of this is to deny the differing analytical predilections, literary comfort zones, and familiar concepts that authors from varied disciplinary homelands bring to this collection. For example, Giugni’s political opportunity structure is basically the turf of political sociologists; Gentile starts her paper by pointing out that the “three Tillys” she identifies are read by distinct audiences differing by discipline and specialty. But Gentile makes that point precisely in order to bring Tilly’s disparate views of the state together and attempt to adjudicate an adequate synthesis; this spirit of cross-disciplinary synthesis pervades much, if not all, of the volume.
Historical period While we have permitted ourselves a certain smugness with respect to the volume’s disciplinary bouillabaisse, we must admit that the historical inclusiveness of this volume does not do justice to Tilly’s audacious (if never completed) attempt to capture in some way the full sweep of history. Perhaps betraying our own preoccupation with modern and contemporary issues, we have assembled a group of essays heavily weighted toward the recent. Soja rivals Tilly in ambition by reaching back into prehistory and forward into the not-yet-written history of cities in
Afterword
363
an ever-more-globalized world, but his contribution could probably be best classified with the chapter by Aya and Eden, as methodological and conceptual pieces not tied empirically to a particular period. Setting these two aside, our scorecard shows no analyses of the prehistoric or ancient world and two set in the Middle Ages (Blockmans and Salzmann). Although Salzmann’s essay strides easily over our confining periodizations and ends on the eve of the Reformation, most of the action occurs in the Middle Ages and it is there that we have placed it. Te Brake is mainly set in the Reformation and immediate Post-Reformation world. The count jumps to six when we turn to the modern era, provisionally defined as 1750–1940 (Centeno and Enriquez, Clemens, van der Linden, Lopez-Alves, Srinivas, and Tarrow). And arriving in the contemporary period, we observe a population explosion in the form of the remaining 12 essays, ranging from World War II–era Japan forward. (This includes Giugni’s discussion of political opportunity structures, since it grows out of social movement literature firmly anchored in modern settings.) This periodization thus reveals glaring gaps in the volume’s coverage. In our own defense, these are to some extent gaps in scholarly dialogue at large. To Tilly’s credit, his never-completed monograph was not his only attempt to stretch the historical reach of his analysis. Indeed, the unfinished manuscript, “Cities and states in world history,” was itself a spinoff of a global history text, completed but as yet unpublished, that he wrote in collaboration with historians (including editor Hanagan). The text starts with prehistory, and its last chapter ends with an essay by Tilly entitled “Globalization, inequality, and disintegration of states, 1980–2050.” Despite efforts like that textbook, extending analysis of contention, trust networks, and related concepts backward to earlier periods remains a challenge for historians and social scientists arguing for the utility of this analytical framework.
Geographic scale Tilly’s analyses ranged from describing a single London or Paris neighborhood to characterizing global dynamics. His initial chapter, at the start of this collection, channels a determination to understand local, national, and international regularities. Despite this range, it is perhaps not surprising that a volume focusing on cities and states ends up by focusing principally on—cities and states. Given the prominence of Tilly’s writings on national states, we are pleased to have reaped 8 of 23 essays that primarily discuss localities and local struggles, dynamics, and outcomes (Auyero, Blockmans, Clemens, Evans and Heller, Fainstein, Marcuse, Soja, and Te Brake). Still, the modal group is 11 chapters on countries, national states, and/or empires. But then it gets interesting. Empires, taken up by Centeno and Enriquez, van der Linden, Salzmann, and Shin, plus less directly by Lopez-Alves (as the entities from which Latin American colonies were breaking away) and Tarrow (in the expansive ambitions of revolutionary France), by definition group together multiple nations, with some typically included against their will. Shin’s discussion of shifting Japanese–Korean relations, Lopez-Alves's story of Latin American and North American colonies declaring independence but often guided by political
364
Afterword
philosophies formulated in the metropole, and for that matter Salzmann’s probing of the status and relations between religious groups within heterogeneous empires all shift scale between larger and smaller units. Srinivas traces the development of welfare states at multiple levels—locality, province, nation—with the ascent, or not, of welfare systems from local to national levels, one of her main topics of inquiry. Other authors skip across scales with even greater impunity. Davis’s drug traffickers and Goodwin’s terrorists transcend local origins to build transnational networks that threaten the integrity of national states. Though Gentile’s main cases are national states, she goes on to elaborate a model of an international relations system dominated by a hegemonic USA. Soja, likewise, extends his city-focused account to explore how city-regions leapfrog national states in the emerging global system. Thus, in addition to having feet firmly planted at the two levels of city and national state, the collection includes some contributions that manage to hopscotch through varied geographic scales.
Geographic setting Tilly’s work centered on Europe, but in later work he sought to extend the analysis geographically as well as temporally. His introductory chapter, “Cities, states, and trust networks,” starts out in ancient Uruk, in present-day Iraq, and his book outline promised chapters on Asia, Africa, and the Americas. In recruiting contributors, we made a concerted effort to reach beyond Europeanists. How do the results stack up? Certainly a significant contingent of the articles tell European stories. Blockmans, Centeno and Enriquez, Tarrow, and Te Brake all analyze European cases. Salzmann studies Europe but escapes a “Europe-only” categorization due to the accident of history that resulted in the denomination of the eastern portion of the Ottoman Empire as Asia. Fainstein, Marcuse, and Katz, examining the USA, along with Gentile, who combines European cases with another spinoff of the British Empire, Australia, bring the count up to nine essays rooted primarily in the Eurosphere. Make that ten if we include Giugni, the majority of whose examples and citations involve Europe and the USA. But we claim some success in geographically decentering the discussion. Shin dissects the Eastern outpost of the global North, Japan. Others gaze Southward. Srinivas focuses on India (with side trips to Japan, Britain, and elsewhere). Davis, Gallo, Lopez-Alves, and Mische contemplate Latin America. Heller and Evans raise the bar by bringing together Brazil, India, and South Africa in a single analysis, generating a total of six essays devoted primarily to the global South. This still leaves some significant holes: nothing on China or the former Soviet bloc (unless one counts those Eastern bloc regions once under Ottoman dominion), not a lot on Africa. But the mixture achieves global scope. As with the multi-scalar analyses noted above, the geographic context gets most interesting when authors consider processes that transcend a single geographic unit. We have resisted categorizing van der Linden’s article, because in truth its setting is a transnational process, the slave trade, that linked Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Goodwin, too, looks beyond a particular region of the world to examine terrorist
Afterword
365
tactics used by national minorities, colonized peoples, and in some cases geographically distant aggrieved groups, in each case frequently crossing borders. One might presume that Auyero, an Argentine who has written extensively about Argentina, had his interest in violent specialists sparked by events in Latin America, but his examples traverse Brazil, Jamaica, the USA, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, defying attachment to any particular region of the world. And even some of those articles clearly rooted in a particular country or region nonetheless branch out. Davis follows her criminal networks northward, Shin reflects on the troubled east–west relationship between Japan and Korea, and Lopez-Alvez swivels north, east, and west to compare state formation in Latin America with modern counterpart processes in the USA, Africa, and Asia. Giugni, despite his predominant reliance on research on Europe and the USA, draws in examples from Hong Kong, Iran, and Palestine. The discussion starts to feel genuinely global not just in scope, but in content.
Final words Early on, our collection includes an actual dialogue-cum-debate between Rod Aya and Lynn Eden. But in a sense every contribution to this collection is engaged in a dialogue with Charles Tilly. Every essay addresses his work and findings, seeks to follow his train of thought, and imagines his responses. Such a conversation is not always easy. A moving target is harder to hit than a fixed one, and Tilly’s ideas were evolving rapidly in the last decade or so of his life, as if he was trying to put into writing, while he could, all the ideas of an incredibly fertile mind. Intellectual conversations with a prolific, creative scholar who is no longer living can be quite fruitful, as all social analysts know. At the same time, the obvious drawback of such dialogues is that the scholar in question can no longer react or respond to one’s ideas. Thus, our aim with this volume is to add to, enrich, and promote the multilateral dialogues that may include Charles Tilly as a now-silent partner, but that also engage new generations of scholars. We opened the Introduction to this book by talking about a series of provocations: Charles Tilly’s provocation to us in the form of his unfinished manuscript, our provocations to a first set of authors and then to a second set. We will be content indeed if this book provokes future rounds of dialogue that build on, stretch, revise, recombine, invert, or even shred this set of ideas on contention and trust in cities and states.
Index
A Abolitionism, 44–46, 55 Ad-hoc tolerance, 239 African National Congress (ANC), 171, 314–316, 320 Agency, 91, 152, 153, 156, 180, 185–187, 189–191, 194, 196, 256, 274, 281, 308, 309, 342 American Federation of Labor, 161 Apartheid, 171, 253, 314–316, 351 Argument, 19, 21, 22, 24, 28, 31, 45, 62, 64, 65, 68, 114, 115, 118, 120, 130, 152, 180, 212, 217, 219, 287–289, 306, 309, 324, 325, 327, 328 Australia, 105, 121, 152, 153, 155, 156, 158, 159, 364 Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), 156–158 Australian Labor Party (ALP), 156, 158
B Bangalore, 142, 143 Bautzen, Germany, 231–232 Bismarck, Otto von, 24, 90, 144 Boundary drawing, 159, 160, 162–164 Brazil, 50, 61, 121, 122, 177, 250, 252, 256, 260, 305, 306, 311, 317–318, 320, 355–358, 364, 365 Britain, 4, 29, 34, 35, 44–48, 52–55, 63, 83, 86, 97, 102, 114, 116, 125, 133, 136, 137, 152–158, 161, 164, 202, 205, 220, 236, 239, 244, 264 British Empire, 101–103, 106, 109, 364 Brokers (Brokerage), 152, 254, 356, 357 Bureaucracy, 37, 95, 96, 98–101, 107, 109, 142, 143, 157, 159, 190, 292, 324, 326 Business(es), 49, 71, 89, 107, 141, 142, 152, 179–196, 225, 259, 296, 297, 328, 342, 346, 348–351, 356
C Capital, 3, 27, 69, 82, 101, 113, 129, 150, 179, 200, 219, 251, 297, 312, 325, 339 Capitalism, 15, 130, 133, 138, 140, 150, 155, 158, 165, 200, 201, 209, 218, 221, 224, 308, 309, 312, 315, 317, 347 Caste, 90, 92, 131, 133, 135, 140–144, 307, 308, 311, 312 Castells, Manuel, 176, 177, 258 CatalhÎyÏk, 213–217 Categorization of citizens, 69 of labor, 152 Causal mechanisms, 23, 24, 65, 96, 244, 279–281 Centralization, 81, 86, 87, 90, 92, 100, 101, 122, 136, 137, 195, 207, 300, 330 Chicago, 177, 182, 184, 190, 218, 221, 268, 331 China, 4, 6, 11–14, 65–67, 100, 135, 215, 217, 220, 310, 311, 364 Chinese Empire, 96, 106 Christian Democratic Party (Germany), 163 Christian Democratic Party (Italy), 159 Christianity, 12, 53, 184 Christians, 28, 29, 32–36, 38, 53, 54, 159, 161, 163, 164, 171, 184–186, 239 Cities, 1, 28, 63, 80, 108, 113, 133, 176, 179, 199, 211, 239, 250, 299, 305, 327, 339, 362 Citizens, 91, 97, 151, 169, 175, 179, 201, 219, 247, 250, 288, 306 Citizenship, 63, 83, 97, 133, 184, 202, 247, 252, 275, 288, 305, 330, 357 City-state relations, 6, 361 Civil society, 175, 251, 256, 257, 260, 261, 273, 281, 293, 314–318, 355–356, 358 Clandestine, 7, 251, 255, 256, 258, 267–269 367
368
Class, 30, 62, 66, 67, 71, 72, 75, 80–82, 86, 89, 90, 109, 121, 131, 134, 137, 141–143, 150, 152, 154, 175–177, 181–186, 191, 200, 205–207, 216, 217, 219, 221, 292, 299, 300, 307–308, 311–314, 317, 324, 326, 329, 333, 341, 344, 346, 348, 350, 352 Clientelism, 311, 355, 356 Coercion, 3, 27, 49, 82, 96, 113, 134, 150, 179, 213, 250, 292, 339 Coexistence, 230–239, 241 Cold War, 67, 74, 99, 152, 160, 162, 164, 294, 351 Colombia, 119, 122, 123, 126, 250, 261, 268, 287–301 Colonialism, 63–66, 120 Colonies, 45, 65–68, 73, 98, 101, 102, 106, 109, 126, 363 Commitment, 3, 6–11, 15, 28–34, 37, 38, 49, 54, 69, 72, 84, 106, 188, 194, 199, 214, 219, 222, 249–263, 306, 317, 335, 340, 341, 356–358 Communism, 161 Community, 4, 29, 65, 90, 114, 131, 176, 180, 199, 215, 230, 250, 267, 289, 311, 330, 349, 358 Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL), 159–161 Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori (CISL), 159, 160 Confessional parity, 239, 240 Confessional privilege, 239, 240 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 163 Congress Party (India), 143, 312 Conservative Party (Britain), 153, 154, 164 Consistency and responsibility to fact (Noam Chomsky), 21 Contention and contentious politics, 274 Contingency, 20–22, 38, 62–64, 74, 91, 162, 165, 189, 289, 294, 335, 364 Corporatism, 155, 162 Crusades, 34, 35, 38 Culture, 6, 28, 44, 64–66, 72, 73, 81, 118, 120–122, 125, 183, 186, 190, 196, 207, 223, 229, 244, 273, 274, 276, 292, 344, 346
D Decategorization, 149, 151–158, 160, 162 Decentralization, 101, 133, 158–159, 221, 224, 252, 298, 310, 317–318, 320 Democracy, 82, 88, 105, 163, 164, 189, 220, 261, 287–290, 293–295, 299, 300, 305–307, 309–312, 316–318, 320, 323, 326, 330, 351, 355–358, 361
Index
Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (DGB), 163 Development, 9, 20, 64, 83, 96, 115, 129, 151, 175, 177, 200, 212, 246, 252, 272, 290, 308, 330, 342, 362 Developmentalism, 24, 130 Developmental state, 315 Discourse, 20, 66, 72, 96, 141, 176, 196, 220, 273, 275, 314, 327 Distrust, 34–37, 136, 140, 355–358 Diversity, religious, 36, 229–247
E Elites, 30, 33, 36, 52, 86, 87, 91, 98, 101, 104, 105, 107–109, 115, 118, 120–122, 125, 143, 150, 156, 161, 164, 171, 182–183, 186–188, 191–193, 195, 200–203, 207, 219, 245, 254, 255, 268, 269, 294, 295, 297, 298, 308–310, 313, 318, 357 El Salvador, 250, 255 Emigration, 106 Empires, 6, 36, 46, 62, 95, 113, 133, 211, 239, 363 Equality, 140, 202, 206, 292, 309, 310, 358 Essentialism, 20 Exclusion, 28, 29, 62, 69, 105, 109, 151, 159–161, 182, 199–209, 239, 240, 242, 306, 307, 312, 313, 317, 331, 343 Explanation, 9, 22–24, 37, 64, 183, 229, 240–241, 244, 259, 273, 289, 294, 328 Exploitation, 10, 30, 46, 65, 73, 74, 109, 307, 341, 342, 344, 346, 350, 351
F Factions (Factionalism), 120, 156, 158, 208, 251, 311, 356–358 Favelas, 260, 269 Framing, 29, 274, 278, 357 France, 35, 45, 54, 63, 79, 82, 83, 85–88, 90–92, 101, 105, 114, 116, 120, 123–125, 151, 153, 160–162, 202, 204, 205, 231, 233, 237, 239, 241, 244, 246, 348, 363 Freedom of conscience, 246 Future, 15, 20, 22–24, 43, 88, 104, 114, 115, 119, 120, 122–126, 135, 154, 163, 194, 205, 245, 256, 311, 319, 332, 333, 335, 365
G Gandhi, Mohandas, 140 Gender, 62, 66, 75, 108, 132, 135, 141, 214, 216, 218, 307–309, 312
Index
Generalization, 23, 34, 208, 325, 335 Geohistory, 211–225 Germany, 83, 90, 98, 114, 116, 120, 126, 133, 136, 137, 152, 153, 158, 162, 163, 204, 231–233, 239, 300, 342 Gilgamesh, 2, 3, 5, 211, 213, 217 Globalization, 125, 150–153, 164, 165, 177, 219–221, 223–225, 258, 259, 262, 314, 351, 363 Gould, Stephen Jay on historicism as approach, 21 on historicism as fact, 20, 21, 24
H Habsburg Empire, 106, 107 Hanagan, Michael, 22, 90, 149, 176, 289, 363 Hegemony, 70, 99, 106, 149–165, 207, 309, 314, 343 Historical explanation as model, 22 Historicism, 19–24, 177, 212, 213, 219, 361 American, 21 as approach or framework, 21 as fact, 20, 21, 24 Marxist-Leninist, 21 as theory, 19–24 Historicity, 21 Holland, 137
I Iberia. See Spain Immigration, 62–68, 70–75, 122, 275–277, 330, 333 Independence, 5, 9, 86, 118, 119, 141, 183, 199, 234, 311, 314, 363 Independence, national, 9, 118, 119, 234, 314, 363 India, 11, 14, 46, 55, 106, 109, 130, 135, 139, 140, 142–144, 305, 306, 311–314, 316–318, 320, 363 Indigenous peoples, 114, 118, 121 Individualism, 22–24, 136, 333 Industrialization, 66, 130, 135, 137–140, 144, 145, 220–222, 258, 259, 262, 312, 348 Industrial welfare. See Welfare, industrial Inequality, 5, 30, 61, 95, 142, 158, 177, 183, 214, 244, 292, 305, 323, 361 Institutionalized riot system, 267 Institutional logic, 356, 358 Interests and passions (Adam Smith), 24 International Transport Federation (ITF), 161 Iran, 11, 213, 311, 351, 365
369
Ireland, 153, 170, 236, 239, 241, 244 Islam, 8, 32, 33, 35, 36, 106, 107 Italy, 14, 83, 103, 120, 121, 151–153, 158–162, 200, 205, 206, 208, 239
J Jacobs, Jane, 213, 214 Jamaica, 269, 365 Japan, 61–75, 138, 139, 300, 363, 365 Japanese Empire, 61, 62, 66–68, 70, 71 Jay, Martin on historicism, 20 Jericho, 5, 214 Jews, 30, 32–38, 92, 239, 241 Judaism, 39
K Karnataka (Mysore), 141–144 Kerala, 141, 142 Keynes, John Maynard, 138, 151, 335 Korea, 13, 64–70, 72, 139, 365
L Labor Party (Australia), 156 Lasch, Christopher on argument, 19 Latin America, 46, 72, 107, 113, 250, 268, 288, 317, 363 Lefebvre, Henri, 223, 343, 352 Liberalism, 106, 140, 154, 287 Liberal Party (Australia), 156 Little, Daniel, 20,
M Manchester, 221 Maritime Union of Australia (MUA), 155–158 Markets, 7, 12, 35, 38, 52, 53, 102, 129–133, 135, 137, 139, 142, 181, 203, 219, 254, 255, 308, 335 Marx, Karl, 23, 212, 219, 221, 307 Mechanisms. See Causal mechanisms Merchants, 5, 6, 14, 31, 33, 35, 36, 40, 53, 81, 188, 200, 202, 208, 219, 220 Merton, Robert K., 20, 43, 44 American Sociological Association Award for best book in science, knowledge, and technology, on self-fulfilling prophecy, 20 Method, 19–24, 49, 53, 54, 96, 99, 165, 176, 185, 187, 188, 193, 195, 263, 325, 332, 333, 339, 363
370
MÅthode des modÉles (Raymond Boudon), 22, 23 Methodological individualism, 22–24 Mexico, 9, 11, 114, 116, 120, 121, 126, 220, 250, 252–262, 269, 318 Migration, 13, 135, 137, 160, 258 Models, 5, 6, 10, 22–24, 29, 31, 32, 62, 63, 69, 80, 81, 83, 101, 104, 114–116, 118, 122, 126, 129, 133–135, 143, 144, 150, 180, 185, 188, 190, 192, 196, 205, 224, 230, 259, 269, 272, 275, 277, 279, 289, 295, 307, 324, 330, 335, 364 Modernization, 21, 115, 132, 142, 144, 150, 152, 220 Moral economy, 27–38 Mumbai, 311–316 Muslims, 28–30, 32–38, 141, 143
N National Association of Port Employees (NAPE), 155 National Dock Labour Scheme (NDLS), 155 National Farmers Federation, Australia (NFF), 156, 157 Nationalism, 28, 90, 92, 99, 104–108, 110, 115, 116, 121, 122, 139, 140, 230, 253 National Party (of Australia), 156 National States, 83, 96–97, 104, 105, 113–126, 150–152, 183, 193, 196, 218, 222, 249, 251–255, 258, 261–263, 306, 317, 318, 320, 363, 364 National Union of Mineworkers, Britain, 154 Nations, 62, 90, 113–126, 129–145, 150, 177–194, 218, 250, 306, 324, 364 Nation state, 65, 67, 97, 113–115, 122, 125, 126, 133, 135, 138, 141, 179–196, 218, 220, 222–225, 250–252, 254, 258, 259, 261–263, 306, 310–312, 319, 320 Neoliberalism, 152, 176, 308 Networks activist, 356 civic, 191, 194, 196, 355–358 criminal, 260, 365 social, 193, 260, 355, 356 trust, 1–15, 29, 175–177, 199–209, 211–213, 239, 269, 341, 355, 362 Newton, Isaac, 24 Nikkeijin, 61, 62, 71, 72 Nisbet, R. A., 24
O Oppositional terrorism, 169–172 Ottoman empire, 51, 52, 101, 106, 107, 239, 364
Index
P Parentela, 159, 160, 163, 164 Participation, 30, 50, 89, 132, 138, 175–177, 184, 188, 191, 206, 208, 269, 288, 294, 298, 299, 308, 310, 317, 318, 320, 326, 336, 352, 356–358 Parties, political, 140, 144, 150, 151, 158, 160, 161, 166, 177, 206, 268, 269, 273, 277, 295, 299, 356–358 Partisanship, 357 Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI), 159–161 Party-government, 150–152, 158, 161–165 Patronage, 8, 9, 135, 140, 206, 269, 313, 320 Peasants, 66, 81, 91, 121, 142, 213, 296–298 Pehlwan, 268 Philanthropy, 196 Pickvance, C., 176 Pingjum, Friesland, 234, 235, 238–240 Platonic realism. See Essentialism Polanyi, K., 130 Political development, 21, 29, 179–196, 331 Political integration, 240 Political opportunity structures (POS), 272, 273, 277–281, 362, 363 Political parties, 140, 144, 150, 151, 156, 158, 159, 164, 177, 206, 268, 269, 273, 277, 295, 299, 356–358 Popper, Karl R. on historicism as theory, 21 on Platonic realism, 20 Porto Allegre, 177 Poverty, 124, 139, 221, 224, 308, 324, 326–328, 330, 333, 334 Producers and Consumers Stevedoring (PCS), Australia, 156, 157 Prophecy, 20 Public-private partnerships, 196
R Race and ethnicity, 307, 309 “Race riots,” 268 Race to the bottom thesis, 151, 152, 164 Rational choice. See Methodological individualism Rationalism, 24 Rationality principle, 22 Re-categorization, 150–152, 158, 163 Red-Green coalitions, 177 Redistribution, 29, 30, 129, 142, 144, 290, 293, 294, 298 Regime, 8, 27–38, 81, 109, 120, 131, 150, 170, 241, 251, 277, 288, 309 Regime change, 151–158, 164, 251
Index
Regimes of capitalism corporatist, 150 neo-liberal, 150 Regionalization, 223–225 Regions, 5, 6, 9, 11–12, 28, 51, 54, 65, 100, 101, 105, 108, 113–114, 118, 125, 134, 135, 137, 138, 144, 150, 165, 200–201, 205, 208, 217, 219, 223–225, 255, 256, 262, 263, 269, 297, 330, 341, 347, 361, 364 Relational approaches, 244, 306 Religion, 4, 8, 27–30, 32, 46, 66, 122, 124, 126, 131–133, 135, 141, 143, 215, 229, 244, 246, 247, 287, 290, 309, 344, 345 Religious groups, 31, 33, 144, 170, 186, 239, 240, 364 Religious minorities, 27–38, 239, 247 Religious war, 34, 230, 241–245 Repertoires, 23, 24, 27–38, 151, 157, 158, 165, 306–307, 316 Repression, 87, 88, 134, 170, 237, 239–241, 269, 272, 274, 279 Republicanism, 124, 140 Rescaling, 176, 223–225 Revolution, 20, 63, 101, 105, 115, 118, 121, 214, 216, 217, 220–222, 224, 270, 278 American, 123 French, 31, 79–92, 123 industrial, 218, 220, 221, 349 Rights civil, 288, 291, 325, 331, 351 labor, 141, 151, 152, 154 political, 105, 287–300 property, 200, 204, 287–300 Roman empire, 36, 97, 220–221 Roosevelt, T., 191, 194, 195 Russia, 48, 65, 83, 98, 102 Russian empire, 107, 109
S San Francisco, 68, 182, 190, 191 Self-fulfilling prophecy (Robert K. Merton), 20 Silk road, 11–15, 215 Simon, H.A., 24 Slavery, 44–46, 52, 55, 56, 99, 346, 347 Social Democratic Party (Germany), Socialism, 166 Social movements, 45, 70, 71, 74, 79, 84, 164, 230, 269, 271–281, 306–307, 310, 313, 316–318, 340, 356, 357, 363 Social movements, urban, 175–177, 317, 318, 346 Social relationships, 23, 292 South Africa, 171, 253, 256, 305, 306, 311, 314–317, 320, 346, 351, 364
371
South, global, 252, 256, 258, 262, 305–307, 310, 311, 314, 319, 364 Sovereignty, 28, 38, 66, 81, 116, 207, 222, 224, 249–263, 310 Spain, 35, 36, 38, 45, 47, 48, 101–103, 107, 120, 151, 153, 159, 160, 162, 234, 351 Spanish empire, 103, 104, 109, 125 State formation, 27–38, 212, 216, 217, 221, 222, 229–231, 242, 244, 247, 249, 250, 252–254, 259, 261, 312, 365 State-making, 21, 82, 83, 85, 104, 113, 230, 242, 259, 362 States and governments, 150 States as imagined communities, 181, 190, 251, 253, 254, 261–263 States, definition of, 96, 105, 214 Stinchcombe, Arthur L. on Charles Tilly, 21 on cumulative causal model, 22 on historical explanation, 22, 24 on theoretically understandable bits, 21–22 Strength of weak ties, 356 Structural holes, 356 Structuralism, 81, 308, 312, 315, 319–320 Structures as constraining, 23 as enabling, 23 only persons doing structure (Alvin Gouldner), 23 as process, 23
T Taxation, 28, 32, 33, 86, 87, 97, 102, 109, 175, 189, 190, 195, 290, 296 Terrorism, 169–172, 230, 343, 351 Theoretical method, 22, 23 Theory(ies), 19–24, 28, 32, 81–83, 85, 88–91, 109, 124, 126, 129, 130, 133, 145, 150, 152, 176, 179, 212, 218, 222, 223, 252–254, 272, 274, 276, 278, 281, 316, 319, 324, 335 Thompson, E.P., 29–31 Tilly, Charles on causal mechanisms, 20, 23, 24, 65, 96, 244, 279 and contradiction, 22, 23, 91, 306, 325, 336 and historicism, 19–21, 24, 177, 212, 219 and methodological individualism, 22–24 and rational choice, 22–24 as realist, 20 on structure, process, 20–23, 55, 65, 279, 340 and tension, 22, 23, 324 on two living geniuses in sociology, 22
372
Tilly, Chris, 1, 22, 49, 54, 149, 271, 361 Tomhaggard, County Wexford, 236 Trade unions, 143, 154, 156, 161, 299 Transport and General Workers Union (Britain), 155 Trust, 7, 31, 130, 133, 144, 177, 183, 200, 204, 206, 208, 215, 222, 223, 250, 252, 260, 292–293, 295–296, 300, 339–341, 343, 344, 356–358, 365 Trust network. See Networks, trust
U Unanticipated consequences, 43–57 Unemployment, 133, 137, 189, 194, 258, 275, 277, 291, 315, 328, 329, 334 Unions, 8, 28, 136, 139, 141, 143, 154, 157, 160–164, 192, 316, 356 United States, 44, 47, 48, 50, 51, 67, 97, 105, 133, 134, 176, 178, 180, 190, 196, 262, 290, 294, 328, 329, 342, 345, 348–350, 352 Urbanization, 30, 33, 122, 130, 137, 138, 140, 144, 201, 214–224, 222, 223, 257–260, 262, 350 Uruk, 1–3, 5, 211, 213, 214, 217, 364
V VendÅe, 20, 85, 87, 88 Violence, 27, 80, 95, 170, 244, 250–252, 267, 297, 342
Index
Violent specialists, 267, 365 Volunteerism, 87
W War, 4, 24, 27, 47, 63, 79–92, 97, 113, 143, 150, 183, 207, 230, 252, 294, 348 War-making, 79, 82, 83, 85–87, 150, 230, 242, 244, 247, 252, 255, 259 Weber, Max, 24 Welfare, 70, 155, 176, 179, 184, 188, 194, 195, 253, 290, 291, 323, 324, 329–331, 334–336, 343, 348, 351 industrial, 129–145 state, 134, 137, 138, 155, 194, 259, 273, 275, 323–325, 327, 330–332, 362, 364 Westphalia, Treaty of, 243, 246 Workers and the working class, 7, 29, 54, 61, 65, 66, 69, 130, 131, 134, 135, 137, 139–144, 152–155, 158–161, 163, 181, 182, 185, 187–189, 193, 209, 221, 317, 318, 331, 345, 346, 348, 357 Workers Party (Brazil), 317, 357 Working class, 30, 34, 67, 177, 319, 346, 348 World War II, 81, 143, 193, 300, 348, 363
Z Zapotec, 11
