Thus It Is Said: I never worry? Now that is a lie (Therborn, *Cities of Power*, Verso)

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Modernity, nation-states and their four main historical pathways

‘Modernity’ may be used as a shorthand for a current or recent culture. In the arts it has come to designate the reign of a style or a stance, ‘modernism’. Into sociology it has been imported to label a (largely pre-defined) social process, ‘modernization’. Post-classical Latin modernus means no more than ‘current, of today’. In my opinion, concepts should do better than just providing a label. They should trigger curiosity, stimulate new research questions. Concepts should be leveraged.
Leveraging concepts of modern and modernity would then mean asking: what does it mean to be modern? How and when can a social period be interpreted as modernity? Should such periods be specified by socio-cultural domains and/or by territorial areas?
In my opinion, the best and the least idiosyncratic definition of being modern is to be unbound by tradition, by the wisdom of our fathers, by the skills of our masters, by any ancient authority. To be modern is a cultural time orientation to the present and towards the future, no more and no less.
A modern culture, then, would be a culture where this time orientation is predominant, modernity an epoch of such predominance. Instead of fixing a label on what we are observing and writing about, we would then be confronted with a number of questions, without any self-evident answers: when did modernity happen? Variously in different cultural spheres, in science, the different arts, in conceptions of history, politics, economics, family life? Did it take place in different ways and at different times in the world? If so, do the variable pathways to modernity affect today’s social and cultural life?
Hopefully, the advantages of seeing modernity not as ‘modes of social life which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards’,32 but as something which has to be discovered and specified, come out of the sample of questions above. Here we have to concentrate on three issues: first, accepting that modernity breaks through in different socio-cultural domains at different times, in a comparative global perspective, is there any sectoral breakthrough which can be taken as more important than the others and is thereby useable as a benchmark? I am arguing that the modernity of political power, of the polity, is the decisive variable because of its intrinsic capacity to affect all other socio-cultural realms. However, the impact of modern political power on the traditionalism/modernity of society may be big or small, fast or slow. There is also a pragmatic reason: political change tends to be eventful and therefore much easier to pin down and date than economic change.
Second, what is, then, a modern polity? The answer, for analytical instead of ideological purposes, had better not be weighed down by particular institutional features, usually derived from the scholar’s native or otherwise ideal country. A simple, straightforward and non-aprioristic answer is, a nation-state. True, nations often refer to their past, but when they emerge, the politics of the nation assert the power of the present against the past. The nation-state is a self-constituted body claiming to rule itself into an open, non-prescribed future, unbound by past precedence, abolishing or marginalizing the rights of princes, under whatever title, denying colonial powers and transcending the traditional rights and powers of tribal elders or hereditary urban oligarchies.
Third, can the arrival of political modernity be globally typologized in a way that is analytically manageable as well as empirically warranted? Yes, it dawned upon me, as I was making a global study of the development of the right to vote,33 that there were four major routes to modern national citizenship, four major pathways into modernity, defined by the conflict lines for and against the new, between modernity and tradition, between modernity and anti-modernity. They can be distinguished in general analytical terms and can therefore be used not only to sort groups of countries but also as ideal types, two or more of which may have been taken in a particular country.
How was the new political culture generated? Internally, in the given society, or imposed or imported from outside? Who were the forces of the new? A new stratum within the given society, an external force or a part of the old internal elite? Where were the main forces of anti-modernity, of traditional authority and submission – inside or outside?
In this vein we may distinguish four main conflictual configurations in the world. They emerged as empirical generalizations, but they can also be used as ideal types, especially as they can be located in a logical property space.* This possibility has operated above all in two great hybrid cases: Russia and China. But the four main actual roads to modernity were opened up in the following ways.
Table 1. Roads to/through modernity by the location of forces and cultures: for and against.
Pre/Anti-Modernity Forces

Pro-Modernity Forces

 

Internal

External

 

 

Imposed

Imported & Learnt

Internal

Europe

Colonial Zone

Reactive Modernization

External

‘New Worlds’ (Settler States)

 

Note: Countries of reactive, or externally induced, modernization include Japan, Qing China, Ottoman Empire/Turkey, Iran and Siam/Thailand.

The new future orientation of the last centuries first emerged in Europe not as a natural emanation of European civilization but out of conflicts internal to Europe, primarily north-western Europe, including wars about European overseas empires. In other words, the European route was one of civil war, which pitted the forces of reason, enlightenment, nation/people, innovation and change against those of the eternal truths of the Church, of the sublime wisdom and beauty of ancient philosophy and art, of the divine rights of kings, of the ancient privileges of aristocracy and of the customs of fathers and grandfathers. It was related to the rise of commerce, capital and industry, built upon colonial accumulation overseas.
In a global perspective, two aspects of the European nation stand out. One is its anchorage in a popular and territorial history, distinguished from the landed property of princely power. The other is its heavy, distinctive cultural load, with spoken language at its core. Standardizing and homogenizing a national language was a central part of national political programmes, of ‘making Italians’ and turning ‘peasants into Frenchmen’, as Eugene Weber’s beautiful book names it.34 The creation of a national language through dialect selection and grammatical and orthographic codification became a major task of European small-nation intellectuals in the nineteenth century, from the Balkans to Norway. Where possible, minority languages were driven out of national culture.
The settler states of the Americas had to create new nations, which mythologically and emblematically, of course, drew upon historical examples as symbolic resources – ancient European republicanism in the case of the United States, historical Catholic experiences and pre-Columbian (e.g. Inca and Aztec) high culture in Hispanic America – but which claimed no ethno-cultural territorial history and shared their language with the colonial metropolis.
Most distinctive of the New World was its conception of the nation as a club to which desirable members could and should be recruited. Targeted immigration from Europe was a major dimension of nation-formation. ‘To govern is to populate’, a prominent mid-nineteenth-century Argentine politician and politician, Juan Bautista Alberdi, said.35 Particularly in Latin American discourse – in Brazil as well as, for instance, in Argentina – this club-member recruitment was explicitly referred to as ‘whitening’ or ‘civilizing’ the nation.36 For a long time, only people of external, European descent were regarded as a full citizens of the new nations of the Americas and Australia.
Nations of the Colonial Zone constitute a third variety, nations identified as ex-colonies. There were no historical territories, no singular historical peoples, only colonial boundaries. In a rare wise decision, African nationalist leaders decided to accept all such boundaries, however arbitrary and culturally divisive. Ali Jinnah did not, and British India, which was larger than any pre-colonial state of India, broke up into India – which Nehru refused to call ‘Hindustan’ – Pakistan and Bangladesh, through terrible pogroms and wars of divorce.
The maintenance of the colonial language is arguably the most ostentatious legacy of the colonial pathway to modernity, with its ensuing complicated and hierarchical relations of nation and culture, though also pragmatically practical in multilingual nations – such as Nigeria, with 400 to 500 languages according to different estimates,37 or India, which has at least 122, according to a recent linguistic census analysis.*
The European notion that a nation is defined by its language could not be applied in the ex-colonies. When it was, as in Pakistan, it had disastrous results, from 1952 bitterly dividing the Bengali east to the Urdu-promoting leaders of West Pakistan, where the Mughal hybrid of Urdu was not the majority mother tongue either.38
A general legacy of anti-colonialism is a strong nationalism as the decisive modern mass politics. Post-colonial culture also tends to be starkly divided between elite and mass culture. Elite culture is usually conducted in the language of the former colonial power, a language which the majority of the population does not understand. In the capital city, the colonial divide is usually reproduced, the post-colonial elite taking over the official buildings and the private mansions and villas of the colonizers. Colonial administrative practices tend to be kept, although often subverted by corruption and/or lack of state resources.
Traditional authorities and rituals tend to persist, drawing upon both their colonial institutionalization and their national credentials. In spite of their use in colonial indirect rule, traditional leaders were often incorporated into modern anti-colonial nationalism. The founding programme (from 1948) of the radical Convention People’s Party in Ghana, for instance, demanded as its first objective ‘independence for the people of Ghana and their Odikros [traditional rulers]’.39 Modern Malay nationalism, as the national Tunku Abdul Rahman Memorial museum in Kuala Lumpur narrates, started after World War II as a protest against British plans to reduce the powers of the traditional rulers and to institute an equal colonial citizenship for Malays, Chinese and Tamils alike. Independent India, on the other hand, did away with the princely states of India.
The nation of reactive modernization is the pre-modern realm, defined by the writ of the prince, the emperor, the king or the sultan. This was how the successful modernizers of Meiji Japan saw it, as did the less successful rulers of Siam and Abyssinia and the soon-defeated modernizers of Joseon Korea, Qing China and the Ottoman empire. It was a historical legacy of rule, synonymous with its ruling dynasty, who often (though not in Japan) gave the realm its everyday name. The modern task here was not national emancipation but building the realm into a nation. In Japan this was greatly facilitated by the high ethnic homogeneity of the country and the low salience of intertwined religions. The most important measure of national unification was the abolition of the feudal daimyo domains, returning their lands ‘to the emperor’. The Meiji modernizers built a modern Japanese nation around the symbol and mystique of the Emperor, whose status, but not his power, was more and more exalted as the modernization process progressed, culminating in the 1930s and during the Pacific War.
In Japan and Thailand in the twenty-first century, the monarch is a sublime national icon, in comparison with which even British monarchical deference and protocol pale into civic celebrity – but an icon of the nation, not the owner of the land. The great modernizer of Siam, King Chulalongkorn (Rama V), has even become a figure of religious devotion, as I noticed at his equestrian statue in Bangkok in 2007.
National language and culture were not primary issues. They were given by the realm, although the status of Sinic civilization and culture came to suffer from the recurrent defeats of China. They became primary when the Turkish nation succeeded the failed Ottoman empire.
The national capitals coming out of emancipation from colonialism and from reactive modernization both have a tendential duality, abruptly juxtaposing urbanistic elements from different civilizations. The hegemonic combination is different, though. The centre of the colonial city was built by the conquerors and then taken over by the ex-colonized, de facto reproducing the characteristic duality of the colonial city. The centre of reactive modernization – usually the princely palace and its surroundings – remained in native hands, though ‘modernized’ by foreign imports of style and amenities. Paraphrasing the doctrine of socialist realism, we may say that it was foreign in form and native in content.
The two great hybrids

The meandering of actual history is rarely captured by the straight lines of scholarly ideal types. In the history of modernity there are two great hybrids weighing heavily on the twentieth- and twenty-first-century worlds: Russia and China. Russia was a part of Europe from the time when the latter was still subsumed under the worldview of Christianity. In the fifteenth century, a Muscovite prince married a Byzantine princess and invited Italian architects to the Kremlin to bolster a claim to being a Third Rome. Peter I had learnt about the modern world in the Netherlands, and in the later eighteenth century the court of Catherine II was part of the Francophone Enlightenment, harbouring Denis Diderot as the court philosophe. In the nineteenth century, Tsarist Russia became a European precursor of the global Cold War United States, the gendarme of last resort against any rebellions against the status quo. Inside Russia there also developed powerful currents of the European labour movement, Marxist social democracy.
However, Russia was also an underdeveloped part of Europe, and among its ruling elite self-consciously so, from Peter I to Lenin. Reactive modernization—catching up with resourceful enemies—was a second crucial part of the Russian path to modernity, from Peter’s use of his absolutist power to build the city of Saint Petersburg rather than a Peterhof replica of Versailles, to Lenin’s and Stalin’s conceptions of socialism as electrification and breakneck industrialization, respectively.
Late imperial Qing China did attempt some reactive modernization, without much success as the devastating imperialist invasion of Beijing in 1900 brought home. Nevertheless, China was never properly colonized; no alien governor-general ever ruled it. But it was partially colonized: its main ports were largely foreign imperialist ‘concessions’ and a major revenue source, the Customs, was controlled by an inter-imperialist consortium.
The hybridity of China included a third, non-negligible component, an offshoot from European class structuration and mobilization. The Communist Party of China has undergone multiple mutations, but its ultimately successful character of a Marxist class organization derives from Europe and the European labour movement, transmitted through the Comintern (the Communist International) in the 1920s.
While post-Ottoman Turkey may be seen as a late case of reactive modernization, after the failed half-hearted Sultanate attempts, Egypt, an autonomous important area of the empire, had to experience the mutation of extravagant khedival modernization into semi-colonial bondage.
Summing up

Nation-states constituted tipping-points of modernity, creating a political space of open horizons of action regardless of whether the nation saw itself as rooted in ancestral territory and culture or not. At their very core of nation conception and constitution, nation-states arose out of very different kinds of power constellations, following from their history of development. Their capital cities have varied accordingly, in ways never before explored systematically, if at all.
There were four main routes to national statehood:
1.The European road: externally overdetermined internal reform or revolution
2.The ‘New Worlds’ of European settlers seceding from the motherland: outgrowing European traditions
3.The colonial road to independence: turning colonial modernity against the colonizers
4.Reactive modernization from above: defending the realm in a new way against novel challenges
These pathways may also be seen as ideal-type trajectories, which may be combined in a given country. The two main centres of twentieth-century Communism – Russia and China – were the two great hybrids of modern state formation. My hypothesis is that this nation/modernity hybridity was crucial to the victories of Communism in Russia and in China, but that is another story.
Furthermore, the new national capital cities bear witness not only to the context of nation-state formation, but also to its political process, whether ruptural or gradual. Did the nation-state arise out of a ruptural violent conflict, a revolution, a civil war, a war of independence, or did it grow into being through an accumulation of gradual shifts of power, or, alternatively, through negotiated transfer?
In the next chapter we shall investigate the constitution and construction of the major capitals along the four major routes of nation-state formation. Later we shall look into how moments of popular and global challenge to the national elites have appeared in national capitals of different constitutive origins. The hybrids of Moscow and Beijing will be dealt with in a special chapter on the coming and going of Communism.