Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
T. S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock (1934)
The defining moment of the world in the twentieth century is 1914. There are other major watersheds, of course: the Russian Revolution, Hiroshima, the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the events of 1989—or the day that Tim Berners-Lee launched the notion of the World Wide Web. But August 1914 remains the century’s biggest rupture between what came before and what came after—a huge shock to the belief that had steadily grown from the end of the eighteenth century in Europe to the start of the twentieth, that progress was inevitable. “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime,” famously intoned British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey on 4 August 1914. He was essentially right. The First World War may have ended in 1918; but the lights of progress, global integration and economic expansion remained out until at least the 1950s—two generations later. And the earthquake of August 1914, with its consequences for international relationships, the decay of stable political structures and the rise of political extremism, was not just of European significance, but global.
It is sometimes said that the First World War did not end until 1945, or even until 1989. When the war officially ended, in 1918, the results set the stage for the next twenty years. The Germans deeply resented the Treaty of Versailles. Much of the map of Europe was redrawn by the victors in line with the theory that future wars could be prevented if ethnic groups had their own homeland; yet this created instability from the Baltic to the Balkans. The Russian Revolution of 1917 had sent shock waves through the world, and was then hijacked by a Stalin interested not in “socialist world revolution,” but in the forced industrialization and collectivization of the Soviet state. Meanwhile, festering German resentments and national shame helped to propel the rise of Hitler and his new variant of fascism—Nazism—which found easy recruits for its theories of racial purity and supremacy in the widespread contemporary European anti-Semitism and xenophobia fuelled by the Great Depression. Western ambivalence toward Nazi expansionism was given some oxygen by a desire to see a strong Germany settling the balance with Stalin’s Russia. Japan, too, was misunderstood—both its emerging power and its regional ambitions. The mistakes and hesitations culminated in the Second World War. And in the aftermath of that came the state of acrid tension that effectively held the balance of global power from the mid-1940s to 1989: the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Economically, the First World War left the world scarred in a way that it would never, to this day, entirely forget. The hyper-inflation that followed in Germany was not the first case in the world, nor the only example of hyperinflation in Europe at the time (Austria and the Soviet Union also suffered), but it was by far the most prominent case up to that point—and the most serious ever to have occurred in a major industrialized economy. The extraordinary consequences associated with hyperinflation were first systematically documented in Germany: repeated redenomination of the currency, the flight from cash and exponential increases in prices and interest rates. In 1922 the highest-denomination banknote in Germany was 50,000 marks; by 1923 it was 100 billion marks. The devastating experience burned itself into the folk memory of the German people, and even now, at several removes, it still arguably influences how Germans think and behave. The power of folk memories from the early decades of the twentieth century continues to stalk the world in other ways, too: what the Somme is to Britain and hyperinflation is to Germany, so the Great Depression is to contemporary America.
But from 1950, though there was no sudden “glad confident morning” for the world, signs emerged that the clouds were beginning to clear. One patch of blue sky was tariff reform. The first half of the twentieth century had seen the world throw up trade barriers with growing enthusiasm. America led in its isolationism and protectionism, and learned—the hard way—that isolation is not an option in the modern world, and that protectionism invites retaliation. As the US emerged from the horrors of the Second World War, it began the task of taking down the barriers erected over most of the preceding century. William J. Bernstein has unearthed a State Department report published in 1945—Proposals for the Expansion of Trade and Employment—that, as he says, effectively sets out the road map for today’s globalized economy. The key task that the authors identified was to negotiate the unravelling of the protectionism that had increasingly crippled international commerce since 1880. In early 1947, trade officials from twenty-two nations met in Geneva using the State Department proposals as their starting point. On 17 November 1947 the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was signed by all participants. GATT, perhaps against the odds, flourished through many rounds of successive talks culminating in the Uruguay Round in 1986, after which the process was handed to the World Trade Organization. The average applied tariff level of the US, UK, France and Germany had risen from around 15 percent in 1913 to around 30 percent in 1932; since 1945 it has fallen significantly, and now sits at something less than 5 percent. The effect of this on trade has been dramatic. If the nineteenth century saw trade expand owing to reduced transport costs, in the twentieth it was owing chiefly to plummeting tariffs.
If tariff reform unblocked the flow of world trade, then the liberalization of capital markets that followed it unblocked the flow of money. One of the opening acts of Margaret Thatcher’s new government in 1979 was the abolition of UK exchange controls. Seven years later came “Big Bang,” a root-and-branch reform of the London capital markets. The effects were dramatic. London’s place as a financial capital was decisively strengthened; this was the beginning of its role as the great intellectual crossroads of a globalizing world economy (of which more later). Ronald Reagan’s administration followed Thatcher’s lead. Country after country loosened up its regulations, not necessarily completely; but the effect was a significant increase in the freedom of capital flows across borders throughout much of the world.
Then the last decade of the century saw radical change sweep through what became known—rather significantly—as the emerging markets. And no change was more radical or more important than the return of China to full participation in the global bazaar. Deng Xiaoping was confirmed as paramount leader in December 1978. His new, pragmatic, leadership emphasized economic development and renounced mass political movements. Immediately he launched the “Four Modernizations”: the modernization of agriculture, industry and science and technology, as well as the military. The aim was clear: to turn China into an uncompromisingly modern industrial nation. And the strategy had a description: “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” It opened a new era in Chinese history.
Deng emphasized that socialism did not mean shared poverty, and policies should not be rejected on the grounds that they were similar to those found in capitalist nations. He allowed management of the macroeconomy through market mechanisms, and much of it was modelled on economic planning and control mechanisms in Western nations. At the local level, material incentives rather than political appeals were to be used to motivate the labour force, beginning with allowing peasants to earn extra income by selling the produce of their private plots on the free market. Local municipalities and provinces were free to invest in the industries that they considered most profitable, which encouraged investment in light manufacturing. Thus Deng’s reforms shifted China’s development strategy to emphasize light industry and export-led growth. Not for nothing has this period been described as China’s Industrial Revolution.
Then India, too, the largest democracy in the world, also began to open up, bringing hundreds of millions of people into the bazaar. By the early 1990s the Indian economy was on the brink of collapse. After a generation of bureaucratic state-planned development, the government was close to default, and foreign-exchange reserves had shrunk to the point that India could barely finance three weeks’ worth of imports. The government headed by Narasimha Rao launched reforms designed by finance minister Manmohan Singh, who later became prime minister, aimed at opening up the country to foreign investment, reforming capital markets, deregulating domestic business and liberalizing the trade regime. The impact of these reforms was clear. Total foreign investment in India began to rise, and economic growth accelerated. Foreign-exchange reserves rose from under $5 billion to over $100 billion within ten years.
The changes in China and India, together with the opening up of Eastern Europe and the demise of the Soviet Union, meant that some 3 billion people joined an increasingly connected global market. And, in the end, the striking characteristic of economic activity in the second half of the twentieth century is its staggering size and acceleration when compared with developments in previous centuries. The total amount of goods and services produced in that period may well have matched the cumulative total output over the whole of recorded human history up to then.
The twentieth century also saw an explosion of the world population—from 1.6 billion people at the beginning of the century to around 6.5 billion at the end. The last three decades have, moreover, seen a surge in migration again. The foreign-born population of the US, for example, is now at an all-time high, at nearly 40 million. There are now nineteen cities in the world with foreign-born populations of over 1 million (including London, Paris and nine US cities).
Simultaneously, the distribution of the world’s wealth has become more unequal. The richest quarter of the world population has seen its per capita GDP increase close to sixfold over the century, while per capita income for the poorest quarter has increased less than threefold. From a long-term historical perspective, this still represents a notable acceleration of income growth. Nevertheless, the levels of GDP per person toward the end of the century in many poor countries were in real terms still well below those already attained by the leading countries in 1900. The level of GDP per person in Africa in 1900 was about one-ninth of that of the leading countries at the time. But by 2000 the ratio was even lower, at about one-twentieth. Economic growth in the poorest countries over the 1990s was insufficient to reduce the absolute number in extreme poverty, which remains to this day at over 1 billion.
Nevertheless, recent studies have shown that over about the last thirty years the majority of the world’s poor have for the first time achieved income growth faster than in developed countries. Many populous economies, including Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia, have experienced strong real per capita GDP growth over the last two decades, notwithstanding the Asian crisis of the late 1990s. But it is China and India that have really made the difference. Together they account for almost 40 percent of the world’s population, and both were formerly extremely poor. Their rapid recent economic progress, consequent on their policy reforms of the last two decades, has had a clear impact on development statistics.
The experience of transformation in China and India in the last twenty years has received increasingly rapt attention and analysis because of their sheer size. Both nations wield increasing diplomatic clout in the international corridors of power. Their emergence on the world stage is profoundly changing international relationships—and indeed our whole understanding of human history and development. For the West, this is quite as radical a change as was ushered in for Europeans by the discovery of the New World. And its impact will become clear more quickly.
There are many obvious differences between China and India. But the prevailing clichés about their differences oversimplify both these countries. It is too easy to define the difference between their development paths as top-down versus bottom-up and then ask which system of government is able to achieve more rapid and more sustainable economic growth.
The contrast is frequently drawn between, on the one hand, India’s long tradition of intellectual tolerance, voluble public debate and political pluralism and, on the other hand, a homogenous and centralized China. But this is too simple in a world of increasingly internet-based pluralism. In December 2008, China’s online population stood at 290 million—around the same as the total population of the US. With the growth in online users has come a rise in the number of bloggers. The Internet Society of China—a body that represents firms such as service providers, network access carriers and research institutes—estimates the number of bloggers in China at 50 million, and states that “More and more Chinese want to express their own views about local and international events through the Internet.” It is clear that there is plenty of grassroots vibrancy in the Chinese economy and in its society. Pluralist expression unquestionably impacts on official policy and action. Leonard Woodcock, the first American ambassador in Beijing after the establishment of official relations in 1972, once reflected that, during his lifetime, women in his own country had been denied the vote, labour had not been allowed to organize, and racial discrimination had been legally protected. “As time passed, we made progress, and I doubt if lectures or threats from foreigners would have moved things faster.” Meanwhile, most Indians recognize—and will typically accept—what they sometimes refer to as the “democratic discount” in their country’s rate of growth compared with that of China.
In other respects, too, there are differences at one level but similarities that are easier to overlook. China faces a demographic time bomb. Because of the one-child policy, it is often noted that it is the first country in history that will grow old before it grows rich. According to the OECD, births in Beijing may already be down to 1.4–1.5 per woman; in Shanghai the ratio appears to be 0.96 births per female. The population is ageing, and in 2025 the average age in China will be 40, having been 27 in 1995. In consequence, care of the elderly is clearly becoming a major policy issue in China, given the extent to which most of the country’s poor have always depended on working members of their family for support in their old age.
In India, the demographic forecast is in one sense brighter in the near term: birth rates are high, and the average age is coming down. On some estimates, by 2025 it is likely that more than 67 percent of the total 1.4 billion-strong Indian population will be between 15 and 64—a potential workforce as much as 36 percent greater than in 2005. India will then have a lower average age than Europe, the US, Japan or China. This demographic dynamic is likely to make India highly attractive for investment, so long as the challenge of education is met. However, in the longer term, India has to go through a transition to demographic stability of its own. This will not be easy in a country where coercive population control is politically inconceivable and that is already one of the most crowded on the planet.
Both the Indian and the Chinese economies are powerhouses with huge potential. The economic fundamentals of both nations, with their enormous pools of rural labour, point to strong growth for decades ahead. But there are obvious dangers, too. The path of economic growth rarely runs smoothly. Financial crashes, coups, political strife and plain bad management have derailed many other so-called miracle economies, from South East Asia to Latin America. And the same huge populations that can translate into economic power could prove to be a double-edged sword if social, political and environmental challenges are not deftly managed. Both China and India need rapid annual growth to provide jobs for the millions joining the urban workforce each year. Even if India grows at a highly respectable 6.5 percent a year, it is estimated that there could be an increase of 70 million unemployed by 2012. For similar reasons, Beijing has kept stoking its economy, and the conventional wisdom is that for the foreseeable future China needs growth of above 7 percent a year on average to create enough urban jobs to absorb migration from the countryside to the cities.
Environmental challenges loom large in both countries. A crucial problem is likely to be water. The two major rivers of both countries have their sources in the ice of a 35,000 km2 area of the Himalayas. The strategic scarcity of a resource that most humans have regarded as free for millennia will loom larger and larger in both countries’ list of economic development challenges in the next few decades. Also, both countries have paid a steep ecological price for rapid industrial and population growth, with huge numbers of deaths attributed to air and water pollution each year. Air quality in big cities like Chongqing and New Delhi is among the world’s worst. And forest cover is vanishing at alarming rates. Enforcement of environmental laws in both nations has been patchy. Many power plants and factories depend on coal and have not invested in clean technologies. Western travellers are often shocked by the resulting pollution. They perhaps forget that their own cities were once like this; photographs of London or Paris fifty years ago would remind them of a time when the civic and cultural monuments they are so familiar with were black with soot.
It is not surprising, therefore, that in both cases there are health concerns, too. Both India and China support vast agglomerations of people in their biggest cities. Both are at some risk of epidemics of AIDS, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases. And a serious flu epidemic could kill millions in both countries.
None of these challenges is unique to these two huge countries. Indeed, the effects of urbanization are obvious in virtually every emerging economy in the world. The rapid urbanization of the world’s population over the twentieth century is measured statistically in the 2007 revision of the UN World Urbanization Prospects report. Globally, virtually all future population growth will take place in cities, especially in Asia, Africa and Latin America. By about 2030, four out of five of the world’s urban dwellers will live in the developing world’s towns and cities. In Asia and Africa, this growth will signal a major shift from rural to urban growth, changing a millennia-long pattern. Globally, the urban population rose from 29 percent of the total in 1950 to 46 percent in 2000, and it is predicted to reach 70 percent—or over 6 billion people—by 2050. From 2008, more than half the people in the world were living in cities.
This urban transformation of the world is the most important social, political and cultural consequence of globalization. In one sense, we are too familiar with it; we need to draw breath and appreciate the sheer enormity of what is happening to the human species. Again, inevitably the statistics are heavily impacted by India and China. India, in the last sixty years, has seen the shift of some 300 million people from villages to cities. In 1947 India’s urban population was 60 million; and in 2008 it is estimated to have passed 360 million. It will increase by another 500 million over the next four decades. In percentage terms, there was a rise from 17 percent urbanization in 1950 to 28 percent in 2000, and the projected figure for 2050 is 55 percent.
In China the percentage of people living in cities is growing even more rapidly: from 13 percent in 1950 to 36 percent in 2000 to a projected 73 percent in 2050. It is the largest demographic shift in the history of humankind. And it is worth noting that, by the standards of history, this is a shift that has occurred remarkably smoothly. Compared to the terrible conditions in, say, the Manchester slums in the nineteenth century, where the mortality rate in under-five-years-olds was 50 percent, or to the horrors of the Soviet Union under Stalin’s forced urbanization between the wars, what has happened in China in the last quarter-century is a remarkably peaceful—but no less radical—transformation.
There is some way to go. China is at most halfway through the urbanization process. India is at an even earlier stage. And others are transforming themselves, too. Vietnam, for example, was 24 percent urbanized in 2000, and is heading for 57 percent by 2050; and in the same time span Bangladesh is moving from 24 percent to 56 percent. Urban populations will at least double in every developing region. Everywhere the story is the same—and its political, social, economic, cultural and psychological implications are profound.
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Cities embody the drive of humanity for connectedness—for society, convenience, stimulation and wealth. And what do people want when they arrive in these vastly expanding conglomerations of the developing world? When they get the voice and the means what do they ask for? The answer is that they want the same things everywhere: air conditioners, fridges, TVs, mopeds, cars ... If you try to cross the street in Hanoi, there are thousands of mopeds. You stand on the curb waiting for a gap, but you never get one. So eventually you cross the road anyway, and you find that, lo and behold, they all flow around you like water, but without touching you, and you walk perfectly safely. In Shanghai and in Mumbai the traffic jams are legendary. If either India or China had as many cars per head as there are in the US, it would have as many cars as exist currently on the planet.
But it is not just material conditions that are changing for so many people in so many cities. The social and psychological ramifications of urbanization, too, are profound and global in their impact. The beginnings of academic sociology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were in many ways influenced by the desire to explain the effects both of commerce and of urbanization on individuals and their social relationships. German sociologists Georg Simmel and Ferdinand Tönnies wrote critical works on individualization and urbanization. As we saw in the last chapter, Simmel focused on how relationships become more and more mediated through money. Tönnies’s Community and Society (1887) concentrated on the loss of primary relationships such as familial bonds in favour of goal-oriented secondary relationships. Humanity’s instinct for commerce and the exchange society lies behind the growth of cities, and as more people enter the global bazaar, urbanization is speeding up. With urbanization comes change to their whole way of viewing the world, bringing both opportunity and discomfort. In cities, some of the streets are paved with gold and others are open sewers. In a lecture entitled Possible Urban Worlds (2000), the social theorist David Harvey—Professor of Anthropology at City University, New York—delivered an excoriating assessment of the modern city:
Every city now has its share (often increasing and in some instances predominant) of concentrated impoverishment and human hopelessness, of malnourishment and chronic disease, of crumbling or stressed out infrastructures, of senseless and wasteful consumerism, of ecological degradation and excessive pollution, of congestion, of seemingly stymied economic and human development and of sometimes bitter social strife ... For many, then, to talk of the city of the twenty-first century is to conjure up a dystopian nightmare in which all that is judged worst in the fatally flawed character of humanity collects together in some hell-hole of despair.
His is an extreme view. But many have analysed the breakdown of security when rural family and village structures give way to urban chaos. Along with the freedoms and potential of individualization come the anxieties of atomization, in which support systems vanish and “to each his own” becomes both a promise and a threat. The implications for communitarian life, art, government and—ultimately—human fulfilment are profound. And therefore any realistic assessment of progress in the development of the world’s emerging economies will inevitably be superficial unless based on a clear recognition of how urbanization will change them to the core.
To see this we have to traverse the history of urbanization, for the roots and differing patterns of the phenomenon tell us a lot. The earliest evidence of true urban settlements dates from around 3000 BC, in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus valley. As cities evolved, they typically displayed both “organic” and “planned” types of urban development. These communities had intricate religious, social and military organizations. Separate areas intended for the business of the ruling elite were often highly planned, symmetrical and imposing. These were in sharp contrast to ordinary residential areas, which were generally allowed to grow by a slow and organic process. Two typical features of the ancient city are the wall and the citadel: the wall for defence in regions periodically swept by conquering armies, and the citadel—a large, elevated precinct within the city—devoted to religious and state functions. Cities growing slowly from older settlements were often irregular, adapting gradually to the accidents of topography and history. Colonial cities, however, were sometimes planned before settlement, using a grid system—easy to design, and practical since it parcels land into suitable development plots.
The Romans engaged in extensive city-building in this manner as they consolidated their empire. Rome itself displayed the informal complexity created by centuries of organic growth, although temple and public spaces were highly planned. In contrast, Roman colonial towns built from poor or nonexistent bases were very often constructed on a grid pattern or a variation of it. European cities such as London and Paris arose from these Roman origins. Many Chinese cities, too—notably Beijing and Nanjing—were developed on basically similar lines.
However, we usually associate the medieval cities of Europe with narrow winding streets converging on a market square with a cathedral and a city hall. Many cities of this period display this pattern, the product of thousands of incremental additions to the urban fabric, while new towns seeded throughout undeveloped regions of Europe were based upon the familiar grid (Bruges for example). Large encircling walls were built for defence against hostile armies; new walls were built as the city expanded and outgrew its former area. During the Renaissance, architects began to treat the city itself as a piece of architecture that could be given an aesthetically pleasing order. Many of the great public spaces of Italian cities date from this era. With the emergence of great nation states from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century came the baroque city. Ambitious rulers sought the grand scale: long avenues, monumental squares and gardens. Paris, Berlin and Madrid all bear witness to such aspirations—as, in a republican context, does Washington DC.
Toward the latter half of the eighteenth century, however, particularly in America, the city became a setting for commerce. The buildings of the bourgeoisie expanded along with their owners’ prosperity: banks, office buildings, warehouses, hotels and small factories. New York, Philadelphia and Boston around 1920 exemplify the commercial city of this era, with their bustling, mixed-use waterfront districts.
For the first time in a thousand years or more, whole new cities sprang up out of next to nowhere because of industrialization—classic examples are Birmingham in the UK and Essen in Germany, both just tiny villages before the nineteenth century. Shanghai is another example, and a twenty-first century equivalent is Shenzhen (1984 population around 40,000; present population at least 8 million).
It has always been the case, and remains so to this day, that cities act as a magnet or vortex. And the magnet continues to work despite the rapid spread of the Internet. Those who expected physical proximity to be rendered redundant by virtual connectivity seem to have been wrong. Today’s fastest growing cities have an average annual growth rate of between 4 and 5 percent—in other words they will double in size in twenty years, if growth continues at that pace. Even to the most travel-worn of world citizen their names are exotic—Behai (China), Ghaziabad (India), Sana’a (Yemen), Surat (India)—to take just the top four from the latest World’s Fastest Growing Cities index. The lure of the possible, the promise of the bright lights—they have always exerted a powerful fascination over the human mind.
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The early twentieth century excited itself about the megapolis of the future, and drew up plans for it. In 1922 Le Corbusier presented his scheme for a “Contemporary City” for 3 million inhabitants. With its sixty-storey, cruciform skyscrapers, rectangular parklike green spaces and huge central, multilevel transportation centre—including stations for buses and trains, road intersections and an airport—this was conceptual elegance on an inhuman and artificial scale: the city as machine rather than organism. By contrast, the best current example of a global megalopolis, London, has grown into this role—not assumed it by design. London is the world’s purest example of a world city: it is quintessentially organic, open and kaleidoscopic, and constantly growing outward culturally from its deep roots in the past.
When the Romans invaded Britain in AD 43, they moved north from the Kentish coast and crossed the Thames in the London region—probably at present-day Lambeth—clashing with the local tribesmen just beyond it. Around seven years later they built a permanent wooden bridge, just east of the present London Bridge. This wooden bridge attracted settlers, became a focal point of the Roman road system and was central to London’s subsequent growth. Though the regularity of London’s original street grid may indicate that the initial inhabitants were from a military background, trade and commerce soon followed. There were many attractions: among them the fact that the river was deep enough for ships and the surrounding land was relatively well drained, flat and accessible, with plentiful supplies of clay for brick-making. There was soon a flourishing commercial centre.
By the Middle Ages, London had become a maze of twisting streets and lanes. There was little sign left of the Roman military grid. Most of the houses were half-timbered, or wattle and daub, whitewashed with lime. The danger of fire was constant, and laws were passed to make sure that all householders had firefighting equipment on hand. Plague, too, was a constant threat, because sanitation was so rudimentary. (London was subject to no fewer than sixteen outbreaks of plague between 1348 and the Great Plague of 1665.) City government came under the leadership of the Lord Mayor and council, all of whom were elected from the ranks of the merchant guilds. These guilds ran all the main channels of commerce, amassed huge reserves of wealth and controlled the city. Each guild had its own hall, and together they had one resplendent meeting place, the Guildhall. There was a real sense that the city was a law unto itself. Royal power was based upstream at Whitehall, and largely left London to its own devices.
The current vitality of London builds on its historic connections, via immigration and trade, to all the corners of the world. On the corner of Fournier Street and Brick Lane in Spitalfields, just to the east of the City, stands the Jamme Masjid mosque, one of the most striking symbols of the fluidity of London’s population. The building has been used for over two and a half centuries as a place of worship for the people of Spitalfields, but the communities assembling within its walls have changed with successive waves of immigration. In 1743, the building started its life as a chapel for the Huguenots who had fled from France in the seventeenth century. In 1819 it became a Wesleyan chapel, but from 1897 the building housed the Spitalfields Great Synagogue, serving the Jewish community who had come to London following pogroms in Eastern Europe. Then it became a mosque and was sold to the Bengali community in 1976. Arguably the very word “refugee” is ingrained in the history of the city: it was coined to describe the Huguenot immigrants seeking refuge from persecution in France.
Britain’s borders have historically been open ones; Holbein, Handel, Brunel, Marx and T. S. Eliot were all immigrants. In 1867, Samuel Smiles referred to London as “the world’s asylum, the refuge of the persecuted of all lands ... one of the most composite populations found in the world.” And an editorial in the Times on 19 January 1858 declared that “every civilized people on the face of the earth must be fully aware that this country is the asylum of nations, and that it would defend the asylum to the last drop of its blood. There is no point on which we are prouder or more resolute [...] we are a nation of refugees.” And most of them came to London.
As a trading centre, too, London reached out to the world, and it has always been sensitive to the winds of change. On the wall of the Court Room at the Bank of England is a dial linked to a weather vane on the building’s roof. Knowing the direction of the wind was critical to monetary policy at the time it was installed, in 1805. If the wind was coming from the east, goods would be coming into the London docks and traders would need a plentiful supply of money. Conversely, if a westerly was blowing, the bank would need to rein in the supply of money to counteract inflationary pressures.
In the late eighteenth century, trade in London gradually assumed the importance (and some of the pomp and circumstance) normally reserved for the Church or the monarchy. The inscription on the West India Dock Foundation Stone needs to be savoured slowly and in full. From the roller coaster of our modern high-speed economy, it is still fleetingly possible to sense from its florid language an older world of moral certainties and optimism about progress, based on industry and commerce:
Of this Range of BUILDINGS
Constructed together with the Adjacent DOCKS. At the Expence of
public spirited individuals
Under the Sanction of the provident Legislature,
And with the liberal Co-operation of the Corporate Body of the
CITY of LONDON
For the distinct Purpose
Of complete SECURITY and ample ACCOMMODATION
(hitherto not afforded)
To the SHIPPING and PRODUCE of the WEST INDIES
at this wealthy PORT
THE FIRST STONE WAS LAID
On Saturday the Twelfth Day of July A.D. 1800
BY THE CONCURRING HANDS OF
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE LORD LOUGHBOROUGH
LORD HIGH CHANCELLOR OF GREAT BRITAIN
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE WILLIAM PITT
FIRST LORD COMMISSIONER OF HIS MAJESTY’S
TREASURY AND CHANCELLOR OF HIS MAJESTY’S
EXCHEQUER
GEORGE HIBBERT Esq., THE CHAIRMAN and ROBERT
MILLIGAN Esq. THE DEPUTY CHAIRMAN
OF THE WEST INDIA DOCK COMPANY
The two former conspicuous in the Band of those illustrious Statesmen
Who in either House of Parliament have been zealous to promote
The two latter distinguished among those chosen to direct
AN UNDERTAKING
Which, under the favour of GOD, shall contribute
STABILITY, INCREASE and ORNAMENT
TO
BRITISH COMMERCE
Thus trade and finance have always been deeply involved in London’s evolution. Indeed, in the boom years of the financial markets in the first part of this decade, London sometimes felt like the very capital of the globalized world. It would be better, though, to describe it as its crossroads. It has some unique advantages—a critical one being the language.
The Oxford English Dictionary includes over 600,000 definitions, and many of them for words borrowed from other languages. The things that define London are also largely true of the language. More than ever before in the history of the world, English can now be called the lingua franca of the modern era: it is the primary language in more than thirty-five countries, and an official language (but not necessarily the most widely spoken) in at least thirty-five others. It is the world’s leading second language, and is rapidly absorbing aspects of cultures worldwide as it continues to grow. It has borrowed more words from more languages than any other language. It is, by international treaty, the official language for aerial and maritime communications, and an official language of the United Nations and of virtually all other international organizations. The “General Explanations” at the beginning of The Oxford English Dictionary state, “The vocabulary of a widely diffused and highly cultivated living language is not a fixed quantity circumscribed by definite limits ... there is absolutely no defining line in any direction: the circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernible circumference.”
There are other factors, too, that make London such an unusual crossroads—political stability, its legal system, its open markets and, as much as anything, its geographical position in the time zones: London is on the prime meridian. From London it is possible to work a normal day and talk to Tokyo in the morning and Los Angeles in the afternoon. One way and another, and without a conscious strategy, over the past twenty-five years London has turned itself into an international marketplace. People have flocked to it from every corner of the world and in every socioeconomic bracket. Over 30 percent of London residents were born outside the country, and there are 33 different communities consisting of more than 10,000 people born outside the country.
And so London has become a cultural—as well as commercial—crossroads of the world. More than 275 languages are regularly spoken in the city. The diversity of influences and traditions has shaped the city’s culture into what it is today. The city is an international centre for arts, music, festivals, museums and much more. Just one example of many: the British Museum is the world’s largest museum of human history, culture and art. Every cuisine in the world can now be found in London—even British cuisine has managed to shed its unappealing image and can be found in expensive and fashionable restaurants.
True world cities today are still few—arguably just London, New York and Paris. But what is it that makes a great world city? The key characteristics surely include active influence on and participation in international events and world affairs; a large population including significant international communities; major travel, communications and financial hubs; world-renowned cultural institutions and universities; a lively cultural scene, including arts festivals, theatre and opera; powerful and influential media with international reach; and strong sporting interests, including world-class sports facilities able to host major international events. If these are the ingredients that make for a world city, then the next few generations will see other world cities emerge in Asia and elsewhere.
But such world cities are only the apex of urbanization. Much more generally, it is as if the human experience of urbanization is changing consciousness itself. Urbanization seems to embody Teilhard de Chardin’s ideas: in his world view, as evolution progresses, so there is a continual increase of both complexity and consciousness. For Teilhard the socialization of humankind is a crucial stage of this process. The finite and spherical surface of the earth contributes to the increased compaction and socialization of humankind and to the emergence of the noosphere. Urbanization is arguably the quintessential manifestation of this process. The ambiguity of its effects on human beings mirrors Teilhard’s ambivalence about the process itself.
Put another way, when people get together in cities and form countless intricate webs, they seem to acquire a new life force; they become more unpredictable, uncontrollable and powerful than the stable communities of settled rural life. Cities tend to be hotbeds of popular movement, and hard for authorities to deal with. The Romans, from early on, understood the power of the people of the city. The initials “SPQR” that still appear all over Roman imperial buildings, from the Latin “Senatus Populusque Romanus” (“the Senate and Roman People”), were a standing reminder that authority depended on at least the acquiescence of the people. Government of all kinds—absolutist, centralist, democratic—has been reminded of this time and again down the ages. One of the best examples of a city with a life of its own, with a people power that often erupts onto the streets to traumatize the politicians and rulers, is Paris. Few centuries have gone by without their share of Parisian upheavals; from the Hundred Years War, to the nineteenth-century barricades, through to present times.
Adolf Hitler always hated Berlin, a city that never produced a majority for the Nazis and that stood for everything he loathed. (The feeling was mutual.) In his 2002 biography Hitler, Joachim Fest describes the leader’s antipathy:
The hectic madness of Berlin, which was then entering its famous, or notorious, twenties, only heightened Hitler’s dislike of the city. He despised its greed and its frivolity, comparing conditions there with those of declining Rome in the Late Empire. There, too, he said, “racially alien Christianity” had taken advantage of the city’s weakness, as Bolshevism today was battening on the moral decay of Germany. The speeches of those early years are full of attacks upon metropolitan vice, corruption, and excess, as he had observed them on the glittering pavements of Friedrichstrasse or the Kurfuerstendamm.
Cities, in short, have always represented a challenge to official power. Why? Not just because of the logistical difficulties of controlling large mobs in confined spaces (a consideration that famously lay behind Haussmann’s remodelling of Paris in the 1860s). More fundamentally, it is because of the challenge they represent to any form of settled social structure. They are natural cauldrons of atomization—constantly tending to break down pre-existing structures and allowing new relationships to form and then re-form. It is this atomization that led to the preoccupation amongst sociologists and in literature with that very modern human condition—alienation.
In critical social theory, “alienation” refers to an individual’s estrangement from “the other”—from traditional community, from our environment, from others in general. For Marx, alienation was a systematic result of capitalism, in which what naturally belongs together is forced apart, and what is properly in harmony is set in antagonistic tension. People are alienated from essential aspects of their own human nature. For Marx, economic conditions lay at the root of this disorder: under the conditions of capitalistic industrial production, workers inevitably lose control of their lives and selves, since they have no control over their work. Workers never become autonomous, self-realized human beings in any individualized sense. Alienation in capitalist societies occurs because work no longer takes place in and around the cottage, but in regimented factories where people are made to work for almost all their waking hours and for wages that are as low as the capitalist owner can get away with. So old structures are destroyed. The new structures alienate. This for Marx was the essence of urban commercial and capitalist life.
For Simmel, the metropolis was a place that altered how the individual interacted with other individuals. Differently from Marx, he focused on how the individualization made possible by the city created alienation. The atomism of modern urban society means that individuals have an ever wider range of ever shallower relations with other people. The result, eventually, is the notorious loneliness in the crowd that cities make possible. The growth of the city, and the brevity and scarcity of the inter-human contacts of the metropolitan dweller, as compared to the stable social intercourse of the rural community, meant that individual self-awareness became a private matter as never before. In more integrated, preurban societies, individual self-awareness is a shared, socially shaped personality. But in urban experience individuals come to perceive themselves as “other than” the relationship they have with their environment—thus posing for the individual the question of how to react to this reality “out there.” The question can be psychologically liberating, but also unsettling.
From this follows an increasingly urgent psychological drive for self-actualization that manifests itself in the celebration of activity. Abraham Maslow, in his famous 1943 article “A Theory of Human Motivation,” defined self-actualization as “the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.” He believed that people who achieve self-actualization are characterized by certain behaviour patterns. Common traits include embracing reality and facts rather than denial, being spontaneous, having an interest in solving problems, and accepting oneself and others without prejudice. These look remarkably like key factors for success in the open, fluid environment of city life.
Self-actualization in this sense is the response of privatized self-awareness to what Simmel called the “objective culture” of the city. In Simmel’s view, social interaction—designed to elicit recognition, or at least awareness, from others—became an essential aspect of the individual response to alienation; it became another means of self-actualization, and would inevitably often take aggressive forms. In urban life, this becomes an existential imperative such as it never is in a more stable integrated rural life. It would be wrong, however, to see this in purely—or even primarily—negative terms. Simmel also argued, for example, that another manifestation of this essentially urban drive is romanticism. This might seem counterintuitive. However, he saw it as no coincidence that romanticism, with its celebration of the experience of nature, flourishes as cultures become urbanized. As Simmel puts it in The Philosophy of Money:
To be sure the distinctive aesthetic and romantic experience of nature is perhaps possible only through this process [of becoming remote from nature]. Whoever lives in direct contact with nature and knows no other form of life may enjoy its charm subjectively, but he lacks that distance from nature that is the basis for aesthetic contemplation and the root of that quiet sorrow, that feeling of yearning estrangement and of a lost paradise that characterizes the romantic response to nature.
For example, consider the semimystical contemplation of the cherry blossom that goes on every year in urbanized, crowded Japan. Or the enduring popularity of Pushkin and Shishkin in Russia; or of Constable and Elgar in England—all of them analogous yearnings of urbanized cultures. Simmel could have generalized the point: he might have argued that—to use his own terminology—the emergence of the objective culture as something “over and against” the individual was a fundamental reason why art generally is so much a product of urban life. Art requires distance—psychological distance—from “the other,” not just from nature, as the basis for aesthetic contemplation.
Self-actualization in urban culture can take other forms, too, of course. One, characteristic of mid-twentieth-century European literature, is existentialism. In Albert Camus’s existentialist novel The Stranger (1942), the bored, alienated protagonist, Meursault, struggles to construct an individual system of values as he responds to the disappearance of the old ones. He lives in a state of anomie—the complete loss of belief and purpose—which pervades the book from the opening line: “Today mother died. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.” When Meursault is prosecuted for shooting an Arab man during a fight, the prosecuting attorneys seem more interested in the inability or unwillingness of Meursault to cry at his mother’s funeral than in the murder of the Arab, because they find his lack of sorrow offensive. The novel ends with Meursault (defiantly?) recognizing the universe’s “sublime indifference” toward humankind. Meur-sault emerges at the start of the novel as a blunt and unfeeling individual. Ultimately, he accepts the world as essentially meaningless, such that the only way to arrive at any purpose is to make it for oneself. A very urban instinct.
Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf (1927) is another classic existentialist text. The “wolf from the steppes” is in fact a middle-aged man named Harry Haller, who is beset with reflections on his being ill-suited for the world of “everybody,” the regular people. He is given a book that describes the two natures of man: one “high,” spiritual and “human”; the other “low” and animal-like. Humanity, it seems, is cursed with perpetual discontent as it struggles blindly between one nature and the other, blind to any alternative possibilities. While Haller longs to break free, he in fact continues to live utterly conventionally as a bourgeois bachelor. He holds that the people of the Dark Ages did not suffer more than those of (an idealized) classical antiquity. Those who are trapped between the two suffer the most. It is hard to find a more striking image of the dilemma of individualization that is the essence of urban life than this wolf from the steppes imprisoned inside the bourgeois bachelor.
What then does this all amount to? We live in a globalizing, urbanizing world. Can this be the New Jerusalem? Certainly one line of thinking—the one that culminates in Fukuyama’s ending of history or Friedman’s “flat” world—would suggest that it is, or at least could be. The human trading instinct first emerged thousands of years ago, and subsequently underpinned the connections, empires, technologies, luxuries and culture of the modern world. Those trading instincts have led us into a world that even to our recent ancestors would have been a world of unimaginable privilege: a world where the individual freedom to transcend the bonds of poverty, ignorance, disease, psychological entrapment and social insignificance means that, for example, the Hawaii-born son of a Kenyan can dream of becoming a world changer; a world where people increasingly gather in great cities of millions or more in which every human luxury and need is available within half an hour to those who can afford it; a world where friends and families can remain connected even when separated by tens of thousands of miles for year after year; and a world where love can blossom between people of different languages and cultures as never before in history.
Or is this only half the picture, and a very rose-tinted one at that? Is the truth not much more frightening: a picture of humanity sleepwalking to disaster, dazed and drugged by its own self-indulgence? For we know how globalization and urbanization have also created huge consumption of increasingly scarce global resources; how humanity must face the possibility that it may be living on an unsustainable scale, which could see future generations gravely threatened; how bitter poverty still shackles hundreds of millions of people to brief lives of suffering and hopelessness; how the gap between these people and the wealthiest has got wider; how for even the majority who live in relative luxury there is a price to pay for fast cars and flat-screen televisions, the price of loneliness and nagging fear that it may all amount to nothing; and how there are still deep clashes between world views that stubbornly resist reasoned debate and inspire the suicide bombers and terror networks of the twenty-first century.
Is this progress? If so, it is certainly ambiguous progress. The development momentum is obvious—in the statistics, and to the astonished naked eye in so much of the developing world. Yet urbanization is so big a change, and so recent, that it is hard to grasp just how much it will change who we are. Individualization and social liberation are inextricably entwined with it. They seem to be goods facilitating self-actualization on a broader scale than ever before; yet they have an obvious shadow side.
Two hundred years before 1989 and the putative “end of history,” the French Revolution shook the Western world. This was one of the biggest political earthquakes of the whole of human history. It unleashed a quarter of a century of war in Europe; political turbulence that reverberated through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and controversy about human rights, the nature of society and the role of the state, the aftershocks of which are with us to this day. Wiser by far than those who thought of 1989 as the end of history was Zhou Enlai. When asked what were the consequences of the French Revolution, he replied, “It is too soon to tell.” And it is certainly too soon to assess an urban revolution of the whole species that is still in train.
What we know is that we fret about what is happening to us—whether we are rich or poor. In particular, as the first decade of a new century nears its close amid a financial and economic crisis that is the worst for nearly eighty years, globalized market capitalism is in the dock as it has not been for a generation. Wherever we are, this is certainly not the New Jerusalem. As we reflect on where we seem to be heading, we agonize—perhaps increasingly as economic difficulties deepen—over four key series of questions: (i) Is open-market capitalism—the engine of global growth for a generation—intrinsically unstable? If so, what should we do about it, and how should we police human commerce? (ii) What of the marginalized, both within fast-growing and mature economies and also those whole countries that have been left behind by globalization and remain mired in poverty? (iii) Can a finite planet cope? How long can humanity continue to consume resources at the level we currently do? (iv) Where does individualization lead? If everything has a price, what does this do to our sense of value? Of rights and duties? Of belonging? Of who we are?
These are the questions for the next three chapters.