Cities, Nationalism and Democratization

Scott A. Bollens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134111824
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Cities, Nationalism, and Democratization provides a theoretically informed, practice-oriented account of intercultural conflict and co-existence in cities. Bollens uses a wide-ranging set of over 100 interviews with local political and community leaders to investigate how popular urban policies can trigger 'pushes from below' that help nation-states address social and political challenges. The book brings the city and the urban scale into contemporary debates about democratic transformations in ethnically diverse countries. It connects the city, on conceptual and pragmatic levels, to two leading issues of today – the existence of competing and potentially destructive nationalistic allegiances and the limitations of democracy in multinational societies.

Bollens finds that cities and urbanists are not necessarily hemmed in by ethnic conflict and political gridlock, but can be proactive agents that stimulate the progress of societal normalization. The fuller potential of cities is in their ability to catalyze multinational democratization. Alternately, if cities are left unprotected and unmanaged, ethnic antagonists can fragment the city's collective interests in ways that slow down and confine the advancement of sustainable democracy. This book will be helpful to scholars, international organizations, and grassroots organizations in understanding why and how the peace-constitutive city emerges in some cases while it is misplaced and neglected in others.

1 The promise of the city¹

This is a study of cities in societies that have endured inter-group conflict, war, and major societal transformations. I test the proposition that cities in such societies are not necessarily inert receptacles dependent for change upon larger political and constitutional re-configurations. Rather, they may be critical spatial, economic, and psychological contributors to national ethnic stability and reconciliation. I examine in this book the capacity of urbanism to effectively address inter-group conflict in nationalistic settings and I probe the role of cities and urban policymakers in guiding societies and citizens during times of political change. In the first case, I study whether urban planning and policymaking can create built environments, provide economic opportunities, and deliver urban services in ways to create physical and psychological city spaces conducive to inter-group coexistence. In the second case, I study the utility of urbanism in leading, supporting, and/or reinforcing societal and political change, and I look for cases where urbanism constitutes a source of light that can help guide a society through the darkness of past memories and the uncertainty of the future.

I hypothesize that cities can be key elements in conflict—a target in attempts to destroy the fabric of a society, but also a necessary foundation on which to build a democratic, sustainable and peaceful society. I view cities as key bridges between broader ideologies (both malevolent and benign) and the psychological and material welfare of a society’s citizens. The city is important in peace-building because it is in the streets and neighborhoods of urban agglomerations that there is the negotiation over, and clarification of, abstract concepts such as democracy, fairness, and tolerance. Debates over proposed projects and discussion of physical place provide opportunities to anchor and negotiate dissonant meanings in a post-conflict society; indeed, there are few opportunities outside debates over urban life where these antagonistic impulses take such concrete forms in need of pragmatic negotiation. Peace-building in cities seeks not the well-publicized handshakes of national political elites, but rather the more mundane, yet ultimately more meaningful, handshakes and smiles of ethnically diverse urban neighbors as they confront each other in their daily interactions. As microcosms of broader societal fault-lines and tensions affecting a nation, cities are laboratories within which progressive inter-group strategies may be attempted and evaluated. By discovering and addressing in progressive ways peoples’ interactions in streets, neighborhoods, and cities, political leaders can develop policies that engage inter-group conflict at its living roots and inspire a more sustainable peace than one imposed through diplomatic formulas. I do not argue that the ultimate causes of inter-group conflict lie in cities; those causes in many politically contested cities lie in historic, religious, and territorial claims and counterclaims. What I do argue is that the most immediate and existential foundations of intergroup conflict frequently lie in daily life and across local ethnic divides and, importantly, that it is at this micro-level that antagonisms are most amenable to meaningful and practical strategies aimed at their amelioration.

Some cities in transitional and contested societies will play a peace-constitutive role. Others will not. Where local policies promote inter-group tolerance and accommodation, the city will help to anchor larger national peacemaking and building. Where local policies are impediments to advances in inter-group relations, the city will restrict and confine larger national peacemaking. I suspect that there may be a range of roles that urban regions play in societal rebuilding, and I seek to explain why some cities play a progressive role in shaping new societal paths while others do not. In those cases where urban-based peace-building is absent, I want to understand how and why the city was limited in contributing to peace, why and how such a role was misplaced or neglected, and how it may be resurrected. In these negative examples, political elites after active conflict has ended may carry on war through other means and exploit contested cities so that the general public interest fragments and collapses. Such a political attack on the capacity of cities to catalyze a future of mutual coexistence that is not wanted by ethnically entrenched political elites points not to the impotence of cities in the face of national conflict, but to the latent power of cities to influence societal change.

My hypothesis that cities can be semi-autonomous catalysts amidst larger societal conflict runs counter to prevailing state-centric notions that it is the high, diplomatic politics of nation-states that matter and that the roles of cities are limited and derivative. The academic literature on ethnic conflict management is strongly predisposed toward emphasis on the “high politics” of states and their promotion and protection of national interests. In this understanding, urban peace-building interventions must await advances in national peacemaking and in this way reflect and reinforce larger societal progress. I assuredly do not endeavor to dismiss the importance of national political factors in conflict management. Rather, I seek to develop a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the city vis-à-vis the state. I attempt this by observing whether there is variability in the roles of cities in nationalistic societies and by investigating the dynamics underlying either the potency or weakness of urban strategies.

MULTI-NATIONALISM AND DEMOCRATIZATION

This study provides an urban-based, grassroots perspective on two of the leading challenges of today: (1) the existence of competing nationalistic allegiances that can tear a society apart, and (2) the possibilities and limitations of democratization in multinational societies. Cities are fulcrums that can help move forward both multinational tolerance and democratization. To the extent that multiple cultures are effectively accommodated within the city, the prospects for a fuller democratic society are likely improved. Dahl (1998:185) lays bare this connection, asserting that the “nature and quality of democracy will greatly depend on the arrangements that democratic counties develop for dealing with the cultural diversity of their people.” Amidst the uncertainty inherent in a societal transition to democracy, the ability of local policies to address issues of group identity, fairness, freedom of expression, and opportunity can create the conditions upon which fuller, more genuine democratic accords can be brokered.

Democratization is no panacea (Sorenson 1998; Snyder 2000). Even if one accepts the legitimacy of democracy as a worthy societal goal, there remains the danger that the democratization process itself can be structured or manipulated by political leaders in ways that severely restrict and weaken the eventual democratic state. Further, as Snyder (2000) has shown, democratization can increase the risk of nationalistic conflict as well as avert it. The early years of building a democratic state tend to be the most tenuous because democratic governance is easier to start than to institutionalize (United Nations Development Program 2002). Democratization is subject to reversals and stagnation if the right conditions are not continually nurtured. Left open to influence by ruthless forces, democratization can lead to disaster as nationalist elites expertly utilize new opportunities to exacerbate nationalist fervor and inter-group conflict (Snyder 2000).

I investigate in this book an under-studied condition that may be conducive to healthy democratization and civic nationalism—the existence of local policies and principles that foster inter-group tolerance and mutual respect. My research connects urbanism and cities—on conceptual and pragmatic levels—to the possibilities and limitations of democratization discussed and analyzed widely today. I link urbanism to the dynamics and requirements of the different phases of democratization as they occur in a dividedsociety context. Debates in the literature about democratization confront issues of group identity (in particular, whether and how identity should be accommodated institutionally and culturally in a multinational society) and challenges of timing and phasing of democratic development (envisioning a fragile and reversible process of nondemocratic breakdown, democratic establishment, democratic consolidation). These issues of identity and phasing in the democratization debates and literature—until now not explicitly applied to the urban setting—provide the analytic lenses through which I examine my nationalistically robust and democratizing case study cities.

Without progressive and peace-constitutive city policies, national and international agreements that create democracy, while absolutely essential, in fact impose a set of abstract and often remote rules and institutions on the urban landscape. Such nationallevel negotiations often result in agreements at the political level, not at the level of daily interaction between ethnic groups and individuals. In contrast, urban strategies are capable of addressing the complex spatial, social-psychological, and organizational challenges of living together or alongside each other under a new political dispensation. Certainly, progressive urban actions that occur outside a framework or process of national peacemaking would likely fail. The argument here, rather, is that national political negotiations that lack an urban component are missing a key co-contributor to the formulation and operationalization of new political goals. Such a national peace, arranged by diplomats and societal elites, would be one detached from the practical and inflammatory challenges of inter-group and territorial relations. By literally bringing democracy to the streets, local policies can be central to the construction of new placebased political identities and possibilities for inter-group tolerance and acceptance.

Studying how city policymakers engage with inter-group issues presents a difficult challenge. Often, policies addressing ethnic, racial, and other urban groups are enacted by a city in incremental ways, are layered atop histories of multiple types of other city policies, and are thus hard to isolate and analyze. I looked for cities that needed to frontally face these ornery group-based issues. I found such cities in multinational societies that have experienced transitional periods of major societal uncertainty due to regime change or violent conflict. In these cities, the societal uncertainty associated with political transition forces policymakers to make an active and less haphazard decision about how they will address ethnicity, race, and nationality in the new post-transition society.

The unraveled nature of the cities and societies in this book makes them, in my opinion, clearer as objects of study. In some respects, cities that have gone through major societal disruptions and transformations may be said to be extreme cases. Far from being extraneous to the study of contemporary urbanity, however, such cities are central to debates about urbanism, democracy, and cultural diversity precisely because these challenges are fundamental to their future quality of existence.² Lessons from the case study cities in this book have wide relevance in today’s urban world. Indeed, the ethnic fracturing of many cities in North America and Western Europe owing to changing demographics, cultural radicalization, and migration creates situations of “public interest” fragility and cleavage similar to my case studies. In studying creative practical approaches toward difficult issues of cultural management, this work seeks to provide guidance to the many urban leaders and professionals who increasingly are struggling to address multiple publics and contrasting cultural views of city life and function.

I investigate four cases, two in Spain (Basque Country and Barcelona) and two in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Sarajevo and Mostar). The cases examine the role of urbanism in a society with a 25-year record of regional autonomy (post-Franco Spain) and in a society immersed in reconstruction after war (post-1995 Bosnia). The Spanish case studies of urban planning and revitalization exist within a national framework that provides regional autonomy as a way to accommodate nationalistic aspirations. The Bosnian case studies are in a country of de facto division and I examine the spatial elements of reconstruction efforts. In both case studies, I look at how planning strategies have interacted with political reform. I use the urban arena as a lens through which to gauge the effectiveness of urban policy as part of subnational peace-building and the accommodation of intergroup differences. This effort is an extension of my earlier field research on urban planning in divided societies in Israel and West Bank (Jerusalem); Northern Ireland (Belfast), and South Africa (Johannesburg) (Bollens 1999, 2000).

Both Spain and Bosnia have experienced major societal transformations and present intriguing opportunities to understand urbanism amidst uncertainty and flux. The transitions came about through violent nationalistic conflict (Bosnia) and nonviolent political regime change (Spain). These two countries have experienced differing trajectories along the three phases of democratization, as outlined by Rustow (1970) and Sorensen (1998). In the first phase, there is a breakdown in the nondemocratic regime. In Spain and former Yugoslavia (Bosnia), this occurred when their authoritarian leaders died (Franco in 1975; Tito in 1980). In a second phase, there is the beginning of the establishment of a democratic order. In Spain, this took place between 1975 and 1979, ending with the popular approval of a new national constitution and regional autonomy statutes. In Yugoslavia, the period from 1980 to 1992 was a false start for this second phase as efforts to democratize and restructure the country unraveled into the 1992–1995 wars. Since 1995, under international community supervision, this phase of creating democracy has restarted. In the third phase of democratization, a new democracy is further developed and consolidated and democracy becomes ingrained in the political culture. Democratic consolidation and maturation has occurred in Spain since the 1980s, while in Bosnia it is arguable whether it has yet begun ten years after the end of war.

After significant societal conflict or trauma (as experienced in the Bosnian war and the decades of Franco authoritarian repression), it becomes necessary for a country to examine the inter-group divisions that led to, or were intensified by, such trauma. In the second, formative phase of democratization, there likely will be efforts to reformulate basic governance structures in order to more effectively advance tolerable coexistence. Indeed, Sorensen (1998) asserts without a democratic resolution of how to deal with ethnic and other cleavages in society, the chances of breakdown or reversal in the democratization process will increase. I seek to fill important gaps in the study of conflict by focusing on the local dynamics and outcomes of efforts to reconstitute substate societies and cities. A city focus enables a finer-tuned analysis of the practical, on-theground dimensions of building peace, including the intergovernmental (local-regionalnational) issues involved in policy formulation and implementation. Emphasis on the local arena promises to achieve a level of specificity and groundedness not found in studies of national-level constitutional and political reform (such as, for example, Roeder and Rothchild 2005; G.Gagnon and Tilly 2001; Lapidoth 1996; Newman 1996; O’Leary and McGarry 1995; Lijphart 1968; Nordlinger 1972). Through analysis of the urban system, I seek to contribute on a theoretical level to a better understanding of the relation between planning, power, and societal transformation and to contribute principles at a practical level for urban interventions amidst societal transitions and inter-group tensions.

Studying cities and urban policy in circumstances where inter-group conflict, war, and societal transition have been facts of life allows us glimpses into how local public authority is used in contexts of uncertainty, turbulence, and disruption. Both during and subsequent to a society’s reconstitution, how does urban policy and governance address nationalistic tensions that have been a central part of a society’s traumatic story? I make the claim here, as in earlier research (Bollens 1999, 2000, 2002), that extreme circumstances reveal ordinary truths—that these unsettled urban contexts illuminate the basic relationships between urban policy and political power far better than in more mature, settled contexts.

MULTINATIONAL CITIES

This theoretically-informed, practice-oriented account of intercultural conflict and coexistence is significant due to the increasing vulnerability of cities throughout the world to ethnic and nationalistic challenges driven by group identity-based claims and immigration. It is also important due to the increasing importance of subnational governance as a means to address issues of ethnic coexistence and democracy within a world where many experts now view the nation-state as decreasingly the territorial answer to the problem of human political, economic, and social organization.

A troubling number of cities across the world are prone to intense intercommunal conflict and violence reflecting ethnic or nationalist fractures. In these cities and societies, ethnic identity³ and nationalism⁴ combine to create pressures for group rights, autonomy, or even territorial separation. Such politicized multiculturalism constitutes a “challenge to the ethical settlement of the city” (Keith 2005:8). Political control of multinational cities can become contested as nationalists push to create a political system that expresses and protects their distinctive group characteristics. Whereas in most cities there is a belief maintained by all groups that the existing system of governance is properly configured and capable of producing fair outcomes, assuming adequate political participation and representation of minority interests, governance amidst severe and unresolved multicultural differences can be viewed by at least one identifiable group in the city as artificial, imposed, or illegitimate. Characterized by ethnic/nationalist saturation of what are typically mundane urban management issues, the unsettled nature of such cities “reveals the contested and limited nature of the national settlement in its schoolrooms and town halls” (Keith 2005:3).

Cities such as Jerusalem, Belfast, Johannesburg, Nicosia, Montreal, Algiers, Grozny, Mumbai, Beirut, Brussels, and now Baghdad are urban arenas susceptible to inter-group conflict and violence associated with ethnic or political differences. In cases such as Jerusalem and Belfast, a city is a focal point or magnet for unresolved nationalistic ethnic conflict. In other cases (such as certain Indian or British cities), a city is not the primary cause of inter-group conflict, but becomes a platform for the expression of conflicting sovereignty claims involving areas outside the urban region or for tensions related to foreign immigration. In cases such as Johannesburg and Beirut, the management of cities holds the key to sustainable coexistence of antagonistic ethnic groups subsequent to cessation of overt hostilities. In cities such as Brussels and Montreal, there have been effective efforts to defuse nationalistic conflict through power-sharing governance and accommodation to group cultural and linguistic differences. Additionally, cities are often centers of democratic thought and action, and can be focal points of opposition to autocratic regimes. Largely peaceful urban revolutions and protests in Ukraine (2005), Lebanon (2005), Belarus (2006), and Nepal (2006) attest to the power of urban spaces in contemporary politics.

As we witness changes in the scale of world conflict from international to intrastate, urban centers of ethnic proximity and diversity assume salience to those studying and seeking to resolve contemporary conflict. Increasingly, cities are the arenas within which decision-makers face multiple and unprecedented social challenges connected to group identity-based claims and immigration. Subnational governance at urban, metropolitan, and regional levels appears increasingly to be the focal point in our attempts to address issues of ethnic coexistence, interaction, and democracy within a globalizing world. Urban areas that endure inter-group conflict and major transformations are doing so now in a world that is increasingly linked economically, socially, and politically (Sassen 2000,1991; LeGales 2002; Loughlin 2001; United Nations 1999). This means that nationalist groups in a city have greater international avenues available to them through which they can seek to spread their political claims. Concurrently, processes of democratization now are more likely than before to be influenced and shaped by international and European political and economic considerations. And, it appears that what happens in cities—in terms of their political organization, immigration policies, and economic structures—affects the nature of the globalization process itself. As stated by McNeill (1999, 110), cities are “crucibles in which global processes can be grounded.” Through economic, infrastructure, cultural, and human resource policies, cities can create productive niches relative to the transnational flow of goods, information, and finances. At the same time, urban social fragmentation and political conflict can obstruct the realization of urban benefits from economic globalization (Sassen 2000; Caldeira 2000; Appadurai 1996). Such urban economic hardships and breakdowns in social structure are increasingly demanding reformulations of urban policy dealing with housing, economic opportunity, and cultural expression.

Nation-states appear increasingly ill suited to meet the challenges of contemporary sub-state ethnic divisions through centralized state action. Accordingly, there have arisen national political reform strategies such as local and regional autonomy, decentralization, power sharing, and federalism that devolve greater powers to sub-national units comprised of territorially-based ethnic groups (Lapidoth 1996). These reform strategies aim to provide minorities a measure of state power, offer minorities better prospects of preserving their culture, increase opportunities for new political coalitions across ethnic groups, and provide breathing spaces...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Cities, Nationalism, and Democratization
• Questioning Cities
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The promise of the city
• 2 Spain, Bosnia, and the urban conflict-stability continuum
• 3 Barcelona: constructing democracy’s urban terrain
• 4 Sarajevo: misplacing the post-war city
• 5 Bilbao, Son Sebastián, Vitoria (Basque Country): urban dynamism amidst democratic disability
• 6 Mostar: urbanism and the spoils of war
• 7 Urbanism, inter-group conflict, and political transition
• Appendix: Interviews conducted
• Bibliography