style="font-size:15px;"> 1.The European road: externally overdetermined internal reform or revolution
2.The ‘New Worlds’ of European settlers seceding from the motherland: outgrowing European traditions
3.The colonial road to independence: turning colonial modernity against the colonizers
4.Reactive modernization from above: defending the realm in a new way against novel challenges
These pathways may also be seen as ideal-type trajectories, which may be combined in a given country. The two main centres of twentieth-century Communism – Russia and China – were the two great hybrids of modern state formation. My hypothesis is that this nation/modernity hybridity was crucial to the victories of Communism in Russia and in China, but that is another story.
Furthermore, the new national capital cities bear witness not only to the context of nation-state formation, but also to its political process, whether ruptural or gradual. Did the nation-state arise out of a ruptural violent conflict, a revolution, a civil war, a war of independence, or did it grow into being through an accumulation of gradual shifts of power, or, alternatively, through negotiated transfer?
In the next chapter we shall investigate the constitution and construction of the major capitals along the four major routes of nation-state formation. Later we shall look into how moments of popular and global challenge to the national elites have appeared in national capitals of different constitutive origins. The hybrids of Moscow and Beijing will be dealt with in a special chapter on the coming and going of Communism.
National Foundations: Europe – Transforming Princely Cities
Europe was a world pioneer of modernist breaks with past authorities, wisdom and aesthetic canon. However, in a global context, the most striking aspect of European nation-states and their capitals is historical continuity as well as continuity of territory, language, religion, art, architecture and urban layout. This paradox of pioneer modernism combined with de facto conservationism is mainly explained by European imperialism. Europe was the only part of the world which did not have its pre-modernity conquered, shattered or fatally threatened and humiliated. Therefore, its pre-national, pre-modern background and legacy matter more than to capitals coming out of other national pathways. With respect to cities, this background had two main features: a particular urban system and form of urbanism, and a historically evolved repertoire of architectural language and symbolic forms.
The core of European civilization was uniquely urban in a specific sense; it developed in sovereign cities, in city-states which were part of regional systems of exchange, rivalry, competition, warfare and alliances. City-states developed on other continents, too, but nowhere else did they constitute political and cultural systems of comparable significance. This was ancient Greece, succeeded by ancient Rome, a city building an empire; by Byzantium, another city holding an empire; and, after the collapse of the Mediterranean urban powers of antiquity, ancient civilization revived in Florence and the other city-states of the Renaissance.
European cities were distinctive legal-political entities, characterized by the civic, in Germanic languages Bürger, rights of its free men.* Even when not sovereign states, European cities and towns usually had institutions of collective self-governance, in the big and wealthy cities represented by magnificent city halls. They had their own legal system which spread around the urban networks from certain nodes, such as Magdeburg law eastwards to Kyiv, among others, and Lübeck law northwards into Baltic towns. A key element of European urban form was a central public space: the Greek agora, the Roman forum, the Italian piazza, the Romance place/plaza, the German Platz, the Russian ploshchad.
Architectural Greek and Roman antiquity defined classicism in European building. It was a form of language which, in spite of its ups and downs in the cycles of taste, never left European – and overseas migrated – architecture until the mid-twentieth-century victory of the modernist movement. It could even blend with modernism, as in some of the best architecture of Italian fascism – for instance, EUR, the exhibition complex built in Rome for the World Exhibition that never was. Indeed, modern nationalism, first of all French Revolutionary and Napoleonic symbolism, drew more heavily on the classical heritage than the ancien régime preceding it, in pageantry, painting, nomenclature – the Temple of Reason, the Field of Mars, the Pantheon and, in monumental architecture, the Vendôme Column and the Triumphal Arch. The new United States was very much part of the early-nineteenth-century so-called Greek Revival, as the public buildings of Washington, D.C., testify. Pre-modern European architecture developed a whole repertoire of styles, which in the nineteenth century were often blended into something known as Historicism or Eclecticism. Classicism apart, the most important element of the repertoire was the medieval Gothic, from the French ‘era of the cathedrals’. It made a powerful comeback in the nationalist age.
Before the Nations
The paradigmatic European nation-state grew out of an existing prenational state, and its capital evolved out of a long pre-national history. Although our proper story begins with nation-states and national capitals, because of the strong pre-national legacy in most of Europe, some prologue history might be helpful.
The Church, the land, the city and the king sum up the prehistory of nation-states and of national capitals. The Church was the decisive conduit of the classical heritage in the Dark Ages. The Classical Pantheon, built under Agrippa just before the Christian era and reconstructed by Hadrian around 130 CE, was consecrated as a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary and All the Martyrs in 609. When the popes started to rebuild Rome after their return from Avignon (in the late fourteenth century), one of their contributions was to add a Christian statue and/or an inscription of themselves to the imperial columns. Two famous examples are the columns of Trajan and of Marcus Aurelius Antonius (at what is now Piazza Colonna), then provided with statues of Saints Peter and Paul, respectively, on top, and an inscription commemorating the contribution by Pope Sixtus V.
The Church was the monumental builder of the Middle Ages and also later, from Renaissance and Baroque Rome to seventeenth-century London after the Great Fire. The Cathedral of Notre Dame, Westminster Abbey and the later Saint Paul’s Cathedral, the Cathedral of Saint Stephen and the Basilica of Saint Peter were the unrivalled pre-modern constructions of Paris, London, Vienna and Rome. So was the Matthias Corvinus Church in Budapest. El Escorial outside Madrid was both a monastery and the most awe-inspiring of the royal palaces. Only the Kremlin of the Muscovy Tsars and the city hall of the rich merchants and manufacturers of provincial Brussels indicated overwhelming secular power or wealth.* Berlin was not a medieval city of significance and became architecturally ambitious only in the second half of the eighteenth city. In other words, Berlin had no important pre-modern centre of monumentality, but there was the castle of the Hohenzollern, electors of Brandenburg-Prussia.†
The Church organized the rituals of the collectivity, from Mass to royal coronations and funerals, and church buildings provided the most important space for homage and remembrance of worldly figures: royal, aristocratic and occasionally even poetical tombs, statues and busts.* London’s Westminster Abbey, since Tudor times, and Saint Paul’s Cathedral seem to have harboured a larger number and, more certainly, a wider range of commemorative monuments than most major churches of Europe.† On the whole, tombs had a very important place in dynastic monumentality, most famously, perhaps, in the abbeys of Saint-Denis and of Westminster and the Viennese Kapuzinergruft of the Habsburgs.
Occasionally – and in papal Rome frequently – the townscape
