Cities of Power. Göran Therborn
Bedford, Russell, Sloane and so on, still bearing witness to the unique British blend of landed aristocracy and urban capitalism. The similar Parisian Place Royale was a royal precedent, discontinued.
Even if they did not finish the anciens régimes, the French Revolution and Napoleon’s armies rattled or challenged their iconostases, from London to Saint Petersburg, from Madrid to Berlin. In the fissures, new national imagery began to emerge. The Napoleonic invasions spawned ferocious nationalisms, from the guerrillas of Spain to the ‘Patriot’ (or ‘Fatherland’) War in Russia, via the Prussian Wars of Liberation. On the literary front, what the latter-day German historian Hagen Schulze has called Hass-und Totschlagspoesie (poetry of hatred and killing) was unleashed. Saint Petersburg got its first national monuments after the war: statues of the two major Russian commanders Barclay de Tolly and Kutuzov were erected outside the Kazan Cathedral, and Russian folklore motifs were added to the triumphal Narva Gate. The only major capital of Europe where nothing national was allowed – for the time being – was Vienna, the base of the oldest and proudest of the royal dynasties.30
By the 1830s, the nation-state situation in Europe may be summed up as follows. The two leading states, Britain and France, had become consolidated nation-states by steady evolution and by the failure of the counter-revolutionary Restoration, respectively. The oligarchic confederation of the Low Countries had become a national monarchy and so had, by an 1830 revolution, Belgium. End of the list of nation-states.
Sweden, in its rustic and modest way, had an evolution rather similar to that of the British, an eighteenth-century post-absolutist, quasi-parliamentary, Estates-governed Age of Liberty, and in the early nineteenth century the Estates deposed a king and asserted their right to make a new constitution before electing a new king. But the Swedish polity was still of four historical estates, not one nation, and coupled to Norway by a personal monarchical union. Denmark was still under absolutist rule, with a king who was also ruling German dukedoms, and as such a prince of the German Confederation. In Spain and Portugal the national banner had been planted, but the battles with royal absolutism had not yet been finally won. Switzerland was an oligarchic confederation of local urban and rural provincial polities, coming together as a nation-state only in 1847. The whole of central and eastern Europe was under princely domination, including the curious case of Greece: a state carved out of the Ottoman Empire by foreign powers on religious, ethnic and geopolitical grounds and put under the absolutist rule of a German prince.
The nationalization of Europe took more than a century. Only by 1920 were pre-modern patrimonial states gone from the sub-continent. The final blow was the defeat and ousting of the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Ottoman and Romanov dynasties. Out of this protracted, complex, by no means linear history, we shall here only pick up a few themes bearing upon the capital cities.
The European national capitals were previous centres of their part of Old Europe, with – except for the Balkans – strong cultural and architectural legacies of Greco-Roman classicism and of the Baroque, the Renaissance and the medieval Gothic. The exceptions were relatively marginal. Before the nineteenth century, Iceland did not have a single city, but the few ecclesiastic and administrative central functions there were had gathered in the area where Reykjavik emerged from the beginning of the twentieth century. The Hague, before the nation, and Berne, for the nation, were chosen by deliberation: the Hague because of its insignificance as a neutral meeting place of the Estates-General of the United Provinces,* Berne as the most central of the major cantonal cities, ethnically – straddling the border between French and German speakers – as well as geographically.
As its full Dutch name – ’s-Gravenhage (the Count’s Wood) – indicates, the Hague has an aristocratic origin as the seat of the medieval counts of Holland and during the federal republic also of the stadhouder (commander-in-chief), when there was one. The Estates gathered in its Ridderzaal (Knights’ Hall), where Parliament now assembles. Berne had been a small oligarchic city republic before becoming, in 1831, the capital of the strong canton of Berne and, in 1848, the permanent seat of the Federal Assembly of the Swiss nation-state. A modest assembly house was built in the 1850s in a square dominated by a casino.* In the 1890s the latter was replaced by a new parliament building, gradually accompanied around the quiet Bundesplatz by the National Bank, the Kantonalbank and the Crédit Suisse.
Balkan Ruptures
The ancient cities of Athens and Sofia (originally Roman Serdica) had shrunk radically and were no longer even regionally dominant, but were soon chosen by the new states: Athens for historical reasons – although the new Bavarian authorities originally planned to demolish the Parthenon and install a new royal palace there† – and Sofia in a complex geopolitical game with several somewhat larger Bulgarian cities.31 To Greek nationalists, Athens was for many decades a provisional capital, a kind of Bonn to the prosperous diaspora while Constantinople was still Ottoman.
Athens and Sofia also exemplify the limitations of the sovereignty of the new Balkan states. Greece and Bulgaria both owed their statehood to foreign armies and navies: the former to an alliance of Britain, France and Russia, the latter to Russia. Greece not only got an absolutist Bavarian king – as neutral between the three big powers – but also a Bavarian administration, and Athens got German architects.32 All this generated two revolutions in Athens, in 1843 and in 1862, leading to a national constitution and a new dynasty. The square in front of the Bavarian Royal Palace became Syntagma (Constitution) Square. From 1909 until its demise, the monarchy had to keep up with a more laid-back mansion, first intended for the crown prince of the new dynasty; the palace was, after lengthy renovation, taken over by Parliament in 1934. As far as I know, this is only the second example in the world of a single building representing the change from royal absolutism to parliamentarism.*
Sofia too got a German king, Alexander von Battenberg – of the family later known in Britain as Mountbatten – and a heavy input of Viennese architecture. It is one of the two European capitals whose main street is named after a foreign prince – the other is Oslo, still paying homage to the ex-Napoleonic marshal who was elected king of Sweden and who, under the name of Karl Johan, conquered Norway in 1814. Sofia dedicates its principal avenue to the Tsar Osvoboditel (the Tsar Liberator), meaning Alexander II of Russia, who conquered Bulgaria for the Bulgarians. The Tsar himself stands in a semi-circle in front of the national parliament at one end of the avenue. He is still there, and also remained during Communist times. The first monument erected in ex-Ottoman Sofia was to a national independence hero, though, Vasil Levski.33
In the Balkans, the national was first of all anti-Ottoman and anti-Muslim. The national was largely centred around Orthodox churches, for which grand new cathedrals were built – in Belgrade, in Habsburgian Baroque, already in the 1830s after Ottoman recognition of Serbian autonomy;† in Athens, Bucharest and Sofia in neo-Byzantine splendour. Another priority building was a royal palace, at a time when royalty was still more anti-Ottoman than national. More genuinely national was the Bucharest Academy, where Romanian was first taught and which soon turned into a university.‡ Serbian Belgrade built its parliament on the former site of the main mosque,34 and in Sofia the main mosque was turned first into a Russian military hospital, then a national library and finally a national museum.35 The Muslim population fled en masse after the defeat of the Ottoman troops. Another thrust was de-Orientalization and Europeanization, for which architects and city planners were invited from Germany, Austria and sometimes France (especially to Bucharest) and other parts of Western Europe, from Italy in the case of Tirana.
For these reasons, the Balkan national capitals do not share the urbanistic continuity of the rest of Europe. Indeed, their rupture with the previous layout of space and architecture is unique in modern times, without any equivalent among the capitals of the ex-colonial zone, among the capital changes of those of reactive modernization, nor among any of the later Communist capitals (except for American-bombed-out Pyongyang). The avidly imported European ideas of public space – wide streets and open places, grid planning and exterior-oriented (instead of inward-turned) residential and public buildings – clashed totally with the Ottoman tradition. Even the architecture of the buildings of Ottoman power was seen as unattractive. Only as a temporary stopgap could the Bulgarian king think of living in the konak of the Ottoman governor, and Romanian Bucharest