Cities of Power. Göran Therborn
which had been the landmarks among the vineyards and gardens of the semi-rural city.
Though facilitated by the massive flight of the ‘Turks’, the whole cities were, of course, not transformed over a decade or two. But certain central areas were, in a dramatic way. In Athens three new avenues were laid out in the centre, with the ‘academic trilogy’ of impressive neoclassical buildings along one of them: University Street, for the university, the Academy and the National Library, designed by the Danish architect Hans Christian Hansen and his brother Theophil. Bucharest gave priority to building and widening a set of boulevards, which after the 1877 war (which won Romania total independence) were all named after events or heroes of the war, fronted by Calea Victoriei with a triumphal arch.36 I have already mentioned Sofia’s Tsar Liberator Avenue. Poor Belgrade changed more slowly, but the street joining it with the road to Istanbul became the main boulevard. Zagreb and Ljubljana were never under Ottoman rule and could therefore follow the European mainstream of continuist change. Tirana became the permanent capital of Albania only in 1925, fifteen years after a proclamation of independence during the first Balkan War, as a small town of 10,000. It was not purged of mosques and Muslims like the other Balkan capitals of the time, but came under strong influence from Italy and Fascism in the 1930s.
Ethnic Change in the East-Central Strip
The ethnic national character of the East-Central European capitals had luckily been decided before the nation-state came onto the top of the agenda. By and large it was decided by immigration from the countryside, driven by rural proletarianization, urban industrialization and rail transport. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ethnic city government and impact was a hot issue in almost all the future national capitals of East-Central Europe. Only three or four among twenty future capitals had by the mid-nineteenth century an ethnic majority from their coming nation: Warsaw, Ljubljana, Zagreb and perhaps tiny Tirana. Helsinki was mainly Swedish-speaking, Tallinn (known as Reval) and Riga were German-dominated, Vilnius was Jewish (and Polish), Minsk was Jewish and Yiddish-speaking, Prague was primarily German and Bratislava was called Pozsony and was until the 1840s the coronation city of the Hungarian crown and the most frequent seat of the Magyar Estates. Budapest consisted of Buda, Obuda and Pest, all three predominantly German in the early nineteenth century. Belgrade was Muslim; Bucharest was Greek-dominated; Skopje more Muslim than Macedonian; and Sofia a multi-ethnic, largely Muslim city. In Sarajevo the Muslims, today’s ‘Bosniaks’, remained a (large) minority until sometime between 1948 and 1991, while in 1926 Ukrainians were less than half of Kyiv’s population and Romanians less than half of Chişinău’s.37
Inter-ethnic friction and conflicts festered in East-Central Europe throughout the twentieth century and even after, but the character of the nation-state capitals was never in doubt, except for Vilnius, which was not the capital of the inter-war Lithuanian Republic because it was ruled by Poland and got a Lithuanian ethnic majority only late in Soviet times.
The bitter inter-ethnic conflicts which accompanied Eastern European nationalism have been best chronicled with respect to Prague, which does not necessarily mean that they were sharper there than elsewhere. But with that qualification, the fate of Mozart in Prague in 1913 is a good illustration of rival symbolic nationalism. The Prague Society for the Promotion of German Sciences, Arts and Literature wanted to put up a statue of Mozart in front of the (German) Estates Theatre, where Don Giovanni was first performed in 1787. However, this required the use of a small piece of municipal land outside the theatre. The city council, Czech-dominated since 1861, rejected the petition, officially for traffic reasons.38
However, the modern history of East-Central Europe should not be reduced to national conflicts. It too was part of the European route of continuisme and class. The new Balkan states of Bulgaria, Greece and Romania, with their powerful German kings, exemplified an eventful but nevertheless gradual transition from princely absolutism to the nation-state, although not to democratic monarchies. The modern history of East-Central Europe is much more dramatic than that of north-western Europe, with the gradual national evolution of its capitals inter-foliated by moments of revolution.
For all its national/ethnic complexity and conflicts, the Strip also experienced the typical European modern primacy of class. Its major intra-state violent conflicts were structured not by ethnicity or religion but class. The Finnish Civil War of 1918 pitted Red industrial workers and crofters against the White yeomanry and professional-managerial strata. The Baltic post–World War I wars had a triangular shape, pitting Balto-German landowners (with German troops); Estonian-Latvian farmers (with a tiny professional stratum), helped by British military; and Estonian-Latvian-Lithuanian workers and worker-soldiers against each other. The Budapest Commune of 1919 rallied urban workers (and a large part of the Jewish intelligentsia) against the upper and middle classes. The Greek post-post–World War II civil war had perhaps a more ideological character, dividing the popular classes, but its poles were the Communistled popular resistance against the Nazi occupation, on one side, and on the other the collaborationist turned Anglophile upper and middle classes.
The Pre-National Central Powers
During World War I, Austria-Hungary and Germany were, in neutral speech, often referred to as the Central Powers for their location in the middle of Europe. The Habsburg monarchy never became a nation-state, but from its stiff neo-absolutism, after 1860 it gradually came to accommodate national elements. With Russian help and under some able military commanders it finally survived and crushed the revolution of 1848. What started its decline and increasingly accommodationist stance was the loss of its Italian lands in 1859 to French and Piedmontese armies, and the decisive blow came in 1866 with its defeat to Prussia at Königgrätz (also known as Sadowa).
In Vienna, what became the grandiose Ringstrasse around the Baroque inner city out of the open military grounds around the city wall, the glacis, was announced by the Emperor in 1857: ‘It is My will that …’39 The original plan was for new military barracks as well as cultural institutions and a dynastic votive church.40 The plan included a city hall – elective municipal government was being adopted in Austria – but no parliament.*
With the defeat at Königgrätz, Habsburg absolutism was doomed and the Ringstrasse changed its character in a bourgeois national direction. The liberal city of Vienna built itself a majestic Gothic city hall, which was interpreted as referring to the proud and autonomous Flemish cities, once part of Habsburg lands. Nearby, Theophil Hansen designed a new version of his Athens Academy as an impressive Reichsrath (Council of the Realm, in fact Parliament), but without any national symbolism. Already, in the early 1860s, a society for the promotion of the arts had petitioned for a monumental programme in honour of non-royals, but mostly of aristocrats connected to the city; it was effectuated in 1867. The liberal city leadership then expanded the programme, primarily with respect to great artists.41
1867 was also the year of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise and the establishment of Austria-Hungary under a double monarch: emperor of Austria and king of Hungary. Financed by rich land rents and soaring wheat exports, the ruling Hungarian aristocrats embarked on a very ambitious national course, peaking in the millennium celebration in 1896 of the Magyar conquest of Hungary, including a World Exhibition and the world’s second underground line (after London’s). The emperor and his Vienna government had to acquiesce. In 1882 a statue of the poet and 1848 revolutionary initiator Sándor Petőfi was erected in Budapest. In 1894 the remains of the exiled national revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth were brought back to the city and given a grand official burial. In 1904 the world’s largest parliamentary building, the Országház (House of the Nation), was opened on the Pest side of the Danube, a duel in stone with the Habsburg Castle on the Buda Hills across the river. In location and in layout it refers to the Palace of Westminster, but it is built in a hotchpotch of historical styles, crowned by a gilded dome.
Prague was part of the Austrian half of the double monarchy and since the 1860s under Czech city government, with the support of which the Czech community built its own national institutions, from the neo-Renaissance National Museum towering over central Wenceslas Square to the Art Nouveau Obecní Dům (Municipal House), an entertainment centre meant to overshadow the German casino. The last national challenge the Catholic emperor had to swallow before the war was the city’s decision