Publicly funded housing is also much higher in Europe than in the U.S. And, unlike in the U.S., public funding of housing since World War II has included much of the middle class as well as the poor. The number of people in publicly funded housing is two to three times as high in Europe as in the United States. In the U.K. and France, for example, approximately 20 percent of households live in social housing.52
In America, freedom means independence, and independence means private control over space. Being self-contained and self-reliant has been the recurring theme of the American psyche since well before the American Revolution. We like to keep our distance from our neighbors. Not surprisingly, then, there is little sense of community in the average American suburb, certainly less than one experiences in the residential neighborhoods surrounding European cities. Jackson makes the pointed observation that “there are few places as desolate and lonely as a suburban street on a hot afternoon.”53
More than 60 percent of all U.S. metropolitan residents live in the suburbs, and their numbers are growing.54 As shocking as it might seem to most Europeans, two-thirds of America’s 86.4 million homes are single-family domiciles.55 And while we seek autonomy inside our self-contained suburban homes, we also retain that nervous energy and restlessness that are also so much a part of the American Spirit. For Americans, freedom means both autonomy and mobility. It’s no wonder, then, that in any given five-year period, 25 to 35 percent of all households change residence.56
Europeans do not share the American restlessness, perhaps because they experience the place where they live as more than a house, as a community. With community comes deeper roots and less willingness to pick up and move to some unknown new place. The average European moves only half as often as the average American.57 I have a young Italian friend in her early thirties who had lived in Rome for several years. She told me she was about to move back to the small community outside Bologna where she grew up and her parents still had their ancestral home. In America, it is unusual for children to return home to their childhood neighborhoods to live out their adult lives. Quite the contrary in Italy and other parts of Europe. My friend told me that many of her friends spent a few years in the “hot” cities of Europe at the beginning of their careers only to find their way back to their childhood communities when they chose to raise families of their own.
There’s an old American saying, “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” We’ve paid a heavy price for our penchant for autonomy and mobility. The desire for ever bigger houses and more private space coupled with our sense of rootlessness and constant changing of residence has cost us dearly, in terms of the aesthetics of daily living. An increasing number of Americans live in cookie-cutter housing tracts plopped down on former agricultural lands stretching as far as sixty to seventy miles from metropolitan beltways. More than 60 million people—one-quarter of the population of the lower forty-eight states—now live in what planners call “exurbs.” The mass exodus of population from older cities into suburbs and exurbs has occurred rapidly, and with little or no long-term spatial planning to guide the migration. Nearly one-sixth of all the land developed over our nation’s history occurred in just ten years between the early 1980s and the 1990s.58 The net result of this chaotic and undirected dispersion of population is what we call “sprawl.” It has become a defining characteristic of the American landscape.
Sprawl is easy to identify. It consists of scattered housing developments, often isolated from one another, and from places of employment, schools, and commercial areas; commercial strip malls along roads adjacent to interstate highways; few if any pedestrian paths connecting housing developments; a lack of public transportation, and wall-to-wall automobile traffic. Worse still, these residential areas generally lack a sense of organic development, or any kind of history. Some—not all—are communities in name only. An increasing number of Americans live in “bedroom communities,” an obvious oxymoron. Culturally barren and nondescript, American suburbs can be isolated places to live. In a sense, they represent the final chapter of the American Dream. Each person is surrounded by his or her possessions and isolated from his or her surroundings—millions of autonomous personal spheres, virtually cut off from one another. Few Americans could likely name half of their neighbors within a three-minute walk of their houses.
What zoning restrictions that do exist in American counties are often weighted toward wide-open residential and commercial development. Coordinated long-term spatial planning between adjacent counties and at the state or federal level is virtually nonexistent. It’s everyone for themselves, and the effect is blight, writ large, across the width and breadth of the American landscape.
It’s not that way in Europe, because the rights of individual property holders, whether they be home owners or commercial businesses, are continually balanced against the customs, social norms, and goals of the community as a whole. Any American that’s ever driven across Europe notices the difference almost immediately. Each community has its own history and story to tell. Communities seem to follow an organic plan. There is a sense of purposefulness and order. In the big cities as well as in the outlying metropolitan areas, there is a sense of neighborhood and of community. People seem to belong.
None of this came about by chance. Spatial planning is far more developed throughout Europe. And now, the governments of Europe have gone a step further, developing an ambitious continent-wide spatial development plan. In September 2000, the European Conference of Ministers Responsible for Regional Planning (CEMAT) adopted what they call “Guiding Principles for Sustainable Spatial Development of the European Continent.” The aim is to bring the economic and social development of each region into harmony with its ecological surroundings and cultural heritage in a “long-term, large-scale and balanced spatial development.”59 The forty-five member states of the Council of Europe have agreed to work cooperatively at the local, regional, national, and continental levels, to make sure that future spatial planning across the European landmass is compatible with Europe’s dream of inclusivity, diversity, sustainability, quality of life, universal human rights, the rights of nature, and peace among people.
Try to imagine the people of the United States ever agreeing to commit ourselves to a similar coordinated long-term spatial planning effort for the country. As long as undeveloped land is still widely available, the cost of gasoline is relatively cheap, home mortgages are affordable, and tax deductions on mortgage payments continue to exist, there is little chance we will reverse our present developmental course. Those who can afford it will have to make due with an occasional vacation in Europe, where they can enjoy a short respite walking streets that go from somewhere to somewhere and that feel lived in.
The Collision of Property and Democracy
On July 12, 1893, a young American historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, read a paper before a meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago on the closing of the American frontier, announced by the U.S. Census Bureau of 1890. Turner reflected on the two dreams that animated American life over the course of its short history as a nation. The first “was that of individual freedom to compete unrestrictedly for the resources of a continent—the squatter ideal.” Turner noted that, to the pioneer, “government was evil.”60 Americans were, and remain to this day, suspicious of government, always worried that it might encroach on or limit their right to accumulate property and remain free. “Don’t tread on me” was one of the early mottos of the American revolutionaries in their struggle against the British crown. The spirit of that message continued to live on in the life of the young republic after the American Revolution.
The other dream, writes Turner, “was the ideal of democracy—government of, by, and for the people.”61 These two dreams coexisted “with the passing into private possession of the free public domain and the natural resources of the United States.” Turner cautioned, however, that “American democracy was based on an abundance of cheap and free lands; these were the very co
nditions that shaped its growth and its fundamental traits.”62
As long as cheap and free land was available, Americans would not have to be overly worried about class conflict. The exploited and destitute masses of immigrants and the native-born could escape the oppression of the East by continuing to move westward. The West, in effect, became a safety valve, a way to ensure equality of opportunity without having to worry about equality of condition. On the frontier, every person was equal in the sense that he or she was on his or her own, unencumbered by government edicts or, for the most part, the long hand of Eastern commercial interests. Now, however, noted Turner, “the age of free competition of individuals for the unpossessed resources of the nation is nearing its end.”63 Turner worried about the fate of a people whose “nervous energy” had for so long been almost singularly dedicated to the task of taming the wild environs of a vast continent and transforming its natural abundance into a store of private property.
American president Calvin Coolidge once remarked that “the business of America is America’s business.” Thirty years earlier, intellectuals such as Turner were already beginning to have doubts about what the future might bring for America, if that was all there was to the American Dream. In his paper, Turner cites the French intellectual Emile Gaston Boutmy, who observed,
The striking and peculiar characteristic of American society is that it is not so much a democracy as a huge commercial company for the discovery, cultivation, and capitalization of its enormous territory.64
Turner ended his paper with a lament that, in hindsight, more than one hundred years later, appears eerily prescient. He wrote,
So long as success in amassing great wealth for the aggrandizement of the individual is the exclusive or the dominant standard of success, so long as material prosperity, regardless of the conditions of its cost, or the civilization which results, is the shibboleth, American democracy, that faith in the common man which the pioneer cherishes, is in danger. For the strongest will make their way unerringly to whatever goal society sets up as the mark of conceded preeminence.65
Most of my European friends and acquaintances are quick to ridicule America’s love affair with “the almighty dollar.” “All you Americans think about is money” has become a standard mantra in virtually every opening discussion about the American character and the American way of life. In reality, the American condition is more complex. It’s not the money per se. Rather, it’s the search for personal security that comes from being propertied, the belief that our possessions will make us free. For many Europeans who have opted for less wealth and more play, the American obsession with creating propertied wealth appears more like a kind of pathology. They say that “our possessions end up possessing us.”
But the point is, it was the American people that became the purest advocates of the European Enlightenment idea that equates private property with freedom. So fervent has been our belief that when the U.S. Congress adopted a new version of the federal income tax in 1894, it was declared unconstitutional by the courts. The U.S. Constitution had to be amended before the new tax could be adopted.66 The very idea that government might take away a portion of one’s propertied wealth to be used for other purposes was anathema to many Americans weaned on the frontier tradition of rugged individualism and self-reliance.
By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, with the frontier closed and cheap public land no longer there for the taking, questions of economic justice and redistribution of wealth began to be heard, especially among immigrants and the native-born laboring in the new foundries and factories in the Eastern and Midwestern cities. The rise of a small coterie of super-rich and powerful robber barons like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose wealth rivaled the great aristocratic families of Europe, did not sit well with millions of American men and women toiling in wretched conditions in the factories and sweatshops that these new men of commerce controlled.
President Theodore Roosevelt was the first head of state to challenge the American preoccupation with property. In 1910, he told the American people,
We are face to face with new conceptions of the relations of property to human welfare, chiefly because certain advocates of the rights of property as against the rights of men have been pushing their claims too far. The man who wrongly holds that every human right is secondary to his profit must now give way to the advocate of human welfare, who rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require.67
America’s flirtation with the redistribution of wealth picked up steam during the global depression in the 1930s. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration’s New Deal programs were America’s first real foray into balancing property rights with human rights. The American dalliance continued through the 1960s and ended abruptly with the demise of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs.
By 1980, America had all but abandoned the idea of redistributive justice. The election of Ronald Reagan, a transplanted Westerner, as president signaled a return to the earlier American Dream, the one that glorified the rags-to-riches theme and held up property rights as the foundation of American freedom.
Now, however, the rationale that spawned private property relations is beginning to fray in the wake of new technologies that are once again fundamentally altering our sense of space and time. The quickening connection of the central nervous system of every human being to every other human being on Earth, via the World Wide Web and other new global communication technologies, is forcing us into a global space and a new simultaneous field of time. The result is that property exchange in national markets is going to increasingly give way in the twenty-first century to access relationships in vast global networks.
Diminished attachment to a private property regime has great potential import for the future of commerce and governance. After all, market capitalism is based on the idea of exchanging property in the form of goods and services between sellers and buyers. If the psychological and ideological attachment to private property continues to weaken, what will be the eventual fate of the marketplace?
The change from ownership to access has equally important implications for nation-state governance. Enlightenment philosophers and economists never tired of making the connection between a private property regime and the legitimacy of the nation-state. It was always assumed that the mission of the nation-state was largely to secure the private property of its citizens. If private property relations were to be subsumed by new commercial relationships—whose modus operandi is less wedded to market exchanges inside a territorially defined political unit and more geared to access in globally connected networks—what might be the effect on the future of the nation-state itself?
The conundrum is that the very commercial and political institutions that are attempting to accommodate these new spatial and temporal realities are the ones whose own futures are in doubt because of the far-reaching changes now taking place in the world. The capitalist marketplace and the nation-state are the defining institutional paradigm of the modern era, just as the Church and the feudal order were in the medieval era. And just as new spatial and temporal changes led to the demise of the medieval arrangement, now, once again, dramatic spatial and temporal changes are leading to the weakening of national markets and nation-states and the emergence of global commercial networks and transnational political spaces like the European Union. Rethinking a world beyond capitalist markets and nation-states will likely be as contentious and bitterly fought as was the struggle that led to the fall of Christendom and feudal society and the rise of the market economy and nation-state. Understanding what historian Karl Polanyi called the “Great Transformation,” the twists and turns that gave birth to modern capitalism and nation-state formation, can provide a much-needed perspective on the challenges facing our current generation as it wrestles with defining a new consciousness and new
institutional models better suited to a globalized space and time.
7
Forging Capitalist Markets and Nation-States
THE MARKET ECONOMY has become such a pervasive force in modern life that we have come to think of it as almost like a force of nature. If the truth be known, we Americans would be utterly lost were the marketplace not the centerpiece of our existence. We forget that the market economy is a relatively new institution in human history. While markets existed far back into antiquity, they were always marginal to social life. Most economic activity was traditionally based in the household. In fact, the very term “economy” comes from the Greek oikos, which means “home.” Members of an extended family produced what they needed for themselves, bartered with nearby neighbors, and occasionally sold any surplus production in open-air markets, which were held infrequently. Large markets, like the great Frankfurt Fair in late medieval times, were annual events that drew itinerant merchants from far afield. At the bigger fairs, one could purchase more exotic goods. Silk, books, parchment, drugs, and spices, mostly from the Far East, were among the more popular goods available for sale.
But the idea of a fully integrated modern market economy extends well beyond the notion of merchants setting up their stalls and selling their wares to local buyers. For modern markets to work, all of the elements that go into making things—land, human labor, and technology—have to be dislodged from the traditional household setting and be converted into a form that can be rationalized, abstracted, quantified, and made into property negotiable for a price in the marketplace.
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