Capitalism and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century: A Global Future Beyond Nationalism

Focusing the Planning Effort in a Globalised World: Provocations

In many parts of the Western world, the liberal and democratic values and institutions on which planning ideas are based have been under sustained attack or crumbling in the face of globalising capitalism and consumer culture. Meanwhile, the rise of a new political-economic nexus centred on the ambitions of the powerful Chinese state are generating patterns of aid and trade which seem to be shifting the tectonic plates of global geography. Powerful alliances are being created with only limited regard for the values which infuse Western political thought, still less for the concerns of emergent movements seeking to transform institutions and practices associated with planning systems in countries seeking to escape from past imperial hegemonies.

What do these profound shifts mean for planning ideas, systems and practices, embedded as they are within national systems of law and government and within western conceptions of administration? Focused on shaping place futures, from the supra-national to the neighbourhood, the planning idea has in part been infused with a mixture of technical competence, co-ordinative capacity and imaginative design. This easily leads to what was once criticised as technocratic paternalism, and more recently as a ‘post-political’ expression of a ‘police’ state.¹ The technical side of the planning idea has been moderated by a concept of a political community which balances the freedom of individuals to pursue their own life path with collective concerns of these individuals for the conditions and futures of the political communities of which they are a part. Deeply embedded in those collective concerns are values of fairness; respectful treatment of all humans and, in recent years, other species; respect for formal laws; and avoidance of gross inequalities. Along with the development of the democratic idea that a political community should be governed by elected representatives of that community, political struggles over the past two centuries have veered between a more libertarian interpretation of this nexus and a more collective interpretation, along a familiar right/left axis. These struggles have focused not just on who should be a community member (or citizen) but on what directions and performative practices such a community should evolve in its formal government institutions, and where in a political system the views of citizens are to be articulated and heard.

The primary locus of these struggles has in the past century mainly been at the level of the nation state. Taking many forms, with different degrees of decentralisation within it, it is at the national level that legal systems and political constitutions are primarily designed. And in imperial times, it was nation states which exported institutional designs and practice norms into the places they colonised and exploited. It is in nation states, even federal ones like the US and Germany, that the laws governing limitations on property rights and the protection of the public realm are embedded, laws which, in countries where the ‘rule of formal law’ prevails, are central to shaping the physical form of settlements, of landscapes and connecting infrastructures – key tools of spatial planning strategies.

But an argument is gaining ground that the nation state is no longer able to act as this locus. Part of this argument is fuelled by the difficulties nation states face in satisfying all the demands and claims of a citizenry which increasingly recognises its diversity and expects fair treatment across multiple demands. Crafting an accepted set of governance institutions and policies for the national community as a whole becomes seemingly ever less possible. The struggle between technocratic elites and citizens who feel misunderstood and neglected is a major factor behind contemporary populist movements which seek a return to older national stabilities, often whipped up by an attention-seeking media. The other part of the argument relates to an increasingly interconnected world, where global capitalism roams around seeking opportunity, where cultural expectations are shared across national borders infusing aspirations and demands for individual opportunity and where global climate patterns are changing fast. Exposed to the challenges generated by these external forces, the nation state faces an even bigger task of finding ways to act in this global context while delivering to its demanding, critical and often anxious citizens. If the nation state can no longer handle this load of trouble, what alternatives may be emerging?

Some argue, as did the late John Friedmann, that the focus should be on “building from below, strengthening the regulatory and tax raising powers of local government and city-regions, and encouraging civil society activism”.² This has strong potential for democratic renewal, linking citizens and their governance arrangements in a more visible and intimate way. But this direction leaves open the question of how such political communities are to relate to each other without some wider arena for addressing a globalising economy and planetary environment under threat. In the late twentieth century, many thought that the European Union could provide such a framework, allowing subnational regions and localities to flourish while the national level became less important. But as Faludi (2018) argues in his most recent book, this hope has turned to disappointment as nation states have remained resolutely dominant, limiting EU initiatives. The value of the EU as an alliance of nation states shows another possible direction, as other alliances build up elsewhere in the world. Their focus is economic, political and military, aimed to counterbalance the Western ‘North Atlantic’ nexus, itself now fading. But few so far have the level of citizen awareness and support that continue to underpin the EU, let alone its environmental agenda and democratic traditions. Is the future world political geography one of supranational alliances in tension with each other?

Others have argued that building political communities around a nested hierarchy of territories – from the neighbourhood to the nation and the nation to the global, no longer has relevance in an age of multiple webs of relations weaving across a global landscape. Each web has its own relational dynamics, its particular nodes and peripheries. Such webs can be seen as distinct political communities, with their own practices of governance, distribution of rights and responsibilities, and norms of legitimacy. Faludi argues for such a way forward for addressing key spatial planning dilemmas facing European peoples, influenced by Hardt and Negri’s claim that global imperialism now takes a decentred and deterritorialised form (2001, p. xii). Yet as these relations overlap, interact and struggle with each other, how are inter-network disputes to be resolved?

Rejecting such alternatives leads to an argument that the key challenge of our times is to build global governance institutions. This is the argument of a new short book by Gavin Kitching’s new book Capitalism and Development in the Twenty-First Century, and it is this book which has provoked my comments. Kitching comes from a background in the political economy of development, imbued with a strong sense of historical evolution, inspired by both Marx and E.P Thompson.³ Kitching stands back from the current angry critique of neo-liberal forms of economic management pursued by very many countries at present – some under duress from the World Bank and the IMF, to take a broader look at the dynamics of development inherent in capitalism as a system. He is inspired by a Wittgensteinian injunction to move from analysis to praxis/practice, an orientation which is of course very familiar to those in the planning field.

His argument builds on a re-statement of the logic of capitalist enterprise now extended to a global scale. This logic is driven by the search for profit, generating competition between firms. “Competitive pressures drive capitalism, they are what makes it a system” (p. 23). This system generates quantum increases in wealth – ‘economic growth’ as it is called these days, but has no moral interest in either the ‘goods’ or ‘bads’ which accompany capitalist enterprise. Along with many others, Kitching is deeply disgusted by current capitalist excess, with its exacerbation of inequalities and its damaging exploitation of environmental resources, excesses which have been enabled in part by uneven, enabling and disjointed regulation by nation states. But, implicitly taking issue with anti-capitalist political movements, he also argues that capitalism as a system has made an important contribution to expanding human welfare through its capacity to innovate and to generate a major quantum of wealth which has improved the material conditions of very many across the world.⁴ The logic driving capitalism as a system, Kitching argues, leads capitalist enterprises to roam around in search of opportunities, both creating and destroying knowledge and technology as they go. As Massey and Harvey have long argued,⁵ such unfettered economic endeavours allow some places to flourish while others are neglected, with the favoured places of one time often being undermined as new dynamics turn the focus of capitalist energy in different directions. But as the capitalist system has no morality, despite the efforts of some companies these days to demonstrate their social and environmental responsibility, it cannot generate a concern for its collective impacts, except where these undermine profit-seeking opportunity and the competitive economic landscape.

At this point, Kitching’s argument moves in a Keynesian direction to stress the importance of containing the excesses of capitalism and limiting the social and environmental harm its unfettered enterprise can produce.⁶ To enable capitalist competition to flourish, such rules need to apply to all enterprises, to create what is often referred to as a ‘level playing field’. A key task of economic policy in post-WW2 welfare states was to establish such ground rules. Such regulations include, of course, those relating to land use and environmental impacts, a key function of planning systems. There is a considerable business-focused literature which notes the diversity of such ‘planning’ systems between and within nation states, a cause of both irritation and of opportunity for exploitation.⁷

Kitching’s key point is that the national systems that act as platforms for the articulation and implementation of such regulation are no longer sufficient in a world of globalised capitalist competition and global environmental threat.⁸ Economic globalisation, underway since the 1970s, operates across multiple markets and, Kitching argues, is accompanied by a globalisation of aspirations. In his view, this generates migration flows from poorer to richer countries, which encourages ‘xenophobic nationalism’ (p. 38). Given the global reach of many powerful capitalist firms, his conclusion is that such regulations need to be global, to create a global ‘level playing field’. He is therefore critical of policies which encourage nations and cities to position themselves ‘competitively’ in a global economy defined by capitalist enterprise. The challenge for political action is instead, Kitching argues, to generate institutions capable of global regulation and with a philosophy which encourages an environmentally healthy and sustainable planet for future generations and provides enough resources so that everyone can live a fulfilled life in whatever way they find fulfilling (p. 93). He sees this as leading to a world where poorer places get richer, but richer ones grow less fast. Broad patterns of inequality are thereby reduced, supported by tax harmonisation measures which operate globally, generating sufficient resources to sustain public services. His Utopia is thus deliberately opposing national ‘race-to-the-bottom’ economic strategies.

Kitching’s discussion at this point becomes a provocation rather than a convincing argument. He dismisses the nation state as a platform for articulating appropriately harmonised regulations. Global economic changes and the resultant pressures from migration are likely to make their politics more ‘nationalistic’, that is, narrowly and defensively focused. National governments will be unable to deliver to the aspirations of their voters because their freedom of economic manoeuvre is limited, and their ability to articulate policy responses in democratic ways is intellectually weakened because of the complexities of global dynamics. So, in an echo of Karl Marx’s call for an international approach to workers’ struggles in the nineteenth century, political struggle now needs to move from a focus on the nation state to campaigning for the creation of global institutions capable of regulating capitalist enterprise worldwide. Kitching recognises that there are a number of global level institutions already addressing trade and environmental issues, as well as the United Nations itself. But he is doubtful about their capacity to arrive at strong and coherent regulations. He is also worried that poorer nations need the chance to develop to reach levels experienced by richer ones. Instead, he suggests that global institutions should grow from existing groupings of ‘developed and developing’ nations and particularly the G20, with the IMF radically reformed into a commission with a narrowly-focused remit to formulate ‘regulatory proposals’ (p. 97) for member nation states to follow. As other nations get richer, they could then join this grouping. Such a development of global economic governance should be supported by developing a cadre of technocrats with the intellectual capacity and moral orientation to the collective good to guide the articulation and implementation of regulatory policies. Is Kitching’s argument then a form of ‘post-political’ Utopia?

Kitching resists this conclusion by asserting the importance of democratic practices to direct and legitimise such technocratic competence. In his Utopia, a globally regulated capitalism will be sustained by a globally aware citizenry, informed by multiple ‘conversations’ about key issues affecting the planet, allowing private enterprise to generate enough growth to allow all to flourish while avoiding serious harm to people and the environment. Here he moves hesitantly towards the territory now well-developed in the discussions (and practices) associated with the idea of deliberative democracy. Kitching advocates a cautiously positive attitude to capitalism as the starting point for such conversations, along with a commitment to the practices of liberal democracy. The defence of liberal democracy, he states, is “more important than abstract debates around social justice. (and) . preventing environmental destruction. Liberal democracy is the most precious jewel of human social life and defending and spreading it the most important single political objective one can have” (p. 113). His project is thus a political one, to be struggled for by people who recognise that, as humans, we live social lives with others and must act collectively to care for our future and our planet. This, for him, is the essence of a humane political life.

What are readers of journals like Planning Theory and Practice to make of such arguments? Those interested in capitalist dynamics may note that what we experience today is as much to do with monopoly, oligopoly and entanglements with state practices, as it is to the drive for profit. Others will look for more recognition of cultural habits of thought and practice which shape people’s identities, aspirations and ways of regarding formal laws and institutions. These are never static, but shift as new influences come into view and new technologies provide channels for the circulation of ideas and information. And as planners know all too well, the world in all its environmental and socio-cultural variety cannot be levelled into a smooth ‘playing field’. It is full of particular traditions and habits and very varied geographies which pull against globalising tendencies, to create the conditions for the situated practices through which any regulatory principles come to be enacted.

And it is not just formal rules which regulate capitalist enterprise but people’s concern about the environment, climate change, about the treatment of others. Such concerns inspire the protests which impact on businesses through direct action against them and through their impact on consumer choices. Further, if people and businesses feel that formal rules make no sense in their specific worlds of action, they will ignore them unless driven to conform by authoritarian government practices. Nor may nation states wither away into insignificance so easily. Their focus in the formation of democratic publics may be weakening, but many people still feel strongly attached to a feeling for their ‘country’, often building on long histories of occupation and oppression by imperial powers, as in Ireland, or Poland for example. To my mind, it is more important these days to recognise that people have a plurality of identities. Some are linked to nested territorial hierarchies from the local to the global. Others are linked to issue-based networks which stretch across territories in all kinds of ways. How can a nexus of global institutions develop sufficient attachments and legitimacy within this plurality to allow its rules to be accepted and embodied in everyday political and economic practices?

It is here that Kitching’s emphasis on ‘conversations’ comes into play. Would these provide the grounding for developing a global regulatory system supported by people in many diverse situations and with many different (and always changing) identifications? Cultivating a global public sphere through conversations among globally-informed people is an enormous challenge. If such conversations pull too far away from the everyday life experience of most people, they will find themselves in a vanguard with no followers. If they become too focused on the experiences and practices of some dominant groups of nations, they can generate what came to be called ‘the Washington Consensus’ as it infused the practices of the IMF and the World Bank in the 1990s and 2000s. Is Kitching’s Utopia and his strategy for getting there still far too ‘western’ for a world which is pivoting east? And is there really a prospect of some kind of relatively progressive global consensus when so much historical and recent experience tells us of struggles for power between advocates of different ideas and different practices? The global stability that many of us born in the mid-twentieth century experienced was held in place by a ‘balance of power’ between two very different political systems, not a consensus.

Like Kitching, I too would like to see humane, socially-progressive and environmental values and practices inform how the world evolves. But I see this as a project requiring continuous struggle, in many arenas at many scales. It is not just global regulatory institutions which need some invention and design, but governance institutions at many levels and along many webs of relations. And while in some very politically-centralised countries, such as the UK, political critique focuses too much on national level policy development, the nation state is likely to be with us as an institution for a very long time. There are also forces developing supra-national alliances, of which the EU is the most developed example, as well as sub-national institutions at various scales. For those committed to struggling to sustain progressive values into the future, it is important to insert such values into all efforts at institution-building, at whatever level and reach. Further, such institutions will only have progressive potential if rooted in people’s everyday understanding of their worlds and how they relate to others. Fostering such potential means cultivating an open-minded, tolerant and outward-looking culture, resisting injustices and recognising our multiple engagements with a wider world. This is a project of education as well as conversation, but education in how to co-exist with a plurality of others in a shared but fragile world. It involves building publics and public spheres at multiple nodes of interaction and multiple levels, in ways which allow some kind of flow of knowledge and learning between them. Without such flows and interactions, and the slow build-up of knowledge and legitimacy, global institutions will either float away on abstractions with limited leverage and legitimacy, or become yet another way of supporting the priorities of global ‘elites’.

People who have been acculturated into the spatial planning field will find this challenge of institutional design familiar territory. We have analysed regulatory practices at regional, national and sub-national level which end up fragmentary and contradictory in concrete situations. We have researched ways in which broader forces interact with the dynamics of particular situations and what people make of such experiences. We have studied how people learn about each other and about their wider context through experiences of trauma, of conflict and of ways of sorting out shared problems. Such studies show that people do learn a good deal from experiences, and very many people are wise and thoughtful in relation to their experiential worlds. Political leaders and technocrats seeking some form of democratic legitimacy who fail to respect this knowledge and experience end up dismissed as either irrelevant or oppressive by the publics they see themselves as representing or acting for. Institutional design is as much about shaping governance cultures and performative practices as about enacting a piece of legislation.

The flow of books about how the global political economy is evolving, of which Kitching’s book is one contribution, reflects the challenging and unsettled conditions of our times. And, as Kitching argues (p. 78), books are one way of enriching the ideas in circulation, helping to stimulate discussion about the changing world order and what to struggle for. It is important that people with a planning background engage in these discussions. We can help to widen and deepen them with our knowledge of the significance of place qualities and spatial interactions in shaping people’s future well-being and attachments. While it is important to understand the dynamics of capitalist enterprise, our experience as researchers and practitioners underlines that there are other dynamics driving political futures, both environmental and socio-cultural, not to mention, as I write this, epidemiological. Planners in turn should take less for granted about currently existing governance institutions, and become more radical in thinking about institutional designs. One aspect of this which deserves much more attention in the planning research community is the challenge of regulation. If we accept that futures emerge rather than being designed, and that interventions can only shape and shift such emergent processes, then we need to look more deeply at the regulatory practices through which such shaping and shifting can happen. Spatial planning interventions work in part through shaping investment projects, but a major function is to regulate the balance between the rights of private property owners and values held by a collectivity. If the governance institutions in which planning systems have been embedded are becoming unstable, as the neo-liberal mode of regulation implodes in the crises of its own contradictions, do we not then need to have a fundamental re-think about the focus, tools and practices of the regulation of land uses, environmental impacts and spatial interactions? And in doing so, do we not need to reach out to experiences of regulatory practices, both formal and informal, in many other arenas?

We planners have long been inspired by treatises on environmental futures, both Utopias and Dystopias. Some are also looking for post-capitalist futures. But we need to look at discussions of political and economic futures which start from where we currently are and what is emerging around us. I would urge planning academics and practitioners to engage in a critical way with discussions about the global economy and how to limit its harmful effects. The aim should be to deepen such discussion with awareness of what is involved in struggling for environmentally sustainable place qualities which can support well-being for people in very many different situations, and what it takes for people to see the value of an open-minded and tolerant direction for shaping the future, rather than an exclusionary and defensive one. And it is always valuable, when deeply engaged in some programme or project, to take a look through Amitai Etzioni’s wide-angle lens⁹ to check how the forces playing around whatever our specific focus may be are changing its context. In our present times, where so much of what we took for granted is being shaken up by new technologies, new directions for capitalist innovation, very evident shifts in our climate and natural environments, changing socio-cultural mores and habits, we need that wide-angle lens more than ever. The challenge is never to lose our understanding of the detailed dynamics which create what is visible through that wider lens.

Notes

1. See Metzger et al. (2015) for how this idea has developed within planning discussion. The use of the term ‘police’ derives from Ranciere (2014) who makes a distinction between what is embedded in formal government and conventional government practice (the ‘police’), and ‘the political’ which refers to ongoing critique of such settlements.

2. See Rajan (2019) for a strong recent argument for enabling local communities to grow in significance to balance the dominant power of the state and the market. For a more radical emphasis on the role of community initiative, see Hardt & Negri (2001, 2017).

3. EP Thompson was a Marxist historian known for his carefully-researched account of The Making of the English Working Classes (Thompson 1963).

4. See Mazzucato (2012) for an argument that major technological innovations originated in state initiatives.

5. See especially Harvey (1985); and Massey (1984).

6. Kitching’s argument echoes that promoted by the ‘regulation theory’ of the 1980s which saw development driven by the struggles between modes of (capitalist) accumulation and modes of regulation (see Amin, 1994).

7. Businesses often argue that planning systems should be designed not just to provide a level playing field of regulatory requirements, but ‘certainty’ about what these requirements will be. Yet it is businesses within a capitalist system which are in significant part responsible for the difficulties of arriving at stable political consensus upon which such certainty could be based.

8. And by implication, sub-national ones.

9. See Etzioni (1967).