“… Now, if Britain was a typical country, you might expect it to have a second city of about five million, which is twice the size of Greater Manchester or the area around Birmingham.

I say this because it has been observed – very loosely it should be said – that the size distribution of cities within countries tends to follow a pattern in which the biggest city is about twice the size of the second city, three times the size of the third city, four times the size of the fourth and so on.

It is named Zipf’s Law after the American linguist George Zipf, who noticed that the frequency distribution of words in many languages followed that pattern.

For the UK, the implication is stark. As the eminent economic geographer from the London School of Economics, Henry Overman, puts it: ‘These kind of arguments imply that the problem with Britain’s urban system is not that London is too big. Instead, if anything, it’s that our cities are too small.’

Our second tier cities in particular. Having cities that are too small is potentially an economic problem because we know that big cities act as hubs which boost whole regions.

We know that cities are where a disproportionate amount of business gets done. And we know that, typically, bigger cities are more productive than smaller ones. …

Hitherto, one might say that the lack of a proper second city has allowed London to divide and rule the rest of the nation. And the argument is even more powerful now that London has become such an obvious global centre.

It is as though Britain has a great world city but lacks a great national one.
So, if you believe this analysis, which second city offers the most hope for taking on the might of London?

Manchester or Birmingham are usually put forward, and the data suggests there is a logic to those two being on the shortlist. …

However, there is an interesting alternative suggestion – Hebden Bridge. It is not a suggestion to take literally, but it does make an important point.

Hebden Bridge, nestling in the Pennines between Manchester and Leeds, is certainly one of the most interesting and flourishing towns in the UK. It was once declared the “fourth funkiest town in the world” (whatever that means) and is often said to be the lesbian capital of the UK. The suggestion that it is Britain’s second city came from resident David Fletcher, who was active in the 80s saving the town’s old mills and converting them to modern use.

His point is that Hebden Bridge is an inverted city with a greenbelt centre and suburbs called Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool.

His point was that the real second city of the UK is a northern, trans-Pennine strip that extends the relatively short distance across northern England, joining the built-up areas that lie second, fourth and sixth in the UK ranking.

Certainly, Hebden Bridge has attracted a lot of professional couples who are split commuters, one heading towards Manchester and one towards Leeds each morning. It is a place that allows both those cities to be treated as next door.

And maybe therein lies some kind of answer to the critical mass of London. It’s not a second city called Hebden Bridge, but a super-city that tries to turn the great cities of the north into one large travel-to-work area.

It would require a lot of physical infrastructure to improve links between the different centres. …”

aus: Evan Davis : The case for making Hebden Bridge the UK’s second city, Mind the Gap: London vs. The RestBBC Two at 21:00 on Monday, 10 March 2014. (siehe ganzen Text auf BBC-Website)

03/14

“To sum up: the other side of individualization seems to be the corrosion and slow disintegration of citizenship. Joël Roman … points out in his recent book (La Démocratie des Individus, 1998), that ‘vigilance is degraded to the point of surveillance, engaging collective emotions and fear of the neighbour‘ – and urges people to seek a ‘renewed capacity for deciding together’, a capacity now conspicious mostly by absence.

If the individual is the citizen‘s worst enemy and if individualization spells trouble for citizenship and citizenship-based politics, it is because the concerns and preoccupations of individuals qua individuals fill the public space, claiming to be its only legitimate occupants and elbowing out from public discourse everything else. The ‘public’ is colonized by the ‘private‘; ‘public interest’ is reduced to curiosity about the private lives of public figures and the art of public life is tapered to the public display of private affairs and public confessions of private sentiments (the more intimate the better), ‘Public issues’ which resist such reduction become all but incomprehensible.

The prospects for a ‘re-embedding’ of individualized actors in the republican body of citizenship are dim. What prompts them to venture onto the public stage is not so much a search for common causes and ways to negotiate the meaning of the common good and the principles of life in common, as a desperate need for ‘networking’. The sharing of intimacies, as Richard Sennett keeps pointing out, tends to be the preferred, perhaps the only remaing, method of ‘community-building’. This building technique can spawn ‘communities’ only as fragile and short-lived, scattered and wandering emotions, shifting erratically from one target to the another and drifting in the forever inconclusive search for a secure haven … As Ulrich Beck puts it … : ‘What emerges from the fading social norms is naked, frightened, aggressive ego in search of love and help….'”

aus: Zygmunt Bauman: Individuality, together, Foreword to: Beck, Ulrich / Beck-Gernsheim, Elisabeth: Individualization. London u.a.: Sage 2002, S.xviii.

04/12

(NL)

“There’s a word I keep hearing lately: “technocrat.” Sometimes it’s used as a term of scorn – the creators of the euro, we’re told, were technocrats who failed to take human and cultural factors into account. Sometimes it’s a term of praise: The newly installed prime ministers of Greece and Italy are described as technocrats who will rise above politics and do what needs to be done.

I call foul. I know from technocrats; sometimes I even play one myself. And these people – the people who bullied Europe into adopting a common currency, the people who are bullying both Europe and the United States into austerity aren’t technocrats. They are, instead, deeply impractical romantics.

They are, to be sure, a peculiarly boring breed of romantic, speaking in turgid prose rather than poetry. And the things they demand on behalf of their romantic visions are often cruel, involving huge sacrifices from ordinary workers and families. But the fact remains that those visions are driven by dreams about the way things should be rather than by a cool assessment of the way things really are.

And to save the world economy we must topple these dangerous romantics from their pedestals. …

So why did those “technocrats” push so hard for the euro, disregarding many warnings from economists? Partly it was the dream of European unification, which the Continent’s elite found so alluring that its members waved away practical objections. And partly it was a leap of economic faith, the hope – driven by the will to believe, despite vast evidence to the contrary – that everything would work out as long as nations practiced the Victorian virtues of price stability and fiscal prudence.

Sad to say, things did not work out as promised. But rather than adjusting to reality, those supposed technocrats just doubled down – insisting, for example, that Greece could avoid default through savage austerity, when anyone who actually did the math knew better. …

But our discourse is being badly distorted by ideologues and wishful thinkers – boring, cruel romantics – pretending to be technocrats. And it’s time to puncture their pretensions.”

aus: Paul Krugman: Eurozone crisis: To save Europe, topple the ‘technocrats’, New York Times Nov 21, 2011 (Internetquelle)

11/11

“Yet there is a sense today that globalisation as we are now experiencing it really is of a different hue … All that can be said at this stage is that it is likely that those who lived through earlier episodes of imperial domination probably felt the same.”

aus: Patrick Chabal & Jean-Pascal Daloz: Culture Troubles. Politics and the Interpretation of Meaning. London: Hurst & Co., 2006, S.168.

Abb.: I Wayan Upadana: Glo(babi)sation, 2013, indoartnow, im Internet.

09/09

“the State as it emerged and was consolidated in Western Europe over several centuries was the result of complex processes. … What were the main processes that led to the constitution of the State?

• First, there was a movement towards centralisation.
• Second, it entailed a protracted dynamic of resource concentration and then an attempt at monopolisation, in the first instance of military means. … the State then succeeded in monopolising legitimate violence both internally and vis-à-vis competing external polities. The process of monopolisation also (and crucially) concerned taxation. …
• Thirdly … centralisation and monopolisation led to the establishment of a bureaucracy … This involved a dynamic of differentiation and the emergency of a clear distinction between public and private spheres. … the rise of the State marked the end of patrimonialism. …
• The last aspect in the development of the State … was institutionalisation. This took the form of the written codification of laws applicable to all citizens and entailed legal responsibilities on the part of those who held political or bureaucratical office. …
• There are of course a number of other considerations that are of importance … Of note would be the relationship between the State, the nation, other territorial entities and different types of political regimes; its role in regulating competing social forces and in imposing order; its links with the élite; and, finally, its economic function, either as actor or regulator or, possibly, as manager of the welfare system …

… the use of the notion [of the State] in settings where the four processes discussed above have not occurred, or have occurred erratically, is a form of ‘concept stretching’ that is inimical to the proper understanding of the exercise of power.”

aus: Patrick Chabal & Jean-Pascal Daloz: Culture Troubles. Politics and the Interpretation of Meaning. London: Hurst & Co., 2006, S.227-229.

09/09

“Paradoxically … it is the West that holds most strongly that revolutionairies are able to provoke cultural ruptures, when the evidence (as in Russia or China) is that this is not the case.”

aus: Patrick Chabal & Jean-Pascal Daloz: Culture Troubles. Politics and the Interpretation of Meaning. London: Hurst & Co., 2006, S.165.

09/09

“… rational choice is helpless simply because its examination of self-interest is always made ex post facto. In other words, the explanation is tautological: conflict occurred because it was in the interests of the actors concerned to engage in violence.”

aus: Patrick Chabal & Jean-Pascal Daloz: Culture Troubles. Politics and the Interpretation of Meaning. London: Hurst & Co., 2006, S.144.

09/09

“The only credible justification for comparison ought to te pragmatic: that is, to enable us to understand better what is happening in the world in which we live.”

“The choice of questions and case studies must be appropriate. Only meaningful comparisons can yield meaningful insights.”

“… an analysis of the political order requires an understanding of power at the local level. … It is not possible to ascertain, a priori, which are the most relevant units of analysis. … Meaningful comparison must be demonstrated, not assumed. …

comparisons … [can] only be set up once the question being investigated has been related to the appropriate level of analysis within the relevant context. In this instance, an assessment of party politics in Muslim and non-Muslim societies requires an analytical framework that would enable a comparison of notions of representation rather than party competition …

… a cultural approach stresses the importance of taking a dynamic, historically based view of social relations. …

What is at stake is the appreciation of the variegated ways in which power, authority, control and influence impinge on the workings of the politics that really affect people’s lives. The difficulty here lies in identifying such webs of power and in finding means of advancing comparative analysis. …

A cultural approach makes possible the identification of important political actors in two ways. First, it proposes to make explicit the systems of meaning that validate authority in society. … Second, it recognises that significant political agency is to be found in both the formal and informal sectors of political life – two areas that need equal research attention. … Finally, it provides a means of studying the increasingly salient role of non-state actors in international relations. …

The first and most significant political function of culture in all societies is to provide a framework for the enunciation of rationality. … This entails working out its two distinct aspects: the first concerns the ‘logics’ of a political system; the second involves understanding how actors explain what they do. … Political logic is always constructed, contextually, within the culture of which it is a part. Thus the aim of a cultural approach is to seek to understand how such logics emerge, or are ‘invented’, how groups of people come to agree, even if only implicitly, on what rational political behaviour is. …

Myths … are usually a response either to the necessity of constructing a clearly defined sense of identity or to meet a perceived threat from other groups. Myths are thus the material from which communities are ‘imagined’ … What matters …. is the fact that myths of this ilk make possible large-scale political violence. …

We are … interested in identifying, understanding and discussing the ways in which the people concerned make sense of the changes they witness or undergo; how they explain what they do, in the ways in which they do it. … culture changes tectonically – meaning that the process is marked by three characteristics: it is perceived by us to be subteranean, unpredictable and to proceed in unequal quantum jumps. … What matters is how political meanings evolve and why.”

aus: Patrick Chabal & Jean-Pascal Daloz: Culture Troubles. Politics and the Interpretation of Meaning. London: Hurst & Co., 2006, S.125-155, 177, etwas umsortiert.

09/09

“‘Culture … denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards live‘ [C.Geerts].

Let us unpack what this characterisation implies for political analysis. The key notion here is that culture is a ‘system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms’. That makes it plain, first, that what may appear merely as a conglomeration of discrete ‘values’ is in fact an inter-related and structured whole. Second, it hightlights the historical dimension of culture, which is to be understood not as being simply the current ‘language‘ of norms and habits (synchronically= but as the living environment, evolved in the longue durée (diachronically). Finally the emphasis is clearly placed on the fact that culture is expressed in symbolic form, and not, as is sometimes believed, only in factual statements. Comparative analysis, therefore, must concern itself with all three aspects of culture …”

aus: Patrick Chabal & Jean-Pascal Daloz: Culture Troubles. Politics and the Interpretation of Meaning. London: Hurst & Co., 2006, S.23.

09/09

“Ethnicity is one of the most widely cited causes of political action, but one of the most difficult concepts to define precisely. … The compelling force of the concept … derives from the perception that it provides a singularly tight fit between identity and community. … Hence the notion is predicated on two fundamental assumptions. The first is that it is possible to identify clearly those characteristics that distinguish one ethnic group from another. The other is that such features are of primary, or determinant, significance for members of those groups. …

In the West it is viewed primarily as an emotional attachment to a community of origin of, more pragmatically, as a basis for lobbying. From the West, however, ethnicity in less economically advanced, of simply culturally different, settings is perceived more as a primordial sentiment, a quality of being which is overwhelming – that is, over which people have little control. Although the same term is used in both instances, in reality the one is the reverse side of the other. …

The point is to … move away from evolutionary theory, and to accept that the instrumental quality of ethnicity is both historically and culturally bound, whatever the setting. … It is neither as clear-cut nor as casual as it is blithely assumed to be. …

The idea that ethnicity is easily identified is very largely a myth, in part due to the colonial method of classifying ‘natives’. … [in] pre-colonial Africa … ethnicity was an eminently fluid and malleable characteristic. Individual, and even whole groups, could easily change ethnic identities or entertain several, or, alternatively consider themselves part of extended religions and occupational groups … At the same time ethnicity need not automatically be politically consequented. … it is imperative to distinguish between political tribalism … from moral ethnicity, which provides the ethical framework for the life of a particular community.”

aus: Patrick Chabal & Jean-Pascal Daloz: Culture Troubles. Politics and the Interpretation of Meaning. London: Hurst & Co., 2006, S.112-115.

09/09