INTRODUCTION

“Revere the emperor, throw out the barbarians” and “Rich country, strong army” were their refrains. But a more fundamental concern of the Meiji oligarchs – and a more self-serving one than they cared to advertise in their rhetoric – was to avoid the fate they had visited upon the Tokugawa family in 1868. As with all political leaders, the oligarchs had first to remain in office before they could achieve any other goals they might have had – whether those were increasing their own wealth or that of their countrymen or anything else.

The Meiji oligarchs ultimately failed to retain the monopoly grip on power they had collectively won; but their loss was not for lack of trying. This chapter recounts the rounds of internal bargaining and institutional adjustments among the oligarchs between 1868 and 1881. There was a palpable tension throughout the period: On the one hand, the oligarchs knew they had to cooperate to protect their regime. On the other hand, each oligarch struggled to rise above his fellow oligarchs. The result was a continuing pattern of alliance-shifting and coalition-building. Some oligarchs – Okuma Shigenobu, Itagaki Taisuke, and later Itō Hirobumi – eventually threw in their lots with the political parties to boost their relative power within the oligarchy. It was this jockeying for power among themselves and bringing in support from outside the circle that destroyed the oligarchy's exclusive control of Japan's political system.

INTRODUCTION

Scholars make much of “bureaucratic control” in Japan, particularly in the pre-war era. We find their discussions misleading, and in this chapter explain why. Simply stated, bureaucratic governance describes pre-war Japan only if one considers the Meiji oligarchs – those entrepreneurs who overthrew a shogunate and launched their own experiment – to be bureaucrats.

Even were the oligarchs bureaucrats, the pre-war Japanese government was not consistently under oligarchical control. Within twenty years of their reign, the oligarchs began to lose their monopoly on power. Never able to quell their internecine rivalries, they struggled to maintain what amounted to a classic failed cartel. Some of them enlisted the aid of “new entrants” in their struggles against each other. For a brief period in the 1920s the political parties founded by these renegade oligarchs were on center stage.

Some oligarchs, particularly Yamagata, gave the military a high degree of independence precisely because they were afraid of the encroachment of representative government. This too, in our view, was an outgrowth of intra-oligarchy rivalry. An independent military, Yamagata reasoned, would preserve his power from hostile political forces for at least as long as he was alive.

To the Japanese people, granting the military political independence was the oligarchs' greatest disservice. But the criticism may be beside the point. Whatever the rhetoric, the oligarchs were in the business of protecting themselves. Promoting the larger interests of Japan (an issue at the heart of this book) seems to have been at most a secondary goal.

INTRODUCTION

It stands in the middle of the Kenyan desert, hundreds of miles from the sea. As befits a minor Kenyan military outpost, it is a modest cement brick affair. Inside, it contains a warped pool table. Outside is a swimming pool, empty of everything except a decade's worth of accumulated sand. There is little to distinguish it from any other Kenyan outpost. Indeed, there is little else to it at all, except the plaque on the side of the building. But it is a plaque with a difference: “The Wajir Royal Yacht Club.”

It seems Prince Edward (later Edward VIII) is to blame. The building had once been a British army outpost, and the prince, in a pique of imperial zeal, had once promised to visit it. When the palace thought better of his royal enthusiasm, he prudently canceled the trip. The troops, however, missed neither the snub nor the chance for some cheap Edwardian revenge. If his majesty could not visit them, they asked, could he at least designate his scheduled stop a “royal yacht club”? The embarrassed palace only too eagerly obliged.

Some royal favors come dear, others come cheap. Some redistribute massive wealth to the favored few. In Chapter 8 we explored how the Imperial Japanese government may have transferred funds to the large banks from the small banks and the depositing public. In Chapter 9 we explored how it transferred funds to its patrons' railroads from the public treasury.

INTRODUCTION

Trains are different from other investments. Basic to our enterprise here, they differ in the significance historians attach to them. For decades, scholars routinely thought them the revolutionary technological change of the nineteenth century.

Trains also differ in their externalities. For decades, scholars routinely argued that they created a wide variety of beneficial spillovers. They generated larger labor markets, smoother national defense strategies, and broader trade patterns. Because railroad shareholders could not capture all these spillovers, scholars argued, left alone they invested suboptimally. Hence a role for government: Perhaps, if it subsidized the industry, it could induce more efficient investment patterns.

Trains differ too in the coordination problems they generate. Not only must firms match their competitors' track gauges and negotiate ways to handle shippers who send freight across more than one railroad. They must overcome special problems in buying the land they will use. Because they need contiguous parcels, sellers (if they know a railroad's plans) can hold up a firm for enormous prices. Hence the other role for government: Perhaps, by easing these hold-up problems, it could alleviate transactions costs too.

These claims are not specific to a particular country. Scholars do not just make them of the United States and Europe. They routinely make them of Japan as well. In his survey of the Japanese economy, Takatoshi Ito (1992: 20, 29) lists railroads prominently among Japan's infrastiructural investments. He then finds in the way the government promoted them a “key to Japan's fast economic growth.”

INTRODUCTION

The Meiji Constitution left a crucial element in the political process unspecified: the selection of Diet representatives. In the last chapter we outlined the logic behind the devolution of power from the oligarchs. In this chapter we explore how the shifting configuration of power influenced the choice of electoral rules. The choice of those rules – and the rules were adjusted several times – involved protracted negotiations among the oligarchs and the Peers, the political parties, the voters and indirectly the disenfranchised. Because electoral rules are at the very heart of political accountability, their evolving shape tells us something about who had power in the system, how much they had, and how they obtained it.

Although the oligarchs gave the Diet only limited powers in the Constitution, they remained concerned that the party politicians would gain popular support. Lest the politicians then demand more concessions, they established electoral rules that encouraged intra-party competition and thereby kept the parties weak. The party leaders mitigated this fratricidal competition by providing voters private goods, but the consequence was widespread corruption and in time voter disenchantment.

In this chapter we first describe the oligarchs' experiments with various electoral rules. We consider the consequences those rules had for the politicians and for their relationship with the oligarchs and the voters. In Section 2 we explore the initial choice of one- and two-member districts in 1889, and the switch to multi-member districts in 1900.

Studies of urbanization processes in the Caribbean in the past two decades tend either (1) to consider urbanization processes in the Caribbean outside of a global context (e.g. Hope 1986), or (2) to consider the local urban dynamics of urbanization apart from the Caribbean city system (e.g. Cross 1979; Portes and Lungo 1992; Potter 1989). The limitations of the studies that examine Caribbean urbanization are also to be seen in the literature on Miami. This literature tends to analyse Miami in relation to the Caribbean and Latin America in terms of the Cuban presence, but does not consider it as a world city (e.g. Allman 1987; Didion 1987; Garreau 1981; Grenier and Stepick 1992; Mohl 1983; Porter and Dunn 1984; Portes and Stepick 1993).

The Caribbean city system refers to a regional division of labour that produces transnational linkages between the most important Caribbean cities; this regional division of labour is based on the movement of commodities, capital, and people across cities. A movement which challenges traditional boundaries. This movement produces a hierarchical division of labour among the region's cities in terms of three distinctive roles: core, semi-periphery, and periphery.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyse the historical—structural developments that explain the emergence of Miami as a world city within the Caribbean city system during the 1970s and 1980s.

Global space is a space of flows. The global cities literature differs in its analysis of the financial, informational, migratory, and cultural circuits that are necessary and sufficient to constitute a ‘world city’. The various representations of ‘world cities’ none the less share a common strategy for conceptualizing global cities as relocalized points of intersection of these global networks, circuits, and flows within the jurisdictional boundaries of cities like New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, or Los Angeles, operating within the clearly demarcated borders of single nation-states. This relocalizing strategy, recentres highly decentred and differentially mediated global processes of capital investment, manufacturing, commodity circulation, labour migration, refugee generation, and cultural production by sharply demarcating between an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’, and then refocusing political—economic and socio-cultural analysis on what goes on ‘inside’ world cities and their respective states and societies.

This chapter seeks to question the relocalizing move implicit in the world cities problematic by examining some of the ways that the networks and circuits in which transnational migrants and refugees are implicated constitute fluidly bounded transnational or globalized social spaces, in which new, transnational forms of political organization, mobilization, and practice are coming into being. These new forms of what I will term ‘transnational grassroots politics’, have thus far been given scant attention in discussions of political life in world cities, because they transcend both the ‘urban’ level of analysis and the nation-state bounded discursive practices in which citizenship, civil society, political representation, national and urban politics are ordinarily cast.

Introduction

From the moment the term was initially coined, world cities have been associated with the concentration of power and wealth within a global context (Geddes 1968; Hall 1966). Such centres; ‘cities with international destinies’, have always been at the core of the world economy (Braudel 1984). During the tumultuous decades following 1960, changes in the organization of international economic activity and in the nature of advanced corporate and financial services have prompted scholars to identify a system of world cities that appear to operate as global nodes for international business decision-making and corporate strategy formulation (Cohen 1981). This international urban system has been recognized in the world city hypothesis as a hierarchy of urban places ranked on the basis of their integration with the world economy. At the apex of the hierarchy are the global cities: sites of rapidly increasing concentrations of corporate power, international finance, and higher-order producer services (Friedmann 1986).

Although its principal exponents have always insisted that the world city concept was not a theory but a hypothesis in need of empirical verification, the world city idea, and its associated assumptions about the nature of urban development, has been absorbed rapidly into the lexicon of urban studies. This in itself should occasion little surprise; the concept has provided a useful heuristic for those struggling to conceptualize the complex linkages of the new global economy.

My purpose in this chapter is to go some way to redressing two imbalances in the current literature about world cities. Specifically, I want first to focus not so much on the global as upon the local. In particular, I want to focus upon how large cities — some of which may be world cities however we define them — are administered and governed. All too often structures of city governance are either taken as a ‘given’, or are ignored altogether. They are almost never looked at in a comparative perspective although, importantly, the ‘politics of urban planning and development’ is included as one of the six themes in an SSRC collaborative investigation of New York, London, Paris and Tokyo (Mollenkopf 1993). In short, I want to put politics and government back into the world cities agenda.

The second imbalance I wish to address is the failure of much contemporary work to look seriously and systematically at large cities and at world cities in less developed contexts. As I have complained elsewhere (Ward 1993), so much urban analysis ignores the experiences and processes occurring in those contexts, despite the fact that this is where urbanization is occurring most dramatically, and that these centres are frequently the production loci for the so-called new international division of labour (Morris and Lowder 1992).

The studies that have been stimulated by John Friedmann's world cities hypothesis have been largely contemporary in nature, the chief exception being Anthony King's (1990) work on London as an imperial city. This general concern for the present is no accident and represents the derivation of the original study from Friedmann's initiative in linking urban hierarchies to the ‘new international division of labour’ (Fröbel et al. 1980). Studies of the latter argued that the world economy was entering a new era with the relocation of industrial production to the Third World, with world cities acting as the basing points of capital in this new globalized organization of production. However, the basic assumption of a social discontinuity between the present and what has gone before is in contradiction with the overall framework that world-systems analysis is sometimes thought to provide for world city studies. For this theoretical schema the emphasis is on a basic structural continuity in a single capitalist world-economy that can be traced back to around 1500 (Wallerstein 1983). Here I will approach the study of world cities from an explicitly world-systems perspective, which means, minimally, setting contemporary world cities into their longue durée context. If there are any benefits to be gained from this exercise it is likely that they will be two-way: as well as extending concern for world cities beyond their contemporary existence we will be focusing on the role of cities in the world-economy, a topic relatively neglected in world-systems analysis (the work of Fernand Braudel (1984) is a major exception).

At one time a beneficiary of tariffs which encouraged the formation of an import substitution manufacturing zone in southern Ontario, Toronto's subsequent rise to world city status has been based on the city's disproportionate national share of business and commercial services. Growing out of the intensive manufacturing of the Fordist era, the city's globally oriented service sector is the legacy of a now defunct Keynesian interventionism that sought to promote national economic development through a comprehensive industrial policy. This chapter explores the recent transformation of Toronto to the status of a world city by examining these sectoral shifts and the long-standing and pivotal role of finance capital in the national economy. The emergence of a new economic space of predominantly finance-based accumulation has coincided with the cultural transformation of the city through increased international and internal migration, and has provoked conflict over the direction of local economic development.

David Gordon (1988) reminds us that the historical process of the integration of the world economy is far from complete. But as many observers have noted, there has been a considerable expansion of the global circulation and investment of capital and of the movement of migrant populations (Sassen 1988, 1991; Stafford 1992). These phenomena can be connected to the period of almost continuous economic crisis that began in the 1970s and which spurred foreign direct investment (FDI) and saw the rise of competing industrial capitals in the newly industrialized countries (NICs).

Introduction

In this chapter I want to address a number of issues: the notion of the world or global city as a representation; the location and context within which this representation has been constructed and circulated; whether the concept represented by the terms ‘world city’ and ‘global city’ is the same and the terms interchangeable, or whether each signals a different set of assumptions and contextual presuppositions with which the object is defined.

If, for the present, we accept that there is indeed some reality which the term ‘world city’ represents, I want to look at this principally as a cultural space and see what recent work in social and cultural theory suggests about it, and how this theory might be deployed to say something about the spaces and built environments of the world city. What is the significance of such a world city as a real or potential site for the construction of new cultural and political identities, or for processes of cultural transformation in general? And what relevance might it have, either for the persistence or modification of existing local, regional, or national identities and cultures, or alternatively, for the construction of new transnational ones? Let me begin by clarifying the terms I have introduced.

In March 1993, less than a month before the World Cities in a World-System conference, a full-page advertisement in the New York Times asked rhetorically why the Japanese transnational corporation Nissan Shatai is trying to evict eighty ethnic Korean families from the village of Utoro near Kyoto in Japan. The villagers are descendants of conscripted labourers brought from Korea during the Second World War. Despite having lived in Japan for decades, the family members cannot vote and suffer discrimination of the sort that faces immigrant workers in many countries. The land on which their homes stand was sold by Nissan to developers in 1987, and efforts have been made to clear the site since then. With its cross-national message — written in English by ethnic Koreans living in Japan, addressed to American car buyers — this advertisement constitutes a powerful metaphor for our chapter.

By taking their plight to the readers of the New York Times, the Koreans blur familiar concepts: global, local, foreign, and domestic. Although this is a local — even parochial — story (how many readers of the advertisement could even locate Kyoto on a map of South-east Asia?), it possesses global veracity, as the organized racism leading to brutal attacks on ‘guest-workers’ in Germany indicates.

Last November in the Mississippi Delta, William White, an African-American tractor driver on the old Miley Plantation, harvested a few hundred acres of cotton. Several months later in the Los Angeles downtown garment district, a man's dress shirt was made from some of this same cotton. Rosa Gomez, an undocumented Guatemalan immigrant put the final stitches into the shirt, operating a state-of-the-art Japanese-produced sewing machine. Ms Gomez had recently arrived in Los Angeles, only one month after her family fled economic deprivation and political terror in the barrios of Guatemala City. They left their homeland about the same time that the cotton was being harvested near Clarksdale, Mississippi. Now the Guatemalan seamstress completed the shirt in a cramped, hot, noisy factory employing about thirty other Latino men and women, run by Mr Su-Hoon Kim, himself an immigrant from Korea. Mr Kim's factory is located in a high-rise building owned by an Anglo family that has long been part of the Los Angeles political élite. Mr Kim, one of a dozen small Asian-American subcontractors in this building, makes shirts for a major US sportswear company which markets them under its brand name at malls and department stores across North America, and exports them under its label to Europe and Japan.

As an interlocking system of production and markets, the global economy is a discovery of the 1970s (Barnet and Müller 1974). At the time there was a good deal of controversy over the so-called ‘new international division of labour’ (Fröbel et al. 1980) and a centuries-old ‘world system’ (Wallerstein 1974). Research paradigms were being born.

The significance of these theoretical developments for the study of urbanization was not recognized until the early 1980s (Cohen 1981; Friedmann and Wolff 1982). Ten years have passed since then, and this chapter is an attempt to survey what we have learned and to assess where we stand in the study of world cities. I begin with a discussion of some conceptual issues: what is the ‘theoretical object’ of world cities research? How shall we define the elusive notion of world city? I then launch into an extended review of the literature, including theoretical developments in the 1980s and empirical studies in the early 1990s. The third section takes a closer look at the notion of a structured hierarchy of world cities and argues the need to remain ever alert to economic and political changes that may lead to the rise and fall of world cities that are linked to each other in ‘antagonistic co-operation’.