Until recently, we thought we were pretty clear about money. It was quite simply the notes and coins in our wallets, or our debit and credit cards, or the welcome additions to our bank accounts, appearing as credits on our screens or on our bank statements. We never doubted that a shop would accept cash, or cards, when we pay for goods and services. We transfer money to other people's bank accounts either in the same country or to another, rarely doubting that it will arrive, even if we might consider the process slow and expensive. Most people in developed economies do not give the form of money or the underlying processes which ensure it functions a moment's thought. Their only concern is very likely the need or desire for more money!

The arrival of new forms of “money” – so-called “cryptocurrencies” – has created much interest and considerable controversy. The purpose of this book is to describe, explain and evaluate the attempts to provide these new currencies as alternatives to fiat money, the government-issued currencies. We shall examine in detail these various forms of new currencies and consider whether or not they can really count as “money” and can replace the familiar forms. Concerns about the safety and reliability of digital assets and their impact on fiat money and monetary policy has led to many central banks exploring the possibility of issuing their own digital currency. The book shall also assess the possible emergence of a central bank digital currency and what that might mean for money.

The key theme throughout this book is that these various efforts to replace fiat currency with cryptocurrencies fail because their structures cannot establish trust, which is essential for money to operate as a means of exchange and value. It is ironic that “trust” was a key motivation behind the first “peer-to-peer electronic cash systems”, designed in the wake of the global financial crisis when faith in central banks and the global financial system was at its weakest.

What globalization is not

Not all megacities are global. Some megacity qualities, such as having a large dominating economy, are necessary for a city to reach global status, although not in themselves sufficient to achieve that end. Global cities may sometimes overlap with megacities but they are also sharply different from them. Megacities are defined within a local context and with reference to their size, scope and complexity, whereas global cities are defined by their international stature and their communications with the rest of the world. For example, by local standards, Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo) is a megacity. Its population of 12 million covers an area of more than 3,000 square miles and it is packed with more than 20 communes. Its proper functioning depends upon a sizeable infrastructure of highways, electric grids, reservoirs and bridges. Yet Kinshasa should not be mistaken for a “global city”. Outside of Africa its connection to the rest of the world is tenuous and its economic integration into the global economy is almost non- existent.

Further, globalization is very different from “internationalization”. Globalization is not, as Thomas Friedman wrongly put it, an act of discovering faraway continents and it certainly did not show up because Columbus crossed the ocean in 1492 (Friedman 2005). If travel outside the known world constituted the presence of globalization, we could go back centuries and call the movement of Neanderthals across Europe an early form of “globalization”. Rather, globalization represents a qualitative change in the substance of international intercourse. That qualitative difference can be measured by the rapid, if not instantaneous absorption of values, information and symbols across boundaries. Things do not just move rapidly, they are assimilated, absorbed and reacted to across boundaries in a stroke of a computer key.

Understanding globalization

Fundamentally, globalization is a process that is driven by multidimensional forces. The key words are “process” and “multidimensional”. By “process” we refer to a condition that is not a permanent state of affairs but a continual flow of activity involving the cross- national integration of people, economies, business firms, social organizations and governments. We can think of this process as affecting cities with differential impacts. Some cities have been able to ride its waves exceedingly well, some have been crushed by it, while others have been barely affected.

Megacity change

During the course of editing this manuscript, our editor, Alison Howson, questioned whether New York crises were “inevitable”. The question penetrated all that we had written and touches on a key finding of our work – the centrality of crisis. Our model of change at the beginning of this volume, locates crises/tensions between growth on one hand and adaptation on the other hand. While tensions refer to “pressures” emanating from groups, “crises” are transition points that can morph into system- wide breakdown. As such they are pivotal to transformation. Crises can also generate innovation, as evidenced by the flood- resistant redesign of Lower Manhattan put into motion after superstorm Sandy. While “inevitable” is not the word we would use, crises have been a major part of the New York's history and some authors have treated it as an inevitability.

Crises have a certain tenacity and seem to always lurk in the background of any serious event. Such was evident across the cases and themes documented throughout this volume. Hence, tensions in the system are seen as having the potential for leading to crises, and ultimately regime change. The most recent incidents of protests/riots in the summer of 2020 and subsequent rising crime rates in 2021– 22 were serious enough to disrupt political and social order. Given enough duration and severity the electorate might have turned towards extremes of left or right. While voters did not take to the extremes, instances of sequential disorder tell us something about the fragility of change.

The protests/riots of 2020 had ample precedent and like most critical events they had both distant and proximate causes. The distant cause revolved around police abuse all too common in encounters with African- American neighbourhoods. The proximate cause or immediate “trigger” for rioting usually entailed an incident between citizens and the police or between different social classes that resulted in injury or death.

During the 1960s protests/riots erupted throughout the megacity. In Harlem riots burst onto the streets in 1964, due to the shooting of a black youth by a white off- duty police officer, and again in 1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King.

In this chapter we explore the ways in which leaders have endeavoured to use policy, planning, incentives and regulation to capitalize on these territorial features and manage the resultant tensions that growth brings to people and place (Kantor, Savitch & Haddock 2002). While there is no question that capital, or more specifically corporate interests, have long been viewed as fundamental to the fiscal health of the region, recent history reveals a more complex set of relationships underlying development decisions. Indeed, today it would appear that labour and civil society groups, undergirded by powerful left- wing political actors, have become a force to be reckoned with. Only time will tell if we are seeing a new phase of development in the megacity, a decentring of the growth machine, or perhaps a counterweight is pushing back in the form of an anti- growth collation advocating for people- centred development (Vogel & Swanstrom 1989).

The New York megacity represents a vast “strategic place in contemporary globalization” processes (Taylor et al. 2014: 3), where local leaders have endeavoured to manage growth and the inevitable pressures it brings to bear on people and place through bargaining and negotiation. Indeed, one of the unique traits of this powerful city has been its capacity to adapt and change through leadership, policy and planning without compromising its iconic economic and political position domestically or internationally.

New York is nothing if not resilient.

New York is first and foremost an economic agglomeration, drawing a diverse range of businesses, a vast pool of labour and extensive flows of capital. As a megacity, it offers the prospect of economies of scale for business. Firms can benefit from proximity to supportive services, competitors and access to supply chains. The global city, as we have seen, is also one that has a wide range of quality- of- life features – ample housing, cultural facilities, public space, transportation and access to educational institutions. Thus it is also presumed to be a place that attracts talent, and by extension serves as a locus for innovation.

Governance across New York is perhaps one of the most counterintuitive features of the region. Given the size of its economy, the vast range of services that must be performed on a daily basis, the scope of its transportation networks and the sheer numbers of people and goods that circulate through the megacity (not only locally but nationally and globally), one would expect that, beneath this living breathing behemoth, there would be a unified, well-organized and coherent governmental system. One would imagine a clear set of institutions in place that would oversee, manage, plan and coordinate these activities. One would anticipate a political system characterized by collaborative leaders, working collectively to adapt to the tensions inherent in growth, and a political system that would serve to keep things moving. One would expect an institutional ensemble that was poised to face the challenges wrought by climate change, terrorism, global economic shocks and health crises. But, in fact, when we turn our gaze to the administrative and political scaffolding that supports the megacity, what we find is something quite unexpected.

This highly productive region appears to operate in the absence of a unified or coordinated structure of governance. Regional institutions operating both across the entire region and within each state coexist alongside a plethora of more localized county and municipal governments, special districts and neighbourhood- level institutions. Governance in the region is so very complex that it does at times seem almost miraculous that the megacity is able to cohere around critical needs, and yet it does.

The megacity contains, literally, thousands of entities, some formally defined in law (de jure) and others informally emerging (de facto). The historic evolution of governance in this dynamic region mirrors the patterns discussed in Chapter 3. Governance has been shaped by ongoing competition between localities to capture a larger share of economic growth, popular pressures over equitable representation and administrative pressures to cut costs and increase efficiency in the delivery of services. It is not simply economic competition that has driven processes of expanded governance, but, as discussed in Chapter 2, necessity has also served as a driver during moments of crisis (environmental, economic, health).

New York has always been a magnet, not only for economic development, commerce and trade, but most importantly for people. Immigration and migration have fuelled growth and also helped to stabilize this diverse region during moments of instability, crisis and decline. In 2020 there were an estimated 4.95 million foreign- born residents in the region (58 per cent naturalized), 21 per cent entered the United States after 2010, and 67 per cent entered the United States after 1990 (US Census Bureau 2019, 2020a). The Great Migration between 1910 and 1970 from the south of the United States brought a 27 per cent increase in the region's black populations. Puerto Rican migration grew during the post- war period, immigration from South America came in the 1990s (NYC Mayors Office of Immigrant Affairs 2021b), and today the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the megacity are of Asian and Pacific Islander origins (NYC Mayors Office of Immigrant Affairs 2021a).

On the New Jersey side of the region, the cities of Newark, Jersey City and Elizabeth situated in the older urban areas of the gateway region are home to the largest foreign- born populations in the entire state of New Jersey. Despite ebbs and flows over time, the megacity is not only home to the largest immigrant population in the United States, but also the largest black population (Mollenkopf 2017). According to the 2020 census, the megacity was home to almost three million African- American residents (US Census Bureau 2020b). Not surprisingly, the megacity has prided itself on being a locus of diversity. While the forces of migration and immigration have been central aspects of megacity growth and diversification, public policy and private markets have been used to influence how these forces overlay onto the region's neighbour-hoods (Leibbrand et al. 2020).

Neighbourhoods have served as critical points of access for new populations, connecting people to jobs, housing, social networks and education; however, the history of neighbourhoods in the region also reveals tales of exclusion and disinvestment. As sociologists Mary Waters and Phil Kasinitz argue, “this diversity is characterized by paradoxes that emerge due to the ‘intersection of race and immigration’. It is at the neighbourhood scale, that these paradoxes are experienced” (2014: 147).

A megacity is a giant city whose urban core and surrounding localities hold ten million or more people. As a practical matter, megacities vary from coun-try to country, but one common trait is its gigantism, stemming from its population, its economy, its governance, its geography and its social makeup. Megacities may be called metropolises (America), agglomerations (Europe) regions (China) or the “Greater” city (as in “Greater London”). This identi-fication touches only the surface of what a megacity is about. The megacity's gargantuan dimensions include the magnitude of its society and its built envi-ronment, the extensiveness of its commerce, the scope of its policies and the complexity of its operations. Added up, the sheer weight of the megacity exerts a prodigious influence on the nation and sometimes on the world.

Not all megacities are able to merge these qualities into a synergistic whole, but New York amply succeeds. New York's City's population alone holds 8.3million – add more than 7 million in its near suburbs and we have a com-posite of 15 million people, sitting on more than 4,000 square miles of land (Statista 2019; US Census Bureau 2020b). The New York megacity holds more people than modestly sized but important nations such as Belgium, Israel, Sweden or Greece. Its land mass is about the same size as South Korea or the Netherlands. Its gross metropolitan product (GMP) of more than $1.53 tril-lion surpasses the gross national product of most nations of the world, and its economic influence reverberates across continents. Much as New York's pros-perity continues to buoy markets abroad, its fiscal collapse in 1975 and later in 2008, sent shock waves through the most advanced economies of Europe, Asia and the Americas. Clearly, New York's fate goes well beyond its region. Although it is too much to claim that where New York goes others are sure to follow, this particular megacity has a global reach.

Change and its cycles

The history of the New York megacity is laced with threats to its viability, but remarkably and strongly it has always come back. As we see it, the core ques-tions rest on how does a megacity, like New York, manage that comeback? What are the strengths and weaknesses that support or hinder its recovery?

Alison Howson was first to broach the idea of doing a series on the world's megacities. We took to it immediately and with enthusiasm. Both of us had been familiar with the world's great cities from both scholarly and personal experience. The promise of doing original work on New York sparked our imaginations. It is, after all, an ideal example of a megacity. Its five counties (boroughs) cover a land mass of more than 200 square miles, and its population of more than eight million people and its high densities make for one of the largest and most packed cities on the planet. In reflecting further, we noted that New York was filled with seeming contradictions. Travelling each day along a vast web of highways, airports and rail can be either surprisingly easy or painfully slow. The New York megacity is immensely rich and deeply impoverished. Its culture and people are steeped in kindness, yet renowned to be rude. It is not the contradictions themselves that pose the issue, but New York's size and diversity that provide the space and opportunity for an immensity of contrasts.

From a strictly formal point of view New York City falls just short of the ten million residents needed to constitute a megacity. We are, however, saved from this criterion by the reality of a Greater New York, whose population reaches 15 million. The day-to-day routines of the larger metropolis cross political boundaries with hardly a thought about who is doing business where. Commuters freely travel throughout the region for commerce, to visit friends or to see the sights. For this reason we have set our focus on a reachable New York metropolis that stretches across 13 counties. This is the New York in which most people work, play and fight over.

Why might it be important to write about this megacity? Firstly, context counts and “the city” itself exists in a greater environment of suburbs, other municipalities, special districts and state governance. The policies of surrounding localities have a profound effect on the city, whether they are related to exclusionary zoning or enormous traffic; both of which respectively have driven up housing affordability and hurt quality of life.

Understanding crises and breakdowns

Sooner or later megacities face a crisis that threatens their well- being or even their survival – either through natural or human- made dangers. By crisis we mean a major problem or challenge to the core principles of a system. Crises derive from different sources and come in different forms. Like most “emergencies” they are unexpected, creeping up on a city by an uncommon, gradual intersection of events or by an abrupt, shocking strike. We categorize these crisis as: (1) natural (2) politico/violent (3) eco/fiscal and (4) techno/infrastructures. Examples of natural crises include weather disasters and widespread diseases. Politico/violent crises include serious challenges to the existing structure of power. Political crises need not necessarily be violent, but merely serve to threaten existing power. In 1971 the state of New York interposed its authority over the city because of endemic police corruption and conducted the Knapp Hearings, which questioned the legitimacy of existing local government. Other political/violent crises did end in violence, such as the Newark riot of 1967 and civil disruptions in northern New Jersey and New York City in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination during1968. Eco/fiscal crises pertain to commercial upheavals and revenue breakdowns, the most notorious occurring in 1975– 76 and 2007– 08. Finally, techno/infrastructure crises pertain to the physical breakdown of the region's electric grid, transportation corridors or water resources. A prime example of the latter includes the region's largest electric blackout during the summer of 1977, which left nine million people without power and another more limited blackout at its 42nd- year anniversary.

Crises yield political consequences. They can create conditions for realigning the electorate and bring new political coalitions into power. The politics of crises also produces a “crisis manager”. Success or failure can make or break the career of public figures. Politicians assign blame for their cause and take credit for their resolution. Chances are the more politicians urge that we keep “politics out of a crisis” the greater the chance that politics will enter the fray, especially as the crisis is resolved.

INTRODUCTION

Populism is a slippery concept, not least due to its use as a catch-all term for widely distinct political projects, extinguishing many of their differences. In the past I have argued (Cannon 2018) that we need to view populism as an academic analytical tradition rather than empirical fact, emphasizing instead the left/right dichotomy as the essential conceptual tool to help order, understand and explain political phenomena. In this chapter I develop this work further, using Bobbio's (1996) conception of the left/right dichotomy as a dyad, shaped by historical consensus and rupture centred on (in)equality. As Noël and Thérien (2008) argue, consensuses emerged between left and right on state development and welfare regimes in the post-Second World War period, and more recently, I argue here, around “progressive neoliberalism” (Fraser 2017) in the post-Cold War period. These global consensuses between left and right can be loosely mapped onto the Latin American experience, as respectively the postwar “state developmentalist” or classic “populist” phase, and the more recent phase of left-oriented “pink tide” governments. These have both been contested by right-oriented administrations, viewed in the dominant literature as respectively “neo-populism” in the 1990s (Weyland 1996, 2003; Roberts 1995), associated with figures such as Menem in Argentina, Collor in Brazil and most notably, Fujimori in Peru, and a more recent radical right populism, associated primarily with Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. In both these literatures, there is strong emphasis on the autonomy of the political from ideology, allowing the concept to “travel” temporally and spatially. In this chapter, I review both these instances of right-wing populism in Latin America consecutively, using a more contextually sensitive approach to these phenomena, which is best equipped to appreciate their distinctions, while emphasizing what they share. Such an approach needs to include, as Munck recommends in the introduction to this volume, the problematics of “development, democracy and social transformation”. Taken from this perspective, while each right-wing populist regime in the region is shaped by the distinct temporal and spatial circumstances in which it emerges, what they share is the right's central historical objective of maintaining and deepening social hierarchy, not just at the level of class, but also in gender, ethnicity and sexuality.

Are Latin America's populist movements complementary or inimical to the traditional left parties? Or, rather, are they a new type of left, more autochthonous, original and anchored in the subcontinent's realities, as opposed to those ideologies that arose in nineteenth-century Europe? These questions assume, on the one hand, an ahistorical perspective that implies not only a certain uniformity in these movements but also that there are similarities between those movements that arose in the 1930s and 1940s, and those progressive, post-2000, governments that were termed “the pink tide”. On the other hand, there is a problem in defining the term “left”. Are we referring to the many varieties of Marxist groups or do we include anarchists, left nationalists and movements such as the Third World Priests? In addition, the same movements, described by academics as “populist” would not consider themselves to be so. Here we will term “left” all those political movements who question capitalism as a social and economic system and will consider “populist” those movements that tend to consider themselves as a vehicle of the people and its aspirations, implying a progressive slant to their policies, and a challenge to established elites. As such, from a Latin American perspective, people like Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro would not be considered “populist”, while Cuba's Fidel Castro would be placed within the camp of the “left”.

These issues become even more complex if we consider that many of the initial populist movements, in the 1930s and 1940s, joined conservatives, moderates and leftists. At the same time, organizations such as the communist parties considered the new movements as indigenous versions of European fascism, while the populists tended to view the traditional left as competitors, that were extraneous and foreign to Latin American realities. Over half a century later, the pink tide included a large part of the organized left, who considered the reforms by Venezuela's Hugo Chávez or Bolivia's Evo Morales as the way towards a popular revolution. This chapter posits that national and historical circumstances tend to define the relationship between the diverse populist movements and the left.

In both popular and academic parlance, the term “populism” has taken on a more or less uniformly negative connotation. It implies being an enemy of democracy, anti-immigrant and, most obviously, irrationally under the sway of a charismatic leader. Yet in Latin America, populism has been an integral element of the development and democratization process and plays an important role in the contemporary process of social transformation under the left-of-centre governments that have emerged since the turn of the century. Thus, we need to deconstruct the term “populism” and explore its diverse historical manifestations, to rethink its meaning and its prospects moving forward.

This introduction to a volume consisting of detailed case studies of Latin American populism, or populism in Latin America, advances in several moments. First, I will approach the burgeoning international debate on rethinking populism to distil some broad lines of investigation, that might serve to guide our research. I distinguish between a structural/ocioeconomic frame for understanding populism, another where the focus is on populism as political strategy/style and, finally, one where populism is seen within an ideational or discursive frame. I also introduce the complex, and sometimes contradictory, relationship between populism and development, democracy and social transformation. A second section introduces several Latin American perspectives on populism in a broad conceptual sense. It examines the structural functionalist approach of the 1950s, the dependent development “compromise state” interpretation of the 1970s and, finally, the discourse approach and its critiques that dominated in the 1990s. We then move from the abstract to the concrete, with two stylized accounts of the classical populism of the 1930– 70 period and the contemporary populism that has emerged in the 1990s and, particularly, in the context of the progressive governments post-2000. This account is set in a broadly political economy frame, with a focus on the changing patterns of capital accumulation, the role of the state and the waves of popular mobilization that have characterized Latin America since 1930.

INTRODUCTION

Hugo Chávez won the presidential elections in December 1998 after a decade of neoliberal policies in Venezuela. The previous period had seen: two successive governments implementing neoliberal economic programmes; the spontaneous popular uprising of February– March 1989, which shook the two-party political system in place since 1958; two nationalist and leftist military uprisings; and a sitting president removed from office by parliament on charges of corruption.

The so-called “Bolivarian process”, that began in Venezuela with the electoral triumph of Hugo Chávez in 1998, was the popular response to the crisis of legitimacy of the political model of representative democracy that had been in place since 1958 (López Maya 1994: 32; Carvallo & López Maya 1989: 49). The failure of the productive model of import substitution, the foundation of representative democracy for 30 years, had become evident by the mid-1980s, with a profound economic crisis that worsened with the fall in oil prices in 1986.

The spontaneous popular uprising of 27– 28 February 1989, known as the “Caracazo” (Barrios-Ferrer 1990: 55; España 1989: 118), revealed the great discontent of the population with a political-economic system that did not satisfy their fundamental needs. The government's brutal repressive response caused hundreds of deaths in the neighbourhoods of Caracas and nearby cities. It reinforced the view that those who governed did not deserve to enjoy the popular support that had sustained the ruling two-party political model for three decades. The two parties in question were the Acción Democrática (AD [Democratic Action]) and Partido Socialcristiano (COPEI [Social Christian party]).

However, in the absence of alternative political options, and with a left in crisis, both in its electoral versions and in the groups that maintained the armed struggle, the two-party system would remain in power for another decade. But the decomposition of the political model continued, and in 1992 two military uprisings followed one after the other. They both failed but they showed that the ship of representative democracy was still sinking.

In the political analysis of Latin America and Brazil, when we mention “populism”, we immediately think about the long tradition of figures such as Getúlio Vargas (Brazil), Juan Domingo Perón (Argentina), Lázaro Cárdenas del Rio (Mexico) or José María Velasco Ibarra (Ecuador). It relates to a time when Latin America was going through a period of intense and complex processes of modernization and inclusion of the working class, within the framework of labour laws and political democracy. More recently, we have witnessed a “return” of populism in Latin America as elsewhere, but now in a conservative version and in a particular context in macroeconomic terms. Unlike the “classical” era of populism, the current neoliberal hegemony has led to a reduction of the role of the state, in favour of greater freedom for capital flows and a shrinking of the labour market, of social policies, of labour rights, and so on. Latin American presidents, characterized by their populist appeal, were very much part of this conjuncture, such as Alberto Fujimori (Peru) and Fernando Collor de Mello (Brazil). What does this new populism of the right signify? How does it relate to the classic populism and the original incorporation of the masses into the democratic order?

These debates are not just a concern from a historiographical or sociological point of view. They are part of the current political process itself, in the sense of building a political programme and claiming political traditions. In this sense, as a way of trying to counteract the neoliberal agenda put into practice in Brazil throughout the 1990s, and also of forming a political opposition to the governments of Fernando Collor de Mello and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the Workers’ Party – Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) – claimed the tradition of national developmentalism (Perlatto 2016). This tradition, which came from Getúlio Vargas (and the subsequent governments of Juscelino Kubitschek and João Goulart) implied a commitment to industrialization and modernization of the country and included the incorporation of the working population into citizenship via the Labour Court. However, it was achieved without shaking the foundations of the primary sector of the economy, based on the large exporting rural areas, and thus was some kind of compromise state.