Development policy,Western Europe and the question of specificity

Context

After the Second World War, government interventions into the economies of Western Europe underwent a sea change; this would include intervention into respective space economies. Prior to the war there was little talk of government action regarding what would come to be called urban and regional development. There were some intimations. In the UK, during the 1930s, some local governments had tried to attract new employers through the powers at their disposal, such as the tariffs on gas from the municipal gasworks (Ward, 1990), and there was also the well-known experiment of the trading estates in areas of high unemployment. However, interventions were spotty and lacked coherence with other types of policy; in fact, to talk about ‘policy’ would have been an overstatement.

After the war things would be very different. With a remarkable uniformity, governments in Western Europe ¹ took steps to mitigate uneven development and to move employment from areas experiencing pressure on labor markets to ones with relatively high levels of unemployment (Romus, 1958). There were also attempts to divert population from the larger cities to new towns. These policies were conceived and implemented at the most central levels of the state. In this way a very particular approach would come to be defined. Elements of it would be replicated elsewhere in the world, not least in apartheid South Africa (Bell, 1986). However, it would also be different from what happened in countries elsewhere, such as the USA.

This distinctiveness has tended to go unremarked. The literature on urban and regional development policy in West European countries tends to be quite introverted and this can occlude significant questions about the conditions of a social and historical type fundamental to its formation and reproduction. To contrast it with a quite different case is to foreground those questions. The US case provides exactly that contrast because of its utter starkness. While in Western Europe central governments have been to the fore, development policy in the USA has always been a matter for local governments and the states and the role of the federal government, a relatively passive one, despite specific interventions, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Regional and urban planning has been front and center in West European countries, while in the USA planners have tended to be subordinated to the demands of developers and the supposed necessities of competing with other cities and regions. The passivity of federal and state governments is in sharp contrast to the activism of central governments in Western Europe.

Development policy in Western Europe remains different. Since the 1970s it has undergone some retreat in what might be regarded as an American direction. Areas eligible for central government aid have greatly contracted in area. Local governments now show more interest in local development. There have been signs of competition of a territorial type. On the other hand, central governments retain important powers of intervention into local and regional economies. This is partly through control over major infrastructural projects: in particular, via rail, airport and port policy, but also through central or regional control over land use planning. In getting local governments involved, central government prompting and participation have played a role absent from the American scene (Cox, 2016: 184; Peck, 1995; Pinson, 2009).

So on the one hand, Western European policy has always been different; on the other, any claim for an ‘Americanization’ of policy there ² needs to be viewed with caution. Certainly, there have been variations in detail: France is not the UK or Germany in these matters. However, the point here is that when compared with the USA, the direction of policy everywhere in Western Europe has been qualitatively different. The questions addressed in this paper, therefore, are exactly how the West European case has been different and why.

Urban and regional development policy in Western Europe

Putting specificity in context

I take it as axiomatic that any explanation of difference has to be with respect to social formations in their entirety. This obviously includes the state, which is the immediate condition for the acts of government and therefore of policy, but both reflects and conditions the broader social process. This is, emphatically, a capitalist social process, which means that our primary attention has to be to accumulation and the class relations underpinning it. This is always expressed in very concrete forms. The countries of Western Europe have been distinctive in their class dynamics, and in the details of accumulation logics, in particular the involvement of central government, something that can be better appreciated when set beside the US experience.

The way in which class relations have informed local and regional development policy in Western Europe, and arguably still do, is fairly clear. Regional employment policy was a spatial expression of the welfare state. The ideal of full employment, or at least an equality of unemployment rates, required moving jobs around, although it was convenient that during the golden years of the 1950s and 1960s there were areas experiencing quite severe pressure on local labor markets. Even while the social roots of the welfare state are complex, there can be little doubt that in its extensiveness and in the way in which responsibility was accorded to the state rather than some public–private mix, it owed much to the strength of respective labor movements. ¹¹

Class has also had clear importance in urbanization policy – green belts, dispersion from large metropolitan areas, new towns – but this time a policy for the forces of the right. Proposals from planners for new towns were never innocent of class anxieties, ¹² and Gravier’s political sympathies and those who he appealed to are well-known. The ground has shifted toward one of urban containment, but the right wing appeal, this time in the form of the wealthy homeowners of small towns and villages anxious about their property values, persists.

In both instances, and despite their apparent class bias, these were policies that, it could be argued, were in the national interest. An alternative to regional employment policy as a means of mitigating regional unemployment would have been to let people move to the jobs rather than the converse. At a time of severe shortage of building materials, seriously aggravated by postwar reconstruction, this was not appealing, at least in the short term. Later, as Germany and Japan recovered and international competition intensified, regional policy would be rationalized as a means of managing production costs: keeping wage costs down by shifting production away from higher to lower wage areas.

The same has applied to urbanization policy. Gravier always argued for dispersion from Paris on grounds of France’s demographic and, therefore, military weakness. Dispersion and the new town ideal were supposedly about healthy living rather than any narrow class agenda, something with a long history rooted in early 20th century anxieties about urban degeneration (Pick, 1989: Chapter 7). Today the exclusion of new building from the countryside and peri-urban areas is justified, above all by those who live there, by reference to preservation, green lungs, ecological sustainability and all manner of things testifying to the ingenuity of their proponents, supposedly ideals that everyone can be swayed by.

Neither of these policies, regional employment or urbanization, could have been implemented by anything other than a highly centralized state. To leave matters of industrial location to the market would result in continuing agglomeration and concentration in particular favored regions and metropolitan areas. ¹³ Ipso facto, if jobs were to be moved to areas of relatively high unemployment, there had to be some structuring of location choice on a national scale: subsidies for industries locating there and limits on expansion in areas where there was pressure on labor markets. The dispersion of population and employment to new towns or the French métropoles d’équilibre also required national planning and funding: national planning because households and firms had to be persuaded to move there and funding because the massive amounts of money required for the physical infrastructure would have been beyond local capabilities.

In contrast, the centrality of class relation to local development policy in the USA is much more difficult to discern. In fact, what immediately strikes is its highly territorialized form: a locally or regionally determined policy that has always justified itself in terms of a spatially defined unity of interest between capital and labor. ¹⁴ Emphatically, this has been one orchestrated above all by local development interests, which then try to co-opt the masses through promises of jobs, increased home values and improved public services resulting from the enhanced revenues that development will supposedly bring about.

State form has enabled this particular type of development policy, because in virtue of its opportunity structure, it has facilitated pressures of a territorial type. In contrast to the states of Western Europe, state power in the USA is quite extraordinarily fragmented, and this extends to the state’s territorial organization. It is not just that American federalism is one of the most radical in the world – far more so than the federalisms of Belgium, Germany, Spain and Switzerland in Western Europe – it is also that the individual states have then seen fit to delegate large chunks of formal power to local governments. The consequences in terms of development policy are clear.

The first is the way in which state responsibilities have been harnessed to promoting local and regional development. Responsibility for areas of labor law, such as workers’ compensation and the oddly labeled ‘right-to-work,’ help to define a state’s so-called ‘business climate’; to attract inward investment, states have competed in terms of their low workers’ compensation rates, for which read ‘inadequate provision for injury on the job’ and right-to-work, meaning ‘harder for labor unions to organize.’ In short, the race to the bottom was happening some while before people anguished about globalization.

Secondly, local governments, by virtue of their powers, are remarkably well-equipped to respond to the demands of the developers. They are responsible for land use planning and permitting with virtually no supervision from state or federal levels. Plans do not have to be submitted to a more central authority to pass a test of coherence with those of neighboring local governments or with some geographically wider development agenda. Local government decisions cannot be appealed to a higher authority. Rather, granting a rezoning is typically one of the ways in which local government smoothes the way for new investment, along with others, such as financial incentives, typically in the form of an abatement of local taxes. Local governments are also free to annex unincorporated land without running a gauntlet of national legislation, as in the UK.

Finally, there is the question of the degree to which territorialized interests have access to central government resources and regulatory authority that can be turned to their purposes. Unlike the Western European state, the American state can be mobilized for very local, even parochial, purposes relatively easily. Party discipline is weak, allowing all manner of horse trading between different legislators so that bipartisan coalitions are much more common. Part of the reason for weak party discipline is the committee system, which operates both at federal and state levels. Any legislative proposal has to pass muster with a committee appropriate to its subject matter. It can be amended by committee members and it can be vetoed. Better yet, from the standpoint of the individual legislator, by and large they get to serve on committees in whose activity home district interests might have a particular stake: so disproportionate representation on the House Financial Services Committee from districts taking in the major financial centers of New York City and Charlotte, North Carolina.

The fact that there is no comparable committee system in the Western European case and that party discipline is much tighter makes this type of territorial appropriation of what central branches of the state have to offer much more difficult. This does not preclude parties taking up issues of what are essentially ones of uneven development, it is just that in order to get a hearing they have to align more clearly with the class interests that are represented by the parties. Rural preservation is one embraced by the right, just as constraining local governments to build public housing is one for the political left.

There is some additional scope for the expression of local or regional interests, and there is some variation between countries. The Belgian, German, Spanish and Swiss states are all federal in form but, with the possible exception of Switzerland, none come close to the radical fragmentation of the American case. In the unitary states there is also some accommodation to local and regional pressures, even while the details vary. In France the practice of cumul des mandats has long provided for this. The Irish state is extraordinarily centralized and local governments are very limited in their functions. However, closely cultivated relations between parliamentary representatives and the central bureaucracy allow some expression of local interests (Breathnach, 2010). The UK is different again. The major political parties have always been sensitive to the implications of separatist sentiment for their own electoral prospects. ¹⁵ Some national devolution was always allowed for, as in the Scottish and Welsh Offices ¹⁶ and, latterly, the delegation of powers to a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh National Assembly. In addition, as the tensions between centralization and regional interests have mounted, the answer has always been the separatist one – think Lombardy’s Northern League and Flanders’ Vlaams Blok, which is in stark contrast to the American case where the highly decentralized form of the state has allowed a relatively easy accommodation (Cox, 2016: 315–316). Accordingly, the balance between centralizing and decentralizing forces in state structure has been different, allowing more centrally coordinated urban and regional development policies.

The contrast is underlined by the fate of top-down initiatives targeting geographically uneven development. In the USA they have been subject to centrifugal forces of such an intensity as to compromise, even undermine, their original intent. Through the committee system legislators get to structure the criteria according to which areas will qualify for government assistance and, given the fragmentation of powers in the American state, that means doing it so as to benefit their own districts or states, and any central vision be damned. The misadventures of legislation aimed at mitigating unemployment in the most severely affected areas represent a case in point (Barnekov et al., 1989). Eventually, about 80 percent of the US population found themselves in the areas qualifying. ¹⁷

However, if the territorialization of the politics of local and regional development in the USA is a defining characteristic, what has happened to class? Why, for example, has American labor been so complicit in the consequences of a particular state structure: why is it that some states have been able to institute policies that are far from friendly to the labor movement; and why is the welfare state in the USA so utterly fragmented, opening up further possibilities for the states to position themselves against each other in the hunt for major investments? Addressing these issues is crucial, since it allows enhanced insight into the West European case. The class relation in Western Europe, and how it has been experienced discursively, has been utterly distinct and has been expressed in distinct types of development policy. In the USA, on the other hand, the way in which capital has been able to subsume labor to itself, to induce an acceptance of its ideological categories of anti-statism, individual striving, the American dream, the market and competition has been quite remarkable.

The whole political spectrum there is displaced to the right. There is no political party recognizably similar to those of Western Europe, which drew impetus from respective labor movements; the origins of the Democratic Party are quite different and rooted more in an environment of interest group politics than in one that is more ideologically driven. The Republican Party is dedicated to the protection and expansion of markets and private property and a corresponding anti-statism for which there is no West European counterpart, or at least one that is taken seriously. In contrast, in Western Europe the center of gravity of the political spectrum has always been to the left of that in the USA. A sense of class antagonism, if now somewhat blunted, endures. The political right, on the other hand, has never shared the anti-statism of the Republican Party. Rather, as a result of a relative political weakness, parties of the right have looked to a strong central state for support in implementing their agenda, and shoring up their defenses, material and ideological, against the labor movement.

In coming to terms with these differences, two major points should be made. The first is that, unlike the USA, Western Europe had a pre-capitalist past, first feudal and then, particularly in France, Germany and Italy, in the form of a countryside dominated by a peasantry that was only incorporated into the emerging capitalist economy in a very qualified way. This has meant very distinctive contrasts in discourse, and in subsequent practice.

There has been a different balance in how the capitalist commodity form ¹⁸ has been accepted. Resistance to commodification and the dominance of exchange value has always been stronger in Western Europe and market values viewed with more suspicion. This has meant a different counter-posing of market to state, and of the commodifying to the de-commodifying. The way in which health care is provided is staggeringly different and, in the USA, markets were always favored in the provision of housing, something much more qualified in Western Europe. ¹⁹

This also relates to different understandings of the individual and the balance between individual responsibility and that of the social, whether in the form of some broader community, the state or the associational, as in the labor union. In the USA the social impresses in the way it is treated as comprising so many means to the achievement, always and emphatically by the individual, of the American dream. ²⁰ The belief is that improvement of material circumstance should be the result of individual rather than collective effort. This then means a very different understanding of class. In the USA, interest groups are favored in political discourse and practice, including access to the state. Labor unions are so many interest groups. In the American public sphere class belongs to the unspoken, even unspeakable.

In Western Europe it has been, and remains, otherwise. In terms of social thought, the experience of capitalism and the attendant industrialism and urbanization set in motion a critical reaction that has endured to the present, and then deepened by the counter-example of the USA, which is still widely seen, in so many ways, as one to be avoided. The critical reaction took as its point of departure a contrast with what had been lost or was about to be lost, and that in the USA could not be lost because it was never there to begin with. This was certainly romanticized and idealized, but in a context of grieving for a lost home in the metaphorical sense, it had power. It found expression in social theory, as in Durkheim’s ([1893] 1960) theorizing of how the development of the division of labor entailed anomie and failures of social regulation, but also in Tönnies’ ([1887] 1988) contrast between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. In short, something was being lost. It is a major theme in 19th century literature: a scarcely concealed anxiety about the alienations of the big city, something that built on the earlier Romantic Movement, its embrace of the sublime and rejection of the industrial despoliation of landscape. This would then find its way into European planning ideals.

It is not just the fact of a pre-capitalist past, at least not stated baldly in those terms. The transition to capitalism was mediated by the absolutist state. This helped create conditions that would facilitate capitalist development, notably by breaking down barriers to trade and by introducing the beginnings of a bureaucracy bent on national enrichment, mercantilist style. However, in the way it favored the landed aristocracy, it was also a problem. To advance their agenda the rising bourgeoisie needed representation, which they would then get, and then exclude those who lacked property, that is, the vast majority. This meant that the labor movement as it developed in opposition to capital had to fight in its turn, which would give it an edge that it lacked in the USA, where male white suffrage was achieved as early as 1840, well before there was much inkling of a labor movement, therefore. A more vigorous, ideologically driven working class has then meant a different relation between capital and the state: the state has been able to take more of a lead in the accumulation process, legitimated in terms of some conception of ‘the national interest,’ whether defined as national security or securing the country’s position in the international division of labor. In sharp contrast, in the USA, the state has always been seen as an encumbrance to be drawn on only when it suits an immediate purpose.

In Western Europe the residues of a pre-capitalist past have had significant effects on the balance between capital and the working class. National debate and conflict have come to reflect a still ongoing tension between the modern and the traditional. No-one talks about modernizing the American state, which is an interesting omission, but they do talk about modernizing, say, the British or the French state. Subsequent discourse can reflect an ongoing suspicion of the rule of the commodity; of the claims of the individual versus those of community, even while the latter gets redefined; and a continuing belief in the possibility of arriving, through deliberation, at some absolute measure of social justice, in contrast to the American instance where a pervasive moral relativism opens up the floodgates to one-off bargaining.

How this tension has played out historically across West European states has clearly varied a great deal. In France, the struggle between the forces of modernity and tradition took shape in the shadow of European power politics and a need for national reconstruction going back to the 1930s. Class polarization was unusually intense, impeding reform. The deadlock would be resolved after the Second World War through recourse to the privileging in the state of a – supposedly neutral – technocratic elite. However, planning had been in the air since the 1930s and even during the Pétainist interlude (Nord, 2010; Schmidt, 2012), and Gravier and his ideas are an important point of continuity. Gravier’s original nostrum had emphasized the moral virtues of the French provinces as opposed to Paris: healthier living and higher birthrates would facilitate a revival of French power. The later view, though, was that alongside attending to the problems of declining regions, regional policy should have a modernizing intent; not least, modernizing the agriculture of the West which would, in turn, mean the dissolution of the peasantry and the need for the industrialization of small towns to meet their needs: an anxiety that had been heightened by the challenges of Poujadism, which had major pockets of strength in Western (although not Brittany) and Southwestern France (Hermine, 2011).

In the United Kingdom, class polarization was not nearly as intense, which allowed the regional policies introduced by the Labour government of 1945 to be taken over and deployed by the subsequent Conservative governments of the 1950s and early 1960s, unmediated by a French-style technocracy. Moreover, the conflict between the traditional and the modern was different. Anti-urbanism was present but not nearly as intense. There could be no connection to national revival as in France, but in any case, the British countryside, lacking a peasantry, was already modern and could hardly be identified as a repository of national virtue, as was the case in France. Accordingly, there is no British equivalent to J-F Gravier. What dominated, rather, was something called distributism, which targeted the ills of economic and political centralization and advocated a return to life in local, relatively self-sufficient, communities, based on a greater democratization of property ownership. This merged with concern about the destructive effects of free trade capitalism and how it was fomenting class antagonisms. ²¹

Concluding remarks

In Western European urban and regional studies, development policy and its subsequent politics as they have unfolded in the countries of Western Europe are a major area of interest. The literature, though, is characterized by a strong home country bias. There is little of a comparative nature and this can serve to limit the types of questions asked. So long as one confines oneself to France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and so forth, not a great deal is lost, since they share a great deal in their policy specifics. However, taken as a group there is a distinctiveness that can be missed. By contrasting the West European experience with the American, the specificity of the former is clarified. This has then led to an attempt to understand that specificity, again by pointing out how the countries of Western Europe share certain features of their socio-historical formation at variance with that of the USA.

In the first place, the role played in the American instance by a highly decentralized state structure highlights the significance in West European urban and regional policy of just how important their relatively more centralized territorial structures have been for policies directed at mitigating uneven development and diseconomies of agglomeration. While in the American case the localities enjoy huge autonomy and so compete in what can be called a market-in-locations, in Western Europe, and despite differences in detail, central planning has played, and continues to play, a much more important role, a role that neither federal nor state governments could have fulfilled in the USA. In turn, these sharp contrasts in state structure need to be situated with respect to quite different social formations in toto. The fact that the countries of Western Europe have had a pre-capitalist past and experienced the centralizing forces of the absolutist state in the transition to capitalism is highly significant. Capitalist social relations – markets, competition, accumulation for accumulation’s sake and the dominance in social life of exchange value – elicit a suspicion in Western Europe, even now, that is almost entirely absent in the USA. There has always been a resistance, not just confined to the working class, that has resulted in a different balance of class forces. In other words, the centralizing structures of the absolutist state were deployed because they had to be. For different reasons, both capitalist and working classes demanded it: the capitalist class because of its relative weakness and labor because it wanted to limit, through national legislation, the ability of employers to compete in terms of wages and conditions of work. In the USA it has been quite otherwise: a centralizing federal government has always been resisted, and the dispersive effects of a radical federal structure preferred. In a context of very different class relations, it would have been otherwise.

However, if the American case helps shed a clarifying light on the West European one, why the USA? The Chinese experience offers a different type of contrast: there has been an area-specific targeting of uneven development that recalls the classic period of regional policy in Western Europe (Dunford and Li, 2010), but also a highly decentralized set of arrangements that seemingly mimics the American competition for inward investment, even while the logic underlying it is quite different: more a matter of the upward ascent of centrally appointed functionaries in the state hierarchy than satisfying the needs of developers (Wang, 2011, 2014).

What makes the USA particularly useful as a contrasting case, though, is that it shares so much with Western Europe. Just as from one angle the differences between West European countries pale beside the contrasting American case, when set beside both of these the Chinese one appears very different. One can question whether or not China is now a capitalist country, but the continuing domination of the economy by the state, the absence of democratic forms and the markedly different level of development make it a much less defensible comparator. In the USA and Western Europe, their shared capitalist character provides an important window on understanding other differences and, thus, the specificity of urban and regional policy in the latter: how, that is, capitalism, the accumulation process and class relations have been refracted by social formations that in other regards are quite different.