No comments on the political motivations of this move. In the 1800s, Parisian neighborhoods were demolished to make way for wide boulevards, as they were harder to barricade and easier to move troops through.
Similar situation in Cairo. Moving the government to a far off, easily protected location means mass protests are dramatically less effective.
Sisi wants to make sure that there's no second Arab Spring some day.
It's so weird that media does not pick up on how this is a repressive move and nothing else. Eg when Kazachstan moved their capital to the frozen, desolate, middle-of-nowhere northeast, there were lots of giggly BBC articles about how that weird President over there moved his capital because a dream had told him to, haha! But few media wrote about how all that was cheap smoke and mirrors for making sure that everybody who lived near the capital was a civil servant, ie dependent, with their livelihoods, on a stable government.
EDIT: I changed my mind, I jumped to conclusions. This capital is only ~30km away, a suburb of Cairo really, which means that likely civil servants will be able to live in Cairo and commute to work (and vice versa some day). I bet protests will still be harder to organize than on the Tahrir square, but not impossibly so (unlike eg Kazachstan, Equatorial Guinea, Myanmar, Brazil etc)
In fact I wonder why they didn't build it 500km further down the Nile (but I'm glad they didn't), that's exactly what I'd expect of an authoritarian government like Sisi's.
> I bet protests will still be harder to organize than on the Tahrir square, but not impossibly so (unlike eg Kazachstan, Equatorial Guinea, Myanmar, Brazil etc)
Brazil's capital was moved from Rio de Janeiro to Brasília to try to solve the perceived problem that the Brazilian federal government was focused on the needs of the coastal area around Rio, and moving it to a more central location would make it more responsive to the needs of the country as a whole. I don't think avoiding protests was a major part of the decision. It was planned for decades – article 3 of the 1891 constitution [0] said the capital should be moved to central Brazil, but the move wasn't actually implemented until 1960.
Australia is another country with a planned capital – Canberra. In Australia's case, both Sydney and Melbourne wanted to be the capital. The compromise [1] was that the capital would be located in a federal territory to be carved out of New South Wales, more than 100 miles from Sydney, and Melbourne would serve as the temporary capital until then.
I had always assumed that that was just the official story, but that not getting millions of angry rioters over was a key (unspoken) motivation. But it seems I was wrong about that, too. I can't find a single source to back up my assumption, I don't know where I got it from.
Brasilia is, today, a large metropolis of nearly 3 million people (the 5th most populous metropolitan area in Brazil). One of the stated motivations to build the city near the geographical center of the country was exactly to get more people to move to that region of Brazil, which was, and still is to some degree, severely underpopulated compared to the coast (and has a great terrain for sustaining large populations). Very large protests are commonplace, so if getting away from angry rioters was in the mind of certain politicians at some point :) it definitely did not work (as others said, the project was planned since 1891, started in the 1920's and only finished in 1960).
You are not wrong, Brasilia has a large population, but the poor regions can't really reach the center of power just by walking (it's an extremely pedestrian-unfriendly city). It also has a flat landscape, unlike Rio that has lots of mountains - which makes this city of city planning much easier.
There is nothing substantial to support that theory, capitals are moved because of unfixable infrastructure, reducing overcrowded capital, historic realigning to actual cultural centres or public spending for economical reasons or to have it in a region ethnically aligned with the politically dominant group
Revolutions happen when a lot of people are demanding change not when people are rioting in the capital
It may be close to Cairo but it has massive walls with tower like structures. The walls look rather like Trump's wall prototypes. Without knowing about it I drove past it on a bus the other week and was think that the hell is that thing? It looks a bit like a huge military base but grander. The entrance gates are quite something, about the size of 10 story buildings.
Egypt may just be following trends nearby: Equatorial Guinea (in Africa) is relocating its capital from Malabo (which is on an island) to Ciudad de la Paz (on the mainland). The country is ranked in the top 10 most corrupt in the world, by Transparency International. It is an outright kleptocracy, and living there is quite an experience, according to people I know. Interestingly, you can go there visa-free as an American, but if you are British, you better not even think about setting foot there. Construction of Ciudad de la Paz is being funded by countries that are either experiencing illiberal trends or have horrendous human rights records: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_de_la_Paz
> Interestingly, you can go there visa-free as an American
They won't let you on the mainland, even with a valid visa. They don't want you to see what the global oil companies have done (and are doing) to the environment.
I understand that. I just assumed if it was BigOil behind the scenes that wells/refineries must be involved which are visible. What kinds of shenanigans are going on? I'm totally not up to speed on what is occurring there.
The 2004 Equatorial Guinea coup d'état attempt, also known as the Wonga Coup, failed to replace President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo with exiled opposition politician Severo Moto. Mercenaries organised by mainly British financiers were arrested in Zimbabwe on 7 March 2004 before they could carry out the plot. Prosecutors alleged that Moto was to be installed as the new president in return for preferential oil rights to corporations affiliated to those involved with the coup. The incident received international media attention after the reported involvement of Sir Mark Thatcher in funding the coup, for which he was convicted and fined in South Africa.
Madrid, Amman, Naypyitaw, Brasilia, Washington...history is replete with examples of governments who wanted to move out of unruly urban centers and start with a "clean slate".
...but it was, nevertheless, moved away from New York City and Philadelphia (the prior centers of government) and not located in Richmond or Baltimore (both of which existed as cities in the general area).
I was just reading a recent "George Washington's Final Battle" which details Washington's struggle to get the capital built where it is. The main reason for the location was to be somewhere halfway between the Northern and Southern states; any other more partisan location may have caused a breakup of the Nation. (at least that's what Washington believed)
You're confusing two different decisions: 1) to relocate the capital to a new federal district in a rural-ish area, and 2) to decide where that federal district was going to be located. You're talking about #2; I'm talking about #1. Washington's recommendation to pick a location in the south came several years after congress had already decided #1. If Washington had not pushed for it, DC would have been built in a different previously-undeveloped area, possibly in the north. Again, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Mutiny_of_1783
I believe in some cases a capital was moved to a minor but already-existing city. Amman and Madrid are examples of this, so maybe they don't count as "purpose-built".
Can you explain what you want to tell about Amman? I lived there when I was a kid (and the city a lot smaller) and it is the only major city in Jordan the the only logical choice as a capital. The position is also good for a capital city, there is nothing in the south (I lived in Aqaba first).
Amman is the largest city in Jordan by some distance _now_, but when it was designated as the capital in 1921, it was much smaller. Its growth has come almost exclusively since then, and as a result of its designation as the captial, it became the largest city in the country.
Bonn, Germany’s capital from 49(?) to 1991 would also fit that pattern. There were far larger cities such as Munich, Hamburg, and Frankfurt in West Germany. Nobody wanted a strong German capital.
Egypt has had an idea of splitting into several large cities each specialising on a particular thing (science, governance, etc) since the 90s. This could just be the start of that plan.
And that itself is a great way to kill innovation and advancement. The core reason cities are good at economic growth is the mixture of dissimilar ideas.
The reason cities are good at economic growth is because of agglomeration. If anything if you look at the actual characteristics of innovative communities they are very homogeneous, not dissimilar. See Silicon Valley or the Manhattan Project, or the Prussian bureaucracy, or Soviet scientific communities.
Most innovative communities aren't some bleeding-heart melting pot but actually look like cults weary of outsiders.
Californian counterculture today still has a self image of diversity but in reality it has its roots in a very like-minded white, middle-class bohemian culture, which is not coincidentally the exact class that dominates tech.
Counter-culture later merged together with business into what was called the 'Californian ideology' in the 90s, and while it has this sort of melting pot burning man aesthetic going for it, intellectually it is incredibly homogeneous, extremely distinct from the rest of the US, and politically streamlined.
Counter-cultures almost always are paradoxically 'melting-pots' of insanely like-minded people, the stubbornness is what makes them so effective. Once counter-culture starts to bleed into the mainstream (the actually diverse population) it dissipates.
Yet Beijing is still home to some of the best universities in the country and the world. Honestly I've heard of Shenzhen as the manufacturing capital or the tech capital, but it's the first time I'm hearing of Shenzhen as a research hub.
China is also not segregated by cities' expertise but by provincial policy. For example, some cities, like Hangzhou had a very preferential treatment towards tech, by virtue of the provincial investment fund being invested in tech companies compared to the usual state-owned steel mill crap.
I suggest you look up the history of Kazakhstan's capital move. Capital moves are often used by authoritarian leaders to consolidate their power by using the move as an excuse to punish and reward underlings, isolating themselves from threats to their power, and using geography to keep politically influential people under their control.
The move of the capital from Almaty to Astana wasn’t just about Nazarbaev increasing his own personal power. It was also an attempt to keep the country viable in its current borders by lowering the chances of the ethnic-Russian-dominated north seceding.
Also, most of Kazakhstan's political elite continued to reside in Almaty and just flew back and forth from the new capital for business, so Astana wasn't even an example of a capital built to secure the rulers from the population.
Eh, it was one king. Only Legitimists consider Louis XVI's son to have been king, and his death was from illness (perhaps hastened by neglect), not a formal execution.
You can advance the science of chemistry, you can set up a democratic republic, you can establish the metric system, but you execute ONE KING, and all that people will remember--
The revolutionaries were quick to behead Lavoisier, who was a member of the establishment and tax collector for the king. He did his best work under the monarchy.
Not sure you can give revolutionary France credit for that field.
To be honest, the historical stereotype of France that I've heard mentioned most as an American is their surrender in WWII, not the regicide in the French Revolution. I imagine it might be different in Europe, though.
* ordinary people, children, and eventually themselves.
The stench of the bodies was so great they moved the guillotines outside the city. One day after beheading a convent of nuns that refused to stop praying, next up was a young boy caught stealing. As he was led up to the guillotine, a shout could be heard from the crowd "Please, no more children!"
But hey, at least they replaced their King with an Emperor.
No, it was an orgy of terror by which France replaced a weak king with a strong emperor. The lesson being, don't become a weak king or these forces will be unleashed again.
Seriously though, I find the entire period fascinating (mostly via the Revolutions postcast, and reading Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety). The French Revolution is such a pivotal point in Western history that I believe that precision is important.
I mean, all I know is some proto-marxists overthrew the king, murdered everybody who looked at them funny for 5 years straight, went crazy, got overtaken by Napoleon who was basically the next king again.
That's a few years as a republic, and an extremely bloody and dysfunctional one at that, how was that pivotal? Was it "just" because it was the situation let Napoleon take power? I'll definitely agree that Napoleon was pivotal :-)
But I'm very shallow wrt this topic, I'd love to learn how (besides the bloodshed), the revolution changed matters.
Countries were transformed from feudal holdings under a monarch into nation states.
I sincerely urge you to learn more. It's much more complex than a few fanatics overthrowing a king and then falling apart. Specifically, it's about how the full military power of France was unleashed upon Europe, and crucially, this was a power driven by ideology - people should govern themselves, not be beholden an ancient royalty and church.
Napoleon could probably never had risen as far as he did under the monarchy. And crucially, he took power in part because he was so successful in waging the Republic's wars.
I never understood the revolution as causing the Napoleonic wars, and I had always gotten the idea that Napolean waged his wars for the much more mundane reason of an Emperor wanting to expand his borders, because ego. I never understood that so much of the revolution's ideas persisted into Napoleon's rule and conquest.
Also I've always had a bit of a beef with people celebrating the French Revolution as some glorious victory of "the people" over their evil oppressors, without mentioning the Terror that followed. Maybe that's made me a bit blind to how much of the good parts persisted :-)
> That is bit too paranoid, some people want to live, not just protest. 18th century Paris was filthy place and needed makeover.
Parisian urban revolts were a regular occurrence[0]; it was an explicit goal to make them more difficult.
The following quote is from the SlateStarCodex review[1] of Seeing Like a State.
"This was a particular problem in Paris, which was famous for a series of urban insurrections in the 19th century (think Les Miserables, but about once every ten years or so). Although these generally failed, they were hard to suppress because locals knew the “terrain” and the streets were narrow enough to barricade. Slums full of poor people gathered together formed tight communities where revolutionary ideas could easily spread. The late 19th-century redesign of Paris had the explicit design of destroying these areas and splitting up poor people somewhere far away from the city center where they couldn’t do any harm."
Failed revolution. The military then immediately seized control in a coup d’état and threw the new and popular president in jail planning to execute him before he died of a heart attack.
In multiethnic states, revolutions only have a claim to be legitimate popular revolutions if they have the support of all major ethnic groups. In Egypt, the new regime after the revolution did not have the support of the Copts at all.
Don't know where you're getting the rules for legitimate revolutions. The revolution led to a fair democratic election. Winners of democratic elections are considered legitimate, not just if a 6% minority disagrees, but even if 49% disagree with the result.
Again, winners of democratic elections are often only considered legitimate if they protect the rights of ethnic minorities. Otherwise they are viewed as oppressors supported by the dominant ethnicity. Mob rule != democracy.
Consider how a number of nascent democracies in Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries are now widely regarded as having had a democratic deficit because of their treatment of Jews or of other ethnic minorities, in spite of the governments being elected by a majority of voters.
And in this case, the percentage that the Copts make up of the Egyptian population (which is infamously disputed, so giving a figure like you did is risky) is completely irrelevant, because any modern democratic state is obliged to respect various freedoms regardless of the amount of the population keen on them.
Depends on the minority. The ever-present minority of people with merely different political views who can just comfortably wait until the next election, do not make an election illegitimate. But if it’s a religious or ethnic minority and its basic human rights and prosperity are threatened by the new regime, then that does suggest that the new government lacks legitimacy even if a majority of the population voted for it. And that was definitely the case with Egypt’s first post-Tahrir Square government and the Copts. A population cannot vote its universal human rights away.
I think instead of "legitimacy", which doesn't mean anything, what you're really saying is "approved by the West and Israel". Similar to Gaza's election or many South American socialist governments, if people make the wrong choice then democracy is discarded.
It is a typical retort to anyone criticizing Egypt's first Tahrir Square government that they are representative of "the West and Israel", when in fact the notion that there exist certain universal human rights that any state is bound to respect, is upheld even in many countries outside of the West and Israel.
Oops, was I a bit sly? Perhaps that equation should be amended to read "(occasional) mob rule".
The people become "ochlos" crowd when in sub-groups, or perhaps when they start causing irritation "ochlesis". Before that, the demos is just a bunch of people.
Originally demos refers just the people of a particular land, from Homeric "demos" = land, and expanded over time to include particular bunches of people (e.g., of a village or town, or a band of people).
The political sense of the people as free and sovereign citizens (the body politic; Latin "plebs") is a later meaning. Before that, demos used to refer to the mass of subjects contrasted to the "basileus" king.
Of course, both demos and ochlos can refer to a crowd (as can "plethos"). One could say that demos has a common attribute (e.g. place of origin) giving it stronger cohesion, while an ochlos may be ad hoc.
Still, ochlos is mass/multitude of people, with the ability to exercise influence in a democratic assembly. It is that characteristic of democracy as mob rule - alright, occasionally, that generated early critique (but also gave rise to rhetoric and dialogue as more benign means of persuasion).
(Source: LSJ and a bit of Lampe)
From your name I gather you are from, or interested in the study of, the Mediterranean?
You guys talk about Morsi being some beacon of democracy when he was a staunch Islamist who went so overboard that people hated him in a year. You forget that Sisi gained power because he was EXTREMELY popular right after the army removed Morsi - Morsi was that much of a cunt.
It’s hard to suggest with a straight face that the Sisi junta is more democratic or less autocratic than Morsi’s legitimately elected government had been, regardless of the latter’s shortcomings (not that he was there long enough to even really pass judgement). Or that Morsi was not strictly an improvement from a due democratic process perspective as compared to Mubarak’s monarch-like status.
I'm not suggesting that either. I'll accept Sisi as more democratic when he actually steps down; until then, some problems, different face.
Morsi was certainly there long enough to pass judgment. I'm not old enough to remember the Muslim Brotherhood, but older family members are and they were fairly concerned about their rapid political rise. I didn't share that concern at the beginning, but quickly realized the dangers of it with the theocratic bend of the newly-formed government.
See Washington DC today, essentially the same thing is happening there as the Capitol complex and building that the citizens used to be able to just walk into and knock on their representatives' office like any other government office, has now been surrounded by concertina wire and fencing and militarized like the green zone in Iraq was.
I have been saying this for a while, the globalist ruling class all around the world is essentially trying to separate themselves from the rabble … or is it cattle? … around them.
That was very effective in Brazil, Brasilia was built in the middle of nowhere, far away from any of the existing large population centers and has basically no economy other than working for the government so if you live there you want the government to stay as it is.
Kind of. I mean, that's pretty much the reason it stayed there after being the provisional capital.
Why was it the provisional capital? Well, the major cities (Istanbul, Izmir) were occupied. Ankara was
* Controlled by Ataturk's government
* Centrally Located
* Decently Large (i.e. not a village)
Similar situation in Cairo. Moving the government to a far off, easily protected location means mass protests are dramatically less effective.