Future as Militarised City-State: A Shared Fantasy

Karl Muth asks what we can learn from the seemingly infinite popularity of the dystopian militarised city-state: Is its popularity evidence of popular concern for civil liberties, a type of society-wide regret for abuses of the past, or a line policymakers should observe and avoid?

When I was a teenager, I was a terribly devoted fan of the show Aeon Flux (though even my hardcore fandom and the allure of Charlize Theron could not motivate me to watch the cynical flop film adaptation of 2005). The show ran, briefly, on Liquid Television, an attempt by MTV (arguably twenty years ahead of its time) to be what Netflix is today – a hybrid distributor and creator of content.

Of the shows on Liquid Television, Aeon was the strongest, both measured by total viewership and by network renewal (MTV purchased an additional five episodes before the first three had even aired, something MTV had not done with any show since The Real World). The show influenced the fringes (but not the mainstream) of early 1990’s culture, which was not sure what to make of the post-Cold-War world and the role superpower(s) might play in it.

What interests me is the world in which Aeon exists. It is, in some ways, a stereotypical dystopia. Some combination of militarised police, constant surveillance, high technology (particularly medical technology) available only to the ruling class, profitable perpetual war (primarily benefitting a small circle of businesspeople on both sides), and so on are the primary characteristics of the setting, which features a Berlin-like wall separating Monica from Bregna (two militarised city-states similar in character to partitioned Augustan Belgrade during the Roman occupation).

Many use the word “Orwellian” too liberally to describe this entire class of fantasy dystopias, but this is not only historically (and literarily) inaccurate, but insufficiently analytical.

The area of Hong Kong where my grandmother lived prior to the war is probably the most important case of one of these states actually being implemented from a policy perspective (I’ve written in more detail about the invasion of Hong Kong here). Within ten days of the invasion, the Japanese began constructing walls blocking movement from then-distant Kennedy Town (not yet named Kennedy Town) into Wan Chai and Victoria. Local people were forced to buy wartime yen and the use of other currencies was banned; the use of larger yen notes was carefully tracked. Water towers from Nathan Road to the waterfront were converted to surveillance towers, with Japanese sentries keeping watch over all movements. Moving in civilian groups of more than four was criminalised. Thanks to Hong Kong’s small size, the overwhelming force used by the Japanese during the invasion, and the immediate financial control exerted by the Japanese army, Hong Kong went from being a mercantile British port to being a militarised city-state in less than two weeks.

Yet it did not look like the militarised city-states we imagine. It did not look like the south London of Judge Dredd, or the futuristic Los Angeles (based heavily on Hong Kong) of Blade Runner. It did not look like the army-base-as-city model for Tel Aviv many political theorists of the 1960’s proposed was inevitable. It does not look like the city of Megaton in Fallout or the city of Middogaru in Final Fantasy VII.

One thing that distinguishes the real militarisation of Hong Kong as a wartime city-state and the ones we imagine is the use of very high technology in our imaginary militarised city-states (the thesis implicitly suggesting that technology allows a higher degree of control over the citizenry than the Japanese were able to achieve with 1940’s technology and an infantry presence with limited intelligence-gathering capability).

We see this technology-as-prerequisite framework in films such as George Lucas’s THX1138 (featuring a subterranean militarised city-state) and the very poor film adaptation of Harlan Ellison’s work (perhaps purposely so, to avoid copyright issues), In Time. Both feature types of control of the population within the city-state that could not be achieved with 1940’s technology. However, it is unclear in both films why or how the rulers of the society profit from these very complex, and undoubtedly expensive, systems of control.

Even in the science fiction love song Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots – another staple of our generation – Yoshimi explicitly works for a city or city-state, not a conventional national government. The song evokes the Tokyo-under-attack-by-Godzilla framework, where the distraught and lovestruck main character is presumably one of many terrified residents depending upon the heroine for protection from the pink robots.

However, importantly, the states we see evolve in real life are (unfortunately) primarily military occupations, rather than corptocracies. Meanwhile, the film and literature canon on this front features primarily corptocracies or, in some cases, complex kleptocracies (in the case of Shin-ra Corporation in Final Fantasy VII and the corporation controlling the Martian colony in Total Recall, shareholder-controlled kleptocratic corporations with some of the characteristics of government).

Why do so many of our visions of the future for the last 100 years center on the militarised city-state, yet there are very few examples of such places actually evolving (aside from wartime occupations)?

The first reason is that – even without all the high technology depicted in cities of the cyberpunk genre (the books of William Gibson or the late-1980’s anime of Masamune Shirow) or its offspring – these overbearing surveillance states are incredibly expensive to operate. They are also, generally, not co-located with cities. An example is the small surveillance-centric militarised city-states along the coastline of Nigeria, controlled by corporations like BP and Royal Dutch Shell. However, very few people live in these communities and they are “factory towns” rather than “cities.”

The second reason is, likely, that information gathered from surveillance is notoriously difficult to sort and monetise. Google and others are making some headway on this – a topic I’ve written about in depth – but the question of what to do with information gathered is a difficult one. In the older science fiction literature, huge halls of records are kept (e.g. Orwell) where these bits of information are warehoused in case they are useful, inculpatory, or relevant for blackmail. In more fantastic portrayals of procedural bureaucracies as dystopias (e.g. Kafka’s The Trial), the grinding gears of the system are themselves a form of oppression.

The third reason, and perhaps the most relevant to our thinking as policy analysts and policy practitioners, is that cities are not autonomous in the ways depicted in these stories. Cities do not generally have monetary policy, defense policy, or any of the underlying forms of state-ness that are usually requisite. Those that do (Monaco, Hong Kong) tend to use these policy levers to make their economies and societies more open rather than more closed, if for no other reason than that the sheer velocity of trade (financial in Monaco’s case, tangible and financial in Hong Kong’s case) is what sustains these low-tax-rate, “thin state” societal designs.

These fictional dystopian city-states – which lie at the intersection that separates science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, and political hypothesis – illustrate a mix of fears generally held by the Western liberal intelligentsia. But rarely do these characteristics actually evidence themselves in a given state. It is important to recognise the limitations in creating such states are resource-based (rather than technology-based). It is also important to see that incremental movement in this direction is enormously expensive, in both financial and productivity terms (this may be less relevant in a total war scenario, like the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong). Finally, it is important to see links between these policies, and that the policies depicted are often mutually-exclusive more than they are mutually-reinforcing.

Still, despite these weaknesses in their applicability in considering real-world policy, I enjoy this genre of fiction immensely. And suspect its popularity stems, at least in part, from the ease with which one can visualise the implementation of at least some of these policies – and the instinctive recoil many (but not all) experience when considering the results of these policies.