In an experimental large-scale study conducted in the UK and the US, a research team from Queen Mary University in London examined the responses of randomly chosen groups of people in both countries to social policy interventions in the form of "nudges," which were suggested either by scientists or by a government working group consisting of special interest groups from the social policy field and policy makers (Osman et al: 2018). The research team found that trust was higher for scientists than the government working group, even when the scientists were proposing fictitious nudges. According to the Queen Mary study, people trust scientific experts, who in this case were not natural scientists, but mostly social scientists like psychologists, far more than members of the political class.

### **Explaining the Trust/Distrust in Expertise Conundrum**

One set of plausible explanations for these and other empirical findings usually revolves around the digital revolution. The Edelman findings seem to confirm what Rachel Botsman has written on distributive trust in the digital age. The internet and digital media have allowed people to distribute their trust over more sources of expertise and knowledge than before. A good deal of knowledge that people trust on the internet does not come from professional experts per se or directly from them, but often from reviews, recommendations, etc. by laypeople whose currency often is first-hand experience or by experts that count as practitioner experts as opposed to experts based on academic research. A similar observation was made by Financial Times columnist Gillian Tett: "At a time when we increasingly rely on crowd-sourced advice rather than official experts to choose a restaurant, healthcare and holidays, it seems strange to expect voters to listen to official experts when it comes to politics." While Tett described a shift from vertical axes of trust to horizontal axes, researchers like Rachel Botsman have called the same phenomenon

"distributed trust." Distributed trust is facilitated and made possible by hightech platforms, many of which (though not all) are run by the private sector. Distributed trust, triggered by the digital revolution, has clearly led to a relative decline of trust in unknown experts, especially as far as consumer choices and other decisions in the non-political world are concerned.

Media and truth researchers like Danish philosophers Vincent F. Hendricks and Mads Vestergaard reject the notion that experts have lost their trust entirely (2018 and 2019). Like Botsman and Tett, they tie the reduction of trust in facts, journalists, and experts to the digital dissemination of information, through which the opinions of experts are drowning in the general cacophony of the internet and social media. This favors a kind of news that is not just fake news, but mixed products of the true, half-true, and freely invented. And this kind of news is very well suited to inflate narratives by reducing complexity. The most recent drops in trusting a peer (a person like myself) can be explained by a certain disillusionment regarding the benefits of digitization and the knowledge economy.

Historians of science and expertise point out that an important characteristic of the expert and of expertise is the claim to independence. Caspar Hirschi suggests that this claim has two aspects: Independence means to have no economic interest in the object of the expert consultation and not to be exposed to any political influences in the advisory activity (Hirschi 2018: 30). If this independence is questioned, experts will become lobbyists, activists, or propagandists depending on the situation, which will at least damage their credibility. The slightest suspicion, valid or not valid, that members of the political class are exploiting their power for their own private interest, has severely damaged trust in governmental institutions.The Muenster Epistemic Trustworthiness Inventory (METI) project at the University of Münster in Germany seems to confirm that this could potentially happen with trust in experts and expert bodies as well. Many of the problems regarding trust in expertise revolve around issues of transparency and conflict of interest of experts and less about doubts about their credentialed knowledge. In the Queen Mary Study, people were ready to trust social policy interventions and recommendations by scientific experts more, even when these recommendations were fictitious and bordered on the absurd, rather than trusting actual recommendations by government working groups. An experimental study by a team of researchers at METI may help to understand why.

The objective of the METI team was to measure laypeople's ascriptions of epistemic trustworthiness to an expert and to determine the underlying dimensions of such epistemic trustworthiness. Epistemic trust in "unfamiliar" experts was measured in three dimensions: i. Expertise: knowledge about topic; ii. Integrity: adhering to scientific standards, iii. Benevolence: towards others and society. For experts ("scientific authors") to be rated high on the scale of epistemic trustworthiness, they needed to do well in the three characteristics of expertise, integrity, and benevolence. The results showed that if a scientific author was rated highly on one dimension, this led to a higher rating on other dimensions—especially between "integrity and benevolence." But when an expert was rated high on expertise alone, i.e. was seen as very knowledgeable, it did not lead to epistemic trustworthiness, unless the expert was rated high on integrity and benevolence as well. In other words, there are other and arguably more important dimensions in trusting an expert than credentialed knowledge about a subject matter. In short, knowing your stuff is not enough: an expert needs to be seen as honest (integrity) and good-hearted with empathy (benevolence) (Hendriks et al. 2015). Obviously, the groups of the Queen Mary study thought that the members of the government working group—which included experts from interest groups—were lacking the allimportant qualities of integrity and benevolence.

A similar conclusion on the importance of the two latter qualities of experts is drawn by Canadian philosopher of science Maya J. Goldenberg, who studies "vaccine hesitancy," which can be understood as a cautious or critical stance towards vaccines. By some estimates, it is on the rise in many western countries including the US and Canada. According to Goldenberg, hesitancy of parents to vaccinate their children is not primarily driven by scientific illiteracy or online misinformation, but ,rather, by public mistrust of scientific institutions. The non-expert public takes the necessary leap of faith into such institutions only if they are confident that the experts therein are both competent and honest (Goldenberg 2019). Again, the perception of honesty/integrity and benevolence in addition to competence/knowledge are crucial criteria that experts—and scientific experts in particular—have to meet if they want to be trusted by the public. At the risk of over-interpreting the findings of the METI project and Ms. Goldenberg, it can be stated that major scientific questions can be derailed by issues of trust like the lack of expert integrity and expert benevolence: when experts and expert institutions engage in political self-dealing, media hype, professional hypocrisy, or public confusion, and general gullibility, they are risking the benefits of their actual scientific accomplishments.

### **The Changing World of Expertise and Expert Institutions: Lack of Transparency and the Perception of Undue Influence**

### Ideas Industry

It can be argued that especially in the US, the trustworthiness of experts has been challenged by changes in the world of expertise and expert bodies: overconfidence in their methods, arrogance, the politicization of expertise, and scandals pertinent to some expert bodies. Daniel Drezner argues that many experts and expert institutions outside the natural sciences are now part of an emerging "ideas industry" (2017). In the US, "ideas industry" public intellectuals, defined as experts "who are versed and trained enough to be able to comment on a wide range of public policy issues" (2017: 8) are being sidelined by "thought leaders." This more recent archetype is, according to Drezner, "an intellectual evangelist" (2017: 9). In Isaiah Berlin's distinction of knowledge actors, public intellectuals are foxes, who know a little something about many things, while thought leaders are hedgehogs, who know a lot about one thing and—as thought leaders—flog that one particular allegedly "big" idea to death. But public intellectuals are not only foxes, they are also critics and skeptics; they prioritize expertise and they are often pessimists.Thought leaders, on the other hand, are creators instead of critics— preachers rather than doubters—and they prioritize experience over expertise and tend to be optimists (Drezner 2017: 9–10). Drezner emphasizes that these binary distinctions should not suggest that archetypes embody different kinds of people within the ideas industry, but rather roles and archetypes that a certain group of experts may assume at different times. Drezner's point is that the modern marketplace of ideas has become an ideas industry and thereby benefits the thought leader more than the older types of public intellectuals. Several factors are responsible for this transformation. The erosion of trust in erstwhile prestigious institutions has weakened the position of both academia and the traditional journalistic perches of public intellectuals. The polarization of American politics has segmented that marketplace into distinct and separate niches, and the dramatic growth in economic inequality has made wealthy individuals and corporations into the primary buyers of "ideas," and thereby dominating the market—at least in the US, but perhaps worldwide (Drezner 2017: 11–12).

A similar distinction is made by the Swiss historian of expertise Caspar Hirschi (2019). "Expert preachers" are similar to thought leaders in that they are scientists who have achieved top researcher status in their discipline and then turn into public authorities to change the world with "big ideas" from within their research. Expert preachers do not specialize in generalizations, but rather generalize their specialization by applying the perspectives, methods, and norms of their discipline beyond its boundaries. Examples mentioned by Hirschi in the field of International Economics are scholars like Jeffrey Sachs, Joseph Stiglitz, and Paul Krugman; in Business Administration, Clayton Christensen; historians like Niall Fergusson; and psychologists like Jordan Peterson. Expert preachers, like thought leaders, push big, often contrarian ideas through outlets such as TED talks, social media blogs (especially YouTube), op-eds, a brand name, and the paid lecture/speaker circuit. In the US especially, they are supported by ideologically friendly private funders and/or housed in ideologically-driven think tanks. Expert preachers are very good at broadcasting ideas widely and reaching large audiences of people hungry for allegedly "new" thinking. In Hirschi's terminology, expert preachers sideline or even replace so-called "professorial/academic journalists," who are a crossover species between journalism and academia. Like public intellectuals, "Professorenjournalisten" and conventional academic experts are critiquing and expanding the public's understanding of a topic. Their preferred outlets were, and still are, "highbrow" periodicals in the US such as New Republic, Commentary, Dissent etc., and they often hold fellowships, professorships (of practice) at universities, academies, and governance schools.

### Think Tanks

A major type of expert institution in the US and elsewhere is think tanks. When the think tank boom in the US started to take off in the1980s during the Reagan administration with the arrival of conservative advocacy think tanks, the integrity of the research findings of right-wing and libertarian think tanks—like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and even older ones like the American Enterprise Institute—was challenged and questioned by many academic scholars because of these think tanks' close ties to the US business community and to wealthy businessmen disguising as politically neutral philanthropic foundation chiefs. But towards the end of the Obama era, flagships of the centrist, center-left, and mostly prestigious academic think tank world of the "universities-without-students" type—like the Brookings Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Atlantic Council, or the Center for Global Development—were also challenged, especially by investigative journalists from the New York Times, for murky influence peddling and being bought by foreign governments and self-declared progressive donors. The New York Times traced \$92 million in donations from 64 foreign governments to 28 US think tanks between 2011 and 2014 (Lipton et al. 2014). To the surprise of many liberal-leaning readers of the Times, the money did not just come from the "usual suspects" like Qatar or the United Arab Emirates, but also from an established and adulated democracy like Norway. While think tank managers were quick to emphasize that the money from governments like Norway or even UAE would not compromise the integrity of their organization's research, an internal document from the Norwegian government, quoted by the Times, stated that "funding powerful think tanks is one way to gain such access" to Washington decision-makers, especially for a small country struggling to be heard in the Washington power game. The problem here is not that think tanks as expert institutions are ineffective with policy-makers, rather the contrary: the problem is one of trust—that the line between scholarly research by experts and lobbying by experts on behalf on their donors was completely blurred, and, thus, the credibility of think tanks as a genre undermined. This calls to mind that, as the Pew survey found, scientific experts were mostly distrusted for lack of transparency, including conflicts of interest (2019b).

But the loss of credibility due to insufficient transparency and undue influence are not the only problems of US think tanks. The public relations firm Cast from Clay (formerly We are Flint) focuses on studying think tanks in the United States and United Kingdom and their impact on public debate. In 2018, a large survey conducted by Cast from Clay found that half of Americans knew what a think tank is and slightly less than half of Americans surveyed knew what a think tank does. 20% of Americans said they trust what a think tank has to say, while 24% do not. 8 But despite this seemingly low trust score, the surprising result was that over 50% of Americans said that they do not know whether to trust think tanks or not. The public relations professionals of Cast from Clay did not interpret these scores as a devasting blow to think tanks' reputations and credibility, but rather as an opportunity to shape and forge the narrative around an expert institution—think tanks—about which most people did not have a fixed opinion. Experts—including experts in think

8 The 2018 study on US think tanks surveyed 2,007 American adults over the age of 18. The sample was nationally representative by age, gender, and region, according to the report. See Hashemi and Muller: 2018a.

tanks—might know a bunch of stuff—and that stuff might be important—but unless those facts and figures are perceived as honest and benevolent, they will fail to break free from the bubble they are in.

### **The Coronavirus Pandemic and Trust in Experts**

During the first months of the Coronavirus pandemic (February to May 2020), it became clear that both policy-makers and large parts of the general public were increasingly turning to scientific experts, working either in academia or for government agencies, and trust in whom, as we saw earlier, has been slowly on the rise in recent years. Coronavirus has catapulted a particular group of experts—medical specialists, especially epidemiologists and virologists—into virtual celebrity status; nearly world-wide, but also in the United States. There are two medical specialists in particular, who both became the scientific expert faces of the White House Coronavirus Task Force9 and its daily briefings with the president. The task force was established on January 29, 2020 and Deborah L. Birx was picked by Vice President Mike Pence to become the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator. Another key member of the Task Force is Anthony Fauci, who has been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984. The 79-yearold Fauci has advised every president since Ronald Reagan. In order to have an impact on the behavior of US citizens during the crisis and to communicate their expertise successfully to a larger American public, Birx and Fauci needed the authority of expert government advisers on Coronavirus and could not just assume the role of talk show expert pundits in a highly polarized media environment. If polls are to be believed, Deborah Birx and even Anthony Fauci seemed to be successfully straddling a fine line. Zignal Labs, a media analysis company, studied 1.7 million mentions of Dr. Fauci across the web and TV broadcasts from Feb. 27 to March 13, 2020 and found that, through mid-March, he was mainly praised, and his comments were straightforwardly reported. Right-wing figures quoted Dr. Fauci approvingly or lauded him for his approving comments on shutting down travel to and from China, Zignal Labs said (New York Times 2020). As a matter of fact, Anthony Fauci, with

9 The group is a US Department of State task force that coordinates and oversees the Administration's efforts to monitor, prevent, contain, and mitigate the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19).

78% approval, earned the highest approval rating for his handling of the response to the coronavirus, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released on April 8, 2020 (Quinnipiac University:2020). Governors followed at 74% approval, while President Trump and Congress were below 50%, at 46% and 44% respectively. "In a country gripped by crisis and divided by partisanship, public opinion is united when it comes to Dr. Anthony Fauci," concludes the survey (ibid.). Governors collectively, and especially those who were following the recommendations of epidemiologists and virologists, have been winning widespread praise from the public for their handling of the coronavirus pandemic, often with the kind of bipartisan approval that has eluded both President Trump and those governors who pushed for a speedy reopening of their states (Washington Post 2020a). Three months into the Covid-19 pandemic, health experts like Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx have won the trust competition with President Trump by a considerable margin. In addition, Americans in red and blue states are staying home at nearly exactly the same rates, as was recommended by most scientific experts. Another recommendation by experts, the wearing of masks, is supported by 80% of Americans (Washington Post 2020b). These results suggest the public is highly attentive and is listening to advice from medical experts.

A new national survey by Pew Research Center, conducted April 29 to May 5, 2020 among 10,957 US adults, and a new analysis of a national survey conducted April 20 to 26, 2020 among 10,139 US adults, confirm the trend of rising trust in medical and scientific experts since the beginning of the pandemic, but with some important caveats (Pew 2020a). The percentage of Americans with a great deal of confidence in medical scientists to act in the best interests of the public has gone up from 35% before the outbreak to 43% in the Pew April 2020 survey. Similarly, there is a modest uptick in public confidence in scientists in general, from 35% in August 2019 to 39% in May 2020. But public confidence in medical and scientific experts has turned upward only among Democrats, not among Republicans. Thus, the somewhat bi-partisan trust in chief medical advisors Birx and Fauci has not translated into a bipartisan increase of trust in medical scientists in general. "Among Democrats and those leaning to the Democratic Party, 53% have a great deal of confidence in medical scientists to act in the public interest, up from 37% in January 2019. But among Republicans and those who lean Republican, 31% express a great deal of confidence in medical scientists, roughly the same as in 2019 (32%). As a result, there is now a 22 percentage point difference between partisan groups when it comes to trust in medical scientists." (Pew 2020a:

5–6) Another finding from the Pew survey conducted after the outbreak of Covid-19 confirms a trend that was visible in the most recent edition of the Edelman Trust Barometer. When people were asked, who should have a say in policy decisions about scientific issues, a majority of U.S adults (55%) in 2020 say that public opinion (which equals the answer "people like me" in ETB) should not play an important role "because these issues are too complex for the average person to understand," while 43% think the public (= "people like me") should help guide such decisions. "The balance of opinion on this issue has shifted since 2019, when a Center survey found the majority (54%) said public opinion should play an important role in science policy decisions" (Pew 2020a: 13). Partisan political differences over the role and value of scientific experts have remained since the breakout, but on some issues, they have been slightly reduced. The Covid-19 outbreak may have further increased trust in scientists, medical experts, and medical professionals—both from its lows in 2016/17 and from the time prior to the outbreak of the pandemic—but it has not significantly reduced distrust between the Democratic and Republican camps in the US. Republican trust in medical experts and scientists is no higher in 2020 than it was in 2019, while among Democrats trust rose by 16% in medical experts and 9% in scientists. Beyond the sustained partisan divide, it is noticeable that the increase in trust in both medical experts and scientists in general between 2019 and 2020—prior and after the Covid-19 outbreak—has been more pronounced among men than among women, more among whites and Hispanics than among blacks, and slightly more pronounced among the millennial generation than among older generations. Among African-Americans, confidence in scientists in general has actually fallen by 2% between 2019 and 2020, while it has risen by 11% among Hispanics during the same time period. (Pew 2020a: 31)

### **Conclusion**

This paper has advanced three main arguments: First, and at the risk of overgeneralization, it argued that a crisis of expertise has more than one origin: the deliberate spreading of doubts about the credibility and the benevolence of experts certainly does occur—especially in the US—but it can only undermine public trust in expertise if and when some experts and expert institutions in some fields have shown an undeniable lack of transparency or clear conflicts of interest. Deliberate attempts to undermine trust in experts exists, but the

data seems to indicate that these attempts only succeed in those instances where and when bodies of expertise tend to violate the norms of transparency and benevolence. Secondly, there is a backlash against a perceived tyranny of expertise when technocratic expertise is perceived as intruding into lifestyle choices or into questions of morality and ethics. In this realm, distributed trust (e.g. in people like oneself) can become as high or even higher than trust in technical experts. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, empirical evidence has demonstrated that, in the US, public trust in experts and expertise has stopped its decline—which had started in the late 20th century and peaked during the years after the Great Recession of 2008—and shown signs of reversal since 2018. With respect to experts in the natural and medical sciences, the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic in the spring of 2020 has accelerated rising public trust in this area of expertise, even though these very experts are sometimes sidelined by those in government.

The recent rise in public confidence for scientific and medical experts is in stark contrast with that for other groups and institutions in the US. For example, confidence in the military has been stable over the same time period, and that for journalists has declined, and slipped even further since the outbreak of Covid-19 (Pew 2020b). Still, the sharp partisan divide revealed by the most recent numbers suggests that the politicization of expertise can be expected to continue in the US—and most likely elsewhere as well. Advising governments in an ongoing crisis like the current Covid-19 pandemic poses risks for scientists. The nature of a crisis like Covid-19 means that scientific work that would normally take months or even a year to conduct, had to be done in a matter of days. The Imperial College London modelling study of March 16, 2020, which seemed to have had a strong influence on changing government policy on the pandemic in both Britain and the United States, has been criticized for allegedly using an outdated computer model that predicted an outlandishly high number of casualties should governments fail to take drastic action.10 The behavior of individual experts, especially when they acquire a quasi-official role, is taken into account when citizens evaluate their trust in scientific expertise. It can boost the public reputation of the scientists and their research teams, as we saw in the case of US Coronavirus Task Force members Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, but it can also undermine the public reputation of experts, as we witnessed in the UK, when the head scientists of the Imperial College modelling team, Neil Ferguson, was forced to resign

10 See https://www.ft.com/content/41e98ccb-a39c-4f88-b444-74d50a76c383.

from the UK government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) in early May 2020, after it was revealed he had broken social distancing rules, which had been recommended by scientific advisers. A public advisory role puts a spotlight on experts and their personal background, whether they like it or not. One reason why Fauci enjoys (limited) bi-partisan support is that he restricts his scientific advice to his narrow field of expertise: public health. When he was asked whether schools or the economy should open, he declined to give a recommendation and said that he would not give advice about economic things, nor any advice about anything other than public health. Fauci and Birx are reasonably popular and trusted scientific experts, but they are not perceived as thought leaders or as members of the ideas industry.

However, rising trust in medical and scientific experts may not immediately solve the credibility crisis of other expert bodies such as think tanks or universities. To regain trust, expert bodies and expert institutions like think tanks or university departments have to regain trust in their integrity and benevolence rather than trust in their subject matter knowledge.

### **Works Cited**

areflint.co.uk/foreging-the-think-tank-narrative-perceptions-usa/, June 25, 2018.

### **Shifting Meridians of Global Authority** Who Is Pushing in Which Direction, and Why?

*Florian Böller and Sebastian Harnisch*

### **Introduction**

There is wide variation in the authority structures upholding the current international order, ranging from institutional authority in international organizations and courts, to authority held by states and transnational networks (Alter et al. 2018; Bogdandy et al. 2010; Peters/Schaffer 2013). What factors induce some leading actors and institutions to accept the withering of authority, while others stand up and resist authority transformation, is an open question. It appears to be certain, however, that the dramatic foreign policy shift during the Trump administration has undermined the traditional authority of the United States as a guardian of the liberal world order. Indeed, the Trump administration has attempted to overhaul the rules and principles of the international order that its predecessors established and nurtured to "strike better deals" for a significant minority among the current polarized American electorate (Jervis et al. 2018).

One of the distinct features of the authority of the U.S. global leadership role lay in the self-limitation of its material power by adhering to the universal norms, rules, and institutions within a liberal world order (Ikenberry 2001, 2011). And because authority is a relational concept, establishing rules-based relations between a leader and followers, U.S. authority hinged on the continuous willingness of subordinate actors to support America's course (Bennett et al. 1997). Today, however, there is considerable evidence that international support for U.S. leadership among key audiences, its allies and partners, their societies and businesses, or tolerance by rivals and enemies, is diminishing (Wike et al. 2017; Shapiro/Pardiijs 2017).

We contend that these strains on U.S. authority have been at work for some time. They arise from several distinct but interconnected sources: First,

and most notably, over the past three decades international institutions have gained considerable authority for themselves, resulting in a substantial politicization of international authority in general (Zürn et al. 2012). Second, and relatedly, domestic institutions in liberal democracies, including the United States, have displayed variant but limited capacities to cope with the cultural and economic discontents of the liberal world order, most dramatically after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008. From a longer-term perspective, the spread of post-modern value systems, including a greater approval of diverse lifestyles, has evoked a cultural backlash in many industrialized countries, while economic pressures for businesses and employees, especially after 2008, have encouraged populist movements, parties, and politicians, to protect "the people" from abusive internationalized elites (Inglehardt/Norris 2016). Third, and more recently, strains in U.S.-led institutions, most notably its alliance system, have been exacerbated by the unintended consequences of expanding the geographical scope of U.S. authority through failed liberal interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya (Anderson et al. 2008; Wickett 2018). Fourth and very much related to the previous points, there is also a growing contestation and opposition towards central tenets of the liberal order, such as free trade, democracy, and liberal values, in non-Western countries and by their respective governments (Acharya 2017, 2018; Mounk/Foa 2018). Rising nationalism in both China and Russia, as well as various forms of populism in Europe, Asia, and Latin America inform strategies to frustrate democratic expansionism and bolster authoritarianism abroad (Tansey 2016; Weyland 2017).

In our reading, America's turn towards populism under Donald Trump and the demise of the bipartisan internationalist consensus in the U.S. are thus manifestations of a larger trend: unfettered forces of globalization and the costs of U.S. authority expansion have corroded the authority of U.S. leadership and the liberal international order itself both in America, the West, and in many non-Western societies.

From a theoretical perspective, we argue that authority in international relations is constantly transformed on two levels: first, at the level of the state, where modern state authorities were made and are remade through war, trade, and other peaceful exchanges. Second, at the level of inter-state authority, where state authorities' and other entities' foreign policies, such as those of the EU, have reconfigured international authority, resulting in various distinctive configurations of legitimate statehood, rightful state actions, and institutional practices of interstate relations (Dunne/Reus-Smit 2017).

There are, of course, different incarnations of authority and domination in inter-state relations, i.e. distinct forms of relational hierarchies in international relations over time (Zarakol 2018). Some of these appear to be compatible with the current liberal order. But some of them are clearly not—for example, those which are primarily based on domination and military coercion because they violate the principle of authority production through selfdetermination on the state level. As a consequence, we argue that domestic shifts in authority production, i.e. towards illiberalism or authoritarianism, will impact the re-production of international authority.

How different powers choose to relate to the waning U.S. authority, and what kind of hierarchical order emerges through respective "relational shifts" is the focus of our undertaking. We presume that analyzing how and why authority is transformed on the domestic level is essential to better understand the course of new authority patterns on the international level.

Much of the debate about the demise of the liberal order so far has focused on the extent of the decline and the causes that have brought it about.1 Will the Trump administration destroy the U.S.-led order to make good on its promise to "make America great again?" Or, in turn, is the sustainment of global diversity, liberal and illiberal alike, a prerequisite for reconstructing American democracy at home? Is China committed to the open trading order that seemed to have served large chunks of its society so well, or is it predestined to dominate the Asian region (and how much beyond) (Johnston 2019)?

These are important questions. In this chapter, however, we are focusing on the causal mechanisms that transform authority relations on the domestic level and which, in turn, shape a country's foreign policy towards authority relations on the international level. We contend that the current theoretical debate about the nexus between national and international authority ascription is biased towards systemic trends shaping domestic authority relations, e.g. in a "second-image reversed"-type of argument (Gourevitch 1978). By focusing on the interaction between systemic trends, globalization, and domestic trends such as populism, domestication, and economization, our chapter adds a new perspective to the debate.

The analysis proceeds in three steps. First, we explore different concepts of authority and their nexus with respective international orders. We argue

1 Cf. Acharya 2018, Böller et al. 2018; Ikenberry 2018, 2017; Lake 2018; Nye 2017; Risse 2006.

that authority is a hierarchical relationship that hinges on the recognition of subordinate states and other actors such as transnational non-governmental groups. Domination, in turn, is also a hierarchical relation. But it primarily relies on threats and punishments to alter the behavior and/or disposition towards the superordinate state, thereby establishing international orders without significant institutions.

Taking these two concepts as a baseline against which the transformation of the current order can be gauged, the second section introduces four mechanisms of domestic authority transformation (politicization, domestication, populism, and economization) that are related to or caused by globalization, and that inform respective foreign policy choices to support, contest, or dissent from the current liberal order. The final section examines the distinct patterns of foreign policy choices, ranging from support to opposition or (re-)creation of a new order.

### **Authority, Domination and the Emergence of International Order**

International relations scholars have long debated to what extent, in which context, and why the supposed anarchy between states is layered by rules, principles, institutions, and other manifestations of social relations. Different concepts, such as hierarchies (Lake 2007; Clark 2017; Zarakol 2018), hegemony (Keohane 2005; Hurrell 2007), international status (Paul/Larson/ Wolforth 2014; Bially Mattern 2005) or international society (Bull/Watson 1984; Dunne/Reus-Smit 2017) seek to explain material differentiation and/or social stratification of international orders, as well as the resulting manifestations and contestations in that order.

Structuralist accounts of international order and authority foreground the relative positioning of actors in a system according to their material attributes. Geopolitical thinkers posit that powerful states create and sustain international orders that privilege themselves over others. International order, in this sense, entails international legal regimes and institutions only so far as they reduce the costs of governing for the most powerful states, such as in theories of hegemonic stability (Lake 1993). Or the order may be manipulated to the benefit of the hegemon by increasing the number of constitutive entities, so as to weaken a rising opponent, for example through competitive decolonization (Hager/Lake 2000). Contestation towards order, or revisionism as it is preferably called in the realist tradition, is then reduced to the struggle for power and supremacy between dominant states, while lesser powers and non-state actors are bound to endure what they must (Davidson 2006).

Other "structuralist materialists" stipulate that the distribution of economic prowess, i.e. production capacity, vis-à-vis other classes and powers does instill distinct foreign (economic) policy strategies in states: economic supremacy upholds liberal trade orders in which free trade principles favor the hegemon over lesser powers. In turn, multicentric economic systems increase competition between great powers and spur control over lesser powers' economic resources (Wallerstein 1980). Contestation, then, ensues when lesser classes and powers in the periphery challenge unequal trade and treaties with the center in order to limit or end their dependency on the latter (Stephen 2014).

### Defining Authority

These two examples of structural mechanisms related to material differentiation among states pertain to hierarchical systems. They rely—not exclusively but mainly—on domination by more powerful vis-à-vis subordinate actors. The major difference of these types of hierarchies from those based on authority is the aspect of social recognition. Authority, in our reading, generates a specific form of social hierarchy: one which rests on the recognition of power towards the bearer of authority (Weber 2014; Lake 2010; Hurd 1999; Sennett 2008; Furedi 2013).

Following the conceptualization of Zürn et al. (2012: 83–88), we find that authority is constituted by two layers of recognition: First, actors may grant authority towards other actors or institutions in general, if they believe that these bearers of authority produce a necessary common good for all actors within the order. Here, authority is grounded on the expectation of a specific expertise or capability that obliges the authority to deliver the good or assume a responsibility necessary to uphold the order. Second, subordinate actors recognize authority because they trust that a specific set of rules, norms, and institutions presents a rightful order.2 This second layer refers to the traditional reading of authority as the legitimate exercise of power.

2 As Krieger (1977: 259) stipulates, "(i)ndeed, we may say that, if obedience is the counterpart of power, trust is the counterpart of authority."

Thus, in both international and domestic relations, various actors can only articulate a claim for authority. This claim entails a particular demand. It seeks to implement rules and norms and create institutions which aim to preserve the former. Within these authority relations, both actors, those who are able to claim authority and those who are bound to follow, need to accept these rules and norms, and they need to regularly take part in its institutions to uphold the order. Within institutionalized relationships, actors who successfully claim authority are able to generate rules and norms that are perceived as legitimate and/or necessary within a given order by the other actors.3 Through interactions within this set of rules, norms, and institutions, there emerges a specific system of authority that produces compliance by participating actors. That way, authority also serves as a mechanism of social control (Hurd 1999). At the same time, systems of authority create (permanent) inequalities, both in terms of material distribution as well status and other social ascriptions; for example, the rights and responsibilities of different actors within the order (Clark 2017: 251). However, subordinate actors will accept this stratification as long as the leader also sufficiently obeys the rules and principles he established. Self-restraint is thus a significant factor to retain legitimacy in authority relationships (Lake 2010: 588; Deudney 2007).

It is important to note that authority will seldom be undisputed or uncontested. Nor will the specific order created by this authority pertain to all actors on a global scale (Reus-Smit/Dunne 2017: 37). It is thus an empirical question as to how far-reaching and expansive a particular claim to authority is.

### International Authority as a Relational Concept

The feature of recognition and assent by subordinate actors recasts authority as a distinct form of hierarchy (Bially Mattern/Zarakol 2016: 627). Thus far, research on international hierarchies has primarily focused on power, status, and questions of the superiority of one actor compared to others. It includes authoritative rule and domination without the specific characteristics of legitimacy, such as accountability, transparency, participation, expertise, etc. In contrast to international authority, the concept of hierarchy is also more static, as it usually does not specify the corridor of acceptable actions that

3 In the words of Beetham (1991): "a given power relationship is not legitimate because people believe in its legitimacy, but because it can be justified in terms of their beliefs."

groupings of authority delimit. Hierarchies thus typically pertain across policy areas, whereas authority structures, such as those of international courts, can be highly circumscribed both in functional and temporal terms (Alter et al. 2018). It follows that authority relations are continuously re-evaluated and re-made by actors as they are subject to constant contestation, transformation, and decline, as well as expansion. It also follows that legitimization as a central source of authority varies over time and policy areas as the accountability, transparency, and participation in authority relationships waxes and wanes. Hence, as employed here, the concept of international authority focuses on agency interaction rather than systemic configuration to account for the transformation of a social order (see Bially Mattern/Zarakol 2016: 625).

Consequently, we theorize (international) authority as a relational term that posits distinct roles taken by actors within a hierarchical system (see Lake 2010): leaders uphold existing rules, norms, and institutions, and are able to (re-)define them, but also need to show self-restraint, i.e. accountability and openness towards participation of lesser powers in order to root the common purpose in the belief systems of followers. Followers recognize the order by either participating actively in establishing the set of rules, norms, and institutions, or by accepting them and acting accordingly. Spoiler states then seek to actively oppose existing authoritative structures while providing no distinct concepts themselves. Other actors may seek to replace the leader either by filling a leadership vacuum within existing systems of authority, contesting the legitimacy of the current leader, or by creating new authoritative structures.

### The Nexus of International Authority and the Domestic Level

While the existing international order prescribes certain rules, accepted forms of behavior, and incentives for states to follow (or lead), the inter-state level is related to the domestic level in several ways: First, governments in leading states need to find domestic support for the costs of providing authority in the international arena to fulfill special responsibilities expected from them (Bukanovsky et al. 2012). This support can become contested if domestic coalitions dispute material gains or the normative value of existing hierarchical arrangements (Shils 1982: 95). Second, contestation may be represented through "transmission belts" (Moravcsik 1997: 528) on the international level, i.e. through responsive institutions. Here, the domestic feedback loop pertains to leaders as well followers whose societies are affected by international outcomes. Only as long as domestic audiences view this arrangement as legitimate, i.e. if it can be legitimated in terms of their own beliefs (Beetham 1991: 11), will they support the authority. Also, if actors perceive that an authority acts detrimentally to the common good of the domestic order, contestation towards an international authority may emerge (Zürn et al. 2012: 87). Third, the impact of international authority or the lack thereof on the domestic level may alter domestic institutions, societal cleavages, and economic relations (Gourevitch 1978). Certain domestic actors might be privileged by the rules and principles predicated by an international order. Disadvantaged groups will therefore have an interest in opposing existing arrangements and submit their demands within the domestic political system. Fourth, domestic societies, functioning as authority audiences, provide a reservoir of ideas and interests that can be uploaded through transnational movements to the international level, thereby transforming international authority through nongovernmental channels.

Gauging the degree of (international) authority is thus a nontrivial endeavor (Daase/Deitelhoff 2017; Simmerl/Zürn 2016). First, it involves the conceptual delimitation between dominance, legitimacy, and authority. Then it requires the empirical analyses of their mixture in existing international orders. Moreover, the interrelatedness between domestic and international authority relations necessitates a closer look at the social mechanisms forging them.

### **The Domestic Side of Authority Transformation: Politicization, Populism, Domestication, Economization**

In the most general terms, authority is a relational form of power characterized by a range of supportive responses to an order. Legal authority, such as in international courts, rests on content-independent responses, which are not tailored to the recipient's interests (Alter et al. 2018). Political authority, such as the U.S. leadership authority, rests upon responses that are tied to a range of forms of recognition. Recognition itself can take various forms: input legitimacy pertains to the participation of subordinate actors in establishing the rules and norms delimiting the authority relationship between them and superordinate actors. Output legitimacy, in turn, is tied to the production of common goods, the provision of expertise, and accountability in providing that good by the superordinate actor. It follows that political authority is

based both functionally and temporally on a much more regular and symmetrical relationship than legal authority.

Our analysis starts from the acknowledgment that international authority vested in international organizations and regimes, such as the International Criminal Court (ICC), and in the U.S. global leadership role are distinct, if intimately tied to each other. We argue that it is possible, if not probable, that some international authority structures may persist in the future without U.S. support, while others may not (Bower 2017).4 In turn, we suppose that various foreign policy responses by other powers are tied to the politicizing effects of the authority of international institutions—such as the European Union in the case of Hungary—that were up to now supported by the U.S. but are not genuine effects of U.S. authority as such. As a consequence, we hold that it may be worthwhile to distinguish between politicizing effects of international institutions and U.S. authority because the former may have considerably larger audiences than the latter.

### Politicization

Out of the four concepts, politicization of authority is the broadest. Following Zürn et al. (2012), politicization of authority refers to a demand for, or the act of, transporting authority relations and their impact into the field of politics, making previously apolitical authority relations political (Zürn et al. 2012: 73). As an analytical concept, politicization thus neither narrows the range of actors or their structural positioning to each other, nor should it be understood as a unidirectional concept, implicating support or opposition by one actor towards a fixed authority structure. Concerning the range of actors involved, politicization may encompass various societal actors but also parliaments, which re-politicize authority relations that may have been deemed legal authority relations before (see the section on domestication below). With regard to the direction of politicization of authority relations, the concept encapsulates both the contestation and the support of international authority. More specifically, as Zürn et al. (2012) suggest, authority relations imply two different layers of recognition: on the first layer, addressees recognize that

4 The International Criminal Court and the shifting U.S. position towards it is one of the more prominent cases in which international authority structures persisted although various U.S. administrations openly opposed its establishment and very existence (see Fehl 2012: 95).

authority is per se functionally necessary to achieve a certain public good. On the second layer, authority is recognized if acknowledged as legitimate in the context of a given stock of beliefs in a community (2012: 83).

For our purpose, we presume that contestation on the first layer, i.e. whether authority is considered legitimate per se, has other implications than contestation of consent on the second layer. Examples of politicization that affect elements of the hitherto existing order can be found across countries and policy fields. Recent studies show that political contestation increasingly affects foreign and security policies. Within the United States as well as within allied societies, military intervention decisions have become subject to partisan fights. Here, the old paradigm that politics "stops at the water's edge" seems no longer applicable (see Wagner et al. 2018; Böller/Müller 2018). In these cases, the sobering results of democracy promotion abroad through interventions in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan pertain to the first layer of authority regarding the production of common goods (i.e. security or democracy). Contestation by domestic actors regarding international trade agreements are then related to the perceived legitimacy deficit that concerns non-transparency, and the lack of opportunities to participate and voice concerns. These contestations, for example regarding the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (van Loon 2018), have made it increasingly difficult for executive actors within the liberal order to enhance and refine the liberal trade regime.

### Domestication

Domestication can well be understood as a specific form of politicization, for it involves the deliberate effort by legislative and judicial branches to address the structural effects of international authority on the domestic separation of powers. Domesticating strategies originate from political actors, legislatures, and courts that seek to contain and re-direct the delegation of domestic competencies by executives to international institutions in a way to preserve the balance of power between the different branches of government (Harnisch 2006, 2009). Focusing on the German safeguards to preserve parliamentary and federal participation in European policy and the use of military force, Harnisch finds that both the Federal Constitutional Court, the Parliament (Bundestag), and the Federal Chamber (Bundesrat) sought to limit the federal government's autonomy to cede competences to the European Union and/or NATO by imposing procedural hurdles (such as 2/3 majority requirements or prior constitutive parliamentary consent for the deployment of German armed forces) and normative limits by imposing structural safeguarding clauses, requiring a structural correspondence between Germany's constitution (domestic authority) and inter-state institutions, such as the EU or NATO (international authority) (Harnisch 2009).

In the case of France, domestication has also narrowed the maneuvering room of the French executive in pursuing an ambitious pro-integrationist agenda in the European Union (Schild 2008). Arguably, domestication has also amplified the German government's hesitancy to deploy its armed forces, resulting in German abstentions from U.S.-led coalition warfare in Iraq and Libya, as well as numerous caveats in the Afghanistan campaign. Similarly, after the 9/11 attacks (Harnisch 2015, 2011, 2004), the U.S. Supreme Court has become more willing to intervene in and review presidential decisions curtailing civil liberties, finding that some executive decisions were unconstitutional (Breyer 2016).

While they are part of the long-term trend towards politicization of international authority, domestication strategies may respond to both instances of U.S. authority and international authority assertion. In contrast to populism, domesticating responses are oriented towards the status quo, since they are rooted in the (dynamic) effort to re-balance the separation of powers of a given constitutional system in interaction with an emerging international legal political order. Moreover, domesticating agents are few and they accept the given political order, not the least because they are constitutive parts of it. This does not mean that domesticating strategies may not transform international authority, as in the case of the German policy during the Eurozone crisis (Harnisch/Schild 2014).

As the U.S. case shows, domestication processes may hinder the exercise of a leadership role to maintain the current authoritative order. Already before Trump, domestic actors within the U.S. Congress sought to avoid the delegation of authority to international bodies (for example, to the International Criminal Court) or blocked involvement in international regimes.5 This

5 Examples include arms control treaties such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty 1999 and the Arms Trade Treaty 2013, or climate policies, regarding the Kyoto protocol 1999 and the Paris agreement 2015. In each case, Republicans criticized these policies because they would interfere with U.S. national authority and either voted down the treaty or precluded its ratification in the Senate.

limited the ability of the U.S. to influence those institutions and allowed other actors to assume a more leading role (e.g. Europe regarding climate policies).

### Populism

Among the different concepts of politicization of authority, populism takes pride of place insofar as different strains of populism challenge national as well as international authority on both levels, i.e. the necessity of authority *per se* and the authority in a particular community. Populism—defined here as a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups, the "pure people" and a "corrupt elite"—holds that politics should be an expression of the "volonté générale (general will) of the people" (Mudde 2007: 23) or a particular part of that people.6

The distinctive structures of populism shape how the transformation of domestic and international authority occur, as both levels are intimately connected. On the domestic level, populist leaders pretend to protect a selection of citizens—oftentimes representing only a fraction of society—from abusive elites, i.e. industrial monopolies, neoliberal takers, or corrupt government officials. Depending on the ideological trait of the underlying societal cleavage (racial, religious, economical), populism may comprise more inclusive groups, such as transnational working classes, or more exclusive groups, such as religious and/or ethno-nationalist communities. On the international level, some populists seek to safeguard "their people" from both domestic and foreign authorities' predatory strategies to "exploit, rape or rip their own people off." As a consequence, populist movements in Central and Eastern Europe do not contest but rather support the "America First" strategy of the Trump administration in order to legitimize their own struggle against the European Union's authority (Shapiro/Pardijs 2017). In turn, because Trumpian populism is a response to the structural growth of international authority, such as in the Dispute Settlement Body of the WTO, and the unintended consequences of U.S. authority assertion through liberal interventions—in particular after 9/11—it attacks central institutional pillars of both orders, such as the freedom of the press and the independence of the judiciary (national level), as well as the

6 This concept builds on Shils (1956), who believed populism to be an ideology of "popular resentment against the order imposed on society" by a ruling class with a monopoly of power and property.

U.S. alliance system and the liberal international economic order (international level).

### Economization

Economization pertains to the transformation of political processes into market-oriented forms of governance, as well as to the dominance of economic rationales in democratic policy making (Lazzarato 2015: 67; Best 2017: 383). An important source of the economization effects on domestic systems is the enlargement of norms, principles, and institutions upholding free trade regimes after the end of the Second World War, and the growth of global economic interdependencies. Capitalism within Western societies and international regimes, such as the Bretton Woods institutions, GATT, WTO, and regional agreements (NAFTA, EU) served as core pillars of the international authority structures led by the U.S. By these means, this liberal order was recognized as producing wealth for a large share of the electorate in participating societies, while stabilizing income expectations through its rule-based institutional structure both in the leading nation, i.e. the U.S., as well as subordinate states (Goldin/Margo 1992; Ikenberry 2011: 333).

Domestically, coalitions emerged between producer interest groups and organized labor in Europe and free trade-oriented elites on both sides of the Atlantic that, backed by the financial and service industries in the U.S., supported the expansion of this liberal economic order (Bailey/Goldstein/ Weingast 2010). At the same time, social policies with different reach and form among Western countries were designed to cushion the detrimental effects of the capitalist order, to create what Ruggie termed "embedded liberalism" (Ruggie 1982, 1992).

More recently, the Global Financial Crisis (2008) and the Eurozone crisis (2010) have triggered substantial contestation and dissent by populist movements—for example, the "Tea Party" in the U.S.—with regards to core liberal principles and norms, such as the freedom of capital, goods, services, and persons. In Europe, governments sought to implement emergency responses to the sovereign debt crisis in several member states and craft new institutions to prevent a further deterioration of the Euro zone. However, as the resurgence of Euro-skepticism and the "Brexit" referendum show, the crisis deepened already existing societal cleavages and led to an overextension of domestic institutions that sought to attenuate economic risks. In the U.S., symptoms of the crisis—such as growing unemployment rates, mass default

of private homeowners, and growing federal debts—fueled dissent among the electorate with regard to the prospects and core principles of the hitherto supported liberal order. In addition, the growing disparities in the distribution of wealth hampered the legitimacy of the order and nurtured doubts about the necessity of the authority of liberal economic institutions and policies (Tooze 2018).

While the GFC affected Western as well as non-Western states, it further accelerated the relative decline of the U.S. and its Western partners vis-à-vis emerging economies. President Trump's "America First" policies are attempting to externalize the negative effects of this relative decline of the U.S. economy (in particular the de-industrialization and resulting decimation of bluecollar jobs) that caused domestic conflicts and triggered fears within the U.S. working class. At the same time, Trump's course spurs the corrosion of the supporting role of the U.S. for the authority structure it created by violating core principles of that order (Carnegie/Carson 2019).

Populist economic policies can thus be interpreted as an antidote against the economization of international trade and financial policies that should have been held accountable for the outbreak of the GFC (Boucher/Thies 2019). Populists claim that their protectionist policies will shield workers' interests from the effects of neoliberal open market strategies through authoritative political decisions, whereas strategies of economization are meant to protect corporate interests from governmental interventionism through the introduction of market-principles, such as self-coordination among corporations themselves.

Overall, politicization, domestication, populism, and economization are significant mechanisms that link domestic politics and international authority. As Table 1 summarizes, these processes are intertwined, but also pertain to distinct functional levels with specific sets of actors and symptoms of crisis.

### **Grasping Foreign Policy Reactions to Shifting International Authority**

Seen from a systemic perspective, the transformation of an international order sets in motion a realignment of role taking by other actors. However, as the previous section outlined, the concrete cues received by subordinate states are refracted through the processes that shape the authority production on

*Table 1: Mechanisms of domestic impact of authority change*

the domestic level: politicization, populism, domestication, and economization.

Leadership transformation thus creates a window of opportunity for other actors to introduce their own claims for authority and pursue changes to the existing rules, norms, and institutions in accordance with their own ideas. In this case, actors need to possess alternative concepts of rightful rule that contrast to the status quo. These actors will thus adapt their foreign policy decisions accordingly and seek leading roles for themselves through the introduction of new rules, norms, and institutions that were not deemed acceptable before.

There might also be actors who, despite leadership transformation, are interested in preserving existing authority structures because their governments and/or societies profit from the existing order, value its normative principles, or because they are unwilling or unable to introduce new authority claims. It follows that these actors will be pressed to take on roles which stabilize existing rules, norms, and institutions.

If authority structures disintegrate and previous rules and institutions break down without being replaced by new authority relationships, then (some) actors might seek to hedge against the resulting insecurity (as a vacuum of leadership and authority emerges). This way, even actors who are interested in upholding the status-quo will be forced to adapt their respective roles to the changing international circumstances.

Accordingly, as a first approximation to gauge variant types of foreign policy reactions to shifting global authority, we can differentiate between two dimensions (see Table 2). The first dimension concerns the question of whether actors are interested in upholding or challenging the status-quo of the rules, norms, and institutions that have been guaranteed by the reigning authority and have structured the previous order. The second dimension requires us to examine whether the actors are willing and/or able to assume a leading role by advancing claims of authority for themselves.

*Table 2: Typology of foreign policy reactions to authority change with tentative examples*

### **Conclusion**

To sum up, we argue that it takes the convergences of two authority processes to stabilize international authority relationships: one within states, in particular within the leading states to legitimize and effectuate an executive branch to extract enough resources to sustain a global leadership role; and second, one (or more) authority relationships between states, to legitimize special responsibilities and duties between leading and following states. As both processes have come under significant pressure in the United States and between the U.S. and international institutional authorities and lesser states, the current liberal international order is bound to be substantially transformed.

Here we have focused on the social mechanisms through which the effects of the transformation of international authority are refracted within the domestic authority structures.We contend that the four mechanisms (politicization, domestication, populism, economization) are all geared towards finding new equilibria between international and domestic authority structures. It is fair to suggest that some of the mechanisms are more transformational in kind and degree than others: Politicization may contest a new international authorities' impact upon domestic authority so as to uphold given domestic authority relationships, as in judicial rulings to limit an executive autonomy vis-à-vis its own or other citizens in the "war against terrorism." Or politicization may instill transformation on the domestic and international level as non-governmental actors use international authority so as to effectuate change in domestic authority structures. Domestication, in turn, is more conservative, as it seeks to preserve a given domestic authority structure. However, it may do so by projecting one's own domestic structures onto international institutions, such as in the case of the German Bundesbank model being transposed onto the European Central Bank structures. Populism, on the other hand, is a distinct transformational mechanism as it seeks to recalibrate both domestic and international authority structures towards the need of an (imagined) oppressed people that has been betrayed by its elites. Economization has proven to be no less transformational in the sense that it puts the interests of corporate actors first vis-à-vis governmental regulations, favoring market forces as regulatory instruments rather than governmental or administrative oversight.

### **Works Cited**

### **Trust and the City** Analyzing Trust from a Socio-Spatial Perspective

*Ulrike Gerhard, Judith Keller, Cosima Werner*

"That's where the trust issues come in, because if people say to someone in the Lower 9thWard [neighborhood in New Orleans affected by Hurricane Katrina]: Oh, don't worry, we'll replace your house somewhere else. There's no trust that that is gonna happen, right? No, there is no trust. Historically, no reason to trust." *MA Sheehan, Lower 9th Ward Homeownership Association, New Orleans 2018*

### **Introduction**

Transformations of (authority and) trust manifest themselves in space, especially in urban space. As the quote by homeownership association's representative Sheehan illustrates, flourishing urban development relies on trust. It is here, on the neighborhood level, where trust relations matter (e.g., for buying or building a home, for feeling at home in a neighborhood) or where the erosion of trust creates anger and fear (e.g., failing public housing policies, the destruction of homes to make room for new developments, the policing of public spaces). These daily urban encounters of residents, citizens, and other actors tell us about recent societal, economic, and political transformations affected by the shifting meanings of trust in US society. We therefore suggest exploring different urban dimensions of trust by developing trust as a sociospatial concept. Furthermore, we argue that trust relations are essential to understand the recent evolutions and transformations of the city.

Urban Studies have emerged into a major discipline that analyses societal changes from a broad theoretical and empirical agenda. It has become a massive interdisciplinary endeavor to understand globalization, the transformation from an industrial to a post-industrial society, and the increasing capitalization of culture and society. Trust, however, has seldom been used as a conceptual lens to understand urban developments. Even more so, it has hardly ever become a methodological tool to analyze recent developments in the city. So, while we outline trust as a socio-spatial concept by applying two quintessential urban geographic rationales to trust —the relational and the mobile—in the first two sections of this essay, we then suggest that scholarship needs more empirical accounts of the struggles, practices, and representations of trust in US cities. Subsequently, we detail related themes that help to grasp empirically the urban dimension of trust. These themes—cities as imaginative spaces, cities as social spaces, the temporal dimension of urban development, and the meaning of home and housing as spatial fixations—do not constitute a comprehensive list of research areas, but they are drawn from different long-term research projects that seek to understand recent struggles and increasing inequalities within US cityscapes. We contend that these issues are among the most important challenges that cities have been facing over the last decades. We therefore suggest that trust can help to conceptualize these issues in a profound manner and, vice versa, that the urban geographic perspective helps to better conceptualize trust in US society.

### **Relationality and Mobility as Geographic Concepts to Understand Trust**

Trust can never exist by itself (Luhmann 1989). It emerges through relations to other objects: to persons (relationships, friendships, communities, etc.), to contexts (time frame, political systems, nation states, etc.), and to places (homes, cities, etc.). Without trust (in any of its possible definitions, see Gerhard/Keller 2019), there would not be any relationship nor bonding, just as any clear delineation would be impossible. As much as trust is relational, there is no absolute meaning, understanding, or measurement of trust. "How much" trust exists in governments, for example, is difficult, if it is even possible to answer (see, for example, Hartmann 2020). Most often, this problem is circumvented by the use of terms such as decreasing trust, which is then categorized as distrust. Distrust, however, is not the opposite of trust, but its

"functional equivalent" that always comes along with it (Luhmann 1989). It is, in simple words, a prerequisite for developing trust relations.

To comprehend the complexity of trust as a relational entity, an understanding of the different concepts of space is helpful. Following Lefebvre's metatheory of three dialectically linked dimensions (also: moments or formants) of the production of space (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]), geographer David Harvey (1973; 2006) identifies a tripartite division in the nature of space. Besides a mere *absolute* space defined by boundaries or mathematic equations that exists independently of matter, he distinguishes between *relative* and *relational* spaces. *Relative* space is demarcated and explained by the relationship between objects and only exists because objects exist and relate to each other (Harvey 2006). This type of space, for example, emerges through flows of people, things, and capital. *Relational* space, in contrast, is contained in objects in the sense that "an object can be said to exist only insofar as it contains and represents within itself relationships to other objects" (Harvey 1973: 13). *Relational* space, in this sense, can be demarcated by immaterial human desires, linguistic attitudes, or political opinions. It emerges from interactions, processes, practices between different actors or objects which bear these relationships within them. Foucault argues in the same direction, but with his own distinct conceptual terminology, when he writes, "we do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another" (Foucault 1986: 23).

The definition of relational space helps to describe trust, namely the *understanding* of another person (or institution, or object) as being trustworthy, which is established due to their mutual (or even shared) relationship. Consequently, we argue that trust plays out in relational space: Its relationality constitutes a certain space as much as it is constituted by it. Urban theorist Edward Soja's critical contributions add another helpful term here: the concept of *Thirdspace* (Soja 1996). Following Lefebvre's ideas on the production of space, Soja argues that the real (*first space*) and the imagined (*second space*) cannot be separated any longer; they have become one, as in *third space*. The usefulness of these different concepts for discussing trust from an interdisciplinary perspective can be illustrated by looking at the treatment of charismatic trust in this volume. It contains a spatial sense of authority, meaning the orientation and setting of an object in a certain landscape that shapes values, norms, or a so-called "vertical resonance" (Rosa 2016, 457ff). The assumed relationships between object and surrounding landscapes connect the actors and thus produce relational places which we need to analyze and understand.

Studying relationality, however, is quite a challenge. How can we analyze trust in specific spaces (e.g., neighborhoods, cities) if they only exist through their relations to others, as nodes within networks? The locality debate or the discourse of relationality vs. territoriality in the field of geography offers a starting point here. Massey (1991), for example, demands a "global sense of place" and suggests that specific places have to be analyzed as dynamic spaces that are embedded in a broader context of networks and flows. These spaces are constituted by their relations to other places or scales as much as they are unique places and can be studied as such. We therefore can use specific places as "exemplars" for the understanding of broader contexts and processes (Massey 1993). McCann and Ward (2010) further develop this dialectic relationship by emphasizing the simultaneous nature of relationality (the global) and territoriality (the local, the urban, etc.). They suggest the concepts of "mobile urbanism" or "mobile policies" that emerge from the dual existence of circulating knowledge and embedded policies (177ff.). In this sense, policies are shaped by fixity and flows at the same time; both of which need to be researched.

This is what the (new) mobilities paradigm, mainly developed by Cresswell (2006) and Sheller (2014), emphasizes poignantly and which becomes crucial also for the understanding of trust. Since trust changes over time and space, possesses different meanings in relational contexts, and develops from stage to stage, its manifestations are fluid and historical. The mobilities paradigm outlines that we not so much need to focus on specific places but rather on the landscapes, routes, lines, and spaces in between them. We can look at flows (e.g., residential movements, evictions) and developments (e.g., planning cultures, housing policies) and try to understand what they signify, how fast they develop, and what changes they cause (e.g., among residents, in the neighborhood, on the larger urban scale). This holds especially true in an interdisciplinary and temporal context, as stressed by Sheller and Cresswell.

There has been a rapid growth in attention to mobilities across the humanities and social sciences since the turn of the millennium. This perspective underlines how the experience of globalization is in myriad ways defined through ever-increasing mobility: ranging from the concrete transportation systems enabling the flows of people negotiating everyday urban and global mobilities to the movement of capital and socio-economic classes into urban habitats; from the manufactured goods and hazardous wastes carried across logistics networks to the diffusion of urban governance policies, practices, and ideas; and from the dynamics of those migrating by choice to those fleeing (or being left behind) in the face of war, natural catastrophes, or conflicts. Far from simply being a "marker of an era" or a "neutral means to an end," mobilities are deeply meaningful and embodied, gendered and racialized, bound up in social, cultural, and political struggles from the local to the global (Culver 2016). Mobilities thus directly relate to trust relations in the city. It is here where social interaction coincides on a micro scale. Cities themselves are "theaters of social interaction" (Mumford 1937), in which conflicts as well as co-operation among various actors proceed. Trust then can be a mobile phenomenon that links the different groups, actors, entities, and places. It is fluid and changeable, but also offers stability, authority, and reliability.

We can therefore consider the erosion of trust or the emergence of distrust as a sign of mobility, or better: immobility. Cresswell (2012), in his second report on mobilities, presents "stuckness" (649) and fixity as important aspects of mobility. It can be man-made (e.g., racial profiling in cities) but also natural (e.g., volcano eruptions, hurricanes), causing human responses or policies that then stop mobility and cause stillness. Such frictions illustrate the severe vulnerability and injustice that is inherent in the global urban spaces we produce. They are thoroughly incorporated into our mobility practices. Evictions, for example, are such a form of mobility: They trigger an involuntary movement, ending the fixity of the place called home. Yet, as a consequence, families are stuck in spaces of homelessness; the loss of home fixes them in a space of social marginality. We are going to discuss evictions as one urban dimension of trust in more detail in the latter part of the paper. We first, however, turn to outline trust as a socio-spatial concept with the help of relationality and mobility in order to analyze and understand transformations of trust in the city.

### **Trust as a Socio-Spatial Concept**

Trust, first of all, is always embedded in a specific, local context. Being aware of the simultaneity of relationality and territoriality, trust relations depend on involved actors, political contexts, historic conditions, as well as social and cultural environments. In cities, we find social ties between landlords and renters, between public housing agencies and public housing applicants, or between municipal governments and private investors (public private partnerships), all of which form a unique environment for trust relations to develop. The relational spaces between them change, also over time. This is to show that context and time frame matter and can never be generalized: public housing estates tell a different story about trust relations than do condo buildings or suburban homes. As one example in urban development, public housing projects were widely espoused as a cure for social ills during the 1950s and 1960s, before they quickly merged into symbols of squalor and neglect. But not in every city or neighborhood: While some lasted only a few decades, others provided homes for generations of mainly African American families. Thus, the very specific locality of these public housing estates has to be taken into account when analyzing what spaces of trust are produced here. Depending on the surroundings, trust developed in different forms or, quite the opposite, has been severely damaged.

This, secondly, leads to the conceptualization of trust as being a highly contingent, context-bound phenomenon, as described by the mobilities paradigm. Trust does not follow rules, it cannot be planned or predicted—although most rational choice theories aim to do just this. It manifests itself in relationships between human beings (ongoing dyads, groups, and collectives), but not of isolated individuals. Or—following the rationale of the mobilities paradigm—trust is the line that connects two entities. Trust therefore contains different emotional, behavioral, and collective components that need to be acknowledged. It represents a complex social reality (Lewis/Weigert 1985) that penetrates the whole institutional fabric of society and therefore needs to be analyzed with the use of a comprehensive, and, most importantly, an interdisciplinary approach.

Thirdly, trust is not an intrinsic resource or an act that is always conscious, but emerges as a habitualized practice in daily lives and experiences. Therefore, it is closely related to social practices. According to Hartmann (2011), trust can only manifest itself in practices, with the practices again evoking trust (or reliability). If residents, for example, are used to go to a convenience store in their neighborhood, despite how high the prices are or how dangerous the trip is, the store itself and its surroundings become a relational, social space that offers reliability, shelter, social contact or, in contrast, fear and loneliness (Werner 2017). It is through those everyday practices of visiting the store (or routines, rhythms, see Cresswell 2012) that the social reality and thus relational space is being produced.

Fourthly, trust is a term, a discourse, and a social practice under continuous change. Due to certain eruptions, residents alter their behavior or political programs change (e.g., new public housing acts, the opening or closure of a store or restaurant in the neighborhood). People are then not eligible to live in certain buildings anymore, they do not receive food stamps any longer, or they are evicted from their homes. Consequently, trust relations have to be reconfigured as new people move in and out of the related space, changing the network of trust relations and thereby the urban fabric. This holds true also for planning laws and urban narratives (e.g., the ideal of a homeowning democracy; the demonization of certain streets or neighborhoods as being dangerous, derelict, or ghetto spaces) which depend on public discourses, media attention, and architectural vogues that shape urban place-making (Busse 2019). Cities also function as imaginative spaces that are represented by literary texts, poems, music, film, or street-art and gain a specific meaning that strongly depends on shifting relations of trust. So, it is not so much the physical, absolute space of buildings and streetscapes, but more specifically the relational space that is being produced through trust relations.

We finally argue that the eruptions, shifts, practices, and movements that constitute these relational spaces need to be investigated empirically. Only then can we understand the role trust plays in urban development. Trust as a socio-spatial concept frames our empirical investigations by looking at different urban dimensions of trust. In doing so, another trust-related concept will come to light: authority. It helps to institutionalize trust relations. For example, housing agencies serve as an authority implementing urban development. Authority therefore also helps to understand implicit power relations between different agents on the urban scale.

### **The Urban Dimension of Trust**

The urban context is the sphere where trust relations epitomize in space. While cities are specific, absolute spaces defined by boundaries and physical buildings, they are also relative and relational, hence an adequate arena for studying social transformations of trust. They are expressions of modern society that is increasingly described as urban society. So, it is in this context in which trust relations function like the gearwheels or lubricating oil of societal relations. Since we understand Urban Studies as an interdisciplinary endeavor, we not only study the temporal development of cities, but also how cities function as social spaces, arenas for political fights, and as the material which sparks our imagination. By analyzing these different urban arenas, we

show that urban space is permeated by trust relations. We call this the urban dimension of trust. Without trust, the urban as a theater of interaction evaporates. Trust relations are not only formed between different urban actors (mostly dealt with in urban geography) but are also a vital component in the representation of cities as utopian, trustful social spaces in fiction, which will be depicted in the next chapter.

### Cities as Imaginative Spaces: The Cultural Representations of Trust in the City

We all have them in our minds: the images of the grand metropolises of our times. There is the glamorous New York City with the promise of an anythinggoes urban lifestyle; there is Paris where lovers walk along the Seine while in the background the Eiffel Tower is glistening in the night sky; there is the progressive spirit of Singapore where the global elites touch ground; or, there is the ever-welcoming Rio de Janeiro with the open arms of the Redeemer and the joy of Carnival. Cities have never been mere physical, absolute places made of bricks, cement, and tons of asphalt—they have always also been the places we imagined them to be. Images of cities travel across and around our globe in the form of books, movies, TV shows, and, most importantly these days, social media. Cities become cultural representations and aesthetic experiences for global audiences with no physical connection to them other than the book they are reading or the Instagram account they are following. These texts, scripts, and images produce a second layer to an already existing cityscape; a layer that is made out of the fictional material that feeds our imagination. The city is thus not only New York, but the glamorous Sex-and-the-City-universe and, at the same time, the place where Betty Smith's Francie is coming-ofage and James Baldwin's Sonny plays the most beautiful blues and someone wants to have Breakfast at Tiffany's. So, while cities still are specific places with a specific locality, they are also global icons relating places, people, and things to each other. In the Harveyan sense, cities are truly *relational spaces* in that they can be understood only in their relations to other places and, vice versa, are constituted by those relations (Harvey 1973). This relational character is reflected in the images and texts, which, in some way or another, are all representations of the city. The city as a *third space* is not merely a mute backdrop to our imaginaries; it is simultaneously constituting of and constituted by them. Thus, as trust relations are strongly reflected in cityscapes, they are taken up and interlaced into cultural artefacts of all kinds. Fictional texts, for

example, are one source of this cultural representation of trust as they reflect in what ways changing notions of trust have shaped urban society over the centuries.

American cities, both as specific localities and global icons, play a key role in popular culture, reflecting on trust as a "formant" of urban space. Cities have become cultural authorities, providing in many cases a continuity and stability which seems to have been lost in so many other aspects of US-American society. For decades, therefore, works of fiction reflected trust in the progressive American city and its promise of endless opportunities. One might think of Fitzgerald's classic *The Great Gatsby* or Sinclair Lewis's *Babbitt* who captured like few others the spirit of the "Roaring Twenties" and its trust in constant progress. "*I like the way the City makes people think they can do what they want and get away with it*," says Viole(n)t in Toni Morrison's novel *Jazz*(1992: 8) when describing how she fell in love with New York after coming North during the Great Migration. There are millions of stories of those who left their homes in the countryside behind, trusting in an image they had of a city that would provide them with a better future (often only to find that a city is not a place where one should trust easily). On the flip side, the city has always been portrayed as a dreary and dangerous place, where, in a sphere of distrust and anonymity, each individual fights for her own survival. Ralph Ellison's *Invisible Man* is roaming the streets of New York all by himself, remaining unnamed and invisible to the world, while hard-boiled detectives in novels by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, or James Ellroy fight off gangsters and femme fatales, never trusting anyone but themselves. Here the theme of the city as an "anonymous jungle" and the general attitude of mistrust have shaped an entire genre (Most 2006; Schmid 1995).

Yet, as cities change, so does the material that tries to capture their unique spirit and characteristics, as well as notions of trust and distrust on the urban scale.The concept of mobilities might be helpful here to understand those transformations. The positivity and excitement about change ("growth is gospel in America," Muller 2012: 303), which seemed to be omnipresent in the early 20th century, is long gone. The promise of endless liberties, riches, and opportunities has been replaced by a more sober picture: skyrocketing rents, evictions, homelessness, a fragile infrastructure, and a skyline which stands more than anything for an unpopular finance service sector. People have grown distrustful of cities as mere "growth machines" (Wilson 2018), embodied by big investors moving into their cities, powerful real estate businesses, creative city agendas, as well as municipal and national governments

who fail to find effective ways of creating a more egalitarian and inclusive city. Nowadays, we find works of fiction, such as Nathan McCall's novel *Them*, discussing gentrification and displacement in such ways that they could be interpreted as a root of distrust into urban development. Other novels address the 2008 financial crash and the subsequent American housing crisis, the tough reality in public housing projects, or the bankruptcy of cities such as Detroit. In her graphic novel *Creation*, Sylvia Nickerson takes a tour through a Rust Belt city which is simultaneously in decline and being upgraded by bohemians who find the shabby-chic inspirational. While her main protagonist, an artist, is endlessly searching for an affordable place to stay, two worlds collide: the young artist is confronted with the proximity of homelessness and severe poverty to her own life overshadowing her upward mobility. The dark images reflect those contradictions and an atmosphere of distrust so typical of the Noir genre. Similarly, natural and human catastrophes are treated as events which end mobility and cause stuckness in (and of) cities. For example, since 2005, Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath have been the subject of many works of fiction and non-fiction (e.g., Dave Eggers: *Zeitoun*; Tom Piazza: *Why New Orleans Matters* or *City of Refuge*) as well as documentaries and TV shows (e.g., Spike Lee: *When the Levees Broke*; David Simon und Eric Overmyer: *Tremé*). They all have one motif in common: as the city drowned, so did people's trust in their government and a post-racial America.

Here a new image of the city is constituted: one which tries to incorporate the harsh realities of American urban society into the fabric of our real-andimagined cityscapes. It is thus necessary to analyze those texts and images to find what they tell us about trust and distrust in American urban society, and how those notions have shifted over the years. While in geography we believe that it is crucial to do in-depth studies of places—observing and interviewing people as well as participating in everyday city life—we support the idea that this can go hand in hand with an analysis of the cultural representation of those places in literature, film, music, and the visual art.

### Cities as Social Spaces: Daily Urban Practices on the Neighborhood Level

The field of Urban Studies researches social spaces and neighborhoods, but the corresponding theories barely analyze trust explicitly. However, it is only with a clear analytic focus on trust relationships that certain innovative

research projects can be undertaken—for example, in C. Werner's ongoing project on convenience stores in impoverished neighborhoods in the cities of Chicago and Detroit. While the analysis of texts and images allows a broad perspective on American cityscapes, this ethnographic project focuses on the microscale of the neighborhood. The ethnographic methods help to explain the social significance of these small-scale food stores in marginalized urban quarters, opening up new meanings of trust. These dynamics need to be emphasized more strongly in the constitution of social space. In the foreground are the everyday constitutions of the customers in relation to their life-worlds. To depict trust in practices not only highlights shifts of practice but also the hidden multidimensionality of trust. Therefore, trust can be conceptualized with the help of a praxeological approach (Hartmann 2011).

Trust determines the sphere of agency (*Handlungsspielraum*) in which people can move because they are trusted. The boundaries of this sphere become tacit knowledge but also emerge as rules and laws (Schatzki 2002). Boundaries convey unspoken expectations on the part of the person who has determined the sphere of agency: A person anticipates the trusted person to move within the given framework. If these limits are crossed, this usually harms trust and promotes the development of distrust. Let us illustrate this with an example from a Chicago store.

A regular customer tries to secure an income with occasional activities through the sale of stolen goods, used clothing, and single cigarettes. She finds her clients in the street, near the store. Sometimes she goes to the store to talk to friends or to warm up until she is asked to leave. On her last visit, she complains that she is starving. The employee is on the phone ordering some food for himself from the nearby eatery. Out of an empathetic gesture, he orders an additional dish for her—his treat. Just as he has placed the order, he catches her stealing some pastries from the store. Accompanied by loud words of disappointment, she is expelled and banned from the store forever. The employee immediately cancels her order.

The example illustrates that rules and laws define the sphere of agency, such as theft, as a punishable offense. It also demonstrates that a general understanding guided the employee's action: that if you are caring and generous to someone, the person will not turn against you. He did not expect that the customer would steal from him in the same moment he is taking care of her. She crossed a legal boundary, but more so, she triggered emotions of disappointment. Her crossing these boundaries was not only punished by banishing her from the store, but by distrusting her from then onwards. She is no

longer trustworthy. She risked being caught and has thus not only lost the trust that was placed in her, but has also forfeited the convenience store as a relational space for social (and economic) interaction.

Another example illustrated by an interview quote from a female resident shows the extent to which trust can affect individual mobility practices within the neighborhood. The interview has been conducted in the social space surrounding the store and reveals the following situation:

[My son] didn't really have no fear [as a child]. But now, you kinna gotta little fear because of the violence that's going on.  It could be seven in the morning; it will be two in the evening, three in the evening. You know, when my son was probably in 2nd grade, you could let them walk to the school and back home. Versus now, we don't trust things like it used to be during that time. […] So it's been a figure from 20 something years up until … You just can't hide.   An accident will cover you in blood out here". (female resident, Chicago 2017)

Goffman (1963) uses the term "unfocused interaction" (97), alluding to the fact that, while the public interactions between strangers take place in physically close space, they keep their social distance through "polite estrangement" (Giddens 1991: 81). One acknowledges strangers, maybe with a brief greeting, a nod, or a smile, but rarely anything beyond that. This practice allows people to assess situations in public spaces and behave accordingly. As a rule, people can trust that others will act according to this restraint. We experience it in everyday life: we have to screen situations for familiar patterns to decide whether to trust strangers. However, the female Chicago resident reveals that the conditions she used to be familiar with no longer apply. Continuous and even arbitrary violence shook her general appreciation of the neighborhood and her openness to judge everyday situations. The underlying assumption in the selected statement would be that children "normally" go to school alone because they need to have no fears in their neighborhood. Nobody would want to do them any harm as even strangers are entrusted with this shared set of believes. Some residents, however, such as those involved in gangs, break the norm of "polite estrangement" by using violence. In the full-length interview, she reports that the violence she has been exposed to in her lifeworld has changed the way she moves around. She is now afraid of passing through

the neighborhood for her daily errands. If she had the choice, she would stay at home. This situation stresses the mobile and relational character of trust. Trust relations in the neighborhood change due to the practices of its residents, while the atmosphere of distrust changes the mobility practices of the residents. This female resident doubts that political agendas and police actions can cope with the high level of violence in the neighborhood; only faith in higher authorities (in this case, God) seems to offer some respite.

Both examples show that the sphere of agency is both opened and limited by trust. The formulation of trust can be seen in the practices of "entrusting" (Baier 1986: 236). People trust each other not to endanger the well-being of others and not to abuse loyalty; and they expect the corresponding behavior. Also, trust must be bound to a subject who assesses whether the person is trustworthy or the situation familiar. The focus on trust and practices therefore identifies new dynamics and interactions in the study of social spaces and facilitates an understanding of why practices are carried out in a specific way.

### The Temporality of Urban Development and Planning

Over the past decade, trust has gained attention as a decisive factor in urban planning (Mössner 2010; Lobeck/Wiegandt 2019). While trust is seldom analyzed conceptually, it is acknowledged as a necessary ingredient for the urban network to function, e.g. in neighborhood planning, urban mobility politics, or participatory planning processes. We argue, however, that trust should not only be a catchword on developers' agendas but has to be theoretically grounded and that its workings have to be analyzed in actual planning processes (Gerhard/Keller 2019). Trust here works not so much on the interpersonal scale, as in the convenience store discussed above, but rather on the institutional scale: it is placed in city planning departments of municipal and national governments or in private developers and corporations, which fulfill a quasi-institutional role. Often this form of trust is said to be one characteristic of modern societies, which tends to embed trust in institutions (Luhmann 1989; Giddens 1991). Yet, the idea of trust in city planning is by no means only a modern phenomenon. Similarly to the city as an imaginative space, cities have always been spaces of utopia. Some well-known examples are hundreds, even thousands of years old: Aristotle discusses urban citizenship in his *Politics* while Augustine examines Christian values in city life in his *The City of God*. One of the most productive periods for urban utopias was the late 19th century when, due to industrialization and mass urbanization, the cities were

on the verge of collapse. Overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, air pollution, epidemics, and many other pressing issues needed to be addressed. Daniel Burnham proposed the *City Beautiful*, Benjamin Ward Richardson *Hygeia*, the city of health, and Ebenezer Howard the famous *Garden City*. They all believed that they could change the way people behaved and form better and healthier citizens merely through design (Hall 1988).

This top-down, bureaucratic understanding of planning did not change in the decades following the so-called Progressive Era. Planners such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier assumed an authority and arrogated a level of trust for themselves which seems almost disconcerting in our neo-liberal age. Having said this, we too have to question the trust we place in city planning agendas and wonder who is claiming authority here and how those actors legitimize the trust placed in them. Buzzwords such as "creative," "smart," "green," and "mixed-income" are thrown around like confetti, often presupposing an almost blind trust because, who would oppose a more sustainable and inclusive city (Swyngedouw 2007). This matter-of-fact attitude of city planners has come to its limits in recent decades. Too often those megaprojects seem to come at a price which fewer and fewer urban citizens are willing to pay: rising rents, displacements, traffic congestion, etc. Grass root activism therefore increasingly opposes large redevelopment projects, claiming the need of citizen involvement in urban planning policies (Jacobs 1961).

In Washington, D.C., for example, the public housing project Barry Farm is being torn down and redeveloped as a mix-income neighborhood. While the project could not be stopped, activists were able to demand a historic marker on the grounds of Barry Farm's extraordinary importance to the civil rights movement and black culture in the capital. In September of 2019, they organized a history walk through the, by then, half-way torn down project, telling the stories of civil rights leaders as well as ordinary individuals who have recently lost Barry Farm as their home; the event ending with a concert of Barry Farm's own go-go band (*see photo 1*). With their actions, the activists were able to postpone the further demolitions until a suitable solution was found. Another example is Amazon's search for the new site of their headquarters. That New Yorkers were able to reject such a huge corporation has gained worldwide media attention in 2019 (Kort/Postinett 2019; Goodman 2019). Even though Amazon promised to bring many jobs to the city while following an equitable development plan, people distrusted their intentions. It would have been likely that the jobs created would not have benefited those who need them so badly but rather the highly skilled professionals who move to the city for the jobs, putting even more pressure on the housing market (Schröder 2018). These examples show that in order for people to trust in city planning they need to be given a chance to voice their opinions and participate in the planning process. If people feel like decisions are being made for them and that those decisions are not for their own good, a wave of distrust is set off which can cause entire projects to fall. Yet, institutional trust should also not be understood as a one-way street. Trust as a relational entity has to work reciprocally. While citizens trust in municipal governments and city planners to work out highly complex plans and to come to wise decisions, those representatives should return the trust placed in them by respecting the needs expressed by the communities.

*Photo 1: #DontEraseBarryFarm—That is the message of Barry Farm's own Go-Go-Band (The Junk Yard Band) playing after the History Walk on Sep 7, 2019*

(Photography: Judith Keller 2019)

As a consequence of this, we should perhaps seriously rethink the relationship of trust and city planning. Maybe it is not enough to only focus on the trust relations of planning institutions and residents. Rather, trust should

be understood as an entity which is present from the very beginning and not merely a goal to work towards. The city itself should be understood as a space in which trust is constantly working between people and institutions. It is a relational phenomenon that cannot be understood in isolation, but only in light of those interactions and their spatial dimension. Again Lefebvre (1991 [1974])'s trichotomy of *The Production of Space* helps to understand that trust is perceived, conceived, and *lived* in space. As Hollis (2013) points out, trust in the city becomes a functional entity if we plan spaces which "allow us to be ourselves" and "behave and interact in trusting ways" (192). The work of Klinenberg (2018) supports this point. He analyzes the positive impact of social infrastructure—spaces of social interaction—in times of crisis and finds that people in neighborhoods with libraries, playgrounds, neighborhood parks, etc. fare better because they have built up a network of trust relations; in other words, the necessary social capital to survive. Trust then is not only the necessary ingredient for urban planning to work smoothly, but for the city to become a lived space and a home.

### Fixity and the Fight for Urban Space: Home and Housing as Spaces of Trust

In the opening quote, MA Sheehan talks about the absence of trust in New Orleans's Lower 9th Ward. Literally cut off from the rest of the city by a canal, the neighborhood has always been disadvantaged and passed over. Little has been invested in its infrastructure, retail, and public transport accessibility. Tragically, this also left the Lower 9th Ward most vulnerable when Hurricane Katrina made landfall in August of 2005. The neighborhood's proximity to the canal was fatal. When its levees broke, the suddenness of the breach swept away entire houses and trees, burying the Lower 9th Ward under ten feet of water. People had to camp on their roofs with no help in sight—they were stuck for days. Yet, while Katrina prominently showed how a highly mobile urban society can instantly collapse into stillness, the residents of the Lower 9 th Ward were not only physically stuck in place, but had been stuck economically, socially, and politically long before Katrina hit.

The Lower 9th Ward is exemplary for African American neighborhoods and other communities of color all over the United States. Almost all of them have a long history of discrimination, segregation, and displacement. Institutionalized racism in the form of Red Lining, the denial of federal housing loans, school segregation, defunding of supermarkets and retail, police surveillance and brutality, etc. has kept an entire social group in a state of perpetuate marginality. Many people are both figuratively and literally stuck in place, as stressed by the new mobilities paradigm. In many cases, those neighborhoods are very isolated, having little relations to the rest of the city as canals, rivers, or highways separate them. If public transport is available, it is often heavily underfunded and thus scarce and unreliable. Yet, the stuckness refers not only to the actual mobility practices within the city, but also to the limited housing options. Even if families are working towards moving to other parts of the city, they often experience discrimination on the housing market. Many landlords do not house people of color in the first place or check their criminal histories and credit scores which then disqualifies them. The severe poverty and the lack of any economic potential in those neighborhoods excludes many people from the for-profit housing market. They depend on public housing or landlords which are willing to take their Section 8 housing vouchers.1 Yet, many African Americans not only have trouble finding housing, but have experienced displacement and eviction for decades. African American communities are depicted as blight or slums in order to justify their removal (Wacquant 2008). They have to make room for highways, high risers, or, these days, mixed-income developments. Then, people are displaced, resulting in a constant form of forced mobility as they are being moved from one disposable place to the next (Desmond 2012). The African American urban experience has thus been one which led many people to distrust those institutions which are supposed to secure an inclusive urban society. They have been failed so many times that there is "historically, no reason to trust," to put it in MA Sheehan's words. While the situation in New Orleans might be especially grave due to the most recent history of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, it still reflects the general distrust towards institutions by a substantial part of American urban society.

It has already been mentioned that many people in those neighborhoods depend on public housing. The trust relationship between the state as a provider of housing and public housing residents is a very special one. The state here assumes the responsibility to provide its most vulnerable citizens with decent housing. The first generation of public housing was initiated by government funds during the New Deal Era with the National Housing Act of 1934 and the Wagner-Steagall Housing Act of 1937 (Gottesdiener 2013). Those

1 Refers to the Section 8 of the Housing Act of 1937. It establishes that the state pays rental assistance to private landlords in order to support low-income families.

pieces of legislation helped many poor, working-class families who had been passed over by the for-profit housing market. The aforementioned Barry Farm in Washington, D.C.'s Southeast quadrant was built back then and was thus one of the oldest public housing projects in the United States. In the beginning, Barry Farm and similar projects—not yet high risers that turned into vertical ghettos, but neat row houses with a lot of green space—were seen as a success. Yet, starting with the Nixon presidency, funds for public housing were constantly cut and, at the same time, many white Americans left the cities, subsidized by the loans they were offered for a suburban home. What happened next is a well-known story: many projects collapsed under the weight of gang wars, drugs, violence, and other social issues, iconically captured by the pictures of the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe (Bristol 1991). Barry Farm has a similar story. Since the project was built in the 1930s, it has been lacking many amenities, and so, in the 1960s, civil rights activists fought for it to be remodeled (Schoenfeld 2019). From then onwards, Barry Farm received no further investments. Later, when the decision was made to tear down the project, its signs of serious neglect where held against its residents and thus their removal framed as the only logical consequence.

However, in contrast to public opinion and stereotypes, public housing, including Barry Farm, was and still is a necessity, and sometimes a success. Many people do not only find a home here but also a community which supports them. There are many urban residents who need public housing because they cannot afford rent from their (minimum) wage or because they are physically or mentally impaired and cannot work. Public housing is their safetynet, and yet, they witness how it is underfunded, torn down, and replaced by mixed-income developments. The trust they placed in their government is broken as they find themselves stigmatized, discriminated against, and moved around cities like a disposable entity, instead of being helped when in desperate need of a place to call home. In 2018 and 2019, this was also the fate of the Barry Farm residents. Many tried to resist the redevelopment of their community, but in the end, they were evicted, and their community torn apart (*see photo 2*). Those who were lucky and found a new home in one of the District of Columbia's other projects have learned that they should not think of themselves as out of harm's way. As one of the residents told us in an interview, she is afraid that her new home, the Kelly Miller-LeDroit Apartments, are next on the Housing Authority's list:

You think, you would consider it home but the whole time they [DC Housing Authority] don't (…). All of a sudden, they tell you: well, this was supposed to be temporary; or this is, you know, not fit for you to live. So, now we have to tear it down and do it all over again. And then they send you some place that might be worse or that they gonna come for shortly down the line, and you'd be doing it all over again." (former resident of Barry Farm, Washington, D.C. 2019)

And it is millions of Americans who feel this way: the uncertainty on the housing market and the few prospects for government aid leave many fearing that they are next to be swallowed by the massive wave of displacements, evictions, and foreclosures that rolls over the United States (Desmond 2016). There is no trust that the housing market or their government is going to show any mercy.

This very tense situation on the housing market is a root cause of poverty. Access to decent housing is in most cases the first step out of these deprived conditions towards self-sufficiency and participation in public life. If people are stuck in a perpetuate state of marginality, they cannot fight for what is naturally theirs: a "Right to the City." In the Lefebvrian sense, this entails more than merely housing; it is the right to partake in city life and to create and form the city as one desires (Lefebvre 2016 [1968]). As Munoz (2018) stresses, the Right to the City cannot be claimed if home and housing do not provide a safe sphere. People need the security of home in order to experience a form of empowerment that enables them to become activists and to fight for a more egalitarian urban society. As participatory observations of the activists fighting for urban space in New Orleans's Lower 9th Ward and Washington, D.C.'s Barry Farm have shown, it is the experience of home and the attachment to place which gives the activists not only strength but also a purpose.

*Photo 2: We Not Moving—Barry Farm residents protesting their eviction and the redevelopment of their neighborhood in early 2019*

(Photography: Judith Keller/Ulrike Gerhard 2019)

### **Conclusion**

These examples from a range of US American cities document how trust as a socio-spatial concept works on all scales of urban space. It could be on the micro scale of the neighborhood between residents, but also on larger scales between investors and buyers or between citizens and municipal governments. As long as trustful relationships are maintained, cities function as social spaces. This paper argues that these trust relations are best described in terms of relationality and mobility, two concepts coming mostly from geography: If mobility and relationality are interrupted or suspended, be it by a natural disaster, an investment-friendly landlord, or a hungry shoplifter, trust ends. This affects general trust in urban space as well: The city no longer represents a safe space and a home (as often portrayed, for example, in fiction). This can be best observed when we look at the formation of urban space. If we detail cities not merely as absolute spaces, but as relative and relational entities, then we can understand the emotional, social, and economic meanings of trust relations in cities.

Trust as a socio-spatial concept sheds light on urban spaces that emerge through the stories told, the social ties developed, or the trauma experienced collectively. As shown by the different case studies, trust relations become prevalent not only in the planning and building of physical urban space, but also shape the daily practices of people living within them and the images which influence their behavior and attitude towards urban space. By looking at these case studies we learned that visions as much as realities of cities change over time and are sometimes expressed by new political agendas, or by changing tastes or socio-economic conditions. Trust relations, therefore, are never stable or consistent, but changeable und fluid. They develop around conflicts and crises, as much as they (try to) provide stability and the feeling of security.

While the empirical details touched upon in this paper are important, this article is only the beginning of a larger research endeavor on the shifting meaning of authority and trust in US American urban society. As a result, we suggest extended research on different cities to gain further insights into the specific relationality and mobility of trust. We portrayed four relevant urban dimensions of trust in this paper. This list, however, can easily be extended by further themes or topoi. Questions of surveillance and policing, for example, are highly relevant not only in US American cities—often sparked there by racial profiling and other discriminatory practices—but confront urban society in many parts of the world. This directly relates to different forms of trust relations: from the interpersonal (between residents) over the institutional (police presence), to the loss of trust in the state as a trustworthy authority. Also, mass media have a strong influence on trust relations in cities as they shape public discourses and thereby impact perceptions of urban space. And, finally, having suggested mobilities as a helpful paradigm for understanding trust in cities, we see mobility itself telling us a lot about trust: investments into driverless cars, for example, will only be successful if people trust the new technology. Trust and technology in cities, therefore, is a topic worthy of indepth research. With these (and other) examples in mind, our way forward is to argue for a framework that uses trust as a socio-spatial concept to analyze urban space. This space, being absolute, relative, and relational, is formed through social relations as much as it influences it. If we understand those urban processes, we can come to a new understanding of trust. Relationality and mobility help to conceptualize trust as a socio-spatial entity, yet they also reflect back on the concept of trust itself.

### **Works Cited**

Baier, Andrea (1986): "Trust and Antitrust," in: *Ethics* 96(2), 231–260.

## **"We must trust that look of hers"** William Dean Howells's Urban Theory of Trust and Trustworthiness in *A Hazard of New Fortunes* (1890)

*Margit Peterfy*

American distrust of the city goes back to the very beginnings of the nation, and is probably most famously voiced by Thomas Jefferson in his *Notes on the State of Virginia* (1785):

The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitutions.

Jefferson's vividly phrased abhorrence of "great cities" is closely tied up with his distrust of government, which we see expressed even more durably in his machinations to designate the site of the nation's then new capital away from the existing major urban centers, New York and Philadelphia (Wills 2002; Conn 2014; Boehm/Corey 2017: 13). Most of the canonical American writers of the nineteenth century (from Emerson to Dewey) harbored similarly antiurban attitudes, with some exceptions such as Walt Whitman's vision of an urban utopia of flamboyant and harmonious co-existence. But, all in all, antiurbanism remained the dominant ideology among the major American writers and thinkers of the nineteenth century (White 1961).

This said, many Americans, whether of old stock or recently immigrated, did not shun cities throughout the long nineteenth century.1 On the contrary: the city that will be the "scene" of this essay, New York, had about 60,000

1 In their 2017 study on America's urban history, L.K. Boehm and S H. Corey write in their "Introduction":"The history of the American city is in many was the history of the United States. Although the agricultural tradition of rural America has left an indelible mark on the physical and cultural landscape, the United States is essentially an urban nation,

residents in 1800 and 600,000 by 1860 and, by 1900, Manhattan alone had 2.2 million residents (Conn 2014: 14).2 Of course most of these city-dwellers did not see themselves as ideological or intellectual advocates for the advantages of cities or urban life-styles; they "just" moved there with various motivations. There has been so much emphasis on the squalid working and living conditions of the—objectified—"Other Half " (Riis 1890) that we tend to forget that, during these years of explosive urban growth through migration, even poor and underprivileged city-dwellers were intelligent, self-interested agents, who arguably chose the city over the countryside because it afforded them opportunities, however meagre, that they could not find elsewhere. The fact that they were lied to and criminally exploited (as vividly described in Upton Sinclair's *The Jungle*, published in 1906), was not a problem of the "mobs" feared by Jefferson, but the result of governmental negligence, fraud, and political corruption steeped in economic egotism. Adding insult to injury, some "theoreticians" of the urban poor, such as, for example, the leader of the Social Gospel movement, Josiah Strong, called these city dwellers an "insolent rabble," or compared them, following a wide-spread nativist, anti-immigration impulse, to "cannibals in some far off coast" (Strong 1885: 129; see also Boyer 1978, Boehm/Corey 2017: 141–182).3

Given the anti-urban stance among nineteenth-century literary commentators on city life, William Dean Howells (1837–1920) stands out as an exception and as one of the first observers who attempted to (re-)present a more comprehensive and also more detailed social view of New York just before 1900 (Kaplan 1986; Bramen 2000; Puskar 2018). This paper will argue that the novel *A Hazard of New Fortunes* (1890) can be read as a reflection on trust and trustworthiness with respect to the momentous changes in urban institutional and political conditions in the metropolis of New York just before 1900. In this, I will focus both on trust (as a relational attitude) and trustworthiness

and has been so for a much longer period and to a greater degree than is generally acknowledged" (Boehm/Corey 2017: 1).

2 In percentages, the changing ratios are even more striking: in 1800 94 % of Americans lived in rural areas; by 1900 this number declined to 50 % (Conn 2014: 13–14).

3 Even reformers with deep sympathy for the plight of the urban poor and with an earnest wish to help, were often not able to see that their help took on the form of moralistic control and social engineering, disrespecting the dignity and individuality of their "wards," especially when the persons to be "reformed" were foreigners, or of a different religious persuasion (Boyer 1974:ix; Kaplan 1986: 69–70).

(as a condition of the trustee), thus following Russell Hardin, who writes: "Poets, playwrights, and novelists get the issue right, but academics often miss … the causal connection that trustworthiness begets trust" (Hardin 2002: 28).

### **William Dean Howells as Social Commentator**

It is important to point out that my reflections on Howells's understanding of trust relationships in American urban society rest specifically on references in his novel *A Hazard of New Fortunes*. The terms "trust" and "distrust" appear there again and again in a range of contexts, also in implicit references to trustworthiness, reliability, risk, expectation, and social justice. The centrality of the topic reveals itself in the closing sentence of the novel—a classically "foregrounded" position in any literary work. Here, the remark "Well, we must trust that look of hers" appears as a comment on a fleeting urban encounter—a point I will come back to later. The statement seems to be typical of the open endings in Howells's novels (Wetzel-Sahm 1995), but when we take trust to be one of the main motives of this work, it provides thematic closure, harking back not just to other moments in the novel, but also to the title that references a concept often understood to be a necessary element of trust: hazard, in the sense of risk (Skyrms 2008).

But before the actual analysis of *A Hazard of New Fortunes* (1890), Howells's own trustworthiness as a reliable and insightful commentator on trust needs to be established. As in many of his almost forty other novels, he made use of a literary aesthetic that he had developed throughout his long and successful career as a novelist, critic, editor, and social commentator. He called this new mode "democracy in literature" and "realism" and saw its superiority above older literary traditions in its openness to a whole set of new topics and experiences that he summarized in the category of the "common sense" or "everyday" life (Howells 1891: 9–10). Much has been written about the success or failure of his efforts in terms of various interpretations of "realism" (with respect to style, philosophy, literary sociology, economy, institutional theory), 4 but this discussion is only relevant here concerning his more inclusive stance towards topics and themes that he felt should be part of his fiction, or rather of literature in general (Trachtenberg 1982: 184–190). He has been criticized for

4 For a recent research overview and bibliographic essay see Ernst/Matter Seibel/ Schmidt 2018: 1–34 and 29–31.