Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

Cross-cultural, cross-societal and cross-national research 669
- comparisons of pairs or multiples of leading or innovating polities across all
world regions over roughly the same span of time;
- comparisons of all polities within one culturally-historically homogeneous region
of the world.
Shmuel Eisenstadt’s gigantic work on the emergence and decline of bureau-
cratic empires64 offers an excellent example of comparisons of the first type.
Nothing of similar scope and analytical depth has as yet been attempted for the
other major type of cross-community organization for resource mobilization and
territorial control: the nation-state.
Karl Deutsch has given us a suggestive cybernetic model of nation-building
processes but has applied it to only a few empirical cases. His pioneering work
on Nationalism and Social Comnzunication limited its quantitative comparisons
to four countries,65 and the data bank built up by him for analyses of varia-
tions among nation-states does not cover sufficiently long spans of time to
allow the testing of developmental models.66 Perhaps his greatest contribution
lies in his effort to codify procedures for the establishment of indicators of
variation in the rates of mobilization within the actual or potential territories
of nation-states :67 this work has inspired a variety of attempts at empirical
testing and has acted as a springboard for further theorizing.68
The Deutsch models fired the imagination of a number of scholars, but they
were limited to only one of the many sets of processes inherent in the formation
of national political communities : they focused on variables explaining the rates
of incorporation of underlying local populations at different physical and/or
cultural distances from the national centre, and gave much less attention to
variations over time in the political or administrative measures of national
standardization and consolidation taken at the territorial centres, or to the
dimensions of elite conflicts over such policies. In Deutsch’s work with Wei!en-
mann on the formation of the Swiss polity,@ there are intriguing pointers toward
the construction of a model of variations in the processes of alliance formation
at the national centre, but the implications of this style of analysis remain to
be worked out for other cases of multicultural nation-building such as the
Dutch, Belgian, Canadian, and Lebanese.
The paradigm developed in successive steps within the Almond-Pye Commit-
tee on Comparative Politics7O offers a better balance between ‘state formation’
variables describing processes at the centre of each system, and ‘nation-building’
variables accounting for processes of change in the underlying territorial popula-
tions. The Almond-Pye scheme posits six crises of development. These define
sets of challenges, decision points or policy tasks in the path of any central
elite or counter-elite endeavouring to consolidate a national territorial communi-
ty. This amounts to a proposal to study all historically given nation-states within
one conceptual grid, whether old-established OK newly constituted, whether in
Europe, European settler areas overseas, in Asia or in Africa. The aim is world-
wide comparative analysis: the paradigm is a tool in the ordering of data on
the sequences of decisions and reactions leading to the formation of nation-
states at different levels of cultural consolidation, political mobilization and
organizational capacity.