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

670 Stein Rokkan
Three of the six crises arise out of conflicts in the extension and differentia-
tion of the administrative apparatus of the nation-state:
- the penetration crisis - the crucial initial challenge of the establishment of a
co-ordinated network of territorial administrative agents independent of local
power resources and responsive to directives from the central decision-
making organs;
- the integration crisis - clashes over the establishment of allocation rules for
the equalization of the shares of administrative offices, benefits and resources
among all the culturally-territorially-politically distinct segments and sectors
of the national community;
- the distribution crisis - conflicts over the expansion of the administrative
apparatus of the nation-state through the organisation of services and the
imposition of control measures for the equalization of economic conditions
between the different strata of the population and between localities dif-
fering in their resources and levels of production.
The other three crises arise out of conflicts between elites and counter-elites
in the definition and differentiation of the territorial population:
- the identity crisis - the crucial initial challenge in the establishment and
extension of a common culture and the development of media and agencies
for the socialization of future citizens into this community of shared codes,
values, memories and symbols;
- the legitimacy crisis - clashes over the establishment of central structures of
political communication, consultation and representation commanding the
loyalty and confidence of significant sections of the national population and
ensuring regular conformity to rules and regulations issued by the agencies
authorized by the system;
- the participation crisis - the conflict over the extension of rights of consulta-
tion and representation to all strata of the territorial population and over
the protection of rights of association, demonstration and opposition.
The paradigm does not posit any fixed sequence in the solution of the six
crises; on the contrary, the purpose of the scheme is to pinpoint variations in
the sequences of challenges, policy conflicts and full-scale crises among histori-
cally given polities and to generate hypotheses concerning the conditions for
the emergence of such varations in processes of nation-building. Unfortunately,
little concrete work has been done on the operationalization of this set of
general concepts or on the classification of historical sequences of conflicts and
decisions within this framework. Characteristically, most of the examples used
in the presentation and discussion of the scheme have been taken from the
brief historiesofthe nation-states emerging from colonial status following World
War II.
Indeed, the decisive intellectual motivation for the development of the scheme
was the urge for some ordering and codification of the insights accumulated
in the initial study of these new states. There was no similar attempt to bring
order into the wealth of historical information at hand on the already func-
tioning nation-states in Europe and the European settler areas. There is little
doubt that the scheme can prove useful in the comparative study of these older