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

Cross-cultural, cross-societal and cross-national research 67 I
nation-states, but the concrete experience of operationalization, classification
and interpretation has not yet been made.”
Whatever the results of such concrete tests, it is clear that this paradigm of
crises does not in itself constituteamodel for the explanation of variationsin the
outcomes of nation-building processes. The paradigm helps to order the information
about each bundle of processes but has not been built into a body of propositions
concerning the consequences of varying sequences of crises and of varying
alignments of elites and underlying populations in the solution of the crises.
This has been a field of great intellectual excitement during recent years. A
number of sociologists and political scientists have tried to develop models for
the explanation of variations in the choice of elite strategies in the building of national
communities and have sought to derive propositions concerning the
consequences of different alliance strategies for the further development of each
system.
We may conveniently distinguish two styles of macro-comparisons along
these lines:
- large-nation comparisons across contrasting cultural areas ;
- comparisons of all units, smaller as well as larger, within one cultural area.
Reinhard Bendix focuses his work on Nation-Building and Citizenship on the
growth of territorial systems of public authority in four contrasting national
communities : Germany and Russia, India and Japan. Samuel Huntington seeks
to define the ‘fusion of functions’ and ‘division of powers’ characteristic of the
United States through an analysis of the contrasting developments in England
and France.72 In both cases the explanatory variables are sought in the processes
of interaction, alliance and conflict among the elites controlling the principal
resources of social, economic and/or cultural power in each population; the
dependent variables are characteristics of the resultant structures of administrative
and political institutions. In another set of ‘leader-nation’ comparisons, by
the political scientists Robert Holt and John Turner,73 these administrativepolitical
variables in their turn offer a basis for the explanation of contrasts
in the timing of the take-off to economic growth: the early industrializers in
each cultural context, England and Japan, are systematically compared and
contrasted with the two later industrializers, France and China, in an effort
to test propositions concerning the consequences of political centralization for
the initiation and spread of economic innovations.
This theme, the interlinkages between processes of economic growth and
processes of political-constitutional change, is equally central in Barrington
Moore’s pioneering analysis of the conditions for the rise of democratic opposition
politics vs. monolithic dictatorships in the leading states of the modern
world.74
Moore distinguishes three ‘paths to the modern age’: the democratic and
capitalist, the fascist and the communist, and seeks to compare the histories
of the leading nations which followed each of these paths in Europe, America
and Asia. He compares the three highly divergent cases of capitalist democracy
in the West, England, France and the United States of America, with
the one nation which may still follow this path in Asia: India. He then com-