Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

4 Anna Triandafyllidou and Willfried Spohn
interest in the nature of the modern nation-state, the processes of state formation
and nation-building and related political movements and identities. For many in a
valid way, Ernest Gellner has defined the modern nation-state as the congruence
between the state as a territorial–political unity of centre-formation and the nation
as a shared culture of a political community (Gellner 1983). The socio-historical
foundations of the formation of the modern nation-state and related national
movements and identities, according to his modernisation theory, are the development
of a capitalist–industrial economy, the standardisation of a common high
culture and political democratic participation. At the same time, it has remained
unclear whether this model of the modern nation-state constitutes an ideal-type
in Max Weber’s sense of social-action orienting idea or a real-type in the sense of a
historically-materialising formation (Balakrishnan 1996; Hall 1997). As an idealtype,
this model seems to be a valid vision particularly for modernising national
movements and political elites but has come under mounting criticism by
alternative, post-nationalistic and multicultural ideas of political organisation. As a
real-type, this model has been questioned regarding its teleological–evolutionary
assumptions in view of the different historical preconditions, varying developmental
trajectories and multiple modern types of the nation-state.
From this perspective, the contemporary reconnection of Europe is not simply
reconstituting a pan-European system of converging modern nation-states. Rather,
there have developed and are continuing to develop varying forms of modern
nation-states on the basis of their differing historical trajectories in the various
European regions. As particularly Stein Rokkan (see the recent reconstruction by
Peter Flora, Stein Kühnle and Derek Urwin 1999) proposed and also Ernest Gellner
suggested, it makes sense to distinguish between at least four major European time
zones of state-formation and nation-building. The first Western European state
formation zone has been characterised by early processes of political-territorial
centralisation and corresponding high cultures; here, aristocratic incorporation
enabled the inclusion of different ethnic groups very early on. The second Western
Central European time zone has for a long time remained under the influence of
the declining Western Roman Empire and was characterised by political fragmentation
on the basis of cities and regions combined with two major high cultures;
here, aristocratic inclusion remained territorially dispersed, contributing to the
endurance of ethnically mixed populations. The third East Central European
time-zone at the intersection between Western and Eastern Christianity has become
until recently the victim of Empire-building; political centralisation here was
predominantly part of imperial state-building in opposition to peripheral forms of
nation-building. And the fourth time zone of nation-state formation has been
created by the core regions of the Eastern Empires with imperial bureaucracies on
the top of segmented ethno-religious groups; here, nation-state formation has
involved the dismantling of Empires and subsequent ethnic nation-building.
In a parallel comparative perspective, there have developed attempts to construct
typologies of nationalism and national identity in the European geographical and
historical context. Hans Kohn (1964) and later Anthony Smith (1991) as well as
John Hutchinson (1994) have proposed to distinguish between the Western state-