The Complexities of Nation Building: Rokkan

Rokkan provides a "quick summary of the geopolitical history of Western Europe" emphasizing several key elements:

City-States

The earliest efforts at state building began on the fringes of economic Europe. The typical sequence was one of gradual build-up at the ethnic center, rapid imperial expansion across a variety of ethnically distinct areas, and then a drawing back and consolidation within a more homogeneous territory (England, France, and Sweden).

Rokkan portrays the 19th century process of European nation building as a fundamentally different from these earlier attempts at territorial consolidation on the continent. Whereas the latter tended to be conquests of peripheral rural areas from a dynastic center, the current configuration of European nations is the product of "invasions of economically and culturally advanced urbanized territories [the prosperous city states along the trade belt between the Mediterranean and the Baltic] from military strongholds" on the edges, first the seaward side and much later the landlord side, of what had been the Roman Empire (Italy and Germany) (577). Rokkan asserts that one cannot de-emphasize significance of these city states. The integration of these prosperous and highly autonomous urban entities posed a complex challenge to nation building efforts.

The Church

Catholicism, with its efforts to maintain its supraterritorial influence, tended to act as a brake on the development of national identities. Thus, it was the Protestant centers of the north that were able to proceed most quickly from state to nation building. The break with Rome allowed for the development not only of national religions, but, with the repudiation of Latin, national vernaculars.

Linguistic/Cultural Issues

As far as the emergence of national structures, "much depended . . . on the initial conditions of ethnic and linguistic unification: how far could the collectivities around each center actually agree on a common standard, how intractable were the linguistic peripheries?" (581). Secessionist movements tended to revolve around ethnic-linguistic divisions.

Law

Only those nations further from the trade belt (England, Scandinavia, most of France) developed legal systems distinct from the essential Roman system that prevailed in the center, one that allowed the conduct of transactions among open societies. In fact, the current dispute over the Common Market is, according to Rokkan, very much a conflict between the economically cross-cut city belt at the center (now incorporated in the nations of Germany, Italy, Spain, and southern France) and the culturally distinctive territorial systems at the peripheries of the system.

Prerequisites for Successful Democratic Transition

Challenges the dominant thesis of Moore that successful transition to full-suffrage among European nations was determined by the closeness of ties of interaction and cooperation between the rural and the urban economic elites. Within Moore's model the greater the distance between the urban and landed economies, the greater the likelihood of unchecked and unbalanced growth of the state and crisis in the transition to mass politics.

While conceding that the explanation works for the England v. Prussia, it cannot explain the contrasts between contrasts between England and France. How could France with its strong bonds between the rural and urban economies experience such a violent transition so very different from England's steady progression toward a representative system?

Rokkan shifts the focus from urban-rural relations to geopolitical distance from the all-important city-states. Those nations with the smoothest transitions were those located at great remove from the city-states and which had much earlier developed distinctive nationalist traditions (England, Sweden). Other nations avoided the turmoil experienced by France in that they were alliances of subsets of the city states, such alliances permitting the free movement of goods that was so central to the prosperity of these urban centers (The Netherlands, Switzerland). Democratic transition tended to be violent and abrupt where absolutist regimes (like France) attempted to limit the exit options (to use Hirsch man's term ) of urban subjects, to limit the free movement of men, commodities, and ideas that was so vital to the prosperity of the urban trading centers. Where such exit options were limited there emerged increasing pressure for voice. But these absolutist regimes not only tried to close their borders they also choked the channels of representation within their territory. As Hirschman demonstrates, you cannot limit both exit and voice without seriously endangering a system. Bloody democratic revolt against the monarchical structures was the result.