.
can the arrival of political modernity be globally typologized in a way that is analytically manageable as well as empirically warranted? Yes, it dawned upon me, as I was making a global study of the development of the right to vote,33 that there were four major routes to modern national citizenship, four major pathways into modernity, defined by the conflict lines for and against the new, between modernity and tradition, between modernity and anti-modernity. They can be distinguished in general analytical terms and can therefore be used not only to sort groups of countries but also as ideal types, two or more of which may have been taken in a particular country.
How was the new political culture generated? Internally, in the given society, or imposed or imported from outside? Who were the forces of the new? A new stratum within the given society, an external force or a part of the old internal elite? Where were the main forces of anti-modernity, of traditional authority and submission – inside or outside?
In this vein we may distinguish four main conflictual configurations in the world. They emerged as empirical generalizations, but they can also be used as ideal types, especially as they can be located in a logical property space.* This possibility has operated above all in two great hybrid cases: Russia and China. But the four main actual roads to modernity were opened up in the following ways.
Table 1. Roads to/through modernity by the location of forces and cultures: for and against.
| Pre/Anti-Modernity Forces | Pro-Modernity Forces | ||
| Internal | External | ||
| Imposed | Imported & Learnt | ||
| Internal | Europe | Colonial Zone | Reactive Modernization |
| External | ‘New Worlds’ (Settler States) | ||
| Note: Countries of reactive, or externally induced, modernization include Japan, Qing China, Ottoman Empire/Turkey, Iran and Siam/Thailand. |
The new future orientation of the last centuries first emerged in Europe not as a natural emanation of European civilization but out of conflicts internal to Europe, primarily north-western Europe, including wars about European overseas empires. In other words, the European route was one of civil war, which pitted the forces of reason, enlightenment, nation/people, innovation and change against those of the eternal truths of the Church, of the sublime wisdom and beauty of ancient philosophy and art, of the divine rights of kings, of the ancient privileges of aristocracy and of the customs of fathers and grandfathers. It was related to the rise of commerce, capital and industry, built upon colonial accumulation overseas.
In a global perspective, two aspects of the European nation stand out. One is its anchorage in a popular and territorial history, distinguished from the landed property of princely power. The other is its heavy, distinctive cultural load, with spoken language at its core. Standardizing and homogenizing a national language was a central part of national political programmes, of ‘making Italians’ and turning ‘peasants into Frenchmen’, as Eugene Weber’s beautiful book names it.34 The creation of a national language through dialect selection and grammatical and orthographic codification became a major task of European small-nation intellectuals in the nineteenth century, from the Balkans to Norway. Where possible, minority languages were driven out of national culture.
The settler states of the Americas had to create new nations, which mythologically and emblematically, of course, drew upon historical examples as symbolic resources – ancient European republicanism in the case of the United States, historical Catholic experiences and pre-Columbian (e.g. Inca and Aztec) high culture in Hispanic America – but which claimed no ethno-cultural territorial history and shared their language with the colonial metropolis.
Most distinctive of the New World was its conception of the nation as a club to which desirable members could and should be recruited. Targeted immigration from Europe was a major dimension of nation-formation. ‘To govern is to populate’, a prominent mid-nineteenth-century Argentine politician and politician, Juan Bautista Alberdi, said.35 Particularly in Latin American discourse – in Brazil as well as, for instance, in Argentina – this club-member recruitment was explicitly referred to as ‘whitening’ or ‘civilizing’ the nation.36 For a long time, only people of external, European descent were regarded as a full citizens of the new nations of the Americas and Australia.
Nations of the Colonial Zone constitute a third variety, nations identified as ex-colonies. There were no historical territories, no singular historical peoples, only colonial boundaries. In a rare wise decision, African nationalist leaders decided to accept all such boundaries, however arbitrary and culturally divisive. Ali Jinnah did not, and British India, which was larger than any pre-colonial state of India, broke up into India – which Nehru refused to call ‘Hindustan’ – Pakistan and Bangladesh, through terrible pogroms and wars of divorce.
The maintenance of the colonial language is arguably the most ostentatious legacy of the colonial pathway to modernity, with its ensuing complicated and hierarchical relations of nation and culture, though also pragmatically practical in multilingual nations – such as Nigeria, with 400 to 500 languages according to different estimates,37 or India, which has at least 122, according to a recent linguistic census analysis.*
The European notion that a nation is defined by its language could not be applied in the ex-colonies. When it was, as in Pakistan, it had disastrous results, from 1952 bitterly dividing the Bengali east to the Urdu-promoting leaders of West Pakistan, where the Mughal hybrid of Urdu was not the majority mother tongue either.38
A general legacy of anti-colonialism is a strong nationalism as the decisive modern mass politics. Post-colonial culture also tends to be starkly divided between elite and mass culture. Elite culture is usually conducted in the language of the former colonial power, a language which the majority of the population does not understand. In the capital city, the colonial divide is usually reproduced, the post-colonial elite taking over the official buildings and the private mansions and villas of the colonizers. Colonial administrative practices tend to be kept, although often subverted by corruption and/or lack of state resources.
Traditional authorities and rituals tend to persist, drawing upon both their colonial institutionalization and their national credentials. In spite of their use in colonial indirect rule, traditional leaders were often incorporated into modern anti-colonial nationalism. The founding programme (from 1948) of the radical Convention People’s Party in Ghana, for instance, demanded as its first objective ‘independence for the people of Ghana and their Odikros [traditional rulers]’.39 Modern Malay nationalism, as the national Tunku Abdul Rahman Memorial museum in Kuala Lumpur narrates, started after World War II as a protest against British plans to reduce the powers of the traditional rulers and to institute an equal colonial citizenship for Malays, Chinese and Tamils alike. Independent India, on the other hand, did away with the princely states of India.
The nation of reactive modernization is the pre-modern realm, defined by the writ of the prince, the emperor, the king or the sultan. This was how the successful modernizers of Meiji Japan saw it, as did the less successful rulers of Siam and Abyssinia and the soon-defeated modernizers of Joseon Korea, Qing China and the Ottoman empire. It was a historical legacy of rule, synonymous with its ruling dynasty, who often (though not in Japan) gave the realm its everyday name. The modern task here was not national emancipation but building the realm into a nation. In Japan this was greatly facilitated by the high ethnic homogeneity of the country and the low salience of intertwined religions. The most important measure of national unification was the abolition of the feudal daimyo domains, returning their