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State formation, parties and democracy. Studies in comparative European politics (2011)

State formation, parties and democracy. Studies in comparative European politics

(2011)–Hans Daalder–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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I.
Comparative European politics: state formation and modernization

chapter two | countries in comparative european politics

Introduction*

This chapter is about the development of comparative European politics, and on the enduring contribution to that line of enquiry of the first Chairman of the European Consortium of Political Research, the late Stein Rokkan. It focuses on the role which the comparative study of European countries has played and should play in our profession. It offers a general survey on the manner in which this field of study has developed in the past half century. And it discusses the relationship of country studies to cross-national studies, which are to some extent their corollary, and from another point of view their contrast. I shall deal with four different ways in which countries figure in the study of comparative politics: (1) as pattern states; (2) as stimuli for the extrapolation of the political experiences of specific countries into new models; (3) as laboratories for cross-national research; and (4) as variables in their own right. I shall end with an attempt to distill some ‘lessons’ which we might draw from this survey.

The paramountcy of pattern states

Some fifty years ago, the prevailing temper of comparative government studies both in Europe and the United States was heavily institutional, highly normative, and hardly comparative. Most scholars were concerned with their own country alone. If they treated other countries, they often practiced what my late teacher, William A. Robson, used to call the Cook's Tour approach: individual countries were treated above all as discrete phenomena, hardly ever as parallel or comparable cases.1. Of course, the larger countries were best known, and their experiences were often appealed to, in positive or negative terms. Also particular institutions were treated, and sometimes borrowed eclectically, from one country to another.2. But then the crisis of the 1930s exploded the easy confidence in democratic institutions which had prevailed until that time. Except for one country, Britain.

Britannia rules

At the end of World War II the British model stood at its zenith. Britain had survived in this war, while (with the exception of a few neutral countries like Switzerland or Sweden) all other European countries had fallen to either native or foreign dictatorship. Britain had produced both a victorious Churchill and had proved simultaneously that it could replace such a paramount statesman in the

wake of victory by a prestigious Labour Party. The British model seemed more enviable than ever before.

We all know the main characteristics of the British model, which many of us teach in elementary comparative government classes to this day: a sovereign Mother of Parliaments; both individual and collective ministerial responsibility which had triumphed early; a decisive role for single member constituencies which supports a two-party system; hence the certainty of single party majority government which rests on a clear electoral mandate and guarantees truly accountable government; a genuine civil service in which the best minds of a nation are ready to do the bidding of whatever party finds itself in power; prestigious courts which respect the principle of the sovereignty of Parliament (and hence do not engage in judicial review), and yet remain sufficiently distant from the Executive to keep it from acting ultra vires, while avoiding a formal system of Droit Administratif which might make government its own judge.

Of course, such a model was an idealized one even in 1945. It did not lack domestic critics then, e.g., those who wished to strengthen Parliament, for instance by reinforcing parliamentary committees,3. so that Parliament would not fall completely under the control of the Cabinet; or those who deemed the electoral system unfair for third parties - with Labour and Liberals reversing their position since the beginning of the early twentieth century;4. or those who began to criticize the dominance in the civil service of the ‘amateur’ over experts and specialists; or those who wished to tidy up the rather messy structure of administrative law in Britain, as in the writings of W.A. Robson or W. Ivor Jennings, criticizing A.V. Dicey's Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, etc. Yet, such criticisms remained for long the province of the specialists, hardly affecting either the clarity or the prestige of the model.

Cross-channel comparisons

The self-confident British model was traditionally reinforced by cross-Channel comparisons. According to widespread impressions in England, there had been all too many lingering vestiges of an absolutist state on the European continent. Did not bureaucracies remain to a certain extent immune from democratic political control? Was not the notion of the Rechtsstaat an instrument for congenial rule over subjects, rather than a guarantee for individual citizens? Were political parties really able to translate votes into power? Typically, so the Standard argument ran, electoral systems on the continent tended to provide far better for the representation of disparate forces than for enforcing the formation of definite democratic majorities. Divided forces could only produce coalition governments which tended to be immobilist and ineffective.5. Parties seemed in such circumstances to be mainly self-seeking. Frenchmen spoke slightingly of a République des Camarades6. and Germans of a Parteienstaat (or later Italians of a Partitocrazia or Belgians of a Particratie), which threatened both the authority, the Obrigkeit, of the State and the free expression of genuine popular will. Compared to British developments, parliamentary government on the continent seemed inherently unstable, or even incomplete. Such developments as took place towards a more real parliamentary

system had (not unexpectedly) been nipped in the bud in the 1920s and 1930s, so the argument went, by provisions for emergency powers and outright defeat by autocratic forces.

Such views had met confirmation from critics in European countries who had measured their own systems (at the time, or post hoc) with British yardsticks. ‘Functionalist’ critics of proportional representation (PR) blamed such systems for making voters and parliaments ineffective.7. They therefore pleaded for ‘British’ reforms such as a single member plurality system, or the effective use of the right to dissolution to strengthen the hands of Cabinets over undisciplined followers. If parties were unable to ensure stable majority government, it might be necessary to resort to other institutional reforms. After World War II there was some hope in such measures as the investiture of the French Fourth Republic, and great trust in the constructive motion of non-confidence in the German Federal Republic. Whereas resentment against the role of Hindenburg led German constitution-makers to strengthen the office of Federal Chancellor, continuing disillusionment with French Gouvernement d'Assemblée was to turn not only General de Gaulle, but also many French experts of political science alias droit constitutionnel, into advocates of strengthening the hands of the President, over against a Parliament deliberately shorn of many of its powers and a Cabinet formally responsible to it.8. All in all, such ingenuity in institutional engineering would hardly persuade British observers that their views of the European continent had been wrong: surely the real secret of stable democratic government was not in constitutions and ad hoc institutional provisions, but in political evolution and traditions, which one might enjoy but could hardly adopt and enforce.

Cross-Atlantic comparisons

The paramount place of the British model was also fed by cross-Atlantic comparisons. From Bagehot (1867) and Bryce (1921) to Laski (1940) and Herman Finer (1960),9. comparisons between the American Presidency and the British system of Cabinet Government had usually been very much to the advantage of the latter. There was strong insistence on the value of the House of Commons as a testing ground of politicians forced to climb the ‘slippery pole to the top’, and strong emphasis on the merits of collective ministerial responsibility over the hazards of rule by a single Executive. Reformist elements in American political science and public administration habitually held up the British model as the one to follow, e.g., in matters like civil service reform10. or the need to adopt ‘a responsible party model.’11. Contrasts between the USA and that other large democracy on the American continent which had a parliamentary system of government, Canada, tended to strengthen such views.12. They were also to inspire the very influential economic models of democracy, as elaborated by J.A. Schumpeter (1942) and Anthony Downs (1957).13. Their descriptions of political entrepreneurs seeking to win undivided mandates clearly had mainly the British system as its inspiration, with multiparty systems being an erring deviation from the preferred simplicity of the two-party norm.

The quaint smaller European democracies

In debates contrasting the larger countries the UK, France, Germany, or the US - the smaller European countries counted for little. There might be folkloristic reporting of their existence. But their development and working seemed largely irrelevant to pressing concerns of comparative European politics. If their experience with democratic government seemed by comparison to other European countries rather favorable, this could be attributed to the presence of special factors: happy institutions like a sober monarchy;14. special arrangements for a stable collegial executive as in Switzerland; advantages of small size making for close internal elite networks;15. a lesser load in international affairs which less fortunate larger states could not escape, etc. With this went the parallel assumption that smaller states were not really relevant, because both military and economic realities prevented them from being fully in control of either internal or external developments.16. Hence, their developments could not contain meaningful lessons for larger countries.

New country models

Soon, however, such parochial proclivities were to decline, permitting developments towards more genuine comparative understanding of a rather larger number of countries. Various factors were to contribute towards such developments.

The decline of the English model

From the late 1940s onwards the appeal of the once all-pervasive British model began to diminish. Various lines of criticism undermined what was once thought to be self-evident truth. Parliament in the British system, so the argument went, was much too weak to sustain the notion of a ‘sovereign’ representative body. Ministerial responsibility was an illusion, as the combined effects of a sovereign Parliament and of individually and collectively responsible ministers was to keep anonymous civil servants immune from genuinely democratic control. At the same time, a bureaucracy under the undisputed leadership of amateurs was hardly fit for a time of increasing government intervention and greatly complicated issues (e.g., the influential Fulton Report, 1968). With it, there came also increasing doubts of the virtues of the mechanics of alternating governments. In place of the existing dogma of the moderating effect of rival teams struggling for the floating vote at the centre, came the notion of ‘adversary politics’.17. Such ‘adversary politics’, far from guaranteeing continuity, led to sudden jolts in policy, proving false the assumption that front benches would ensure ‘Butskellite’ policies, whether a Butler or a Gaitskell was in control. Effective power tended to shift towards militant ideological wings whether in the case of the Labour Party or the Conservatives, with groups external to Parliament increasing their power.18. The hallowed notion of the electoral mandate became a dubious fig-leaf, resting not on actual consent given at the polls but on minority votes being transformed into dubious majorities merely by an unrepresentative electoral system. If forces at the centre attempted to mobilize against the potential tyranny from either ideological wing, they proved to be insufficiently powerful within the existing parties; and if they tried to obtain representation through the formation of new parties, and attempted to enforce coalition

government, they were seen to be badly discriminated against by the very electoral system which had once been held to be the embodiment of British virtue.19. British political scientists moved in the forefront as critics of their own system, pointing to other European countries as doing in fact rather better than Britain, which seemed to slip to the bottom of the European league.

The American reversal

The presumed superiority of the British model had by that time already greatly suffered in American debate. This was of course due largely to the new prominent role of America in world politics. But it was powerfully reinforced by developments in political analysis. If the APSA had in 1950 still proclaimed the superior virtues of the British-inspired ‘responsible party model’, the much looser American party system was now proclaimed to be rather functional for a country the size of a continent, with a medley of disparate groups. The absence of strong ideological divisions between the parties clearly fostered a bargaining style of politics. For all its inequalities, the system was relatively open to new groups, and could thus figure as the archetype of a ‘polyarchy.’20. Cross-cutting cleavages made for moderation. If empirical research revealed considerable inequality in influence, this could be discounted by the comparative finding that America after all had rather a great ratio of ‘citizens’ to ‘subjects’ or ‘parochials,’21. while elites seemed more democratically inclined than fortunately apathetic masses. The time was ripe for Gabriel Almond's influential article in which he sought to change the terminology of comparative politics and coined the famous distinction between an Anglo-American and a Continental-European model.22. In depicting the latter, he took over many of the stereotypes which had characterized the earlier cross-Channel dialogue. The European Continent was apparently mainly a mixture of Weimar Germany, pre-1940 and post-1944 France, and post-war Italy. Typically, other, smaller European countries were described at most as being mixed - which presumably meant that they had some Anglo-Saxon virtues in addition to undoubted continental - European vices.23.

The umbilical cord

In the late 1940s began the massive trek of young European political scientists to the United States, made possible by unparalleled generosity on the part of American universities and American foundations. Such young scholars were easily swayed by the sense of exhilaration and limitless energy of the American profession. Its impact was increased further by its level of specialization and its openness to other disciplines. This made American scholarship doubly attractive for younger men, pitted against senior faculty members in their own countries who were very much of another style and era. There was immediate desire to replicate American studies at home, and to engage in new collaborative ventures with American scholars. But there was also a clear sense of uneasiness. Did one's own country really fit the often hasty, and hazy, American generalizations? At worst, the reactions of younger Europeans might take the form of what used to be known as the Zanzibar-ploy: whenever an exciting hypothesis or generalization was ut-

tered in international conferences, a petty voice might be heard saying: ‘But it isn't like that in Zanzibar...’24. More positively, it led to a clear wish on the part of younger European scholars of the day to bring one's own country onto the map of international political science. In order to do so, such studies had to be written in English. Their country had to be ‘translated’, as it were, into the terminology of political understanding developed from analyses of the British and/or American system. English also became the paramount language of communication within European countries, pushing aside both French and German which before World War II had held at least a similar place. At the same time, scholars from different European countries were rather differently motivated to engage in such ‘translation efforts’. Scholars in larger countries lived in a more self-sufficient environment than scholars in smaller countries. And within the larger countries there were clear differences between victors and losers of World War II, the latter possibly showing a greater openness as they had to recast their own systems and craved for a new international understanding.25.

Extrapolated models

There was, then, often an umbilical nexus between scholars in one European country and the American profession. In some of the best cases such contacts led to an attempt to fashion new models and typologies, in which knowledge of particular countries, which so far had not been taken adequately into consideration in English or American-derived generalizations, provided an important source of inspiration. I mention a few of the best-known and fruitful:

Italy and Sartori 's model of polarized pluralism: Italian developments, with a dominant Democrazia Cristiana facing what soon became the largest Communist party of Western Europe - albeit in a system with many other parties on the right, the centre and the left - undoubtedly provided the source of inspiration for Sartori's model of polarized pluralism.26. Of course, Weimar Germany and the precarious situation of the French Fourth Republic - squeezed by Communists and Gaullists alike - were there for all to see. There is in Sartori's approaches some trace of Ferdinand Hermens,27. i.e., in his notion of ‘ideological stretching’, as well as of Duverger,28. i.e., their common distaste of a center. And Sartori would not have presented such a brilliant analysis if he had not been familiar with general approaches, notably those of Schumpeter, Downs and Dahl in elaborating what some have all too easily called the ‘economic model of democracy’. For all that, Sartori's typology of party systems is a magnificent example of what profound knowledge of one other country than those taken up into ‘Anglo-American’ comparative politics could contribute to a refinement of general models and typologies. If some fifteen years elapsed between Sartori's initial formulation of the model and his final analysis in Parties and Party Systems (1976),29. this is not because Sartori lacked knowledge of general political science or of his own country, but because by that time the amount of available material on other European countries was so rich that it forced him to sit down and take note.

The consociational democracy model: The elaboration of the consociational democracy model is another example of the generation of a new general model from

what began as a single case study.30. Apart, and sometimes before, Arend Lijphart's influential and well-known contribution, there had been pointers to this model, which were also influenced by the knowledge of specific countries, e.g. some of my own work on the Netherlands,31. Gerhard Lehmbruch's elaboration of the model of Proporzdemokratie on the basis of Austria and Switzerland,32. Jürg Steiner's attempt to bring Swiss experience into modern political science,33. or more generally Val Lorwin's analysis of segmented pluralism34. which was powerfully influenced by Lorwin's studies of France and Belgium, but also a clear product of an attempt at comparative understanding in the context of a research project on Political Oppositions and one on Smaller European Democracies. Yet Lijphart's book The Politics of Accommodation (1968)35. presented the best known attempt at what he himself called ‘an extended theoretical argument based on a single case of particular significance to pluralist theory’, i.e., the Netherlands. Lijphart consciously addressed Almond's typology, and amended Almond's version of the ‘Continental European system’, by adding the variable of competitive, i.e. coalescent, elite behavior to Almond's distinction of countries with a homogeneous versus a heterogeneous political culture.36. Stressing that democracy was possible in ideologically divided societies, provided elites were aware of the danger to the system and deliberately acted to contain these divisions, Lijphart coined both an empirical and a normative model. From it he was to deduce operating rules applicable to apparently such unpromising cases as Northern Ireland,37. South Africa38. and many Third World countries.39. He later elaborated the empirical argument into a continuum in which the Westminster Model figures on one end, and what he terms (somewhat wistfully) the Consensus Model of Democracy on the other. Or to make the same point differently, he moves from what was originally a single country extrapolation to a deliberate reversal of the once dominant Westminster model, holding that his consensus model is more frequently found in actual democratic politics, while questioning the normative biases which underlie earlier extrapolations from the British case.40. I cannot go into the merit of the debate on the consociational democracy model, or Lijphart's later generalizations for that matter.41. Suffice it to say that some country experts have criticized the model's applicability to countries which Lijphart regards as consociational, while others maintain with considerable vigour that consociational practices are in fact found in many countries not in Lijphart's consociational box, or even near the ‘consensus’ side of his continuum. I only raise the model as one example of the far-reaching results which bringing one new country on to the map of comparative politics can have on prevalent paradigms which until then rested almost exclusively on the experiences of some of the larger countries alone.

The inspiration from Norway. Of course, Stein Rokkan's work starting from issues important in Norway is probably the most convincing example of all.42. But I shall postpone that clinching example to the end of this chapter when I shall turn to the lessons Rokkan's work holds for all of us in comparative politics.

Countries as laboratories

Cross-national studies

Roughly at the same time that more and more countries were brought on to the map of comparative politics, another trend became manifest. More and more countries came to serve as laboratories for cross-cultural, often behaviourally-oriented, studies. More and more aggregate data became available, due to the efforts not only of social scientists, but also of governments and a growing number of intergovernmental organizations. Such material presented opportunities not so much for specific country studies, but for analyses aiming at cross-national generalizations. The availability of more and more cases was important to test general propositions, while at the same time many studies aimed at levels of analysis which were thought to be comparable, and even similar, across countries. One can easily single out at least three different examples of such cross-national research efforts.

In the first place there were general studies on the basis of relatively easily available data on actual elections, and the political composition of parliaments and cabinets. I am alluding to the kind of work by Douglas Rae on electoral systems;43. on turnout;44. on trends in aggregate electoral volatility;45. on electoral support for particular types of political parties;46. or of the total Left;47. on relations between political fragmentation or the presence of anti-system parties to cabinet stability;48. and the wide-spread attempt to test formal coalition theories.49.

Less general, but at least as penetrating and influential was, secondly, the massive growth of survey analysis. Europeans should remain conscious of the immense debt all of us owe to the inspiration from the Michigan studies which were replicated and inspired further analysis in one European country after another. Also some other major studies were the product of American inspiration, or at a minimum American-European collaboration. I am thinking of the work of Almond and Verba (1963) on political culture; Verba, Nie and Kim (1978)50. on modes of political participation; and Inglehart (1977)51. and Barnes and Kaase (1979)52. on value change, unconventional political behavior, and so forth.

Thirdly, cross-national analysis is found in studies based on social indicator data. The most powerful example is the work by Peter Flora53. and others on political modernization, the growth of the welfare state and comparative policy analysis. Tellingly, it is the area in which the two first winners of the Rokkan Prize, Manfred Schmidt and Jens Alber, made their substantial contributions.54.

In all such studies (whether on elections, parliaments, cabinets, mass surveys, or social indicators), countries tend to be not so much the object of study, but a source of data to be analyzed for the sake of general theorizing.

Macro-theories

If most of such studies still proceeded from within-nation perspectives, there were of course also studies which had a more general sweep. Ever since the 1930s there has been a concern with the rather different strength fascism gained in different European countries, a field of many beliefs but few definite studies. The Cold War added a somewhat similar concern with the difference in strength of communist

and other anti-system parties in different European systems. From the 1950s other macro-theories abounded, notably propositions about ‘The End of Ideology;’55. its reversal in new propositions on post-materialism,56. and later the wave of neo-corporatism.57. Here again, one can point to particular countries as the source of inspiration: e.g., Germany for Kirchheimer's early concern with the waning of opposition and the rise of catch-all parties;58. France and Germany in the late 1960s for the development of Inglehart's Silent Revolution; or initially Latin America and Portugal for an inspiration of the study of neo-corporatism which flourishes particularly in a German and Austrian environment, even though some of the best empirical work has been done in Scandinavia. All such studies led to cross-country analysis, pervaded by almost cosmological convictions. One should note, however, that many of its practitioners and protagonists were satisfied with general conclusions, without a strong concern with the possible effect of country-specific factors. Such factors would presumably reveal themselves in the data, or would at most provide a source of irritating ‘noise,’ to be eliminated from analysis, rather than meriting study for their own intrinsic importance. Such general trends were greatly reinforced by the trend towards increasing specialization and professionalization in the discipline which often caused an innocent neglect of the importance of the country-environment in which data were collected, and which - just possibly - might explain particular findings. In such developments Rokkan's first lesson - that data should be interpreted within the context in which they are collected - is apt to be forgotten.

Countries as variables

Stein Rokkan's Werdegang59.

Rokkan was concerned with cross-national studies from an early period in his professional life. In the late 1940s and early 1950s he had the opportunity to study in England and the United States, where he immersed himself in all manner of disciplines and approaches. This made him turn away from his original literary studies and political theory to more empirical modes of research. His first two projects were cross-national, i.e. a survey of the cross-cultural meaning of the concept of democracy, and a study of the political attitudes of teachers in different countries. Apart from these cross-national projects, he (with Henry Valen) also pioneered electoral studies in Norway, in close cooperation with American scholars. Working on partly American-inspired survey questions put to Norwegian voters, Rokkan was made forcefully aware of the specific Norwegian factors which had to be taken into account to explain particular findings. Among these, the nature of political cleavages, and their ecological variation were most crucial. This led him to the vital question of how particular social cleavages had, or had not, been politicized. This forced him back into an analysis of geographically differentiated historical processes. It made him turn towards the lasting importance of initial mass mobilization processes, and hence into a search of how responsible government and franchise extension had brought different social groups in the official political arena. This forced him back further and further into history, into analyses

of processes of state formation itself.

In Rokkan's work there are therefore clear signs of what I earlier called ‘the umbilical nexus’: ‘American’-type research induced him to bring factors into account which deviated from American ‘generalizations’. He thus brought certain concepts into comparative politics which were peculiarly Norwegian in inspiration: e.g., the emphasis on centre-periphery conflicts, the crucial importance of counter-cultural protest, the lasting importance of political alignments which had been characteristic for the first period of mass mobilization, concern with the manner of institutional change (notably the introduction of responsible government and suffrage extension), and with the peculiar processes of state formation which seemed to differentiate Norway from its immediate Scandinavian neighbours.60.

In what way, then, was Rokkan different from others who were moved to extrapolate from the experiences of their own country? The essence of his work, I suggest, is his combination of developmental work and comparative country studies (or to say the same in a more resounding terminology, of ‘diachronic’ and ‘synchronic’ comparisons). He not only went back into the history of his own country, but also concerned himself with the study of virtually all European countries. He was profoundly aware of differences, as well as similarities, in their contemporary politics and in their historical development. Countries thus became to him very much variables in their own right. He attempted to analyze how states had historically been formed, and was concerned as much with cases of states that eventually did not form as with those which had emerged successfully. But in doing so, he also remained constantly aware of the interaction of within-state political processes with processes in the making of states - crossing the borderline so artificially drawn into our profession between subnational, national and international developments.

Rokkan was himself an extremely generous man, showing unparalleled openness to the work of others, whether young or old, of whatever country, or whatever discipline. It gave him more building blocks than any of us. Yet, for all his magnanimity he disliked three sins, frequently committed in our profession: (1) he had little patience for those who took the particular outcome of history at a particular time or place as ‘given’, as if the status quo itself did not need explanation; (2) he could be caustic about superficial typologies which were ‘based’ on a few (usually large) countries only; and (3) he despised what he once termed ‘numerological nonsense’, i.e., the indiscriminate use of quantitative data drawn from different countries and ‘interpreted’ without adequate contextual knowledge.

Rokkan's own ultimate ambition was to construct what he called his ‘topological-typological map’, or ‘macro-model of Europe’. To this end, he devised innumerable ‘grids’ and ‘schemata’, seeking to account for numerous variations and complex sequential processes in what was yet as parsimonious a manner as possible. Understanding his work is not always easy. Many of us hardly begin to understand the very diverse situations and developments with which Rokkan sought to grapple. He was never really ‘ready’ and seemed as animated by his search as by his tentative conclusions. He never consolidated his work into one book, even though he collected his best papers until 1970 in one hard-cover vol-

ume entitled Citizens, Elections, Parties (republished Colchester: ECPR Press, 2009). One must hope for a speedy publication of a volume incorporating his many writings since 1970. In the meantime, one should gratefully acknowledge the elegant manner in which Rokkan's learned associate, Derek Urwin, finalized their joint research project within the ECPR on Economy, Territory and Identity, which was to be Rokkan's last.61.

Some lessons62.

I have at one time been nicknamed, by one of my godless (or at least swearing Scandinavian friends) ‘the bishop’. Let me therefore summarize this rapid survey in a few general ‘lessons’:

1.The study of single countries is a rewarding venture by itself. Configurative analysis is always fascinating, as it forces one to take note of the complex interaction of many variables, and brings one at least in close contact with real politics in the process.
2.One can improve insights in one country greatly by immersing oneself in at least one other country, and by seeking to explain the one country in the terminology and hidden assumptions of the latter.
3.Most of us feel inclined to extrapolate (generally positively, but sometimes negatively and critically) the insights obtained from one's own country. Such a venture may increase the store of our knowledge. The macro-map of Europe, to use Rokkan's ambitious term, has to be built from single ‘bloes’, and only a ‘topological-typological’ approach can do justice to the full complexity of so many developments of so many different countries and their constituent parts. Yet, the difference between the ‘Zanzibar-ploy’ and a true contribution to learning is in the modesty of one's country-specific message, and one's willingness to interpret it through borrowing insight from a genuine understanding of other countries.
4.The rich resources of Scandinavian scholarship - so insufficiently known, although so visibly present in Gothenburg where I had the privilege to give this Rokkan lecture - is there to remind us that we should not fall for the easy assumption that the only important countries for comparative analysis are either large countries, or our own country. Rokkan has taught us what nuggets the professional mining of information on smaller lands may bring us!
5.Certain issues (e.g., those on the level of macro-theories, or those near to universal psychological of sociological factors) may lend themselves to more abstract and general approaches, as well as to more concrete quantitative approaches. But there is always the likelihood and danger that country-specific factors interfere with the findings. Inadequate awareness of such country-specific factors may indeed lead to vacuous theorizing on the one hand and ‘numerological nonsense’ on the other - which makes for a terrible ‘brew’ indeed.
6.Countries should not be treated as static phenomena. One should analyze not only the contemporary conditions, but also the longer-term develop-
mental processes of countries.
7.General understanding cannot be reached in any short-cut manner. It demands a level of erudition few of us have. The demand for greater learning often sits uneasily with a simultaneous pressure for specialization and professionalization. Perhaps, then, we should veer back to seeking greater erudition, now that we are becoming so professional?
8.Given the enormous demand which acquiring a genuine knowledge of other countries (both in their contemporary state and developmental characteristics) makes on us, we should continue to promote joint research projects by teams of country specialists. All too often, however, these result in the juxtaposition of loose country-descriptions - of little or large Zanzibars - rather than a genuine comparison. Both in the planning and in the finalizing of such collaborative ventures, the true task - to raise general questions which a systematic comparison of countries could help us answer - is apt to be treated in too cavalier a spirit.
9.Rokkan has shown how much profit can be had from a crossing of disciplinary boundary lines. Such a crossing must be encouraged - most notably with history, economics and sociology - provided it does not lead to a new verbiage, and provided it remains anchored in an increased understanding of real political developments and conditions.
10.Rokkan did more than anyone I know in promoting the infrastructure of international scholarship. We have the proud legacy of the European Consortium to support us. Let us use it with the sense of imagination and commitment, the systematic effort coupled to an eclectic common sense, which were so characteristic of the man whom we so rightly honor by having an annual Rokkan-lecture.

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