may be used as a shorthand for a current or recent culture. In the arts it has come to designate the reign of a style or a stance, ‘modernism’. Into sociology it has been imported to label a (largely pre-defined) social process, ‘modernization’. Post-classical Latin modernus means no more than ‘current, of today’. In my opinion, concepts should do better than just providing a label. They should trigger curiosity, stimulate new research questions. Concepts should be leveraged.
Leveraging concepts of modern and modernity would then mean asking: what does it mean to be modern? How and when can a social period be interpreted as modernity? Should such periods be specified by socio-cultural domains and/or by territorial areas?
In my opinion, the best and the least idiosyncratic definition of being modern is to be unbound by tradition, by the wisdom of our fathers, by the skills of our masters, by any ancient authority. To be modern is a cultural time orientation to the present and towards the future, no more and no less.
A modern culture, then, would be a culture where this time orientation is predominant, modernity an epoch of such predominance. Instead of fixing a label on what we are observing and writing about, we would then be confronted with a number of questions, without any self-evident answers: when did modernity happen? Variously in different cultural spheres, in science, the different arts, in conceptions of history, politics, economics, family life? Did it take place in different ways and at different times in the world? If so, do the variable pathways to modernity affect today’s social and cultural life?
Hopefully, the advantages of seeing modernity not as ‘modes of social life which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards’,32 but as something which has to be discovered and specified, come out of the sample of questions above. Here we have to concentrate on three issues: first, accepting that modernity breaks through in different socio-cultural domains at different times, in a comparative global perspective, is there any sectoral breakthrough which can be taken as more important than the others and is thereby useable as a benchmark? I am arguing that the modernity of political power, of the polity, is the decisive variable because of its intrinsic capacity to affect all other socio-cultural realms. However, the impact of modern political power on the traditionalism/modernity of society may be big or small, fast or slow. There is also a pragmatic reason: political change tends to be eventful and therefore much easier to pin down and date than economic change.
Second, what is, then, a modern polity? The answer, for analytical instead of ideological purposes, had better not be weighed down by particular institutional features, usually derived from the scholar’s native or otherwise ideal country. A simple, straightforward and non-aprioristic answer is, a nation-state. True, nations often refer to their past, but when they emerge, the politics of the nation assert the power of the present against the past. The nation-state is a self-constituted body claiming to rule itself into an open, non-prescribed future, unbound by past precedence, abolishing or marginalizing the rights of princes, under whatever title, denying colonial powers and transcending the traditional rights and powers of tribal elders or hereditary urban oligarchies.
Third, 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,
