Differentiation in authority structures: state, nation, and democracy in Europe and America

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter reconstructs the European and American patterns of state, nation, and democracy building to show the different authority structures that emerged in the 19th century — and thus the institutionalization of different modalities of partisan politics in the 20th century. The different processes of political development in Europe and America has brought into being two distinct political orders on the two shores of the Atlantic. In the European nation-states the political order was constructed around the experience and the idea of the state. In both early state-builders and late state-builders, the state has become the natural container of the nation. In America, on the other hand, nationality has been the product of the democratic process, not its precondition. Nation and democracy went together, the one defining the other. It was the democratic process which defined the boundaries of the nation.