TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Twentieth Century World: A Modernization View *

Rights and Obligations in Russia and the West *

APPENDIX *

CHARACTERISTICS OF MODERN SOCIETY *

NATION AND NATIONALISM *

Bosnia-Herzegovina *

Chronology of the July Crisis of 1914 *

Fourteen Points *

Tyrol 1919: National Self-Determination *

FASCISM *

The goal of Modern World History is to enable students to understand their contemporary world environment as the consequence of the historical process. Historical analysis explains not only the past but gives the historically-minded individual an understanding of the range of human behavior that makes the present as it unfolds less bewildering and promotes intelligent planning for the future. The focus of this study is on how the world has developed since approximately 1890. Since the world at the point of departure for this study was itself the product of earlier historical development, it is important to understand the character of that world.

At the end of the nineteenth century all states of the West saw themselves as modern or modernizing and perceived the rest of the world as primitive, backward or barbaric. Non-Western states ranging from venerable Asian empires to societies just emerging from the new stone age were agreed on at least one thing: modernization was necessary if they were to preserve or in many cases recover their independence from the technologically and militarily superior West. Thus modernization, albeit perceived in distinctly different terms around the world, was a common goal. Western Europeans and North Americans saw themselves as the leaders in a process that had led them from a "dark" medieval past to a technologically advanced and politically liberal modernity. They justified their imperial conquest of the globe as "the White Man's Burden," or "Manifest Destiny" and expected that western values would be adopted around the world because they were modern. The West in its exuberant embrace of the modern failed to see that its own modernity was a mixture of traditional values, some unchanged - some modified, with new values that had developed along the road leading out of the Middle Ages. What the West failed to recognize in its era of imperialism, and what the United States as the foremost global power in the world today still fails to see, is that there is a wide variety of forms for a modern society. Western modernity is rooted in a unique tradition and we must come to understand that contemporary, non-Western societies must be left free to work out their own unique mixes of tradition and modernity. Values and morals are historically and culturally determined and vary widely according to the nature of the traditional society and the nature of modernization.

The revisionist modernization theory, which this study embraces strongly, emphasizes that there are divergent paths to modernity and that each path is cut according to the unique historical experience that preceded it. This approach owes much to the work of Barrington Moore Jr. whose work focuses on the nature of traditional societies how the time, manner and pace of modernization influenced whether a particular modern society would be a democracy or a dictatorship.

This introduction is an attempt to describe a selected few modern and traditional or semi-traditional societies as they existed about 1890 relative to the interplay of traditional values and forces of modernization. This analysis will establish a conceptual framework within which the reader can understand the further modernization of already modern or semi-modern societies and the impact of modernization on purely traditional societies. The goal is to promote sensitivity and understanding of societies, which in their headlong dash for political, economic and military independence seem to disdain values, which we tend to see as universal. This survey will focus first on the familiar societies of England and France from whom American values were largely derived. Next we will examine Germany as an undoubtedly modern, yet disturbingly authoritarian state. Then we will assess the tragic Russian attempt to catch up with the West while still retaining its traditional social and political power elite. Finally we will turn to Asia to examine economic success story of Japan and traditional China confronted with the need to modernize for self-preservation, yet aware of the destructive forces that threatened her four thousand-year-old civilization.

Before undertaking a brief comparative study of these societies in various stages of modernization, it is necessary to discuss the genesis of conceptual approach of modernization theory. Comparative modernization is a theoretical approach that "seeks to contribute to an understanding of how the advancement of knowledge--the scientific and technological revolution--affects societal development."

The roots of modernization theory may be found in eighteenth century concepts of progress and nineteenth century systems of analysis which saw historical development as progressive and perceived the imperialistic conquest of the world by the West as either scientifically inevitable or divinely ordained. At the turn of the twentieth century western Europeans and North Americans saw themselves as thoroughly modern and eastern and southern Europeans were rapidly trying to catch up. The image was that Britain and France along with the "white settler regimes" they had spawned through colonization (e.g. U.S., Canada, Australia, South Africa) had evolved from the brutish traditional-command societies of the feudal past under the impact of the progressive forces of commercial and later industrial capitalism into "modern," liberal parliamentary democracies. Liberal-modernists in Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and elsewhere saw their industrializing yet still authoritarian empires as simply farther back, but on the same road to modernity. The First World War, the rise of Communist and fascist totalitarianisms and the Second World War drew a temporary cloud of pessimism over this optimistic view of the course of world history. However, with the emergence of the United States as the dominant force in the world after 1945, Americans picked up the torch of civilization and attempted to light the dark corners of the world with their own version of civilization.

Communist domination of half of Europe and much of Asia provided new concern for these new bearers of civilization, but early modernization theory explained that there was reason for optimism. This was known as the convergence theory and was based on what Indian scholar, A.R. Desai correctly sees as ". . . the naive assumption that the western capitalist model of 'development' was a fit and ultimate end for the whole world." This perception of a single, Western model for modernization is typified by some of the opening lines to S.N. Eisenstadt's Modernization: Protest and Change:

Just as the European and North American racist and ethnocentric view of the world denied the validity and cultures of the non-Christian, non-capitalist world, so also did early modernization theory have arrogant, anti-historical flaws. In defining "modern" by the examples of the United States and western Europe and seeing all traditional societies as more or less the same, we ignored powerful, unique factors that had conditioned our own development. In the process we also denied the existence of powerful and unique factors in other, sometimes ancient, civilizations presuming that when they "modernized" they would become like us.

The revisionist view of modernization presented here would eliminate from the list of common characteristics of modern societies, political institutions, social organization, ethics and values which were the product of the unique development of the liberal, "western" part of Western Civilization. (See "Characteristics of Modern Society" which follows this essay.) Most readers of this essay will hold a set of values conditioned by a rationalist tradition ensuing from Greek antiquity that places a heavy emphasis on individual human rights which later blended with a religious tradition which is exclusivist in that it sees Christ as the only source of salvation, while at the same time being universalist and messianic, reaching out to all non-believers. Modified by the inherent expansion of commercial and later industrial capitalism throughout the world "Western Civilization" would have recreated the world in its own image.

In contrast comparative modernization emphasizes the importance of tradition in societies that were fundamentally different from those in feudal western Europe. If the societies, which undergo modification through modernization, differ, then it stands to reason that the modern societies resulting from this process will also be different. The goal here is to replace the naive and culturally arrogant belief that modernization will ultimately render the world "reborn in the American image," with an understanding and tolerance of the values of other cultures and acceptance of the idea that our values will not necessarily or even probably evolve elsewhere as modernization continues.

The emergence of fascist, Communist and other authoritarian regimes in all but the historically liberal "Western" parts of Western Civilization in the first half of the twentieth century specifically as a means of modernizing economically backward societies seems to suggest that there are divergent paths to modernity. David Collier comes to a similar conclusion based on his work on post-Second World War Latin America. He writes that "a new set of hypotheses emerged which suggested that in late developing nations, more advanced levels of industrialization may coincide with the collapse of democracy and the increase in inequality." Edward S. Mason draws a similar conclusion from his studies of Third World countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia:

One of the criticisms frequently leveled at modernization theory has been the tendency to see "modern society" as distinctly different from traditional society. The social scientists who pioneered work in modernization theory tended to over-simplify pre-modern societies, failing to appreciate the variations and adaptability of traditional values. More recently, historically-based modernization theory has attempted to investigate the degree to which traditional values are modified, but not destroyed, in the process of historical development and survive to color myriad variations of modernity. This flexible and historically based approach to an understanding of the modern world provides both the generalizations and the system necessary to make sense of the modern world and a means to explain similarity and diversity.

The principle generalization upon which the following descriptive analysis of selected examples of modernization is based is that there are two basic approaches: 1) liberal modernization, and 2) conservative modernization.

In the various countries to be investigated, one or the other pattern is principally predominate. Once modernization begins, it appears that divergence in political, social and ethical values is more evident than the convergence presumed by earlier modernization theory. There are four factors that appear to be decisive in this process:

In order to establish categories for historical comparison at the turn of the twentieth century, countries seen as modern or modernizing will be defined as either liberal or conservative modernizers.

LIBERAL MODERNIZATION is defined as the process that ultimately produced the liberal, parliamentary-democratic, capitalist societies of western Europe and North America. Both Barrington Moore and Leonid Ignatieff in the selections from their work that follow this essay posit the importance of a feudal experience in laying the foundations for the concept of contractual rights vis a vis the state. Moore adds to this the importance of a bourgeois revolution against that experience. Although the bourgeoisie, once in power, rigorously rooted out privilege based on medieval rights, they retained the concept of rights guaranteed by contract, albeit for a modern bourgeois society in which privilege was justified by natural rather than feudal law. Thus the bourgeoisie, triumphant over the feudal order, retained the unique, western emphasis on the importance of mutual, individual rights guaranteed by contract. The principle of contract, which the nascent bourgeoisie had adapted from the feudal law to apply to their commercial dealings, was now applied to the politics as a means of defining the relationship of human beings to each other and to their state.

The growth of such a bourgeoisie as a class of significant enough pro-portions to effect a revolutionary transformation of the traditional, European feudal society was a phenomenon unique to western civilization, and then only to its most western parts. The process was long and slow and began with the commercial revolution of the late Middle Ages which produced first an economic and only later a political awareness of the human being as an individual. The entrepreneurial capitalism emerging out of the early, long-range trade centered in the Mediterranean and stretching north through central Europe to the North and Baltic seas, might have transformed Central Europe, but atrophied after the beginning of the sixteenth century. The opening of Atlantic trade combined with the concomitant struggle between the French and both Austrian and Spanish Habsburg forces over the partitioning of Italy led to an economic decline and the loss of political independence. With the loss of the Italian "locomotive" pulling economic development, the central European "caboose" lost momentum as well. Religious wars seriously hampered continental trade in the sixteenth century and the Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century physically devastated and economically ruined central Europe. The Powers who arbitrated the peace settlements ending the Thirty Years created a new European state system that recognized each independent political unit as sovereign unto itself, with no higher authority. For the German territory this meant the confirmation of the existence over 300 sovereign states, with close to 1800 additional other political entities, including imperial free cities and knightdoms. Central Europe became a power vacuum where the peripheral powers of France, Prussia, The Austrian Habsburgs Empire and Poland were able to have their way.

While some remnants of the capitalist ethos survived in the "Italies" and "Germanies," by the seventeenth century it was in England and its North American colonies, the Low Countries and to a degree in France where first the economic and later the political revolutions of liberalism occurred. In each of these cases the feudal experience had left a legacy in which mutual rights among contracting partners was important. In an era when the need to mobilize state governments for the purpose of fighting wars, protecting commercial rights on the oceans of the world and eliminating the patchwork of particularistic medieval laws, the consolidation of sovereign rights in the hands of an absolute monarch was seen the efficient thing to do. While the concepts of progress and modernization as we understand them did not exist, centralization of authority by the destruction of competing medieval rights was seen as essential to the consolidation of the new monarchies.

In a sense then, there were two competing campaigns for what is being referred to in this essay as political modernization: 1) authoritarian, monarchical modernization, and 2) liberal-bourgeois modernization. Only in a few, western societies did there exist a strong enough bourgeois class to have created broad enough support to mobilize liberal revolutions on behalf of a concept of rights secured by law. In this context, liberal meant liberation--liberation of the individual from the inequality of the remnants of medieval law rooted in aristocratic privilege, liberation from the arbitrary control of absolute political rule and liberation from laws that dictated religious practices and curtailed freedom of expression through the press and speech. In short, liberals believed in a universal, natural law in which all men were bound together by a tacit social contract that guaranteed them inalienable rights, but also required of them social obligations by virtue of their membership in society. The strength of the feudal tradition is strongly evidenced in these revolutionary ideals. The following discussion will undertake a short overview of the historical process that transformed the traditional/feudal societies western Europe into the liberal democracies of the twentieth century.

IN ENGLAND feudal monarchy was limited and therefore in a sense parliamentary. It was, however, far from the democracy with which we commonly associate the concept of a parliamentary form of government. In the European Middle Ages there was really no state. A feudal king reigned, but ruled only through a great number of vassals who wielded power based on private contractual relationships which obligated them to certain service but also gave them rights and privileges. The contract was mutually binding and gradually evolved into the concept that society was governed by feudal law, made up of myriad individual contracts and that no individual was above the law. Either partner had the right of redress of grievance against the other with the ultimate right of renunciation of allegiance, i.e. revolution. The mutual right and obligation of "advice and consent" required in most feudal contracts before a lord undertook any action which might require his vassals to perform service beyond their usual, led to the creation of royal councils and ultimately medieval parliaments. Magna Carta, which most schoolchildren think created modern democracy, was in fact a purely feudal document forced upon King John in 1215 to prohibit him from exceeding his rights as a feudal lord. Although the provisions requiring consultation on new taxes and the right of all freemen to equality under the law or a trial by his peers would have great significance later, the principle importance of Magna Carta rests in the fact that it explicitly recognized that feudal contracts constitute law which was binding on the king as well as his vassals. Magna Carta is only the best known such document in the Anglo-American world; other feudal societies throughout western civilization experienced similar development of feudal law.

Having established some of the legal precedents for modern democracy, we need now to turn to the economic and social forces which gradually destroyed the viability of feudal/traditional society in the north and west of Europe and created the bourgeois class, which would ultimately use some elements of the feudal tradition to forge a new order. Feudalism had originally been a collection of practices and institutions that had grown up in the Middle Ages in order to meet various military, economic, political and social needs of that particular stage in history. It was basically a variant of traditional and culturally conservative societies all over the world, rooted in the rural village, with no money, little trade and no concept of progress or profit. Already by the eleventh century however, regional trade had developed in the seas around the Italian peninsula and by the time King John was forced to put his quill to the Magna Carta, a new, long-range trade had begun to revolution-ize the character of commerce and production and ultimately all of society. In the Middle Ages once the menace of barbarian invasions had subsided, local economic specialization took place that saw the establishment regional trade centers and craft manufacture in fortified towns or Bourg(s). Town-dwellers thus became known as bourgeoisie and most were organized in guilds that served the common interests of their members against political and economic against domination by the princes. In this early phase of development, guilds may be seen as modernizing elements. But the merchants who dealt in many different kinds of consumer goods used the economics of scarcity to drive up profits. Craftsmen, who only produced specific items and were at the mercy of merchants both relative to the prices paid for their products as well as to the prices of the goods they consumed, pulled out of the merchant-dominated guilds and formed their own. Their interests were not capitalistic and they turned conservative and became protectors of a medieval, urban status quo. Manufacture was only upon order. Prices were fixed and the materials and methods of production were determined by traditional guild prescription. There was no possibility for individual innovation, no real risk and little concept of profit. This process is more typical of northern Europe than Italy, where the feudal imprint was less strong and commerce was better developed.

The development of long-range trade was the principle motor force of early modernization. Even in the Middle Ages merchant began to make profits trading in goods that could not be produced in one area as well as in another. The craftsmen's guilds were not well equipped to survive in the age of growing world commerce. Lacking capital in the form of money and bound by the traditional emphasis on craftsmanship and by his unwillingness to produce for anything except a sure order, the guildsman lost control over production and exchange to an emerging class of entrepreneurs. Typically, they were merchants who had accumulated money and had developed a sense of an unseen market and what it would bear in terms of prices for goods. By the sixteenth century they had built great trading firms, banks and the beginnings of a commercial infrastructure was growing in commercial cities. Ultimately they developed the domestic, or "putting out" system of manufacture, whereby they supplied peasants with raw materials and primitive manufacturing equipment and paid wages in exchange for labor. This establishment of the "primitive factory system" marked the beginning of the separation of labor from capital that is a hallmark in the later development of western civilization. Great fortunes were accumulated by the new entrepreneurs and because their commercial empires were centered in cities, the capitalistic activities of the new elites served in later years to make the term bourgeois virtually synonymous with capitalist. This process of social-economic transformation was greatly accelerated by the opening of world trade routes as the consequence of the discoveries of the "Age of Exploration" in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. But the benefits of this acceleration did not redound to the benefit of Italy and her central European trading partners, but rather to her former junior partners on the Atlantic seaboard powers which were more favorably situated to exploit the new trade routes and less negatively affected by the religious wars of the era.

Even before the "Age of Discovery" western civilization had seen the gradual rise in the importance of money and an accompanying increase in prices. However, in the sixteenth century significant population growth with a consequent increased demand for food supplies combined with an enormous influx of precious metals from the Spanish Empire in the Americans produced an inflationary spiral that had serious social and political implications.

As money and the things it would buy became increasingly important so too did money gradually begin to play an important role in determining social status and influencing politics. In most places in western civilization, the former feudal aristocracy disdained capitalistic activity as beneath their station and sought to convert feudal requirements into fixed money payments. But the long-term inflationary trend continually eroded aristocratic incomes and ultimately the feudal aristocracy was forced to seek appointments in the service of royal courts, which resulted in a concomitant loss of political power and the strengthening of centralized monarchical power. This trend was exacerbated by the military and economic obsolescence of the feudal aristocracy. The origins of the feudal system lay in the necessity of levying mounted armies in an age when remuneration for service could only be in land and privilege. Technological innovations in warfare by about 1500 made the feudal knight largely superfluous. Large armies of infantry made up of commoners became important and kings increasingly sought sources of money to pay what were becoming national armies, in order to aid in the consolidation of national monarchies as well as in the establishment of these monarchies as European powers. In this, both bourgeoisie and peasantry looked to the kings for policy to benefit their respective positions vis a vis their traditional opponents - the aristocracy. Kings looked to the bourgeoisie for much-needed money and to the peasantry for their support in arms and their taxes. In some areas of West, the feudal nobility took advantage of rising agricultural prices to become agri-businessmen of a sort, and thus made the transition to a more modern and influential aristocracy. Most, however, did not and were condemned to a deteriorating economic status or utter dependency on the sinecures of the new absolute monarchs. The wealthiest of the emerging bourgeoisie were indeed "merchant princes" with palaces to rival any of the feudal aristocracy. They even acquired political influence as advisers to the crowned heads of Europe. But they were barred from direct political power by a political system that vested absolute power in one monarch and even if they consorted with kings, they never were considered socially equal. As commerce and money grew in importance the gap between the importance of the bourgeoisie in the economy and its lack of political privilege and social status became increasingly obvious. In England the bitter and protracted War of the Roses among competing aristocratic factions for control of the monarchy in the last half of the fifteenth century had led to the decimation of the feudal aristocracy. The victor in this civil war was Henry Tudor who used weariness and general disgust with feudal anarchy to build a strong reasonably centralized monarchy. Wealthy bourgeois were courted for their financial support; bought empty aristocratic titles and married their daughters to poverty-stricken aristocrats. In general there occurred a blurring of class lines between the new wealthy bourgeoisie and what was left of the old feudal aristocracy. Unlike most of their continental counterparts, English aristocrats were becoming commercial agriculturists and fused with a "funded" aristocracy of urban capitalists in a community of interest not necessarily best served by the crown. In the seventeenth century, the House of Commons, comprising the landed gentry as well as representatives of the commercial classes and the towns, launched what turned out to be a revolution of modernization. In challenging the right of the King Charles I to arbitrarily levy new taxes, Commons asserted its right of "advice and consent" as held in traditional feudal contract and reiterated in Magna Carta. The struggle involved a twenty-year civil war and later a short, virtually bloodless "Glorious Revolution," and by 1689 had created a government in which sovereignty rested in Parliament. The Bill of Rights and other acts and laws liberated Englishmen from most of what was left of feudal privilege and arbitrary royal authority. The modern, bourgeois concept of private property was established as the legal basis for land ownership and was established as the criterion for the voting franchise. A vague concept of England as one nation, ruled over by a representative Parliament, albeit elected by only about 6 per cent of the population, had developed.

FRANCE, like England, had had a feudal experience in the Middle Ages. It had also undergone much the same kind of social and economic transition under the "commercial revolution," with the exception that its aristocracy did not typically become commercial agriculturists with the accompanying blurring of class lines between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie as had taken place in England. Desultory foreign war and enervating feudal wars, under the guise of religion, both among aristocratic factions and between the feudal aristocracy and the monarchy had, by the beginning of the seventeenth century made bourgeois and peasant alike cry out for a strong monarchy to restore order. France, like England, had a feudal parliamentary body, but under the pressure of the Hundred Years War against England, its dominant aristocratic elements had surrendered the power to tax to the king in return for tax exemptions. Thus by the seventeenth century, while the Estates General survived as a ceremonial body, it had in effect lost any real political power. It was not called for 175 years, as France refined divine right monarchical absolutism as the acme of the political form. The Sun King, Louis XIV, successfully seduced the prominent and potentially dissident aristocrats into a life of dependent leisure in the gilded cage of the magnificent palace-city of Versailles. Meanwhile he created a new, bourgeois-staffed royal bureaucracy to perform services formerly carried out by disparate feudal courts. Bourgeois advisers played prominent roles in determining policy that insured France an important place role in the world of commerce and manufacture. Peace or successful war brought prosperity to some, but urban riots and peasant revolts remained a persistent problem. At the turn of the eighteenth century, it appeared that France had successfully become a centralized, bureaucratic state that was accommodating the social and economic changes of the era. The deterioration of what appeared to be a successful synthesis of feudal-traditional and modern society began with a series of debilitating wars at the end of the reign of Louis XIV. Throughout the eighteenth century a rising national debt cried out for tax reform which would have ended the traditional aristocratic exemptions and taxed bourgeois wealth more fairly. But the incompetence of kings to face the problem squarely combined with a resurgence of aristocratic power served to paralyze the entire government. In 1789, when a hapless Louis XVI turned to the long-dormant Estates General as an institution which might produce a consensus for tax reform, the bourgeois-dominated Third Estate attempted to use peaceful obstructionism as a means of emulating the recent and much-admired American revolution against royal absolutism. A mixture of persuasion and violence convinced many of those representing feudal privilege in the First and Second Estates to join with the Third Estate in creating one body representing all Frenchmen - a National Assembly for the purpose of writing a constitution. In this first, relatively peaceful stage of the revolution, the National Assembly ended what was left of feudal rights, confiscated feudal Church lands for sale to the people of France and issued a Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen which defined a liberal and modern concept of abstract rights and political power. Natural right replaced feudal privilege as the basis of society. While many of the old privileged classes accepted the changes, others fled to the absolutist states of central Europe where they used the universalist pronouncements of the revolution to convince the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia to intervene against the "virus of democracy" which infect their subjects as well. In the ensuing war France beheaded its King and Queen along with about forty thousand "enemies of the revolution" from all classes and mobilized the nation by creating a political dictatorship (The Reign of Terror) to protect the revolution. The terror relaxed after several years, but when this relaxation led to serious problems in all sectors of society, the military hero, Napoleon Bonaparte was able to seize power. Under Napoleon's fifteen-year rule, many of the modernizing effects of the revolution were retained, but liberty and popular political power were not. Ultimately, Napoleon's imperialistic ambition overreached France's capacities to rule and an international coalition of conservative powers brought defeat and a restoration of monarchy, albeit retaining many of the changes wrought by the revolution.

In 1815, both England and France were limited, constitutional monarchies with the right to vote restricted to a small, conservative aristocracy of landed property. Relative to the situation two centuries before, both countries had become considerably more modern. Freedom, which under the sway of laws conditioned by feudalism, had been a function of the class into which one was born, now had become a political issue and was determined by the bourgeois criterion of property ownership. Status was determined by bourgeois criteria of wealth and could be earned rather than inherited. Feudal restrictions upon opportunity had been swept away and freedom of religion meant that the Church no longer exerted a dominating force in the life of the nation. The city had become the economic as well as the social and political locus of power. England was already in the throes of industrialization and France was on the threshold. In the course of the century industrialization would become a second wave of the economic revolution that had already brought the fundamental transformation of western civilization. Industrialization brought a profound change to the way that most people worked and where they worked.

IN ENGLAND, where industrialization first began in the mid-eighteenth century, great new cities as the centers of manufacture grew up, frequently where none had stood before. A large new class of proletarians, industrial workers, was also created out of under- and unemployed peasants and urban workers. The initial years of the industrial revolution brought great wealth to some a few, new industrial entrepreneurs, but enormous misery to many of the new working class. Nevertheless, by the mid-nineteenth century the per capita real income had doubled over the course of the past hundred years and most people connected with industry or the related and increased commercial activity benefited to a greater or lesser degree. Happiness however, is conditioned by more than material prosperity. Workers came to see themselves as cogs in a gigantic economic and political machine over which they had no influence. By the turn of the nineteenth century, England was in the midst not only of an economic revolution, but also a political and social transformation that can be seen as a second wave of the capitalist revolution that had already brought an end to the feudal-traditional society of the European Middle Ages. A political reform movement developed in England already at the time of the American Revolution, but none of the proposed franchise bills had passed. A revolution in France in 1830 combined with popular demonstrations on behalf of electoral reform ultimately culminated in the Great Reform Bill of 1832. It brought the voting franchise to the middle classes and redistributed seats in Parliament in accordance with shifts in the population brought about by the commercial and industrial revolutions. Still, Parliament represented only men of substance - about 12.5 per cent of the population. A two-party had long been in place. The Conservatives represented largely landed wealth and the Liberals new capital. The working classes were unrepresented, although it was their demonstrations which had convinced the elites that reform was preferable to revolution. In the last third of the century however, both parties gradually came to recognize that the inclusion of all in the electorate was essential to the modern state. Conservatives and Liberals competed with each other for the favor of prospective voters by sponsoring bills widening the franchise until by the beginning of the twentieth century most workingmen with fixed residences had the right to vote. In the last years before the outbreak of the First World War, the Liberal Party began a substantial move to create a modern welfare state for the benefit of the lower classes. This drove many of the party's original adherents to the Conservative Party, which became the party of wealth, both landed and commercial-industrial. The working class however remained suspicious of the Liberals and began to develop a party of their own (Labour). After the First World War, it emerged as the second major party, while the Liberal Party declined into a small centrist party, usually of little consequence in the formation of British governments.

FRANCE, unlike England, never experienced a "take off" into industrial revolution. Although her constitution of 1814 was in some ways a liberal document that embraced many of the changes wrought by the French Revolution, it enfranchised only 100,000 wealthy landowners. The resulting Chamber of Deputies was an anti-modernist body that attempted in many ways to legislate away the changes of the revolution. Against this reactionary trend a revolution in 1830, led by workingmen, students and intelligentsia chased out the king. The next logical step for some was to create a new French Republic, but for the liberal elites, a republic smacked of mob rule and they manipulated the crowning of a new king, Louis Philippe. As a member of the house of Bourbon he had proper royal credentials and, as a soldier in the revolutionary army in 1792, he at least placated the demands of the republicans. Louis Philippe became known as the "bourgeois king" and affected this style in his manner and dress. He reformed the electoral franchise largely to the benefit of the upper bourgeoisie. For eighteen years the Chamber of Deputies and Louis Philippe ruled France in the interests of the bourgeoisie. Iron production and railroad construction began to develop significantly, but on balance the French bourgeois was already too comfortable in the pre-industrial sense to risk the challenges of industrial entrepeneurialism. Nevertheless a working class did develop, principally in Paris and a few other large cities that experienced the typical misery associated with the early phase of industrialization. The Chamber of Deputies remained sublimely oblivious to these problems. When the middle and lower classes demanded the right to vote so as to have access to the instrument of government as a means of dealing with growing misery, they were told "enrich yourselves, then you may have the vote." In 1848, yet another revolution drove Louis Philippe into exile and for the lack of any other alternative a republic was proclaimed. But the republic was, from the beginning, badly divided. Liberals wanted a broadened, but still limited franchise, radical republicans wanted universal manhood suffrage and some intellectuals and workers demanded a "social republic" with public support for collectivism manufacture. An attempt by Parisian workers to mount a new revolution to achieve their ends was met with brutal repression by a coalition of their erstwhile revolutionary comrades and peasants terrified of this "specter of socialism." Ultimately France turned to its past for leadership, electing the nephew of Napoleon as president. Using the widespread fear of socialism and his own widely disseminated ideas about modern, industrial society, Louis Napoleon, in four years, converted the revolutionary republic into The Second Empire, and took for himself the title of Napoleon III.

Much of Napoleon's formula for the ruling of France anticipated the methods of twentieth century fascist dictators. He gained power legally and by an effective use of both policy and propaganda he promoted the belief among many Frenchmen that a kind of direct democracy could be achieved through authoritarian rule periodically put to popular sanction through plebiscites and effectively manipulated parliamentary elections. The appeal in this argument stemmed from a widespread distrust of parliaments as the tool of special interests. Ever since the first French Revolution, parliaments had been erected on various franchise laws, all if which excluded some sector of the population. Napoleon III granted universal manhood suffrage and promoted the image that he was the arbitrator of the interests of all and that through strong authoritarian rule he served the best interests of all Frenchmen, not the narrow class interests represented by the political parties. Under Napoleon III the state took an active role in the construction of railroads and other public works as well as establishing new banking institutions to mobilize credit for private capitalist development. As long as the economic climate of France remained good following the recovery from the depression of 1845-48, Napoleon's "dictatorial democracy" found little focused opposition. But another depression in 1857 combined with foreign policy mistakes and a widely unpopular free trade policy led to the waning of Napoleon's popularity. He undertook a policy of liberalizing the Empire in the 1860's ultimately leading to a new constitution in 1870 that might have effectively turned Napoleon into something like a limited monarch. This process was never completed. In the summer of 1870 French bellicosity vis a vis the developing German state to the east led her into war against Prussia and her German allies. Napoleon led his armies into a trap and was captured. In Paris, the Second Empire collapsed and the Third Republic was declared under a provisional government of national defense. Paris was besieged and the victorious German allies gathered in the Palace of Versailles where the new German Reich was proclaimed. Later a severe peace treaty was accepted by the provisional government that surrendered the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to the new Germany. Outraged at what they regarded as a "sell-out" to the Germans, Parisian workers revolted proclaiming the creation of a sovereign Paris Commune. Again the wealthy classes supported by the conservative rural peasantry crushed the Paris workers whom they thought were trying to establish a communist state.

France seemed more divided than at anytime since the great revolution. There was no consensus on the kind of government to create. The crushed and sullen working classes wanted some kind of a social-welfare state, while the majority of Frenchmen were monarchist, but divided between the descendants of Charles X and Louis Philippe. There were even some Bonapartists. Scarcely one third of the delegates in the new National Assembly were supportive of the Republic that had been proclaimed in the wake of the collapse of the Second Empire. Despite this inauspicious beginning, the Third Republic remains the longest-lived French government since the collapse of the monarchy in 1789. In various ways the opponents of the republic managed to discredit themselves in the years after 1871 and by the turn of the century France had finally achieved a measure of political stability as a modern, secular state. The republicanism, which many had seen as synonymous with revolution and terror, had proven itself, as one reluctant republican put it, to be "the government that divides us least." Under the republic banking and financial institutions developed and the foundations for a modern industrial society were gradually laid. France achieved no spectacular industrial transformation as had taken place in Germany and the United States and she lagged far behind England in the standard of living for all but the elites. While the Republic was stabilized, its leadership was not. Universal manhood suffrage in a politically divided environment meant that in any French parliament a premier could build a majority only through a coalition that might involve a dozen or more political parties, each with their own desires and aversions. Fortunately, most of the machinery of government created by Napoleon I, survived the century and provided stability throughout the society, despite the apparent chaos of regularly falling governments. While most of France became reconciled to the new government, labor did not. Both the elected government and the bureaucracy reflected the interests of the bourgeoisie, both upper and petty, and the peasantry. There was little social legislation of either the English or the German kind, and Socialist representatives in parliament felt increasingly frustrated with the failure of the state to seriously address their problems. But industry was relatively less important to France than the other major world powers and for the time being the bourgeois-peasant synthesis was strong enough to carry her into the twentieth century.

While there are significant differences in the pre-twentieth century modernization of England and France, the historical development of both was favorable for the establishment of institutions that this essay has defined as liberal. The early and sustained commercial activity in both countries had created capitalist institutions and bourgeois values in the pre-industrial era that had led to successful revolutions against the restricting remnants of the feudal era. The relative abundance of capital in England made the difficult "take-off" phase of industrialization comparatively less exploitive and the evolutionary rather than revolutionary industrialization of France meant much the same. The values of individualism and private property had already become rooted in these societies and were thus part of the cultural baggage carried by those who became the new proletarians. For these reasons, in both countries essentially bourgeois governments could use the extension of the voting franchise, establishment of public education, labor legislation and social welfare laws to mute the tensions of modernization and build a new political consensus rooted in old traditions but bent to new tasks.

CONSERVATIVE MODERNIZATION, by contrast, came in societies that shared little, or not at all in the commercial revolution that had transformed the West. While on the surface, a feudal tradition appears to be a common experience in most of Europe and in Japan, outside of Western Europe, the relationship between lords and vassals was more a bond of obligation than a contract of mutual rights and responsibilities among freemen. (See "Rights and Obligations in Russia and the West" by L. Ignatieff which follows). When the revolution of modernization came, it came late and rapidly, usually as a necessity for protecting the society from some external threat. Its initiators were the elites, attempting to preserve their power in a traditional society and the power of their states in a world increasingly dominated by the modern states of the West. These elites saw industrialization as essential, but strove to accomplish this without changing traditional political and social relationships. In contrast to the West, where industrialization was substantially financed by capital accumulated through the earlier, commercial revolution, in the remainder of the world, capital was in short supply. The solution was either to borrow from the West, which also meant surrendering a measure of control, or to use labor intensive techniques to squeeze capital out of the traditional agrarian sector and the newly forming proletariat. Whether conservative modernization might have worked is still an open question. In the following case studies, Russia and China are clearly examples of failure culminating in revolution and an ultimate turn to communism as the vehicle for modernization. Germany appears to have been successful in the period before 1914, but in defeat she was forced by her enemies to adopt the democratic-capitalist model of the West. It was an ill-fitting suit, which Germans soon changed for a modernized version of traditional authoritarianism, which we have come to know as German fascism, or Nazism. Similarly, Japan appears to have been successful in the process of conservative modernization, but after disillusionment with parliamentary democracy in the early twentieth century she also turned to a modern authoritarianism, which some have called Japanese fascism. The following descriptive section will focus on an explanation of the basic character of traditional society in these four countries and the degree to which each had begun to change under the very recent impulses of modernization.

The less involvement a given area had with the commercial revolution that had begun the destruction of feudal/traditional society in the West, the more the society tended to remain ostensibly traditional. In the German states, Imperial Russia and Japan where a kind of feudalism existed, auto-critic rulers had reached effective compromises with their aristocrats. The latter preserved their privileged position in society, while agreeing to serve their rulers obediently in the army and the bureaucracy. In eastern Germany, particularly Prussia, and in Russia serfdom survived into the nineteenth century, while in western Germany serf obligations had been commuted into money payments, but the social and legal powers of the aristocracy remained. Each class was tied to its function and there was no sense of individual freedom as in the West. Indeed, individualism was widely seen as destructive to society. Democracy was regarded as mob rule in which the faction that shouted the loudest decided, on the basis of narrow self-interest, for society as a whole. Nationalism was viewed with deep suspicion because it implied equality and brotherhood of all which threatened not only the traditional social order, but also the revolutionary destruction of all of these states and the erection of new nation-states in their place.

Modernization in Germany began toward the middle of the nineteenth century, when there was in fact no Germany. The area inhabited by German-speaking peoples had been consolidated from the over two thousand political entities of the Middle Ages into thirty-nine states as part of the reorganization of Europe resulting from the Napoleonic era, but there was no effective political, or economic unity. The atrophy in commerce that had started as a consequence of the shift of trade routes from central Europe to the Atlantic in the sixteenth century, became virtual economic standstill as a consequence of the Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century. It is risky to generalize about "Germany," since in fact the divided character of the society meant that there were a number of realities. Had the German Empire that was created in 1871 been the product of a genuine unification, rather than a conquest by Prussia, then German history in the subsequent era might have been distinctly different. Nevertheless, it was Prussia that ostensibly extended its system over the other German states. Along the Rhine and its tributaries a small German bourgeoisie survived and it was here that the liberal-democratic movement has been at its strongest. (It is no mere coincidence that it is in the soil of western Germany that a parliamentary democracy has successfully grown up following the Second World War. Nor is it surprising that Germans in the east were the most successful of all communists in applying authoritarianism to the process of modernization.) But it was Prussia that gave the new German state its basic character, and it will therefore be Prussia upon which this short study will focus.

In Prussia, which was virtually untouched by the commercial revolution which transformed western Europe, the traditional elite was the Junker aristocracy which had its origins in the crusading order of the Teutonic Knights who conquered the northeastern Baltic region in the early thirteenth century. This clerical-military order was organized according to the principle of blind obedience of the leader or Führer. Prussia ultimately became secularized and acquired the superficial appearance of feudal states in the west, but without the concept of rights as well as obligations secured through a mutually binding contract among freemen. Later, the Prussian Grand Dukes gained control over the central German Electorate of Brandenburg creating the politically united but physically divided state of Brandenburg-Prussia. Brandenburg had had a weak feudal state structure, under which its ruler, the Elector, was subject to limitation by medieval parliamentary bodies known as Estates. In the seventeenth century however, the Junkers willingly surrendered the weakly established tradition of Estate limitations on the crown in return for guarantees by the crown of their unlimited control over their serfs and exemption from taxation. The lack of any significant bourgeoisie meant that there was no threat of a revolution on behalf of individual rights vis a vis monarchical absolutism from that sector. Thus the Junkers gained absolute control over agricultural labor, production and sales. They traded with western merchants who came to them, thus becoming entrepreneurs in a sense, while at the same time stifling the growth of any local bourgeoisie. The Junkers also dominated the bureaucracy and the army and formed a strong partnership with the absolutist monarchical state. In the nineteenth century, Prussia gradually began to modernize in the areas of mining and manufacture, but in contrast with England during the same period, the initiative came from the state with the Junker-dominated bureaucracy fulfilling the entrepreneurial role.

In order to improve the administration of commerce among the German states, Prussia introduced in 1834 the Zollverein or Customs Union, which ultimately promoted integration of trade, promoted canal, road and railway construction and generally made Prussia the center and most important segment in an increasingly economically unified Germany.

A nascent bourgeois class developed and in the general breakdown of political authority in the revolutions that swept Europe in 1848, this class attempted to perform the political liberalizing function that its English, Dutch, American and French counterparts had already fulfilled. The revolution was however premature and in the wake of the failure of the liberal middle class to create a unified, liberal German state, the old, traditional forces were able to reassert their authority through the military strength of the Prussian state. Economic development continued and political unity was achieved in 1871, but under the leadership of the traditional, authoritarian Prussian state. Although the political leaders of the new German state were mostly the descendants the old, landed aristocracy, they cooperated with the growing bourgeoisie to form what has been called "organized capitalism." It was basically a market-based economy under which individual entrepreneurs were guided and supported by the precursor of the modern "interventionist state." A handful of private banks enjoyed monopoly status guaranteed by the imperial government. They in turn provided capital for industrial development that increasingly took the form of huge horizontal and vertical cartels, which facilitated the process of technological innovation. Part of their profits flowed back to the banks, which used it for further investment both within the country and in underdeveloped areas such as the Ottoman Empire and China where German imperialistic interests were growing. The government also supported the creation of scientific institutes to support basic research that then worked in close relationship with private industry to apply what was learned to business. Thus the bourgeoisie came to see their economic interests as well served by this bureaucratically efficient and militarily strong authoritarian state and most willingly jettisoned the liberal principles commonly associated with their class. A Reichstag elected by universal manhood suffrage gave the illusion of parliamentary liberalism, but in reality political authority rested in the hands of the emperor, who might, as in the case of Wilhelm I and Bismarck, delegate responsibility to his Chancellor.

The traditional military-agrarian complex opened to include the new industrial sector and the state implemented protectionist tariffs for the protection of both agriculture and industry. Foreign competition was shut out and domestic competition was reduced by the strong trend towards huge industrial cartels. An excellent system of scientific and technical education provided personnel for the new enterprises and a state-owned railway network made shipment of raw materials and finished goods reliable and inexpensive.

To a large degree the traditional political-social structure survived the initial process of modernization. Tariff policy effectively subsidized the traditional land-owning Junker elites, but at the same time protected much of the peasant class and the new industrial bourgeoisie. But not all Germans benefited. Protectionism also brought higher prices in all sectors and many small peasant landholders failed. Craftsmen, artisans, and small businessmen of the pre-industrial era grew increasingly unable to compete and became susceptible to reactionary rhetoric, which spoke of the evils of modernism, particularly grasping industrial capitalism, and interest banking behind which a Jewish conspiracy for world domination was believed to lurk. In imperial Germany however, these elements were relatively few. There was however, one class that everywhere bore a heavy burden in the process of rapid industrialization - the proletariat. Fearing the Social Democratic Party and its Marxist ideology which preached world revolution, Chancellor Bismarck developed the basis for a social welfare state to woo the workers. While the policy was unsuccessful in undermining the Social Democratic Party, it did convince most workers that improvement of their lot could be accomplished through unions and social legislation rather than requiring revolution. In 1914, when radical Marxists urged that the proletariat turn the imperialist war into a war of the workers of the world against the capitalists, German Social Democrats remained loyal to the conservative empire. In summary, although pockets of backwardness and discontent remained at the turn of the twentieth century, it seems safe to conclude that Germany had survived the initial stresses of modernization. The middle classes that had been revolutionary in the West, were the beneficiaries of a modernization that had been led by the traditional elites. They did not perform a revolutionary function, but rather were accommodated within the traditional society and in the case of the very wealthy they even were able to buy titles and palaces which assured them a grudging degree of social status.

THE MODERNIZATION OF IMPERIAL RUSSIA. Russia bears some resemblance to that of Germany except that its tardiness, the rapidity with which it developed and the authoritarianism in the society in general was more pronounced. Unlike Germany on the eve of her modernization, the Russian Empire had a long tradition of political unity. Beginning in the thirteenth century, the Grand Princes of Moscow gradually gathered all Russians under their sway. This nascent Russian nation then expanded outward until by the nineteenth century they had built an empire that stretched from Prussia, Sweden and Austria in the west to the Pacific, and from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Ottoman Empire, Persia, Afghanistan and China in the south and east. It was an empire with over a hundred different nationalities, but was ruled autocratically by an emperor who claimed to rule by the will of God under the dictates of the ideology of Official Nationality, which denied official recognition to all religions, save Orthodoxy and all nationalities other than Russian. All classes were subject to the unlimited authority of the ruler. Even the landed aristocracy had traditionally been required to perform state functions. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, under the German-born Catherine the Great, the aristocracy had been relieved of most of their obligations, but liberation was for political expediency and was the gift of the empress, not a concession to some concept of rights. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Russian social-economic structure was still traditional, with about ninety per cent of the population involved in agriculture, over half as serfs. There was virtually no bourgeoisie and unlike the Prussian Junkers, the aristocracy showed little interest in becoming agrarian capitalists. The autocracy and its bureaucratic officials were deeply suspicious of the changes that modernization might bring. Russia's shattering defeat in the Crimean war in 1856 brought about the political decision to eliminate serfdom as the first step towards the selective modernization of the Empire. The goal was the reassertion of traditional Russian military might and international power in an era when shear weight of population was no longer sufficient. But the autocracy was absolutely committed to the preservation of the traditional political order and social structure. Given this inflexibility the process was probably condemned to failure from the outset. The land distribution that accompanied the emancipation of the serfs was inadequate for most peasants. Redemption payments for the land received deprived them of a decent standard of living and precluded the development of a rural market for consumer goods that would be necessary for a broad-based modernization. Furthermore, land was not given to individual peasant households, but rather to the traditional village-commune (mir), which dampened any sense of individual initiative. In short, the serf and land reforms failed to create a healthy and prosperous peasant sector that could have been a conservative bulwark of a regime experiencing the stresses of modernization.

When modernization began in the 1860's with a vigorous program of railway construction, the necessary machinery and railway equipment had to be purchased on credit from foreign suppliers. To pay back these loans, Russia increased taxes on the peasant sector in grain for sale on the international grain markets. The result was that Russia became a grain exporter at the same time that the already low per capita food consumption among the peasants was dropping. The results were frequent rural famines amidst plenty in the storehouses of the tax collectors.

The industrial "take-off," when it began in the late 1880's was accompanied by even worse dislocation and misery than had been common elsewhere, while the official government policy was to support and subsidize private capitalism. A severe shortage of entrepreneurial talent made for inefficiency and heavy government involvement in the process. There was a heavy dependence on foreign, particularly, French capital in both private and public enterprise. This had significant foreign policy implications in the First World War and provided Lenin and his Bolsheviks with a potent argument in the revolution of 1917.

At the turn of the twentieth century Russia was definitely in the throes of a major revolution of modernization. She was behind most European countries, but was relatively developed by world standards. But unlike Germany, no consensus for the conservatively modernizing society had developed. The peasant sector remained impoverished and sullen. The working class had begun to organize and strikes became commonplace in the first half decade of the new century. In 1905 a revolution wrung a grudging compromise for a kind of parliament (Duma). But when the Emperor Nicholas confronted the pallid efforts of would-be liberals to use this Duma as a means to legislate change, he altered the franchise law so as to produce a body that would dutifully sanction imperial decisions. Whereas the Second Empire had brought most Germans some degree of improvement in their condition and the promise of much more, most Russians saw only deterioration in their lives. Whether Imperial Russia might have moved through this phase and made conservative modernization a success as in Germany is open to question. In any case, The First World War intervened in the process and before it was over Imperial Russia had fallen and Lenin and his Communist Party were in a position to apply a new and different kind of authoritarianism to the task of modernizing Russia.

THE MODERNIZATION OF JAPANESE SOCIETY began with the Meiji Restoration, an event of profound political and social importance. In 1867 the Tokugawa Shogunate, the last in a long line of feudal military dictatorships which originated in the twelfth century, was overthrown by a coalition of feudal elites who promptly announced that all power had been restored to the Japanese Emperor. What followed was a remarkable program of economic, social and political transformation that made Japan a modern nation state by 1900. Indeed, Japan stands alone as the only country outside of Europe and North America to successfully modernize by the beginning of the twentieth century. It is equally important to note that Japan's program of conservative modernization outlived the efforts of Germany and Imperial Russia, both of which collapsed with the First World War. It therefore stands as the most durable and sustained example of conservative modernization until 1945 when Japan was defeated and occupied at the conclusion of the Second World War.

When feudal elites overthrew the Tokugawa Shogun and staged the Meiji Restoration of 1867, they did so because Japan was directly threatened by the military power of the Western nations. In 1854 the United States forced Japan to end the Tokugawa policy of exclusion and seclusion which had lasted nearly 250 years and which effectively isolated Japan from significant contact with European nations. The United States not only forced Japan to open her doors to Western influence but also did so on the basis of diplomatic inequality. The Japanese were required to accept the principle of extra-territoriality, which held that foreign nationals in Japan were not subject to Japanese law. They were also forced to accept the concept of "most favored nation", which held that Japan was required to grant automatically to the United States any additional treaty rights given to any other nations in subsequent negotiations. After negotiation of the U.S. treaty, all the major nations of Europe concluded similar treaties with Japan. In the period between 1854 and 1867, as several military confrontations occurred between European nations and the all but independent feudal lords of western Japan, it became clear to the leadership of the feudal elite outside of the Shogun's government that Japan must begin an ambitious program of modernization if it were to avoid division and direct control by the nations of the West. Thus Japan, like Germany and Imperial Russia, embarked upon modernization as an act of self-defense.

Japan's ability to successfully modernize in the late nineteenth century was directly tied to certain unique features of her traditional culture. Most important were two factors: the tradition of borrowing from others who were culturally and/or technologically advanced and the institutions and values associated with Japanese feudalism. Beginning as early as the 6th century A.D., the Japanese demonstrated an ability to adopt foreign ideas and adapt them to Japanese society without fundamentally altering indigenous values. At this early date the Japanese borrowed heavily from China, whose cultural achievements were superior to those of Japan, but the Japanese never lost sight of who they were in cultural terms. In this way, Confucianism, Buddhism, Chinese architecture and the written Chinese language in character form came to Japan. All of this and more was digested and distilled by the Japanese to accommodate already established Japanese cultural norms. The end product was a Japanese version of imported Chinese culture that was made to serve pre-existing values. When the leaders of the Meiji Restoration turned to the task of transforming Japan to the status of a modern nation state, they drew on this tradition, borrowing much from Western nations, but ultimately they created a unique and, at base, thoroughly Japanese version of modernity. Although the hardware and technology of Japan's modernization was frequently unchanged and identical to that of modern Western states, social and political values thought to be "modern" by the West were imported and modified by the Japanese to reinforce long standing political and social norms. There is no better example of this than the establishment of political parties and the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution in the decade of the 1880s. Known to the West as "modern" political institutions, in Japan they were controlled by traditional elites and functioned in a decidedly undemocratic fashion.

Apart from Japan's ability to adopt and adapt foreign culture, the Japanese feudal tradition imparted certain values that aided those who structured the modern Japanese state. In several respects, Japanese feudalism, which dates from the twelfth century, was unlike feudalism in Western Europe where liberal modernization eventually occurred. The notion of contract in Japan, as noted earlier, was less one of freemen who entered equally into an agreement but it did not follow the more authoritarian forms of feudalism in Prussia and traditional Russia. What is important here is that the Japanese were familiar with the idea that contract implied law, even if the partners were not always equal. The tradition of contract enabled the leaders of the Meiji Restoration to quickly write modern codes of law that so impressed Western nations that they surrendered the rights of extra-territoriality by the decade of the 1890s. Familiarity with the principal of contract also assisted the Japanese in establishing a modern judiciary and the framework for constitutional government. Perhaps more obviously, the tradition of feudalism that identified the warrior as the central ethical figure in society, naturally reinforced Japanese efforts to build a modern army and navy in the 1880s and made military careers attractive to able young men. And because of Japan's feudal code of honor, the Code of Bushido, the individual in Japan was accustomed to think in terms of duty and loyalty toward higher authorities and to engage in unlimited self-sacrifice for some entity or idea beyond the individual or his family. Finally, a strong national consciousness had grown up at an early date within Japanese feudalism. This national consciousness, combined with an equally strong sense of feudal loyalty, produced a genuine national patriotism long before the Tokugawa Shogunate was overthrown in 1867. For the Japanese, it was an easy step to shift loyalty from the Shogun to the Emperor and from the feudal realm to the nation as a whole.

If elements from Japanese tradition eased the transition to modernity, significant social and economic changes during the Tokugawa era (1603-1867) also played an important part. Two of the more dramatic changes came in the areas of government and economics. Because the Tokugawa was an unprecedented period of peace since the beginning of feudalism, the role of the bushi or samurai gradually shifted from one warrior to civil bureaucrat. By the time Japan began its efforts to modernize, many feudal elites were skilled in civil administration that facilitated their movement into the bureaucracy of the emerging Meiji state from feudal realms. Even more significant was economic growth, the development of a money economy and the rise of a merchant class, the chonin. Under the Tokugawa, Japan was given a unified system of weights and measurements and national currency. The great cities of Edo (Tokyo) and Osaka and the castle headquarters of various feudal lords became major economic centers. The extensive development of coastal shipping provided the Japanese with a national transportation system so that good from all sections of the country entered the markets of Osaka and Edo. The ruling feudal elites who congregated in urban centers depended increasingly upon the services of the chonin. In an effort to control the chonin and commerce, the Tokugawa Shogunate officially sanctioned the creation of merchant guilds and monopolies (za, forerunner of the zaibatsu) and entered into paternalistic economic relationships with the chonin. All in all, these economic changes and new relationships between government and mercantile capitalism, provided essential building blocks upon which Japan's industrial economy grew after 1867.

As in the case of Germany and Imperial Russia, the feudal elites who engineered the Meiji Restoration sought to achieve modernization within the larger parameters of tradition. They effectively utilized the symbolic importance of the Japanese Emperor, urging all to work and sacrifice for the greater good of Japan. The chonin of the Tokugawa era represented the emergence of a Japanese bourgeoisie. It was, however, one that was certainly without the revolutionary leanings or potential of similar groups in Western Europe. The Meiji state continued the paternalistic relationship between government and private enterprise established during the Tokugawa, insuring incentives and rewards in return for cooperation in building the new Japan. Labor intensive policies, employed in Germany and Imperial Russia because of the lack of capital, became a centerpiece of Japanese modernization in the late nineteenth century. Especially hard hit were Japan's peasants and farmers upon who fell the burden of increased taxes. And finally, to achieve modernity as well as lessen the financial burden of the new Meiji state, lower ranking feudal figures were sacrificed with the formal abolition of feudalism in 1876.

The initial phase of modernization in China stands in sharp contrast to what occurred in Japan, Germany and Imperial Russia. While it has been argued that Germany and Japan successfully implemented programs of conservative modernization and that Imperial Russia was at least in the throes of a major revolution of modernization by 1900, China lagged far behind all these countries. China's attempt to implement a program of conservative modernization in the latter half of the nineteenth century was hampered by a number of factors. The most important of these were the actions of Western states and Japan which diplomatically and militarily intervened in internal Chinese affairs and, even more significant, a set of attitudes and values imparted by Chinese tradition which colored the thinking and actions of China's leadership.

China's first organized attempt to modernize occurred in 1862 when the ruling Qing dynasty inaugurated the Tong Zhi Restoration. As in the case of Germany, Imperial Russia and Japan, the motivation for embarking on reform and modernization came in response to a direct military threat from Western nations and, complicating the situation, a massive internal revolt known as the Tai Ping Rebellion. By 1862 China had twice suffered the humiliation of defeat in military confrontations with Western states. The first of these contests, known as the Opium or Anglo-Chinese war of 1839, ended with the negotiation of the Treaty of Nanjing (Nanking) in 1842. The British went to war against China because they wished to expand commercial contact which until 1842 the Chinese limited to the single port Guangzhou (Canton) and because the Chinese acted decisively in 1839 to end the British importation of opium. Although outlawed by the Chinese since 1729, the British continued to smuggle opium which was used as a commodity of exchange to offset a British trade deficit in silver (in 1838 alone, the British imported over 5 millions pounds of opium to China). Among other things, The Treaty of Nanjing legalized the importation of opium, opened five new treaty ports, gave Great Britain control over Chinese customs and saddled China with extra-territoriality and the "most favored nation" principle. The United States and other European nations promptly forced China to negotiate similar treaties. A second war between 1856-1860, initiated by the British and French, resulted in additional concessions that included the right to exploit interior markets in China. Once again, other Western nations forced new treaties on China in an effort to offset British and French gains, with the United States insisting that the Chinese government grant "freedom of religion" to all its Chinese subjects and accept responsibility for the safety of missionaries who began to flood the interior of China in the hope of converting the Chinese masses to Christianity. Even after the Chinese initiated reforms designed to modernize the Chinese state they were forced to contend with continued foreign intervention, both military and diplomatic. The Chinese fought and lost wars with France (1885) and Japan (1895), was forced to surrender large areas of its territory to Western powers for economic exploitation in a major scramble for concessions in the late 1890s and was invaded by an army composed of several Western nations during the Boxer Uprising of 1900. These events and others served to perpetuate an atmosphere of crisis in diplomatic affairs and, not unnaturally, distracted from as well as confound efforts to effect internal programs of reform and modernization.

Reeling under the impact of Western and Japanese imperialism, the Qing court faced a host of internal domestic problems unassociated with the menace of foreign enemies. Because the Qing dynasty had ruled over a prolonged period of peace, China's population, 85% of which resided in the countryside as peasants and farmers, had grown dramatically. Between 1741 and 1850, the population increased from 143 to 430 millions while the land under cultivation increased by only 35%. By the middle of the nineteenth century, hunger gripped the land. Peasants who previously owned land became tenant farmers when they were forced to sell their smallholdings to survive. A series of natural calamities in the decades of the 1840s and 1850s only added to the misery of China's millions. Famines struck in 1847 and 1849, the Changjiang (Yangtze river) over flowed its banks in 1849 and flooded large portions of four central provinces and the Huang He (Yellow river) began in 1852 an equally disastrous shift in its course from the south to the north of the Shandong (Shantung) peninsula, flooding land in five north central provinces. Sporadic peasant revolts broke out in the 1840s and finally coalesced in the Tai Ping Rebellion of the 1850s, which took the lives of 20 million before it was crushed in 1864.

When the Qing dynasty finally responded to the twin perils of foreign imperialism and domestic upheaval it was unequal to the task. The vitality of the dynasty had long been sapped by an historical economic and administrative phenomenon known as the dynastic cycle, something common to all previous dynasties in Chinese history. Chinese historians have attributed this repetitive cycle to a central tenet of Confucianism which attached great importance in adhering to certain economic and administrative practices which were said to be characteristic of an era of "Golden Rule" some three thousand years earlier in Chinese history. Thus unwittingly, dynasty after dynasty fell victim to a common set of problems which, in turn, encouraged corruption among the bureaucracy and a general inattention to or inability to deal with the problems of the state. The Qing was especially susceptible to these forces because it was not a native Chinese dynasty. In 1644 the Manchus, a group of people who lived in an area northeast of the Great Wall, invaded China and established the Qing, a dynasty of foreign rule. Throughout China's long history she had been invaded and ruled or partly ruled by other groups who originated north of the Great Wall. In every case these "barbarians", as they were initially known to the Chinese conquered by the sword but quickly embraced Chinese cultural norms as a way to perpetuate their rule. Consequently the Manchus, like the Mongols and others before them, adopted Confucianism and proceeded to rule as native Chinese dynasties had done. In the process, they effectively became "Chinese" and therefore vulnerable to the dynastic cycle.

It was against tremendous odds that the Qing court launched the Tong Zhi Restoration of 1862. Known in English as the "Self Strengthening Movement" and in Chinese as "Union for Order," the programs of reform and modernization that followed took as their inspiration assumptions drawn from traditional Chinese philosophy and custom. The theme of Chinese modernization, the court announced, would be "Chinese learning for the essentials; Western learning for self defense," a sentiment echoed by virtually every major Chinese leader from the Republican revolutionary Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) to Communist revolutionary Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung). From the perspective of the Qing court, a sharp distinction needed to be drawn between the hardware and technology of modernization and the pollution of Western social and political values. To make the point perfectly clear the Qing called for the restoration of Confucian governing norms at the same time it commissioned the building of modern machine shops, arsenals and shipyards at Shanghai, Guangzhou and Fuzhou (Foochow). Indeed, the Qing only grudgingly acknowledged a secondary role to Western knowledge in the modernization of China because the Qing court and Chinese intellectuals still clung to the once valid notion that China's civilization surpassed those of all others, East and West. The Chinese name for China, Zhongguo, literally means "Central Kingdom" and stands as one indicator of how the Chinese still viewed the world in the nineteenth century. Unlike the Japanese, who had a long tradition of borrowing from others, the Chinese understood themselves as the teachers of others and their culture as universal, a rich source from which "barbarians" could draw if they wished to become civilized. So rich was China's heritage that some Chinese scholars ventured the argument that there was no need to import Western technological or scientific knowledge. "The empire is so great," one court official announced, "[that] if is necessary to teach Western studies an extensive search should find someone in China who has mastered barbarian learning." With eyes firmly fixed on the past, Chinese elites rejected the notion of progress, which had become an article of faith in the West, and assumed that China's modernization would not come at the expense of scrapping traditional institutions or political and social values defined by the centuries old doctrines of Confucianism.

Although a heavy prejudice existed against borrowing Western scientific and technological knowledge to arm China against the continued threat of Western imperialism, much was accomplished before the Self-Strengthening Movement ended with the death of the reigning emperor in 1874. Chinese workmen in Shanghai produced China's first steamship, over 200 Western scientific treatises and manuals were translated, a number of Interpreter Colleges were formed to learn Western languages and a fleet of fifteen naval vessels were constructed at Fuzhou to be manned by new graduates of the Fukien Naval Academy. All of this impressed Western observers but such achievements scarcely represented a major step toward industrial transformation of the Chinese economy that remained overwhelmingly agrarian. In fact, most in China knew little of these developments which were limited to a few eastern coastal areas. For the most part, the small Chinese gentry and an even smaller entrepreneurial class that emerged in this period were not officially encouraged by the Qing to participate in its efforts of limited modernization. Most ominous for the survival of Qing conservative elites was the fact that millions of peasants continued to suffer in the great hinterland of China.

After 1874 the leadership of the Qing court fell to the Empress Dowager Cixi (Ts'u Hsi), who all but abandoned these first meager steps in modernization only to subsequently but belatedly revive them in the period 1901-1907 as the dynasty approached collapse. While the Western nations and Japan sparred with each other over the continued exploitation of China, building railroads and mining China's natural resources, the momentum for change gradually slipped to the hands of a small number of Chinese radicals who advocated revolution as the only viable vehicle for China's modernization. Foremost among this group was Sun Zhongshan, who acquired a Western education and solicited funds from overseas Chinese for the purpose of toppling the Qing dynasty. Perhaps Sun's greatest contribution to the modernization of China was an attempt to create a modern sense of Chinese nationalism. Among other reasons, Sun argued that the Qing should be overthrown because they were Manchu and thereby drew a distinction between culture and ethnicity. The traditional Chinese idea that one owed first loyalty to the extended family and second loyalty to the culture, Sun argued, should be reshaped to establish primary loyalty to the nation state and the challenge of building a new China. To this nascent expression of modern Chinese nationalism, Sun added a condemnation of Western and Japanese imperialism.

Long moribund, the Qing dynasty was overthrown in 1911. The collapse of the Qing brought an end to faltering and belated attempts of conservative modernization in China. In turn, conservative modernization was succeeded by more radical alternatives to modernization in the form of Fascism and Communism that competed with one other until the eventual victory of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party in 1949.

The feudal tradition in Western Europe supported the supremacy of the law and was strong enough to counter the growth of monarchical power at the end of the Middle Ages. In Russia, on the other hand, as a result of Mongolian and Byzantine influences, the supremacy of the ruler became the tradition. Western doctrines of government led to an emphasis on rights, whereas Russian ones emphasized obligations. This variance is one of the basic reasons for differences between Russia and the West. . . .Before the Mongolian period, the Russian prince was not an autocratic ruler. Vernadsky thus analyzes the situation: "The political organization of the Russian principalities in the pre-Mongolian period was a combination of monarchical, aristocratic and democratic government." . . . The results of two hundred years of Mongolian rule were reflected in a "new view regarding the power of the Prince. The power of the Khan was one of merciless strength. It was autocratic; submission to it was unqualified." After repudiating Tatar control, the rulers of Moscow found themselves successors of the Khans and absolute masters over their subjects. With the fall of Constantinople before the Turks in 1453 and the marriage of Ivan III to the heiress of the Paleologues, these rulers were able to think of Moscow as the new and ultimate Rome and to add prestige to power. Now that the Russian Tsar felt himself to be tsar of all the Russias and heir of the Byzantine Empire, the Byzantine-Roman conception of the Emperor as sole legislator seems to have taken root. Attitudes acquired from the Tatars, traditions founded on Roman law and taken from Byzantium, and the unswerving support of the Church, all contributed to the development of autocracy in Russia.

The growth of monarchical power in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was not, of course, restricted to Russia. In many countries of Western Europe decline in the strength of feudal barons, together with other factors, had increased the power of the kings. There was however, one significant difference between developments in Western Europe and those in Russia. There was, in the West, an authority which proved itself a counterweight to royal power, replacing that formerly provided by the feudal barons. This counterweight was a legacy of feudalism: ". . . the principle that the community is governed by law and that the ruler as much as the subject is bound to obey the law." No such rival to royal power existed in post-Mongolian Russia.

This fundamental principle that the king was not superior to the law but subject to its authority was stated by Bracton in the thirteenth century. . . . The sovereignty of law over the ruler himself has been periodically asserted by English lawyers ever since the days of Bracton and was assumed by many Englishmen to be a fact peculiar to their country. [But] the notion that the ruler was subject to law was in fact basic to mediaeval political theory: "The truth is that the conception of an absolute monarch, the source of law, and superior to the law, was wholly alien to medieval civilization.". . . The true contrast lies, not between English and French, but between Western European and Russian political doctrine. Where Russian political thought was not the result of Mongolian views, it derived from Byzantium, in other words from Roman law, according to which the supreme legislative authority lay in the ruler, rather than in the community. The same ideas could also be found in Western Europe as a result of a renewed interest in Roman law at the University of Bologna, particularly during the thirteenth century. This doctrine of the state, however, was quite exceptional in the West until the end of the Middle ages. Much more prevalent there was the view which derived from the feudal contract, from feudal law. . . .

In Russia, on the other hand, the Roman concept that law depended upon the will of the ruler, . . . went hand in hand with Mongolian traditions of submission to the State. These ideas could have been modified if feudalism had developed in Russia to the same extent as in the West. . . .

It was not, of course, so much the bond of fealty as the whole contractual basis of that bond and the consequences thereof that were lacking in Russia. . . . The idea that sovereign as well as subject had obligations and subject as well as sovereign had rights under the feudal contract was an important juridical conception in all countries where feudal society and feudal law had taken root. It is the judicial more than any other aspect of the feudal system that has contributed to modern society. It is there that we find the mediaeval and the modern democratic conception that the law is superior even to the ruler.

So far we have been considering the actual distinction between Western European and Russian mediaeval views of the state. As we have seen, the prevalent idea in the West was the supremacy of law, although the influence of Roman ideas of the supremacy of the ruler were increasing towards the end of the Middle Ages. In Russia these Roman ideas, coming from Byzantium, were dominant, being strongly reinforced by Mongolian usage and the authority of the Church. We should now give some consideration to the consequences of these different views.

The existence of a contract entails the existence of rights, as well as obligations, and the feudal contract was, of course, no exception. But how was the vassal to enforce his rights against the lord? In the first place, he could appeal to the feudal court which consisted of the other vassals. In the last resort the vassal could renounce his allegiance as was done by the English barons when, in 1214, they entered into an agreement to make war upon their king if he refused to confirm laws which had been granted in a charter of Henry I. A lord could similarly defy his vassal. Renunciation of allegiance and defiance were the usual preliminaries to war by vassal against lord or lord against vassal. . . . Making war against the king was, of course, a method of procedure which contributed strongly to the disorders of the Middle Ages, but it was recognized as legitimate by such feudal law books as the Assizes of Jerusalem, the Site Partidas and the Etablissements de St. Louis, and it did result in Magna Carta and the establishment of an English Parliament in 1264. As a last resort, vassals might depose their sovereign. . . .

The growing diversity and complexity of European civilization contributed to the growth of national feeling and the need for greater centralization and firmer sovereignty: in other words, for strong national monarchies. The support of leaders of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century helped to increase the authority of the king, just as did that of the burghers. As new demands caused an increase in new legislation, the mediaeval conception of laws being the custom of the community was affected by the realization that they could also be the commands of a supreme authority. Yet so strong was the mediaeval tradition of the supremacy of law that only in 1576 do we find the first important argument of the century that the king should be absolute and subject to no law--in Bodin's Republic. Even then Bodin concedes that this absolute power must be subject to divine natural law and the law of nations.

The extreme view of royal supremacy, known as the theory of the Divine Right of Kings, had apparently originated with Pope Gregory the Great and had found few supporters since its appearance in the ninth century. . . . The Theory of Divine Right was not supported by any particularly distinguished writers, in spite of the efforts of James I. The Revolution of 1688 virtually ended it in Britain and the theoretical basis of the change of government was provided by Locke's Treatises on Government with their doctrine of the social contract. This was to become the dominant political theory throughout the eighteenth century and to contribute to the American and French Revolutions as it had to the English. In view of its importance it would be well to remember that the roots of this theory lay in feudalism since, ". . . the conception of a contractual relation was the fundamental principle of all feudal society and was therefore an important part of the normal political tradition of the Middle Ages." By the terms of the feudal contract it was recognized that the lord forfeited his rights if he broke the contract by neglecting his obligations or the rights of his vassals. . . . The promises made to his subjects by a sovereign, usually in his coronation oath have by many writers been regarded as forming part of a solemn contract. Kings must not be allowed to forget the rights of their subjects under the contract on pain of forfeiting their crowns. Lest future governors forgot these rights, they were enunciated in the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which also announced that "law is the expression of the general will."

In this brief review of political developments in Western Europe from the end of the Middle Ages to more modern days we have seen that, although strong rulers met the need of the times during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, yet the mediaeval tradition of the supremacy of law persisted throughout. So strong was it that it helped to bring about the overthrow of rulers who were considered to have abused their augmented powers. The tradition still persists and forms an important part of the basis of Western democratic thought. . . .

The fact that, in Russia, there was no effective counterweight to royal autocracy did not mean that there was no opposition either to that autocracy or to the new class of landlords which it had instituted. . . . [But the] revolts and attempts to limit royal authority . . . [were] merely responses to an intolerable state of affairs, not the assertion of neglected rights, as in England, France, America and later in other countries. Only in the nineteenth century did greater familiarity with the Western insistence on rights lead to the first Russian demands for a constitution. . . . The effort to replace autocratic government with a constitution failed, and . . . the revolutionary movement . . . by the end of the century, had been gripped by a more radical mood. By the time of the Revolution of 1917 a growing number of the intelligentsia demanded a radical republic rather than a constitutional monarchy. The autocracy of a monarch was replaced by the dictatorship of a group of people acting in the name of the proletariat. Russia enjoyed only a few years of experiment in a more or less constitutional monarchy and a very short interval of a more than constitutional republic. Under the circumstances it is not strange that the rights set out by the Constitution of the Soviet Union, when taken together, amount merely to the right of agreement with the established system whether in meetings, on paper or from a public platform. The right of agreement cannot be considered one of the more fundamental human rights.

The principle of unquestioning submission to the state which prevailed in Russia after the Mongols resulted not only in the unlimited authority of the Tsars, but also in the idea that all subjects owed service to the state. . . . It was the obligations of the people that were stressed in Russia, not their rights. Here perhaps lies the root of one of the main differences in outlook between Russians and Westerners. In western countries, the state has often been viewed as a necessary evil which must be prevented from interfering with the rights of its citizens and the chief duties of which are to preserve order and regulate the relations of individuals and associations. To the Russians, the state was not so much the regulative as the initiative authority, and such a view was not likely to result in emphasis on individual rights.

While admiring the more democratic governments of the West, Russians of all classes and opinions have often commented unfavourably upon many aspects of Western civilization. The search for material well-being that plays so important a role in the life of the average citizen of Western countries has been condemned as vulgar egoism or materialism. Even before Marx's teachings were known in Russia, the bourgeois West was considered to be on the verge of inevitable decay. . . .

As explanation might be offered for this anti-Western attitude. For a people that thought of life mostly in terms of obligation was it not natural to regard the preoccupation with rights as a sign of undue egoism? Is it so strange that Russians should assume that states composed mostly of individuals primarily concerned with the search for profit and pleasant living were victims of materialism and on the verge of decay? They did not sufficiently appreciate the role that has been played in human progress by insistence upon human rights. A system of constitutional government could have given the Russians experience in adjusting the balance between rights and obligations. Instead, Russia still finds itself subjected to authoritarian government. In order to bring out the difference between the Western and Russian attitude towards rights, the author has found it necessary to concentrate his attention upon the question of rights, rather than upon obligations. It should be remembered that rights should exist only side by side with obligations. While rights were not emphasized in Russian history, some critics feel that they have been overemphasized in the West. If Russia needs to remember about the existence of rights, the citizens of Western countries need sometimes to be reminded of obligations.

1. Production in both agriculture and manufacture is increasingly mechanized and driven by inanimate sources of power, not subsistence; products are intended for consumers outside the immediate family, e.g. cash crops.
2. Increasingly work is performed away from the home. Even in the rural setting men perform field work and women are confined to domestic, "non-productive" tasks in the home, as are middle-class urban women. A "cult of domesticity" develops emphasizing the importance of women as supportive wives and mothers and unsuited for work in the world of business and industry. Large numbers of children are no longer necessary to hire out for additional income and there occurs a drop in the birth rate.
3. Cash crop agriculture replaces subsistence agriculture and a money economy becomes increasingly prominent.
4. Diversification and depersonalization of labor relations, i.e., the "Boss" is a distant Corporation Board of Directors, Board of Trustees, State Central Planning Committee, etc. A hierarchical bureaucratic structure prevails.
5. Status is achieved through accomplishments, not inherited through aristocratic birth. There is an increasingly high degree of social mobility. Social roles are fluid and specialized.
6. People live increasingly in an urban setting. Values evolved in cities become those of society as a whole.
7. Sovereignty is seen to emanate from secular sanctions in the people and the ruler or government serves the people as a whole. Nation-state or other, larger political units are made possible by improved transportation and communication and the people are inculcated with nationalism as a means of insuring social control by the nation-state. In the case of multi-national federations such as the U.S., Canada or until recently, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, secular ideologies such as Democracy or Communism can provide the cohesion. (Recently religion has emerged as a revolutionary political force in some areas of the world and is serving as an ideologically unifying force much as nationalism or Communism. E.g. Iran, Iraq)
8. Integrated, highly differentiated governments with well-developed bureaucracies and a unified, secular system of law based on a rational assessment of the needs of society.
9. Mass educational systems aim at developing fundamental literacy to improve economic productivity and create paths for the inculcation of a sense of civic responsibility. Education is rooted in secular, scientific values that promote the political, economic and social integration of the modern state.
10. There is an increasingly large service sector.
11. Physical and social phenomena are explained by reason, rather than by religion or superstition.
12. There is a general acceptance of the concept of progress, which is rooted in economic development and which is seen to bring happiness. A sense of time rooted in productivity not nature.
13. There is a general improvement of health, measured through increased life span, reduced natal and infant mortality rates.

According to McKay, et. al. A History of World Societies, pp. 4

"The modern state is an organized territory with definite geographical boundaries that are recognized by other states. It has a body of law and institutions of government. If the state claims to govern according to law, it is guided in its actions by the law. The modern national state counts on the loyalty of its citizens, or at least a majority of them. It provides order so that citizens can go about their daily work and other activities. It protects its citizens in their persons and property. The state tries to prevent violence and to apprehend and punish those who commit it. It supplies a currency of medium of exchange that permits financial and commercial transactions. The state conducts relations with foreign governments. In order to accomplish even these minimal functions, the state must have officials, bureaucracies, laws and courts of law, soldiers, information, and money. States with these attributes are relatively recent developments."

Plano, Jack and Olton, Roy. International Relations Dictionary, Kalamazoo Michigan: Western Michigan University Press, 1979.

A social group which shares a common ideology, common institutions, and customs, and a sense of homogeneity. "Nation" is difficult to define so precisely as to differentiate the term from such other groups as religious sects, which exhibit some of the same characteristics. In the nation however, there is also present a strong group sense of belonging associated with a particular territory considered to be particularly its own. A nation may comprise part of a state, be coterminous with a state, or extend beyond the borders of a single state.

In common parlance the words "country," "state," and "nation" are often used synonymously, but they do not mean exactly the same thing. "Country" has geographical connotations, "state" expresses the legal organization of a society, but the term "nation" involves a sociocultural perception of the group. The hyphenated term nation-state aptly describes a socially and culturally homogeneous group possessing the legal organization to participate in international politics.

The spirit of belonging together, or the corporate will that seeks to preserve the identity of the group by institutionalizing it in the form of a state. Nationalism can be intensified by common social, linguistic, historical and religious ties. It is usually associated with a particular territory.