Kasravi: The Integrative Nationalist of Iran National Integration
‘Political Modernization’ has become a sponge term. For some it has soaked up the process of building such centralized institutions as state bureaucracies, standing armies, and disciplined political parties. For others it is closely related to the breakdown of regionally independent agrarian economies into highly interdependent industrial economies. And yet for others, it is synonomous with the transformation of traditional cultures where subjects owe allegiance primarily to their parochial groups, and view themselves as distinctly detached from the central authorities, into modern cultures where citizens owe allegiance to the state, consider it their natural right and even civic duty to participate in public affairs, and feel that their political system - whether democratic or totalitarian — should have deep roots in the social system.
But in whatever specific way ‘political modernization’ is used, it is invariably associated with the general process of national integration: the integration of traditional decentralized administrations into centralized modern state bureaucracies; the integration of agrarian economies where there are few direct links between the regional units into industrial economies where these units are fused into one unitary and directly linked social system; the integration of rulers and ruled through institutions that stretch from the centre to various areas and layers at the periphery; the integration of exclusive bonds — such as to clans, tribes, religious sects. and regional groups — into more inclusive ties to the nation; and the integration of multi-cultural, multi-tribal, multi-lingual enpires into new nation-states often, if not always, with one political ideology, one culture, one language. and one national identity)
Although a.s early as the nineteenth century two such different minds as Marx and Durkheim both wrote on the transformation of independent agrarian units into inter-dependent industrial societies, it was not until quite recently that social scientists have focused their attention on the problem of political unification. This revival of interest is reflected in Clifford Geertz’s much quoted article ‘The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the \ew States’ which first appeared nine years ago in a collection of essays entitled Old Societies and New Nations: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa.2 In this work Geertz showed how newly independent countries were invariably confronted by the agonizing problem of reconciling traditional affiliations — such as ties to tribes, regions, religions, languages, and ethnic groups — into modern nation-states demanding the political allegiances of all their citizens. He concluded that this was one of the major ‘revolutions’ facing the emerging states of Africa and Asia.
‘l’he concept of political unification has also been used in a somewhat different fashion by Leonard Binder in his articles ‘Egypt: The Integrative Revolution’ and ‘National Integration and Political Development’.3 While for Geertz national integration means the aggregation of communal groups into nations, for Binder it signifies the closing of the wide gap between elites and masses through the building of new national values and state institutions.
