of general processes with universal validity. The same processes should by and large
yield the same outcomes irrespective of time, place and local culture. Socio-economic
and political evolution proceed in the same way everywhere following similar stages
of development. This line of thinking broadly characterizes scholars associated with
modernization theory, such as Rostow (1960), Deutsch and Foltz (1963), and Pye and
Verba (1963). Although this school of thought was losing popularity once it became
apparent that the Third World countries were not following the same path of
development as the Western countries, it remained influential among certain political
and cultural theorists. Today the idea that socio-economic development drives the
same process of value change everywhere around the globe is, for instance, clearly the
key message of Ronald Ingleharfs work. He argues that as agricultural societies
industrialize they will experience a cultural change from traditional religious to
rational secular value orientations. Additionally, as industrialized societies become
post-industrial, so their citizens will gradually consider post-materialist values to be
more important than materialist ones (Inglehart and Welzel 2005).
The particularists, by contrast, assert that social change does not follow the
same logic of development everywhere. Countries, regions and cultures evolve in
their own unique way, showing qualitatively different paths of socio-economic
development. As Bendix (1964: 1 ) puts it:
Belief in the universality of evolutionary stages has been replaced by the realization
that the momentum of past events and the diversity of social structures lead to
different paths of development, even where the changes of technology are identical.
Scholars associated with this school of thought tend to understand culture as an
enduring phenomenon shaping rather than being shaped by political and socio-
economic processes (e.g. Huntington 1996; Putnam 1993). A distinction can be drawn
between hard-line and more moderate particularists. While the former assign absolute
primacy to culture and civilization as the drivers of human agency (e.g. Huntington
1996), the latter do not deny that modernization has produced commonalities among
countries with similar levels of development but argue that despite these
homogenizing pressures cultural and institutional differences persist. It is among the
latter that we can place scholars who have identified various regimes of capitalism
and scholars who have pointed to lasting differences between countries in the strength
of civic culture. Authors of the first-named group include Hutton (1995), who has
contrasted the shareholder model of the English-speaking countries to the stakeholder
model of mainland Europe, and Esping Andersen (1990), who has distinguished three
enduring regimes of welfare capitalism among western states. Typical representatives
of the second group are Kohn (1944, 1994), who claimed that a civic brand of
nationalism prevails in western Europe and an ethnic illiberal variety predominates in
central and eastern Europe, and Brubaker (1992), who argued that the contrasting
principles on which the immigration and citizenship policies of France and Germany
are based (Ius Solis versus Ius Sanguinis) are rooted in different conceptions of the
nation (civic in France; ethnic in Germany).
As social cohesion in many definitions is understood as a broad phenomenon
incorporating cultural, social, economic and political elements, it is pertinent to
explore the concept in the light of the two contrasting perspectives. Is social cohesion
a phenomenon that correlates closely with stages of socio-economic development? If
so, the universalist view would be supported. Or can we identify enduring
qualitatively different regimes of social cohesion among countries in a similar stage of