State formation and nation-building in the Netherlands and the Soviet Union: a historical comparison

Abstract

The interrelated processes of state formation and nation-building are analysed for two cases: the Netherlands (1795-1960) and the Soviet Union . The central question is: how did these states deal with strong cultural (religious or ethnic) cleavages in its societies. In general, there are three options: elimination, marginalization, and institutionalization. In both states institutionalization was dominant, but the kind of institutionalization differed very much: 'personalistic' (the Netherlands) versus territorial (Soviet Union) institutionalization. The hypothesis has been put forward that, in general, institutionalization on a 'personalistic' basis will create more political stability.

The changing relationship between state and church/religion in the Netherlands

“…It prevented, for example, strong regionalism in the southern Catholic provinces of North-Brabant and Limburg, despite some efforts in that direction in Limburg (Knippenberg 1996;. Both confessional 'pillars' in particular developed into strong bulwarks of organisations and subcultures; the socialist 'pillar' was weaker and missed, for instance, its own educational institutions.…”

Problems in Measuring Diachronic Religious Behavior, or Using Indicators to ‘Make a Virtue of Necessity’: The Case of the Netherlands (1975–2005)

“…For a long time (after 1930), the Netherlands was a segmented or pillarized society, meaning, for example, that Catholics married other Catholics, sent their children to a Catholic school, got Catholic medical attendance, voted for a Catholic political party and so on (Dekker and Ester 1996). Although the phenomenon is now of less importance, it has become more widespread among Catholics, who are more closely knit and committed to developing this way of life than Protestants (Knippenberg 1998). The issue cannot be explored any further here, but we feel it likely that statements about belonging to a given denomination can also be influenced by factors that are largely unrelated to personal commitment in the religious sphere.…”

“…However, in many cases this is one of the few longterm variables available. This is partly because it is collected by census in some countries; in the Netherlands, for example, it was first recorded in this way in 1809 (Knippenberg 1998).…”

“…The complex variety of topics addressed by researchers that specialize in the evolution of religion includes a thread of debate focused on three frequently interconnected issues 1 : identifying the causes that triggered the process of secularization and when it started (De Graaf et al 2004;Knippenberg 1998Knippenberg , 2006Te Grotenhuis and Scheepers 2001), discovering the features of the trend and whether it is monotonic (Coleman 1978;De Graaf and Te Grotenhuis 2008;Eisinga et al 1996) and revealing the current state of this process-whether it is still increasing, has stopped or is decreasing (Greeley 2004;Lechner 1996;Stark and Iannaccone 1996).…”

Understanding culture in territorial management and its implications for spatial planning

“…Catholicism became predominant in most parts of the country a few centuries before the establishment of the first water board in the thirteenth century. The influences of Protestantism started in the northern part of the country in the fourteenth century and became prevalent in the seventeenth century, mainly in the north and the west of the present-day Netherlands (Israel 1995;Knippenberg 1998). More importantly, they are associated with different conceptions of the human-human relationship, which imply distinctive social organisation approaches, as described below.…”