Dimensions of (Historical)
Comparisons
Risto Alapuro
Katisten Kartano, 28 February 2013
The justification of comparisons
• “Nobody who has studied and seen only France will
ever understand anything, I dare to say, about the
French revolution.” (Tocqueville 1952, 94)
• Comparisons help to ask better questions – to see what
it is that has to be explained. (Tilly 1981)
• A conventional definition: “In comparative history, two
or more historical phenomena are systematically
studied for similarities and differences in order to
contribute to their better description, explanation, and
interpretation” (Kocka and Haupt 2009, 2). – See Kocka
and Haupt 2009, 3-5.
• Example: The Finnish Civil War of 1918
Implication: unconnected units
• This view presupposes a relative autonomy of the cases
included in the comparison.
→
• “Paradoxically, the notion of separate and isolated units has
been especially easy to adopt in comparative research.”
(Kettunen 2006, 32)
• But: “In recent years both the Europeanization and the
globalization of economic and political life, and culture and
communication have created and intensified relations,
connections, entanglements and constellations that extend
beyond the borders between nation states, regions, and
civilizations.” (Kocka and Haupt 2009, 199)
How to react to the non-autonomy of
the cases in comparative research? (I)
• In the study of causal sequences (customary in
comparative research in the social sciences) you can
include “external factors” in the analysis:
• “In tracing a process, a researcher can easily consider
both internal and external elements. Thus an analysis
of capitalist development can consider the impact of
local factors and external factors, as well as
interactions between the two.” (Rueschemeyer and
Stephens 1997, according to Lange 2013, 80)
• Cf. the analysis of revolutionary challenges in the end
of World War I
How to react to the non-autonomy of
the cases in comparative research? (II)
• “Encompassing comparisons begin with a large
structure or process. They select locations within
the structure or process and explain similarities
or differences among those locations as
consequences of their relationship to the whole”
(Tilly 1984, 125)
• Immanuel Wallerstein: The Modern World-System
(1974)
• Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without
History (1982)
How to react to the non-autonomy of
the cases in comparative research? (III)
• Instead of accepting cross-national comparisons
as a taken-for-granted starting point for the
research, one can look at comparisons as an
object of study. One can consider the production
and reproduction of the conception of separate
national units both as a part of the making of the
nation-state and as an inherent part of current
globalization. (Pauli Kettunen, especially in
analyzing the use of “models” [like the “Nordic
model”] in comparative research)
Implication of the non-autonomy of
the cases for the analysis
• The Galton problem: the diffusion (see
Kleinschmidt 1991)
• Comparative research must take connections
between the compared cases into account:
“mutual perceptions and influences, transfers
and travels, migrations and trade, interaction,
relations of imitation and avoidance, shared
dependence from one and the same constellation
or common origin” (Kocka and Haupt 2009, 20).
Mutual dynamics, symmetry,
asymmetry
• The point: Asymmetry but also mutual dynamics (not
only diffusion):
• An example is the criticism of the “multiple
modernities approach”, which first identifies “the form
of modernity associated with the West and only then
examines “the cultural dynamics of other religions
and/or civilizations in comparison to it”. This is a
“diffusionist position”, or “a form of unacknowledged
Eurocentrism carried in the very methodology of
comparative analysis”. (Bhambra 2010, 133, 137, 139;
cf. Kaelble 2009, 34)]
An example: Histoire croisée
• Histoire croisee “asks that historians understand
their categories of analysis, as well as their
objects of study, as ‘entangled’ products of
national crossings. (…) Rather than proceeding on
the basis of established categories of ‘nation,’
‘state,’ or ‘society,’ histoire croisée orients itself
around problems, particularly the ‘entangled’
historical relationships between Germany and
France in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.” (Cohen and O’Connor 2004, xiv)
More generally:
• Entanglement history, history of transfer, integration history,
connected history, cross-national history, transnational history,
shared history, relations history, histoiré croisée and
Verflechtungsgeschichte” (entangled histories), …
• These approaches involve comparison as one of their dimensions:
“In order, as a historian, to recognize what is happening during a
transfer, one must compare the following: the position of the object
under investigation in its old context with that in its new context,
the social origins of the intermediaries and of the affected parties in
one country with those of another, terms in one language with
those of another, and finally the interpretation of a phenomenon
within the national culture from which it comes with that in which it
has been introduced” (Johannes Paulmann, cited in Kocka and
Haupt 2009, 20).
A combination of comparative and
transfer studies
• Transfer studies and comparisons need each other:
• (1) “Comparisons require the consideration of transfers
because transfers are a significant factor when addressing
convergence and divergence [between cases].”
• (2) “Transfer studies require comparison because it is only
through comparison that the delivering culture can be
distinguished from the receiving culture.” An example:
“When one argues that the German nation largely consists
of transfers from French culture, one must use comparison
to figure out what is German and what is French.”
• (Kaelble 2009, 35)
Comparison as an aspect of transfer studies (of crossnational history, or of the creation of national history)
• “Nations were made in a transnational arena, and
constructed, at least in part, by comparisons.”
• Example: “The nations which resulted from the
ruins of the Habsburg empire owed their form (…)
to American and British conceptions about the
proper composition of a nation.” Therefore
comparative histories must take into account “the
ideological function of comparisons in the
constitution of national differences.” (Cohen and
O’Connor 2004, xviii-xix)
• Cf. Kettunen.
The domestication framework
• At issue is “the creation and harmonisation of
global trends”:
• (1) “external models are never just adopted (…)
their meaning and consequences are different
from the original blueprint”,
• (2) “the role of local actors”: “compliance is often
presented as a voluntary move and adapted to
local conditions in order to save face”,
• (3) “the consideration of a reform in terms of
domestic frames of sense-making”
• (Alasuutari 2009, 66, 67)
Domestication framework as a
comparative approach?
• Domestication framework as a version of transfer
studies?
• Cf. Alasuutari 2009, 69: “it is (…) interesting to ask
how and why different nation-state government
actors, or individuals working in different
occupations or perhaps taking part in an
international organisation, compare each others’
practices, adopt and promote them as worldwide
models, and follow the same trends.”