Recent challenges to the unity of the nation-state in advanced industrial societies have surprised most of us. Scotland, Quebec, Flanders, Occitania, bCatalonia and other regions have made life more interesting politically and more confusing intellectually. While the emergence of ethnic consciousness, or concern with ethnic identity, appears nearly universal across Europe and North America (or indeed around the globe)nationalist movements—demands for autonomy or outright separation—are not equally strong: the nationalism of the Scots, the Basques, Catalans, Croats, Flemish, and Quebecois is far more powerful than that of the Alsatians, Bretons, South Italians, and the Occitents.

This paper is a semiological attempt to derive meaning from the recent reconceptualization of the German nation: the thesis of the separate socialist nation as advanced by the Socialist Unity Party (SED) of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Before entering upon the question of how the-socialist nation of the GDR is defined and what this definition means in contrast to the definition of the nation current in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), we may well ask whether it makes any difference. In spite of the furor aroused by this idea in the West German press, non-Germans may legitimately wonder whether it is not silly to quibble over whether to the GDR a separate state or a separate nation.

This essay outlines research that has occupied much of my time for the past several years. It concerns regional associations in traditional China, or what is known as hui-kuan or tung-hsiang-hui. When I began this research, inspired in part by Ho Ping-ti's masterful survey (1966), I believed, as did Ho, that most of the stones on this particular field of knowledge had been turned.What remained to be done, it seemed to me, was to record the vicissitudes of these traditional associations in the modernizing atmosphere of early twentieth-century China. But the more I began to look into these associations—into the way they operated, what they implied about Chinese society, and how they seemed to put the countryside into the city—the less I felt I knew and the less I was satisfied with previous generalizations made about them.

Western sociology, which mirrors the dynamic development of modern industrialised and urbanised society, has not escaped the need for radical division of work; and many of the social institutions of Western society have been made subjects of sociological specialisation. These treat various kinds of human activity as fixed behaviour patterns which, up to a point, exist in their own right but cannot be divorced from their social background. A society cannot be understood without examining its specific institutions; conversely, these can be understood only in the context of that society.

Social scientists left and right have long engaged in the project of identifying the conditions under which revolutionary, class-conscious social movements emerge. This project aims at prediction, in the hope of either promoting social revolutions or preventing them. Until quite recently both Marxist and liberal social scientists have focussed on “modern” urban social classes as the generators of revolution: the bourgeoisie, the intellectuals, the industrial proletarlat. But paradoxically, though Marx summarily dismissed the peasantry as so many “potatoes in a sack,” and despite the generality of working-class social movements, the major revolutions of our time have been made largely by country people, to the extent that they were made by social movements at all. Thus two major issues take shape in the study of revolutions. One, how and why do peasants—allegedly “premodern” and conservative—defy the laws of social science and becomerevolutionary agents? What is it about rural social conditions that enabled them to dynamite the old order? Two, what is the relationship between revolutionary social movements on the one hand, and revolutionary outcomes on the other? A movement entails the collective action of a class whose ideology may be described as more or less radical; a revolution entails the overhauling of a social structure. In this context, no matter how ideologically “revolutionary” a social movement may be, it is but one of the causal elements that converge to produce social revolution.

Early in 1964, the recently independent Belgian Congo (now Zaire) experienced a wave of unrest sparked by a rebellion in its Kwilu province. Under the leadership of Pierre Mulele, the movement established control over an entire region for a period of nearly two years. The initial success of Mulelism encouraged a series of further uprisings which brought the central government to the brink of collapse. Although the Kwilu rebellion was ultimately reduced by a combination of military force and regional economic stagnation and thus failed in its objectives, it has attracted considerable scholarly attention because it aptly illustrates the processes whereby social movements in the postwar Third World originate and evolve.