University of Heidelberg

This Research Area deals with the cultural flows through which concepts, institutions and practices that have to do with governance and administration are transferred across cultures locally, regionally, or globally, and are reconfigured in a continuous but non-linear historical process. It sets out to discover, in all three realms, the particular factors pushing, pulling, and blocking such flows and translating their contents, to map the transculturally shared but mostly intangible basic features that result from this process, and to trace the dynamics in which the concerned cultures deal with a perceived asymmetry in their governance and administration.

With the postmodern and postcolonial shift in some trends of scholarship to the study of transgressions of borders, norms, and other instruments of state order and to a focus on subaltern actors, the ongoing research relevance of state, governance, and administration has been questioned. While these forays away from the normative into the areas of the transgressive have opened important new fields of research and perspective, the case for disregarding the importance of governance and administration is not convincing.

The field of study of governance and administration has been the domain of political science approaches that took their point of departure from the internal dynamics of a given (Western) polity and privileged comparison of the relative effectiveness of different systems against a given set of extraneous standards. Similar approaches have been chosen by historians comparing, for example, the effectiveness of the Roman and the Han Empires in their management of a large and ethnically diverse population and their being threatened from neighbours with high military prowess.

Two assumptions support this approach, that of a set of “objective” problems, which human polities will have to solve independent of their cultural make-up, and that of a set of basic features of human nature, which prompts largely predictable actions and reactions, again independent of cultural environment. While such a comparative approach has the merit of highlighting features by contrast, it falls short of the overwhelming if largely unstudied evidence of the actual flows of concepts, institutions, and practices of governance and administration across national and cultural borders, which operates in fact both as a shared heritage and a common platform for trading experiences, for polemics, and for debate. This common heritage and platform provides the basis for formal transnational institutions and informal transnational networks. Systems competition concerning internal administration between states as well as interaction between states operates on the basis of both national interest and a large shared but underground set of features (down to the details, in the modern age, of constitutional stipulations, notions of “order”, or the legitimacy of mandatory inoculation programmes for children), which have resulted from cultural flow. This is an ongoing process in which concepts and strategies of Czar Peter the Great, Emperor Wilhelm, and the CPSU merge with those from Walt Rostow or John Rawls, but also the experiences of other Asian nations. The particular trajectories followed by modernising Asian states and their leaders when expanding their functions to the point of becoming the agent educating both traditional elites and common people in modernity show striking similarities due to their common point of reference, but also highlight in their differences the importance of the cultural context in which they unfolded. An analysis of the process of this global flow that will make these features visible through their multiple and contested reconfigurations and understandable in the particular local historical context of these reconfigurations will give historical and cultural depth to a scholarly understanding of governance and administration across cultures and promises to offer an improved framework for analysis of past political history and informed action in the present.