Aspects of social development in new countries: impacts of immigration on nation-building and state formation

Abstract

Nation-building and state formation have been primary aspects of social development in New Countries; i.e., the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, and Canada. Part of the reason for this is sought in the retardation of ethnic and geographic integration, deriving from the fact that these five countries have large territories and relatively short histories of settlement. These two properties in combination distinguish them from the rest of the world, particularly in respect to effects on social development. Moreover, as these countries have received the largest \ volume of immigration recorded in history, the problem of the ethnic and geographic integration involved in nation-building and state formation was reshaped during the mass immigration period of 1880 to 1930. The distinctive characteristics of their social development from settlement colonies to modern states have frequently been referred to in the social science literature and in the historiography of New Countries, but there has been little success in constructing a model of the social development in New Countries. Immigration studies, on the other hand, have been either too general or too specific to differentiate uniqueness from generality in the social effects of immigration in New Countries. In the present study, the process of nation-building and state formation is not analysed in economic or social psychological terms but from a social structural perspective. Social demographic data are analysed in conjunction with qualitative documents in order to explicate the interactive patterns of social classes. The analysis of social demographic data was facilitated by the decomposition of the total societal system into six dimensions of social differentiation: ethnic, regional, urban, family-role, industrial, and occupational. Special emphasis was given to changes in the ethnic, regional and urban dimensions because these three dimensions are directly related to nation-building and .state formation processes. However, changes in the other three dimensions are briefly discussed as well. The analysis of social demographic changes and changes generated by the interaction of social classes showed a parallelism in nation-building and state formation in particular, and social development in general, among these New Countries