European Journal zyxwvut of Political Research 27: zyxwvu 443-462, zyxwv 1995. zyxw 0 zyxw 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. Comparative politics and the decline of the nation-state in Western Europe JAN W. VAN DETH University of Mannheim, Germany zyxwvu 1. Introduction The world has seen dramatic changes is the last few years. This platitude is commonly illustrated by the collapse of the Soviet ‘empire’, the normalization of relations with South Africa and Vietnam, and the establishment of Pales- tinian self-rule in Gaza and Jericho. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall member- ship of the United Nations has increased, with some 25 new independent states. But while the number of national states is increasing rapidly, the uniqueness and independence of the types of political organizations are in decline. The world has become a global village with a dense network of interdependent trade relations, international exchanges, and competition for world market shares (Stubbs zyxwv & Underhill 1994). The end of the Cold War, then, seems to have stimulated a dual process of the creation of new national states on the one hand, and the decline of the relevance of this political unit on the other. Obviously, these developments have not failed to touch the field of com- parative politics. The lingering debate on the use of the national state as the primary unit of analysis seems to have reached yet another phase and several authors have pleaded for fundamental changes. For instance, Strange ob- serves that political developments all over the world share common roots and ‘the first imperative, therefore, is to stop clinging to the outworn assump- tions of comparative politics’ (1992: 308). Another specialist refers to extra- ordinary political changes’ everywhere which ‘make obsolete virtually all the conventional approaches to comparative politics’.’ A rather more prudent Daalder concludes that ‘comparative politics, then, stand before its greatest challenge yet. Never before were so many fundamental questions raised at one and the same time’ (1993: 30). These authors urge a new approach in comparative politics - not only in regions where new states are appearing, but also in the European case. Do we really need a ‘fundamental shift’ in our approaches, now that national states seem to be in a process of rapid This article is a modified version of a paper presented at the sessions on ‘The State of the Discipline’, 16th World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Berlin, Germany, 21-26 August 1994.