Introduction

In times of ‘cultural studies’ as a leading paradigm in historiography, a paper on institution building seems to be utterly outdated. Looking at institution building seems to belong to the suspicious tradition of ‘modernization theories’ in which institutions and their functional role were taken as crucial for any process of social change. The topic sounds like being part of the famous macrohistorical ‘master narratives’ of the past decades, focussing on ‘big structures’, but ignoring individuals and their experience, which for good reason have lost much of their attractiveness. In the opposite view, ‘Europeanization’ today is usually discussed in terms of identities, symbolic orders and cultural perceptions, but not in terms of structures or institutions. The newly risen interest in institutions that for a certain amount of time came up with the end of communism, in the meantime again has declined; even scholars, who in former times had little sense for culture in the explanation of social change, today have discovered culture as a crucial, if not as the decisive factor for ‘failed’ or ‘successful’ transformations. ‘Culture matters’, as S. Huntington and L. Harrison have claimed in a book discussing the preconditions of economic and social change. Francis Fukuyama has figured out that the cultural good of ‘trust’ is a major criterion for successful economic development, not formal institutions, and David Landes has explained world wide economic inequalities in terms of cultural preconditions.