Wimmer, Andreas and Nina Glick Schiller. 2002. Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-state Building, Migration and the Social Sciences. Global Networks 2 (4): 301-334.

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Transnationalism is not something new, not a byproduct of a post-Cold War globalisation, but something that has simply been eclipsed by “methodological nationalism”, the authors argue:

What we discover in this twilight is how transnational the modern world has always been, even in the high days when the nation-state bounded and bundled most social processes. Rather than a recent offspring of globalization, transnationalism appears as a constant of modern life, hidden from a view that was captured by methodological nationalism. (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002: 302).

The authors provide an outline of how migration and migrants were perceived and how methodological nationalism shaped these views. Over time, migrants come to be seen as destroying three proclaimed isomorphisms, first between people and sovereignty, then people and nation, and finally between people and the “solidarity group” of a social state. And, they simply do not fit the sedentarist conceptions of nation-state builders.

The authors describe four phases in this historical shift:

• a very open phase with hardly any restrictions on movement between 1870-1918, in industrialised countries happily absorbed immigrant workers. By the beginning of the WW1 almost all states had abolished passport and visa systems.
• This open phase was followed by a phase of closure between 1919 and 1949, in which the immigrant is blamed for everything that was wrong with industrial modernity.
• 1946-89: The cold war, in which Western nation-states reimagine their roots and forget about immigrant labour that helped shape their prosperity.
• 1990 to present: the various approaches to globalisation and their attempts to overcome or at least rethink the nation-state as natural scale of analysis.

Together with Prasenjit Duara’s appeal to rescue history from the nation (Duara 1995), and Willem van Schendel’s call to jump scale and think beyond and across the borders of area studies (Schendel 2002), this article advocates an agenda of great importance to the Neighbouring China project. However, the four phases described by the authors have very little to say about migration and its perception in the region I am concerned with.

References

Duara, Prasenjit. 1995. Rescuing History From the Nation : Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Schendel, Willem van. 2002. Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20 (6): 647-668.