Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation-state building, migration and the social sciences
Author(s)
Wimmer, Andreas
Abstract
Methodological nationalism is understood as the assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form of the modern world. This paper distinguishes three modes of methodological nationalism that have characterized mainstream social science, and then shows how these have influenced research on migration. The authors discover parallels between nationalist thinking and the conceptualization of migration in postwar social sciences. In a historical tour d’horizon, the authors show that this mainstream concept has developed in close interaction with nation-state building processes in the West and the role that immigration and integration policies have played within them. The shift towards a study of ‘transnational communities’ – the last phase in this process – was more a consequence of an epistemic move away from methodological nationalism than of the appearance of new objects of oservation. The paper concludes by recommending new concepts for analysis that, on the one hand, are not colored by methodological nationalism and, on the other hand, go beyond the fluidism of much contemporary social theory.
