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Transnationalism.

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 Transnational / Transnationalism
Religious ideas, religious practices, and the struc-
tures of religious organizations extend across the
borders of nation states and national societies.
This is true of Judaism, of the highly centralized
and globally active Catholic Church, and of the
decentralized yet internationally interconnected
Protestant communities (such as the Pentecostal
and “born again” churches) and the Ummah as
the worldwide community of Islamic people.
This is also true of Buddhism, Hinduism, and
Confucianism. Although nation states play a key
role in the place of religion, transnational social
dynamics have also been decisive.
The Concepts of Transnationalism,
Transnationality, and
Transnationalization
The term transnationalism first gained popular-
ity in the social sciences in the 1990s. It refers to
social relations and groups that extend across the
borders of nation states. Transnationality is used
to describe a specific quality of social phenomena
such as power or social inequality. While transna-
tionality refers to structures and outcomes, trans-
nationalization focuses on the process and the
making of social relations and textures spanning
across national borders. The focus on transnation-
alism, transnationality, and transnationalization
is not meant to imply that nation states are less
important, let alone dying out, but that nation
states are no longer the exclusive containers of the
social.
There are three major definitions of
transnationalization:
(1) In a broad sense transnationalization refers to
the fact that socially relevant phenomena and pro-
cesses extend across the borders of nations and
nation states, which is what makes them transna-
Pries L_Transnational.indd 1
tional. Examples are the Internet and fast-food
chains.
(2) The social sciences take a somewhat nar-
rower perspective of transnationalization, which
here refers to the strengthening of social relations
in interaction itself. Here it is not the material
infrastructure of fiber optic cables in the Internet
but the social practice of cross-border interchange
and mobility, as in emailing, phoning, and travel-
ing. Transnational relationships are distinguished
from inter-state and inter-governmental ones in
the sense of international relations in political
science. Transnationalization here means the
intensification of the social interaction not of states
or big corporate actors but of normal persons,
such as migrants, and of collective actors, such as
Greenpeace. In this broader sense the terms “trans-
national” and “cross-border” are interchangeable.
Transnationalization here means “globalization
from below,” as opposed to corporate and state “glo-
balization from above.”
(3) In an even narrower sense transnational-
ization refers to the extension and intensification
of social entities, normally treated as nested uni-
locally in nation states, that span across national
societies. Transnational families, transnational
organizations, and transnational labor markets are
examples of transnational social units that span
pluri-locally across nation states without having a
clear center. These social units are not just ephem-
eral encounters but dense and durable social
entanglements. They are social networks or social
spaces. In this sense “transnationalization” is used
to distinguish this specific concept from other
forms of cross-border phenomena and processes
like “globalization,” “mondialization,” “cosmopoli-
tanism,” “diasporization,” “supranationalization,”
and “glocalization.”
The suitability of the terms transnationalism
and transnationalization depends on the existence
of nations, nation states, and national societies,
2/10/2015 5:54:42 PM
 2 Transnational / Transnationalism
for anything transnational can exist only as long
as there are nations which can serve as referents
of the term. In this sense transnationalization is
used in deliberate contrast to the concepts of “de-
territorialization,” “globalization,” and “cosmopoli-
tanization” according to which national/territorial
boundaries and, even more, geographical/spatial
connections are becoming less and less impor-
tant. The concept of transnationalization, then, is
used to counter not only what Andreas Wimmer
and Nina Glick Schiller (2002) call “methodologi-
cal nationalism”—the assumption that national
societies, as defined by the boundaries of nation-
states, are the main units of analysis in social
science—but also the concepts of deterritorializa-
tion, liquefaction, and virtualization, and the over-
all idea that in the future social processes will no
longer be connected to specific spatial locations.
Transnationalism and the Nation State
Transnationalization is by no means a new phe-
nomenon. Social relationships and social spaces
that extend beyond the boundaries of the preva-
lent forms of socialization have always existed.
Examples include traveling adventurers and itin-
erant traders in antiquity, religious networks, and
major organizations that have spanned the bound-
aries of principalities and feudal realms since the
beginning of Catholicism, and economic service
providers that connected large trading cities and
continents, such as the Fugger family and the
Hanseatic League. When, in the eighteenth cen-
tury, ideas of national units in the form of mod-
ern nation-states and national societies began
to take hold, many of the historical structures of
social space which had come to extend beyond
the territorial boundaries that used to separate dif-
ferent social units—and thus to connect them—
became transnational in a wider sense of the term.
Consequently, the nationalization of certain pro-
cesses such as the emergence of social classes and
the concept of public education has always been
accompanied by the continued existence of social
Pries L_Transnational.indd 2
practices such as long-distance trade and royal
intermarriage.
Transnationalization, when understood in
this sense, depends on the emergence of modern
national societies that are demarcated by nation-
state boundaries. In Europe there has emerged the
concept of nations as “imagined communities”
(see Anderson 1983). This idea refers to the for-
mation of collective identities which provide the
structure for membership rights that are relevant
to the lives of the members of these communities.
These rights include the rights to housing, educa-
tion, work, freedom of movement, and social secu-
rity. After centuries of religious conflict between
Catholics and Protestants, the Peace of Augsburg
of 1555 and, more, the Peace of Westphalia of
1648 established the binding principle of cuius
regio, eius religio, which required that all those
who lived within the territorial boundaries of a
sovereign state have the same religion—that of
their ruler. This Westphalian order culminated in
the twentieth-century concept of national soci-
eties as relatively culturally homogeneous units
which are clearly separated by the boundaries of
nation-state “containers.” There should be only
one homogeneous social space within a given geo-
graphical territory. All residents should have the
same language, religion, culture, ethnic identity,
and tradition, and every national society, in its
role of an imagined social unit, should have one,
and only one, geographic or territorial point of
reference.
The idea of national societies that are homoge-
neous in this sense has been the guiding principle,
though not the reality, of social development in
Europe in the modern age. The nationalization of
the central aspects and mechanisms of socializa-
tion was conceptualized as one of the main pillars
of modernization—alongside individualization,
urbanization, secularization, rationalization, and
functional differentiation. This “cutting to size” of
certain dynamics of social development to make
them fit the units of analysis of national societies
characterizes the comparative sociological study
of modernization.
2/10/2015 5:54:42 PM
 Transnational / Transnationalism
In the twentieth century, modernization was
analyzed mainly as the diffusion of social values,
practices and institutions from one national soci-
ety to another—for example, as the dissemina-
tion of rationality, democracy, social welfare, and
secularity from the West to the rest of the world.
Although the social reality of so-called multi-
ethnic states and multi-cultural societies was
acknowledged, the majority of theoretical and
empirical studies in social sciences assumed what
is known as methodological nationalism: “the
assumption that the nation/state/society is the
natural social and political form of the modern
world” (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002: 302).
Ulrich Beck, drawing on the ideas of Wimmer
and Glick Schiller, has proposed that the previ-
ously dominant perspective be replaced with what
he calls “methodological cosmopolitanism,” a new
perspective which focuses on “the increasing
interdependence of social actors across national
boundaries” (Beck 2004: 30). Even more radically,
John Urry, in Sociology Beyond Societies, has argued
that the focus of sociological research should move
away from “the ‘social as society’” to “the ‘social as
mobility’ ” (2001: 2). Urry notes that sociology as a
discipline is “organised around networks, mobility
and horizontal fluidities” (2001: 3). He claims that,
to examine the present-day ‘post-societal’ situa-
tion, a sociology must be developed which draws
on metaphors that focus on “movement, mobility
and contingent ordering, rather than upon stasis,
structure and social order” (2001: 18).
The sweeping criticism that Beck and Urry
level at twentieth-century sociology—the procla-
mation that the structures and patterns of social
order of national societies are in a process of
disintegration—is questioned by the approach of
transnationalization. While globalization is indeed
a challenge to the paradigm of nation states and
national societies, nation states and socialization
based on national structures continue to be impor-
tant. Therefore the alternatives “either globalism
or methodological nationalism” are not adequate.
Global, transnational, and national social relations
and entities are of increasing importance at the
Pries L_Transnational.indd 3
3
same time. Transnationalization is only one com-
ponent of a more complex multi-level model of
relating systematically social spaces—family life,
working space, religious practices, collective iden-
tities, claims making, and social movements—to
their corresponding geographic configurations—
local, national, transnational, global (see Pries 2001
and 2008; Vertovec 2004). The transnationalism
research of the last twenty years has produced a
wide range of empirical studies (see Khagram and
Levitt 2007), including the book series Routledge
Research in Transnationalism and the journal
Global Networks.
Implications for Social Policy
The concept of national societies—of entities
defined by the territorial boundaries of nation
states—might be regarded as an historical inven-
tion, a principle conveniently invoked to justify
nationalism, racism, and violence. But national
societies have also proved reliable frameworks for
individual and collective actors for several cen-
turies. Transnationalization began at the same
time as the nationalization of the social. Since
about the last quarter of the twentieth century the
everyday lives and social practices of an increas-
ing number of persons (work, leisure, communica-
tion, information acquisition), the frameworks of
reference of their values (human rights, social jus-
tice, fair trade, protection from tyranny), and the
role and use of artifacts (television, the Internet,
airplanes) are no longer restricted to any one
territory. Countries now act as hubs of migration
and global values.
But the fact that socialization is subject to
increasing internationalization does not mean that
geographical spaces, geography itself, and nation-
states have become less important. The “national”
in “transnationalization” shows that both nation
states and national societies continue to shape
social policy. Nation states and national societies
dominate the ways collectives perceive themselves
and others (collective identities), political groups
2/10/2015 5:54:42 PM
 4 Transnational / Transnationalism
(parliaments, governments, political parties),
everyday life (families, leisure), work and employ-
ment (companies, unions), and social welfare
(healthcare, pension funds). But many of these
aspects of social entanglements and socialization
processes transcend the borders of national soci-
eties. Transnationalism and transnationalization
capture some aspects of these border-crossing
phenomena. Globalism and globalization capture
other ones.
The transnationalization of socialization has
implications for social policy that can hardly be
overestimated. Transnational social spaces raise
questions of the establishment or adaptation of
multiple membership rights, from social security
to citizenship. Social integration can no longer
be restricted to a single place but rather must be
seen as an open and unpredictable social pro-
cess of increasing interconnectedness of per-
sons on local, regional, national, supranational,
global, glocal, diasporic, and transnational levels.
Transnationalization also increases the risk that
only actors who can articulate themselves appro-
priately or who have strong lobbying power will
be able to make themselves heard on the various
levels. Still, transnationalization should not be
regarded as a threat to social stability and nation-
state control, even if transnational crime, from
tax evasion to human and arms trafficking, are an
increasing challenge. Above all, transnationaliza-
Pries L_Transnational.indd
View publication stats 4
tion may bring about new forms of social diver-
sity that extends across different places and social
cohesion beyond fragmentations that are limited
to one place.
Bibliography
Anderson, B., Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism, New York, 1983.
Beck, U., Der kosmopolitische Blick oder: Krieg ist Frieden,
Frankfurt/Main, 2004.
Khagram, S., and P. Levitt, The Transnational Studies
Reader: Intersections and Innovations, London, 2007.
Pries, L. (ed.), Rethinking Transnationalism: The Meso-
link of Organisations, London, 2008.
———, New Transnational Social Spaces: International
Migration and Transnational Companies, London,
2001.
Urry, J., Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the
Twenty-first Century, London, 2001.
Vertovec, S., “Migrant Transnationalism and Modes of
Transformation,” International Migration Review
38(3): 970–1001, 2004.
Wimmer, A., and N. Glick Schiller, “Methodological
Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building,
Migration and the Social Sciences,” Global Networks
2: 301–334, 2002.
Ludger Pries
2/10/2015 5:54:43 PM