Globalization, Nationalism, and the Future of Area Studies*

Who Needs American Studies? Globalization, Nationalism, and the Future of Area Studies*

Boris Vormann

ABSTRACT

Since the mid-1970s the United States and other North Atlantic nation-states have been under- going complex processes of state restructuring. In this context, many authors have predicted the ‘end of the nation,’ the ‘end of territory,’ even the ‘end of history.’ What is the future of area studies such as American Studies—which have traditionally been premised on the assumption of national societies—in an emerging, allegedly postnational world? This article contends that both nations and nation-states have by no means been overcome, despite pervasive arguments to the contrary. While nations and nation-states might have changed in form, they have gained importance in facilitating seemingly detached flows of globalization, providing a rich and largely understudied field of research. Area studies can serve as a research strategy to challenge existing, methodologically nationalistic perspectives without falling into the extreme of ignoring the category of the national altogether—as American Studies after the transnational turn has tended to do. I argue that Ameri- can Studies will remain relevant in the future, not only because the nation and the nation-state continue to be important categories worthy of more intense study, but also because critical area studies, if they take a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, can serve as a remedy against one often neglected form of methodological nationalism that has consequences beyond the immediate concerns of American Studies and area studies, namely academic specialization.

Introduction

A prevalent opinion among scholars and the wider public has it that nations and nation-states are relicts of the nineteenth century that are rapidly unravelling—if they have not become obsolete already. Given intensifying processes of globalization, many insist that nation-states are losing the political and economic capacities that used to characterize them as institutional entities during the heyday of the industrial revolu- tions in Europe and North America, or even during mid-twentieth-century Atlantic Fordism. Modernity, it appears to some, has swallowed its own children (e. g., Beck). That multinational corporations seem to be operating outside the purview of individual nation-state economies is one reason for this perception: the political economy of the nation-state is no longer the horizon of action for economic players gone global. As a correlate of increased economic exchange and as a reaction to past and potential military conflicts, new international organizations have formed that, at least in principle, equally compromise nation-state jurisdictions. Finally,

* This article builds on a paper which I presented at the symposium “The Discourse of the National in the Humanities” at the University of Oslo on May 29, 2013. I would like to thank the participants of the symposium for their critical feedback, particularly Ida Jahr and Winfried Fluck, as well as Ingo Kolboom for his remarks on earlier versions of the manuscript. Also, I am very grateful for the helpful comments offered by my friend and colleague Gina Caison. 388 Boris Vormann to name a last argument often mobilized in such debates, unprecedented streams of migration have led to new identity regimes in transnational diasporas, further undermining the affective power of the nation and shifting collective identity regimes from its national confines to non-territorial, individualized, and globally networked communities of belonging. Although, as some would add (e. g., Appa- durai), we can certainly observe disjunctures between the cultural, political, and economic dimensions of globalization, nation-states are generally ceding power to entities and organizations on other scales and levels, or so the argument goes. If, for the moment, we accept these assumptions, what does this disintegration of the national—as a horizon of action and belonging—imply for academic fields that have been erected on the epistemological assumption of national societies? Uni- versities and academic disciplines had been part and parcel of nineteenth-century nation-building projects in Europe and North America. Their graduates were to be educated and recruited as members of specialized elites in increasingly bureaucra- tized national societies. Consider, for instance, the formation of ‘cadres’ in France, where the grandes écoles such as the École normale supérieure (founded in 179), the École Polytechnique (1794), and the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (1794) were created as channels to further national (economic and technological) development and to spread the secular values of the French Revolution through a new generation of teachers, artists, and historiographers. In France, as well as in other European and North American national societies, academia served as a vehicle to stipulate, solidify, and legitimate narratives of the nation, transforming the myth of a common national past into pseudo-objective truth claims (Vormann, Zwischen). This canonized knowledge, of course, was to equally affect common perceptions of what a nation was, thereby naturalizing the category of the national as the norm, as the obvious container for a society, as the main organizing principle and forum for economic development and political action. In what some would call a postnational era, this history of knowledge formation begs the question whether we need to rethink the structures of academia, so deeply enmeshed with the nation. This question needs to be posed with even more vigor when it comes to area studies, which have tended to take the nation for granted as a research subject—not just as the fertile ground for their growth as institutional entities. American Studies, for instance, has been tied to U. S. nationalism since its inception and has had dif- ficulties separating itself from it over the course of the twentieth century. The notion that the United States offered an exceptional case was one of the tenets of the field’s founders in the 1930s, equipping researches with a common “horizon of intelligi- bility,” an “interpretive paradigm,” and an “overarching orientation” (Pease, “Ex- ceptionalism” 108). The United States was envisaged as a role model of liberalism and social progress for the rest of the world, providing a sharp contrast to Europe’s history of social classes and warfare. The notion of ‘newness’ offered a promising alternative and a credible solution in overcoming socialism, and begged academic interrogation. Throughout the Cold War this transatlantic tension bolstered Ameri- can Studies, providing researchers in the field with a legitimate cause.1

1 The global antagonism with the Soviet Empire, according to Daniel T. Rogers, created in the U.S. the yearning for a “proof of its own uniqueness” (21). What exceptionalism meant in Who Needs American Studies? 389

Prompted by the assumed impact of globalization processes on nation-states, many American Studies scholars have recently called for a ‘transnational turn’ to end the field’s complicity with U. S. nation-state power, imperialism, and Ameri- can exceptionalism (e. g., Fishkin; Elliott). In this article, I suggest that the coun- tertactics that have been proposed to transcend the national—through a focus on fluid borderlands and the disinterpellation of others—are not as critical and emancipatory as it might seem. By implying a postnational era, transnational Americanists tend to overlook the continuing political, economic, and cultural relevance of both the nation and the nation-state. Instead, I argue that nations and nation-states should remain important objects of critical analysis. However, I also argue that the existing disciplinary division of labor might not be adequate for this task.

Some Conceptual Distinctions

How do changes in the political economy actively reflect the shapes and forms of research fields? Do subsystems of academia become redundant? And what kinds of knowledge do we need that might emerge out of existing disciplinary and canonical structures? To specify these questions and tackle them within the brief scope of this essay: is there a future for academic fields premised on the national in a postnational world? And, more precisely: have area studies such as American Studies become irrelevant due to shifts in the global political economy and the changing capacities of nation-states? These questions immediately raise two follow-up questions regarding the terms of our debate. First, do we live in a postnational world? What is the role of the nation and the nation-state today and in the future, given such processes of globalization? This makes it necessary to both specify what we mean by ‘globalization’ and to indicate where we draw the line between a nation and a nation-state. Would the end of the nation-state entail the end of the nation? And, vice versa, would the decline of a national community automatically result in the demise of the nation-state? Another aspect that needs to be addressed if we want to come to grips with the future of area studies under changing social realities is the problem of methodological nationalism. This engages a second and distinct set of questions: are we, still today, reifying the category of the national? Are we ignoring certain social groups and actors of society because of mindsets that have been stuck in the nineteenth century, despite ongoing political, economic, and cultural change? It is important to start out with a critical distinction, which is already antici- pated in these two sets of questions; that is, on the one hand, the nation as a field this context was not that the United States were simply different from other nations. Rather, to use Rogers’s words, this form of exceptionalism juxtaposed “one’s own nation’s distinctiveness to every other people’s sameness—to general laws and conditions governing everything but the special case at hand. […] Different from what? Different from the universal tendencies of history, the ‘normal fate of nations, the laws of historical mechanics itself” (23). Even the name ‘American Studies’ as a frequent synonym for ‘U.S. studies’ reveals the inherent contradictory logic which begins to break down internally. 390 Boris Vormann of knowledge, and on the other, as a category of knowledge. Put differently, we need to distinguish between the nation as a subject of analysis and as a prism through which we see society. To be sure, this distinction cannot always be so easily maintained—also because the university, being part of society, takes on a role in the ways in which we understand that given society—, but it is an important difference to discern because deconstructing the nation analytically does not necessarily entail a deconstruction of the concept (as a structure of orientation) in actual practice. The continued relevance of nations and nation-states, I contend, bears important implications for both area studies’ possible reach and its necessary set of approaches. In what follows, I address each of these two aspects—of the nation as a field and as a category—in order to respond to the question if fields of research such as area studies are still relevant in the current ‘global’ conjuncture. After clarifying some of the definitions, I firstly turn to the nation as an empirical fact. In a second step, I address the problem of methodological nationalism. I argue that we should be prudent in our use of the terms ‘postnational’ and ‘transnational’ because, perhaps counter-intuitively, the nation-state fulfills pivotal roles in processes of globalization. Although it is important to deconstruct national myths, genealogies, and rituals from a theoretical point of view, it is also crucial not to forget the ways in which the category of the national can still be mobilized in political practice as well as the role that it serves as a mediator between individuals, groups, and institutions of the state. The debate about methodological nationalism is an important first step in precisely this direction. Therefore, I extend common notions of methodological nationalism by adding a third dimension, that is, disciplinary specialization. I close by arguing that American Studies, if it wants to remain relevant in a critical sense, needs to be interdisciplinary and comparative. One of its central tasks will be not to evade the question of the national but to tackle it.

What Is a Nation? And What Is a Nation-State?

I offer a few preliminary remarks about what a nation is and how it relates to the nation-state and to sentiments of nationalism because it is precisely the confu- sion of these categories that leads us to draw problematic conclusions about the present importance of nations and nation-states and their potential future under processes of globalization. When Ernest Renan posed his question “Qu’est-ce que la nation?” in an often- cited lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1882, he famously answered in the nega- tive, that “Man is a slave neither of his race nor his language, nor of his religion, nor of the course of rivers nor of the direction taken by mountain chains. A large aggregate of men, healthy in mind and warm of heart, creates the kind of moral conscience which we call a nation” (53). The nation, according to Renan, was not determined by ethnic, racial, or geographic factors, but constituted a daily plebiscite by individuals (read: by men). In his opinion, the nation was “a spiritual principle,” “a soul,” a “large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the Who Needs American Studies? 391 future” (52-53). Not yet did Renan ask whether the nation had shaped his cognitive faculties—as we do when we speak, for instance, of methodological nationalism— instead he was interested in the nation as a subject of analysis in and of itself. The notion of the spiritual principle and the daily plebiscite underlined the voluntaris- tic principle of his concept of the nation. This was an important starting point for later constructivist analyses (both of civic and ethnic nationalisms), which could dismantle invented traditions, grand narratives, and myths of origin of the nation and thereby begin to question the notion of a primordial and glorious national past whose beginning lay in time immemorial (e. g., Hobsbawm; Geary). This discursive understanding of the nation, of course, reverberates in Benedict Anderson’s influential analysis of nations as “imagined communities,” which he de- fines as “limited” and “sovereign”—limited in the sense of exclusive and sovereign in the sense of territorial. This definition and its seemingly interdisciplinary insistence on the importance of both imaginary and territorial exclusiveness somewhat obscures the fact that Anderson’s account lacks a theory that links the nation with the state-building project. Indeed, the strong definition of the nation as an imagined community blurs the concepts of the nation and the nation-state. Researchers too often elide this distinction, and one important reason for this is that after Anderson, the nation has come to be regarded as a shared culture, language, and identity— while the state and its institutional logics have been swept under the rug. At the same time, both categories, that of the nation and that of the nation- state, have been referred to as though they shared a meaning. This was not necessarily the consequence of intentional acts, but rather of intense disciplinary specialization: how could cultural studies scholars or linguists legitimately judge the development of state institutions? And how would political scientists and economists, in increasingly mathematized research fields, interpret nation-states as something else than a set of institutions, self-interested actors, and external constraints? Doubtless, the cultural turn has reached the social sciences (Sayer). And certainly, cultural sociologists help us bridge certain cleavages and enable disciplines in the humanities to take into consideration the importance of material developments in the political economy on discourses and affect. So, I am exaggerating these caricature postures of, as Bob Jessop and Stijn Oosterlynck term, “hard political economy” and “soft sociology” (1164, 1161)—but I am doing so for a reason. Here, we can catch a glimpse of the notion that disciplinary specialization is not just a consequence of social development in the spheres of the economy or in politics, or even of the fragmentary tendencies in institutional dynamics—but that, on the contrary, our rigid categorizations might be contribut- ing to the unbundling of these spheres in problematic ways. We should be careful not to use the concepts of the nation and the nation-state indiscriminately because this imprecision will bring our theoretical and practical understandings into murky territory. Without acknowledging it, interpretations of the nation in the humanities often seem to imply the nation-state as though the decline of the latter (the state) were to entail the waning of the former (the nation). The same is often true for research in the social sciences, although in the opposite direction. But we need to be very specific on this point. Whereas the nation can be viewed as a discursive formation that can be mobilized by political actors for 392 Boris Vormann certain purposes, that creates the link between individuals and large-scale social structures, that can both empower and exclude individuals and social groups, the nation-state is a “specialized apparatus of rule” (Calhoun, Critical 236) character- ized by a certain institutional inertia: it creates constraints and limitations, it pre- scribes mechanisms and dynamics that follow, to a certain extent, their own logic. Of course, it gets a little more complicated than this distinction suggests. The missing link between the nation-state and the nation is that of nationalism, which, according to Ernest Geller’s classic definition, is “a political principle that holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.” In this sense, nationalism, according to Gellner, is a “theory of political legitimacy, which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones […]” (1). Put in different terms, nationalism describes a movement or a sentiment that insists on the desirability of a mono-national, unitarist state. It provides the political actors of the nation-state and legitimacy for their political actions—mostly through tacit consent under elected officials in a representative democracy—which, in turn, bol- sters the notion of a nation that has crystallized in the political institutions and mechanisms of the nation-state. We need to keep this complication in mind. Building on this critical distinction we can rephrase and specify our initial questions. First, if nations and nation-states change—because of globalization processes, new types of diasporas, forms of belonging, and political communities—are they still relevant subjects of analysis? How do they interact? And might they vanish? At this point it is certainly clear that what is generally referred to as methodological nationalism raises a completely different set of questions concerned with the naturalization of the nation in academia and the nation as a container for social analysis: is there a problem with our research categories? Despite any professed intentions towards problematization, does academia actually help to reify and reproduce national myths? From which follows the critical question: how can these hegemonic discourses be challenged rather than facilitated? And, finally, what would the role of area studies be in this endeavor?

The Nation as a Subject of Analysis

In order for us to address the nation as a subject of analysis it helps to try and understand where the pervasive hope for a postnational world comes from. Of course, I am not able to provide an exhaustive account in this context. But it seems important to articulate these reasons because they give us a good sense of why we tend to have an impulse to overcome the nation in academia. As I will contend, we should not follow this urge, because wishful thinking might distort our view on the subject of analysis. The postnational reflex seems to be fostered, for one, by a certain cosmopolitan ideal that remains rigidly juxtaposed to the nation. In this reading, the national past is understood as a bloody past, as a history of repression and exclusion, a past directly linked to genocides, deportations, and ethnic cleansing. In a postnational world, one that integrates societies on a global scale, we might hope that these Who Needs American Studies? 393 divisive, potentially totalitarian mechanisms would be overcome. The hope for a postnational world is equally fostered, second, by a certain emancipatory ideal. The national focus was internally and externally exclusive. It was limited, in its initial phase, to white, male property owners and remained thus until at least the second half of the twentieth century when minorities in different national societies began to make their voices heard in political discourses and were able, albeit to a very limited extent, to produce changes in institutional settings.2 Some scholars hope that in a postnational world individuals might encounter one another on a level playing field and address this unevenness once and for all, doing away with the exclusivity maintained by nation-state institutions. What seems to also give rise to a certain postnational impulse in academia, in addition to these normative vantage points, is the political hypothesis of an end of the nation-state, often associated with the 1990s notion of the end of history. Al- though this idea was quickly contradicted by new nationalisms and nation-states in Eastern Europe as well as the re-writing of ‘new histories’ in the 2000s, this assumption has left traces in discussions about the nation-state and its role within liberal paradigms. In this Hegelian reading, most prominently represented by the work of Francis Fukuyama, the end of the Cold War represented a new historical stage in which ideologies had been overcome and replaced by a globally inte- grated system of liberal capitalism. In this process, nation-states would eventually disintegrate as meaningless remnants of a past overcome. However, I think the strongest reason for the notion of a ‘postnational’ era is the economic grand narrative that nation-states are dissipating—a reading which, again, is the consequence of an uncritical blurring of nation and nation-state. This argument often proceeds as such: new information and transportation technolo- gies have led to a constant increase in connectivity across national borders, that is, an increase in the mobility of people, capital, ideas, and goods (to cite one standard definition of globalization). In this process, nation-states lose in power to other actors on the supranational level (e. g., WTO, UN, IMF, World Bank, etc.), on the subnational level (e. g., cities and regions), and laterally, to entities such as NGOs. In this process forms of belonging and identity are supposed to change because of increased interdependencies and exchange, in turn relegating national identities to the historical dust bin. Even though the link is never quite estab- lished, this narrative would have us believe that national identities will decrease in importance because of state-restructuring. This dominant storyline should not be appropriated so uncritically. First, we need to complicate the picture. This grand narrative relies upon an internal logic of strong technological determinism about the general account of globalization.

2 If we recall Benedict Anderson, its exclusiveness is even a feature of the nation’s definition. The critique of exclusiveness can even be applied to progressive thinkers such as T. H. Mar- shall and his insistence on the importance of supplementing civil and political with social rights, granting “the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards pre- vailing in the society” (30). Although the notion of social citizenship perhaps found its closest approximation during the historical period of Atlantic Fordism, then, it remained incomplete and limited with regards to gender and race (Fraser and Gordon). 394 Boris Vormann

In mainstream thought, globalization is viewed as one-directional, external, and natural—a perspective that obfuscates key political actors, infrastructural logics, and ideological rationales (Vormann, “Infrastrukturen”). Most importantly, this techno-deterministic view ignores the unevenness of these processes, which are not simply a hybridization of cultures or processes of convergence, but which are contradictory dynamics in which the nation-state retains key political functions and in which the nation remains a central political community. Even if we would agree that the nation as a category and as an identity marker loses in importance, the term ‘postnational’ is strongly overstating the case. By comparison, would we argue that European states lived in a post-religious world after the church as an institution lost in social influence? After theAct of Suprem- acy in 1534? After the Enlightenment era and the age of revolution? After the 1905 French law on the Separation of the Churches and the State? Among others, religion has become one identity marker. National identity, too, is very unlikely to vanish. The task is then to ask how it is changing. How is it mobilized differently as a structure of affect? And which constraints and potentials do nation-state institutions provide in this process of transformation?3 What applies to the nation is equally true for the apparatus of rule that is the nation-state. It is not necessarily losing in power but changing in shape. Soci- ologist Saskia Sassen observes a shift in competencies within governments from the legislative to the executive and legal branches (Territory). Importantly, she emphasizes the functions that state institutions fulfill as the necessary technical- administrative entities through which processes of globalization can be furthered (Sociology 37-38). Ellen Meiksins Wood, among many others, has equally insisted on the fundamental role of the state in facilitating globalization processes. To be sure, state retrenchment can be witnessed in some cases—especially when it comes to the rolling back of social welfare state institutions (Brenner et al.)—but the state has to do work that goes way beyond securing private property rights and establishing and enforcing the proverbial ‘rules of the game.’ The nation-state ab- sorbs risks for the private sector; it waives taxes and incentivizes investments for some, it protects industries for others; it extends its penal facilities to mitigate the harsh social repercussions of welfare cutbacks. It is true that it does so under a different organizing logic than during the Keynesian-Fordist era, but the nation-state ‘never went away,’ despite neoliberal rhetoric. In fact, if we buy into the logic of the abovementioned grand narrative, we risk replicating the neoliberal utopia that a frictionless market rule could indeed exist (Peck). Rather, the state facilitates the market and has to mitigate social repercussions of market failure. It does so particularly in those fields, I might add, that are generally regarded as important

3 Indeed, we can even witness a certain renaissance of the national, for instance in Ger- many. Until the 1990s, all federal policies and institutions in Germany were labeled as ‘federal’ (e. g., the Bundesrat, the Bundesregierung, the Bundesinitiative). In recent years, this has changed. ‘National’ has become a dominant moniker for all sorts of political initiatives. There is now a “national action plan for integration,” a “national action plan for children,” a “national action plan for education and sustainable development.” Twenty years ago, this mobilization of the national in political discourse would not have been viewed as just reactionary, but (because of Germany’s special history) as potentially fascist, right-wing rhetoric! Who Needs American Studies? 395 aspects of any nation-building project: security, economic policy, infrastructure, education—and, more generally, the provision of public goods. Instead of following the logic that predicts the end of the nation-state, we need to ask how states cope with the constant failure of the free market and how, in these processes, the nation-state and (in a non-congruent fashion) the nation are being reinvented. I would be remiss not to emphasize one last point regarding the pertinence of nations and nation-states: globalization and nationalism do not contradict one another. For instance, consider the rise of nationalism in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall in the context of an unprecedented global expansion of competitive capitalism. Think also of Québécois, Catalonian, and Scottish nationalism today (Gagnon; Vormann et al., Quebec). If we look, for example, at Québé- cois nationalism since the 1960s and the Quiet Revolution, we see that industrial policies and agglomeration strategies on the level of regional states can align with national projects of minority nationalisms to foster a “circulus virtuosus,” as Peter Graefe and Michael Keating argue—a virtuous circle of decommodification in certain fields and innovation and competitiveness in others (Graefe, “National- ismus” 330; Keating). In turn, the nation might even experience a revival. Such a return may occur because the nation represents more than a mere problematic, hegemonic discourse. It can also be viewed as a discursive formation for the ar- ticulation of collective and individual rights, of principles of solidarity, or as a framework for increased emancipation (Vormann and Lammert). Therefore, we should not buy into the logic of modernization theory that nations and nation-states are a residue of an earlier era that will soon be overcome. We should stress, rather, that they are precisely the outcome of a differentiation that became necessary in the first wave of globalization as a distinction against other nations, colonies, and further real and imagined Others (Conrad). This counter-movement is still ongoing. As a consequence of existing institutional path dependencies, as a correlate of relatively inert vehicles of political mobilization, and as the result of the need to stabilize economic exchange, the increase in connectivity will not simply dissolve existing national institutions, identity markers, and discursive formations—although it does alter their form; indeed, it might even strengthen them.

Three Dimensions of Methodological Nationalism

I am not arguing that because the nation and the nation-state are still relevant subjects of analysis, we should continue to conduct research in the humanities and the social sciences in the traditional ways. Rather, we should be careful not to overstate the case of deconstruction. That the nation is constructed does not mean that it is imagined.4 National discourses can be mobilized, national identities can empower and provide recognition just as much as they can agitate, exclude, and repress. This potential of the nation and its function as a social intermediary for

4 Frank Kelleter makes this important—though often ignored—point with regards to transnational American studies in his essay “Transnationalism: The American Challenge.” 396 Boris Vormann the nation-state, in turn, is not just a vague theoretical notion, but has recently led to a reinvigoration of state institutions, particularly in the response to different crisis phenomena. State reactions to attacks on the symbols of U. S. power on Sep- tember 11, 2001 or to the financial crisis that began in 2007 can serve as instances in which political actors mobilized national discourses to legitimate nation-state intervention. The question we need to ask, then, is whether a given type of national mobilization is problematic or if it has an emancipatory dimension. Nonetheless, the problem remains that the nation is still often viewed as a pre- political category. This brings us to the problem of methodological nationalism. Are our research categories in the domain of the ‘national’? After all, they have been shaped during the era of nationalism and nation-building precisely as parts of these nation-building projects. Taking this one step further, are they still valid? Here it is useful to unpack what methodological nationalism means. I would like to highlight two forms of methodological nationalism that are generally addressed in the social sciences, but that can equally be observed in the humanities and contemporary area studies.5 Before I conclude, I would like to add a third dimension that can inform our debates about the role of academia in society that has not been systematically and sufficiently explored in debates about methodological nationalism. This will serve as a basis to assess the critical potential of area studies such as American studies under conditions of globalization. The first form of persisting methodological nationalism is related to what I have already outlined. Classical social theory has a blind spot when it comes to understanding the rise of nationalism. For a long time, nationalism and nation- building have been viewed as anachronisms, not worthy of study. This dominant line of thinking has its followers in modernization theory (e. g., Beck, What). As, among others, Anthony D. Smith (“Nationalism”), Montserrat Guiberneau, and Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller have argued, this systematic blindness is the consequence of what might seem to be a paradox; that is, that modernization would lead to a decline rather than the creation of national communities. According to Marx, Durkheim, and Weber the increasing “differentiation, rationalization and modernization of society was going to gradually reduce the importance of ethnic and national sentiments” (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 303). These foundational thinkers of modern social theory—and those who followed in their footsteps—ascribed nationalism to “earlier stages in the continuum of social evolution. As a traditional, communitarian, ascriptive, bourgeois or pre-rational phenomenon, nationalism was thought to be a transitory stage on the way to the modern, rationalized and individualized meritocratic class society” (303). The second form of methodological nationalism can be referred to as methodological nationalism tout court. By this I mean the practice of naturalizing the nation as a universalistic container. This includes two connected aspects. The first one relates to what John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge have labeled as the “territorial trap” (94), which occurs when researchers equate society and the nation- state, and then take this congruence for granted (Beck, What 25). The second aspect of classical methodological nationalism regards the epistemological level of

5 In part, I am following Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller on this point. Who Needs American Studies? 397 national discourses rather than their ontology. This is perhaps the more straight- forward, widespread form, in which national historiographies and agendas are naturalized without the slightest gesture toward critique or analysis (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 304). These tendencies of reifying and naturalizing nations and nation-states are reflected in the research of nearly all disciplines of the social sciences and the humanities. Modern history was written largely as a history of particular nation- states.6 To be sure, the goal was no longer to legitimize a particular nation-building project, but the underlying assumption remained that “a particular nation would provide the constant unit of observation through all historical transformations” (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 305). This historiographical tendency is also reflected in analyses of different social science disciplines. In international relations theory, for instance, and especially in realist accounts from Hans Morgenthau’s work, the nation-state serves as the natural unit of analysis. Since its neoclassi- cal founders, economics has equally studied the economy of national entities and their relation to one another. In addition to the tacit naturalization of the nation- state, of course, most data collections that researchers use have been collected by national governments resulting in the nation as a political, economic, and cultural unit being taken for granted from the beginning. The critique that has been voiced against methodological nationalism is that a perspective narrowed in one of these ways will exclude important actors, strug- gles, and fields of social practice from the purview of the researcher. Moreover, the insistence on national uniqueness—for instance, in traditional cultural studies analyses of American exceptionalism—has had strong “overtones of national su- periority” (Tyrrell 1034). Of course, the awareness of methodological nationalism has not failed to steadily increase over the course of past decades. Different ways have been suggested to circumvent these pitfalls. More generally, researchers have gone in two main directions to overcome methodological nationalism, but in the process they have taken problematic shortcuts. On the one hand, researchers have tried to ‘zoom in’ by analyzing local histories, examining social relations within neighborhoods and, more generally speak- ing, critiquing power relations on the micro scale. Ethnographic analyses on this scale, for instance in sociology, have sometimes served to overcome methodological nationalism—or, at least, to bracket the category of the national. Foucauldian and related postructuralist approaches that have been highly influential in Ameri- can Studies and other interdisciplinary fields of research have equally sought to destabilize the rigid categories of the nation-state and decentralize understandings of society by shifting the attention to practices on the ‘capillary’ level of individuals. Other researchers, by contrast, have tried to overcome methodological nationalism by ‘zooming out’ of the national framework. Methodologically, this has happened in International Relations theory by deconstructing international relations in order to demystify notions of an anarchic Hobbesian international system as discursively produced. More empirically, a focus on transnational dia-

6 This was certainly true up to the 1990s, although notable exceptions such as Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1974) or Eric Wolf’s (1982) work exist. 398 Boris Vormann sporas and diversity, for instance in cultural studies research, has equally served as an attempt to overcome the national perspective. Ulrich Beck, for example, suggests to de-territorialize our understanding of communities of belonging by researching transnational communities (see What).

Transnational Turns

In addition to these more general counter tactics we can identify three types of avoidance strategies in the field of American Studies after the transnational turn. In order to understand current transnational debates and to identify their moot points, it helps to briefly trace back the etymology of ‘transnationalism,’ a term coined by Randolph S. Bourne in his 1916 essay “Trans-National America.” In that essay, Bourne rejects the concept of the melting-pot and the notion of assimilation to an “Anglo-Saxon nation” and argues, rather, for a new civic and cultural form of nationalism. It is important to emphasize that for Bourne transnationalism does not mean to overcome or question the concept of the U. S. nation as such, but to envision U. S. exceptionalism in a different way. Bourne’s civic and culturalist understanding of the nation as a “transnational” nation does not escape the logic of nationalism, but seeks for a more inclusive conception of the national community, one that would be more welcoming to immigrants from different ethnic backgrounds. In recent years, researchers in the field of American Studies have tried to overcome the national in different ways and with different agendas. Randolph Bourne’s text can fit into a category identified by Winfried Fluck as aesthetic transnationalism. This form of transnationalism, Fluck argues, articulates a promise of rejuvenation on two levels: a rejuvenation of the field and its ‘tired’ practices, but also of the researcher who has been stuck in these old routines for too long. […] When American culture is no longer explained on narrow national grounds but reconceptualized on the grounds of a multitude that extends beyond national borders, it can appear more creative and aesthetically much more interesting than the white WASP culture canonized by American exceptionalism. (“A New” 368-69) As Fluck argues, a new focus on diversity in newer “transnational texts” has served to critique American exceptionalism and to “teach us about a need for recognition.” But these criticisms unintentionally “help to reconstitute American ideals and show the way for a moral regeneration of the country” (Fluck, “Inside” 27).7 The texts that fall into this category come with the same problem as Ran- dolph S. Bourne’s argument. On the way to uncover a second reality and richer understandings of what is already there, they rebuild U. S. exceptionalism on different pillars. Rather than overcoming U. S. exceptionalism, then, they add new facets (diversity, multiculturalism, etc.) to civic conceptions of the nation. The new facets of inclusion constitute a rearticulation of the exceptional logic that makes such diversity “possible.”

7 “In the final analysis,” Fluck concludes, “this line of argument continues to pursue an approach in which the analysis of American society and culture is still guided by American ideals, albeit now more inclusively defined” (“Inside” 27). Who Needs American Studies? 399

A more promising and emancipatory avenue, it seems, is taken by those American Studies scholars whom Fluck has grouped under the rubric of political transnationalism. For these authors, transnationalism serves as a prism to identify transnational solidarity groups in the hope of empowering individuals previously disenfranchised by the nation-state (e. g., Pease). By means of “disinterpellation,” New Americanists seek to salvage interstitial subject positions for members of a “new international communality” (“A New” 374). Yet Fluck’s critique of these approaches is certainly warranted. The sole focus on identity formation and the endorsement of more flexible and fluid identities forfeits much of political transnationalism’s critical potential, because this individualistic emancipatory ideal is very much congruent with neoliberal ideology. The fluid transnational subject-positions advocated by New Americanists resemble the flexible and individualized identities of those working and living under conditions of flexible accumulation. The free-flow ideology of globalization matches that of transnationalism. A third group of authors in the field of American Studies that is seeking to overcome U. S. exceptionalism needs to be clearly distinguished from the two other groups—and it too comes with its own set of problems and blind spots. Their writ- ings could be grouped under the term methodological transnationalism, which argues that the specialization of disciplinary discourse, the research categories devel- oped in the nineteenth century, and the data sets that researchers use all naturalize the category of the national. Similar to other critics of methodological nationalism, these authors challenge the unquestioned epistemological role of the nation as the only valid horizon of interpretation of social relations. The project of these authors then becomes to provide other possible interpretations and alternative readings of history. This is done by emphasizing the importance of non-national historiography on the individual, local, and regional level—and how these micro-histories relate directly to the world economy (see e. g., Tyrrell; Thelen).8 The move to other scales and units of analysis—to the interstitial spaces and from the ‘either/or’ to the ‘both/and’—is the common denominator of self-ascribed counter-hegemonic projects such as ‘transnational’ research in American Studies. But it is a highly problematic one to make, because this perspective evades the crucial question of how the national is still mobilized in practice. Moreover, some of the fears articulated in transnational studies are actually unfounded: examining the nation and the changing nation-state does not stand in an irresolvable contradiction to the aims of a transnational critical approach. If we define methodological nationalism as a problem of perspective, of inherited and naturalized research categories linked to the rise of the nation and the nation-state, and if our objectives are defined as counter-hegemonic and critical, then we can view one aspect of academic practice as methodologically nationalistic that is not normally viewed as such: disciplinary specialization. In an emancipatory project, area stud-

8 It is worth noting—and quite telling—that authors who seek to write such transnational, global histories, such as Ian Tyrrell, draw heavily from world-systems theory, but forget to men- tion the central role that Immanuel Wallerstein ascribes to the nation-state in securing mo- nopoly power for the accumulation of capital. 400 Boris Vormann ies such as American Studies could function as a countervailing force to these fragmentary tendencies. The historical differentiation of academic fields—into political science, economics, sociology, etc.—gradually emerged with the specialization, modernization, and bureaucratization of the rising nation-state. Academic specialization was a result of complex dynamics that overlapped and were mutually reinforcing: institutional path dependencies within departments and universities, researchers’ dependence on a field of study that they could claim to be their niche, the technological development of research tools and and methodologies—but also, crucially, changes in social practice that were both analyzed and shaped by the nascent fields. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the centuries of modern nation-building, political economy—a compound noun that previously signified the ‘rules of the household’ (oikos, ‘the house’ and nomos the ‘law’)—were concerned with the “inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations” (Adam Smith). Prior to this, mercantilism had served as the guiding philosophy of the absolutist state and as the source of knowledge to stabilize its institutional framework—which, in turn, had served as the legal and political infrastructure on which revolutionary elites would build their national agendas. Just like economics, the discipline of history buttressed nation-building projects. It served as a means by which nations could reinterpret their past—and, indeed, invent their traditions (Hobsbawm)—under the guise of scientific neutrality. Based on Hegelian notions of the state as the facilitator of human freedom and self-development, historiography could interpret history as a meaningful pattern pointing toward the finality of national self-assertion (Fluck, “Transatlantic”). Art and art history are perhaps the most significant examples of how philosophy and historiography could enter an (unholy) alliance to further the idea of a primordial national past, which would serve as a discursive body of legitimization for national projects yet to come. This intellectual division of labor, of course, no longer serves the immediate purposes of nation-building, at least in the direct way that I have just outlined. Since Adam Smith and after the marginal revolution, markets have been viewed as external neutral mechanisms to coordinate individual, private interests; a view that has given rise to an increasingly quantitative and fragmented analysis of society in economics, but also in political science and sociology (Slater and Tonkiss). Historians have also sought to liberate their profession from the grip of national projects over the course of the twentieth century. Newer fields of research that emerged in the wake of the post-World War era, such as Cultural Studies, have similarly cherished an ideal of counter-hegemonic critique that saw the nation- state as its formidable opponent. These tendencies were bolstered on both sides of the political spectrum by dominant critiques of the nation-state around that time. On the left, in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, the nation-state came to be regarded as the political form responsible for the horrors of the holocaust. On the right, the Keynesian-Fordist welfare state’s bureaucracy became the object of virulent critique of proponents of public choice theory, and later, neoliberalism (Vormann and Püschel). Extreme forms of specialization that have followed the initial, modern split of academia render it unfit for a critical examination of society today. This, as I Who Needs American Studies? 401 argue by way of conclusion, is where the potential lies for research in critical area studies. The fragmentation of perspectives makes us buy into the existence of different social spheres—the economy, politics, and culture—and thereby obscures the emancipatory potential of knowledge while at the same time enabling an un- precedent social dominance of technocratic expertise. Rather than fleeing into macro- and micro-accounts of social development, then, I suggest we reconsider the basis of our analyses.

In Lieu of a Conclusion: The Potentials of Critical Area Studies

Throughout this article I have argued that the categories of the nation and the nation-state are still relevant and it is important to distinguish between the two. The nation-state is crucial as a site of practice through which seemingly detached global flows of goods, capital, and people are sustained. The nation is a forum that provides recognition and structures of belonging in order for citizens to be active and participate in political discourses. Both nations and nation-states have by no means been overcome and in fact might even be gaining in importance. Indeed, the nation-state and the nation are, in large part, both symptomatic and constitutive of processes of globalization. In short, it is still pertinent for area studies to conduct research on nations and nation-states; even more so because the way in which this research is conducted now is beset with analytical blind spots. Moreover, I have acknowledged the problem of methodological nationalism that is deeply engrained in our research institutions and disciplines. I have added academic specialization as a third dimension of this problem. One way in which fields premised on the national, such as American Studies, have tried to overcome these perspectival shortcomings has been through a transnational move. This paradigm shift has been based on two problematic assumptions, however. The first one, which I have already addressed, is that nations and nation-states are no longer valid research categories. This erroneous assumption is reflected, perhaps in an extreme form, by the work of Ulrich Beck who insists on a “politics of post-nationalism” in which “the cosmopolitan project contradicts and re- places the nation-state project” (qtd. in Calhoun, Nations 14). The second flaw of the transnational critique is that it potentially loses its critical edge in deflecting our view from the national. Rather than hoping that a transnational perspective would somehow lift us above the category of the national—and this is the final, admittedly normative point by which I would like to close—we need to address the ways in which nations and nation-states structure our thoughts and actions much more directly. American Studies—understood as one exemplary form of area studies in this concluding section—will not lose its relevance because of the changing nation- state. But it is in need of revision. To be certain, it can no longer legitimate itself by evoking some kind of American exceptionalism. Neither should difference and otherness and their discursive production be the only points of interest. The strength of area studies lies in its ability to be a much-needed countervailing force against the parceling and compartmentalization of academia, which I have 402 Boris Vormann identified as one form of methodological nationalism. Two dimensions of such a research agenda are crucial: critical interdisciplinarity and a comparative scope. By critical interdisciplinarity I mean the attempt to overcome the artificial boundaries imposed upon researchers in the humanities and social sciences. Im- portant inroads have been made in economic sociology (e. g. Slater and Tonkiss; Swedberg), economic geography (e. g., Coe et al.) and political sociology (e. g., Nash) to try and understand social development as a whole by combining the methods and perspectives of different disciplines. This type of triangulation en- ables us to overcome disciplinary blinders that shroud our thinking when we only stick to the conventions of discourse analysis in cultural studies, statistical analysis in economics, or the study of institutions in political science. It is important to highlight, however, that interdisciplinarity is not an end in itself. It is a necessary, but not an independently sufficient condition for a critical analysis worthy of the name. Critical area studies provide us with a common object that we can comprehend more fully only if we take into account the different dimensions that constitute social development, not in an additive but a post-disciplinary fashion.9 This is also where the comparative dimension becomes crucial. A comparative approach, in and of itself, does not necessarily yield a critical perspective. Some even argue that comparative approaches are part of the problem because they reinforce the national structures that we seek to overcome. For Ian Turrell, American exceptionalism “is in practice inseparable from the concept of national distinctiveness in American historiography, and the two notions have become linked through comparative history”—even in cases where historians “may deny the notion of exceptionalism” (1035). If we use a comparative framework, not to place societies into “tidy boxes” (1033), but in order to emphasize disjunctures between the actual and the possible—for instance, in the field of education policies, in the different ways in which collective histories are told and re- told—, we can articulate emancipatory projects from within the nation-state that do not forgo social realities and practice. In taking an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, area studies such as American Studies are not only important because the nation and the nation-state are still relevant subjects of analysis but because we also need to explore how they change. There is a new need for historically and geographically specific, comparative, and interdisciplinary approaches to formulate critical analyses of society— perhaps now even more so than when area studies were first institutionalized. American Studies (and other interdisciplinary area studies) can provide remedies for the pitfalls of dominant disciplinary specialization tendencies such as methodological individualism, transhistorical and universalistic accounts of society, and highly specialized, mono-disciplinary (or even biologistic10) social analyses. I have already outlined the uncritical appropriation of globalization discourses that can serve as a case in point here, in that they view ‘the economy’ as an external force rather than asking how processes of globalization are socially produced

9 For a helpful theoretical and methodological framework that would support such a project see Jessop and Sum. 10 See Charney and English; Fowler and Dawes. Who Needs American Studies? 403 and how they are culturally and historically specific. Neoliberalism constitutes another example. Far from being just a utopian discourse that needs to be decon- structed—as the attempt of establishing frictionless market rule—we need to also grasp these tendencies as a project, or multiple projects, of neoliberalization (as Jamie Peck argues). These projects depend on existing and new forms of state- craft and need to be examined precisely in the way they fail to realize an unat- tainable project in institutionally, geographically, and historically specific ways. One timely counter-hegemonic project, then, would be to overcome our national heritage of mono-disciplinary research by re-thinking the economy as a set of imaginaries and discourses, while at the same time re-thinking culture not only as a discourse, but also as a set of practices that are contingent on institutions and material-enabling conditions. This is more than a multi-disciplinary analysis. From this perspective, to return to my initial reflections about the nation as a research subject, the nation can be viewed as a category of meaning-making that shapes institutional arrangements, understandings of the public good and the public interest, that guides economic and political imaginaries in context-specific ways. In turn, comparative analyses of institutional path dependencies and material constraints in different nation-state contexts help us pin down political actors’ potential room to maneuver and emancipatory possibilities, even under seemingly overwhelming conditions of neoliberal globalization. In this sense, critical area studies, not transnational studies, allows us to normatively distinguish legitimate from illegitimate politics and to ask the central counter-hegemonic question: what is and what could be?

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