Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation–state building, migration and the social sciences

TLDR

Methodological nationalism is defined as the assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form of the modern world. The study distinguishes three modes of methodological nationalism in mainstream social science and shows how they have shaped migration research. The authors conduct a historical tour d’horizon, tracing how the three modes of methodological nationalism evolved alongside Western nation‑state building and immigration/integration policies. They find parallels between nationalist thinking and postwar migration conceptualizations, note that the shift to studying transnational communities reflects an epistemic move away from methodological nationalism, and recommend new concepts that avoid nationalist bias while transcending contemporary fluidism.

Abstract

Methodological nationalism is understood as the assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form of the modern world. We distinguish three modes of methodological nationalism that have characterized mainstream social science, and then show how these have influenced research on migration. We discover parallels between nationalist thinking and the conceptualization of migration in postwar social sciences. In a historical tour d’horizon, we 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 observation. The article concludes by recommending new concepts for analysis that, on the one hand, are not coloured by methodological nationalism and, on the other hand, go beyond the fluidism of much contemporary social theory.