Methodological Nationalism

Methodological nationalism is a term that has emerged in the academic study of globalization and transnationalization. It refers, often critically, to the equation between society and nation-state. However, there are several different aspects to the term, which should be differentiated. First is the idea that social change is caused mainly by endogenous conditions that are internal to the respective nation-state/society. This aspect emerged in the debate about methodological nationalism in the 1970s when external causes of social change were contrasted to endogenous conditions. Second is the proposition that political and territorial boundaries put limits on other societal institutions, so that there is a spatial convergence between national territory and the extension of society. This corresponds to Ulrich Beck's famous notion of the “container model” of society, according to which state-constructed and state-controlled borders demarcate the extent of societal relations. The discussion about this aspect of methodological [Page 1152]nationalism goes back to the 1950s, when Wolfram Eberhard criticized Talcott Parsons's concept of society as a social system with reference to Chinese society in the medieval period. A third aspect refers to the fact that macro-sociological and especially comparative research has often taken the nationstate or the country as a kind of natural unit of research. Finally, Beck and Natan Sznaider include a fourth aspect of methodological nationalism, alleging that it includes a focus on states and government in social scientific research.

Generally, Beck and Sznaider develop the most far-reaching conclusions in their discussion of methodological nationalism. They argue that present-day processes of globalization and cosmopolitanization have gone so far that societies are transformed in their basic features; in particular, the boundaries between national and international have become blurred. These social transformations supposedly undermine most of our traditional stock of social scientific concepts that were based on methodological nationalism and therefore need to be reexamined. In a world of clearly demarcated nation-states these concepts were working quite well; however, with the erosion of the boundary between national and international, the concept of nation-state society is losing its descriptive relevance. Not only are customary sociological concepts suspected of being superfluous “zombie categories” but also the conventional practices of empirical social research are in need of a thorough epistemological turn. These widely discussed and far-reaching claims about the importance of methodological nationalism in sociology have to be analyzed thoroughly in their relation to sociological theory, empirical methods, and their empirical presupposition to put the concept of methodological nationalism in perspective.