A Social Theory of the Nation-State

The Political Forms of Modernity Beyond Methodological Nationalism

Daniel Chernilo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134150113
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A Social Theory of the Nation-State: the political forms of modernity beyond methodological nationalism, construes a novel and original social theory of the nation-state. It rejects nationalistic ways of thinking that take the nation-state for granted as much as globalist orthodoxy that speaks of its current and definitive decline.

Its main aim is therefore to provide a renovated account of the nation-state's historical development and recent global challenges via an analysis of the writings of key social theorists. This reconstruction of the history of the nation-state into three periods:

• classical (K. Marx, M. Weber, E. Durkheim)
• modernist (T. Parsons, R. Aron, R. Bendix, B. Moore)
• contemporary (M. Mann, E. Hobsbawm, U. Beck, M. Castells, N. Luhmann, J. Habermas)

For each phase, it introduces social theory's key views about the nation-state, its past, present and future. In so doing this book rejects methodological nationalism, the claim that the nation-state is the necessary representation of the modern society, because it misrepresents the nation-state's own problematic trajectory in modernity. And methodological nationalism is also rejected because it is unable to capture the richness of social theory's intellectual canon. Instead, via a strong conception of society and a subtler notion of the nation-state, A Social Theory of the Nation-State tries to account for the 'opacity of the nation-state in modernity'.

Part I
Understanding the nation-state

1
The critique of methodological nationalism

A debate in two waves

Methodological nationalism can be simply defined as the equation between the nation-state and society in social theory. Before trying to transcend it, however, we must establish the terms of the debate, differentiate some of its key versions and understand its implications as clearly as possibly. These tasks constitute the aim of this first chapter.

The nation-state’s position in modernity has proved taxing for the social sciences in general and for social theory in particular. For instance, in his book Cosmopolis. The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, philosopher and mathematician Stephen Toulmin (1990:140) captured the opacity with which the nation-state has confounded intellectuals.

Between 1650 and 1950 few political philosophers challenged this basic assumption, or questioned that ‘nationhood’ is the natural basis of State formation: their central question was, ‘How do nation-states acquire and retain legitimacy, and by what means are they entitled to enforce the political obedience of their subjects?’. The prior question – ‘To what extent does the nation-state have only limited value as the focus of political organization or social loyalty?’– remained unaddressed.

Indeed, Toulmin nicely disentangles the question of understanding the specific nature of modernity’s novel socio-political arrangements – the issue of the nation-state’s acquisition and maintenance of socio-political legitimacy – from the question of how and why the nation-state succeeded in being regarded as the only legitimate form of such modern socio-political arrangements. The merit of Toulmin’s formulation, it seems to me, lies in the fact that he posits the question simultaneously at a historical and a logical level. In other words, the invitation is to reconsider the relationship between the set of institutional practices that have led to the creation and consolidation of the nation-state in modernity and the intellectual outlook with which scholars have tried to make sense of these practices. Furthermore, the time-frame within which Toulmin situates this enquiry is large enough to regard it as one of modernity’s key questions: the position of the nation-state in modernity has remained as puzzling as consequential for intellectuals for more than three centuries.

Although the depth of Toulmin’s question helps setting an ultimate horizon for this book, to address fully the field opened up by his remark is beyond my abilities and the scope of this project. I shall then narrow down the time-scale and the intellectual traditions to which attention will be devoted. In the first part of this chapter, I provide a clearer understanding of what methodological nationalism is and when the critique of methodological nationalism first emerged. In the second part, I move on and assess the most important version of the current critique of methodological nationalism, that of Ulrich Beck.

The critique of methodological nationalism in the 1970s

The equation between the historical formation of the nation-state – as modernity’s key socio-political arrangement – and the idea of society – as one of social theory’s key analytical tools – is a result of the first systematic reflections about the position of the nation-state that started to develop in the early 1970s. A central feature of what has been referred to as the ‘second crisis of modernity’ was precisely a more reflexive approach towards the relationships between society and the nation-state (Wagner 1994:30–1). Indeed, a number of commentators started, at that time, to make this equation explicit and began to reflect upon its implications in previous social theory. For instance, in his volume devoted to the class structure of the advanced societies, Anthony Giddens mentioned the theoretical consequences underwriting the understanding of society as ‘national societies’. He was not only concerned with the intellectual origins of the equation between the nation-state and society but also with its consequences for how empirical social analyses were being carried out; for instance, in the way in which the distinction between the internal and external field of national societies was being used in development policies. Giddens was mostly interested in comprehending how the question of society’s modernisation was closely associated with the idea that national societies were autonomous units being ruled by their own internal dynamics. For our purposes here, the crux of Giddens’ argument lies in the fact that he wanted to relate this understanding of national societies to a more sophisticated explanation of modernity’s key structural tendencies. In other words, the problem for Giddens was less about what the nation-state actually is and more about how an inadequate definition of the nation-state leads to a deficient comprehension of modernity itself. Thus, towards the end of that book, Giddens (1973:265) made the following critical claim:

The primary unit of sociological analysis, the sociologist’s ‘society’– in relation to the industrialised world at least – has always been, and must continue to be, the administratively bounded nation-state. But ‘society’ in this sense, has never been the isolated, the ‘internally developing’ system which has normally been implied in social theory. One of the most important weaknesses of sociological conceptions of development, from Marx onwards, has been the persistent tendency to think of development as the ‘unfolding’ of endogenous influences with a given society (or, more often, a ‘type’ of society). ‘External’ factors are treated as an ‘environment’ to which the society has to ‘adapt’ and therefore merely conditional in the progression of social change […] In fact, any adequate understanding of the development of the advanced societies presupposes the recognition that factors making for ‘endogenous’ evolution always combine with influences from ‘the outside’ in determining the transformations to which a society is subject.

An increasingly explicit reflection upon the multiple consequences of the equation between society and the nation-state was then taking place. To the best of my knowledge, the coinage of the term ‘methodological nationalism’ belongs to Portuguese sociologist Herminio Martins who, towards the end of an interesting piece devoted to reassessing the position of time in contemporary sociological theory, used it to give the equation a succinct name. The actual selection of the concept ‘methodological nationalism’ seems to have followed the idea of methodological individualism, which was already common currency at the time.² If methodological individualism conceived of social facts as the aggregate result of individual actions, methodological nationalism was to conceive of international relations on the basis of individual national societies. In the same way as methodological individualism’s explanation of social life regards individuals as monads, methodological nationalism’s explanation of modernity’s development comes out of the behaviour of national societies: both individuals and societies were autonomous and isolated units which recognised no external constraints to their own interest. Similar to Giddens’ understanding of the problem, for Martins (1974:276) this idea of individual national societies did not leave the questions of development and social change untouched.

In the last three decades or so the principle of immanent change has largely coincided with a general presumption – supported by a great variety of scholars in the entire spectrum of sociological opinion – that the ‘total’ or ‘inclusive society’, in effect the nation-state, be deemed to be the standard, optimal or even maximal ‘isolate’ for sociological analysis […] In general, macro-sociological work has largely submitted to national pre-definitions of social realities: a kind of methodological nationalism – which does not necessarily go together with political nationalism on the part of the researcher – imposes itself in practice with the national community as the terminal unit and boundary condition for the demarcation of problems and phenomena for social science (my emphasis).

In his discussion of Martins’ definition of methodological nationalism, British sociologist and historian Anthony D. Smith, who later became a leading scholar in the field of nationalism studies, took Martins’ definition of methodological nationalism and gave it a slightly different, more empirical, orientation. In the context of his analysis of state-sponsored nationalism throughout the world in the twentieth century, Smith emphasises the importance of nationalism as both a cognitive and psychological outlook. Nationalism becomes for him the key force behind social change in modernity. When this nationalistic perspective becomes inseparable from state power and its ability to steer social life, as he claims it is increasingly the case during the second part of the past century, a wholly new political actor is ready to make its presence felt: the nation-state. The unification of nation and state changes not only the face of modernity but also that of the disciplines devoted to the study of modern social life. This ‘principle of “method-ological nationalism” operates at every level in the sociology, politics, economics and history of mankind in the modern era’, hence

The study of ‘society’ today is, almost without question, equated with the analysis of nation-states […] There are very good reasons for proceeding this way, but the theoretical underpinning derives much of its force from acceptance of nationalist conceptions, and goes a long way to reinforce those conceptions. In this way, the world nation-state system has become an enduring and stable component of our whole cognitive outlook, quite apart from the psychological satisfactions it confers. (Smith 1979:191)

Let me now try to draw some consequences from these standpoints. All three arguments endorse the view that sociology’s central concept, society, has to an important extent been equated with the nation-state in recent social scientific works – and increasingly also in people’s heads.³ They similarly agree on the fact that this equation between society and the nation-state takes an endogenous or internalist explanation of social change for granted and that a thorough revision of this self-contained image of society was urgently needed. Interestingly, they also seem to concur on the idea that, as long as the internalist focus was discarded, there was no intrinsic problem in equating the nation-state with society: the historical record seemed to support the idea that the nation-state could become or was actually becoming the normal representation of society in modernity. Society and the nation-state have tended to fuse in modernity – at least in the developed world. The quarrel was then not so much against the equation itself but much more definitively on its internalist presuppositions and implications.⁴ Each of the three authors is, however, concerned with one particular aspect of the discussion that has since proved crucial. Each writer advances a particular aspect of the argument of methodological nationalism and a distinction between its different versions may help us further clarify what methodological nationalism is, to what extent it has effectively permeated into social theory’s theoretical frameworks and how can we start overcoming it.

Martins’ argument, first, concentrated on the results that methodological nationalism brings for social theory’s concepts and theorems. His claim is posed in relation to logical presuppositions and conceptual definitions; the rise of methodological nationalism was for him the result of a thirty-year long process based upon a number of assumptions which cohered around a self-sufficient image of society. As long as social theory presupposed that social change was internally driven it would always conceive of its object of study as self-contained; the link between society and the nation-state being made on the basis of the national structure of sociological categories. Martins was duly concerned with the negative impact that this wide-ranging but unquestioned equation between the nation-state and society has had in all the social sciences. As the argument works specifically at the level of the conceptual development of social theory, I shall call his position the logical version of the argument of methodological nationalism. I do not share, however, Martins’ assessment that social theory is intrinsically contaminated with methodological nationalism. In fact, I believe that social theory actually provides us with the tools to transcend it. But it is only fair to acknowledge the key contribution he made not only by coining the term methodological nationalism but more substantively by pointing out that the problem was as real as it was urgent. Martins somehow opened up the debate on the broader conceptual implications it bears for social theory.

Smith, for his part, was not primarily concerned with disciplinary traditions or canons. Rather, he concentrated on why the nation-state could reinforce this image of solidity and self-sufficiency and also on how an international system of nation-states strengthened the relevance of the nation-state at all levels: social, intellectual and political. Smith claims that there is a somewhat natural psychological satisfaction of state bureaucrats and state intellectuals from small countries in seeing their flags alongside those of bigger, ‘historical’, more powerful nation-states. He understands the rise of methodological nationalism as a socio-psychological consequence of the importance of state nationalism during the twentieth century. He tries to understand how a certain number of historical trends have led to the expansion of a nationalistic worldview for politicians, intellectuals and the wider population alike. In his view, then, methodological nationalism results from the evolution of the nation-state over the recent past and, because of that, I would like to call it the historical version of the argument of methodological nationalism.⁵ Indeed, this epochal diagnostic looks now increasingly obsolete because whilst in the late 1970s it could still have made sense to conceive of a world of nation-states we are no longer in a situation to take such a laidback position (see next section and Chapters 9 and 10).

Finally, Giddens made a somewhat less clear but equally important point. He emphasised that the way in which the nation-state is being defined and conceptualised – namely, as an isolated and internally developing unit – bears substantive consequences on how modernity itself is theorised. He is duly worried that a methodologically nationalistic theorisation of the nation-state may lead or has already led to a methodologically nationalistic definition of modernity. In other words, the way in which a nation-state is theorised crucially determines the way in which modernity itself is conceptualised. In a way, Giddens is making a stronger point as he combines logical and historical arguments.⁶ His claim is that if and when a theoretically deficient conceptualisation of society is matched with a historically deficient recognition of the nation-state’s key features, we end up with a deeply problematic image of modernity’s development and main features. This is therefore the third and substantive version of argument of methodological nationalism.

It is worth keeping in mind the fact that this first wave of debates about methodological nationalism conveyed a certain critique of well-established trends and practices in the social theory and social sciences of that time. These writers’ problem was with the internalist focus that characterised methodological nationalism because it dimi...

Table of contents

• Critical realism: interventions
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Understanding the nation-state
• Part II Classical social theory
• Part III Modernist social theory
• Part IV Contemporary social theory
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index