![]()
1 Mapping the terrain of transnationalization
Nation, citizenship, and region
Yasemin Nuhoḡlu Soysal
In the last two decades, East Asian countries have opened up regionally and globally via deepening investment and trade ties, increasing population mobility, cross-fertilization in popular culture and consumption, and a new political climate of collaboration among Japan, China, and South Korea and between Taiwan and the mainland.1 The global agendas of human rights and liberalism have penetrated the region and the drive for democratization has intensified. Simultaneously, East Asia exhibits renewed national assertiveness and nationalist impulses, expressed through competition in regional and global markets, geopolitics, as well as new cultural positioning—at times entangled with territorial and colonial legacies. How should we understand such seemingly contradictory developments as they bear on the transformations of the nation and citizenship in East Asia?
Conventionally, studies on East Asia juxtapose these developments, centering on the much-exercised dichotomy of the national (often understood as “unique”) and transnational (often understood as “the West”). We have a different orientation in this book project. Rather than treating the national and transnational as contradictory trajectories, we focus on the interactions between the two, with a view to seeing how these interactions work to transform the ideals and practices of the “good nation,” “good society,” and “good citizen.” We inquire into the reworking of the nation and citizenship vis-à-vis the transnational in a variety of institutional, policy, and societal sites. The individual chapters cover a comprehensive empirical range: education, science, immigration and multicultural policy, human rights, gender and youth orientations, contemporary art, “values” politics, and regional politics. These are sites where the boundaries of the nation are contested and the relationship between the citizen and (national) collective is redefined. These are also sites that increasingly engage global norms and forms, and expand networks and markets in the region and beyond. Thus they allow us to address different ways that the national and transnational are intertwined, with intended and unintended, and at times contradictory, consequences.
The volume focuses on aspects of transnationalization that are missing in the accounts of the contemporary East Asian developments. The view of the national and transnational as dichotomous spheres of effect and analysis, which animates much of the social science research in this field, overlooks emerging processes that transform the contemporary nature of the nation and citizen in East Asia. At the same time individual chapters reveal various forms that transnationalization takes and the extent to which the region and the global, as transnational nodes, are constituted at the national level.
Although not unique to East Asia, in the last two decades the processes in which we are interested have intensified in the region. The volume engages the temporal dimension of transnationalization. Unlike the European countries that purposefully pursued transnationalism in the form of region-building in the aftermath of the Second World War, East Asian countries have engaged the transnational at different time points and in the context of different global situations. Japan was a first-comer (through its connection to the hegemonic “West” via the United States) in many of the empirical domains we address in this volume. Thus it provides good comparative leverage for our exploration of the contemporary period in which a common view is that Japan is withdrawing and China is advancing to play a leading role in regional and world affairs. The beginning of the twenty-first century—which is no longer framed by Cold War conflict and in which United States’ hegemony is no longer taken for granted—represents overall a more dynamic transnationalization in the region, beyond states’ own agendas, and sometimes contradictory to such agendas, impacting different organizational and societal sectors.
Mapping the analytical terrain
In contrast to studies that emphasize discrete national contexts or that simply rehash past conflicts and their contemporary manifestations in the East Asian region, this volume prioritizes transnationalization processes in their regional and global expressions. Our collective effort is not on the theorization of transnationalism as a substantive or normative concern.2 Rather the individual chapters of this volume offer investigations that help make transnationalization analytically legible in apprehending the seemingly contradictory developments of nation and citizenship in East Asia.
As an analytical node, we suggest the term transnationalization to capture the institutionalization of nation-transcending frameworks, models, and standards, and their constitution of actors’ orientations and strategies. It points to the shifting valence of the national as an “organizational logic” and “cultural-cognitive orientation,” both as intended and unintended consequence.3 As such, transnationalization is about transformations of what is historically organized and conceptualized as national, rather than simply reforming at a different level, and may or may not lead to regional or global arrangements (Ramirez 2012, Sassen 2006, 2008). The advance of explicit transborder regimes (e.g. the World Trade Organization and the European Convention on Human Rights) or social formations “spanning borders” (e.g. migrant networks and collective action) is one, but in our view limited, aspect of transnationalization.
Two main analytical threads underline the current volume.
First, the analytical strategy engaged by the authors locates the nation-state and a variety of national actors within their broader transnational environment—in an analytical sense these two levels are inseparable. Here we find affinity with a number of long-established sociological perspectives. Sociological institutionalism, and particularly its world society variety as advocated by John Meyer and his associates, posits that actors are embedded within their wider environments and their actions are only meaningful within the frameworks and interactions provided by such environments (Meyer 2010, Meyer et al. 1997, Schofer et al. 2012). The research programs of Saskia Sassen (2006, 2008) on globalization and denationalization, and Ulrich Beck (Beck and Sznaider 2006) on cosmopolitanization and methodological nationalism, support a similar analytical imagery that undoes misleading binaries.4
Such an analytical move opens up theoretical space for explaining the transformative role of transnational processes not as undermining the nation-state but reconstituting its cognitive, cultural, and organizational premises. It contrasts the simplistic view of “powerful” global institutions weakening nation-state authority by enabling the global corporate economy (e.g. through the IMF) or enhancing global justice (e.g. through the ICC court) (Sassen 2008). In its stead, our analytical strategy leads us to observe the expanded actorhood of the state constituted by transnational frameworks—engaging in region-formation, building a globally agile and able citizenry, and presenting a globally attractive and responsible nation—even when its organization is de- or super-nationalized or integrated with global markets (Leheny, Soysal and Wong, Zhang in this volume).
Second, we note the absence of a centralized global authority in the current world structure. Again in affinity with sociological perspectives, we regard the world as an interdependent state system, in which nation-states, organizations (public and private), and individuals constitute the major actors (Meyer and Jepperson 2000, Sassen 2008). International finance and economic regulators and justice institutions, as commonly posited, are among the driving forces in transnational processes. To this we add a more expansive list of actors—experts, scientists, professionals, social movements—and their expanding resources and linkages into the analytical imagery.
The diversity of actors (with different identities and in different local contexts) and the lack of a centralized global authority do not necessarily mean a chaotic order. One significant aspect of the current world system is the diffusion, however uneven, of discourses, structures, and practices leading to convergence around principles and models of governance (e.g. of good nation, good society, and good citizen). Cognitive and normative expectancy structures, via a broad set of associational and learning processes, constitute the main channels of such diffusion ( Jepperson 2002, Strang and Meyer 1993). This view contests much of the literature that pictures the wider world simply as hegemonic powers, or globalized authority structures controlled by them, imposing models and rules on weaker countries (Dobbin, Simmons, and Garrett 2007). Models and rules indeed become hegemonic, often with theoretical and scientific backing, and their diffusion is facilitated by the world structure enabled by hegemonic powers of the time, but the hegemonic powers themselves are not always the proponents of the emerging order. Under US economic expansion and dominance, both economic and political liberalism diffused rapidly in the late twentieth century. Note, however, that while the United States, via global regulators such as the WTO, IMF, and World Bank, clearly pushed market-based policy reforms, much of the liberal human rights norms have diffused despite the United States’ notorious resistance during and after the introduction of the UN Covenants on Human Rights (Somers and Roberts 2008).
Moving on from these analytical premises, we specify three different routes through which transnationalization takes place. All three implicate national actors and their engagements that are constituted and enabled by non-nation-specific frameworks, principles, and models. We do not theorize these routes as allencompassing but offer them as indicative of the empirical observations provided by the individual chapters in this volume.
Transnationalization through externalization of legitimacy: Transnationalization of the nation and citizenship is closely related to broader legitimacy expectations. In an expanded (increasingly connected and institutionally dense) world environment, while states retain their sovereign status, their legitimacy is no longer simply conditioned by a contract with the nation, but also by their adherence to nation-transcending frameworks of appropriate organization and action (Levy and Sznaider 2006, Meyer 2010). The broader environment, via processes of isomorphism, prescribes models of proper nation-stateness and citizenship, which include goals of socioeconomic development and “cosmopolitan” self-definitions and proper forms of participation in global politics, which include regional organization and institutionalization (Leheny, Soysal and Wong, Tsutsui in this volume). States often adopt such models and organizational forms because they risk losing legitimacy in the international system. A range of reform actions and policies follow, not because they are necessarily proved solutions to immediate problems (although they are often thus articulated) but because they signal proper nationhood and competitiveness in the wider world (Soysal and Wong, Zhang in this volume).
Externalized legitimacy also grounds new identity formations at the societal level. The expansion of international movement networks and global campaigns, as well as local activists’ cultivation of external allies and projection of their claims onto international institutions, have been noted as instances of transnationalization (della Porta and Tarrow 2005, Sikkink and Keck 1998, Tarrow 2005, Tsutsui and Wotipka 2004). A more radical point is made here: the cognitive and cultural transformation of national (societal) groups in relation to transnational frameworks that consequently facilitates changes in local practices and policies. Tsutsui (in this volume) describes the self-transformation of the Ainu from a small, invisible group to a “proud” indigenous minority by linking to the global indigenous movement and appropriating transnational human rights discourses. These connections brought new meaning, identity, and legitimacy to the Ainu’s local struggles. The Ainu became active claim-makers, making significant strides in their struggle for recognition by the Japanese government and abroad. Although discrimination against Ainu in Japan remains an ongoing issue, the greater visibility and formal recognition of the Ainu has all the same contributed to global norm expansion and reproduction.
Transnationalization through “theorized” standards and practices: Nation-states not only operate under externalized legitimacy expectations but are also embedded in a web of expertise. A wide range of experts, consultants, and their associated assemblies (professionals, scientists, businesses, movements), draw standards that enable “non-national organizing logics and operational space” (Sassen 2006, 2008; see also Meyer 2010, Strang and Meyer 1993). Such standards are often theorized as “best practices” and abstracted from national contexts. They are produced not only for markets (e.g. intellectual property rights, accounting principles) but for a variety of fields, in science, education, professions, media and arts, and even social movements. Education and science, domains with explicit theories of collective good, generate universalistic standards that suffuse the international sphere via elaborate organizational carriers (Drori and Meyer 2006, Meyer, Ramirez, and Soysal 1992; Soysal and Wong, Zhang in this volume). This can be contrasted with international migration, a much less institutionalized and much more contested field of policy, resistant to transnational standards (Skrentny and Lee in this volume). In other domains, such as the arts, standards are produced via more informal networks and private schemes that facilitate global consumption (Favell in this volume).
The inconsistencies and discrepancies between transnational standards and local capacities and contexts create much mobilization for change. Nongovernmental and governmental actors both mobilize. Zhang (in this volume) shows how Chinese synthetic biology and stem-cell scientists, as well as grass-roots movements, pressure the Chinese government to introduce national regulations and organizational resources in line with transnational standards in order to increase the capacity of life sciences in China on a par with the most advanced governance structures in this particular field. Transnational standards may also provide the grounds for reimagining of national territories or breaching of others, lending themselves to the creation of a new niche for regional conflicts, as in the workings of the international ocean regime in East Asian seas, described by Dudden (in this volume).
Transnationalization through projected spaces of participation: Immigrant diasporas are often conceptualized as “transnational communities,” engaging in practices that thread between places of origin and settlement. This is not the kind of transnationalization we are evoking here, as diasporic communities are more often than not nationally bound (Soysal 2000). We refer to the transnationally shaped imaginaries that inform individual life courses, strategies, expectations, tastes, aesthetics, and value orientations. These imaginaries are enabled by increasingly standardized conceptions of the individual with standardized categorical qualities (Frank and Meyer 2002). They are scripted and transmitted through global businesses and consumption markets (Favell, Y. Nakano), migratory flows (Skrentny and Lee), electronic and other media (Chang and Tam, L. Nakano), professional networks (Zhang), and scientific theories (Chang and Tam, Iwabuchi, Soysal and Wong). Nationally decontextualized, such imaginaries create expectations and avenues for individual mobility and participation, not only for international migrants, but also for those who remain close to home (Sassen 2006).
Transnational reworkings of the nation and citizenship in East Asia
The observations provided in this volume reveal transnational transformations of the nation and citizenship at multiple levels of the social system (policy, organizational structure, social movement activity, indiv...
