The end of the Cold War in 1989 triggered many fantasies about the present and future. Some of these fantasies were owed to an epistemological spell that channelled the view of the world as developing in a one-sided way. This epistemology was part of a discourse that configured itself around the word globalization, which at the same time meant the decline if not the end of the importance of the nation-state and even of democracy (Guéhenno, 1993). According to this discourse, the world seemed to be moving towards a global unity in which cultural and national differences were deemed as not really essential anymore. The task left was of how to recognize, explain or interpret this development and its consequences properly.
Obviously, globalization refers to a connection between singular phenomena and universal globality and vice versa, and in this way it marginalizes the relevance of any kind of meso levels: here, concretely the ordering and regulating power of the nation-state. In the beginning, frequently under the keyword de-nationalization, globalization primarily meant the privatization of the economy, which was, not coincidentally, often exemplified by the example of France, which has the most state-run economy in the West (Schmidt, 1996; Daley, 1996). The economy should therefore be privately financed. The vision was that henceforth there should be no more state-owned enterprises, and nation-states should restrain themselves from regulating and taxing companies so that they could successfully compete in the global market.
These economic visions and legitimations of a free global market economy subsequently prompted comprehensive reinterpretations of human life, which was, again, understood as moving toward greater social and cultural unity across the globe. As early as in 1990, globalization was defined as “all those processes by which the peoples of the world are incorporated into a single world society, global society” (Albrow & King, 1990, p. 9) or as “the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa” (Giddens, 1990, p. 64). The epistemological presuppositions that were part of these definitions and their associated research programs became clear when Robertson emphasized – in addition to his metaphoric definition of globalization as the “compression of the world” – a simultaneous “intensification of the consciousness of the world as a whole” (Robertson, 1992, p. 8). Epistemologically, this is revealing because it obviously says that the historical development of the globe can be correctly recognized only when an awareness of this development has been generated. Under this intended epistemological shift of emphasis – the spell of globalization – certain topics in the research agendas have been overemphasized and others marginalized.
Accordingly, since about 1990 we have seen the proliferation of writings describing, asserting and explaining this global movement towards “the world-system” (Wallerstein, 1986) or “a single world society” (Archer, 1990, p. I). It is noticeable that these explanations do not actually critically question the thesis of globalization but look for evidence that makes the presupposed thesis plausible in some way or another (Steger, 2004, pp. 1–12). In addition, it is remarkable that although the phenomenon described or explained by globalization is actually a fundamental historical matter, most authors are not historians but sociologists. While acknowledging that the term globalization is new, they claim that the thing it describes is much older. Robertson (1992, p. 8) makes this assumption in the same way as James and Steger (2014), who assert that “globalization began centuries before it was named as such” (James & Steger, 2014, p. 431): one has simply only now realized where the historical journey came from and where it is going to. Perhaps the most famous construction of these “great histories” assumes a 500-year world development starting from an initially homogenous world “around 1500” (Meyer et al., 1987, p. 23) that has been governed by “cultural principles exogenous to any specific nation-state and its historical legacy” (Meyer & Ramirez, 2000, p. 115), laying the foundation of the emerging “world society” (Meyer et al., 1997).
The striking attention that renowned sociologists pay to centuries-old developments towards a predictable future – this is the general thesis put forward here – has to do with the fact that sociology is not simply an academic discipline that investigates social facts and relations, but it has emerged as a particular discourse that constructs its own object of research. Dependent in one way or another on the previously mentioned epistemological “intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole” (Robertson, 1992, p. 8), it relies on a particularized depth of field for its research lenses, which leads to an increased awareness and certainty of grand world historical developments. At the same time, however, it tends to overlook the effectual mechanisms of the everyday reproduction of national identities, particularly in education (Tröhler, 2020a). The situation is somewhat reminiscent of a fair in which the spectators watch spellbound as a magician, whose art lies essentially in distracting the attention of the spectators, performs a hiding trick, which then amazes the enchanted spectators. Instead of looking more closely at the magician’s unobtrusive hand movements, the spectators are fascinated by the glamor, the illusion and the amazement. For indications of nationalism, now rampant for at least two decades across the globe, there was little research sensitivity left in this deluded attraction to globalization.
In itself, one could or even should have been sensitized in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks – at least 12 years after the Cold War. From this time on, “international terrorism” was reacted to with drastic measures to ensure “national security,” even if that also often affected, sometimes severely, the global liberty rights of humans. Freed from the enchantment connected to globalization, it has become more than evident that it was precisely during this period of the last 20 years that all the bold and crude nationalists we know today came to power, supported by the electorate, in Hungary, Turkey, Poland, England, the United States, Israel, Brazil, India, Australia and China, to name a few, and they came close to power in Italy, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria. Hardly anyone has asked what had actually framed the nationalist minds of the people to vote for the Orbans, Erdogans, Trumps, Modis, Morrisons or Johnsons. And if that wasn’t enough, the undoubtedly global Coronavirus pandemic of 2020–2021 has brought to light numerous nationalisms across the globe, and not just by childishly calling the virus the “China virus.” China boasted that it could fight the pandemic more efficiently than the rest of the world; Russia made international propaganda that it was the first country in the world to vaccinate its people (and actually named its vaccine “Sputnik” as a reminder of the technological ignominy the USSR had inflicted on the United States in 1957).1 A little later, the United Kingdom came along and boasted that it was the first Western country to vaccinate its population, and Switzerland followed by emphasizing that it was the first country that had approved vaccination in an orderly (and not accelerated) way; shortly after, Israel proclaimed it wanted to be the “world champion” in the vaccination of its national people. The internationally operating pharmaceutical companies profited massively from the national race for the vaccines, when competition drove up prices and alleged or actual supply shortages for at least some countries soon led to accusations of “vaccine nationalism.” But research, still fascinated by the supposed cultural and social globality of our existence and foremost morally indignant about the Coronavirus in schools, has remained remarkably silent: the nation(-state) had been removed from the research agenda, and where nationalism was addressed at all, it was treated as a moral problem that had to be countered with morals and human rights, which had to be taught not least through education for tolerance and intercultural education.
This volume aims at a disenchantment of education research under the spell of globalization. Unlike the melancholic motifs expressed by Max Weber in his observation of a “disenchantment of the world” (Weber, 2008), this motif promises illuminating clarifications through a conscious questioning of the epistemological delusion which has had two related consequences. On the one hand, it led to the educational research agendas under the spell of globalization, and at the same time it largely left out the question of national identity (re-)production. The result has been that neither the globality nor the paradox of the imperialist character of nationalism have received sufficient attention.
This research intention underlying this volume is made plausible here in four steps. First, it analyzes how sociology, by virtue of its own conditions of emergence, can function as a particular epistemology that suggests globalization. In a second step, it is first shown how a certain form of educational research – here labeled as “large-scale test psychology” – owes itself to globalized, i.e., largely imperial, world views, whereupon reference is subsequently made to how it is foremost sociologically inspired educational research that takes these global enactments for granted and undertakes endeavors to describe, criticize or explain them. In a third step, it is indicated by way of example that, at least in the field of education and schooling, there can be little talk of global isomorphism if one actually looks historically and reveals the essential differences which indicate that school systems in general and curricula in particular have been attuned to the great cultural theses of respective nation, institutionalized in the modern state and its organizations, such as schools. The fourth part formulates research desiderata at the intersection of education and nationalism. Their implementation promises to provide a better theoretical understanding of nation, nationalism and nation-state, as well as to expose the educational imperialism of a few nation-state agents. Above all, one can expect that the educational mechanisms reproducing national identity, which are still very effective in nation-states, will be recognized more adequately. After all, this reproduction affects not only the school but also the epistemologies in academic research.
1Who speaks “globalism”?
The “rhetorical package,” or discourse, in which the concept of globalization has been relevantly configured in the past 30 years can be labeled as “globalism” (Steger, 2004, pp. 4–5). This would be equivalent to how “nationalism” is now understood as a discourse, i.e., as “a particular way of seeing and interpreting the world, a frame of reference that helps us make sense of and structure the reality that surrounds us” (Özkirimli, 2010, p. 206). In the latter case, the spatial claim associated with this discourse (p. 208) is a limited, at best internationally recognized, state territory; in the former case, it is the entire world, the globe.
A rough look at the question of who speaks the language of globalism gives a relatively clear answer. The average spokesman of this language is firstly a sociologist and secondly an Anglo-Saxon, i.e., more precisely, British or U.S.-American. While today the first feature – sociology as epistemology ...
