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THE CHALLENGE OF TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY Young-sun Hong, State University of New York, Stony Brook Let me begin by clarifying my intentions here. Doing transnational history does not mean studying one or more specific topics or even applying a particular method. Rather, transnational history involves deconstructing--from a potentially infinite number of perspectives--the nation-state as one of the fundamental categories through which Western modernity is narrated and doing so by showing how the national intersects with or is imbricated in sub- and supra-national phenomena whose repression or forgetting first makes possible the political and cultural construction of the nation. This does not, however, mean that we must jettison the concept of the nation-state and its constitutive claim to territorial sovereignty as a fatally flawed master narrative because the state remains a weighty actor, even if its conceptual and geographical borders are much more porous than was once believed to be the case. Rather, following Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, we must learn how to see the nation-state as a “global nation” which mediates the local impact of global forces, actors and institutions while acting back upon them. Far and away the most important analysis of these issues is Thomas Bender, ed., _Rethinking American History in a Global Age_ (University of California Press, 2002). What I find most intriguing about this transnational perspective is the following. By decoupling or dissociating sovereignty from territoriality, transnationalism forces us to rethink those narratives of Western modernity that viewed the territorial nation-state as the primary site of progress, development, and even human freedom while at the same time de-naturalizing the Eurocentric opposition between “traditional” community and “modern” nation-state, place-based subaltern experiences and state-guided productivist modernization and development, and between the West and all of those peoples who were believed to lack those constitutive features of Western modernity (or at least who were constructed as lacking them). This critique of the founding mythology of the nation-states creates a conceptual space for the investigation--by historians and representatives of other disciplines and interdisciplinary inquiry--of subnational and transnational images, voices, and symbols in temporal and spatial locations beyond and at the border of European modernity. Herein lies the productive interpretive potential of a transnational approach to German and European history. The call for the transnationalization of national histories has been eagerly taken up by many in the past few years, but done successfully by very few. The basic problem, at least as I see it, is that these attempts approach the problem by thinking outward from the nation-state, but never succeed in leaping over their own shadow, so to speak, because we still by and large lack the concepts and categories needed to think those subnational, supranational, paranational, and global processes that can not be adequately conceptualized from within the nation state. And the most basic justification of transnational history is its ability to illuminate dimensions of historical reality that can not be understood from within a national perspective. Some of the most successful transnational history to date has focused on immigration, hybrid identities, and various forms of “double consciousness.” However, it has proven much more difficult to identify other factors that would yield comparable gains in knowledge--as I learned first hand last year as I watched graduate students in a research seminar that I was teaching on transnationalism struggle to identify productive transnational approaches to questions of interest to them. In an article published ten years ago in the _AHR_, Michael Geyer and Charles Bright enumerated four broad sets of processes which they argued constituted the modern condition of globality. [1] This represented an early yet important attempt to delineate the domain of what would later become transnational history. The problem, though, is finding a way to operationalize these forces of globality in a concrete research project, and the limits of our collective imagination here are nowhere reflected more clearly than in those pieces that criticize nation-based historiography for its Eurocentrism, but that do so without offering concrete models of what a transnational history might look like. While those works which in recent years have attempted to chart a transnational approach to German history are certainly correct in calling for an alternative to nation-based history because it would be impossible to extend a self-contained, monadological subject of history to the point where it would be dialectically transformed into something different, they leave this alternative frustratingly underdefined. Nor does the new imperial history offer a way out of this self-centeredness of the national subject because, although it brings to light the hitherto hidden traces of imperial experience on national identity in the metropolis, it does not aspire to get outside the monad to create a strong sense of an overarching global process which embraces metropolitan and colonial societies, but which impacts them in different ways. The result of these theoretical limitations is that many studies that claim to write transnational history often reproduce Eurocentricism that they criticize because they neglect to interrogate the ways in which Europe was constructed. Can we really “Europeanize” German history without examining the racial regime on which the very idea of Europe rests--and can we do this without creating a new analytic framework and a new subject of the transnational history of Europe? Although one can only welcome the call for the “Europeanization” of German history, one can not do this without examining the racial construction of the German nation and, more generally, without understanding how the construction of the “White Atlantic” depended on discourses of racial difference. [2] I have been making my own tentative efforts to solve this theoretical conundrum while at the same time saying something meaningful about the history of the two Germanies. Thanks to much historical scholarship in the past decade, we now have a much more sophisticated understanding of post-1945 German history than was available before, and we know that East and West Germany shared the similar experiences arising from two different yet equally contradictory industrial modernities. While the Cold War has been the object of sustained scholarly analysis, however, this focus on East-West rivalry has left other important areas of research egregiously undertheorized. One such area, I contend, concerns multiple locations of the Third World and non-European peoples in the discursive politics of difference (race, gender, class, sexuality), whose rhetorical strategies were central to the construction of German identity and citizenship. Although the Cold War was driven by ideological, economic and geopolitical competition between the two blocs, these blocs were not self-contained, hermetically enclosed vessels. Rather, as the recent theorists of transnationalism have argued, they represented political projects and spaces which enjoyed—and which could only enjoy—a provisional existence because the forging of these entities required control over processes which, due to their subnational, transnational or global nature and their different temporalities, escaped the control of the nation-state or, in this instance, the capitalist and communist blocs.[3] During the era of decolonization, rivalries between the First and Second Worlds ran directly through the Third World. The two blocs and their member states each objectified and constituted the Third World in its own way.[4] For the East, it was the object of international proletarian solidarity in a common struggle against the vestiges of imperialism, the threat of neo-colonialism, and the reality of poverty and disease. For the West, the Third World was a vast domain of archaism and underdevelopment which had to be carefully guided into modernity by the practitioners of the new policy sciences. They hoped that modernization along Western lines would save these countries from their own poverty and ignorance and inoculate them against the threat of communism that haunted all nations as they took their first steps down the road to economic development and social modernization. [5] Both of these communist and capitalist narratives of modernity anticipated a future whose realization ultimately depended on winning the hearts and minds of these newly independent states and reshaping them in their own image and likeness. However, these modernizing processes were not transparent, one-way processes. No matter how much the two blocs, and the two Germanys, hoped to see themselves reflected in the mirror of the Third World, their Cold War blinders, reinforced by persistent racism, prevented them from seeing that these countries were themselves sovereign agents on the world stage and that they had local knowledge, values, and interests that could not be fitted without remainder into either narrative of modernity. Thus, by an unexpected and ironic twist, in their efforts to persuade these newly independent countries of the superiority of the capitalist and communist roads, the countries of both blocs found that their domestic policies could not be insulated from criticisms emanating from their Third World publics. Domestic policies were implicated in this international rivalry in essential ways because the self-definition of the protagonists was always shaped with an eye to the reception of this rhetoric by the world audience. Consequently, emissaries from the two blocs felt pressed to personify the values of their respective systems and resolve, at least in the eyes of their hosts, the limitations or contradictions of their system. Thus, I would like to suggest, the mediation of these nationalist and internationalist projects through the Third World audiences played an important, but unrecognized role in the construction of national identities in both East and West. As a result, we need to look not only at metropolitan intent, but also at the way these intentions were refracted through Third World agency and at how this reception ultimately led to a transformation of this metropolitan project. Not only did the Third World reception of American initiatives help shape American understanding of themselves. This reception also helped define the parameters through which East Germany could present itself to this audience. Understanding this complex process involves creating, at least imaginatively, a new subject of Cold War history, a sort of three-sided transnational public sphere, to capture the influences flowing in all directions between the United States, the GDR, and their Third World audiences. Notes [1]. Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, "World History in a Global Age," _American Historical Review 100:4 (October 1995), 1034-1060. [2]. Victoria de Grazia, _Irresistible Empire. America’s Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005) [3]. Thomas Bender, _Rethinking American History in the Global Age_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). [4]. Walter Mignolo, _Local Histories/Global Designs_ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 92. [5]. Walter Rostow, _The Stages of Economic Growth_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971).
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