ABSTRACT
It is not only among sociologists that can reference to the so-called spatial turn (Warf and Arias 2008) be encountered. Taking a closer look at the adaptation of the ongoing debate about the spatial in the context of current academic debates about the phenomena of progressing internationalization, we find that (not only) social science has been set on the issue of trans-nationalism . Here, the reconfiguration of social processes and structures in relation to spatial orders takes an especially distinctive shape. Trying to evaluate the scientific achievements gained by transnational studies, we can identify a central innovation: in contrast to general studies on globalization, transnational research conceptualizes geographical and social space as not necessarily bound to the “container” of the nation-state. It seems clear that the critique of methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) can unquestionably be regarded as a crucial advance and argument against the dominant approaches and methodology of international studies. On the other hand, there also remains the danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, through underestimating the still very strong weight of nation-states and the national level of analysis or even dissolving the geographic-spatial bonding of the social into the air of deter-ritorialization, spaces of flows and global cosmopolitanism.
