ABSTRACT
Transnationalization is most often associated with either 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). These are rather limited perspectives. Instead I offer transnationalization as a distinct analytical mode 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. As such, transnationalization is about transformations of what is historically organized and conceptualized as national, rather than simply reforming at a different level. I specify three different routes through which transnationalization takes place, foregrounding the extent to which nation, citizen, and region are reworked in a variety of institutional, policy, and societal areas that the book covers: a) through externalized legitimacy, whereby states and other national actors pursue transnationally diffused frameworks of proper nationhood and citizenship to signal their participation and competitiveness in the wider world; b) through scientifically “theorized” standards, by which the discrepancies between such standards and local capacities and contexts spur mobilization among governmental and non-governmental actors; c) through projected spaces of participation, in which transnationally transmitted imaginaries inform individual life course strategies, tastes, aesthetics, and value orientations, creating expectations for individual agency and participation, even when policy and public commitments are contrary to such agency and participation. All three routes implicate national actors and their engagements that are constituted and enabled by non–nation-specific frameworks, principles, and models. The chapter suggests that transnational transformations of the nation and citizenship take place at multiple levels of the social system (policy, organizational structure, social movement activity, individual tastes and attitudes), even as the levels themselves remain loosely coupled.
