Readings this week illustrate the benefits of adopting a transnational lens to scrutinise national pasts. One could argue that approaching history by dividing it into compartmentalised nations can lead to two crucial omissions: first, that of the exogenous formation and shaping of nations; second, that of the complexity underlying the seemingly monolithic “historical reputation” of nations.
As Conrad has elucidated, nationalisation and globalisation, while traditionally having been thought of as being two stages of a linear historical development, are actually concurrent and interlinked. That nations are not only made on their own, but also shaped by (or against) a host of exogenous contexts. The globalising context did not blunt the edge of nationalistic instead, it has given further impetus to the assertion and celebration of the nation as it confronted external influences. Using the case of the Deutsche Arbeit conception, Conrad showed that even the quintessentially national was defined with respect to both the within and the without. This attention to globalisation’s shaping of the German nation, in a way, echoes other exogenous approaches to nationalism I have seen elsewhere — one apt example would be Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (I happen to be doing my MO3264 review on the work). Here, Colley identified the core question in the making of the British nation on top of existing English, Scottish, and Welsh identities as being not “what we are in common”, but rather “what we emphatically are not”. Hence, it was a host of negative identifications, namely the deep anti-Catholicism and Francophobia enshrined in a series of European warfare, that served to truly bind the disparate populations of the British Isles. Such an emphasis on the exogenous shaping of nations is surely not without its critics, but it does address a crucial dynamic in the shaping of nations that is not necessarily available when adopting a strictly national scope. The transnational approach, therefore, is able to elucidate the factors in the nation-making that lie beyond the confines of the national border.
Valerio’s work, especially its introduction, also suggests how transnational history can supplement the insufficiencies of national approaches. At times, the lack of scrutiny of transnational interactions in a nation’s history leads us to think of national pasts in monolithic and simplifying manners. When we take such essentialising terms as the “German Empire” and “occupied/Prussian Poland” for granted, we are tricked into thinking that the imperialist enterprise was solely carried out by the Germans for the Germans, while the Poles are consigned to the margins as either passive onlookers or perpetual victims. However, Valerio quite rightly redirected our attention to the subtle interconnection between Poland and Germany, not least by pointing to Polish colonial endeavours (often taking advantage of imperial networks) and engagement in German political, scientific, and intellectual discourse. Crucially, this puts into question the powerful Polish historical self-image as the leading brother among the oppressed, shedding new light on the subject of national memories. In many ways, permeating both intellectual space and public discourse, such matters as national amnesia or difficulty to speak of certain episodes of history (such that would disrupt the grander national self-image) are far more common occurrences than we think — Ireland’s historical victimhood (also that of Scotland perhaps) versus its imperial participation and Great War contributions; France’s celebrated cosmopolitanism versus its infamous “Vichy syndrome” as well as “Algerian syndrome”; furthermore, from my observations, the rhetoric of the “historically peace-loving, non-colonial Chinese people” is also gaining increasing subscribers in contemporary China (not least to boast of some sense of moral superiority over the West), while everyone conveniently forgets how China went from small tribes near the Huanghe to the giant rooster that it now is on the world map over the centuries. Indeed, neither were national approaches the sole perpetuator, nor transnational history the sole corrective to these historical misconceptions. Nevertheless, transnational history — benefiting hugely from its affinity with microhistory — with its attention to hitherto concealed or unnoticed cross-border interaction can help to enrich the picture we currently have of national histories, which can be quite susceptible to unwarranted compartmentalisation and arbitrary essentialisations.