Transnational history is often presented as a solution to the so-called ‘methodological nationalism’ that was and is prevalent amongst the social sciences. However, Naumann’s Revisiting transnational actors from a spatial perspective and Alcalde’s Spatializing transnational history: European spaces and territories argue that this new methodology is far from something that should be adopted uncritically, and it can itself fall into the same pitfalls as the methodology it was designed to supersede.
Naumann argues that the ‘transnational’ has begun to increasingly resemble an essentialised ‘sphere of its own’. More specifically, how focusing only on mobility risks turning ‘transnational actors’ into cosmopolitan ‘free agents’, and treating the transnational as something entirely detached from local and national contexts. They instead posit that actors are, no matter their stripe, always present in multiple, layered spaces, the local, the regional, the imperial, and the international.
Alcalde, meanwhile, connects transnational history and the ‘spatial turn’, arguing that, if done improperly, transnationalism will only replace the nation-state container that once confined how people approached history with new, larger, but still abstract containers, such as Europe, essentially resulting in the recreation of ‘methodological nationalism’ as ‘methodological transnationalism’. He instead calls for a flexible use of scales and spatial units derived from the research question, not assumed in advance.
Both articles also clarify what makes a source ‘transnational’, arguing that some documents are not magically ‘global’ and others ‘national’, but that, a source becomes transnational when it allows us to trace cross-boundary relations. Such as an activist whose correspondence about a local political or environmental campaign is relayed to an international organisation. Naumann echoes Pierre-Yves Saunier’s metaphor of the ‘historian’s Trojan horses’ to describe sources about actors who migrate between spatial orders, allowing historians to better discover and measure transnational connections.
Both texts also provide suggestions about how sources can be interpreted transnationally, which can be boiled down to approaching sources from a ‘spatial’ lens: what spaces does the source assume the reader is fluent in, what borders does it cross, and how are its actors positioned socially. Even relatively small sources can be used to reconstruct larger transnational spaces if we simply follow the networks they exist within.