Week 7 Blog

For my research project, I am looking at the transnational networks that created and maintained the New Right movement and (in modernity) the Alt-right movement. I read Wimmer and Schiller’s work on Methodological Nationalism, The Social Sciences, and The Study of Migration, to consider different approaches to the methodology in my own work. This piece highlighted various ideas I noted in my pre-liminary research. Most significantly, I believe that the New Right movement showcases how individuals internalize academia’s understanding of the nation-state and nationalism and apply it to their political mobilization.
Schiller and Wimmer discuss how nationalism, the formation of the nation-state, and migration were understood and shaped mutually through global trends occurring from around the 1870s to the First World War. The creation of a global market, a renewed rush for colonization, and an increase in industrialization and modernization led to the more concrete formation of the nation-state. As such, the nation-state became the assumed and natural container of organization, creating an identity shaped by an understanding of “the people” who held rights, responsibilities of mutual aid, and shared a cultural identity. This era gave rise to academia’s understanding ( and the overall organization of knowledge and fields) of the nation and the people who belonged within it. Therefore, the social sciences have hardly questioned the methodological nationalism in their works. The social sciences would either ignore, take for granted, or remain constrained to a specific territorial boundary when touching upon the nation-state and nationalism. In the end, these categories of study were created and formalized because they helped concretize modern ideas of the nation-state.
When conducting my preliminary research, multiple articles and journals expressed shock at the bouts of violent nationalism expressed by the new right. I found this sentiment interesting, as based on my previous knowledge and historical pieces on the evolution of the right, conservatism, and its emphasis on natural and “organic” ethnic groups had been a continuity since the very creation of the nation-state as an identity. Schiller and Wimmer discuss how the social sciences have had amnesia over the role of nationalism (even in its violent expressions) in creating boundaries and national identities. Nationalism was assumed to be foreign to Western states, which were built upon democracy and liberal ideology.
What I found the most interesting was that the individuals who developed the foundational ideology for the new right were rooted in the ideologies that led to the formation of the nation-state. Similarly, how the nation-state was constructed through cross-border interactions, the nationalistic and insular far-right movement was created by transnational networks. The right’s conversations on belonging, modernization, and immigration, and “organic” ethnic groups were the same ideas that built the nation-state.
When working on this project, I must keep this in mind, because if I ignore methodological nationalism in my own work (and in my understandings of others’ research), I run the risk of portraying this movement as inherently shocking and paradoxical instead of portraying it as a natural progression of conversations on belonging and exclusion originating from the formation of nation-states.