Wimmer and Schiller’s article acts as a critique of how social sciences have traditionally framed, and progressively begun to frame, migration. Their central claim is that much of twentieth century historiography operated under a belief in ‘methodological nationalism’, treating the nation-state as the natural, and in some cases sole, unit of analysis, and to equate society itself with the nation-state. This then assumes that political and social life can be easily and neatly contained within national borders, which fails to treat nationalism as its own living historical force, naturalises the nation-state by treating it as a purely self-evident object of study, and territorially limits analysis by confining it to state borders. For Wimmer and Schiller, this flawed framework has had a great impact on disciplines from sociology to economics, and has produced a ‘container model’ of society where culture, solidarity, and polity are all neatly aligned within a national space when the actual reality of the situation is never that simple. In such a model, migrants become simple, inhuman, ‘anomalies’, they disrupt this supposed neat order and as such are treated as a problem that must be solved. This ‘problem solving’ can be seen in how postwar migration studies often focused on assimilation, integration, loyalty, perceived welfare dependence, etc. rather than taking a step back and rethinking the frame being used. They also argue that the nation-states themselves were not particularly self-contained, that instead modern states emerged through transborder processes, such as imperialism and colonialism, that are often obscured, deliberately or overwise, by a purely national approach to history.
However, they also warn that a rejection of methodological nationalism must also refrain from endless mobility or borderlessness for their own sake. In this, Wimmer and Schiller tackle something that has become very common in many works on the subject of refugees in the modern world. While socially progressive circles have begun to shift away from the narrative of victimising and removing agency from refugees, and reassert that they are neither burdens on the nation-state that accepts them nor something that should be pressured to ‘assimilate’ into this new nation-state, these currents often fall into the very generalisations and denial of agency common amongst socially regressive circles. Their ‘methodological fluidism’ often placing too much weight on one singular material fact, the fact that they are refugees, and losing sight of the many more surrounding pressures. Where an ethnonationalist would label these refugees as agents of destabilisation for the country, and a social progressive of the type covered previously would blanket them as agents of liberation, Wimmer and Schiller instead argue that their politics are not determined solely by their status as refugees. They argue Instead that the simple act of being a refugee tells us very little about the actual beliefs and social framework of a refugee, for such things are the product of conditions that run far deeper and older than any modern day conflict or humanitarian crisis. Refugees are diverse, even refugees that come from the same country, ascribing to different religions, coming from different cultures, ethnicities, and believing in different political ideologies.
In summary, Wimmer and Schiller have provided a much-needed criticism of a purely cosmopolitan interpretation of refugees that itself emerged to combat the nationalist framing of refugees. Where methodological nationalism has long been the target of post-modern criticism and attempts to excise its influence from historiography the reactionary cosmopolitanism it triggered has been analysed to a far lesser degree. Works such as these are, in my opinion, of great importance in exposing the similarity between a purely cosmopolitan and purely nationalist approach to migration, where one labels refugees as inherently transgressive in a negative manner, the other uses it in a positive one.