THIS COLLECTION OF PAPERS emerged from a conference held by the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies to explore contemporary uses and understandings of the term ‘transnationalism’ The enormous appeal of concepts describing global processes, such as ‘transnationalism’ and ‘globalization,’ often leaves unacknowledged the Western hegemonic perspective that they tend to assume. They are concepts formulated to describe processes emanating from the centre/core, yet their apparent neutrality conceals a political import once overtly expressed by terms such as ‘neo-imperial’ and ‘neo-colonial’ Of particular interest in these essays is the question of the effect of global processes upon the nation-state and national cultures in the non-Western world.
The concept of transnationalism was originally devised in the 1970s to describe the emergence of business enterprises operating beyond the boundaries and regulation of a single state—’transnational corporations’. More recently, it has been used to describe diaspora cultures produced through immigration to the developed world. ‘Transnational’ describes social worlds produced through continuing transactions and exchanges between home societies and immigrant communities.
Transnationalism converges with the term ‘globalization’ to the extent that they are often used interchangeably to describe global processes that transcend the regulatory and cultural space of the nation-state. Both transnationalism and globalization also point to changes in the character of nation-states as institutional expressions of modernity, including their sovereignty and their regulatory capacities. Both terms have gained currency in the post-Cold War era as the nature of the post-colonial state has changed. As Bruce Kapferer notes in his analysis of contemporary violence in Sri Lanka, national development no longer requires a modernizing and centralizing sovereign state, but an accommodation to global market policies. Yet, ‘transnationalism’ and ‘globalization’ may be usefully distinguished by recognizing the extent to which the nation-state remains central in transnationalism, but not in globalization. Globalization refers to the intensification of worldwide social relations that link distant places and also influence social life in them. It refers to the effects of time-space compression and the emergence of new forms of global social and economic integration. Globalization is about processes that are deterritorializing, decentring and denationalizing: production, consumption, communities, politics and identities are all seen as increasingly detached from specific localities. By contrast, ‘transnational’ refers to aspects of the ‘state’ that continue to regulate its borders and shape national society and identity to different degrees. Transnational processes remain anchored in the social and political contexts of nation-states.
This collection of papers explores transnationalism through specific case-studies. Mohammed Bamyeh introduces the discussion with an analysis of what he describes as the retreat of national solidarity and the emergence of new transnational forms of ‘postnational’ solidarity. His initial focus is upon the establishment of the European Union, which he sees as a bureaucratic achievement divorced from European nationalism’s earlier turbulent history. He describes the post-World War II world as creating the conditions for postnationalism through the United Nations and international agreements regarding human rights, trade and security. The European states cooperated in subordinating national Pout of to a stands of con icaeatcasy thatched the union together logic of postnationalism, the United States, Bamyeh argues, has not. It has embarked upon a new kind of imperialism in the face of internal and external challenges to its very possibility. For Bamyeh, transnational processes and institutions have opened up the possibility that the national will be eclipsed as the primary source of politically- and territorially-focused solidarity.
If Mohammed Bamyeh sees the transnational as the path to the post-national, Kazuhiko Okuda reminds us that the nation-state of modernity was a transnational export from Europe. In a discussion of the origins of the modern Japanese state, Okuda outlines the self-consciousness with which the Meiji élite sent out the Iwakura study mission (1871-73) to effect a massive, but selective, cultural borrowing from the West. Its ultimate goal was to discover the best examples of modern governmental, technological and policy practices in order to construct a sovereign Japan.
Leif Manger addresses transnationalism by exploring the changing social and cultural world of the Hadramis of Singapore. The Hadramis are an Indian Ocean diaspora culture forged through maritime trading and missionary activity from the tenth century onward—well before European colonialism and the postcolonial states that succeeded it. Arguing against simplistic characterizations of diaspora culture as the survival of tradition in a new locale, he documents the complex history of the negotiations behind Hadrami identity in Singapore. Instead of the construction of identity through boundaries, he emphasizes the hybridity of diaspora identity spaces negotiated within the specific contexts of nation-states.
If diaspora communities are trying to survive in a globalizing world, so, too, are states. Both Wan-Li Wee’s analysis of modernization in Singapore and Ibrahim Aoudé’s discussion of Hawaii’s efforts to secure a place in the global economy examine the transnational politics of state survival and local responses to it.
Through an analysis of architecture and film, Wee explores Singapore’s embrace of modernization as a deliberate project undertaken by the government of the city-state. Its thorough acceptance of modernity leads Wee to observe that Singapore’s planners concurred with Le Corbusier’s conviction that all of the contradictions of becoming modern may be resolved by technological means, by a universal rationalism. He notes that if the ‘modern’ or the ‘global’ is seen as coterminus with the
‘Western, then ‘West’ becomes a transnational concept detached from its geographical origins. But the semiotic surface of modernism produced through Singapore’s planned urban architecture conceals a much less ordered and assimilated social world. Through an analysis of popular film, he reveals the rebellious and untidy lives of the working class in the very settings that were emblematic of social engineering-the Housing Development Board (HDB) public estates that accommodate Singapore’s working class.
Ibrahim Aoude’s paper explores the way in which Hawaii has used public policy to strengthen its position in a globalizing world. Confronted by economic marginalization in a global economy, the state responded by adopting public policies that subsidized the rich (corporations) and withdrew support from Hawaii’s social welfare system. In other words, the very basis of democratic power has shifted from entitlements of citizenship to the conditionality of participation in the world market. Transnationalism here refers to the specificity of public policy borrowing in inter-state competition to attract and maintain capital investment and the emergence of, and cooperation between, social movements against globalization.
Although there is still the possibility of negotiation between international capital, the state and citizens, globalization has contributed to profound social crises in those areas in which the state has lost or forfeited this capacity. What Aoudé describes in Hawaii as public policy borrowing to promote neo-liberal economic reform is experienced in weaker states as imposed IMF structural adjustment policies to alter the social distribution of wealth. In those states that have faltered in their own negotiations with international capital, the IMF has been the agent of transnational neo-liberal public policy implementation.
In his paper upon the state and civil violence in Sri Lanka, Bruce Kapferer explores the external and internal forces that shattered the postcolonial nation of Sri Lanka. He argues that, in the post-Cold War period, the new imperial dominance centred upon Europe and North America has changed the circumstances of states in the periphery. The political need has receded for “strong territorially sovereign nation-states” to manage development and modernization; instead, the state has been made the broker for international capital. The consequence is that the state has become more centralized with the “routine suspension of democratic citizens’ rights.” In Sri Lanka, internal conflict has produced a long-running civil war constructed along ethnic lines. Rather than heralding the transcendence of the postnational over the national, however, this marginalization of peripheral states in the new imperial age has triggered a powerful rebirth of nationalism and ethnic forces. Therefore, he suggests, violence and resurgent ethnicity are not merely expressions of social breakdown, but consequences of the reworking of nationalist solidarities in diverse ways.
Michael Humphrey and Maroun Kisirwani also explore transnationalism in the context of a nation-state in crisis, examining the role of international humanitarian law and human rights movements in reconstituting, rather than undermining, the Lebanese nation-state. While transnational processes have eroded the sovereignty and dominion of the state, as Bamyeh argues, justice has not been displaced from it. For most people, citizenship is the source of legal protection and rights, not international courts or law. The paper’s focus is post-war Lebanon and the unresolved issue of the ‘disappeared! Amnesty laws have prevented any serious investigations into their fates, but the issue will not go away. The burial of the dead is an act which relates to a social morality that is communal and, in this case, national.
Estela Valverde also examines transnationalism in the context of national crisis in her account of the military repression and denationalization of Uruguayan society through external and internal exile.
Post-dictatorship Uruguay parallels Lebanon insofar as the political élite brokered the transition to democratic politics through a blanket amnesty upon human rights abuses. There, too, the issue of the disappeared continues to remind people that the past has not been resolved because it was premised upon an injustice to their memory —namely, to forget them. Unlike Lebanon, however, the Uruguayan politics of the disappeared takes place in a regional environment that shared the experience of collaboratory dictatorships and sought different political resolutions through truth commissions and trials. In addition, the Organization of American States Court of Human Rights has provided a regional legal forum to which cases of human rights abuse may be taken and which can challenge amnesty laws that contradict human rights set out in international laws and conventions. Transnational legal processes and human rights movements continue to provide the basis for the possibility of national justice and recovery.
From this collection of essays, we can see that ‘transnationalism’ as an analytical concept preserves the specificity of cultural and political realities in a globalizing world. Transnationalism and globalization certainly overlap, but they are not interchangeable.
