Deepening historical understanding in a transnational world: A review essay

Community College Enterprise, The, Fall 2003 by Aquila, Dominic A

The weakening of the nation-state system

Just as in Dawson's study, the status of the nation-state shapes a considerable part of the context for Rethinking American History. But the nation-state's unrivaled position of power and prestige is today no longer what it was when Dawson wrote. Bender and company write as the vitality of the nation-state and the nation-state system of international relations is being called into question. For some scholars the nation-state as the quintessential political expression of the modern age, is giving way to as yet undefined forms of social organization associated with postmodernity. According to this view, such developments as the Internet and other new technologies have eroded the ability of the nation-state to control the symbols and messages that help sustain its unity and internal coherence. These technological developments and the way they are deployed also intensify the long-standing tension between transnational corporations and individual nation-states, which involves, among other things, questions of capital investment and transfers, labor relations, and environmental regulations.7 Politically, the recent invasion of Iraq by a U.S.-led coalition of forces without the direct authority of the United Nations has dealt a blow to the international system of nation-states from which it is still reeling. And, in the realm of political ideas and policy, the most significant challenge to the current nation-state system is Samuel P. Huntington's highly controversial book, The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking of World Order. Huntington's understanding of history centers on civilizations and cultures drawing on Dawson's work and that of other historians who have looked beyond the nation-state as an organizing principle.

The new internationalism and its limits

Those writing for Rethinking American History are quite aware of the degraded prestige of the nation-state. Their agenda is not so much to depreciate it further, but to recognize its limits as a means of doing history, and to underscore that its very form emerged over time in relation to particular sets of historical conditions, conditions which gave it the shape and substance we see before us today. As Prasenjit Duara argues, certain historical events such as reshaping of large political communities by the expansion of global capitalism, and the rapid reorganization of nation-states in the former Soviet-block following 1989 have "denaturalized the nation form, or at least undermined its claim to be an evolving primordial essence."8

But not all of the contributors to Rethinking American History are sanguine about the project to historicize the nation-state or to marginalize its importance among U.S. historians. Addressing the concerns of these friendly dissenters to the main thrust of the LaPietra project, Bender writes, "The death of the nation, like Mark Twain, has been announced too soon. It is not about to disappear, and as long as the nation is granted the exclusive power to make citizens and protect their rights and to deploy legitimate violence, it must be a matter of continued and intense scrutiny." Accordingly, both the book and its companion piece, the La Pietra report to the historical profession, advocate not for a "postnationalist" history, but instead for "an enriched national history, one that draws in and draws together more of the plenitude of narratives available to the historian who would try to make sense of the American past."9 David Hollinger's essay does not disagree with this nuanced understanding of the Bender agenda, so long as it still makes a place for traditional nation-state histories. Moreover, reflecting a view similar to that registered by others in the Bender collection, Hollinger worries about the lack of a clearly defined alternative to the current international system. Internationalists' proposals for "the replacement of the world of nations by a world of something-elses," he argues, "is of heuristic value at best to the historian concerned with the people who have lived in the United States."10