Methodological nationalism shapes our understanding of what is truly possible – the alt only looks utopian from the perspective of someone who’s never had to challenge it

It is particularly marked in the social sciences of France (Taguieff 1991: 46) and Germany, where the sociologist Otto Hondrich (1992) felt moved to deliver a public nostra culpa for having neglected nationalism as an object of social theory (see Radtke 1996). In the Anglo-Saxon world, the early works on nationalism by Deutsch, Kedouri, Gellner and Smith and others developed, from the 1980s onwards, into a well-established research tradition, especially in the field of historical sociology (cf. Thompson and Fevre 2001), without, however, having much influence on mainstream social theory. More fundamentally, however, this silence about the continuing importance of national principles stemmed from a methodological problem, as Anthony Smith suggested two decades ago (A. D. Smith 1983: 26). That nationalist forms of inclusion and exclusion bind our societies together served as an invisible background even to the most sophisticated theorizing about the modern condition. The social sciences were captured by the apparent naturalness and givenness of a world divided into societies along the lines of nation-states (Berlin 1998). What Billig (1995) has shown for everyday discourse and practice holds true for grand theory’s encounters with the social world as well: because they were structured according to nation-state principles, these became so routinely assumed and ‘banal’, that they vanished from sight altogether. Methodological nationalism has thus inhibited a true understanding of the nature and limits of the modern project. It has produced a systematic blindness towards the paradox that modernization has led to the creation of national communities amidst a modern society supposedly dominated by the principles of achievement. Whether Parsons and Merton or Bourdieu, Habermas and Luhmann, none of these authors discusses in any systematic fashion the national framing of states and societies in the modern age. Interestingly enough, such nation-blind theories of modernity were formulated in an environment of rapidly nationalizing societies and states, sometimes, as was the case with Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, on the eve or in the aftermath of nationalist wars. Ignoring the national framing of modernity, however, is just one form of methodological nationalism A second variant, typical of more empirically oriented social science practices, is taking national discourses, agendas, loyalties and histories for granted, without problematizing them or making them an object of an analysis in its own right. Instead, nationally bounded societies are taken to be the naturally given entities to study. Here are some illustrative examples of the naturalization of the nation-state from different disciplinary traditions. International relations assume that nation-states are the adequate entities for studying the international world. While the anarchical nature of this interstate system and the changing dynamics of hegemony and polycentrism have been discussed at length, almost no research was done on why this international system has become an international one (one exception is Mayall 1990). Similarly, scholarship after the Second World War on the newly independent states thought of nation building as a necessary, although somewhat messy, aspect of the decolonization process (see for example Wallerstein 1961). The task of building a viable national culture was seen as an evident corollary to the other tasks of modernization, projecting as a model a vision of Western nation-state building. Nation building and state formation made natural bedfellows in the works of modernization theorists such as Lerner or Rostow, since the nation-state model represented the only thinkable way of organizing politics.