Transnationalism and Its Discontents during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War

Bibliographic Data

ID7748266
AuthorsMaud S Mandel (John Brown University, corresponding author), Maud Mandel
Year2003
Volume12
Issue3
Pages329-360
Publication date2003-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueDiaspora A Journal of Transnational Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1044-2057 • E-ISSN: 1911-1568
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/dsp.2011.0059
OpenAlexW1997670257
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited32

Diaspora 12:3 2003 Transnationalism and Its Discontents during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War 1 Maud Mandel Brown University In recent years, scholars have become increasingly interested in the concept of “transnationalism.” Thanks to the progressive globalization of political and economic structures and communication networks, previous constraints on the extent to which individuals can participate in more than one society have diminished. Such shifts have had a profound impact on how scholars have conceptualized minority identities. Thus, while those who worked on immigrant communities once focused primarily on “distinctions between the here and the there, the center and the periphery, black and white.... such analyses are being supplemented by a whole set of new, unbounded concepts ... [including] multiplicity, border crossing, disjunction and ethnoscapes, cultural hybridization, porousness, webs, and transnational communities” (Goldin 2). For the most part, this focus on the transnational has been linked to the contemporary world, and particularly to the postcolonial migration of labor and the spread of globalization.2 Such a broadening of the conceptual framework on migration, however, has also been liberating for historians examining the migrations of the past. Indeed, as recent criticism has suggested, transnational processes are not new.3 Donna Gabaccia, for example, argues in her historical study of worldwide Italian migration that “transnationalism is no invention of the late twentieth century or postmodern world. Nor is it the new threat to nation-state hegemony that cosmopolitan scholars ... might hope” (11). As such comments suggest, historians have begun to turn to the concept of transnationalism as a means of “interrogat[ing] ... the centrality of the nation-state” in modern history and historiography (Thelen 967). Indeed, some argue that transnational analyses provide important alternatives to the nation-based histories that have dominated Western scholarship for much of the twentieth century, silencing alternative voices and movements (Thelen).4 Others— while noting the benefits of a transnational perspective in enabling scholars to examine the impact of global forces on such structural realities as racism and gender discrimination—have cautioned us not “to overlook the extent to which the state has structured and xxxxxxxxxxxx 329 Diaspora 12:3 2003 still structures the ‘life chances’ of women and men” (Pederson; see also White). The contours of this debate tend to position the “national” and the “transnational” on opposite ends of a long spectrum. Scholars of the contemporary world, for example, seeking to distinguish recent migration waves from those of the past, point to the various global phenomena, such as new communication and transportation technologies and the increasing pace of global economic interconnectedness , as a way to distinguish the “transnational moment” from its predecessor.5 Likewise, historians cautioning us not to jettison the national in favor of the global or transnational remind us of the persistence of state power despite the increase of broad transnational forces, while those who encourage a transnational focus remind us of the limits of the nation-state’s reach in shaping people’s lives. Often missing in this discussion, however, has been a recognition of the profound ways in which national and transnational forces have operated not as opposites but as mutually reinforcing frameworks and structures.6 This interconnected relationship was most notably evident, ironically enough, in the middle of twentiethcentury Europe when empires and colonial regimes were progressively replaced by a variety of small national states. As Rogers Brubaker has shown, in this moment of national formation, a “triangular nexus” took shape between particular minority groups, their countries of national origin, and the states in which they lived. Thus the new states of interwar East Central Europe, “while ostensibly based on the principle of national-self determination, in fact assigned tens of millions of people to nation-states other than ‘their own’”: Germans made up significant minorities in Poland and Czechoslovakia; Hungarians were prominent in Romania, Czechoslovakia , and Yugoslavia; Bulgarians and Macedonians could be found in Yugoslavia, Greece, and Romania; and Ukrainians and Belarusians lived in Poland (5– 6). The raison d’être for the nationalist elites striving to create these territorially based nation-states was to organize “the nation,” generally defined in ethnocultural terms, into a self-governing political unit on a shared territory. And yet the demographic realities of post-war

Diaspora · Epistemology · Globalization · Hegemony · Immigration · Nation state · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Postmodernism · Sociology · Transnationalism · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy

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