US Border Theory, Globalization, and Ethnonationalisms in Post-Wall Eastern Europe

Bibliographic Data

ID7748288
AuthorsClaudia Sadowski-Smith, Claudia Sadowski‐smith (0009-0005-1690-8173, Michigan State University, corresponding author)
Year1999
Volume8
Issue1
Pages3-22
Publication date1999-03-01
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.1999.0016
OpenAlexW1972932712
LanguageEN
References cited14

Diaspora 8:1 1999 US Border Theory, Globalization, and Ethnonationalisms in Post-Wall Eastern Europe1 Claudia Sadowski-Smith Michigan State University In April 1999, the simultaneous involvement ofthe United States in three apparently unrelated events illustrated important shifts in geopolitical realities. A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which prefigured dramatic geopolitical changes in the countries of the former "Evil Empire," a US-dominated NATO not only bombed Yugoslavia to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, but also continued its air strikes against Iraq. In the same month, NATO also approved a new Strategic Concept that identified the "uncontrolled movement oflarge numbers ofpeople" as ample justification for military "crisis intervention" and thus officially recognized international migration and refugee flows as a new class of security challenges.2 Viewed from this broader perspective, NATO's Operation "Allied Force" against Yugoslavia indicated the further multiplication of "security threats" to a US national interest that has been continuously redefined since the end of the Cold War. So-called former Communists-turned-fascist in parts of the Second World have now joined "Middle Eastern terrorists" and hemispheric border crossers on the list of major enemies ofthe US. This essay explores intersections between two of these geopolitical sites—post-Wall Eastern Europe and the US-Mexico borderlands—by juxtaposing the recent surge ofethnonationalisms in Eastern Europe, especially the former USSR and Yugoslavia, with proclamations by US border theory about the arrival of a post-national era. The post-national emphasis on the transformative potential of ethnic formations vis-à-vis nation-states, I argue, needs to be supplemented with more complex theories that acknowledge the emergence of global re-configurations . The US-Mexico borderlands has recently attained important theoretical status in the work of US scholars of ethnicity, border artists, and Mexican academics.'1 Conceptualizing the border as a site of intensified flows of capital, cultures, and people, this work has pioneered the emergence of post-national models of cultural analysis. Their emphasis on hemispheric immigration has helped transform the border into a term of translation that helps its practitioners to imagine connections between a US-Mexico trans- Diaspora 8:1 1999 frontera culture; other racialized historical and cultural formations, such as the "Black Atlantic"; and diasporic immigrant communities .4 Their practices of flexible and non-absolutist citizenship are said to further contest the US nation-state's already diminished ability to sustain territorial control over its borders and to maintain its role as what Benedict Anderson has famously called "imagined community"-maker. While the theoretical focus on diasporic bodies appears to be new, since it foregrounds the ties of US ethnic groups to their country or region of origin, it also simply expands transnational ^ US-specific configurations ofethnicity and their reliance on various cultural nationalisms. Centrally grounded in the metaphorical notion of border crossing, diaspora studies have amended the original argument—that the existence of various US ethnic groups in itself challenges national narratives—to say that their transformation into transnational bodies allows a focus on the diminishing importance of the nation-state. It seems that the recent surge of Eastern European ethnonationalisms can be easily reconciled with the new emphasis on the ongoing erosion of the nation-state by ethnic formations. Latino artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, whose performance work has significantly shaped border studies, has used events in Eastern Europe to illuminate the weakening of state borders in the context of globalization . He has projected "the processes of balkanization that Eastern Europe underwent from 1989 to 1992 ... onto the United States: dozens of micro-republics pop up everywhere; the U.S.Mexico border disappears" (21). The Chicana writer Cherríe Moraga has even more clearly likened Eastern European ethnonationalisms to US cultural nationalisms. She has argued that the "dissolution of the Soviet Union has given renewed impetus to secessionist thinking" among US ethnic groups, asking, "If the Soviet Union could dissolve, why can't the United States?" (169, original emphasis ). Connecting ethnonationalism to American Indian cultural nationalism, Native American scholar and editor Elizabeth CookLynn wrote in 1996 that at "a time when nationalism seems to be asserting itselfin the world in new and puzzling ways, the most obvious example being the

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