The
Postnational Self is a
collection that comes with a message: The age of the nation is over, whereas
the postnational age is beginning to dawn. A nation, or so the editors set out
in their introduction, is something where one feels at home, "a structured
set of emotions and attitudes, shaped by an imagined oneness of political and
prepolitical, contemporary and historical, rational and cosmological
orientations" (xiv-xv). Our home, in turn, is "where we belong",
with "belonging" separating in the two dimensions of
"being" and "longing" (vii). In our days of globalization
and "globality" (xv), of multiculturalism and internationalism, this
conception is being challenged: emigrants are irritated by the otherness of
their host-country, natives may be irritated by the otherness of immigrants.

As a
result, "the organicism and essentialism of national identities are no longer
just taken for granted" (xv). As John A. Halls puts it in his contribution
to the volume: "Belonging needs to be reimagined because the world has
changed." (53) People react with quite different strategies to this new
situation: with revisions of the concept of a nation in civic, liberal or
cosmological terms, but also with feelings of uprootedness or identity loss.
Some react with the "construction of multiple homes and hybrid series of
belonging", but others with "reaffirmations of old-style nationalism
in nostalgic, secessionist, or ‘new racist’ forms" (xvi). As Seyla
Benhabib puts it in her contribution, "global integration is proceeding
alongside sociocultural disintegration and the resurgence of ethnic,
nationalist, religious, and linguistic separatisms" (85). The situation is
paradoxical in many respects. Not only is there a "resurgence of national
identities in a global world" (3), but also a tendency that modern
particularists increasingly employ universalistic arguments (invoking human
rights etc.) to put forward their claims (140).

The
chapters of the book explore these changes and the different reactions to them.
The 15 authors and two editors come from a variety of academic fields, from
international studies and sociology to social anthropology and comparative
literature. They are all renown experts on the topics they write on, basing
their contribution on broad research and scholarship. As varied as the authors’
disciplines are there methods: some apply philosophical discussions, some
report on their fieldwork, some discuss juridical or cultural developments.

The
book divides into three parts. The first part, "Nationalism and
Postnationality", contains chapters by Mark Juergensmeyer, Ray Taras,
Philip Schlesinger, John A. Hall and Richard Jenkins. These contributions
explore the broader political context of globalization (in the media, in
economics, in professional collaboration), and how it effects identities. The
chapters of the second part, "Self and Community", have been written by
Seyla Benhabib, Riva Kastoryano, Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal, James Tully, Michèle
Lamont and Michael Herzfeld. They discuss the relationship between the
political concept of citizenship and concepts like belonging and identity. Ulf
Hannerz, Benjamin Lee, Orvar Löfgren and Jeffrey Herf contributed to the third
part, "Images of Home, Belonging, and Exile". They explore topics
like the relation between identity and space (Hannerz), the cultural history of
the crossing of state borders (Löfgren), or the different strategies to cope
with the Nazi-past in the two German states in the post-war era (Herf).

In the
end, the collection itself proves that the use of the definite article in its
title is mistaken: There is nothing like "the" postnational self,
there are many of them. And, one might add, there are still national selves and
also not-yet-national selves. The collection manages to present some of this
richness. Plenty is left to be discovered.

© 2003 Ludger Jansen

Ludger
Jansen, Dr. phil., Philosophisches Seminar, Universität Bonn, Germany

Categories: Philosophical, Psychology