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Konrad Jarausch and Charles Maier have pointed out very effectively both the potential of a transnational approach to historical studies, but also some possible limitations on this approach. Building on their remarks, I would like to offer a few observations on assumptions that the participants in the form have made about the nature of the nation and the nation-state. It seems that participants have implicitly or explicitly defined the nation-state as a primarily territorial entity, a contiguous space with politically fixed boundaries. They may assert that events and institutions outside these boundaries influence what happens within them, and Young-sun Hong's and Jennifer Jenkins's contributions go in this direction. Or they may express some reservations about transnationalism. Konard Jarausch observes that the territorially bounded nation-state has a certain internal autonomy which cannot be entirely dissolved into transnational networks. Charles Maier takes a more epistemological approach, suggesting that the geographical is a basic category of historical investigation, just as the temporal is, so that a study of a geographically bounded German nation-state would be as legitimate as a study of, say, the years 1914-1939, or 1873-1896, to take two different forms of temporal boundaries. In view of both the accordion-like expansion and contraction of the territory of the German nation-state in the twentieth century, and the age of the two Germanys, 1949-89, when "Germany" was not a contiguous geographical entity with politically fixed boundaries (indeed, neither of the two German states was such an entity), the question could be raised if the best place to look for the German nation-state is in a politically bounded geographic space. Arguably, the twentieth century German nation-state existed, legally and conceptually, elsewhere. It existed, among other sites, in codes of law, such as the BGB, in civil service rules and prerogatives, the celebrated "wohlerworbene Rechte" of the Beamten, in an educational tracking system and the diplomas and formal qualifications it produced, in collective bargaining agreements and in claims on a social insurance system. If we looked for the German nation-state in these different places, the nature of what is transnational might be different as well. Jonathan Sperber University of Missouri
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
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