Jarausch
Date: Monday, January 23, 2006

I have been reading these exchanges with interest and while I have no
settled position, I'd like to offer just a preliminary and doubtless
idiosyncratic reaction.  I won't endeavor to summarize the interesting
papers that have been offered before, but would in effect like to build
on the points Konrad Jarausch made in the most recent contribution.

History is an inquiry, a process of research and analysis (causal and
hermeneutic).  As a quasi-science or craft (as well as art) it needs
different tools for different tasks.  Obviously some widespread
processes are global or cover other large areas of the globe that are
broader than states and/or nations.  Since our historical researches --
in good part as a legacy of the nineteenth century German historians --
tended to privilege the evolution of the state and nation, we've often
ignored these and are now discovering their importance and fascination.
Migration, disease, ecological transformation, technological change,
epistemic communities, artistic styles - as well perhaps as religious
revivals (remember the Jesuits!) all merit close study on a
transnational basis.  So can learned and political behavior and models
(the diffusion of the so-called welfare state or the downsizing of the
welfare state/risk society), and common concepts of humanity, including
racialized and hierarchical ones.  Who could possibly be against these
researches?

But I read Jarausch as a plea not to throw out the baby (some baby!)
with the bathwater.  States may never have the monopoly of even
legitimate force, but they established themselves painfully as the major
claimants to imperative or coercively sanctioned action, which included
the right and need to mediate many transnational forces.  We can
usefully write the history of non-state actors, and it is germane to
today's world of NGO's.  We can usefully write the history of
"connections" or _Vernetzungen_, etc., as well; but sometimes the
Gertrud Stein challenge seems to become relevant,  i.e. her description
of Los Angeles: "There's no there there."  Is there a there there?

Of course, the correct answer to the Gertrud Stein objection is that
transnational history forces us to address the question, What there is
exactly there?  L.A. certainly existed, even for Miss Stein, even for
Woody Allen; and no one has said Germany is particularly vaporous, not
even the historians of Heimat, who find it built up as a sort of coral
reef.

Let's play with the imagery of networks for a minute.  It has become
very fashionable.  But if we want to write about networks, we have to
write about nodal points as well as strings between them.  Now this
image, crude though it is, serves a purpose.  Because transnational
history, evoked (though rarely practiced) purely as a history of
connections, points out that without strings there are no nodes; it also
emphasizes that not all strings run to nodes.  But sometimes it
downplays the idea that the state-as-node or the nation, or whatever the
jurisdiction or collectivity under scrutiny, is not just a node as a
network metaphor might suggest.  The node, in fact, operates on the
strings.  Let me suggest another image that might be more useful:
collective actors (states, regions, etc.) are more like the marines we
see on old newsreels going over the side of troop ships in World War II.
As they step on the rope nets that support them, they pull on the ropes,
distort the netting, and force every other marine clambering down the
side to adjust his balance.  It's quite a complex dance, and some
marines fall off into the water.

One brief aside: I don't think it fair to say that the program of
comparative history reified states as historical actors.  Yes, it gave
them a new claim to the attention of historians.  But the best
comparative history has always asked - as Hintze explicitly did about
the formation of representative assemblies or Weber did about ascetic
religious behavior - whether such a history was really a comparison of
independent instances or a history of one over-arching ideal type
exemplified in different places.  The program of comparative history has
yet to be seriously debated; we're still drawing on Marc Bloch from the
l920s.

My own personal sense (but it's not a program I want to claim any
overriding merit for) is that the answer to Gertrud Stein's challenge is
her own second use of the word "there." There's perhaps no there there -
but there is a there.  I think we historians are deeply implicated by
the concept of "there"; and by that I don't mean by any nostalgiac
evocative history of _lieux de memoire_, which, I fear, makes us
complicit in all the political trends I don't like in the last
twenty-five years.  We practice a spatially oriented craft as well as a
temporally oriented one: every process we describe is defined in part by
its extent, and we are now learning that many boundaries were hitherto
unacknowledged.  Such a statement is not a challenge to the need for and
legitimacy of transnational history.  On the contrary.  It is an
argument for intensely thinking through the geography for each process.
Bloch and Hintze did this with respect to feudalism; Smith, Marx,
Luxemburg, Lenin, all the dependency theorists and their offspring did
it with respect to economic processes.   Even Spengler and Samuel
Huntington, his spiritual descendant, did it with respects to alleged
collective psychologies.  I think it's time to stop claiming that any
given extent of a spatial process is what is really crucial or should be
privileged - whether in terms of defending microhistory or global
history.  Spatiality (like the gravity which is one expression of it) is
not homogenous, but on any scale we know it is continuous and always
operative.  Of course, we all like to propose what we feel like doing
ourselves, and for now I'm intrigued by space and territory (politically
bordered space) as such.  Obviously it's not irrelevant for such a
multi-layered set of human settlements as Central Europe, but then it
isn't really for other foyers of human interaction, whether in
one-bedroom flats or vast imperial spaces.  Are we not limping back
somehow to refocusing on spaces in their own right, as a sort of
historiographical equivalent of a Kantian analytic a priori, as an
essential part of our research programs?  Obviously there are good
historical reasons for this; but they need not be explored here.

Charles Maier

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