Flow and Place: Transnationalism in Four Cases

Abstract

Flows and places(1)--these are the minimal objects of transnationalism. Flows unite the twin phenomena of transnationalism and globalization, but place separates them. Flows are the informational and interactional links among sets of individuals and institutions. What marks the new era of globalization and transnationalism is not these flows as such and the processes they produce, but their speed and volume at increased pace and scale that resists both definition and regulation in terms of location. These processes, decentred from the nation and any particular nation, working independent of any boundaries and any national territory, are global. Global processes transcend space and only have a location in an de-territorialized, abstract global space (cf. Featherstone, 1990; Kearney, 1995). These same flows which constitute global processes, e.g., financial and cultural, also work on a much smaller scale and in contained forms, link specific individuals and institutions in few states, creating particular and specific connections and relationships. The different treatment of place can usefully distinguish globalization from transnationalism. Transnational processes are not worldwide, but are anchored in places, i.e., states, both homelands and nations of settlement. Both migrants and corporations whose journeys and activities cross borders of two or states are best referred to as transnational. Transnationalism is a more humble and... adequate label for relationships and phenomena which are variable in scale and distribution and cross state boundaries. (Hannerz, 1996: 6) Some caution in describing transnationalism is a healthy antidote to the sometimes almost giddy catastrophism or boosterism that marks writing about globalization.GlobalizationIt is not, however, possible to examine transnational phenomena separate from global flows and processes which underlie, make possible, support and facilitate them. These transnational phenomena can, however, be understood and analyzed as distinct from the flows which constitute them. The movement of capital is the global flow most often referred to as evidence of a new era. Its characteristics are increased volume and speed in capital movements and autonomy from managers of national economies, and its consequences are volatility which disrupts national economies and the creation of new centres of wealth accumulation, i.e., decentralizing capitalism and defining global cities. (cf. Friedman, J., 2001a, Leach, 1997, Ong and Nonini, 1997, Sassen, 1991) The same technologies that facilitate capital flows offer individuals openings for forms of communication which create a new shape for transnational relationships. The challenges to sovereignty of states by corporations and elites acting to separate capital from any particular nation or state have correspondingly weakened prescriptive definitions of citizenship. As absolutist definitions of citizenship softened the exclusiveness of nations and made nations open to diasporic communities, the alternate and excluded spaces of transnationalism escaped from the shadows of nationalism. (cf. Kappus, 1997). The legitimacy of nation-building projects has been undercut by the complex commitments of citizens and corporations.(2) It may be that the age of nationalism (Gellner, 1983) has been succeeded by the formation of a global culture, an era of creole culture(s). (cf. Featherstone, 1990).The answer to this question is unclear and opinion on globalization is divided about whether the boundedness of the local, the boundaries of cultures, are being erased, about the politics and morality of the phenomenon, and about the future of the globalization process itself. There is agreement that the experience of physical phenomena has been altered; compression of space and time is sensed; the world is a smaller place, if not exactly in the image of McLuhan's global village. Opposing theories of homogenization and fragmentation anticipate different outcomes of the trends of world integration, its consequences are both immiserating and enriching; globalization is continuity and it is change; it is novel and a harbinger of the future and it is similar to and an extension of the past; it is new and it is old. …