Introduction: The Nation State and Beyond. Governing Globalization Processes in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

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The history of globalisation is anything but a no-frills affair that moves smoothly along a clear-cut, unidirectional path of development and eventually leads to seamless global integration. Consequently, scholarship in the social sciences increasingly argued against equating the history of globalisation processes and transcultural entanglements with the master narrative of the gradual homogenisation of the world. A strong common ground these concepts share is the objective of transcending the national as an analytical category and replacing it by focusing on interaction and flows, transfers, and exchanges as the core categories in the study of history. Examining the shifting patterns of global connections has, therefore, become the main challenge for all those who seek to understand the past, the present, and the future of modern societies. And this challenge includes finding a place for the nation state—a form of social organisation that no longer seem to fit into the new analytical framework despite its obvious historical and current significance. Against this background, the introductory chapter argues that the authors assembled in the volume suggest another reading of the role and significance of the nation state in the development of the modern world. The studies presented here argue that looking at the nation state from the perspective of global entanglements gives way to its interpretation as a dynamic and multi-layered structure that partakes in globalisation processes and plays different and at times even contradictory roles at the same time. Accordingly, it is not the nation state that ceases to exist, due to increasing processes of global exchange, but a certain perspective on the nation state which can no longer be upheld.