In questa pagina il testo completo dell'intervento di Guido Tintori alla tavola rotonda "Paradise: Lost or Under Construction?" curata da Igor Dobricic (ECF) e Angela Serino per commentare la prima partecipazione assoluta della comunita' Rom e di quella Armena all'interno della Biennale di Arti Visive di Venezia di quest'anno. Parlare delle due mostre considerando il panorama politico europeo e' stata un'occasione per re-articolare termini come "identita'" e "nazione", per capire le potenzialita' di termini nuovi come "transnazionalismo". Venezia, 17 settembre 2007.

Premessa all'incontro (definizione e alcune domande) di Angela Serino:

Sintesi video degli interventi alla tavola rotonda:


Guido Tintori e' ricercatore presso il FIERI, Forum Internazionale ed Europeo di Ricerche sull'Immigrazione. Dottore di ricerca in Storia della societa' europea, dal 2003 e' membro della rete di eccellenza IMISCOE (International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion in Europe), iniziativa della Commissione Europea. Le sue ricerche si sono concentrate sull'integrazione e la partecipazione politica degli emigrati italiani negli Stati Uniti e sugli aspetti storici e legali delle attivita' politiche degli immigrati transnazionali. E' autore, tra l'altro, di "Cittadinanza e politiche di emigrazione nell'Italia liberale e fascista", "Come si diventa cittadini italiani" in G. Zincone (ed.), "Familismo legale. Come (non) diventare cittadini italiani", Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2006.

In questo suo intervento Tintori sintetizza la varieta’ delle definizioni del termine transnazionalismo utilizzate nelle scienze sociali. Al contrario di quanto potrebbe sembrare, precisa Tintori, questo termine ha una sua contestualizzazione storica legata al concetto di nazione e forse, piu’ che di transnazionalismo, si potrebbe parlare meglio di condizioni di cittadinanza post-nazionale.

I’ve been asked today to talk briefly about the term transnationalism, its meaning and use in the social sciences. This is not an easy task to accomplish. I will try to answer the question through a “digest” of different contributions *.
In the last 10-15 years Transnationalism has become a buzzword in social sciences as well as for the media and in the public discourse to refer to global activities carried out either by individuals, groups or organizations that somehow transcend the state dimension.
Related to individuals, anthropologists and sociologists have elaborated the concept of transnationalism between 1990 and 1995 primarily within the context of contemporary immigration from Mexico and the Caribbean basin to the United States. Other scholars in the field of social sciences have endeavored to apply it to other ethnic groups in different time periods. Indeed, this concept in social sciences was proposed by anthropologists Glick Schiller, Basch and Blanc-Szanton in 1992 “as the process by which immigrants build social fields that link together their country of origin and their country of settlement […] Transmigrants develop and maintain multiple relations […] that span borders […] and develop identities within social networks that connect them to two or more societies simultaneously”.
The concept has rapidly encompassed almost every cultural, social, and economic action of migrants including their political activities.
The same authors together with Soysal (1994) initially argued that transnationalism may undermine the salience of national sovereignty and citizenship, creating deterritorialized and postnational communities, alternative to – if not in conflict with – territorially bounded national polities.
Saskia Sassen (1992) and Eva Ostergaard-Nielsen (2003) have stressed out the importance of transnational activities and initiatives taken from the locality of migration by migrants who seek to have an effective impact on specific issues in localities of the home country, bypassing the state/national dimension, and have coined the terms, respectively, of global cities and translocalism to describe this phenomenon.
In the studies of international relations, a kind of landmark is represented by the book Transnational Relations and World Politics published in 1971. The authors, Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, describe global interactions among multinational businesses, revolutionary movements, Ngo’s,trade
unions, academic and scientific networks, religious institutions as transnational relations, and they assess their impact on interstate politics.
Of course, there’s been a lot of talk about the transnationalization of world affairs, or the so-called globalized economy.
Very often international, multinational and transnational are used interchangeably. Already in 1999 Alejandro Portes, Guarnizo and others pointed out that transnationalism could become a meaningless idea when used as a catch-all term. In 2001 Portes proposed a first categorization of international – activities and programs that pertains to nation states, multinational – large scale institutions such as corporations or religious whose activities take place in multiple countries, and transnational – activities initiated and sustained by non institutional actors, be they organized groups or networks of individuals across borders”. Portes also demonstrated how it’s likely to exaggerate and to misunderstand the real significance of transnationalism if the concept is used to theorize a challenge to nation-state. New empirical studies have added on Portes’ arguments by showing that transnational communities often works as locations for nation-building processes and even generators of nationalism (Gabaccia 2000; Laliotou 2004; R. Smith 1998). Many scholars have looked at long distance nationalism and its relationship to fundamentalist religious movements, as well as the ways in which migrants use receiving states to pursue foreign policy goals in their homeland.
Waldinger and Fitzgerald (2004) argued that the term “transnational” should only refer to the relationship between immigrants and nation-states because it is only in this domain that nationalism and states enter into the picture. In her reply to Waldinger and Fitzgerald, Glick Schiller (together with Levitt 2006) revised her initial hypothesis of transnationalism as a possible challenge to nation-state, and she even affirmed the importance of the concept “to capture all of the cross border social relations of migrants […], because the social field in which they live crosses state borders, they are necessarily subject to the power of two or more nation states.”
States still do play an active role in promoting forms of transnational activities that must not be underestimated, as pointed out by the “neo-institutionalist” perspective (March and Olsen 1984; Hall and Taylor 1996). Sending states’ institutions, political parties and organizations do shape individuals/emigrants’ transnationalism by means of their policies for expatriates, citizenship policies, electoral laws, and strategies (Bauböck 2003; Ostergaard-Nielsen 2003).

In 2003 political scientist Rainer Baubock too proposed his definition of the term transnationalism as human activities referred to states as bounded political entities whose borders are crossed by flows of people, money or information and are spanned by social networks, organizations or fields.
Baubock’s categorization of the terms international, multinational, supranational and transnational is particularly useful because he takes as a starting point the term national and put them in connection with the nation-state dimension. He defines international external relations between independent states and organizations in which these states are represented by their governments (example: United Nations). Multinational is referred to states such as Canada, Spain, United Kingdom that have historic communities who enjoy substantial political autonomy. Supranational is referred to states that have transferred part of their sovereignty to a larger federal polity (European Union).
So transnational are defined political institutions and practices that transcend the borders of independent states if they involve simultaneous overlapping affiliations of persons to geographically separate polities.
Reversing the perspective, Bauböck has suggested that the intertwinement of memberships in
territorially separated and independent polities gives the migrants/individuals an opportunity, on one hand, “to combine external and internal status and affiliation” and, on the other, to change “the institutions of the polity and its conception of membership” in the countries of both origin and destination. One of the main effects is the changing of the conception of citizenship and loyalty as exclusive to one nation-state. An increasing acceptance of dual citizenship has been registered among the states in the last decade.
Yet, the same scholar (2007) has remarked as a mistake to confuse transnational citizenship with postnational conceptions of membership, or to believe that the former signals a general trend towards substituting membership-based rights with universal human rights grounded in personhood. What is new and empirically significant, according to Baubock, are institutional responses to transnationalism that enable migrants to claim rights and membership in several polities The theoretical debate is still ongoing and at an early stage. Most of all, most of the literature on the relationship between transnationalism and nationalism is still characterized by empirically unsubstantiated theoretical claims.
Even if there is not a broadly agreed definition of transnationalism the best categorizations of the concept so far (Portes 2001, Baubock 2003) have all a mutual relation with the term nationalism, that might imply sometimes a conflict interaction with it but never a total denial of it.
Let’s address very quickly the question whether the this is a newly conceived language of social sciences, and most of all if the phenomena it tries to describe are new. Claims of transnationalism’s novelty are by now overpassed. Social scientists progressively learned that transnational practices belonged to past-day immigrants as well as present-day ones (see Foner 1997, 2000; Gerstle and Mollenkopf 2001). As early as in 1916 Ralph Bourne wrote an article titled “Transnational America”.
Not even transnational citizenship as defined by Baubock is a new phenomenon. In my studies on the Italian communities in the US, I’ve found out that almost since the early stages of their settlement in the United States, Italian Americans pursued transnational political activities that modified the existing ethnic power relations in U.S. institutions – from unions to parties – and contributed to increase the people’s rate of democratic participation. Their experience demonstrates that the States and their institutions – governmental agencies, parties, unions (see also Smith 2003, for similar arguments about Italian Americans and banks in both countries) – responded to the migrants’ transnationalism already atthe beginning of the 20th century.

Yet, the development of a transnational paradigm in social sciences shed a new light on the analysis of the individuals’ and organizations’ familial, social, economic, religious, political, and cultural processes, since it removed the blinders of methodological nationalism, so that now these activities are conceived and studied as processes involving simultaneously at least the sending and receiving countries, and that create a cross-national social space. The transnational paradigm still remains the best attempt in scholarship to respond to and reflect on globalization.


* The references on which this “digest” is based are cited at the end of this paper.


References

Basch, Linda G., Nina Glick Schiller, and Christina Szanton Blanc (1994) Nations Unbound:Transnational Migration, Postcolonial Predicaments, and the Deterritorialized Nation-State. London: Gordon and Breach.
Bauböck Rainer (2003) “Towards a Political Economy of Migrant Transnationalism.” International Migration Review 37 (3): 700-23.
(2007) "Stakeholder Citizenship and Transnational Political Participation: A Normative Evaluation of External Voting", Fordham Law Review, 75: 2393-2447
Bourne, Randolph (1916) “Trans-National America.” Atlantic Monthly 117: 86-97.
Foner, Nancy (1997) "What's So New About Transnationalism? New York Immigrants Today and at the End of the Century." Diaspora 6 (3): 354-75.
(2000). From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Gabaccia, Donna R. (2000) Italy’s Many Diasporas: Elites, Exiles, and Workers of the World.Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Gerstle, Gary and John H. Mollenkopf, eds. (2001) E Pluribus Unum? Contemporary and HistoricalPerspectives on Immigrant Political Incorporation. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Laliotou, Ioanna (2004) Transatlantic Subjects: Acts of Migration and Cultures of Transnationalism between Greece and America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Glick Schiller, Nina and Peggy Levitt (2006) “Haven’t We Heard This Somewhere Before?: A Reply to Waldinger and Fitzgerald”, Paper provided by Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Center for Migration and Development. in its series Working Papers with number wp0601.
Hall, Peter and Rosemary Taylor, (1996) “Political science and the three new institutionalisms”, Political Studies, 44: 936-57.
Luconi, Stefano and Guido Tintori (forthcoming), “The Political Activities of the Italian Americans in Historical Perspective: What is New in Political Transnationalism?”
March, James G. and Johan P. Olsen, (1984) “The new institutionalism: organizational factors in poltical life”, American Political Science Review, 78: 734-49.
Eva Ostergaard-Nielsen (2003) “The Politics of Migrants' Transnational Political Practices”,
International Migration Review 37 (3): 760-86.
Portes, Alejandro, Luis E. Guarnizo, and Patricia Landolt. 1999. “Introduction: Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent Research Field,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22: 463-478.
Portes, Alejandro 2001. “Introduction: The Debates and Significance of Immigrant Transnationalism.” Global Networks 1 (3): 181-94.
Sassen, Saskia. (1992) Global Cities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Smith, Robert C. (1998) “Transnational Localities: Community, Technology, and the Politics of Membership with the Context of Mexico-U.S. Migration.” In Transnationalism from Below, Vol. 6, Comparative Urban and Community Research, edited by Michael P. Smith and Luis Guarnizo. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
(2003) "Diasporic Membership in Historical Perspective: Comparative Insights from the Mexican, Italian and Polish Cases", International Migration Review 37 (3): 724-59.
Soysal, Yasemin Nuhoglu (1994) Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Vertovec, Steven (2003) “Migration and other Modes of Transnationalism:Towards Conceptual Cross- Fertilization”, International Migration Review 37 (3): 641-665.
Waldinger, Roger and David Fitzgerald (2004) “Transnationalism in Question.” American Journal of Sociology 109: 1177-95.