Methodological Nationalism: A Typology

Recently, political theorists have focused on how critiques of methodological nationalism from the social sciences impact normative theory, particularly in relation to migration and justice. Articulating methodological nationalism has proven valuable, exposing how state-centered thinking has influenced key issues in migration theory and reinforced questionable assumptions about membership, culture, economic distribution, and political power (Boudou, 2023; Dumitru, 2014, 2023; Menge, 2024; Sager, 2016, 2018, 2021; but see Kymlicka 2022 for a normative defence of methodological nationalism). This critique has prompted important discussions about the moral challenges posed by both transnational and internal migration, as well as encouraged normative inquiries into how cities, regional and global organizations, and private corporations influence migration. Additionally, it has led political theorists to reconsider the impact of Eurocentrism in their work and to more seriously address the legacies of colonialism and empire. Although there is a disagreement about the normative valence of methodological nationalism among scholars, they agree around what I call ‘state-centrism thesis’. State-centrism asserts that avoiding methodological nationalism requires reducing the influence of state-centered categories such as permanent/provisional/settled/temporary/immigrants, stateless persons vs citizens. Depending on one’s view, these categories risk to bias normative reasoning and lead to justify positions that bring about reduced rights to immigrants. While I believe state-centrist thesis could be of help, I will argue that the solution to methodological nationalism depends on what is identified as normatively problematic with methodological nationalism in the first place. If one understands methodological nationalism as a mainly epistemic and only indirectly a normative problem, this will favor state-centrist thesis. Whereas, if one believes it to be a directly normative problem as a form of ideology critique (Baycan-Herzog & Sager, n.d.), then state-centrism is not very helpful, even sometimes counterproductive. Although it is indeed helpful to be attentive to the role played by state categories on normative reasoning, engaging with them is often of utmost importance to articulate existing injustices. Avoiding them completely might even sometimes lead political theorists to offer epistemically unjust analyses that would morally harm normative status of immigrants. For ‘the ideology thesis’, what might equally matter is to identify ideological reasoning around the state-centric categories. This article will show that even sometimes in tension, these two theses of state-centrism and ideology are ultimately complementary. Understanding them around this typology could offer us a more comprehensive articulation regarding how to avoid methodological nationalism in theorizing.