Mapping the Transnational World: How We Move and Communicate across Borders and Why It Matters

Abstract

Emmanuel Deutschmann’s Mapping the Transnational World: How We Move and Communicate across Borders, and Why It Matters challenges the assumption that all aspects of societal life have become and continue to become more and more global. Deutschmann argues that human mobility and communication that overcomes large geographical distances are generally an exception rather than a common or emerging pattern. Mapping the Transnational World instead puts forward strong arguments for why the world is in fact much more regional than it is global. By doing so, Deutschmann challenges prominent social scientific theories, such as McLuhan’s concept of the ‘‘global village,’’ Luhmann’s idea of a ‘‘fully actualized world society,’’ or theories inspired by Marx’s notion of the ‘‘annihilation of space by time.’’ To substantiate this argument, the book draws on an expansive amount of data on refugees, migration, asylum seekers, tourism, international students, online friendships via Facebook, monetary remittances sent across national borders, and international phone calls. For Deutschmann, transnationalism does not imply that interaction between borders will be sustained as understood by some scholars, such as Peggy Levitt or Alejandro Portes. Instead, the author defines the concept of transnationalism as the crossing of a national border either physically (as a refugee, asylum seeker, migrant, student, or tourist) or through communication (such as online friendships, phone calls, or remittances). The book contains four content chapters in addition to an introduction and one concluding chapter. Drawing on dominant theories of globalization, such as Wallerstein’s worldsystem, Meyer’s world polity, and Luhmann’s world society, Chapter Two develops a theoretical argument toward what Deutschmann calls comparative sociology of regional integration. Writing from a European context of knowledge production, where regionalism is often theorized as a uniquely European phenomenon, Deutschmann argues that such a perspective is not particularly helpful in understanding it as a universal phenomenon. Instead, transnationalism should be studied across time and comparatively across regions. Chapter Three fleshes out the distinction between global and regional activity. The chapter investigates the question of whether the data examined, in the context of this book, on national cross-border activity is global or regional. This is also where the strength of the book lies and where its use of vast-ranging data shines. Drawing on data on transnational mobility reaching back to 1960, Deutschmann shows how much of this transnational mobility remains in fact regional. At its center, this chapter grapples with different concepts of regionalism—from the regional categories proposed by Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations to those regions identified by Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs) as well as a data mining approach proposed by Deutschmann that detects regions—and how the data collected for the book measure up to these categories. As a scholar of postsocialist societies, and with the data presented in the book going back to the 1960s, I would have liked to learn more about how Deutschmann dealt with how those countries shifted ground since then both politically and culturally. For instance, according to the regions proposed by 432 Reviews