Are we all transnationals now? Network transnationalism and transnational subjectivity: the differing impacts of globalization on the inhabitants of a small Swiss city

Abstract

I ask in this article how the inhabitants – migrants and non-migrants – of a specific geographical space, a small Swiss city in French-speaking Switzerland, live out different forms of transnationalism. Transnationalism is for this purpose defined and operationalized on two dimensions: I make a distinction between network transnationalism and what I call transnational subjectivity. The first dimension includes the transnational social networks; the latter refers to the cognitive classifications of a person's membership and belongings in transnational space. Analysis of the personal social networks of 250 inhabitants of this city, supplemented by data from qualitative interviews, brings to light four different ideal types of how transnationalism is lived. It reveals that these morphologies are closely related to questions of social positioning as well as processes of integration, locally or in transnational space.

Keywords:

• Transnationalism
• social networks
• cosmopolitanism
• cities
• ethnicity
• Switzerland

Acknowledgements

My special thanks go to Christin Achermann, Ellen Hertz, Joëlle Moret, Bülent Kaya, Etienne Piguet and René Schaffert for their useful critiques and ideas on how to present the material. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Ethnic and Racial Studies editors and to the anonymous referees for valuable suggestions.

Notes

1. In comparison with European or North American cities, the number of inhabitants is very small. However, the reader should keep in mind that Switzerland is a country of roughly 7.5 million inhabitants with only five cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants. The district of Neuchâtel has roughly 51,000 inhabitants.

2. It should be noted that Switzerland accords citizenship on a ius sanguinis basis, with the result that many of the people who counted as foreign nationals were born in Switzerland, sometimes even of parents who were also born in Switzerland.

3. For critiques with regard to network analysis see the excellent article by Emirbayer and Goodwin (1994).

4. To take the national boundary as the main feature for defining a transnational tie might sound paradoxical or could even be considered as an implicit retour of a methodological nationalism. There may certainly be other ways of empirically operationalizing the concept: distance could be another way of defining a transnational tie. However, I decided to use the reference person's place of residence as the defining criterion, if only to take seriously the ‘nation’ part in transnationalism.

5. Twenty-eight have dual nationality.

6. According to the Swiss Statistical Office, in 2006 the mean income was 5,623 Swiss francs (Swiss: 5,952 CHF; foreigners: 5,140 CHF).

7. Cosmopolitanism has become a hot topic in social science and can mean anything from an attitude or value, to a regime of international governance, or even a set of epistemological assumptions. In the reading of Woodward, Zlatko and Bean (2008) there are three main domains in the literature on cosmopolitanism: institutional, political or cultural dimensions. In this article I will not deal with questions of political and institutional cosmopolitanism, but only with the cultural and identificatory dimensions.