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The evolution of the European Community (EC) towards a supranational constitution is charted by combining three different perspectives. First, an examination is made of the major features of the integration process since 1959, which argues that the European market and polity developed symbiotically, as the activities of economic actors, organized interests, litigators and judges, and the EC's legislative and regulatory organs became linked, to create a self‐sustaining, dynamic system. Second, the ‘constitutionalization’ of the treaty system is investigated, and the activities of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) surveyed; among other things, constitutionalization secured property rights for transnational market actors, expanded the discretionary powers of national judges, and reduced the EC's intergovernmental character. Third, the relationship between the ECJ and the national courts is considered, focusing on how intra‐judicial conflict and cooperation have shaped the production of specific constitutional doctrines; through these ‘constitutional dialogues’, the supremacy of EC law was gradually achieved, rendering it judicially enforceable. Overall, the chapter situates the development of the European legal system within the overall process of European integration.

This essay inquires into the implications of the “fading of the state” for religion and the prospects for a universal “ecumene” in the expanding transnational space. Assuming that forms of polity and forms of religiosity have an effect on each other, one should expect the thinning of state boundaries and the expansion of transnational political, social, and economic institutions and epistemes to affect forms of religiosity and the formulation of religious goals. Excluding the likelihood that the new transnationalism would favor resurrecting a universal church, this essay concludes by exploring the prospects and challenges posed by ecumenism or “universal religiosity” grounded in the principle that there is truth in all religions.

In a globalizing world, members of the same religious community, anchored in different parts of the world, have greater capacity to increase their cultural, social, and economic links with one another. Ironically, this chapter points out how the rise of religious pluralism amid globalization has also strengthened the hand of Muslim leaders such as Osama Bin Laden, intent on destroying pluralism altogether. Al-Qaeda preaches peace but glorifies violence. Bin Laden’s view that violent jihad is an obligation on individual believers isolates him from leading Muslim scholars and jurists. Still, he has been able to gather and hold a sizable following, through dramatic actions, but also through the very same communications technologies that drive religious pluralism and create soft power in world affairs.

This part marshals the largely uncompiled evidence of FBI author files to suggest that the worst suspicions about the stakeout of Paris noir were basically correct—that Wright was not too wrong, it follows, when he darkly joked that any African American “who is not paranoid is in serious shape,” at least if he or she sought literary license outside the United States during the Hoover era. Two decades before American involvement in World War II opened the floodgates of black Paris, the FBI began to influence the movements of expatriate Afro-modernists—this even as it manipulated “lit.-cop federalism” to nationalize itself in the mind of white America. In the French capital of black transnationalism, and satellites beyond, FBI agents and informers kept tabs on a network of black literary travelers they hoped to link by the vulnerabilities of statelessness alone. Thus, this book's fourth thesis: The FBI helped to define the twentieth-century Black Atlantic, both blocking and forcing its flows.

George Pagoulatos and Xenophon Yataganas argue that the prevalent European story among Greek public intellectuals has equated Europe with progress, identifying the country's modernization challenge with catching up with Europe. Consequently, pro‐European supranationalism has been the most vocal opposition pole of the debate, struggling against a long tradition of cultural gravitation towards Eastern Orthodoxy, ethnocentrism, a nostalgic communitarian vision of the past, a “culture of the underdog”, or the statist/national school of thought. The independence versus integration divide has been the most salient one in the Greek public intellectual debate. Such ideological polarization, however, has been mitigated by the emergence of a “third pole” of transnationalism which was given impetus by the increasing complexity and mishaps of the European integration project, and especially the disenchantment following the rejection of the European Constitutional Treaty. This transnational school of thought is gathering pace among Greek intellectuals who are principally European scholars.

This chapter highlights the relevance of international students for the study of Asian Pacific American identities. Despite dominant views that frame them as “foreigners” with no place in the constitution of American society, these students transcend such distinctions by reinterpreting and reformulating their experiences of transnationalism through discourse. This chapter traces this process through an analysis of how a group of Korean graduate students studying in the United States deploy and resignify discursive practices associated with Korean society to make sense of their positions within a network of new relational oppositions. In particular, it focuses on how language ideologies that construct Koreans as illegitimate speakers of English are used as a resource for negotiating the students' liminal status in the United States.

This book explores relationship between American literature and globalization and how this equation has fluctuated and evolved over time. In addition to works of fiction or poetry that are organized explicitly around particular conceptions of place, the book considers how a wide range of texts are informed implicitly by other kinds of geographical projection, of the type found in cartography and other forms of mapping. It argues that the connection between American literature and geography, far from being something that can be taken as natural, involves contested terrain. The book also examines how the United States has moved from a national phase to a matrix of transnationalism and relates it to the idea of deterritorialization first broached in 1972 by French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and how this move toward a transnational infrastructure has manifested itself in American literature.

Since the 1980s, migration has undergone various developments that have changed the understanding of the concept of migration. The former understanding of migration as the integration of the migrant in the host society or the return of the migrant to the society of origin was proceeded by complex migrations and multiple social relations across boundaries. This migration trend paved the way for the term ‘transnationalism’. This term suggests that sociocultural groups are no longer territorially defined but rather are defined through migrations, and a global ethnography has been created. This chapter illustrates the broad potential of the transnational approach by analysing Afghan refugees and migrants, particularly the Hazaras who originated in the mountainous region of Afghanistan. These refugees were a result of the 1978 communist coup and the 1979 Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Afghan refugees form the largest displaced population. This exodus of the Afghans was not entirely dictated by war, insecurity and poverty but as well as the nomadic nature of their life where mobility is seen as a planned strategy. In migration and exile, the process of integration and definitive return are seldom achieved as movement and mobility is continuous.

This chapter examines how and why states regulate their diasporas, and considers whether and how they should do so. The chapter begins by noting that the extra-territorial components of state policies are relatively overlooked aspects of global migration governance—which tends to be conceived in terms of international relations between migrant-receiving and -sending countries. Drawing on a large comparative study, the first section of the chapter highlights that many states dedicate a portion of the state apparatus—referred to as ‘the emigration state’—to emigration and the diaspora. It identifies four different types of emigration state (engaged, disengaged, paper-only, and incoherent) and describes the main features of each, noting that only ‘engaged’ states exhibit a coherent range of mechanisms relating to the diaspora. The second section of the chapter begins to develop explanatory hypotheses for each type, outlining an agenda for further research. The final section of the chapter evaluates arguments for and against ‘engaging diasporas’ in terms of interests, norms, and global cooperation. Based on this evaluation, it concludes there is a need for more coherence in this area of global migration governance.

This chapter begins with an analysis of the dominant disciplinary understandings of trasnationalism and identity, exposing the limitations of their reductive framing, specifically within the liberal constructivist tradition. To make theoretical sense of the broad and contradictory interactions that constitute the domestic abroad, the rest of the chapter presents a systematic analysis that delineates first the political and then the economic dimensions of the domestic abroad, revealing the manner in which they are related to each other through an elucidation of the concept of hegemony. This framework then sets the stage for understanding the domestic abroad as the product of the processes through which the bourgeoisie, in the context of the development of capitalism on a global scale, continues its attempts to establish a seemingly organic connection between its interests and the interests of the nation-at-large, and to legitimize its hegemonic status.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there were waves of pogroms and persecution; world wars and expulsions; the British White Paper of 1939 that barred further Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine; the gates of Western countries closed to refugees from Nazi persecution. There was the total destruction of the nation in Europe, the center of its life for a millennium. However, people often overlook the fact that there were also crucial positive conditions. There were sweeping and comprehensive historical circumstances—some of them intended directly for the Jews, most not related to them at all—that enabled the Jews, in the final analysis, to change the very nature of their hovering existence of transnationalism.