Thoughts on the local versus the national in history writing

 Several years ago I read Wimmer & Glick Schillers now classic article "Methodological Nationalism and beyond: nation-state building, migration and the social sciences". Back then I concieved it as a tricky text and I am still not sure that I have fully comprehended their critique of general history writing. If I would dare to say anything it is that Wimmer & Glick Schiller proposes that historians for a long period of time have taken the national state as given actor and boundary for studies in history, thus creating a hegemony in social sciences and the humanities were it is hard to think outside the realm of national politics. 

 Wimmer & Glick Schillers argument can be critiqued for being overly simplistic, since there is a wide field of colonial history, oral history and similar topics that needs to take a different point of departure than the nation state. As an historian I however likes their notion of an overly focus on national politics and national actors, since this aspect works as part of a blindfold towards different understandings of social development. In this regard methodological nationalism can also function as a way of producing overly simplistic history since it is many times proposed that once the state makes legislation or policy changes, these are implemented throughout society. 

In my one year masters I studied how the concept of normality were developed in Swedish disability politics. However I was also intrested in how this concept were turned into practice by the municipalities and courts, which led me to also a reading of material from primarily swedish courts. What I found was that the legislators ideals were not put into practice by muncipalities, since their interpretentions of the law diverged from the legislators ideas. Therefore, a discrepancy was existed between the state and the muncipalities, which were needed to be settled in court. 

For me this was a rather striking insight which created the need to go beyond national politics and instead focus on how national policies were interpreted at the level of implementation. In my 2023 dissertation I therefore focused not only on the progress of government policy but also  municipal policy, thus being able to create an understanding of policy-making as part of a negotation between the state and the muncipalities. Once the dissertation was complete a common remark was that it was really the processes at the local level, which made out around half of the book, that were interesting. 

In my ongoing project called "Our sharpest weapon was matter-of-factly education: the mobilization of the Swedish Association for Sex education in Skåne 1933-1945" I have once again focused on the local level. By doing this I have managed to create not a different history of Swedish changed sexual policy, but instead highlighting different actors than those that previously have gotten a place in Swedish history. Thereby I have also complicated and nuanced the current history writing of swedish sexual policy. 

So, what have all this got to do with methodological nationalism? On the one hand I still work within the national as a given point of reference. But I have however also come to learn that history writing needs to take other arenas than strictly national politics as point of departure. Some people would say that my ongoing research interests to a large degree can be seen as a form of local history, which is an description I partly object to. Studying the local in itself is never my aim, but rather the the local works as a way to complicate the larger picture. After all, politics are made by people and it is their immediate surroundings that they put their power into use.

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