‘The Postnational Constellation’ 27 Years Later: The Main Research Paradigms and Their Preliminary Results
Illya Gerasimov (Chicago), 20.00 CET, 16 October 2025
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On September 28, 1998, Jürgen Habermas’s Die postnationale Konstellation: Politische Essays was released by Suhrkamp Verlag, registering the arrival of a new social phenomenon: the postnational situation. It did not mean that national solidarity and nationalism had become obsolete, only that they no longer held a monopoly on social organization and likely functioned differently than they had earlier in the twentieth century. Habermas proposed several political forms for accommodating the postnational situation. Over the next 27 years, some of them proved more realistic than others. In parallel, several approaches to postnational analysis were developed and tested in the social sciences and humanities. I will briefly survey these dynamics and discuss the reasons for the persistence of a nation-centric approach even in the attempts to defy nationalist narratives.
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Ilya Gerasimov (Candidate of Sciences in History, Kazan University and PhD in History, Rutgers University) is a co-founder and the executive editor of Ab Imperio: Studies of New Imperial History and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Space. He has published several books and edited volumes, including A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia: From Russian to Global History (Bloomsbury: vol. 1, 2023; vol. 2, 2024); Plebeian Modernity: Social Practices, Illegality, and the Urban Poor in Russia, 1905–1917 (University of Rochester Press, 2018), Modernism and Public Reform in Late Imperial Russia: Rural Professionals and Self-Organization, 1905–30 (Palgrave, 2009), and Empire Speaks Out: Languages of Rationalization and Self-description in the Russian Empire (Brill, 2009). He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters published in the US, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Italy, Japan, and Canada.
This is the first lecture in the “Reclaiming Transnationalism” lecture series, co-organised by Denys Shatalov (Kryvyi Rih/Berlin) and Stanisław Krawczyk (Wrocław) within the framwork of the “Young Network TransEurope” at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. For further information about the lecture and the series please contact: Stanisław Krawczyk