Thirty years ago, Arjun Appadurai famously proposed:

“We need to think ourselves beyond the nation. This is not to suggest that thought alone will carry us beyond the nation or that the nation is largely a thought or an imagined thing. Rather, it is to suggest that the role of intellectual practices is to identify the current crisis of the nation and, in identifying it, to provide part of the apparatus of recognition for postnational social forms. … Put another way, no idiom has yet emerged to capture the collective interests of many groups in translocal solidarities, cross-border mobilizations and postnational identities. ... They are still entrapped in the linguistic imaginary of the territorial state. ... This vicious circle can only be escaped when a language is found to capture complex, nonterritorial, postnational forms of allegiance.”^[1]

Since then, the conversation about the postnational condition has evolved from discussing one’s theoretical intuition to registering the practical political ramifications of the process. The most obvious of these is the failed-state-like effect observable globally, from the handling of the COVID-19 epidemic or the migrant crisis by Western democracies to the institutionalization of corruption as a main mechanism of political control in post-Soviet societies. Time has corrected much in the earlier insights regarding the “postnational constellation” (Habermas), particularly the expectations that international organizations could compensate for the growing dysfunctionality of the nation-state, or that an autonomous cosmopolitan culture and civil society would form.^[2] Rich literatures pondering the problems of postnational citizenship, postnational democracy, and world government have developed into subfields with their own research agendas and internal debates.
Yet Appadurai’s initial call to find a language “to capture complex, nonterritorial, postnational forms of allegiance” remains largely unanswered. Discussion of the postnational is informed by a nation-centered episteme that implies the fundamentality of a territorial nation, framing the conversation in terms of inter-, post-, or transnational arrangements – that is, it is still based on “nation,” albeit in a modified way. It does not help that “nation” in English means both the polity and the anonymous community of horizontal solidarity united by a universally embraced common characteristic. As a result, “postnational” tends to ignore interconnected, yet autonomous processes: the demise of nation-states’ functionality and the loss of nations’ monopoly on social cohesion and integration – what Habermas termed the breaking of “the historical symbiosis of republicanism and nationalism.”^[3] So, too many scholars – including Habermas himself – discuss the post-state future assuming that society remains the same and only needs a better political form. They use terms such as “population” and “civil society” in the singular, without addressing the fundamental question: Why should people residing on a certain territory experience social solidarity with each other, or why should this solidarity be stronger than it is with people residing in other countries? And conversely, those who focus on new forms of groupness tend to reconcile these forms with the old political structures – of territorial nation-states and their democratic institutions. But “postnational” is increasingly a post-state condition, and the territorial nation-state is the only existing form of modern statehood. Thus, nonterritorial or transborder nations and postnational communities of solidarity require new political forms that need to reconcile them with the fact that people live in countries but no longer invest all their loyalty in their countries and compatriots.
Modern sociological models envision a country’s population as segmented into networks of solidarity based on very different principles and ideas. Partially overlapping and increasingly transborder, they grant individuals membership in a few or many networks and hence multiply and complicate people’s social identification. Mid-twentieth-century-style national belonging remains only one of the possible forms, and is an increasingly aggressive one when exploited by governments striving to restore the nation-state’s legitimacy and hence efficiency by mobilizing the country’s populations into a single nation. Political processes in the United States and the Russian Federation seem to confirm Gerard Delanty’s assessment: no longer representing a majority of the country’s population,

“nationalism has rebounded but without a nation. As a result of far-reaching cultural pluralization and social diversification, on the one side, and on the other growing social inequality and social discontent deriving from globalization, the national domain has lost its integrative powers. … The idea of the nation as a common space has in effect been abandoned by large swathes of the radical right for whom there is no common future, just survival.”^[4]

In the systemic postnational condition, “this leads to reactions that affirm the national but in ways that intensify its disintegration.”^[5]
In a desperate attempt to restore the efficiency of Russia’s crumbling statehood by strengthening its legitimacy in citizens’ eyes, the cynical and profoundly cosmopolitan Russian political class resorted to nationalist mobilization. They started with civic patriotism, then tried religious fundamentalism, then moved to xenophobia: every subsequent step was necessitated by nationalism’s new effect of intensifying disintegration instead of the expected social cohesion. Utterly frustrated, Putin’s regime eventually resorted to the nation’s literal mobilization – for a war with any suitable and relatively low-risk adversary whatsoever. While seemingly outlandish, this fatal decision logically follows from the political playbook shared by all nation-states, particularly those ruled by right-leaning neonationalists. Therefore, the task formulated by Appadurai has acquired practical urgency that far exceeds its purely intellectual aspect: we need to think ourselves beyond the nation to avoid further social disintegration and international confrontation.
Over the past decades, many academic disciplines have been building the foundation for this effort. On behalf of the new imperial history of Northern Eurasia, we can point to our conceptualization of the imperial situation – of the coexistence and overlap of various taxonomies of diversity with no single and universal “exchange rate” between them – as a way to conceptualize society as an open system. Turning “empire” into an analytical concept and disentangling it from any specific historical empire (as it happened with “nation” as a concept) allowed groupness to be modeled as dynamic, contextual, and multifaceted, and one’s identification – as situational and transformable. Empire taken as a context-setting category discredits any single narrative of belonging/experience/culture, retains hierarchical order structuring imperial political and social formations, yet also allows the exploration of hybridity, overlaps, multiple belongings, and so on. However, the case of historical imperial formations can only indirectly be projected onto the postnational era, and not everyone agrees on borrowing historians’ conceptual apparatus to discuss modern society. How would you frame the analysis of the present postnational situation – or the past – from the vantage point of our new reality?
Back to square one, we can more or less neutrally speak of people living in countries and joining cultural and political communities of a local and transborder scale. What does it take to describe and analyze more complex social arrangements, past and present, without relying on “nation” as a normative concept – either positively or through its persistent deconstruction?
With the rise and fall of nation and nation-state in the course of just several centuries, is there not a risk of essentializing empires as a new normative concept? Identifying them in various periods of history across millennia, not centuries, makes “empires” an even more rigid and ahistorical category than “nations.” How can we historicize prenational and anational societies, and using what analytical language?
The nation-centered episteme has constituted the core of the modernity paradigm in social sciences and humanities, and the discourse of empire’s “eternity” undermines the very legitimacy of conventional periodization. While “modernity” as a normative concept has been rightfully criticized for imposing value-ridden and western-centered interpretations, it seems ahistorical and counterproductive to deny the specificity of the period characterized by the rise of mass societies of universal literacy and participatory political regimes. Can we speak of modernity in a non-nation-centered language?
Queer theories have become an example of relativizing rigid group identities and identifications. Can the language of queer theory become universally applicable in social analysis, beyond the sphere of gender-related relationships? Queering effectively deconstructs groupness, but a positive theory and social action necessitate stabilizing the meaning of relations and identification at some point. However inclusive, taxonomies of gender identities envision the same methodological nationalism as any approach embracing the realism of the group. Is there a solution for this predicament within the queer theory approach?