국사의 초국가적 역사

This article reviews the ‘Writing the Nation’ series and the Review Forum held in Korea (April 22-24, 2016). This series is a pan-European academic achievement sponsored by the European Science Foundation, which constitutes a massive database of European national histories. From a comparative and transnational perspective, it investigates the historical process in which the emergence and consolidation of the nation-state system in 19th and 20th century Europe underlay the establishment of history as an academic discipline. The overarching purpose of the series is to examine the historical constitution of the so-called “methodological nationalism” which has naturalized the nation-state as the most basic unit to frame time and place in historical writing, and ultimately deconstruct its still universal appeal. The Review Forum intended to complement and strengthen the comparative scheme of the series by the comparison with the historiographies of East Asia (Korea and Japan). Based on what was discussed at the Review Forum, this article tries to assess the series’ achievement and show its utility for understanding the structure of the ‘national history regime.’ In this era of historical change and unpredictability, the series is very timely in that it illuminates the fundamentally transnational dynamics of nationally constituted modern historiography and calls for emancipating our historical imagination from the cage of methodological nationalism.