WORLD-, TRANSNATIONAL- AND GLOBAL HISTORY - HISTORIOGRAPHY FOR NETWORK SOCIETIES OF THE 21ST CENTURY?

During the past three decades, within the main currents of historical thought, world, transnational, and global history gained special importance. Starting from the long tradition of writing world histories, in the context of social and intellectual changes since the 1980s, especially the end of the Cold War and the strengthening of the globalization process, the paper analyzes the origin of these disciplines, their characteristic theoretical and methodological features, the main research topics and their most significant results. These approaches have in common the search for alternative spaces of historical analysis that would not be connected to the traditional framework of the nation-state. As a result, there is an inherent stimulus to overcome methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism in historical research. Therefore, they represent at the same time an attempt to write history not only for contemporary, globally more tightly integrated 'network societies' but also a type of historiography less marked by nationalism. However, world-, transnational-, and global history also have inherent limitations. Firstly, there is a danger that they will become the ideology of the ongoing process of globalization and, secondly, that people as creators of their history will be suppressed in favor of social and economic structures and processes. Finally, the paper analyzes the opportunities that world-, transnational- and global history provide to smaller national historical cultures. In this sense, it seems that a 'glocal' approach - which observes the global aspects of phenomena from local, regional and national history and their feedback influence on global currents of history - would be particularly useful. Ultimately, although world-, transnational-, and global history will become neither the only nor the dominant paradigm in historical thought, their insights undoubtedly represent a welcome counterbalance to the (still prevailing) national historical narratives.