Methodological nationalism, a concept developed by Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, refers to “the assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form of the modern world”. Modernity, as they put it, “was cast in the iron cage of nationalized states”. Understanding nation states and societies as naturally given objects of study, and the nation-state model as the only thinkable way of organising politics, produced an analytical separation between “nation” and “state”, and subsequently “nation” and “democracy”, so that the national framing of modern state-building and democratisation became invisible. For this reason,
nationalism appears as a force foreign to the history of Western state building. Instead, it is projected to others […] Western state building was reimagined as a non-national, civil, republican and liberal experience.
References:
Wimmer, A., & Glick Schiller, N. 2002. Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences. Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs, 2 (4)