Imagined Communities.

Benedict Andersons Imagined Communities (1983) is often depicted as a mountain of a book which subjected
nationalism to a degree of analysis which it had hitherto been denied. Anderson launches his thesis with the
observation that plausible theory about nationalism is conspicuously meagre, and that no theorist of the
magnitude of Marx, Freud, or Darwin has yet addressed the questions raised by the nation. Yet whilst one
may suspect that the most influential contributor to the analysis of nationalism will turn out to be Anderson
himself, Imagined Communities is a profoundly inadequate book and there is already a whiff of rot around many
of its conclusions.

Once upon a time, according to Anderson, there was an age of religious imagined communities, in which
meaning depended upon the non-arbitrariness of the sign and religious texts were consequently written in
privileged and untranslatable languages. These prevailed (if only amongst elites) throughout the states and
regions encompassed within the religious community. Anderson contends that with the rise of print capitalism,
innovations such as the newspaper and the novel identified (or imagined) and addressed new national
communities. These texts resorted to vernacular languages rather than the old privileged languages; or
established formal versions of these vernacular tongues, which could be understood throughout the regions
which made up the new nation and by those who had previously been unschooled in privileged languages.

Reading newspapers and novels became the mass ceremony through which the national community was
imagined. The religious imagined community had been characterised by a conception of temporarily in which
cosmology and history were indistinguishable; so that the material world was represented as fixed and
unchanging whilst the origins and the end of the world were always present in religious truths. Throughout the
new imagined communities, however, millions of unconnected individuals were aware that they were mutually
witnessing the life of their nation, as it moved calendrically through homogenous, empty time.

Anderson proposes that nationalism first emerged at the end of the eighteenth century amongst creole
communities, and that the conceptual model was pirated around the world until it was set in ineradicable
place. Although official nationalism was from the start a conscious, self-protective policy, intimately linked to
the preservation of imperial-dynastic interests, subjected peoples soon took control of the nations imagined by
colonial powers.

Imagined Communities initially demonstrates a recognisably Marxist economic determinism: a local bourgeoisie
has to accrue enough capital to launch print-capitalism, there has to be a national market for printed
materials, and similar economic circumstances determine the seemingly unstoppable course of nationalism as it
is pirated around the world. Once the world has organised itself into nations, however, history stops.
Revolutionary leaderships inherit nations and, however hostile they may be to the idea of nationalism, they
consciously or unconsciously come to play lord of the manor. Anderson shoots the horse from under him, in
discarding the Marxist analysis which has carried his theory to modernity. The nation is now a permanent and
seemingly ahistorical political reality, and aside from the possibility that the established array of nations may
fracture into a greater number of nations Anderson recognises no further opportunity for subsequent
geopolitical communities to emerge.

Andersons rejection of Marxist theories of nationalism was informed by the spectacle of the 1978 Cambodian-
Vietnamese war the first large-scale conventional war waged by one revolutionary Marxist regime against
another in which none of the belligerents has made more than the most perfunctory attempts to justify the
bloodshed in terms of a recognizable Marxist theoretical perspective. Anderson seems merely to insist that
universalistic discourses such as Marxism should be qualified by a recognition of the nations resilience. A
bourgeoisie may be systematically exterminated, but as long as this remains, say, the British revolution, then it
can be incorporated into Andersons model. Imagined Communities argues firstly that nationalism is both
economically determined and that, once in being, it is too profound a characteristic of human experience to
economically determined out of existence; and secondly that nationalism is a leading feature of modernity and
that, by comparison, the citizens solidarities with a specific class or race can (or should) be only secondary. The
nation, for Anderson, is the stage upon which all of modernity is enacted.

Anderson portrays the nation as the end of history, or even as utopian, so that Imagined Communities at times
resembles Marxism without the happy ending. He argues that despite the tendency of cosmopolitan
intellectuals to equate nationalism with bigotry and racism, it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire
love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love. This is perhaps in danger of elevating stupidity to a great
emotion. Anderson observes that, for most ordinary people of whatever class the whole point of the nation is
that it is interestless it can ask for sacrifices. The aura of purity and disinterestedness which comes from
laying down ones life for the nation makes this act fundamentally different to that of dying for the proletariat or
even Amnesty International. It seems rather foolish, however, to agree to die for the nation in itself, or for some
of the grubby things which have historically been defined as national interests.

Admittedly, the British army often seeks to recruit teenagers, because few rational adults can be persuaded to
put their lives in danger for the sake of something as pointless as, say, the Falkland Islands. Yet one can (only)
speculate that most recruits are motivated by a sense of immediate camaraderie with their fellow soldiers, or a
love of danger and violence, or good wages and educational opportunities, or countless other interests, rather
than the prospect of lemming-like sacrifice. At the suggestion of a link between nationalism and racism,
Anderson maintains that, today, even the most insular nations accept the principle of naturalization no matter
how difficult in practice they may make it. Yet crimes such as the Nazi Holocaust or the mass murder of native
Americans were committed against peoples not only defined as racially inferior, but as Other to the nation; and
often through the very means of imagining the community in the first place, such as national newspapers which
demonised excluded peoples.

Andersons contention that nations inspire love may jar with his thoroughly unromantic account of nationalism.
He reduces the citizen to a consumer, who only (consciously) joins a nation by purchasing and reading all of the
documents in which it is imagined. Citizenship emerges from this analysis as passive and contractual, and
Anderson also rather overlooks the widespread illiteracy which prevails within many modern nations. Andersons
nationalist is a bourgeois consumer and reader, and those who have no money hold an uncertain place in his
nation.

In the twenty-first century when print capitalism is not quite the force that it once was Imagined
Communities may already appear to be rather dated. Anderson leaves his story just when it starts to get
interesting. Twentieth-century European immigration often took the form of permanent settlements; entailing the
idea of arriving from an old nation and joining a new one. Such immigration was often involuntary and the
immigrants themselves were often victims and exiles. In the twenty-first century, however, the rise of cheap air
travel has furnished opportunities for more people (in the West) to lead a cosmopolitan lifestyle. This tourist
immigration is unconcerned with the dichotomy of belonging and exclusion. Cosmopolitanism is suddenly far
more the culture of the young people who live hand to mouth than it is that of middle-class liberals, who may
own a home, vote, and pay taxes in a specific country; and may not have the energy and proficiency to access
cosmopolitan culture in the same way that young people do.

Moreover, print-capital is being progressively usurped by cyberspace, and the individual may increasingly refer
to the internet for news, entertainment, commerce, education, and social networking. Andersons analysis would
logically imply that the users of these websites together constitute an emerging transnational imagined
community. If amidst all of this nationalism may seem like something of a bore, Anderson maintains that nations
inspire a disinterested love. In a 2005 interview with a University of Oslo internet journal (ironically enough), he
argues that in an era of globalisation many immigrants resort to a strategy of long-distance nationalism. He
provocatively declares that, I havent met many cosmopolitans in my life, perhaps no more than five.

Although Anderson seems to be blandly dismissive of cosmopolitanism, his position as an anthropologist alone
intimates that cosmopolitan virtues such as tolerance, travelling, and an appreciation of foreign cultures are
necessity, even if they merely complement a nationalistic conception of citizenship. Incidentally, Anderson states
that I no longer have such an attachment to England. I do have a certain but not strong attachment to the
USA, and an attachment to places I have studied in Southeast Asia. He resembles a man who quite likes the
idea of nationalism, rather than necessarily having anything to do with

it.