Imagined Communities: Reflections On The Origin And Spread Of Nationalism

In Chapter Seven, Anderson examines the final wave of nations that have gained independence since the end of World War II. Most of these states are the product of “colonial nationalism,” which swept through the remaining vestiges of the European empires in Africa and Asia during and after the war. Drawing upon the legacy of nation-building models that preceded them in Europe and the Americas, these postcolonial nations exhibit a complex nationalism deriving from their colonial origins. Many of these states retained the language of the colonial power as their official language. They combined popular nationalist sentiment with the ideological machinery of official nationalism that they inherited from imperial rule. Leaders in these states selected from, and adapted to their own purposes, a range of nationalist institutions, republican ideals, systems of government and education, elections, celebrations, and the manipulation of mass media for ideological purposes pioneered during the 150-year history of nationalism. Anderson traces the differing outcomes of colonial nationalism by comparing 20th-century nationalist movements in Dutch Indonesia with those in French West Africa and French Indochina. He concludes the chapter with a brief account of Swiss nationalism, which demonstrates that national identity can thrive in a country divided into three main language communities.

The nationalist movements in Europe’s African and Asian colonies were spearheaded by a native, bilingual intelligentsia, educated in the colonial capitals or, occasionally, in the metropoles of London, Paris, and Amsterdam. These knowledge workers were fluent in the colonial language-of-state, e.g., English, French or Dutch. As functionaries serving the colonial governments, they were restricted geographically to the administrative centers of the colonies and excluded from high corporate or civil service positions within European capitals. By the middle of the 20th century, dramatic improvements in transportation, as well as the expansion and specialization of administrative services within the colonies, created an army of native-educated functionaries. This cadre of young bilinguals had access to the literature and philosophy of Western culture, including models of nationalism and the nation-state. Anderson argues that the “educational and administrative pilgrimages [of these knowledge workers within the colonized territories] provided the territorial base for new ‘imagined communities’ in which natives could come to see themselves as ‘nationals’” (140). Excluded from corporate positions of power by the policies of colonial capitalism, and unattached to local bourgeoisies, this ‘first generation’ of educated natives became the “key early spokesmen for colonial nationalism” (140).

Colonial nationalist movements, paradoxically, were inspired by the repressive official nationalism of the occupying colonial powers. Anderson observes that the colonized were increasingly made aware of European national histories, through education, celebrations, the print media, and other means. These histories, which cast the events of the European past in nationalist terms, quickened the resolve of the native intelligentsias to define and create their own national identities.

The case of Indonesia, a vast nation comprised of about 3000 islands with significant religious and ethnolinguistic diversity, is particularly striking. Sharing neither a mother-tongue, religion, nor ethnicity with the inhabitants of islands thousands of miles away, Sumatrans learned to regard the Ambonese islanders as fellow Indonesians, while their near neighbors in Malay, with whom they share a language and ethnic background, are foreigners. Anderson argues that the Indonesian sense of national identity, spanning far-flung and diverse island populations, owes to the highly-organized, centrally-controlled and uniform system of education set up by the Indonesian government. The racism endemic to colonialism, by which the indigenous natives were set off from their colonial masters, foreign entrepreneurs, and other ethnic groups, further solidified a sense of collective national identity. In addition, by the 1920s, Indonesia had developed a serviceable vernacular language-of-state that became adopted as the national language upon independence.

In French Indochina, composed mostly of what is now Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, “educational policy [also] contributed to the growth of an ‘Indochinese’ consciousness” (124). However, this national sentiment was not broad-based and did not survive, owing to the differing forms of educational and administrative pilgrimages in the region. The French favored the Vietnamese over the Khmer and Laotians, and this resulted in different educational and administrative policies toward these ethnic groups that led to their functional segregation from each other. As a result, the French colony of Indochina fragmented into the nation-states of Vietnam, Cambodia (Kampuchea), and Laos.

In comparing the differing outcomes of these postcolonial nationalist movements, Anderson emphasizes that languages are not necessarily symbols of nation-ness. It is not necessary for a people to speak a single language to form a unified nation. The existence of print-language, not a particular language per se, is the critical element for inventing nationalism. In colonial territories, a sense of national community can unite speakers of several different languages, provided that education produces a politically-significant number of bilingual speakers. Multilingual Switzerland demonstrates this point. Anderson argues that Switzerland’s economic, political, and cultural backwardness and its geographical inaccessibility delayed the rise of nationalism until the late 19thcentury. At the same time, its non-monarchical political institutions enabled it to avoid the excesses of official nationalism. Switzerland is best understood as belonging with the last wave of nations, able to imagine itself as a nation “in ways that did not require linguistic uniformity” (139).

In Chapter Eight, Anderson addresses the relationship between nationalism and racism. He argues that, contrary to prevailing opinion in liberal Western intellectual circles, patriotism is not inherently racist. Racism and antisemitism tend to be expressed within national boundaries, not across them. Anderson contends that national identity is conceived in language, not on a racial basis. Just as a language can be learned by a non-native, national communities ‘invite’ outsiders to join the nation, and naturalize those who do so. Moreover, “nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time […] outside history” (149).

Anderson contends that racism originates in class-based, not national, ideologies. The European aristocracies’ claim to superiority over the lower classes at home was transformed in the colonies into the rulers’ belief of their superiority over the racially-inferior native populations. Anderson argues that wherever racism developed outside of Europe during the 19thcentury, it was inseparable from European domination of its colonial possessions.

An empire’s colonies were a place where petty bourgeois administrators from France, Britain (among other nations) could play at being aristocrats and enjoy the all-white solidarity. Aristocratic racism in this imperial setting linked colonial rulers from different, even rivalrous, nation-states in a fraternity sharing the ‘white man’s burden’ of empire. Racism was thus an intrinsic part of the official nationalism by which the colonial empires legitimized and sustained their power. By contrast, the anticolonial movements and postcolonial nations of the last wave have shown little evidence of reverse racism toward their (former) colonial masters.

Chapter Nine, the conclusion to the original edition of Imagined Communities, reiterates the dominance of the nation-state and nationalism on the contemporary global stage. Anderson observes that “since the end of the eighteenth-century nationalism has undergone a process of modulation and adaptation, according to different eras, political regimes, economies and social structures” (157).As a result, the model of the nation, as an imagined community, has extended to every conceivable contemporary society.

The legacies of nationalism are two-sided. While popular nationalism has, in differing degrees, been instrumental at some stage of all nationalist movements, official nationalism has been a powerful and seductive model for revolutionaries once they successfully take control of the state. The instruments of official nationalism, its levers of power (such as records, maps, files, laws, archives, bureaucracies, police forces), are inherited by the revolutionary regime, who seek to “use the power of the state in pursuit of their visions” (159). Anderson reminds that we must recognize the subtle and profound workings of nationalism, its deep emotional appeals as well as the Machiavellian machinery with which it serves the state’s interests, to limit or prevent future wars.