53 pages • 1 hour read
Benedict AndersonImagined Communities: Reflections On The Origin And Spread Of Nationalism
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1983A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Nationalism
Nationalism is the central theme of Imagined Communities. As the subtitle of the book indicates, Anderson’s aim is to explain the origins and spread of nationalism—and the nation-state—throughout the globe over the past two-and-a-half centuries. He identifies three main historical phases of national independence movements: the “creole pioneers” of North and South America, lasting from the 1770s through the first few decades of the nineteenth-century; the European phase, which lasted roughly from 1820-1920; and the “last wave” of nation-states that arose from the breakup of the European colonial empires in the period following World War II. The nationalisms that inspired these movements each involved distinctive ways of imagining and realizing the national community as a result of their different geographical, historical, political, linguistic, and cultural circumstances.
Anderson’s historical account and analysis of nationalism relies on his definition of the nation as “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (6). The national community is socially constructed; it requires an act of imagination by its members to achieve reality. This act of imagining the nation involves a sense of their simultaneous participation in the national life and their consciousness of sharing a national heritage, values, and destiny. One carries an image of the shared, national community within oneself even though this community is made up of people who are largely anonymous to each other. Similarly, the nation claims to be sovereign over its territorial extent and recognizes that extent is limited by the geographical boundaries it shares with other nation-states.
The act of ‘thinking’ the nation was made possible by a combination of historical transformations that enabled the emergence of national identities from the political communities that preceded them. Anderson emphasizes the collapse of the medieval, religious world-community and dynastic monarchy, the innovating role of print-capitalism, the rise of vernacular languages in Europe, and the new apprehension of time as “empty” and “homogenous.” His materialist account of the origins of nationalism and national consciousness seeks to provide a modernized and suppler Marxist perspective on nationalism and the birth of the nation-state.
Anderson’s account of nationalism is also revisionist in that it seeks to correct the Eurocentrism of many previous theories of how the nation-state originated. The idea of the nation was first politically realized in the Americas; it then became “modular,” appropriated and adapted by European independence movements and ultimately spread throughout the world. Nationalism has a universal appeal and is rooted in liberal ideals, Anderson claims. He disagrees with the notion that it is a “pathology” of history intimately linked to racism, the suppression of human rights, and state-sponsored violence within and without national borders.
Anderson’s optimism applies to the liberating possibilities of ‘popular,’ anti-dynastic nationalism, which he distinguishes as one of the two major variants of nationalism. Popular nationalism, he argues, fueled the revolutions in the Americas that led to the establishment of the United States and the nation-states of Latin America. The linguistic nationalisms in 19th-and-20th-century Europe were popular movements, and popular nationalism also played a role in the birth of postcolonial nation-states in Asia and Africa. Anderson distinguishes this revolutionary form of ‘inclusionary’ nationalism from ‘official’ nationalism, the latter of which is a conservative, reactionary strategy serving the interests of established state power.
Anderson’s critics maintain that that he doesn’t adequately address the complex interactions of popular and official nationalism within individual nation-states, or the violent ethnic nationalisms that surfaced in Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism. Similarly, his historical account noticeably ignores the nationalisms of the Arab world, where the durability of religious political structures seems to contradict his theory of the origins of national consciousness.
Print Capitalism
Print capitalism is a fundamental material factor in the origin of nationalism, according to Anderson, and forms a major theme of the book. He argues that “the convergence of capitalism and print technology […] created the possibility of a new form of imagined community […] which set the stage for the modern nation” (46). By the 18thcentury, the market in Europe for books, newspapers, and other publications had rapidly expanded, along with the size of reading audiences for these materials. Reading habits shared by thousands created a sense of invisible community with other readers consuming the same printed matter, while the presentation of time in novels and newspapers modelled the simultaneity that the community’s members imagined bound their lives together.
Capitalism’s restless search for markets revolutionized printing by expanding into vernacular languages once the market for Latin texts had been saturated in the 16thcentury. This vernacularizing thrust received a fortuitous impetus from the Reformation, which created a mass readership and popular literature in the vernacular as a result of Martin Luther’s Biblical translations and tracts in German. While stimulating new readerships, it also mobilized them for political and religious purposes. The possibility of imagining the nation as a community only became possible, Anderson claims, when “capitalism and print created monoglot mass reading publics” (43).
Throughout Europe, print capitalism had a standardizing effect on the multiplicity of spoken vernaculars by creating a smaller number of print-languages. Anderson contends that “print languages laid the bases for national consciousnesses in three distinct ways” (44). First, the print-language unified speakers of different (and sometimes mutually incomprehensible) dialects, enabling them to comprehend each other in print and realize they were part of a much larger reading community within their language-field. Second, print capitalism gave a fixity to language, slowing the rate of change in languages. This eventually created an aura of antiquity around a vernacular language, which is crucial in the subjective imagination of the nation. Finally, through establishing print languages, print capitalism selectively created languages-of-power that could be—and were—used administratively by states. This elevated certain dialects that were closer to the print language, while other dialects were demoted by being unable to achieve widespread presence in print. Dialects that remained primarily spoken lost status and came to be considered substandard.
While “the fixing of print-languages and the differentiation of status between them were largely unselfconscious processes resulting from the explosive interaction between capitalism, technology and human linguistic diversity,” the political ramifications of these processes were soon grasped by those in power (45). National governments have found it expedient to control access to print in order to manage ethnic minorities or subject populations. This is seen in discouraging the development of transcription systems for minority-spoken languages and the manipulation of orthography (for example, Ataturk’s compulsory Romanization of the Turkish language script and the Soviet suppression of Arabic script among its Turkic-speaking minorities). Anderson notes that many of these governments were largely indifferent to what these minorities speak. Rather, control of print-language was felt essential to manage (or suppress) nationalist sentiment among these populations, while promoting the official nationalism of the regime.
The Rise of Vernacular Languages
In his Afterword to Imagined Communities, Anderson identifies vernacularization as one of the book’s main themes. The role of language in creating a people’s sense of national identity, though not ubiquitous, has been extremely important in the global history of nationalism. Linguistic nationalisms formed the basis of most of the nationalist movements in Europe during the 19th and early-20th centuries. Vernacular languages also were a determining factor in the shaping of postcolonial states, though the role they played was typically more complex, owing to the historical legacies of colonial administration. Anderson cites the translation of his book into twenty-nine languages as evidence of the enduring force of vernacularization, five centuries after vernacular languages first began to displace Latin in Europe.
The “fatality of human linguistic diversity,” in combination with capitalism and print technology, enabled the possibility of imagining a new type of community—the nation (43). Anderson notes that “there was and is no possibility of humankind’s general linguistic unification. Yet this mutual incomprehensibility was historically of only slight importance until capitalism and print created monoglot mass reading publics” (43). The Reformation was instrumental in producing mass audiences for vernacular publications, and thus stimulated anti-papal and proto-nationalist sentiments in Europe.
Prior to the rise of linguistic nationalisms in the 19thcentury, the major vernacular languages in Europe were not identified as they are today with particular territories. German, French, English, and Spanish were variously spoken as languages-of-state in the dynastic realms governing Europe and as languages of cultivation among the aristocracies. Print-capitalism, by creating national print-languages, elevated certain vernaculars and dialects to literary dignity and official status as languages-of-power.
This process of vernacularization, which had begun in the 16thcentury, assumed a more systematic form by the 19thcentury. It did so both as an instrument of official nationalism and as embodying the popular nationalist sentiments of communities expressing their newly-discovered (or “re-discovered”) national identity. Vernacular languages became charged with nationalist feeling and their promotion or suppression served the ideological purposes—revolutionary or reactionary—of nationalism.
The intelligentsia played a critical role in the linguistic nationalisms of Europe. The rise of language study in the universities, the recovery and publication of historical vernacular texts, the development of comparative philology, and the study of myths and folklore in vernacular traditions all amounted to a “lexicographic revolution” that swept through Europe from the late 18thcentury through the 19thcentury (72). This energetic movement fed national imaginings and led to profound political consequences.
In Europe’s colonial possessions, the bilingualism of educated natives was essential for enabling the imagination of a national community. The suppression, or sanctioning, of indigenous languages by colonial administrators was a fundamental factor in shaping the postcolonial nation that arose from the retreat of empire. In this context as well, Anderson insists on the value of the vernacular, whatever historical accidents may have led to one’s birth into a particular language community: “Through that language […] pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed” (154).
Imperialism and Postcolonialism
Another major theme of Imagined Communities is the legacy of European imperialism as it affected the formation of postcolonial nation-states in the Americas, Africa and Asia. Anderson was an anti-imperialist and Marxist, and his historical analysis of nationalism is informed by these perspectives. Nearly all the current nation-states in southeast Asia, his field of expertise, had been colonies of the English, French, or Dutch empires until well into the 20thcentury. At the height of the Age of Imperialism at the start of that century, over 90% of Africa was divided and controlled by European powers. The postcolonial nation-states that emerged in these areas are characterized by a complex nationalism owing to their history of colonial subjection and the lengthy tradition of nationalisms that preceded and inspired them.
The rise of popular linguistic-nationalisms in Europe during the 19thcentury led to the corresponding development of official nationalisms, especially in the dynastic monarchies. As noted above, official nationalisms arose as conservative, often reactionary, responses by established power groups to the waves of popular nationalist sentiment that threatened to marginalize or exclude them in the new, popularly imagined communities. Official nationalism harnesses nationalist feeling for dynastic interests. It involves the systematic effort to naturalize the ruling (often non-native) dynasty by giving it national credentials, suppress linguistic nationalisms among subjected language groups, and propagate ‘official’ nationalist ideology. Anderson offers the example of the Czarist ‘Russification’ of the vast polyglot Russian empire, composed of many non-Russian ethnicities, as a textbook case of official nationalism.
In the neo-colonial setting (that is, the European colonial empires of the 19th and 20thcenturies), official nationalism served to subject, colonize, and administer the occupied territories and their native inhabitants. The massed power of Western technology, science, educational institutions, bureaucratic specialization and military force worked to achieve a totalizing grasp of the colonized. Racism was a rampant feature of the colonial project. Official nationalism aimed to nationalize the subject native populations by indoctrinating them in the traditions and national identity of the colonial power. This ideologically-motivated education often achieved the opposite of its intentions by inspiring the colonized to form their own nationalist movements of liberation. These movements imaginatively ‘mapped’ the new, imagined community along the lines marked out by the educational and administrative pilgrimages of the young, educated and bilingual native intelligentsia.
Anderson argues that the nation-states that were the fruit of these movements inherited a complex, double legacy of popular and official nationalisms. The institutional tools of official nationalism (maps, museums, censuses, educational programs) proved effective aids in consolidating and projecting power and disseminating nationalist ideology once the revolutionary movements took control. Official nationalism (what Anderson calls “state Machiavellism”) enters the leadership styles of the post-revolutionary regimes in a subtle and paradoxical manner. This often takes the form of retroactively nationalizing the ancient, pre-colonial, dynastic realms whose historical remains are still visibly evident in the post-colonial state: “The more the ancient dynastic state is naturalized, the more its antique finery can be wrapped around revolutionary shoulders” (160). The metaphor aptly conveys the hybrid nature of post-revolutionary (and postcolonial) nationalisms and the complexity of their cultural significations.
Postcolonial critics, such as Partha Chatterjee, have contended that Anderson’s analysis of postcolonial nationalism remains overly Eurocentric in that it sees these nationalisms as fundamentally derivative and dependent on Western models. Anderson assumes the conditions that prevailed in Europe and the Americas—the explosive expansion of print-capitalism, the perception of time as empty and homogenous—are universal conditions for imagining the possibility of the nation. This assumption disregards other modes of imagining community that may be characteristic of non-European cultures and that may influence their political organization.
