Thumbnail: Bottle of Rum and Newspaper, Juan Gris, 1914.
Fortuitously, I was reading this book as a clip of Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari was circulating. In the clip, taken from a TED talk, Harari claims that nations are “just stories”. Among other strange errors (at one point, for example, he juxtaposes ‘real’ mountains to ‘fictional’ nations - as if ‘a mountain’ does not itself refer to an abstraction), this view of nations and nationalism is a common, but mistaken, reading of the literature; and in particular, of its most important figure: Benedict Anderson.
This mistake is understandable. Anderson’s Imagined Communities makes a point of refuting primordialist nationalism - the idea that national groups have an essential, even timeless, quality about them. As with Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition, even the title of Anderson’s book alludes to accusations of fictionality. But to think this leads to the claim that nations are fictions is a grave misjudgement. In a critique of Ernest Gellner, who - albeit in a less farcical way - made the same point as Harari, Anderson writes that “all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact… are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined”. One should not “assimilate invention to fabrication and falsity, rather than to imagining and creation”, he adds. If nations are fictional, then so too is society itself, and most other social formations. The concept becomes vacant of all meaning. So then, what does it mean to describe nations as ‘imagined communities’?
To start, Anderson would have us consider what makes nations - as opposed to other social formations - so special. With a characteristically understated wit, he asks the reader to imagine the absurdity of “a Tomb of the Unknown Marxist or a Cenotaph for fallen Liberals”. The point being, of course, that most every nation is scattered with such monuments; for Australians, Argentinians, and so forth. The emotional - or even spiritual - heft of the nation is unmatched; not by ideology, nor religion, nor gender. I am reminded of Orwell’s quip in England Your England: “Christianity and International Socialism are as weak as straw in comparison with [nationalism]”. The irony being, of course, that this strength is matched only by the moral and intellectual inferiority of the latter to the former. In fact, such a juxtaposition matters: like Orwell, contemplating the pilots in the bombers flying above him, Anderson was prompted to write Imagined Communities by the wars between Vietnam, Cambodia, and China in the late seventies; when, for the first time, and with “the most perfunctory attempts” at justification, ostensibly Marxist states went for each other’s throats.
The mystery of nationalism is that, despite this potency, it is a rather new component of our cultural ecosystem. Throughout most of history, the ‘national community’ was not a thing anyone belonged to. Nobody was French, Columbian or Indonesian, in the sense that they thought of themselves as ‘sharing’ in an identity from Calais to Nice, or from Sumatra to Sulawesi. Anderson dates the birth of a “national consciousness” not to nineteenth century Europe - as many others have - but to the “creole states” of late eighteenth century South America. There, local elites - chafing under rule by the metropole, while simultaneously living in fear of the oppressed masses beneath them - began, Anderson argues, to conceive of an identity as Spanish-speakers who were not Spanish, but something else. Still, such sentiments held in common may make a class, or a community, but not a ‘conscious’ one. What separated the creole administrators of Mexico City to those of Caracas, or Buenos Aires?
This is where Anderson’s theory takes a materialist-literary turn. The newspaper, he argues, was the conduit through which these communities were imagined as nations. “Print capitalism” led to the diffusion of provincial newspapers across Latin America. An official from Mexico City would read his local; a paper only a person from Mexico City would read. He became immersed in the news relevant to him - the coming and going of ships, prices, marriages - and thus became part of an imagined community of all for whom this news “belonged”. Print capitalism, however, was inextricable from “the general level of development of capitalism and technology”; which, according to Anderson, is why no “Spanish-America-wide” nationalism every appeared. The local backwardness of Spanish capitalism confounded its geographic enormity. The would-be United States; which, having no such segmentation - for the area it covered at this time was but a fraction of the size of Venezuela - was so interconnected that a ‘North American’ nation did not appear until later. This meant that westwards expansion was possible from within the conceptual domain of the ‘United States’; in a way that, if the US invaded Mexico now, it would not be. There is a wider point here - that “the world historical era in which each nationalism is born probably has a significant impact on its scope”. Despite writing mostly on culture and language, Anderson does not write as an idealist: from the beginning until the end of his narrative, uneven and combined capitalist development both drives and constrains, simultaneously, the formation of national consciousness.
It is one thing to claim this ‘colonial/creole/information technology’ nexus played a role in the emergence of nationalism. It is another to argue, as Anderson does, that the nation was not a creation of “economic interest, liberalism, nor Enlightenment”, but of “pilgrim creole functionaries and provincial creole printmen”. Anderson really does provincialise Europe; and in a way that, I think, can only be applauded. But how did this child of creole printmen come to conquer first Europe, and then the world?
Piracy is Anderson’s answer. Once the national model had been set in Latin America - linguistic unity, popular sovereignty, flags, and citizens - it was imitated by emerging bourgeoisies in nineteenth century Europe. The aristocracy had been supra-national: writing in Latin, not vernacular; tied to dynasty, not peoples; and ruling over subjects, not on behalf of them. Colonial creoles invented the nation to assert themselves with-or-against against Madrid. Bourgeois Europeans took this idea and used it to make sense of their own political struggle against the ancien régime. Further, if the “locus of sovereignty had to be the collectivity of [vernacular] speakers and readers”; then mass education, civil rights, and representative politics needed to follow. Nationalism took on populist elements in Europe because it was a pirated version of a Latin American idea - one in need of retrofitting for the European context.
This story - of creation and initial transference - is, I think, the most important told in Imagined Communities. Anderson goes on to trace the last movements in the history of the nation: first the “offical nationalism” of the age of imperialism, and then the “half-concealed transformation” of colonial-states into nation-states. To briefly summarise: the former stage saw the co-opting of national ideas by pre-national dynasties; which, while it enabled their survival in the short-run, ultimately condemned them; as “the short, tight skin of the nation… [could not be] stretched over the gigantic body of the empire”. The latter represented the final, globe-encompassing explosion of nations: as the national model - passed down, “step by step”, from Latin America - became the modus operandi of decolonisation. This last chapter draws out an idiosyncratic part of Anderson’s theory: that nationalism, rather than developing in a stadial fashion, has a “profoundly modular character.. draw[ing] on more than a century and a half of human experience and three earlier models”. While Anderson seems commitedly materialist - the historic motors he identifies are always the same: capitalism and print-capitalism - his literary sensibilities give a pluralist, cumulative, character to the history he writes. He sees twentieth century “nationalist leaders” as consciously absorbing the influence of generations of nationalism past: the citizenry’s of the Americas, the vernacularising populism of Europe, and the militarism of ‘official nationalism’. Newer variants, such as the linguistically fractured nations of Mozambique and Switzerland, also alter the national recipe. This is all possible because the nation has no essential features, only fulcrums of “particular solidarities”; which, in turn, facilitate collective imagining of communities. Language, and print language in particular, is simply a particularly strong vector of “nation-ness”.
There are, of course, many criticisms I could make of Imagined Communities. The mode of argumentation is essentially literary: changes in language, and especially in written language, loom large in the text. This is not intrinsically problematic; however, I was left feeling that crucial claims were somewhat under-supported: in particular, the all-important “piracy” of nationalist ideas from the Americas, by Europe, is not directly evidenced. Anderson instead argues from analogy, citing how the French Revolution became a “thing”, a “blueprint”, and thus an inspiration, through text, after the event. More could have been done to draw out the lines of inspiration, direct or indirect. The same is true, to varying extents, of other important arguments: the manner by which official nationalism filtered down into the periphery during the twentieth century, or the ways postcolonial nationalism borrowed from earlier experiences. Nonetheless, I feel about Imagined Communities similar to how I felt about Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests: both are so elegant, concise and genuinely insightful that evidentiary issues can perhaps be overlooked. Most importantly, both make valuable correctives: while Hirschman reveals considering ‘interest’ as either an eternally recognised virtue or vice is mistaken, Anderson remedies both simple primordialism and vulgar fiction-speak. His book makes pronouncements like those of Harari appear little more than garbled imitations.