The origins and uses of nationalism
Review essay of Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson
Nationalism emerged as a decisive political force in the 19th century, eventually leading to the formation of hundreds of nation-states. It created a new kind of us-them dynamic: people outside of “membership” or the border were excluded. On the inside, it was a project of power consolidation, myth-making, and the opening of career avenues to self-appointed members. Also included were racism, scapegoating, and ethnolinguistic chauvinism. Why did it emerge at the time it did? What are its elements and toolbox? Where does it lead? These are the questions that Anderson attempts to answer in this book, which many tout as a classic.
Anderson defines the “nation” as an imagined political community, both limited (within finite boundaries) and sovereign (wielding exclusive powers). Larger than family or tribe, the nation would become an exclusive community that was “a deep, horizontal comradeship” for which many were “willing to die”. He sees it as a fictive construct that was self-consciously conceived and then coopted and manipulated from the top, a mix of populism and politics. The context that enabled this, he believes, included economic development (i.e., early capitalism), a confluence of scientific and social discoveries, and rapid communications. Its region of origin was Western Europe.
The development of nationalism, he informs us, became possible only when 3 ancient cultural constants lost their ascendency. They were: 1) a particular script-language that offered privileged access to power/knowledge (Latin) to religious overseers; 2) societies (or empires) that were organized into rigid hierarchies with royalty at the apex, spanning multi-ethnolinguistic groups; 3) man was synonymous with the origin of the world, even cosmology itself; in practical terms, this meant that group identities were limited to family or tribe, which operated distantly from the centers of power, often as autarkies or relatively independent feudal fiefdoms. These three interlinked “certainties” formed the basis of old-world view.
According to Anderson, the mass development of print-as-commodity (by moveable type) is key to understanding the context in which nationalism developed. Humanists cultivated a new appreciation of Ciceronian Latin that was far more sophisticated than medieval Latin, hence harder to read and less appealing to emerging capitalists and functionaries. For its part, the Reformation saw an explosion in vernacular writing, sparked by Luther’s pamphlets and Bible translation, which proved far more accessible than Ciceronian Latin and easier to learn. Vernaculars were also used increasingly for administrative purposes in the service of absolutist centralization, as practiced by the ambitious kings. The choice of a particular vernacular language, Anderson informs us, was gradual, unself-conscious, and pragmatic, mostly a convenience to deal with local populations as they were being integrated into absolutist states. The vernaculars gave rise to a popular reading public in books and newspapers, which capitalist printers recognized were lucrative new markets. This led to the explosive growth of popular presses.
Anderson then argues that vernacular print capitalism laid basis of a nationalist consciousness. First, it created unified fields of communication that the elite understood they could use, below Ciceronian Latin but above local dialects that were often incomprehensible even a short distance away. It also offered a new venue for culture, including ethnic music, that served to unify peoples into larger group identities. Second, it provided a fixity to language, a base from which to forge community on a national scale. Among other things, it enabled storytellers and rabble rousers to construct images of antiquity and tradition that were out of the hands of monastic scribes; this freed “history” from Christian strictures, bringing ethnolinguistic groups into their own light as a supposedly independent phenomenon. Third, when employed administratively, it created languages of power, disadvantaging those who didn’t speak or write them.
These fixed languages became an integral part of the apparatus of absolutism, which involved the centralized control of larger territories than had been possible under feudal fragmentation. This enabled kings to deploy interchangeable (or replaceable) officials to carry out duties; these bureaucrats for the most part were loyal and beholden to central authorities. This eliminated the dependence of kings on lower feudal lords, whose loyalties to the state were often contingent and defined by their own self-interest. As the economy and society integrated larger swaths of the population into the state, the barrier of a Latin education was overcome by bringing vernaculars into commerce, administration, science, press, and literature.
Later, Anderson writes, Enlightenment ideals inspired a new, populist nationalism, generating political pressures on dynasts – everyone was supposed to be entitled to “membership”, and perhaps even representation, in society, essentially as co-equals in a kind of fraternity; excluded ethnolinguistic groups within polyglot empires began to demand the right to participate in the emerging polities. Dynasts quickly began to promote national identification as a way to shore up their legitimacy. This resulted in “official nationalism”, which developed as a way to harness popular energies via membership as well as in response to popular ethnolinguistic movements, whose own sense of nationalism was evolving.
According to Anderson, the establishment of official nationalism was a reactionary process, an attempt to obscure the discrepancy between the nation and its dynasty. Kings saw it as a means to consolidate their power and position, rendering the chosen population – its members – to resist outsiders, in effect excluding certain internal groups, foreigners, indeed the other. It is from this time that antisemitism, racism, and ethnolinguistic discrimination become political issues.
Official nationalism also offered opportunities to participating citizens to enter a new class of professionals, given the need for teachers, functionaries, merchants, and large-scale planters, particularly in the colonized territories of empires. This new class arose because neither native populations nor traditional elites could supply sufficient personnel for the purposes of building absolutist regimes and empires. Goals included the unprecedented mobilization of national resources and the opening of administration to talent. For example, in the Meiji restoration, the Samurai (Japanese aristocrats) were displaced from their traditional control of state operations while a modern military establishment was created. This led to violent rebellion that was brutally repressed.
Moreover, the effort to instill official nationalism created a system that was exportable in theory, applicable anywhere, especially in colonies. As Anderson notes, this policy spectacularly backfired. Colonized native elites, recruited to serve the métropole, received education and access to western culture and local career positions. However, they remained lower in the hierarchy and given fewer economic resources, that is, condemned to inferiority. Having absorbed ideas about the métropole’s nationalism, history, and institutions, these elites – an intelligentsia that colonizers created – developed into nationalists in its own right. Furthermore, with capitalism and their own print media, the control of colonizers further loosened.
Colonial subjects came to see themselves as “nationals”, even when little evidence existed that they were ever part of a genuine community or even had common origins. For example, though the Philippines and Indonesia represented vast areas of ethnolinguistic similarity yet with little organization beyond local elites, a new generation of leaders forged nationalistic sentiments in a few decades. This template would include the experience of creole revolutions, those fomented by whites in the Americas, as well as excluded ethnolinguistic groups within the contiguous borders of empires, such as Austria-Hungary.
A further development in colonies and subject territories was the “scientific” definition of borders and group identities. This included the census, mapping, and museum (to display “shared” archaeological origins); they were interlinked, creating a space for purposes of control in the late colonial period. At any time, colonists were empowered to say what belonged to whom and what didn’t, all within clear boundaries, and countable in an apparently scientific way. Paradoxically if unsurprisingly, this information benefitted the local intelligentsia, which used it for their own nationalistic purpose, as if history justified their newly forged “national consciousness”.
In a related development, racism naturally sprang from the effort to preserve a sense of innate, “natural” superiority, in particular over non-white colonial subjects or slaves. Colonies had provided opportunities for lesser aristocrats and poorer bourgeois from the métropole to live pseudo-aristocratic lifestyles, demanding solidarity between members of the white ruling class. One way to maintain their sense of superiority was race: the other became unavoidably inferior by pseudo-scientific definition. Unfortunately, this was a very poorly developed chapter, covering it all in 15 pages. I think Anderson bit off more than he could chew.
Creole revolutionaries were not threatened with extermination. According to Anderson, it was a kind of war between brothers, in stark contrast to the treatment meted to non-white native populations. They could imagine themselves as developing parallel to the métropole or place of origin, a part of them yet with a separate, self-generated identity that was somehow earned. The end result was a rearrangement of power elites in a new nation, leaving the society’s organization relatively intact. This was certainly the case with the Founding Fathers of North America – it is deliciously perverse, at least to me, to think of ourselves as creole.
Finally, there was a formulation and promotion of a new type of national narrative, a story that was supposed to lend meaning to every member on the inside of the boundary. The pioneer of this was Michelet, in his history of the French Revolution’s forgotten dead – he informs us about the “reasons” for which they gave their lives, which the dead may not even have known as they died. It was like a rediscovery of something “deep down” that was always known, something that makes us “us”, forging an imaginary unity so that we might move ahead as a nation. Of course, Anderson notes, any new consciousness required the destruction of the previous consciousness, which had been predominantly local, faith-based, and devoted to the monarch.
Nationalist movements would culminate in the demand for self-determination and the establishment of their own nation-states: a government that controlled membership, administrative control, and the championing of a particular vernacular and narrative. By the end of World War II, nation-states had become the norm as units in international relations, eclipsing many of the older empires that were breaking under these pressures. From European nationalism, nationalist movements – whether creole or ethnolinguistic natives – had learned to harness its populism and official nationalism, combining popular enthusiasm and their own political/ideological aims.
Anderson’s Language can rise to the poetic, but most often it is clunky, stale, and abstruse in only the way academia seems to produce. “One central similarity,” he writes, “strikes the eye: the isomorphism between each nationalism’s territorial stretch and that of the previous imperial administrative unit.” Perhaps worse, he often makes difficult leaps in logic. Eventually, I could get what he was saying, but it took real (and I would say, unnecessary) effort. It is worth it to persevere, I got more on second reading, but there are too many passages like this: “So was the novel, with its spectacular possibilities for the representation of simultaneous actions in homogenous empty time.”
Given the praise that this book received in both academic and journalistic circles, I was surprised at how mediocre a reading experience it was. Much of it is a frustrating slog. Perhaps Anderson originated the ideas and they are now so mainstream that they seem banal – I perceived very little that was new in them. That being said, it offers a strong synthesis of interesting concepts about the origins and uses of nationalism. There were also many proofs with interesting details in themselves, such as the revolutionary unification of Indonesia as a nation or why Spanish South America fragmented into many nations. The problem is that, to satisfy me with more detail, the book would have to expand to about 3 times its length. I guess that means I wanted a different kind of book, one of more substance and historical corroboration to support the ideas.
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