Imagined Communities: Reflections On The Origin And Spread Of Nationalism

“Theorists of nationalism have often been perplexed, not to say irritated, by these three paradoxes: 1) the objective modernity of nations to the historian’s eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists. 2) The formal universality of nationality as a socio-cultural concept—in the modern world everyone can, should, will ‘have’ a nationality, as he or she ‘has’ a gender—vs. the irremediable particularity of its concrete manifestations, such that, by definition, ‘Greek’ nationality is sui generis. 3) The ‘political’ power of nationalisms vs. their philosophical poverty and even incoherence.”

Nationalism involves several significant contradictions, which have made it difficult to define and theorize. While the modern “nation-state” is a relatively recent historical development, nationalists perceive their nationality as ancient. Moreover, everyone has a national identity; thus, the idea of nationality is ubiquitous across the globe. However, each nationality is thought to be unique and to possess its own exclusive characteristics. Finally, nationalism as an idea and political reality has substantial power, yet what actually constitutes one’s nationality is murky and incoherent. Anderson believes that these paradoxes have caused academics to treat nationalism, somewhat contemptuously, as an “empty” concept and an unhealthy political reality.

“I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” 

Anderson stresses the imaginary character of the political community that constitutes a nation. One feels a shared identity with other members of the same nation, though one will never know or meet more than an infinitesimal fraction of them. This doesn’t mean that the sense of community one feels isn’t genuine; rather, all communities are ‘imagined,’ i.e., mentally- and socially-constructed, and they may be imagined in a variety of ways. 

“[The nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.” 

The nation is a geographically-limited, imagined community in which all members feel they share a stake and a fraternal bond. National identity tends to conceal the social hierarchy (and injustice) present in a given nation; it fosters an imaginary sense of egalitarianism among fellow citizens regardless of their economic class. Cutting through the boundaries of gender, race, and social class, nationality is a powerful unifying force among a population.

“No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers […] Yet void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings.” 

As a nationalistic symbol of sacrifice for one’s country, the tomb of the Unknown Soldier underscores the relationship between nationalism, death, and religious feeling. The emotional and ideological power of such monuments is also linked with the anonymity of their interred remains. The absence of knowledge about the personal identity of the buried soldier opens a space for imagination and idealization, transforming the chance death of a forgotten individual into an enduring emblem of national identity and destiny.

“[I]n Western Europe the eighteenth century marks not only the dawn of the age of nationalism but the dusk of religious modes of thought […] With the ebbing of religious belief, the suffering which belief in part composed did not disappear […] What then was required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, of contingency into meaning. As we shall see, few things were (are) better suited to this end than an idea of nation. If nation-states are widely conceded to be ‘new’ and ‘historical,’ the nations to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past, and […] glide into a limitless future.” 

Anderson links the emergence of nationalism with the decline of religion as a unifying political force in Europe. Nationalism serves ideological needs that were (and still are) addressed by religion. It provides a reassuring sense of continuity in the face of human mortality, and a sense of meaning in the face of chance and unpredictability. The mystique of the nation consists in its being perceived by the nationalists as something ancient, and even eternal, in a sense, an ideal with which one identifies.

“What I am proposing is that nationalism has to be understood by aligning it, not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with the large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which—as well as against which—it came into being.” 

Our understanding of nationalism has been hampered by treating it as merely one political ideology among many others. Anderson argues that nationalism needs to be seen from a wider perspective, as a complex response to the evolution and decline of large cultural systems. Rather than contrasting it with Marxism or liberalism, for instance, nationalism is more analogous to cultural entities like religion or kinship. Anderson sees the development of nationalism as directly tied to the decline of global religious communities (e.g., Christendom) and the dynastic realm in politics.

“All the great classical communities conceived of themselves as cosmically central, through the medium of a sacred language linked to a superterrestrial order of power […] Yet if the sacred silent languages were the media through which the great global communities of the past were imagined, the reality of such apparitions depended on an idea largely foreign to the contemporary Western mind: the non-arbitrariness of the sign.” 

Anderson distinguishes the modern nation from the large-scale “religious communities” of the ancient and medieval worlds that were united by a global faith, e.g., the Islamic realm (the “Ummah”) or Christendom. These communities envisioned themselves as divinely-ordained hierarchies, connected to the Deity though a monarch. The human and divine worlds were mediated by a sacred language (church Latin or classical Arabic), in which the sacred texts of the community were written. Moreover, the sacred language was believed to have a privileged relationship to reality; it was a “truth-language” that actually embodied the essential nature of the realities it described, not merely a conventional system of signs used by a community of speakers.

Social relations were imagined along a vertical axis in the ancient and medieval worlds. The individual was connected vertically to God’s representatives on earth and the divine realm. This contrasts sharply with the way the modern nation is imagined as a horizontal community of fellow citizens, linked by a vernacular language. If language is not a true reflection of nature but a conventional arrangement for communication between speakers, no language has a privileged relation to nature. All languages are thus equally distant from the world they describe, and this linguistic parity reflects the parity of modern nations.

“Kingship organizes everything around a high centre. Its legitimacy derives from divinity, not from populations, who, after all, are subjects, not citizens. In the modern conception, state sovereignty is fully, flatly, and evenly operative over each square centimeter of a legally demarcated territory.” 

In organization and structure, absolute monarchy differs from the nation-state in many fundamental ways. Power and legitimacy in kingship descends from on high; in the nation, it is invested (if only nominally) in ‘the people.’ This difference extends to how sovereignty itself is imagined and exercised under the two forms of political organization. 

“[T]he very possibility of imagining the nation only arose historically when, and where, three fundamental cultural conceptions, all of great antiquity, lost their axiomatic grip on men’s minds. The first of these was the idea that a particular script-language offered privileged access to ontological truth […] It was this idea that called into being the great transcontinental sodalities of Christendom, the Islamic Ummah, and the rest. Second was the belief that society was naturally organized around and under high centres—monarchs who […] ruled by some form of cosmological (divine) dispensation […] Third was a conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable, the origins of the world and of men essentially identical.” 

Anderson identifies three historical shifts that paved the way for the emergence of the nation, politically and imaginatively. First, the idea of nationalism is rooted in the rising importance of vernacular languages, rather than a universal and sacred language like Latin or classical Arabic, which transcend national boundaries. Moreover, citizens in modern nations consider themselves in a horizontal, essentially fraternal, relationship with their fellow countrymen, at least as regards their shared nationality. The old idea of the “divine right of kings”—and the social hierarchy connected with it—cuts across this fraternal sense of community. Finally, men’s ideas of time and history needed to change to enable the origin of the modern nation and nationalistic feeling. History and time became secularized. Time was ‘emptied’ of its theological structure, and history became a chronology in which events occurred as a result of natural, not divine, causes.

“[T]he convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation.” 

The broad historical shifts identified in the previous quotation made it possible to begin to imagine the national community. But it was the rapid expansion in Europe of the print market for vernacular languages, beginning in the 16th century, which made that possibility a reality. The publishing market standardized national “print-languages,” creating large communities of readers who consumed newspapers and other publications. This unified populations that spoke a variety of dialects under a single, “national” language that could be read and understood by all literate members of the community.

“Yet it is obvious that while today almost all modern self-conceived nations—and also nation-states—have ‘national print-languages,’ many of them have these languages in common, and in others only a tiny fraction of the population ‘uses’ the national language in conversation or on paper.” 

While a national language is an important element in creating a national community, it is not essential that this language is spoken by the majority of its inhabitants. Anderson cites the former colonial states in Africa as an example of nations in which the vast majority of the population does not speak the national language (which is often the language of the colonial power).

“Why did the Spanish-American Empire, which had existed calmly for almost three centuries, quite suddenly fragment into eighteen separate states? […] The beginnings of an answer lie in the striking fact that ‘each of the new South American republics had been an administrative unit from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.’ In this respect they foreshadowed the new states of Africa and parts of Asia in the mid twentieth century, and form a sharp contrast to the new European states of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” 

Anderson argues that geographical vastness of the Spanish-American colonies, the difficulty of communication and commerce between them, and the economic and administrative policies of Madrid prevented the unification of these territories in a single Spanish-American nation. Spanish creoles, born in the new world but culturally and linguistically Spanish, were considered inferior by peninsular Spaniards, particularly if they interbred with the native population. Racism, economic exploitation, and the provincialism of the colonials ultimately resulted in a national attachment to the administrative unit of the Spanish empire in which they lived.

“What I am proposing is that neither economic interest, Liberalism, nor Enlightenment could, or did, create in themselves the kind, or shape, of imagined community […] none provided the framework of a new consciousness—the scarcely-seen periphery of its vision—as opposed to the centre-field objects of its admiration or disgust. In accomplishing this specific task, pilgrim creole functionaries and provincial creole printmen played the decisive historic role.” 

To understand the ways new nations were imaginatively shaped in the western hemisphere we need to examine how the American and Spanish colonies were specifically administered and grasp the fundamental role of printers/publishers in the colonial territories. The spirit of liberalism and progressivism of the Enlightenment provided an intellectual breeding ground for envisioning national independence, but it was specific economic and political practices that stamped the character of each national independence movement.

“If we consider the character of these newer [European] nationalisms which, between 1820 and 1920, changed the face of the Old World, two striking features mark them off from their ancestors. First, in almost all of them ‘national print-languages’ were of central ideological and political importance, whereas Spanish and English were never issues in the revolutionary Americas. Second, all were able to work from visible models provided by their distant, and after the convulsions of the French Revolution, not so distant predecessors.”

The great surge of nationalist movements in Europe began to crest just as the period of revolutionary nation-making in the Americas was winding down, having redrawn the map of the New World. Anderson identifies two significant differences between the American and European nationalisms. First, in the Americas, language was not a point of contention between the colonial powers and the colonies. Political borders coincided with linguistic borders (English in North America, Spanish and Portuguese in South America), and thus nationalist movements weren’t based on asserting linguistic independence.

In Europe, by contrast, linguistic nationalism was the order of the day in the 19th and early-20th centuries. The European dynastic empires were (in varying degrees) polyglot, incorporating many ethnicities and languages. The birth of the Hungarian, Romanian, Greek, Czech, and other national movements were directly tied to restoring the primacy and establishing the prestige of national vernacular languages. Linguistic nationalism, strengthened by scholarly study of the vernacular within the universities and creative employment of it by writers, fertilized the soil for political nationalism.

Second, the movements of national liberation in the Americas originated without paradigmatic models. In Europe, by contrast, where the rising tide of nationalism largely followed that in the New World by a few decades, the idea of a “nation” was something to be consciously aspired to.

“[I]n world-historical terms bourgeoisies were the first classes to achieve solidarities on an essentially imagined basis. But in a nineteenth-century Europe in which Latin had been defeated by vernacular print-capitalism for something like two centuries, these solidarities had an outermost stretch limited by vernacular legibilities.” 

The nobility of the dynastic regimes were connected to each other by kinship and alliances. Comprised of a small number of people, their solidarity as a class was cemented through personal relationships, marital alliances, and inheritance. The European bourgeoisie, by contrast, was diffuse and largely anonymous to each other. Their consciousness as a class was based not on personal connections or kinship, but on literacy, as members of a large linguistic community that read the same national print-language. Through a shared print-language, they were able to visualize the existence of thousands of others like themselves.

Anderson claims that these national bourgeoisies were the first socioeconomic classes whose sense of solidarity was largely based on imagination. While an illiterate nobility could still function as a nobility, Anderson contends, the bourgeoisie’s cohesion as a class was only made possible through literacy and a national print-language.

“In effect, by the second decade of the nineteenth century, if not earlier, a ‘model’ of ‘the’ independent national state was available for pirating […] But precisely because it was by then a known model, it imposed certain ‘standards’ from which too-marked deviations were impermissible.” 

Anderson argues that the French Revolution and the independence movements in the Americas provided a model for the nationalist struggles in Europe that succeeded them. This model brought a set of expectations about what a nation should be. Republican institutions, the ideas of a common citizenship and that power is vested in the people, along with the abolition of serfdom and slavery, formed a blueprint for the new nationalist movements. As the ideology of nationalism evolved, this resulted in European nationalisms being more populist and progressive in character than those that preceded them in the New World.

“The lexicographic revolution in Europe […] created, and gradually spread, the conviction that languages (in Europe at least) were, so to speak, the personal property of quite specific groups—their daily speakers and readers—and moreover that these groups, imagined as communities, were entitled to their autonomous place in a fraternity of equals.” 

In this quotation, Anderson describes the development of linguistic nationalism in Europe during the 19thcentury. Sharing a common language, and united by the medium of their print-languages, the speakers of German, Czech, Polish and other vernaculars felt a sense of national identity that they increasingly believed should be realized politically in their own nation-state. The large dynastic monarchies of Europe, such as the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, were polyglot, however, comprised of many ethnic groups speaking a diversity of languages. This created difficulties when the imperial monarch adopted a vernacular language as the administrative language of state business. Heads of state aimed to unify and universalize their realms. Elevating a vernacular language, such as German, as a language of administration inevitably privileged its native speakers while disaffecting speakers of other languages within the state.

“The new states of the post-World War II period have their own character, which nonetheless is incomprehensible except in terms of the succession of models we have been considering […] [A] very large number of these (mainly non-European) nations came to have European languages-of-state […] they took from linguistic European nationalism its ardent populism, and from official nationalism its Russifying policy-orientation.” 

Many new nation-states were once European colonies in Africa and Asia that won independence in the years after World War II. Their colonial heritage is the reason why these nations have often retained the language of the colonizing power, such as French or English, as their administrative, and, occasionally, nationalprint language. Anderson argues that these nations typically exhibit a complex, multi-faceted nationalism owing to their colonial heritage and recent origin. They combine a genuine, popular nationalism with a systematic official nationalism that instills the national ideology through mass media, education, and other means. This “last wave” of nations originated at a time when the nation-state had become the only legitimate international norm, and they construct their ideas of national identity and nation-building from the wide array of historical models that preceded them.

“As bilingual […] early-twentieth-century intelligentsias, they had access, inside the classroom and outside, to models of nation, nation-ness, and nationalism distilled from the turbulent, chaotic experiences of more than a century of American and European history […] Finally, as with increasing speed capitalism transformed the means of physical and intellectual communication, the intelligentsia found ways to bypass print in propagating the imagined community […].” 

The “colonial nationalism” that resulted in new nation-states in Africa and Asia in the second half of the 20thcentury was led by educated groups of bilingual natives. These young intellectuals were schooled in colonial capitals, or occasionally in the seats of empire, such as London and Paris. Barred from higher positions in European governmental and corporate structures, they gradually coalesced into like-minded associations that imagined a national community for their homelands. These groups utilized modern forms of media—radio, television, etc.—as well as print to promote a sense of national identity and also disseminate nationalist ideology.

“In an age when it is so common for progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals […] to insist on the near-pathological character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred of the Other, and its affinities with racism, it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love. The cultural products of nationalism—poetry, prose fiction, music, plastic arts—show this love very clearly in thousands of different forms and styles.”

Anderson argues that nationalism is not inherently racist or xenophobic. Rather, nationalism expresses a sense of communal participation that feels ‘natural’ and selfless, because one’s birth nationality is not a conscious choice. Nations offer immigrants the opportunity to be naturalized as citizens, extending national identity to them. Moreover, expressions of nationalist feeling in national anthems, pledges of allegiance, etc. rarely contain any overt elements of hatred of the nation’s enemies.

“The fact of the matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time […] outside history.” 

Racism is grounded in the ideology of aristocratic class distinctions, not in the ideology of nationhood. The aristocratic ideas of ‘blue blood,’ ‘breeding,’ and the threat of racial contamination by an inferior group lie at the roots of racism. These prerogatives of the aristocracy were transported to the colonial empires, where they were transformed into the idea of European racial superiority over the colonized peoples.

“Interlinked with one another, then, the census, the map and the museum illuminate the late colonial state’s style of thinking about its domain.” 

In Chapter Ten, Anderson focuses on three institutions—the census, map, and museum—as instruments of colonial power that facilitate its administration of subject territories and help legitimize its claim to its possessions. All are fundamentally political and harbor ideological intents. They work to classify, in a totalizing manner, the people, geography, and historical ancestry of the subject nation.

“For this sense of parallelism or simultaneity […] to have vast political consequences, it was necessary that the distance between the parallel groups be large, and that the newer of them be substantial in size and permanently settled, as well as firmly subordinated to the older. These conditions were met in the Americas as they had never been before.” 

Anderson argues that the English and Spanish colonies in the Americas came to see themselves as parallel communities to their imperial motherlands. Their nationalist movements did not want to relocate the seats of European empire to the new world, but to achieve independence on parity with the mother countries. This became politically possible because of the sheer size of the colonies and their distance from the European metropoles, resulting in the establishment of the first nation-states.