Imagined Communities: Reflections On The Origin And Spread Of Nationalism

Anderson begins by emphasizing the remarkable political durability and emotional appeal of the idea of the nation. Recent conflicts among Marxist regimes like the People’s Republic of China and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam underscore the resilience of nationalism and the role of the nation in forming the individual and social identity. In the late 20th century, nationalism and the nation-state show no signs of decline. Despite oft-repeated claims that the era of nation-states is coming to an end, Anderson observes that “nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time” (3).

While immensely influential, the ideas of nation, nationality, and nationalism have been difficult for historians and political scientists to clearly define and explain. The Marxist goal of a classless society, for instance, envisions an international social organization that supersedes the parochialism of competing nationalisms. However, Marx largely avoided addressing the question of nationalism and failed to explain the political endurance of the nation-state. Marxist critique has been largely silent regarding what it tacitly considers the anomaly of nationalism. Anderson’s aim in Imagined Communities is to offer an interpretation of nationalism and nationality as cultural artefacts that arose towards the end of the 18th century from a convergence of specific historical forces. Once the modern ideas of the nation and of nationality emerged in Europe and the Americas, they were transported to diverse societies and geographical locations across the globe.

To understand the idea of the nation, we must confront three paradoxes: 1) historically speaking, nation-states are a modern political development, yet the nation is perceived as ancient by nationalists; 2) nationality is a universal socio-cultural concept found throughout the world, yet each nationality is thought of as utterly unique; and 3) nationalisms are politically powerful, yet philosophically incoherent. Part of the difficulty in previous attempts to explain nationalism is that theorists have considered it a political ideology like liberalism, or fascism, rather than a cultural system, like religion.

Anderson defines the nation as “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (6). Four elements comprise this definition: the imaginary character of the nation, its geo-political limitation, its sovereignty within those limits, and its function as a community. The nation is an imaginary construct because no citizen will ever know, or even become aware of, more than a small percentage of fellow countrymen, yet all feel members of a shared community. The sense of belonging to a community as large as a nation thus has an imaginative basis. In addition, the nation is limited, because even the largest is not all-encompassing, as beyond its borders lie other nations. Each nation considers itself (or aspires to be) free, and thus considers itself sovereign. Finally, the nation is imagined as a community, a fraternity of equal members, regardless of the actual social injustice and exploitation that may exist within it. Anderson notes that it is this powerful sense of community that has made it possible for millions of people to sacrifice their lives for their nation.

The modern nation arises in the eighteenth-century, at a time when institutional religion was weakening as a political force in Europe. Concurrently, dynastic monarchies were facing the threat of liberal reform and the growing economic and political power of the bourgeoisie. Nationalism, Anderson contends, must be understood as a response to these two great cultural shifts.

In Chapter Two, Anderson explores the cultural roots of nationalism. The modern nation and our idea of national identity are products of the secular rationalism of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment philosophers sought to overcome the prejudices, misguided beliefs, and social injustice promulgated by church doctrine. However, the growth of rationalism failed to address the deepest spiritual needs and crises of men and women. As the coherence of the Christian religious system and worldview declined, existential feelings about death and immortality were gradually associated with the idea of nationalism.

This is seen most strikingly in monuments embodying sacred duty to the nation, such as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Anonymous and empty of identifiable remains, such tombs are nevertheless “saturated with ghostly national imaginings” (9). These monuments demonstrate the association of nationalism with death, immortality, and the desire for meaning. Their cultural significance lies in the fact that they embody a sense of continuity and national destiny that symbolically transcends the unpredictability of life and the finality of death.

Nationalism became a conduit for religious imaginings partly as a result of the decline of Christendom and the geopolitical realm of Islam (the “Ummah”) as vast territories united by religion. These religious communities were imagined, spatially and temporally, very differently from the modern nation. Anderson observes: “All the great classical communities conceived of themselves as cosmically central, through the medium of a sacred language linked to a super terrestrial order of power” (13). The sacred texts written in those languages, such as the Qur’an and the Latin Bible, unified communities composed of many different ethnicities under a divinely-ordained hierarchy reaching down from a supreme Being. These communities were characterized by their hierarchical and concentric organization (and imagination) of social space, as opposed to the horizontal and boundary-oriented conception of space in the modern nation. Moreover, the sacred languages of classical Arabic and church Latin were believed to truly embody reality, not merely represent it through a conventional system of arbitrarily-chosen signs. Since such languages had a privileged, exclusive relationship with ‘the truth,’ the religious communities sought to convert and assimilate outsiders to their universal faith.

The stability of the religiously-imagined community of Christendom began to decline after the late Middle Ages. Anderson identifies two main reasons for this decay: the effect of explorations of the non-European world, and the gradual lessening importance of Latin. The encounter with distant cultures expanded the cultural horizon of Europeans, while the invention of the printing press and print-capitalism in the 15th century greatly expanded the range and importance of vernacular languages. As Anderson observes, “the fall of Latin exemplified a larger process in which the sacred communities integrated by old sacred languages were gradually fragmented, pluralized, and territorialized” (19).

The decline of dynastic monarchies in Europe, beginning in the 17th century, was another significant factor in the rise of nationalism. The legitimacy of the antique monarchies derived from divinity, not from the people. Monarchy was considered immutably sacred and divinely ordained, and the social relations in the state were correspondingly imagined as vertical. Kingdoms expanded through strategic marriages between royal families, as well as by war. The intricate sexual politics that bound together the rulers of European monarchies is a practice far removed from the organization of modern nation-states. With the rise of political liberalism and revolutionary movements inspired by the Enlightenment in the 18th and 19thcenturies, the era of the dynastic monarchy began to ebb.

Finally, the development of the nation is tied to a fundamental change in human perceptions of time and history that occurred around the time of the Enlightenment. This shift “made it possible to ‘think’ the nation” (22). The medieval Christian mind was dominated by an allegorical approach to history that saw past and future events as linked by divine providence, and thus simultaneous, in the eyes of God. People believed they were living near the end of time and that the second coming of Christ was near at hand, prefigured in significant events. The contents of the universe, spatially and temporally, were linked in a network of correspondences, manifesting the eternal divine plan. The medieval mind thus had no conception of history as an endless chain of cause and effect or of radical discontinuities between the past and the future. Cosmology and human history were intimately linked.

In contrast to the medieval conception of time as a divinely-grounded simultaneity, the modern mind sees time as homogenous and empty. Simultaneity is simply the coincidence of events in time, not a matter of prefiguration and fulfillment. Anderson notes that this new idea of time, arising in the Enlightenment, is essential for the imagining of the nation as a community. The novel and the newspaper, two forms of imagining that originate during this period, explore and express the modern concept of simultaneity. The novel’s “idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogenous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history” (26).

Both the novel and the newspaper rely on fictional techniques of organizing and relating events according to an unfolding, linear chronological framework. Moreover, the popularity of newspaper reading from the 18thcentury onward exemplifies the idea of the nation as an imagined community: the morning ritual of reading the paper is performed by thousands (or millions) of others whom one does not know, but of whose existence the reader is confident. All share in this daily ritual, “creating that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations” (36).