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PORTSIDE CULTURE

READING IMAGINED COMMUNITIES AMID A RESURGENCE OF NATIONALISM  
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Samuel Clowes Huneke
April 10, 2024
The New Republic
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_ What Benedict Anderson’s classic account of nationalism’s
origins misses about today’s world. _

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_Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism_
Benedict Anderson
Verso
ISBN: 9781784786755

Whenever I land back in the United States after a trip abroad, I feel
a warm rush of familiarity, a penetrating relief at having made it
home to native soil. It’s a curious sensation for someone like me,
an academic who has lived abroad numerous times and certainly does not
subscribe to the “America First” nationalism of the contemporary
right. Nonetheless, it’s real, that comforting feeling of being once
more surrounded by the strangers who make up my “imagined
community.”

There was a period in the late 1990s when nations seemed to be fading
away, nothing more than a warm glow on the horizon of the twentieth
century, a tingling sensation that sentimental scholars indulged in
after foreign travel. Globalization, it was thought, would wipe away
the nation-state, replacing it with a neoliberal paradise of
nongovernmental organizations and corporations and universal human
rights. “The very fact that historians are at least beginning to
make some progress in the study and analysis of nations and
nationalism,” the great historian Eric Hobsbawm opined in 1992,
“suggests that, as so often, the phenomenon is past its peak.”

Thirty years later, nationalism is back with a vengeance. From Giorgia
Meloni’s government of “God, homeland, family
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to Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist
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movement to Vladimir Putin’s efforts to rebuild
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old imperial Russia, nationalism has been intensifying around the
globe for quite some time now.

Curiously, though, the most highly regarded study of nationalism
remains _Imagined Communities
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1983 book in which he coined the famous term. Nearly half a century
old and cited over 140,000 times, it is undoubtedly one of the most
influential scholarly works of the late twentieth century, responsible
for cementing the idea that nations—far from ancient communities
stretching back to the dawn of history—are, in fact, social and
cultural constructs of recent vintage.

Returning to the text after well over a decade, however, I had
completely forgotten that it was a work of Marxist scholarship. For
Anderson, it began as an effort to explain what he considered a
profound problem for the socialist left: namely, that wars broke out
between socialist states, specifically Vietnam’s 1978 invasion of
Cambodia as well as the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War. For socialists, who
so frequently insisted that “Marxists as such are not
nationalists,” these skirmishes posed a grave problem. How could a
movement that sought to unite the oppressed proletariat of the earth
succumb to petty nationalist grievances?

Anderson’s goal, then, was to explain nationhood from a Marxist
perspective, to understand how the same economic forces that inform
socialist thought could also be leveraged to explain nationalism. The
result is a dazzling interpretation of the last 500 years of history,
displaying a mastery of the material uncommon among writers today. 

 

The ancient realms, in Anderson’s telling, were defined by three
common characteristics. Each was organized around a particular
“script-language,” which held out the hope of divine
truth—Latin, in the case of Christian Europe. Each rested on a
belief in concentric hierarchy, usually manifested as a feudal society
orbiting a monarch. And—most importantly—each relied on a sense of
temporality, an understanding of time, that did not meaningfully
distinguish between past, present, and future. But in the late
medieval and early modern eras, societies slowly began to shed these
characteristics, opening up space for new manners of thought and new
forms of belonging.
In Anderson’s account, the force of modern capitalism shoveled aside
the ancient ways of being and thereby made room for the emergence of
nations. These new “imagined communities” were based on
vernacular, rather than divine, languages. They were conceived as
leveled societies of coequal citizens. And they were attached to a
profoundly historical sense of time: The nation became a protagonist
of history; what the Germans call a _Schicksalsgemeinschaft_, a
community of fate, “moving steadily down (or up) history.”

Capitalism enters Anderson’s account in the disguise of the printed
word. Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz first set moveable type to paper in
the middle of the fifteenth century. His original Bible was printed in
1455, and “print-capitalism,” as Anderson christens it, was born.
By 1500, some 20 million books had been printed. A century later, that
figure was 200 million. These texts spread and standardized vernacular
languages and challenged the sacred centrality of Latin—and through
it of Christianity. They also made intellectual communion possible
between people who had never met and would never meet. In the profits
of print-capitalism lay the seeds of the imagined community. 

Of course, one might justifiably ask: If nationalism arose in large
part because of printed language, disseminated through newspapers and
books, what might become of it in a world where fewer and fewer people
have the attention span to read a newspaper article, let alone a
novel? Can the nation survive TikTok? But Anderson’s goal was to
explain not the enduring conditions for nationalism to flourish but,
rather, the circumstances of its birth. 

The first nations sprouted in the Americas, the offspring of the
earliest European colonies—the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru,
Portuguese Brazil, and the 13 colonies. Modern states required
functionaries, bureaucrats, and intellectuals and merchants scurrying
about to do their bidding. But the careers of these functionaries were
geographically limited. Whereas an aspiring diplomat from peninsular
Spain might circulate through Mexico on his way to higher office back
home in Madrid, those born in the colonies could expect never to leave
the administrative unit of their birth. And it was unlikely, no matter
how talented they were, that the sovereign would ever appoint them to
the highest offices, even there. As their number grew, they slowly
began to form a class who began to think of the administrative unit of
their birth as something slightly different and slightly more
meaningful: a nation. By the early nineteenth century, most of the
Americas were organized into independent nation-states, almost all of
them republics. 

At this point, Anderson argues, nationalism became an intellectual
product available for export—or, as he puts it, “piracy.” As
nationalist movements sprang up on the European continent, its
monarchs grew increasingly concerned (with good reason) that
nationalist fervor might sweep them off their thrones. After all, most
royal families were foreign imports: England, for instance, has not
been ruled by an English family since 1066. It has not been ruled by a
British family since 1688. What claim could they possibly possess to
rule a nation-state of Britons? 

 
Europe’s sovereigns thus reimagined themselves as primi inter pares,
first citizens of prehistoric nations. Their governments generated
“official nationalisms” which could then be exported to their
African and Asian colonies, where local (nonwhite) subjects were
taught to be good Englishmen and Frenchmen and Dutchmen—and to be
good colonial administrators. But, once again, their careers were
halted at the colony’s edge. No matter how well educated, no matter
how well they spoke English or French, no matter how competent they
were, the color of their skin meant that they would never move beyond
the roles prescribed them within the colonial hierarchy. And so, they
too began to imagine themselves as members of a cohesive, ancient
community, a nation that deserved statehood no less than
Czechoslovakia or Poland or Switzerland. 

And thus, we arrive at the end of the twentieth century, a world
divided into nations and nation-states. Anderson’s account is a
compelling one, for it explains the economic and geopolitical
circumstances that attended the birth of nations and their
perpetuation into the contemporary world. But what it cannot explain,
and what Anderson himself remains seemingly mystified by, is “the
_attachment_ that people feel for the inventions of their
imaginations.” Why, that is, “people are ready to die for these
inventions.” No matter how many fine poems of the love of the
fatherland or motherland (or whatever) he cites, Anderson’s Marxist
framework cannot explain the devotion that nations have and continue
to inspire.

The oversight is a result, perhaps, of Anderson’s strange, tenacious
attachment to the idea of the nation. Waving aside “progressive,
cosmopolitan intellectuals,” who point out the violence and racism
of nationalism, Anderson instead focuses on how “nations inspire
love.” The “cultural products” of nationalism, he tells us,
“show this love very clearly,” whereas it is exceedingly rare to
find “nationalist products expressing fear and loathing.” It’s
an assertion that beggars belief. Perhaps the most famous nationalist
epics and novels are, indeed, works of love, but it requires little
effort to find the extraordinary bodies of nationalist literature
riven with hatred for the other; determined to protect the purity of
the nation from contamination. The Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, for
instance, penned _Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man_ in the heat of
World War I, a 600-page screed directed against French civilization.
Richard Wagner’s operas—nationalist art if ever it existed—are
laboriously racist and antisemitic. No one would seriously think to
claim that organized religions are essentially peaceful because they
inspire “love,” yet this is precisely what Anderson suggests of
nationalism.

Perhaps it should not surprise us, then, that _Imagined Communities_
remains strangely blind to the violence of nationalism and,
especially, to the ideological interlocking of nationalism and racism.
Indeed, in the roughly 10 pages that address racism, Anderson argues,
“The dreams of racism actually have their origin in the ideologies
of _class,_ rather than in those of nation.” While “nationalism
thinks in terms of historical destinies,” he contends in a slipshod
sleight of hand, “racism dreams of eternal contaminations.” He
suggests that racism developed only in the nineteenth century out of
aristocratic pretensions and the “official nationalism” sponsored
by Europe’s monarchs.

These are passages no serious historian would write today, and
they’re indicative of just how little mainstream scholars thought
about race and racism a half-century ago. We know now (if we didn’t
then) that modern racism _was_ already present in the earliest
European colonization and offered grounds for the multitude of crimes
committed against Indigenous peoples. Indeed, Anderson even cites
examples of such racist thought early in the text! We know that the
specific forms of anti-Black racism that have flourished in Western
countries—especially in the United States—are a direct product of
the system of chattel slavery (which Anderson leaves virtually
unmentioned). And slavery provided, of course, the economic foundation
of early European colonialism. The notion that the conjoined spread of
capitalism and nationalism—both of which were amply wrapped up in
colonialism—had nothing to do with racism is risible. The fact of
the matter is, nationalism and racism are twinned forms of
meaning-making characteristic of the modern world, and it is no
accident that they both came of age in the twentieth century.

While Anderson’s text offers a compelling account of nationalism’s
origins, then, it speaks little to the guises in which nationalism has
reappeared in the twenty-first century. Even if nationalism in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries were not fundamentally racist (it
was), there could be no doubt that the far-right nationalism on offer
today is. Moreover, the left’s rejection of racism (such as it is)
remains largely consonant with its skepticism toward nationalism. For
all the economic accounts one might offer to explain nations and
nationalism, there remains at the end of the day something profoundly
ineffable about it, a deep desire for community defined not only by
who belongs but also by who does not. As Anderson writes, national
belonging satisfies not a political need but rather a baser human one,
a need for meaning and belonging. If that is indeed the case, we are
likely living not through the twilight of nationalism but rather its
violent rebirth.

Samuel Clowes Huneke is an assistant professor of modern German
history at George Mason University. He is the author of _States of
Liberation: Gay Men Between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War
Germany
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* history of nationalism
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* capitalism and nationalism
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* Racism
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* colonialism
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