Imagined Communities
By Benedict Anderson
Verso, 1993. $32.95
Reviewed by Jeremy Smith
This is the second edition of Anderson's quite original piece on the emergence of nationalism as a form of mass consciousness.
It is the second edition in two senses. First, Anderson wishes to refocus his project around his thesis that nationalism was a product of the early 19th century revolutions in the Americas rather than of European nation-state formation. Second, he wants to graft his impressions of political events of the 1980s and 1990s onto his earlier production, which, he admits, was sloppy in some respects.
So many of the different dimensions of subjective nationalist consciousness are delved into that it is difficult to briefly cover all. Imagined Communities has been the reference point for all subsequent work on these issues.
The book proceeds steadily through a history and a sociology of identity. Here the key themes include religion, the emergence of print capitalism and media technologies, American republicanisms, language and the state, imperial and nation-state forms, colonialism and national liberation, racism, revolutions, the orientalist images of the colonial world, and the American origins of nationalism.
Anderson's greatest strength lies in his notion of imagined communities, which allows him considerable leverage in developing an explanation of why nationalism emerged as a form of consciousness at the end of the 19th century. Put simply — and it is a simple idea — the development of capitalism was accompanied by the uprooting of traditional communities, which in turn were integrated into territorially bound states and "societies". Such social structures were fairly recent innovations, and they could not exist without a form of consciousness which subjectively integrated the members of nations. This was possible only within the context of the material preconditions set by the rise of capitalism and its technologies.
The development of printed language, books and the media in the framework of 19th century capitalism meant that a nation of culturally diverse peoples could forge a relatively common identity through the consumption of culturally similar products. Language and identities became homogenised, the myriad of long-standing cultural traditions disappearing or at least weakening, replaced by dominant national identities.
This otherwise lucid exposition of the rise of nationalism occludes two important factors. This homogenisation involved political struggles around the often brutal suppression of minorities and their cultures. The violent character of the constitution of nationalism is absent from Anderson's analysis.
Secondly, the emergence of the working class as the first subordinate class in history to be defined by its self-association rather than geographical dispersion does not figure either. This quite clearly gave impetus to the development of nationalism.
While these are important omissions, Anderson's argument is a significant contribution to our understanding of why and how nationalism emerged with capitalism and the nation-state and not earlier.
The key disappointment of this second edition is Anderson's argument around American nationalism. His claims proceed: American nationalism emerged within the settler communities due to their isolation from the European centres of their empires, to which the migrants of the New World felt attached. This sense of "parallel" identities maintained the empire's hegemony over its emigrant subjects. However, in the end, liberal and republican ideas spread through the development of American print media. These forced the basis of a new nationalist ideology through which the revolutions could be explained. Later, European nationalism fashioned itself in the image of its American counterpart.
There are a number of problems with this argument. Overall, there is little evidence of the coalescence of American nationalism prior to the revolutions. To the extent that nationalist ideas were present, they were contested by the many colonial elites faithful to the empire. Furthermore, the liberalism that permeated debates about trade in the 18th century Americas does not, as Anderson suggests, equate simply with nationalism.
Most importantly, the spread of nationalism in the Americas after the revolutions was neither universal nor unproblematic. Witness the US Civil War, or Bolivar's pan-Americanism. This contrasts with the later and more stable development of nationalism in Europe which Anderson himself maps out.
In other respects, also, Imagined Communities is unsatisfying. Anderson's thesis that nationalism has greater potency at the end of this century than it did at the end of the last is simplistic. Differentiation between northern and southern forms of nationalism would throw this idea open to dispute.
However, overall, this is a contribution to debates about the character of nationalist consciousness which has to be taken seriously, if for no other reason than for the breadth of its inquiry and the challenge that it offers to traditional theories of nationalism.