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 sociocultural 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. In other words, unlike most other isms, nationalism has never produced its own grand thinkers: no Hobbeses, Tocquevilles, Marxes, or Webers.

My point of departure is that nationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view of that word’s multiple significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind.

In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.

In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.

For present purposes, the two relevant cultural systems are the religious community and the dynastic realm. For both of these, in their heydays, were taken-for-granted frames of reference, very much as nationality is today. It is therefore essential to consider what gave these cultural systems their self-evident plausibility, and at the same time to underline certain key elements in their decomposition.

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. Accordingly, the stretch of written Latin, Pali, Arabic, or Chinese was, in theory, unlimited. (In fact, the deader the written language - the farther it was from speech - the better: in principle everyone has access to a pure world of signs.)

But even though the sacred languages made such communities as Christendom imaginable, the actual scope and plausibility of these communities can not be explained by sacred script alone: their readers were, after all, tiny literate reefs on top of vast illiterate oceans.

First was the effect of the explorations of the non-European world, which mainly but by no means exclusively in Europe ‘abruptly widened the cultural and geographic horizon and hence also men’s conception of possible forms of human life.’

Second was a gradual demotion of the sacred language itself. Writing of medieval Western Europe, Bloch noted that ‘Latin was not only the language in which teaching was done, it was the only language taught.’ (This second ‘only’ shows quite clearly the sacredness of Latin - no other language was thought worth the teaching.) But by the sixteenth century all this was changing fast.

In a word, the fall of Latin exemplified a larger process in which the sacred communities integrated by old sacred languages were gradually fragmented, pluralized, and territorialized.

Yet even in the age of Pope and Addison, Anne Stuart was still healing the sick by the laying on of royal hands, cures committed also by the Bourbons, Louis XV and XVI, in Enlightened France till the end of the ancien regime. But after 1789 the principle of Legitimacy had to be loudly and self-consciously defended, and, in the process, ‘monarchy’ became a semi-standardized model.

No surprise then that the search was on, so to speak, for a new way of linking fraternity, power and time meaningfully together.