The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 7 | Issue 0 | Article ID 3085 | Mar 16, 2009

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The Inadvertence of Benedict Anderson: Engaging ImaginedCommunities

Radhika Desai

The Inadvertence of Benedict Anderson:Engaging Imagined Communities

Radhika Desai

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism London: Verso, 2006, secondrevised edition (first published 1983, revisede d i t i o n , 1 9 9 1 ) . x v + 2 4 0 p p . I S B N9781844670864

Like celebrities who ‘need no introduction’,Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities(hereinafter IC) should need no review. Afterall, it is one of the most widely cited works inits field and such academic ubiquity is surelyreview enough. Indeed, no single phrase occursas widely and frequently in the literature onnationalism as ‘imagined communities’. That itis not always attributed to its original creator istestimony to its pervasive acceptance andadoption. However, I am probably not alone inhaving long felt a certain unease with IC: not

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on individual points, though many of these havebeen criticized (see Özkirim, 2000, for aconvenient summary of the principal criticismsof IC), but with slippages between its statedaims and arguments and their real logic. Myunease was recently heightened when I tried toplace IC – the conjuncture in the developmentof nations and nationalisms at which itintervened and the contribution it made –within a larger historical perspective onnationalism’s evolution over recent centuries,and an intellectual historical perspective onattempts to comprehend it (Desai 2009b). Re-reading IC in its new edition – now including apost-face detailing the impressive history of itstranslations and editions – nearly a quartercentury after its original publication has servedto crystallize vague unease into overallassessment.

Inevitably, this assessment is made against thebackdrop of the rather drastic swings offortune which IC’s object of study – nationality,nation-ness, nationalism (p. 4 [all numbers inbrackets indicate page references in the 2006edition]) – underwent since the book’spublication, including being consigned to theproverbial ‘dustbin of history’ by many,Anderson included (see Desai, 2009b). When ICwas originally published in 1983, and in its1991 new and expanded edition, Andersonins is ted that ‘ the “end o f the era o fnationalism,” so long prophesied, is notremotely in sight. Indeed, nation-ness is themost universally legitimate value in thepolitical life of our time’ (p. 3). Then came thatcomplex historical conjuncture when the SovietUnion broke up into its constituent nationalunits and ‘globalization’ hit the newsstands.(The two were connected: one of the least fuzzyof globalization’s many meanings was theextension of the capitalist world over theformer Communist bloc, re-establishing theglobal reach that had been broken by theRussian Revolution although even those whosubscribed to it (Rosenberg 2005) overlookedthe fact that this process had begun decades

before the collapse of the Soviet Union with theUS rapprochement with China.) Thisconjuncture seemed to have opposingimplications for nations and nationalisms.While the fall of Communism added many morenations to the roster of the United Nations,complete with outpourings of nationalsentiment, in its more widely acceptedmeanings, ‘globalization’ was deemed corrosiveof nation-states and nationalisms, its increasedcommercialization and commodificationdissolving national institutions and borders,rendering nation-states irrelevant.

Though Anderson had, until at least 1991,insisted on the crucial importance of nationsand national ism, he now changed hisassessment, relying not on any lines of analysisdeveloped in IC, indeed, not even referring tothem, but on the popular understanding that‘globalization’ – migrations, the fall ofCommunism, technological, transport andcommunications revolutions, transnationalinvestments and the like (Anderson, 1996: 8) –had made the fu ture o f na t ions andnationalisms unsure. While the central claimsof globalization, including the claim that it wasrendering nation-states ineffective andirrelevant, were beginning to be contested,( H i r s t a n d T h o m p s o n 1 9 9 9 , W a d e

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1996 , We i s s 1998 ; c f . Desa i 2009efor thcoming) , Anderson swal lowedglobalization discourse whole. He claimed thatthe break-up of the Soviet Union had merelycreated ‘a congeries of weak, economicallyfragile nation-states . . . some entirely new,others residues of the settlement of 1918; ineither case, from many points of view a quarterof a century too late’. They were ‘unlikely todisturb global trends’ which portended ‘theimpending crisis of the hyphen that for twohundred years yoked state and nation’. Thehyphenation of the nationalist aspiration tostatehood and the state’s need for loyalty andobedience had become radically uncertain and‘[p]ortable nationality, read under the sign of“identity” is on the rapid rise as peopleeverywhere are on the move’ (Anderson, 1996:8). Older and better established states couldalso be expected to have their problems,particularly given the acceleration oftechnological change and cost-escalation in the

military sphere:

. . . [s]tates incapable of militarilydefending their citizens, and hardput to ensure them employmentand ever-better life chances, maybusy themselves with policingw o m e n ’ s b o d i e s a n dschoolchildren’s curricula, but [heasked] is this kind of thing enoughover the long term to sustain thegrand demands of sovereignty?(Anderson, 1996: 9)

Anderson’s new position was only apparentlysimilar to Eric Hobsbawm’s complex historicalverdict on post-Soviet nationalism. Hobsbawmhad said already in 1990 that nationalism had‘become historically less important’ (and wasprobably the interlocutor against whom, a yearlater, Anderson had insisted on the continuinghistorical importance of nations andnationalisms). For Hobsbawm it was alreadyclear then that nationalism was ‘no longer . . . aglobal political programme, as it may be said tohave been in the nineteenth and earliertwentieth centuries’ (Hobsbawm, 1990: 191).

‘[N]ation’ and ‘nationalism’ are nolonger adequate terms to describe,let alone analyse, the politicalentities described as such, or eventhe sentiments once described bythese words. It is not impossiblethat nationalism will decline withthe decline of the nation-state,without which being English, Irishor Jewish, or a combination of allthese, is only one way in whichpeople describe their identityamong the many others which theyuse for this purpose, as occasiondemands. It would be absurd toclaim that this day is already near.However, I hope it can at least be

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envisaged. (Hobsbawm, 1990: 192)

This judgement was merely confirmed by theapparent resurgence of nat ions andnat ional isms produced by the fa l l ofCommunism: they were merely ‘The chickens ofWorld War I coming home to roost’, a settlingof past accounts, frozen by the rise ofCommunism and unfrozen by i ts fa l l(Hobsbawm, 1996: 259). This was the verdict ofa historian of nations and nationalisms who hadremained, throughout, sceptical of their claimsand uneasy with their particularising thrust. Itsaid merely that nations and nationalism hadceased to actively remake the map of the world,in effect that the generalisation of the nation-state system was substantially complete.Though it also recognised that nations andnationalisms were declining, they were doingso very gradually. Hobsbawm’s positiondiffered from Anderson’s not only in itsconsistency with his earlier work, but also inhaving no truck with voguish ‘globalization’.

That Anderson’s critical volte-face is notreferred to, discussed or reflected upon, letalone made the basis of any reassessment ofIC’s principal theses in the new edition, that IC,in its turn, is not referred to in the 1996 piece,makes one wonder how deep Anderson’sintellectual convictions really go, how firmly hisscholarly judgements are rooted in aninvestigation and weighing of the evidence, andhow seriously he takes the normal scholarlyinjunction to consistency. The only newmaterial in the 2006 edition is a largely self-congratulatory, not to say cute, account of IC’s‘subsequent travel-history in light of some ofthe book’s own central themes: print-capitalism, piracy in the positive, metaphoricalsense, vernacularization, and nationalism’sundivorceable marriage to internationalism’ (p.207).

In this essay, I explore what I take to be themore important contradictions and ambiguitiesof IC. A first set of criticisms concerns the

relationship of the book to the politicaloccasion which avowedly inspired it: therelation turns out to be far more complex andambiguous than Anderson gave his readers tounderstand. This leads on to an assessment ofthe book’s fulfilment of its aims, as originallystated in 1983 and later elaborated upon in thepost-face to the new edition of 2006. Thecritical nature of these reflections must not betaken to mean that IC broke no new ground.Two major achievements are noted: however, inthe first case, Anderson himself seems unawareof the true significance of his theoretical moveand, in the second, there is an inadvertencewhich makes full accreditation difficult. Theessay closes with reflections on the inadvertentachievements and failures of the work.

Political imposture

The opening pages of IC inform us that it wasoccasioned by the wars in Indo-China whichbegan in the late 1970s. They underlined, forAnderson, the enduring importance ofnationalism.

While it was just possible to interpret the Sino-Soviet border clashes of 1969, and the Sovietmilitary interventions in Germany (1953),Hungary (1956) Czechoslovakia (1968), and

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Afghanistan (1980) in terms of - according totaste - ‘social imperialism,' ‘defendingsocialism' etc., no one, I imagine, seriouslybelieves that such vocabularies have muchbearing on what has occurred in Indochina. (p.1)

Quite why ‘it was just possible' to see Europeanevents in terms of class politics and ideologyand not the events in Indochina is not explainedand one cannot help wondering if, like so manywriters, Anderson also reserves classcategories for the West and national ones forthe rest (Ahmad 1992). At any rate, the sub-textpositions Anderson as a Marxist or someonesympathetic to Marxism, who was forced, atlong last, to admit that the forces of narrownationalism had betrayed Marxist ideals ofsocialist fraternity and internationalism.Casting around for an explanation, he thendiscovered that despite ‘the immense influencethat nationalism has exerted on the modernwor ld , p l aus ib le theory about i t i sconspicuously meagre' (p. 3). Thus IC. Framedin this way, IC appears as a work of one withdeep sympathies with the left, emerging at acritical moment to reflect on its past mistakesand failures.

This is misleading in several respects. Thoughthe wars in Indo-China disillusioned manyMarxists, this was hardly because of theybetrayed a hitherto unacknowledged

nationalism, because disputes betweenEuropean Communist nations were somehowpossible to understand within Marxist termsand those between the Asian communist oneswere not. While the Stalinist defence of‘socialism in one country' was certainly seen byMarxists to be a compromise of Communism'sglobal aspirations, national realities were notsimply opposed to class ones by Marxists. TheSoviet regime had to deal with nationalitiesinternally from its earliest days and itsupported national liberation abroad.

Anderson's stance is quite audacious and couldonly be credible to those ignorant of Marxisttheoretical traditions and easily susceptible tostereotypes of it. Consistently IC attributes toMarxism a simplistic opposition between nationand c lass , between nat ional ism andCommunism. In reality, of course, while therewere always tensions, slippages and gaps inMarxist understandings of nationalism, such anopposition was a creation of Cold War anti-Communism, not of Marxism or Communism.These intellectual and political traditionsaimed, instead, to comprehend the interactionbetween these two principles, however well orbadly this or that thinker accomplished thetask. Whether it was Marx and Engels'

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injunction to each working class to settle scoreswith its own bourgeoisie in the CommunistManifesto, Marx's clarity about the importanceof India's independence for even her capitalist,let alone socialist, development, Engels' notionof peoples with and without history,Luxemburg's interventions on the question ofPoland, Lenin's and Bolshevik support for self-determination and their theorization ofimperialism, Gramsci's ideas about the‘national-popular' or the Austro-Marxists'insights about the interaction of nationalismand social democracy in the context of theempire, classical Marxism sought to theorizethe interaction of nationalism and Communism,of nation and class, in concrete circumstancesof capitalism and imperialism. Nowhere doesAnderson acknowledge this. Indeed, he hitcheshis horses to the idea of the opposition betweenthe two, not to mention the suppression -political and intellectual - of the one by theother through the deployment of ‘fictions like"Marxists as such are not nationalists" or"nationalism is the pathology of moderndevelopmental history"' (161). Needless to say,Anderson provides no references for thesepernicious fictions. It is noteworthy thatalthough Anderson wishes to be, and is, takenfor a major authority on the subject ofnationalism, and one particularly well-informedabout left scholarship on the subject, he hasnever acknowledged the complexity of theinteraction of Communism and nationalism inthe Soviet Union, a theme on which some of themost insightful work on nationalism has beenpublished in the years since the break-up of theSoviet Union (Suny, 1993, 1998; Martin, 2001).

IC is not an easy work to locate in any traditionof writing about nationalism, usually dominatedby historians and scholars of politics. As thework of an area studies specialist, it draws, inparticular, from the author's long study ofSouth East Asia, although as much, if not morespace is devoted to the countries most familiar

to him personally - the UK, his country oforigin, and the US, where he has lived andworked for decades. Indeed, these lattercountries form the real basis of IC's mostdistinctive theses, as we shall see. Discussionsof these specific national experiences areinserted into some broader arguments aboutnationalism more generally. While literature onnationalism has certainly become moreplentiful after 1983, as Anderson points out inthe Preface to the second edition (p. xii), it wasnot meagre before then. In any case, Andersonnowhere discusses the literature either beforeor since 1983 to any extent, nor does he pointto the specific manner in which it falls shortand how IC helps fill the gaps. Indeed,Anderson identifies himself as something of anoutlier of this field of scholarship, referring tohis ‘idiosyncratic method and preoccupations'being ‘on the margins of the newer scholarshipon nationalism' if only to claim that ‘in thatsense at least, [IC is] not fully superseded' (p.xii).

In fact, IC's relations to other traditions ofscholarship on nationalism are murkier thanthis posture of happy, even productive,idiosyncrasy acknowledges. When Andersondeclared liberalism and Marxism intellectuallybankrupt in the face of nationalism, he did soon the strength of two very brief quotations:Hugh Seton-Watson's conclusion that noscientific definition of the nation could bedevised and Tom Nairn's statement thatnationalism was ‘Marxism's greatest historicalfailure'. Neither can support the weight. Seton-Watson's inability to find a ‘scientific' definitionwas due precisely to the substantial elementsof subjectivity in the phenomenon (Seton-Watson, 1977: 4-5), elements which Andersonwould himself emphasize as one of the chiefthemes of IC. Seton-Watson's remark should,therefore, have led Anderson to explore thiskind of scholarship further, and acknowledgeits insights, not dismiss it. As for the quotation

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from Nairn, further investigation reveals thatNairn's account of Marxism's ‘failure' was farmore complex than Anderson allowed. Not onlywas Nairn aware that Marxism could lay claimto the substantial corpus of theory andreflection on the subject of nationalismmentioned above (not to mention Leninistpractice: on this see Mayer, 1964), but Nairnwent on to say that the failure of his Marxistforebears

was not a simply conceptual or subjective one.No amount of brass-rubbing will compensatefor that. The fact is, that if they could not puttogether a tolerable theory about nationalism,nobody could, or did. Historical developmenthad not at that time produced certain thingsnecessary for such a ‘theory'. The time was notripe for it, or for them. Nor would it be ripeuntil two further generations of trauma hadfollowed 1914. There is nothing in the leastdiscreditable to historical materialism in thefact, although it is naturally lethal to ‘Marxism'in the God's-eye sense. (Nairn, 1981: 331)

‘"Marxism" in the God's-eye sense' was, ofcourse, Stalinism, in contrast with which Nairninvoked other Marxist and historical materialisttraditions of reflection, theory and practice - inparticular the Bolshevik idea of ‘uneven andcombined development' - on the strength ofwhich he made his own very substantialMarxist contribution to the theory ofnationalism. Certainly his statement gave nowarrant for the loose invocation of oppositionsbetween class and nation, between socialismand nationalism, which Anderson resorted to soconsistently as a stand-in for knowledge ofMarxist traditions.

Anderson's Miscarried Agenda

The aims of IC were both modest andswaggering. On the one hand, Andersonclaimed no more than to ‘offer some tentativesuggest ions for a more sat is factoryinterpretation of nationalism'. On the other, hebreathtakingly claimed to be bailing out bothMarxism and liberalism - universalistideologies, ill-at-ease with nationalism - as theirlender of last resort, to be imparting the liberaland Marxist study of nationalism, both‘etiolated in a late Ptolemaic effort to save thephenomenon', an urgently required Copernicanspirit (p. 4). Anderson would mount thisintellectual rescue operation, conjure this‘Copernican spirit', by looking for resourceswhere, he claimed, neither Marxism norliberalism had been looking - in culture:

nationality, . . . nation-ness, as well asnationalism, are cultural artefacts of aparticular kind. To understand them properlywe need to consider carefully how they havecome into historical being, in what ways theirmeanings have changed over time, and why,today, they command such profound emotionallegitimacy. (p. 4, emphasis added)

In addition to these originally stated aims, headded in 2006, that he had had three others:first, to ‘critically, of course,' support TomNairn's claim that the UK was ‘the decrepitrelic of a pre-national, pre-republican age andthus doomed' and his indictment of ‘classicalMarxism's shallow or evasive treatment of thehistorical-political importance of nationalism';second, to ‘widen the scope of Nairn'stheoretical criticisms' to include ‘classicalliberalism and, at the margins, classicalconservatism; and third, ‘to de-Europeanize thetheoretical study of nationalism', an aim which‘derived from long immersion in the societies,cultures and

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languages of the then utterly remote Indonesiaand Thailand/Siam' (pp. 208-9).

To deal with the originally-stated aims first, ifMarxism and liberalism were not bankrupt -and we have seen that Anderson's claims abouttheir bankruptcy were ill-founded - they wereclearly in no need for Anderson's rescueoperation. Declaring them bankrupt was merelyAnderson's flawed attempt to free himself fromthe burden of engaging with them. Nor was itclear that nationalism was only ‘cultural'.Anderson did not explain why it was not alsopolitical and economic. Certainly, neither aNehru nor a Nkrumah nor yet a Sukarno or aHo, neither a Jefferson nor a Bolivar nor yet aMazzini, imagined otherwise when they lednationalist struggles. Projects of national

development lay at the core of nationalistmovements and even after they became thesettled nationalisms of established states,nationalisms always embodied a distinctivepolitical economy - typically its own version ofnational development - and not only a culturalpolitics (Desai 2009c). Each reflected theparticular concerns of the classes that led thembut these had to be compromised by theconcessions each was forced to make to equityand other such popular concerns to the extentthat their success was reliant on popularmobilization. This was as much the case inEurope and the Americas as it was in de-colonized Asia and Africa in the 20th century.The cultural content of these nationalisms wereintimately tied to the requirements of theireconomic and political tasks (see the variouscontributions in Desai 2009a). Few could affordto celebrate inherited culture in simple ways,given the tasks of modernization. In thenationalism which lay at the core of theCommunist revolution in China, for example,where traditional society and polity had failedso spectacularly against imperial pressures,‘Anti-traditionalism' dominated and mostintellectuals ‘believed that the Chinese nationalcharacter had so many serious shortcomingsthat cultural and spiritual restructuringprograms were urgently needed to cure andeven, for some . . . to remake the nation'. Evenconservatives who ‘advocated . . . restoringChina's traditional Confucian cultural values . .. admitted the necessity of a fundamentalremaking of Chinese culture'. (Wu 2008: 477).In post-war Japan, political economy andcultural polit ics were even harder todistinguish: the largely cultural ideas ofJapanese uniqueness which had powered pre-s u r r e n d e r n a t i o n a l i s m w e r e s ocomprehensively discredited by defeat as tothat for the next several decades ideas aboutJapan's national distinctiveness attachedthemselves to the national economy rather thanto any specifically cultural themes (Hein 2008). To what extent could a theory which focused onthe cultural aspects of nationalisms alone

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‘properly' understand them?

There remains the matter of the emotionallegitimacy which nations enjoy, to whichAnderson devotes a whole chapter (pp. 141-54).Emotional legitimacy forms the ineffable coreof nationalism and it looms so large forAnderson that, incredible as it may seem, facedwith it he brushes aside his own previouslybuilt up explanations of the phenomenon.Although he ‘tried to delineate the processes bywhich the nation came to be imagined, and,once imagined, modelled, adapted andtransformed', such accounts of changes insociety or consciousness do not

in themselves do much to explain theattachment that peoples feel for the inventionsof their imaginations - or to revive a questionraised at the beginning of the text - why peopleare ready to die for these inventions. (p. 141)

But Anderson cannot seem to make up hismind. Though ruling out explanation, anddevoting the chapter exclusively to lyricizingthis ‘emotional commitment', Anderson goes onto invoke the ‘fatality' of national belonging, its‘purity' and ‘disinterestedness' as explanationsfor people's emotional attachment to theirnations. This is what elicits the sort ofcommitment which is capable of the ultimatesacrifice.

A number of things may be said here. First ofall, at a logical level, if all the long pages ofexplanation which precede this chapterultimately fail to explain this deep core ofnationalism in the way ‘fatality' does, whybother to write them? What is their relationshipto the lyric exposition in Chapter 8? Secondly,Anderson surely draws too easy and stark acontrast between national belonging, a‘fatality', and other forms of association whichone may join and leave ‘at easy will' (p. 142).All forms of enduring commitment - todemocracy, science, socialism, religious belief,or human rights, e.g. - create attachmentswhich are hardly possible to join or leave ‘ateasy will'. As for willingness to die, people havefought and died for a variety of things otherthan nations - from crassly material things likeland and resources to elevated ideals such astruth, democracy, rights and socialism. Thenation is hardly the only form of community toelicit the ultimate sacrifice. Thirdly, as the

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history of deserters, conscientious objectorsand the realities of soldiers' responses inbattlefields have recounted, the willingness todie for nations is not as ubiquitous as Andersonimagines. Finally, while Anderson is willing tosuspect ‘official nationalism' of a lot, he doesnot entertain the possibility that the imputationof such profound devotion to the nation as toelicit the willingness to die for it, including theputting up of tombs of unknown soldiers, maybe the work of official nationalism too. There isno doubt that national belonging hasconsiderable force - emotional and ideological.However, Anderson's lengthy discussion of thematter remains unconvincing: is nationalbelonging really stronger than other forms ofbelonging always, everywhere and in allcircumstances? Is it not more forceful in somecountries than others? Here, as at so manyother places, Anderson clears space for his ownreflections only by brushing a great deal underthe proverbial carpet.

To go on to the aims retrospectively announcedin 2006, two of them were to ‘critically' supportNairn, and to overcome not just Marxism's butliberalism's limitations on nationalism. We find,however, that IC's few theoretical criticismsare reserved for Marxism: in IC Anderson doesnot have two interlocutors, only one: theMarxist Tom Nairn. All the references to Seton-Watson are exegetical: relying on the richhistorical detail, particularly on mattersEastern and Central European, of Nations andStates, to illustrate this or that point, agreeingrather than disagreeing with him on all criticalissues.

Anderson's theoretical thrusts against Nairnmiss their mark. When he berates Nairn forapplying the terms ‘pathology', ‘neurosis' and‘dementia' to nationalism, despite his broadsympathies for it (p. 5), Anderson overlooks thedouble-sidedness of Nairn's appreciation of

nationalism encapsulated in his designation ofnationalism as the ‘modern Janus', lookingforward as well as back, emancipating as wellas oppressing, modern as well as, avowedly atleast, antique. In a largely imaginary contestwhich Anderson sets up between nation andclass, Anderson surely has a point when he saysthat racism has its roots in class (pp. 148-9).But to claim that it has nothing to do withnationalism is to ignore how national inequalityhas been productive of racism from aninternational perspective as much as classinequality had been productive of racism indomestic contexts.

Finally, we come to Anderson's criticism ofNairn's argument that nationalism was ‘tied tothe political baptism of the lower classes'(Nairn 1981: 41). Anderson's refutation isinconsistent. In reference to Spanish America'spioneering nationalisms, for example, he tellsus at one point how the Creole nationalistsfeared the Negro working population and, afew lines later, that they sought to makenationals and citizens out of it (p. 49). This is acritical issue because Anderson uses this as anopening for the central argument of his book:that nationalism spread around the world in thewake of the American Declarat ion ofIndependence (and the French Revolution thatcame so close on its heels) because laternationalists were

able to work from visible models provided bytheir distant, and after the convulsions of theFrench Revo lu t ion , no t so d i s tan t ,predecessors. The ‘nation' thus becamesomething capable of being consciously aspiredto from early on, rather than a slowlysharpening frame of vision. Indeed, as we shallsee, the ‘nation' proved an invention on whichit was impossible to secure a patent. It becameavailable for pirating by widely different, andsometimes unexpected, hands. (67)

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Rather than the entry of the lower classes intopolitics, nationalism's origin and spread were,according to Anderson, better explained by the‘modular' character of nationalism and the‘piracy' of nationalism's original ‘Creole' modelby nationalists who came later. But such‘political baptism' was merely as aspect ofnationalism for Nairn, and not an explanationfor the origin and spread of nationalism, to besupplanted by ‘piracy' and the ‘modularcharacter of nationalism'. In attempting to bestone of Nairn's more insightful comments aboutthe centrality of popular mobilization innationalism - that ‘The new middle classintelligentsia of nationalism had to invite themasses into history; and the invitation card hadto be written in a language they understood'(Nairn, 1981: 340). Anderson claims that ‘it willbe hard to see why the invitation came to seemso attractive, and why such different allianceswere able to issue it, unless we turn finally topiracy' (p. 80). This simply rings false. First,while usually educated middle-class nationalistleaders were aware of nationalist struggles ofother times and places and undoubtedlyapplied aspects of this knowledge to their ownsituations (Why would they not? Why re-inventthe wheel?), they also faced unique historicalcircumstances in which they had to leadstruggles against actual or threatened foreigndomination. They had to fashion nationalismsout of an equally unique set of resources

offered by history. It was the structuralsimilarity of the task that fell upon onenationalist leadership after another in the longstory of the emergence of the nation-statessystem, and not some modular character it had,that imposed the broad similarities onnationalisms which have been so widelyobserved. Within the parameters of suchstructural similarities, however, nationalistscould be more or less creative and more or lesseffective in accomplishing their tasks.Secondly, people responded to such ‘invitationcards' on the basis of their understanding ofthe gains being offered - prosperity or equality,land or electricity, jobs or dignity, peace orrevenge - not because they were sold on theidea of being nations in the image of someother nations.

If Anderson's criticisms of Nairn all fail, whatremains of his promise to ‘critically support'Nairn's theory? Not much, given that hecompletely ignores the substance of Nairn'saccount of nationalism in The Break-up ofBritain. This is hardly the place for an exegesisof this argument and only its broad thrust maybe outlined so as to gauge the extent ofAnderson's elision. Nairn's argument is

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fundamentally materialist and in good part his‘indictment' of official Marxism was made witha view to invoking critical currents of Marxismto present a more fully historical materialist,i.e. Marxist, theory of nationalism. For Nairntook the development together of nationalismand capitalism, that is, of nation and class andnation, seriously. He criticized most accounts ofnationalism for being ‘vitiated from the start bya "country-by-country" attitude . . . that humansociety consists essentially of several hundreddifferent and discrete "nations", each of whichhas (or ought to have) its own postage-stampsand national soul'. He argued, instead, that ‘theonly framework of reference which is of anyreal utility here is world history as a whole'.Keeping in mind the overall evolution of theworld order of capitalism, he insisted that ‘[I]tis the forest which "explains" the trees'. In thismaterialist and world-historical view, theorigins of nationalism lay

[n]ot in the folk, nor in the individual'srepressed passion for some sort of wholenessor identity, but in the machinery of worldpolitical economy. Not, however, in the processof that economy's development as such - notsimply as an inevitable concomitant ofindustrialization and urbanization . . . [but in]the uneven development of history since theeighteenth century. This unevenness is amaterial fact; one could argue that it is themost grossly material fact about modernhistory. The conclusion, at once satisfying andnear-paradoxical, is that the most notoriouslysubjective and ‘idealistic' of historicalphenomena is in fact a by-product of the mostbrutally and hopelessly material side of thehistory of the last two centuries. (Nairn, 1981:335-6).

Nairn's critical point was that capitalismproduced not one but two kinds of inequality -social and regional or spatial - and these wereproductive of classes and nations. Nationswere, therefore, material realities as much asclasses were. How material they are can beappreciated from the fact that economicinequality within nations, great though it is haslong been and though it has become evengreater in recent decades, remains smallcompared to economic inequality betweennations (Milanovic 2005, Freeman 2004). Howmaterial nations are can also be appreciatedfrom the centrality of the ‘developmental state'- whether the US, German and Japanese, ormore recent Asian and Latin American, andabove all the Chinese - in earlier casesovercoming, and in later ones, at leastmitigating - these international economicinequalities (Chang 2002 and 2008; Reinert2007). Of course, materiality could also workthe other way, as the increase in class andregional inequalities in most countries underrecent market-driven policies have alsoattested. And along with these new politicaleconomies came distinctly new forms ofcultural politics in nations, as I and mycontributors attested in our recent work ondevelopmental and cultural nationalisms (Desai

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2009a). If one is to engage critically with Nairnin order to insist that nations were merely‘cultural artefacts', it is essential to addressthis issue frontally. Not surprisingly,Anderson's attempt to carve out a specificexplanatory space for culture does not succeed.It cannot unless the equal ly specif icexplanatory weights of political and economicfactors are duly considered and acknowledged.Anderson claimed that his theory of nationalismwas intended less to explain the socio-economicbasis of anti-metropolitan resistance in theWestern Hemisphere between say, 1760 and1830, than why the resistance was conceived inplural, ‘national' forms - rather than in others.The economic interests at stake are well-knownand obviously of fundamental importance.Liberalism and Enlightenment clearly had apowerful impact, above all in providing anarsenal of ideological criticisms of imperial andanciens régimes. What [he was] proposing isthat neither economic interest, Liberalism norEnlightenment could, or did, create inthemselves the kind, or shape, of imaginedcommunity to be defended from these regimes'depredations; to put it another way, nonep r o v i d e d t h e f r a m e w o r k f o r a n e wconsciousness - the scarcely-seen periphery ofits vision - as opposed to centre-field objects ofits admiration or disgust. (p. 65)

However, Anderson could only claim this byignoring the fact that, for Nairn, thegeographical and social contours of unevendevelopment explained precisely the kind andshape of the imagined community and that thefocus on the ‘wood' rather than the ‘trees'enabled the reasons for the plural and nationalforms of resistance as opposed to singleuniversal resistance based on class or somevaguer common humanity required byliberalism or the Enlightenment to emergeclearly in relief.

Finally, how did Anderson ‘de-Europeanize' thestudy of nationalism? The short answer is, byAmericanizing it, and worse, by Americanizingit in the sense of the USA, rather than of theAmericas as a whole. By Anderson's account,the USA was the first nation-state and foundedthe first of the models (the other two wereEuropean) which all others had to follow, as hisargument about nationalism's ‘modularity'required. What little Anderson offered by wayof a sociology of nationalism's origins isconfined to explaining the emergence of histhree ‘models' which the rest of the non-Euroamerican world was bound to imitate. Onewonders how much of Anderson's knowledge ofIndonesia or Thailand was involved in comingto this conclusion.

In the homelands of these models, according toAnderson, the origins of nationalism lay in theprocess of secularization. Nationalism, as

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Anderson conceives it, displaced religion in anumber of critical ways.

[T]he very possibility of imagining the nationonly arose historically when, and where, threefundamental cultural conceptions, all of greatantiquity, lost their axiomatic grip on men'sminds . . . the idea that a particular scriptlanguage offered privileged access toontological truth . . . the belief that society wasnaturally organized around and under highcentres . . . [and] a conception of temporality inwh ich cosmo logy and h i s to ry wereindistinguishable, the origin of the world and ofmen [being] essentially identical. (p. 36)

Rather than any political economy of unevenand combined development, ‘print-capitalism'and the new secular pilgrimages of thefunctionaries of the new centralized absolutistand colonial states determined the ‘shape' and‘k ind' o f the new consciousness andcommunity, making it national. Print-capitalismdenoted ‘a half-fortuitous, but explosive,interaction between a system of production andproductive relations (capitalism), a technologyof communications (print), and the fatality ofhuman and linguistic diversity' (p. 43). Underits impact, while Latin itself became ‘moreCiceronian . . . increasingly removed fromecclesiastical and everyday life', vernacularprint languages rose to displace Latin both inthe religious and political spheres (pp. 39-41),serving as the basis of new, smaller but muchmore centralized entities in the latter. The newvernacular print languages laid the basis fornational consciousness by unifying ‘fields oflanguage and communication below Latin andabove spoken vernaculars'. They gave ‘a newfixity to language'. And they made out ofdialects which were closer to the printlanguages privileged ‘languages of power' (pp.44-5). The first widened the community as printmade mutually incomprehensible dialects

mutually intelligible, the second laid the basisfor the antiquity which would so often beclaimed for nations and the third marginalizedmore distant d ia lects in ways whichoccasionally led to ‘sub-nationalisms'. The riseof modern centralized absolutist and colonialstates on the other hand gave rise to ‘journeys'which defined the extent and limits of the unitswhich would come to be conceived as national.Just as pilgrims of the past marked the ever-expanding limits of the sacred world of religionby undertaking pilgrimages to distant sacredcentres, so state officials now undertookjourneys to and from provincial centres,creating the experiential basis on which theextent and l imits of the new nationalcommunity would come to be imagined.

Rich as the discussion of print capitalism andofficial pilgrimages is, and suggestive of howcultural phenomena such as secularization,Protestantism, vernacularization, literacy andothers contributed to the nationalisms ofEurope, it is hardly surprising. One can expectcultural phenomena contemporaneous with therise of nationalism in any part of the world tohave been connected with the shaping of thenational culture: much as, e.g., emergingreligious movements in India structured theparticipation of many communities in theCongress in the 1920s and 1930s (Hardiman1977) or, to take another example, radio

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became a carrier of nationalist messagesbeginning in the 1930s and TV frames newforms of nationalism today - whether inThailand, India or the former Soviet Republics.

A l though they were or ig inal ly‘unselfconscious processes', Andersonsuggested, these Euroamerican developmentssoon crystallized into ‘formal models to beimitated, and, where expedient, consciouslyexploited in a Machiavellian spirit' (p. 45).American nationalists pioneered a modelwhich, by the second decade of the 19thcentury at the latest (p. 81), was available forimitation and ‘piracy'. Later nationalisms wereable to work from visible models provided bytheir distant, and after the convulsions of theFrench Revolut ion , not too d is tant ,predecessors. The ‘nation' thus becamesomething capable of being consciously aspiredto from early on, rather than a slowlysharpening frame of vision. Indeed, as we shallsee, the ‘nation' proved an invention on whichit was impossible to secure a patent. It becameavailable for pirating by widely different, andsometimes unexpected, hands. (p. 67)

The ‘last wave' of decolonized nations whichwould have been critical to any project of ‘de-Europeanizing' theories of nationalism became,in IC ‘incomprehensible except in terms of thesuccess ion o f mode ls we have beenconsidering'. Their retention of Europeanlanguages of state resembled the Americanmodel, their populism, the European and their‘Russifying' policy orientation, the officialModel (p. 113). The bilingualism of its elites‘meant access, through the European language-of state, to modern Western culture in thebroadest sense, and, in particular, to themodels of nationalism, nation-ness, and nation-state produced elsewhere in the course of the19th century (p. 116). How Anderson's largelyEurocentric discussion, not to mention the idea

that non-European nationalisms were modelledon Western models served to ‘de-Europeanize'the study of nationalism is hard to fathom.Rather than de-Europeanising the study ofnationalism, this was surely adding an extra,hefty, layer of Eurocentrism.

The implication of Anderson's argument is thatwhile there is a sociology of nationalism forEurope, there need not be one for the ThirdWorld because countries in it were merelyimitating, nay ‘pirating', pre-fabricated models.This would certainly seem insulting if oneconsidered it to be true. Partha Chatterjee, forone, decided to take offence at Anderson'simplication that Third World nationalism wasmerely ‘derivative' (Chatterjee 1986). Heneedn't have: Anderson's argument would onlywork if Third World societies were clean slatesonto which Westernized nat ional is tintellectuals could write Western stories ofnationalism, if they had no sociologies of theirown which might resist and complicate suchattempts.

The second edition seemed to abandon the ideaof the imitation and piracy of ‘models'altogether, because, ‘a brilliant doctoral thesisby Thongchai Winichakul, a young Thaihistorian', stimulated Anderson to think about

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space, mapping and the role of the colonialstate in both (p. xiv). The addition of a newchapter on the ‘census, map and museum'corrected Anderson's ‘short-sighted assumption. . . that official nationalism in the colonizedworlds of Asia and Africa was modelled directlyon that of the dynastic state of nineteenth-century Europe'. Now, as Anderson saw it, ‘theimmediate genealogy should be traced to theimaginings of the colonial state' (p. 163).Anderson is surely dissimulating when hesuggests that this conclusion might appear‘surprising' because colonial states ‘weretypically anti-nationalist' (p.

163). The view that nationalisms of the ThirdWorld borrowed from their colonial masters issimply too widespread. In any case, borrowingfrom Europeans when ‘at home' as it were, washard to distinguish from borrowing from themwhen ‘away' in the colonies. Now theexplanation of the shape of the nationalisms ofthe ‘last wave' even dispensed with the agencyof ‘bilingual' elites who did the work ofimitation and replaced it entirely with that oflargely European colonial elites. Some ‘de-Europeanization'! Some nationalism!

As already noted, the real problem with theargument about the modular character ofnationalism was the implication that thesimilarities were the result of ‘copying', not ofthe structural similarities in materialcircumstances and possibilities. While the ideaof Third World

nationalists copying American and Europeanmodels hardly served to de-Europeanizeanything, it completely neglected the level atwhich the true creativity of any nationalismmay be found: below the level of the broadstructural similarities where one found thevarious ways in which the nationalists deployedthe differing social, political, economic andcul tural resources they had and theeffectiveness with which they were able to

formulate and fulfil the equally various tasks ofbuilding nations.

Reading IC, one might never suspect that thirdworld nationalists coped with qualitatively newproblems, economically, politically andculturally. One might never suspect that theysought to stem colonial resource and economicdrain, to reverse deindustrialization andreorient economies from imperial to nationalpriorities, e.g. by creating food self-sufficiencyand recovering resources controlled byforeigners. One might never suspect that theyoverthrew or reformed ancient regimes -Empires, Caliphates or kingdoms - creatednational out of colonial bureaucracies,concocted ‘unity in diversity' and ‘pancha sila'long before anyone had ever thought of‘multiculturalism', displayed a precociousmodernity in modernising available ‘traditions'to serve new ends as in India's Panchayati Rajor Tanzania's Ujamaa. One might never suspectthat they laboured to unite nations againstcolonial ‘divide and rule', gave entirely newmeanings to terms like secularism, as in India,or communism, as in China or Vietnam, orproduced critiques of oppressive ‘traditional'cultures often in the face of Europeanromanticizations of the same. Many of theseinitiatives failed or misfired. The fact remainsthat they testified to a creativity which is rarelyreferred to, let along acknowledged in Western

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discourses, including western discourses onnationalism.

Ironically, Anderson arguably overlooked thereal significance of his idea of ‘Creolepioneers.' Anderson had complained in thePreface of the 1991 edition that this move hadbeen more or less completely neglected in thereception of the book's first edition. To drawattention to it he re-titled the chapter about it‘Creole Pioneers'. Neither the prefatorycomments nor the new title substantiallyaltered the situation, however, perhapsbecause Anderson himself did not fully graspthe implications of his move. Locating theorigins of nationalism in a ‘first wave' in theAmericas - beginning with the revolt ofBritain's American colonies in 1776, thuspredating the French Revolution, from whichscholars of nationalism usually dated thebeginnings of nationalism, by a critical fewyears - was IC's most important theoreticalmove, and potentially its most originalcontribution to the study of nationalism, on twocounts.

First, it had the potential to link discussions ofthe geo-politics of capitalist modernity,including the politics of uneven and combineddevelopment and the spread of nation-states inresponse to it, with discussions of nationalisms:the two are undeniably, but still all-too-obscurely, intertwined (see Desai, 2009a and2009d), though the complete absence of anydiscussion of Holland's 16th century overthrowof Spanish rule and of England's 17th-centuryCivil War and revolution was problematic. Thepotential could not be realized, however, givenAnderson's exclusive focus on matters cultural.Secondly, in order to locate the origins ofnationalism in the Americas, Anderson arguedagainst the grain of the study of nationalismhitherto, so long focused not only on Europebut also taking as paradigmatic its mid-19thcentury ‘ethno-linguistic' nationalisms. The‘Creole Pioneers' of nationalism weredistinguished neither by ethnicity nor languagefrom the mother countries against whom theydefined their nationhood. This was a theoreticalmove which potentially could theorize (andlegitimize) a greater variety of nationalisms,detaching nationalism from ethnicity andlanguage, and potentially other ‘primordial'

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elements with which nationalism has all toolong been associated to the detriment of theunderstanding of its real historical and politicalcharacter.

Inadvertent success

The most famous thing about IC was, of course,its title: Anderson lamented in the 2006 post-face that ‘the vampires of banality have by nowsucked almost all the blood' (p. 207n) from it.However, there was a profound irony here,which Anderson did not note. As a catch-phrase,

‘imagined communities' inspired a great deal ofscholarly output, largely of a humanist andpostmodern sort. However, most of this writingworked themes of imagination, creativity,forging and forgery, and inventedness of this orthat nation and, less frequently, of nationalisms

in general (because so little of postmodern andhumanist scholarship tends to be theoretical,and so much about particularities which arecelebrated as such), themes which it was notAnderson's aim to invoke at all. What he meantby the phrase turns out to be, in retrospect,rather banal: the nation's imagined, as opposedto experienced character. In this sense, thenation was not the only sort of imaginedcommunity: a nation was ‘imagined'

because the members of even the smallestnation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yetin the minds of each lives the image of theircommunion ... In fact, all communities largerthan primordial villages of face-to-face contact(and perhaps even those) are imagined. (p. 6)

The idea of the inventedness of nations andnationalisms would have gone against the grainof Anderson's very respectful treatment of thephenomena. Anderson complained about howthere was ‘among cosmopolitan and polylingualintellectuals ... a certain condescension[towards nationalism]. Like Gertrude Stein inthe face of Oakland, one can rather quicklyconclude that there is "no there there"'' (5).Such condescension also laced the work ofscholars of nationalism who, like Renan, could,for example, be exasperated by the distancethat separated nationalist from reliableaccounts of history (Renan, 1996). The idea ofthe inventedness of nations, with all theirreverence that came with the formulation,was better expressed in Eric Hobsbawm and

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Terence Ranger 's explorat ion of theinventedness of so much culture, in this case,imperial as well as national, that appeared inthe same year as IC, The Invention of Tradition(1983).

The effects

As I reflected on this strange record of failureto achieve declared aims and inadvertentsuccess at that which was not even attempted,an analogy insistently forced itself on me. Thefailure of IC was no ordinary failure. JamesFerguson (1990) showed how, in the case ofdevelopment projects in Lesotho, theimportance of certain undertakings lay not intheir success in achieving their stated aims, butprecisely in the political effects of theirfailures.

‘Development' institutions generate their ownform of discourse, and this discoursesimultaneously constructs Lesotho as aparticular kind of object of knowledge, andcreates a structure of knowledge around thatobject. Interventions are then organized on thebasis of this structure of knowledge, which,while ‘failing' on their own terms, nonethelesshave regular effects, which include theexpansion and entrenchment of bureaucraticstate power, side by side with the projection ofa representation of economic and social lifewhich denies ‘politics' and, to the extent that itis successful, suspends its effects. The shortanswer to the ques t ion o f what the‘development' apparatus in Lesotho does, then,is found in the book's title: it is an ‘antipoliticsmachine', depoliticizing everything it touches,everywhere whisking political realities out ofsight, all the while performing, almostunnoticed, its own pre-eminently politicaloperation of expanding bureaucratic power.(Ferguson, 1990: xiv-xv)

IC ‘while "fail ing" on [its] own terms,nonetheless [has] regular effects' on thescholarly field in which it intervenes, inflectingit to the right, primarily by de-politicizing it andmaking nationalism a part of inconsequentialcultural erudition while neoliberalismattempted to roll back the gains of nationalindependence for so much of the Third World.For a whole generation of scholarship in theage of neo-liberalism, IC smoothed the pathaway from the rich traditions of theorizingpolitics, political economy and history, not tomention culture, in historical materialism bygiving false reports of its bankruptcy. And,most ironical ly , i t made the study ofnationalism more Eurocentric than ever beforewhile de-legitimizing Third World nationalismsas Western constructs at precisely thehistorical moment when neo-liberalism neededto be countered by progressive politics alongnational as well as class lines. At least part ofthe popularity of IC was the product ofneoliberalism and its derivatives, ‘globalization'and new formulations of ‘empire', all of whichopposed national and social attempts to undothe harms of markets and capitalism. As thesecome crashing down in the world-wideeconomic crisis which marks the end of thecentury's first decade, as it becomes clear justhow national the responses to the crisis havebeen despite decades of neoliberal andpostmodern and postcolonial anti-statediscourses, one hopes that those interested innationalisms and nation-states will turn to thetraditions of scholarship which have betterilluminated the dynamics of nationalist andrevolutionary change than has IC.

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Radhika Desai is Professor of Political Studiesat the Department of Political Studies,University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. Sheis the author of Slouching Towards Ayodhya:From Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics(2004), Intellectuals and Socialism: ‘SocialDemocrats' and the Labour Party (1994) andnumerous articles in Economic and PoliticalWeekly, New Left Review, Third WorldQuarterly and other journals and editedcollections on parties, culture, politicaleconomy and nationalism. Most recently shehas edited Developmental and CulturalNationalisms, a special issue of Third WorldQuarterly (2008, 29(3)). She is

currently working on two books - When Was

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Globalization? Origin and End of a US Strategyand The Making of the Indian Capitalist Class.email: desair@cc.umanitoba.ca]

Radhika Desai wrote this article for The Asia-

Pacific Journal.

Recommended citation: Radhika Desai, "TheInadvertence of Benedict Anderson," The Asia-Pacific Journal, March 16, 2009.