The Inadvertence of Benedict Anderson: Engaging Imagined Communities

Radhika Desai

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism London: Verso, 2006, second revised edition (first published 1983, revised edition, 1991). xv + 240 pp. ISBN 9781844670864

Inevitably, this assessment is made against the backdrop of the rather drastic swings of fortune which IC’s object of study – nationality, nation-ness, nationalism (p. 4 [all numbers in brackets indicate page references in the 2006 edition]) – underwent since the book’s publication, including being consigned to the proverbial ‘dustbin of history’ by many, Anderson included (see Desai, 2009b). When IC was originally published in 1983, and in its 1991 new and expanded edition, Anderson insisted that ‘the “end of the era of nationalism,” so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight. Indeed, nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time’ (p. 3). Then came that complex historical conjuncture when the Soviet Union broke up into its constituent national units and ‘globalization’ hit the newsstands. (The two were connected: one of the least fuzzy of globalization’s many meanings was the extension of the capitalist world over the former Communist bloc, re-establishing the global reach that had been broken by the Russian Revolution although even those who subscribed to it (Rosenberg 2005) overlooked the fact that this process had begun decades before the collapse of the Soviet Union with the US rapprochement with China.) This conjuncture seemed to have opposing implications for nations and nationalisms. While the fall of Communism added many more nations to the roster of the United Nations, complete with outpourings of national sentiment, in its more widely accepted meanings, ‘globalization’ was deemed corrosive of nation-states and nationalisms, its increased commercialization and commodification dissolving national institutions and borders, rendering nation-states irrelevant.

Though Anderson had, until at least 1991, insisted on the crucial importance of nations and nationalism, he now changed his assessment, relying not on any lines of analysis developed in IC, indeed, not even referring to them, but on the popular understanding that ‘globalization’ – migrations, the fall of Communism, technological, transport and communications revolutions, transnational investments and the like (Anderson, 1996: 8) – had made the future of nations and nationalisms unsure. While the central claims of globalization, including the claim that it was rendering nation-states ineffective and irrelevant, were beginning to be contested, (Hirst and Thompson 1999, Wade 1996, Weiss 1998; cf. Desai 2009e forthcoming), Anderson swallowed globalization discourse whole. He claimed that the break-up of the Soviet Union had merely created ‘a congeries of weak, economically fragile nation-states . . . some entirely new, others residues of the settlement of 1918; in either case, from many points of view a quarter of a century too late’. They were ‘unlikely to disturb global trends’ which portended ‘the impending crisis of the hyphen that for two hundred years yoked state and nation’. The hyphenation of the nationalist aspiration to statehood and the state’s need for loyalty and obedience had become radically uncertain and ‘[p]ortable nationality, read under the sign of “identity” is on the rapid rise as people everywhere are on the move’ (Anderson, 1996: 8). Older and better established states could also be expected to have their problems, particularly given the acceleration of technological change and cost-escalation in the military sphere:

. . . [s]tates incapable of militarily defending their citizens, and hard put to ensure them employment and ever-better life chances, may busy themselves with policing women’s bodies and schoolchildren’s curricula, but [he asked] is this kind of thing enough over the long term to sustain the grand demands of sovereignty? (Anderson, 1996: 9)

Anderson’s new position was only apparently similar to Eric Hobsbawm’s complex historical verdict on post-Soviet nationalism. Hobsbawm had said already in 1990 that nationalism had ‘become historically less important’ (and was probably the interlocutor against whom, a year later, Anderson had insisted on the continuing historical importance of nations and nationalisms). For Hobsbawm it was already clear then that nationalism was ‘no longer . . . a global political programme, as it may be said to have been in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries’ (Hobsbawm, 1990: 191).

‘[N]ation’ and ‘nationalism’ are no longer adequate terms to describe, let alone analyse, the political entities described as such, or even the sentiments once described by these words. It is not impossible that nationalism will decline with the decline of the nation-state, without which being English, Irish or Jewish, or a combination of all these, is only one way in which people describe their identity among the many others which they use for this purpose, as occasion demands. It would be absurd to claim that this day is already near. However, I hope it can at least be envisaged. (Hobsbawm, 1990: 192)

This judgement was merely confirmed by the apparent resurgence of nations and nationalisms produced by the fall of Communism: they were merely ‘The chickens of World War I coming home to roost’, a settling of past accounts, frozen by the rise of Communism and unfrozen by its fall (Hobsbawm, 1996: 259). This was the verdict of a historian of nations and nationalisms who had remained, throughout, sceptical of their claims and uneasy with their particularising thrust. It said merely that nations and nationalism had ceased 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 and nationalisms were declining, they were doing so very gradually. Hobsbawm’s position differed from Anderson’s not only in its consistency with his earlier work, but also in having no truck with voguish ‘globalization’.

That Anderson’s critical volte-face is not referred to, discussed or reflected upon, let alone made the basis of any reassessment of IC’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’s intellectual convictions really go, how firmly his scholarly judgements are rooted in an investigation and weighing of the evidence, and how seriously he takes the normal scholarly injunction to consistency. The only new material in the 2006 edition is a largely self-congratulatory, not to say cute, account of IC’s ‘subsequent travel-history in light of some of the book’s own central themes: print-capitalism, piracy in the positive, metaphorical sense, vernacularization, and nationalism’s undivorceable marriage to internationalism’ (p. 207).

In this essay, I explore what I take to be the more important contradictions and ambiguities of IC. A first set of criticisms concerns the relationship of the book to the political occasion which avowedly inspired it: the relation turns out to be far more complex and ambiguous than Anderson gave his readers to understand. This leads on to an assessment of the book’s fulfilment of its aims, as originally stated in 1983 and later elaborated upon in the post-face to the new edition of 2006. The critical nature of these reflections must not be taken to mean that IC broke no new ground. Two major achievements are noted: however, in the first case, Anderson himself seems unaware of the true significance of his theoretical move and, in the second, there is an inadvertence which makes full accreditation difficult. The essay closes with reflections on the inadvertent achievements and failures of the work.