Lecture 17: Introduction to Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities PDF

Lecture 17 Introduction to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined communities In this last lecture, I will try to briefly present the third book adopted for the exam, Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson. It is important, above all, to underline this fact. In our class, there are students from ma...

Lecture 17 Introduction to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined communities In this last lecture, I will try to briefly present the third book adopted for the exam, Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson. It is important, above all, to underline this fact. In our class, there are students from many different countries of the world. Why is this aspect so important? It is very important because concepts like ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ might have different connotations for different nationalities. Therefore, the value judgements that we can link to these concepts could also be very different and – I would like to stress this point with particular emphasis – every value judgement related to this concept, in my view, is worthy of deep respect. In Western Europe, for example, I do not think we have the same perspective as citizens from a country conquered in the recent past by another nation might have. In Western Europe, in the first decades of the 19th Century, nationalism developed in harmony with the values of the French Revolution and, for many years, the ideal of nationalism mostly represented a promise of liberty of a nation related to liberal and democratic values. However, despite this fact, we can observe that the rise of the ideal of nationalism was strictly connected, from the very beginning, with several aggressive foreign policies. This ambiguity marked in a certain sense the subsequent development of the idea of nation, first in Europe, and later around the world. The first nationalism in Europe was born in revolutionary France, which invaded many nations in Europe under General Napoleon Bonaparte and his revolutionary army, thus spreading destruction and violence while at the same time fostering the ideals of the revolution (liberty, equality and fraternity) in the occupied countries. This example shows how complex history is, and how it is never simple to separate good and evil, or those who are right from those who are wrong. Furthermore, French nationalism unintentionally caused the rise of nationalism in countries where national feelings had not existed, or were not particularly developed, such as Italy. For many years, in Western and Central Europe, nationalism was the flag of liberal and democratic thinkers and political movements: they did not find any contradiction between the ideal of liberation of the nation and the ideals of individual freedom and democratic participation. The heroic patriots of the Italian Risorgimento, which led to the political unification of the peninsula and the foundation of the sovereign State of Italy – I’m referring for instance to Giuseppe Mazzini – were not nationalists in the meaning that this concept has acquired nowadays. Mazzini founded the ‘Young Italy’, a patriotic association devoted to the national liberation of Italy from the control of foreign States, but he also promoted the ‘Young Europe’, because he believed that Europe could became a confederation of sovereign States and nations. Nevertheless, in the second half of the 19th Century, many nationalists theorized and developed the concept of nationalism in the aggressive meaning of the word. In many cases, nationalism merged with the new ideas of race and with the concept of imperialism. In its imperialist form, nationalism meant death, conquest and destruction for many countries and peoples outside Europe, but even in Europe nationalism was the cause of several wars, among them the two world wars in the 20th Century. In particular, it merged with right wing totalitarian ideologies, like Nazism and Fascism. For this reason, in Western Europe, at least until recently, nationalism, after WWII, became a bad word, an insult, a totally discredited value: in the second half of the 20th Century it was perceived, at least for most intellectuals and politicians, as an ideal linked with policies which jeopardized democracy, or, even worse, which led to genocides and mass exterminations. It can be observed that in Europe even nowadays many nationalist leaders, movements and parties prefer to use the word ‘sovereignism’ instead of nationalism. The process of the political unification of Europe can be understood as an attempt to prevent similar outcomes in the present and in the future and an attempt to extinguish the fire of nationalism once and for all. In Central and Eastern Europe, things developed somewhat differently. After WWII, nations like Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Albania etc. fell under Soviet and Communist control. In some of these countries, the national beliefs were very strong and local communist parties, on the contrary, were very weak. This is the reason why most of the peoples of these countries considered communism a sort of nationalism and imperialism imposed by Russia. In these States, nationalist feelings flowed for decades like underground rivers. Since in these nations communist ideals didn’t really affect most people, local communist parties, especially in the years preceding the fall of the communist system, started adopting national concepts which they clumsily tried to conciliate with the official political religion of the State, based on communist internationalism. Stalin himself took advantage of the idea of nationalism in order to strength the stability of the countless countries ruled by communists inside and outside the Soviet Union, thus laying the foundation of nationalism in these nations. When Communism fell, national beliefs came to light and in many cases replaced Marxism-Leninism. For several reasons, nationalism is on the rise again in today’s Europe. This could be attributed to the sense of uncertainty caused by economic and social challenges and political and moral crisis: people started to lose their trust in liberal and democratic values; the integration of masses of immigrants is not easy, even more in times of economic troubles. In other countries, like Africa, America and Asia, nationalism has had a different development. For example, in the 20th Century, it was linked with national liberation struggles to escape European and Western colonialism, and often it merged with left wing ideologies, especially with Marxism. The result of this struggle of social and national liberation was in many cases the achievement of national independence and national sovereignty. In some cases, for example in Africa and in the Middle East, the building of national states did not correspond to real national traditions, century-old identities and natural geographical barriers, such as rivers, lakes or mountains. The boundaries of many States were drawn with a ruler. Another problem is that nationalism was a European brand, or, at least, many peoples learnt national ideology directly from Europe. I think that Anderson’s book can help us understand the complex phenomenon of nationalism, especially since it elaborates an unconventional point of view on this ideology. In fact, his conceptual definition of nation is unconventional, as is his historical reenactment of the origins and development of the national consciousness. As you will see reading the book, nationalism, according to Anderson, cannot be considered a political ideology. Nationalism is a sort of ‘secular religion’ which is capable of unifying a political community, and developing a strong sense of identity which encompasses different social classes and groups. From this point of view, nationalism must be compared to the previous great cultural systems: religious community and dynastic realms. This is one of the strong points: from a qualitative point of view, national identity is stronger than liberal and democratic identity; inside the nation, from a quantitative point of view, it is also stronger than socialist identity, because socialism tries to unify only some classes, and to fight the others. For Anderson, nation is an imagined community. Imagined community – I think that we must underline very well this point – does not mean false or fictional. Anderson is a serious scholar who tried, first of all, to understand the object of his study. He was not a nationalist, but in his definition of nation there is no value judgment. What does Anderson mean by ‘imagined community’ and what is a nation? Anderson thinks that, in order to fully understand the meaning of this concept (the concept of nation), we have to consider its four main features: to be imagined, to be limited, to be sovereign, to be a community. The nation is an imagined community because members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. The nation is also imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself conterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream a wholly Christian planet. The nation is also sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at the stage of human history when inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism between each faith’s ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state. Finally, the nation is a community because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings. In his very rich and still relevant book, Anderson tries to highlight the cultural roots of national consciousness. In his view, the origins of nationalism must be traced back to at the beginning of 19th century in the new American nations and State, where nationalist movements emerged in ‘creole communities’ - descendants of white European settlers in the North and South Americas. Contrary to a very widespread belief, Anderson states that the pioneers of nationalism were the officials of European empires in America, because they were the first promoters of a strong national feeling. This is the first of four ‘models’ that contributed to the birth of nationalism. The second model is related to the birth of European nationalism. In Europe, nationalism originated from the work of intellectuals, who promoted national languages. This version of nationalism was linked to the development of national bureaucracies. A community based on the bourgeoisie, which needed a nation in order to increase his wealth and power developed. The third step was the birth of a ‘nationalism from the top’, which merged nationalism and dynastic power. Between the 19th and the 20th Century colonial nationalism emerged. This was linked to the national State. Finally, The fourth model of nationalism develops out of the colonial context and institutions of education, bureaucracy, and movement. Anderson argues that in Asia and Africa, the administrative, educated, bilingual intelligentsia came to identify themselves as colonial, national, and part of a solidarity of power and outside models of nation. It is through the experience of travel and educational access that this intelligentsia gained power and created an imagined community of nationals. These are some of the topics, which you can find in Anderson’s book. His interpretation of the complex phenomenon of nationalism is obviously arguable, but I am sure that he developed a new way of interpreting this issue.