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.
Political imposture
The opening pages of IC inform us
that it was occasioned by the wars in
Indo-China which began in the late
1970s. They underlined, for
Anderson, the enduring importance of
nationalism.
While it was just possible to interpret
the Sino-Soviet border clashes of
1969, and the Soviet military
interventions in Germany (1953),
Hungary (1956) Czechoslovakia
(1968), and Afghanistan (1980) in
terms of – according to taste – ‘social imperialism,’ ‘defending socialism’ etc., no one, I
imagine, seriously believes that such vocabularies have much bearing on what has
occurred in Indochina. (p. 1)
Quite why ‘it was just possible’ to see European events in terms of class politics and ideology
and not the events in Indochina is not explained and one cannot help wondering if, like so many
writers, Anderson also reserves class categories for the West and national ones for the rest
(Ahmad 1992). At any rate, the sub-text positions Anderson as a Marxist or someone
sympathetic to Marxism, who was forced, at long last, to admit that the forces of narrow
nationalism had betrayed Marxist ideals of
socialist fraternity and internationalism.
Casting around for an explanation, he then
discovered that despite ‘the immense
influence that nationalism has exerted on
the modern world, plausible theory about it
is conspicuously meagre’ (p. 3). Thus IC.
Framed in this way, IC appears as a work of
one with deep sympathies with the left,
emerging at a critical moment to reflect on
its past mistakes and failures.
This is misleading in several respects. Though the wars in Indo-China disillusioned many
Marxists, this was hardly because of they betrayed a hitherto unacknowledged nationalism,
because disputes between European Communist nations were somehow possible to understand
within Marxist terms and those between the Asian communist ones were not. While the Stalinist
defence of ‘socialism in one country’ was certainly seen by Marxists to be a compromise of
Communism’s global aspirations, national realities were not simply opposed to class ones by
Marxists. The Soviet regime had to deal with nationalities internally from its earliest days and it
supported national liberation abroad.
Anderson’s stance is quite audacious and could only be credible to those ignorant of
Marxist theoretical traditions and easily susceptible to stereotypes of it. Consistently
IC attributes
to Marxism a simplistic opposition between nation and class, between nationalism and
Communism. In reality, of course, while there were always tensions, slippages and gaps in
Marxist understandings of nationalism, such an opposition was a creation of Cold War anti-
Communism, not of Marxism or Communism. These intellectual and political traditions aimed,
instead, to comprehend the interaction between these two principles, however well or badly this
or that thinker accomplished the task. Whether it was Marx and Engels’ injunction to each
working class to settle scores with its own bourgeoisie in the Communist Manifesto, Marx’s
clarity about the importance of India’s independence for even her capitalist, let alone socialist,
development, Engels’ notion of peoples with and without history, Luxemburg’s interventions on
the question of Poland, Lenin’s and Bolshevik support for self-determination and their
theorization of imperialism, Gramsci’s ideas about the ‘national-popular’ or the Austro-Marxists’
insights about the interaction of nationalism and social democracy in the context of the empire,
classical Marxism sought to theorize the interaction of nationalism and Communism, of nation
and class, in concrete circumstances of capitalism and imperialism. Nowhere does Anderson