places, Anderson clears space for his own reflections only by brushing
a great deal under the
proverbial carpet.
To go on to the aims retrospectively announced in 2006, two of them were to ‘critically’
support Nairn, and to overcome not just Marxism’s but liberalism’s limitations on nationalism.
We find, however, that IC’s few theoretical criticisms are reserved for Marxism: in IC Anderson
does not have two interlocutors, only one: the Marxist Tom Nairn. All the references to Seton-
Watson are exegetical: relying on the rich historical detail, particularly on matters Eastern and
Central European, of Nations and States, to illustrate this or that point, agreeing rather than
disagreeing with him on all critical issues.
Anderson’s theoretical thrusts against Nairn miss their mark. When he berates Nairn for
applying the terms ‘pathology’, ‘neurosis’ and ‘dementia’
to nationalism, despite his broad
sympathies for it (p. 5), Anderson overlooks the double-sidedness of Nairn’s appreciation of
nationalism encapsulated in his designation of nationalism as the ‘modern Janus’, looking
forward as well as back, emancipating as well as oppressing, modern as well as, avowedly at
least, antique. In a largely imaginary contest which Anderson sets up between nation and class,
Anderson surely has a point when he says that racism has its roots in class (pp. 148–9). But to
claim that it has nothing to do with nationalism is to ignore how national inequality has been
productive of racism from an international perspective as much as class inequality had been
productive of racism in domestic contexts.
Finally, we come to Anderson’s criticism of Nairn’s argument that nationalism was ‘tied
to the political baptism of the lower classes’ (Nairn 1981: 41). Anderson’s refutation is
inconsistent. In reference to Spanish America’s pioneering nationalisms, for example, he tells us
at one point how the Creole nationalists feared the Negro working population and, a few lines
later, that they sought to make nationals and citizens out of it (p. 49). This is a critical issue
because Anderson uses this as an opening for the central argument of his book: that nationalism
spread around the world in the wake of the American Declaration of Independence (and the
French Revolution that came so close on its heels) because later nationalists were
able to work from visible models provided by their distant, and after the convulsions of
the French Revolution, not so distant, predecessors. The ‘nation’ thus became something
capable of being consciously aspired to from early on, rather than a slowly sharpening
frame of vision. Indeed, as we shall see, the ‘nation’ proved an invention on which it was
impossible to secure a patent. It became available for pirating by widely different, and
sometimes unexpected, hands. (67)
Rather than the entry of the
lower classes into politics,
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’ model
by nationalists who came later. But
such ‘political baptism’ was merely as
aspect of nationalism for Nairn, and not
an explanation for the origin and spread
of nationalism, to be supplanted by
‘piracy’ and the ‘modular character of
nationalism’. In attempting to best one
of Nairn’s more insightful comments
about the centrality of popular mobilization in nationalism – that ‘The new middle class
intelligentsia of nationalism had to invite the masses into history; and the invitation card had to
be written in a language they understood’ (Nairn, 1981: 340). Anderson claims that ‘it will be
hard to see why the invitation came to seem so attractive, and
why such different alliances were able to issue it, unless we turn
finally to piracy’ (p. 80). This simply rings false. First, while
usually educated middle-class nationalist leaders were aware of
nationalist struggles of other times and places and undoubtedly
applied aspects of this knowledge to their own situations (Why
would they not? Why re-invent the wheel?), they also faced
unique historical circumstances in which they had to lead
struggles against actual or threatened foreign domination. They had to fashion nationalisms out
of an equally unique set of resources offered by history. It was the structural similarity of the task
that fell upon one nationalist leadership after another in the long story of the emergence of the
nation-states system, and not some modular character it had, that imposed the broad similarities
on nationalisms which have been so widely observed. Within the parameters of such structural
similarities, however, nationalists could be more or less creative and more or less effective in
accomplishing their tasks. Secondly, people responded to such ‘invitation cards’ on the basis of
their understanding of the gains being offered – prosperity or equality, land or electricity, jobs or
dignity, peace or revenge – not because they were sold on the idea of being nations in the image
of some other nations.
If Anderson’s criticisms of Nairn all fail, what remains of his promise to ‘critically
support’ Nairn’s theory? Not much, given that he completely ignores the substance of Nairn’s
account of nationalism in The Break-up of Britain. This is hardly the place for an exegesis of this
argument and only its broad thrust may be outlined so as to gauge the extent of Anderson’s
elision. Nairn’s argument is fundamentally materialist and in good part his ‘indictment’ of
official Marxism was made with a view to invoking critical currents of Marxism to present a
more fully historical materialist, i.e. Marxist, theory of nationalism. For Nairn took the
development together of nationalism and capitalism, that is, of nation and class and nation,
seriously. He criticized most accounts of nationalism for being ‘vitiated from the start by a