Europe’. Now, as Anderson saw it, ‘the immediate genealogy should be traced to the imaginings
of the colonial state’ (p. 163). Anderson is surely dissimulating when he suggests that this
conclusion might appear ‘surprising’ because colonial states ‘were typically anti-nationalist’ (p.
163). The view that nationalisms of the Third World borrowed from their colonial masters is
simply too widespread. In any case, borrowing from Europeans when ‘at home’ as it were, was
hard to distinguish from borrowing from them when ‘away’ in the colonies. Now the explanation
of the shape of the nationalisms of the ‘last wave’ even dispensed with the agency of ‘bilingual’
elites who did the work of imitation and replaced it entirely with that of largely European
colonial elites. Some ‘de-Europeanization’! Some nationalism!
As already noted, the real problem with the argument about the modular character of
nationalism was the implication that the similarities were the result of ‘copying’, not of the
structural similarities in material circumstances and possibilities. While the idea of Third World
nationalists copying American and European models hardly served to de-Europeanize anything,
it completely neglected the level at which the true creativity of any nationalism may be found:
below the level of the broad structural similarities where one found the various ways in which
the nationalists deployed the differing social, political, economic and cultural resources they had
and the effectiveness with which they were able to formulate and fulfil the equally various tasks
of building nations.
Reading IC, one might never suspect that third world nationalists coped with qualitatively
new problems, economically, politically and culturally. One might never suspect that they sought
to stem colonial resource and economic drain, to reverse deindustrialization and reorient
economies from imperial to national priorities, e.g. by creating food self-sufficiency and
recovering resources controlled by foreigners. One might never suspect that they overthrew or
reformed ancient regimes – Empires, Caliphates or kingdoms – created national out of colonial
bureaucracies, concocted ‘unity in diversity’ and ‘pancha sila’ long before anyone had ever
thought of ‘multiculturalism’,
displayed a precocious modernity
in modernising available
‘traditions’ to serve new ends as in
India’s Panchayati Raj or
Tanzania’s Ujamaa. One might
never suspect that they laboured to
unite nations against colonial
‘divide and rule’, gave entirely new
meanings to terms like secularism,
as in India, or communism, as in
China or Vietnam, or produced
critiques of oppressive ‘traditional’
cultures often in the face of European romanticizations of the same. Many of these initiatives
failed or misfired. The fact remains that they testified to a creativity which is rarely referred to,
let along acknowledged in Western discourses, including western discourses on nationalism.
Ironically, Anderson arguably overlooked the real significance of his idea of ‘Creole
pioneers.’ Anderson had complained in the Preface of the 1991 edition that this move had been
more or less completely neglected in the reception of the book’s first edition. To draw attention
to it he re-titled the chapter about it ‘Creole Pioneers’. Neither the prefatory comments nor the
new title substantially altered the situation, however, perhaps because Anderson himself did not
fully grasp the implications of his move. Locating the origins of nationalism in a ‘first wave’ in
the Americas – beginning with the revolt of Britain’s American colonies in 1776, thus predating
the French Revolution, from which scholars of nationalism usually dated the beginnings of
nationalism, by a critical few years – was IC’s most important theoretical move, and potentially
its most original contribution to the study of nationalism, on two counts.
First, it had the potential to link discussions of the geo-politics of capitalist modernity,
including the politics of uneven and combined development and the spread of nation-states in
response to it, with discussions of nationalisms: the two are undeniably, but still all-too-
obscurely, intertwined (see Desai, 2009a and 2009d), though the complete absence of any
discussion of Holland’s 16
th
century overthrow of Spanish rule and of England’s 17th-century
Civil War and revolution was problematic. The potential could not be realized, however, given
Anderson’s exclusive focus on matters cultural. Secondly, in order to locate the origins of
nationalism in the Americas, Anderson argued against the grain of the study of nationalism
hitherto, so long focused not only on Europe but also taking as
paradigmatic its mid-19th century ‘ethno-linguistic’ nationalisms. The
‘Creole Pioneers’ of nationalism were distinguished neither by ethnicity
nor language from the mother countries against whom they defined their
nationhood. This was a theoretical move which potentially could theorize
(and legitimize) a greater variety of nationalisms, detaching nationalism
from ethnicity and language, and potentially other ‘primordial’ elements
with which nationalism has all too long been associated to the detriment
of the understanding of its real historical and political character.
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 now sucked 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 of scholarly output, largely of a humanist and
postmodern sort. However, most of this writing worked themes of imagination, creativity,
forging and forgery, and inventedness of this or that nation and, less frequently, of nationalisms
in general (because so little of postmodern and humanist scholarship tends to be theoretical, and
so much about particularities which are celebrated as such), themes which it was not Anderson’s
aim to invoke at all. What he meant by the phrase turns out to be, in retrospect, rather banal: the
nation’s imagined, as opposed to experienced character. In this sense, the nation was not the only
sort of imagined community: a nation was ‘imagined’
because the 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 ... In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-
face contact (and perhaps even those) are imagined. (p. 6)
The idea of the inventedness of nations and nationalisms would have gone against the grain of
Anderson’s very respectful treatment of the phenomena. Anderson complained about how there
was ‘among cosmopolitan and polylingual intellectuals ... a certain condescension [towards
nationalism]. Like Gertrude Stein in the face of Oakland, one can rather quickly conclude that
there is “no there there”’’ (5). Such condescension also laced the work of scholars of nationalism
who, like Renan, could, for example, be exasperated by the distance
that separated nationalist from reliable accounts of history (Renan,
1996). The idea of the inventedness of nations, with all the irreverence
that came with the formulation, was better expressed in Eric Hobsbawm
and Terence Ranger’s exploration of the inventedness of so much
culture, in this case, imperial as well as national, that appeared in the
same year as IC, The Invention of Tradition (1983).
The effects
As I reflected on this strange record of failure to achieve declared aims
and inadvertent success at that which was not even attempted, an
analogy insistently forced itself on me. The failure of IC was no
ordinary failure. James Ferguson (1990) showed how, in the case of
development projects in Lesotho, the importance of certain
undertakings lay not in their success in achieving their stated aims, but precisely in the political
effects of their failures.
‘Development’ institutions generate their own form of discourse, and this discourse
simultaneously constructs Lesotho as a particular kind of object of knowledge, and
creates a structure of knowledge around that object. Interventions are then organized on
the basis of this structure of knowledge, which, while ‘failing’ on their own terms,
nonetheless have regular effects, which include the expansion and entrenchment of
bureaucratic state power, side by side with the projection of a representation of economic
and social life which denies ‘politics’ and, to the extent that it is successful, suspends its
effects. The short answer to the question of what the ‘development’ apparatus in Lesotho
does, then, is found in the book’s title: it is an ‘antipolitics machine’, depoliticizing
everything it touches, everywhere whisking political realities out of sight, all the while
performing, almost unnoticed, its own pre-eminently political operation of expanding
bureaucratic power. (Ferguson, 1990: xiv–xv)
IC ‘while “failing” on [its] own terms, nonetheless [has] regular effects’ on the scholarly field in
which it intervenes, inflecting it to the right, primarily by de-politicizing it and making
nationalism a part of inconsequential cultural erudition while neoliberalism attempted to roll
back the gains of national independence for so much of the Third World. For a whole generation
of scholarship in the age of neo-liberalism, IC smoothed the path away from the rich traditions of
theorizing politics, political economy and history, not to mention culture, in historical
materialism by giving false reports of its bankruptcy. And, most ironically, it made the study of
nationalism more Eurocentric than ever before while de-legitimizing Third World nationalisms
as Western constructs at precisely the historical moment when neo-liberalism needed to be
countered by progressive politics along national as well as class lines. At least part of the
popularity of IC was the product of neoliberalism and its derivatives, ‘globalization’ and new
formulations of ‘empire’, all of which opposed national and social attempts to undo the harms of
markets and capitalism. As these come crashing down in the world-wide economic crisis which
marks the end of the century’s first decade, as it becomes clear just how national the responses to
the crisis have been despite decades of neoliberal and postmodern and postcolonial anti-state
discourses, one hopes that those interested in nationalisms and nation-states will turn to the
traditions of scholarship which have better illuminated the dynamics of nationalist and
revolutionary change than has IC.
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Radhika Desai is Professor of Political Studies at the Department of Political Studies, University
of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. She is the author of Slouching Towards Ayodhya: From
Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics (2004), Intellectuals and Socialism: ‘Social Democrats’
and the Labour Party (1994) and numerous articles in Economic and Political Weekly, New Left
Review, Third World Quarterly and other journals and edited collections on parties, culture,
political economy and nationalism. Most recently she has edited Developmental and Cultural
Nationalisms, a special issue of Third World Quarterly (2008, 29(3)). She is
currently working on two books – When Was Globalization? Origin and End of a US Strategy
and The Making of the Indian Capitalist Class. email: desair@cc.umanitoba.ca]
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