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
Like celebrities who ‘need no introduction’, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities
(hereinafter
IC) should need no review. After all, it is one of the most widely cited works in its
field and such academic ubiquity is surely review enough. Indeed, no single phrase occurs as
widely and frequently in the literature on nationalism as ‘imagined communities’. That it is not
always attributed to its original creator is testimony to its pervasive
acceptance and adoption. However, I am probably not alone in having long
felt a certain unease with IC: not on individual points, though many of these
have been criticized (see Özkırımlı, 2000, for a convenient summary of the
principal criticisms of IC), but with slippages between its stated aims and
arguments and their real logic. My unease was recently heightened when I
tried to place IC – the conjuncture in the development of nations and
nationalisms at which it intervened and the contribution it made – within a
larger historical perspective on nationalism’s evolution over recent centuries,
and an intellectual historical perspective on attempts to comprehend it (Desai
2009b). Re-reading IC in its new edition – now including a post-face
detailing the impressive history of its translations and editions – nearly a
quarter century after its original publication has served to crystallize vague
unease into overall assessment.
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)