Imagined Communities: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

After World War One, the old dynastic order was replaced by the League of Nations (an earlier organization similar to the present-day United Nations); after World War Two, “the nation-state tide reached full flood,” and in the 1970s the last (and first) of the empires—the Portuguese—finally fell. In this chapter, Anderson looks at the specific traits of nations that formed after World War Two, which were mostly outside Europe but still used European languages in government. They combined popular nationalism with official nationalism, and are still largely works in progress. And they preserved the borders drawn by colonial powers due to “the geography of all colonial pilgrimages” from colony to Europe, in the same way that Latin America did, even though they lacked the “real problems of communication and transportation” that hampered Latin America two centuries before.

But Anderson notes that, for three significant reasons, many more Africans could make colonial pilgrimages to the imperial center during the 20th century. First, transportation technology (trains and ships) caused an “enormous increase in physical mobility.” Secondly, because the European empires and bureaucracies were so large when operating in Africa, they recruited not only creoles, but also bilingual natives. And thirdly, the spread of education made travel to Europe more accessible and bilingualism among natives much more widespread than before. Bilingualism in turn meant they could write back directly to their overlords, and that they learned about European struggles for independence and revolutionary philosophies. What’s more, they learned these histories through the lens of nationalism, even when that was not the goal of the original actors’ freedom struggle.

This wave of nationalists was also uniformly young, which “signified dynamism, progress, self-sacrificing idealism and revolutionary will.” It also meant a generational gap between the young who were educated in the colonial language and the old who never learned it. Indonesia, an incredibly diverse set of ethnic groups, religions, and histories living on thousands of islands, is a prime example. Indonesians came to think of themselves as countrymen in part because of the “colossal, highly rationalized, tightly centralized hierarchy” of colonial schools. These schools taught everyone the same things with the same materials and also forced students to move to progressively larger population centers to continue their educations, first from villages to provincial towns for secondary school, and then to only two cities—Batavia (Jakarta) or Bandung—for university. This “gave the maps of the colony which they studied […] a territorially specific imagined reality.”

Another important factor in Indonesia was that the Dutch colonial power derided and hated all native Indonesians equally, which led those natives to think of themselves as a collective, especially when the Dutch started treating non-native non-Europeans living in Indonesia more favorably (and even Japanese people as “honorary Europeans”). This racist concept of the “native” did not have the same equalizing force everywhere, however, in large part due to the differences in bureaucratic structures.

In French West Africa, education was initially centered in Dakar, the present-day capital of Senegal, which forced elites from the whole region to make pilgrimages to the city. But later, when schools were built around the region, Dakar lost its status. And even more importantly, Dakar was never as important administratively as Jakarta was in Dutch Indonesia, which meant that though West Africans educated there had a general sense of transnational solidarity, they also identified specifically with their own future nations.

In Indochina—a territory that now comprises the sovereign states of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam—the ruling French remodeled the education system to distance Laos and Cambodia from Thai cultural influences, tear Vietnam away from Chinese ones, and teach French to elites everywhere. As in Indonesia, higher education funneled people to regional centers: there were only two lycées (government high schools), in Saigon and Hanoi, and the only university was in Hanoi.

But, for a few reasons, “Indochinese” identity never formed as a composite. One reason was the parallel creation of bilingual schools, first in French and Vietnamese and later in French and the native Cambodian language Khmer, which later led to the creation of a third lycée in Cambodia’s largest city, Phnom Penh. Both split the region on the basis of locals’ native languages. And unlike other empires, the French allowed some natives to work in other colonies—specifically, Vietnamese bureaucrats were allowed to work in Laos and Cambodia.

As a result, Vietnamese bureaucrats were probably the only ones to think of French Indochina as a unified whole. In contrast, people from Laos and Cambodia formed distinct identities, and it is no coincidence that Cambodians educated in the French bilingual schools and then denied opportunities at the expense of the Vietnamese became the leaders of Cambodia’s independence movement. While there were historical conflicts between the Vietnamese and Cambodians, there were similar conflicts in Indonesia, and Indonesian nationalism easily put them on the backburner. This was possible because Batavia (Jakarta) never lost its central role, and because people from throughout the archipelago could travel there.

The fascinating “accident” of the Indonesian language was another major contributor to Indonesia’s unity. The Dutch never spread their own language, unlike the French, but instead governed through the common trade language of Malay, which quickly became the major language of print and turned into “the national(-ist) language bahasa Indonesia” that still dominates all but the most local forms of communication in the country. Anderson emphasizes that this does not make Indonesian nationalism more “real” or “authentic” than nationalisms that used colonial European languages—rather, he simply wants to show how this shared language was a crucial tool for “generating imagined communities, building in effect particular solidarities” among diverse peoples in the Indonesian context. European languages can do the same thing in other contexts. In general, he argues, what is important for nationalism is the fact of a shared, written language, rather than the details of which language gets selected.

Indeed, Anderson contends, while Indonesian has become a first language in many parts of Indonesia, the same thing need not happen for a language to truly become national. For example, technology makes it possible for multilingual populations to receive the same news, and leaders are also aware of how to use “systems modelled on official nationalism’s; elections, party organizations, and cultural celebrations” to make people feel like citizens. Although language can be an important contributor to the formation of national consciousness, then, it is not essential at all, especially from the 20th century onwards. To illustrate this point, Anderson turns to one final example: Switzerland.

Multilingual Switzerland did not become an integrated nation until the end of the 19th century. Its shell of a government was the structure left behind by a French occupation in 1798, it was a poor and “overwhelmingly rural” place full of peasants, and it was ruled by a “loose coalition” of aristocrats. Religion was a far more important dividing factor than language until 1848, and basically nobody could understand each other besides the bureaucrats who worked in French. So as to not get trampled by one of its more powerful neighbors, Switzerland chose to make German, Italian, and French equal. But none of this happened until roughly the same time as Asian nationalisms at the turn of the 20th century, “in that period of world history in which the nation was becoming an international norm.”

Anderson ends the chapter by summarizing his argument: “The ‘last wave’ of nationalisms, most of them in the colonial territories of Asia and Africa, was in its origins a response to the new-style global imperialism made possible by the achievements of industrial capitalism.” As print spread, empires and their bureaucracies grew too large, and school and administrative systems in turn created pilgrimage systems in colonies. These factors created classes of “bilingual intelligentsias,” who started imagining creating their own nations based on American and European “models of nation, nation-ness, and nationalism,” which could be refined for their own needs. Through improved communications technology, they could get the nationalist message out faster than ever before, to a wider and more multilingual audience.