Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Imagined Communities, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Nation as Imagined Community
Language, Publishing, and Identity
Centralization, Technology, and Power
Piracy and the Uses of History
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.
Although he again jumps nearly a hundred years ahead to an important new wave of national independence movements, Anderson of course does not mean to erase the numerous revolutions and new nations that were born in between the primary examples he considers. Nevertheless, the post-World War Two period was particularly important for a number of reasons, for instance because many European empires could no longer afford to hold onto colonies, and because many Asian and African colonies sent their populations to fight in the War alongside Europeans, then realized they lacked the same rights they were fighting for. (In a sense, this participation in war can be interpreted as a kind of pilgrimage.)
Themes
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.
Anderson returns to the primary factors he saw as driving Latin American nationalism, which here he sees in hyperdrive because their two central causes—capitalism and technology—were in a more advanced state after World War Two. Africans made more pilgrimages and were more integrated into the fabric of empire, both political and intellectual. And their strategy of reading nationalist intentions into historical movements—ones that unintentionally produced nations—suggests how Anderson sees the study of nationalism and past independence movements as possibly fruitful for future revolutionaries (whether nationalist or not).
Themes
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.”
Anderson is suggesting that nationalists’ youth made it easier for them to imagine communities, perhaps because their previous forms of self-identification were less fixed and certainly because of their fervent, idealistic, creative energy. But their youth also explains why the school became as important a site for pilgrimage as the state: the centralized curriculum of Indonesian schools helped diverse students see a commonality—or communality—among themselves, and the geographical centralization of these schools created a concept of a unified territory centered on Jakarta and Bandung, even though that territory comprised numerous, otherwise unrelated islands. Although he scarcely mentions it, Anderson specializes in the history and politics of Indonesia, making his insights here particularly significant (and explaining why he generally speaks with more authority and less reliance on other scholars’ work here).
Themes
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.
Anderson confirms that imagined national communities can also consolidate around a common enemy, which was certainly always present in territories suffering European colonialism. The added element of racism also enabled the diverse Indonesian population to see themselves as ethno-racially linked, and to tie their national identity to this racialized image of the citizen. So in both these senses, nationalism formed as a mirror image to colonialism, affirming that which the colonizers rejected.
Themes
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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 contrast to Indonesia, French West Africa’s smaller-scale regional schools created a system of hub-cities around the enormous territory, much like in Spanish Latin America until the 19th century. In turn, the students who made pilgrimages to these cities from the surrounding areas came to see those cities as the “centers” of their nations-in-the-making. So again, the scale of administrative (here, educational) centralization under the colonial government set a template for the scale of national identification during the era of revolutions. This was a remarkably powerful force in French West Africa, enough that it overwhelmed the ethnic group identities and divisions that were largely unrelated to colonial borders.
Themes
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.
The case of French Indochina is parallel to French West Africa, although with a crucial difference: ethnic boundaries ultimately translated into political ones in Indochina. This was largely intentional, however, since France worked hard to “divide and conquer” by making different groups see themselves as distinct and opposed to one another. So it is hard to say whether ethnic boundaries created political ones, or vice-versa, since cultural influences and identities were apparently more mixed and blurry until the French began exploiting differences.
Themes
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.
Although there was only one university in Indochina, Anderson seems to conclude that the educational fragmentation of Indochina—particularly because of its linguistic fragmentation—was enough to prevent Khmer, Vietnamese, and Lao speakers from seeing eye-to-eye. Unlike in Indonesia, the French treated some of the people they colonized as superior to the others, which made it more difficult for these colonized peoples to develop a collective identity against the common enemy of the colonizer.
Themes
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.
After making the differences between Indochina and Indonesia clear, Anderson notes that there were nevertheless similar ethnic tensions in Indonesia as in Indochina. This is in part his way of reminding the reader that historical events are reliant on various factors and are seldom black-and-white. And it is also a way of pointing to the relatively greater importance of the outside forces that promoted coherent political units (at first, colonies, which made nations possible), as opposed to existing internal forces that, while important to a nation’s people, were not initially couched in the vocabulary or ideology of nationalism. Finally, here it is worth recalling the example Anderson cites at the beginning of his book—Vietnam has just invaded Cambodia—which is further evidence that the divisions sown between Vietnam and Cambodia, combined with their splicing into different nations, created lasting rivalry and conflict.
Themes
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.
The extraordinary story of bahasa Indonesia, a nonnative language turned national language, is another reason the archipelago became imaginable as a unit to the people living within it. This reaffirms the power of language to both symbolize people’s national identity and open lines of communication throughout the nation, creating possible connections among citizens who would otherwise have virtually nothing in common. At the same time as Indonesia is an extraordinary testament to the power of language, Anderson is again careful to emphasize that language is not a necessary feature for nations to form. The comparison to European languages in former colonies is instructive: both Indonesian and these European languages perform all the necessary functions of connecting citizenry, but the European languages are unlikely to become sources of national identity in the way Malay/Indonesian has in Indonesia.
Themes
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.
From a contemporary perspective, Anderson’s argument about technology’s communicative function and the potential obsolescence of monolingual nations is intuitive or even obvious. In order to emphasize again that history is open and changeable rather than fixed and formulaic, Anderson very clearly distinguishes powerful nationalist tools (like language) from conditions necessary for nations to form (which are very few: just the existence of a community imagined as sovereign and limited).
Themes
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 seems to imply that Switzerland became a nation as though by default: a highly decentralized rural society, it only unified after another power (France) took an interest in it for the first time. In a sense, this parallels narratives of postcolonial sovereignty. The relative unimportance of language as a source of identity (as compared with religion) in Switzerland also indicates that language need not matter very much for nations to be successful: it is not always a determining factor. And there are, of course, numerous other examples of successful multilingual nations, spanning all the eras and waves of nationalism (such as Canada, Belgium, India, and South Africa).
Themes
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.
Anderson’s conclusion helps clarify this chapter’s complex argument, which shows how a variety of tools and techniques allowed the imagination of communities in the formerly-colonized world, and how models of previous revolution allowed these imagined communities to make political claims on the empires that ruled them. Asian and African nationalisms are excellent examples of how oppressed peoples can productively use the histories of nations to their advantage—and in turn reshape that history, creating new models for nationalism in the future. This offers an optimistic counterexample to previously discussed cases of piracy and imitation, like the Japanese Empire.
Themes
