Anderson emphasizes that nationalism has taken diverse forms as a result of differences in culture, historical changes in technology and markets, and perhaps most of all, the availability of historical precedent. Anderson highlights this last factor, which he calls “piracy,” because it has been relatively underemphasized in scholarly work on nationalism: after nationalism’s birth in the Americas, the rest of the world followed suit in converting monarchies and colonies to nations, but they envisioned what a nation was and could be through the lens of the nations that already existed. Ironically, many of the differences in nationalism across history are the products of nations trying to do the same things; that is, different ways of adapting history have resulted in a diversity of nations and nationalisms. This shows the contingency at the heart of nationalism: although many nationalists believe their nations to be destined for greatness, in fact most nationalist governments cobble their programs together as they go, taking history as a model and often repeating the errors of those they idolize. Anderson uses these examples to make an argument about the role of history itself: it can help people see that the future is not determined, and that citizens and governments have control over their own futures—including whether they conceptualize themselves through the framework of nationalism.
Anderson emphasizes that nations repeatedly copy one another, “pirating” off of one another’s histories. This creates a paradox: nations look backwards, judging themselves by the standards of the past and trying to replicate history, even as they trudge forward and make the history of the future. Anderson notes that, after the first independent American nations formed as republics, virtually all other newly independent countries followed suit (at least in name). Once the precedent was set, it was seen as absolute, first by the European nations that formed in the 1800s and early 1900s, and later by the African and Asian ones that formed after World War II. But Anderson sees a less uniform, more selective version of this phenomenon behind the 1978-1979 wars between Vietnam, Cambodia, and China: although all three countries had very similar ideologies, they followed different models: Cambodia copied Russia and China, and Vietnam was influenced by the ethno-nationalisms of Europe. Anderson thinks that the war resulted from these differing models, not from the countries’ political philosophies (which were similar). This begins to show how nationalism and other political forms are historically contingent, as much the product of circumstance and accident as leaders’ explicit intentions or goals. Most of all, they are certainly not based in anything like fate or inevitability. Japan offers an extreme example of misinterpreting history. Following after European colonialism, it built one of the most brutal empires ever—this shows the danger in seeing history as destiny (since so many empires were expanding, Japan thought, there would be no other way to survive in the future), and the error in assuming that history was always morally justified. Indeed, Anderson emphasizes that many nationalist movements—despite being themselves historically contingent products of particular social, economic, and cultural circumstances—tend to valorize history as the sum of fate or destiny, think of their nations as timeless entities with some primordial right to territory or power, and selectively “remember/forget” their own national histories in order to create a more positive narrative. When turned into official policy, this can become dangerous, in part because it can lead people to try and repeat events that never really happened, or to develop a deeply distorted vision of their own country and ignore the lessons of history. What these examples of piracy all have in common is a kind of uncritical, token deployment of history as a political strategy, which is based on appealing to people’s nostalgia as a justification for repeating the same mistakes.
In contrast, Anderson also sees another, positive side to piracy: it allows nations to learn from history, not just idolize or copy it, and so makes it possible to constantly refine the potential of the nation as a political form. In some cases, piracy was effective: for instance, by copying European diplomatic strategies and infrastructure construction policies, Thailand successfully dissuaded England and France from colonizing it. In other words, it became one of the very few non-European countries to escape European colonialism by successfully communicating to European powers that it was willing to and capable of meeting their standards of nationalism. This shows how states can selectively deploy lessons from history in order to break rather than repeat historical trends. Similarly, Anderson notes, many nations embrace this paradox through official nationalism: they valorize the past and the idea of the nation, but only as a strategy to improve their nations in the long run (for instance, by offering the next generation a vision worth fighting for). Indeed, Anderson’s whole book is a long argument for the historical contingency of nationalism, which he thinks is neither inevitable nor going away anytime soon: he sees nationalism as the product of specific economic, political, and social factors that, though entrenched, can be eliminated or changed. This means that what nations choose to do can shape the future of the nation-state model, and that part of their freedom to shape the future lies precisely in their decisions about which histories to valorize.
As nations consciously look backwards to other nations for examples and inspiration, Anderson notes, the concept of the nation is at once apparently fixed—because leaders are looking to the past—and constantly evolving—because leaders’ attempts to repeat the past in new contexts are inevitably, if often accidentally, innovative and novel. For Anderson, the solution is for scholars and political leaders to recognize this paradox for what it is: they must learn from the past while planning for and adapting to the future, treating the past as a case study full of trial and error rather than as a model to reproduce.
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Piracy and the Uses of History Quotes in Imagined Communities
The aim of this book is to offer some tentative suggestions for a more satisfactory interpretation of the “anomaly” of nationalism. My sense is that on this topic both Marxist and liberal theory have become etiolated in a late Ptolemaic effort to “save the phenomena”; and that a reorientation of perspective in, as it were, a Copernican spirit is urgently required. My point of departure is that nationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view of that word’s multiple significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind. To understand them properly we need to consider carefully how they have come into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time, and why, today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy. I will be trying to argue that the creation of these artefacts towards the end of the eighteenth century was the spontaneous distillation of a complex “crossing” of discrete historical forces; but that, once created, they became “modular,” capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations. I will also attempt to show why these particular cultural artefacts have aroused such deep attachments.
The century of the Enlightenment, of rationalist secularism, brought with it its own modern darkness. With the ebbing of religious belief, the suffering which belief in part composed did not disappear. Disintegration of paradise: nothing makes fatality more arbitrary. Absurdity of salvation: nothing makes another style of continuity more necessary. What then was required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning. As we shall see, few things were (are) better suited to this end than an idea of nation. If nation-states are widely conceded to be “new” and “historical,” the nations to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past, and, still more important glide into a limitless future. It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny. With Debray we might say, “Yes, it is quite accidental that I am born French; but after all, France is eternal.”
The idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history. An American will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of his 240,000-odd fellow-Americans. He has no idea of what they are up to at any one time. But he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity.
It remains only to emphasize that in their origins, the fixing of print-languages and the differentiation of status between them were largely unselfconscious processes resulting from the explosive interaction between capitalism, technology and human linguistic diversity. But as with so much else in the history of nationalism, once “there,” they could become formal models to be imitated, and, where expedient, consciously exploited in a Machiavellian spirit.
The overwhelming and bewildering concatenation of events experienced by its makers and its victims became a “thing”—and with its own name: The French Revolution. Like a vast shapeless rock worn to a rounded boulder by countless drops of water, the experience was shaped by millions of printed words into a “concept” on the printed page, and, in due course, into a model. Why “it” broke out, what “it” aimed for, why “it” succeeded or failed, became subjects for endless polemics on the part of friends and foes: but of its “it-ness”, as it were, no one ever after had much doubt.
In much the same way, the independence movements in the Americas became, as soon as they were printed about, “concepts,” “models,” and indeed “blueprints."
Insofar as all dynasts by mid-century were using some vernacular as language-of-state, and also because of the rapidly rising prestige all over Europe of the national idea, there was a discernible tendency among the Euro-Mediterranean monarchies to sidle towards a beckoning national identification. Romanovs discovered they were Great Russians, Hanoverians that they were English, Hohenzollerns that they were Germans—and with rather more difficulty their cousins turned Romanian, Greek, and so forth. On the one hand, these new identifications shored up legitimacies which, in an age of capitalism, scepticism, and science, could less and less safely rest on putative sacrality and sheer antiquity. On the other hand, they posed new dangers. If Kaiser Wilhelm II cast himself as “No. 1 German,” he implicitly conceded that he was one among many of the same kind as himself, that he had a representative function, and therefore could, in principle, be a traitor to his fellow-Germans (something inconceivable in the dynasty’s heyday. Traitor to whom or to what?).
In much the same way, since the end of the eighteenth century nationalism has undergone a process of modulation and adaptation, according to different eras, political regimes, economies and social structures. The “imagined community” has, as a result, spread out to every conceivable contemporary society. If it is permissible to use modern Cambodia to illustrate an extreme modular transfer of “revolution,” it is perhaps equitable to use Vietnam to illustrate that of nationalism.
Thus the model of official nationalism assumes its relevance above all at the moment when revolutionaries successfully take control of the state, and are for the first time in a position to use the power of the state in pursuit of their visions. The relevance is all the greater insofar as even the most determinedly radical revolutionaries always, to some degree, inherit the state from the fallen regime.
China, Vietnam, and Cambodia are not in the least unique. This is why there are small grounds for hope that the precedents they have set for inter-socialist wars will not be followed, or that the imagined community of the socialist nation will soon be remaindered. But nothing can be usefully done to limit or prevent such wars unless we abandon fictions like “Marxists as such are not nationalists,” or “nationalism is the pathology of modern developmental history,” and, instead, do our slow best to learn the real, and imagined, experience of the past.
In the original edition of Imagined Communities I wrote that so often in the “nation-building” policies of the new states one sees both a genuine, popular nationalist enthusiasm, and a systematic, even Machiavellian, instilling of nationalist ideology through the mass media, the educational system, administrative regulations, and so forth. My short-sighted assumption then was that official nationalism in the colonized worlds of Asia and Africa was modelled directly on that of the dynastic states of nineteenth-century Europe. Subsequent reflection has persuaded me that this view was hasty and superficial, and that the immediate genealogy should be traced to the imaginings of the colonial state. At first sight, this conclusion may seem surprising, since colonial states were typically anti-nationalist, and often violently so. But if one looks beneath colonial ideologies and policies to the grammar in which, from the mid nineteenth century, they were deployed, the lineage becomes decidedly more clear.
All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives. After experiencing the physiological and emotional changes produced by puberty, it is impossible to “remember” the consciousness of childhood. How many thousands of days passed between infancy and early adulthood vanish beyond direct recall! How strange it is to need another’s help to learn that this naked baby in the yellowed photograph, sprawled happily on rug or cot, is you. The photograph, fine child of the age of mechanical reproduction, is only the most peremptory of a huge modern accumulation of documentary evidence (birth certificates, diaries, report cards, letters, medical records, and the like) which simultaneously records a certain apparent continuity and emphasizes its loss from memory. Out of this estrangement comes a conception of personhood, identity (yes, you and that naked baby are identical) which, because it can not be “remembered,” must be narrated. Against biology’s demonstration that every single cell in a human body is replaced over seven years, the narratives of autobiography and biography flood print-capitalism’s markets year by year.
