Imagined Communities: Reflections On The Origin And Spread Of Nationalism

The gradual decline in Europe of Latin as a sacred and universal language, of the unquestioned legitimacy of divinely-ordained monarchy, and of the conception of history as the embodiment of divine providence, created the possibility in Europe for imagining the national community. These cultural shifts occurred as a result of scientific and geographical discoveries, improved communications, and the growth of capitalism. In Chapter Three, Anderson emphasizes the critical role that print-capitalism played in the development of national consciousness. He identifies three elements that laid the groundwork for the new form of imagined community: the new technology of printing, the rapid expansion of the print market under capitalism, and the diversity of human languages. The convergence of these elements “set the stage for the modern nation” (46).

By the beginning of the 16thcentury, book-publishing had become one of the earliest and most successful forms of capitalist enterprise. Virtually all books were published in Latin and marketed to a broad but thin segment of the population, consisting primarily of the intelligentsia and clergy. By the middle of the 16thcentury, the market for Latin texts had become saturated and publishers turned to the potentially huge market for books written in vernacular languages. The “revolutionary vernacularizing thrust of capitalism” was given a huge boost by the impact of the Reformation, which “owed much of its success to print-capitalism” (39). Anderson notes that after Martin Luther nailed his theses to the chapel-door in Wittenberg in 1517, printed versions translated in German spread throughout the country within days. The Lutheran Reformation spurred a torrent of publications in the German language, including hundreds of Luther’s Biblical translations, making him the first best-selling author in a language other than Latin. At the same time, his works reached the first truly mass readership. In the “religious propaganda war that raged across Europe for the next century […][Protestantism] knew how to make use of the expanding vernacular print-market being created by capitalism”; this created large new reading publics, with important political and religious consequences (40).

In addition to fueling the explosive growth of publishing markets and reading audiences during the Reformation, vernacular languages began to displace Latin as instruments of administration in European states. As a result of this haphazard, largely pragmatic shift, Latin continued to lose its preeminent position as an authoritative and universal language.

Finally, print-capitalism played an enormously significant role for the origin of nationalism by creating mechanically reproducible print-languages. The immense diversity of spoken languages and dialects in Europe were distilled by the publishing market into a smaller group of print-languages that could be understood by all the speakers of a given language. While speakers of the dozens of dialects of French, for instance, might find it difficult if not impossible to understand each other in conversation, all became capable of understanding a standardized form of French in print. This had the effect of unifying populations as national linguistic communities, fixing languages into a standardized and stable form, and authorizing dialects close to that form, while demoting the prestige of other dialects.

Anderson observes that “the explosive interaction between capitalism, technology, and human linguistic diversity” set into action processes that were “largely unselfconscious” but would become “consciously exploited in a Machiavellian spirit” (45). The political and cultural implications of being able to publish and disseminate information in native vernaculars were quickly grasped by political authorities. This led to the suppression in Russia, Thailand, and elsewhere of national (or “sub-national”) identities by discouraging the use of native languages among minority populations and restricting efforts to transcribe or publish indigenous languages in written and printed form (45).

The national print-language is not necessarily the most widely used or spoken language in a particular nation-state, however. In the former colonial states in Africa, for instance, only a tiny fraction of the population uses the national language, which typically has been the language of the colonial power. The flexible relationship between language, national consciousness, and the origin of nation-states raises a set of questions to which Anderson now turns.

In Chapter Four, “Creole Pioneers,” Anderson examines how the desire for independence arose in the European colonies in the Americas and led to the establishment of the first nation-states. The creole communities in America, consisting of people of European descent who were born in the New World, developed the idea of their own nationhood long before most of their European brethren. At the same time, they often assimilated into their nations (at least theoretically) the oppressed indigenous populations as fellow nationals. How is this to be explained?

National movements in the Americas were characterized by two elements that distinguish them from the mid-19th century nationalisms in Europe that were to follow. In both North and South America, language was not a defining factor. The thirteen original English colonies, Brazil, and the colonies of Spain all spoke the same languages as their mother countries; their creole inhabitants shared the same language, much of the same culture, and the same descent as the people against whom they fought. Secondly, nationalisms in the New World were not primarily populist in nature and were not motivated by a desire to enfranchise the lower classes.

Anderson observes that the liberal spirit of the Enlightenment and the restrictive policies of the Spanish government fueled the independence movements in Latin America. Just as important, though, was that each of the new South American nations was an individual administrative unit in the two centuries preceding their independence. These territories were geographically and economically bounded: “The very vastness of the Spanish American empire […] and, above all, the immense difficulty of communications in a pre-industrial age, tended to give these units a self-contained character” (52). This contrasts with the English colonies of North America, which were much smaller in size and enjoyed a greater degree of inter-state communication and commerce than the Spanish colonies.

Anderson argues that the administrative units of the Spanish empire in Latin America gradually began to be conceived as fatherlands by the colonial inhabitants, who “constituted simultaneously a colonial community and an upper class” (58). The colonial creole administrators were barred from similar positions in Spain; being born in Latin America meant they were “to be economically subjected and exploited, but they were also essential to the stability of the empire” (58). Racism was another wedge dividing the colonists and the mother country. The interaction and interbreeding of Spaniard creoles with indigenous populations demoted the colonists in the eyes of the Spanish and Portuguese.

The decisive historical role in creating new national consciousnesses in the Americas was played by the creole English, Spanish, and Portuguese colonial administrators and printers. The small size, close connections and ease of communication among the English colonies enabled them to realize the idea of America as an incipient national community of united states. In South America, Spanish-American nationalism was unable to achieve a unified nation-state. Anderson attributes this to the vastness and geographical isolation of the Spanish colonies from each other, the “level of development of capitalism and technology in the late eighteenth century and the ‘local’ backwardness of Spanish capitalism and technology in relation to the administrative stretch of the empire” (63).