IMAGINED COMMUNITIES BENEDICT ANDERSON

1. IMAGINED COMMUNITIESBENEDICT ANDERSON SUMMARIES OF CHAPTERS FIVE TO EIGHT

2. CONTENTS • CHAPTER 5: OLD LANGUAGES, NEW MODELS • CHAPTER 6: OFFICIAL NATIONALISM AND IMPERIALISM • CHAPTER 7: THE LAST WAVE • CHAPTER 8: PATRIOTISM AND RACISM

3. CHAPTER 5: OLD LANGUAGE, NEW MODELS INTRODUCTION • Close of the era of successful national liberation movements in Americas coincided with the onset of age of nationalism in Europe. • Two striking features of these newer nationalisms. • First, in almost all of them ‘national print-language’ was of central ideological and political importance. • Second, all were able to work from visible models provided by their predecessors. • In this chapter the focus is on print language and piracy.

4. INFLUENCE OF ‘DISCOVERIES’ AND ENLIGHTENMENT • European concept of nation-ness as linked to private property language had wide influence in 19th century Europe and on subsequent theorizing about the nature of nationalism. • In the 16th century, Europe's ‘discovery’ of grandiose civilizations hitherto only dimly rumoured – in China, Japan, the Indian sub continent, suggested an irremediable human pluralism. • Most of these civilizations had developed quite separate from the known history of Europe. • The impact of the ‘discoveries’- seen in peculiar geographies of the imaginary polities of the age, e.g. Thomas More’s Utopia.

5. Such utopias, ‘modelled’ on real discoveries-were depicted as contemporary societies. • Such works were criticisms of contemporary societies, and the discoveries provided good models. • Next came the luminaries of the Enlightenment. • It was possible to think of Europe as only one among many civilizations and not the best.

6. RESULTS OF SUCH DISCOVERIES • A revolution in European ideas about language. • Portuguese, Spanish seamen, missionaries, soldiers etc had gathered word-list of non-European languages to be assembled in simple lexicon. • Example - out of the English conquest of Bengal came William Jones’s pioneering investigations of Sanskrit (1786). • The 19th century was, in Europe, a golden age of vernacularizing lexicographers, grammarians, and philologists. • Energetic activities of these professional intellectuals were central to the shaping of 19th century European nationalism.

7. Eric Hobsbawm’s dictum- “The progress of schools and universities measures that of nationalism, just as schools and universities became its most conscious champions,” …certainly correct for 19th century Europe.

8. PRINTING AND PRINT- LANGUAGE GETS SET • By mid 18th century, the prodigious labours of German, French, and English scholars had not only made available the Greek classics, but also pagan works and those of ancient Hellenic civilization. • In the late 18th century, grammars, dictionaries and histories of the Rumanians appeared. • Between 1789 and 1794, the Russian academy produced a six volume Russian dictionary. • The period 1800-1850, as the result of pioneering work by native scholars, three distinct literary languages were formed in the northern Balkans: Slovene, Serbo - Croat, and Bulgarian. A separate Bulgarian national state was to come into existence by 1878.

9. Stimulus for the birth of Hungarian nationalism was provided by the extensive publications of Ferenc Kazinczy (1759-1831), ‘the father of Hungarian literature’.

10. CONCLUSION CHAPTER 5 • Lexicographers, grammarians, and composers were producers for the print market, they were linked to the consuming public. • Mid-19th century Europe witnessed rapid increase in state expenditures and size of state bureaucracies. • The bourgeoise achieved solidarities on an imaginary basis through print capitalism. • The nobility were consumers of the philological revolution.

11. CHAPTER 6: OFFICIAL NATIONALISM AND IMPERIALISM • The philological-lexicographic revolution and rise of intra-European nationalist movements created increasing cultural, political difficulties for many dynasts. • For administrative purposes these dynasties had settled on certain print-vernaculars as languages-of-state. • The lexicographic revolution in Europe created the conviction that languages were the personal property of specific groups- their daily speakers and readers. • These groups, imagined as communities, were entitled to their autonomous place in a fraternity of equals.

12. Nearly all dynasts, by now were using some vernacular as language of state. There was also seen a tendency among the Euro-Mediterranean monarchies to sidle towards a beckoning national identification. • The ‘naturalizations’ of Europe’s dynasties later led to ‘official nationalism’. These ‘official nationalisms’ were a means for combining naturalization with retention of dynastic power. • From about mid-19th century there developed ‘official nationalism’ in Europe. They were responses by power groups threatened with exclusions from popular imagined communities (e.g. Russia, England, Japan) • The model of official nationalism was also followed by states with no serious power pretensions, but whose ruling classes felt threatened by the world wide spread of nationally imagined communities (e.g. Hungary, Siam)

13. Austro-Hungary - the absolutist Joseph the second decided early in the 1780’s to switch the language of state to German. • He wanted a unifying language connecting all parts of his empire and German seemed to be the best with its vast culture and literature. • The development of Hungarian nationalism in the nineteenth century shows in a different way the imprint of the ‘official’ model.

14. CONCLUSION CHAPTER 6 • From about mid-19th century there developed ‘official nationalisms’ inside Europe. These nationalisms were historically ‘impossible’ until after the appearance of popular linguistic-nationalisms. • Such official nationalisms were conservative policies, adapted from the model of the largely spontaneous popular nationalisms that preceded them. • In the name of imperialism, similar policies were pursued by the same sorts of groups in the vast Asian and African territories in the course of the 19th century. • Official nationalism concealed a discrepancy between nation and dynastic realm. Slovaks were to be Magyarized, Indians Anglicized, and Koreans Japanified.

15. CHAPTER 7: THE LAST WAVE • The First World War brought the age of high dynasticism to an end. By 1922, Habsburgs, Romanovs and Ottomans were gone. In place of the Congress of Berlin came the League of Nations, from which non-Europeans were not excluded. • After the cataclysm of World War Second the nation-state tide reached full flood. • A very large number of nations came to have European language of state. • In the ‘nation-building’ policies of the new states we see both a genuine, popular nationalist enthusiasm and a systematic instilling of nationalist ideology through the mass media, the educational system, administrative regulations, and so forth.

16. Considering the origins of ‘colonial nationalism’, one central similarity with the colonial nationalisms of an earlier age immediately strikes the eye: the isomorphism between each nationalism’s territorial stretch and that of the previous imperial administrative unit. • The transformation of the colonial state to the national state was facilitated by three factors.

17. THE FACTORS • Firstly, the enormous increase in physical mobility made possible by the astonishing achievements of industrial capitalism. • Secondly, increase in imperial bureaucratization, which had its practical as well as ideological side. • Third was the spread of modern-style education, not only by the colonial state, but also by private religious and secular organizations.

18. CONCLUSION CHAPTER 7 • The intelligentsias were central to the rise of nationalism in the colonial territories, not least because colonialism ensured that native agrarian magnates, big merchants, and even a large professional class were relative rarities. • This last wave of nationalism, mostly in colonial territories of Asia and Africa, was a response to the new-style global imperialism made possible by the achievements of industrial capitalism. • The paradox of official nationalism was that it brought the idea of ‘national histories’ into the consciousness of the colonized. • Capitalism also helped to create popular, vernacular based nationalisms in Europe. • The last wave arose in a period of world history in which the nation was becoming an international norm and it became possible to ‘model’ nation-ness in a more complex way than before.

19. CHAPTER 8: PATRIOTISM AND RACISM PATRIOTISM AND NATIONALISM • Nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love. The cultural products of nationalism-poetry, prose, music- show this love clearly in different forms and styles. • It is truly hard and rare to find analogous nationalist products expressing fear and loathing. • Nation-ness is ‘natural’ in the sense that it contains something that is un-chosen, for example, nation-ness is assimilated to skin colour, gender, parentage and birth, all things which one cannot help. • It has an aura of fatality embedded in its history. The idea of the ultimate sacrifice comes only with an idea of purity, through fatality.

20. Dying for one’s country, which usually one does not choose, assumes a moral grandeur. • National anthems sung on national holidays, no matter the words and the tunes, generate in singing an experience of simultaneity. • People wholly unknown to each other utter the same verses to the same melody. Nothing connects us all but imagined sound.

21. RACISM AND NATIONALISM • Nation-ness is not the source of racism and anti-Semitism. • Nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations. • Racism erases nation-ness by reducing the adversary to their biological physiognomy. • The dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of ‘class’, rather than in those of nation.

22. Where racism developed outside Europe in the 19th century, it was always associated with European domination, for many reasons. REASONS • The rise of official nationalism- response on the part of threatened dynastic and aristocratic groups to popular vernacular nationalism. • Colonial racism was a major element in the conception of ‘Empire’ which attempted to weld dynastic legitimacy and national community.

23. The colonial empire permitted some number of bourgeois and petty bourgeois to play aristocrat off centre court. • There was also the typical ‘solidarity among whites’ which linked colonial rulers from different national metro poles, whatever their internal rivalries and conflicts.