Years of Poems and Spirits

Book Review: Imagined Communities, by Benedict Anderson

I read this book with great interest, partly because in the past summer, several big cities in China witnessed rambunctious protests over Japanese Prime Minister’s visits to the Yasukuni shrine. The two nations are supposedly exemplary actors in today’s global community: one boasts the 2nd largest economy among all nations. The other holds the record of continuous rate of GDP growth for the last 10 years. One is the 2nd largest contributor to the United Nations and aspires to become permanent Council member. The other already is one. What is even more intriguing is the close economic interdependency between the two, and equally connected societies: Shanghai hosts the largest overseas Japanese community. At the same time, there are more than 150,000 Chinese students attending Japanese universities and language schools .

Despite almost self-explanatory benefits, with presumably-catalytic example of European regional integration, the chemistry between the two nations remain rather explosive. It is with this observation in mind, thus with loaded expectations from a dedicated study of nationalism, that I find this book disappointing.

To be precise, I am objecting to both the goal of the book and its approach. In the Preface (for the 2nd Edition) and the Introduction, the author professed his struggle with the position Nationalism stands within Marxist paradigm. The seminal event that triggered this book, the 3rd Indochina War in the late 1970s was less typical a series of nationalistic conflicts than a Cold War reverberation in the region. However, the war was unsettling to the Marxists because the antagonists were all (at least self-proclaimed) socialist states, which should have transcended nationalism to embrace internationale. Hence was Tom Nairn’s admission, “The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure.” (p3)

In my view, that’s where Anderson’s book comes into the grand debate. Even if he can’t resurrect a “Ptolemaic phenomena”, Anderson offers to ameliorate the anxiety among the faithful by reducing the “anomaly” into a manufactured “imagination”. To someone like me who comes directly from a hotbed of nationalism, the notion that it can be explained within an ideology—but not itself an ideology—is a non-starter.

Further reading only deepened my doubts about the relevance of Anderson’s arguments . For example, he called nationalism “imagined community” because “… all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact … are imagined.” If so, the word “imagined” must have meant something else, or the entire New York Stock Exchange could be nothing but a big fantasy. When describing the creation of nationalism, Anderson repeatedly emphasized the role printing-capitalism played. To me, the correlation between the two is due more to historical timing than direct causality. The coming of vernacular media should have facilitated the spread of nationalism but an ideology can exist without mass medium. After all, various religions and schools of thought had entered our collective history centuries before the first printing press.

The underlying assumption of the book is that nationalism is a relatively modern product. “Modern”, in this context, not only denotes time proximity, but also allude to “Modernity”—the historical period after Medieval but before Post-colonialism. It is in this period, the author suggests, that all ingredients of nationalism come to being, among them secularization and print-capitalism. With this assumption, Anderson goes on de-constructing nationalism as manufactured (by self-serving Creoles), imposed (“official nationalism”) and constantly revisioned (e.g. “the reassurance of fratricide”).

It is only during his discussion of nationalism as a “portable” or “abstract” concept, did he come close to what I was looking for—nationalism as a unique (i.e. irreducible) social phenomenon. The irony is, there are so many excellent historical materials in the book that could have supported such an argument. In fact when the author has to provide interpretation of those events, particularly in a comparative setting, he seems to undermine his own conviction of nationalism as purely imagined. For example, when explaining why Russia was able to hold together under an imposed nationalism whereas the British Empire was not, Anderson pointed out that, in the domain of the latter, “[o]nly a minority of the subjected peoples had any long-standing religious, linguistic, cultural, or even political and economic, ties with the metropole.” (p92, italic added) Apparently, there are more to nationalism than sheer imagination.

Furthermore, is nationalism only a production of modernity as the author implied? I’d argue not. Wherever there are international conflicts, there will be defensive reactions. One product of such reactions is the mantra of “us” versus “others”. For example, Anderson thinks that the term “Greek” designates more a cultural identity than a national one. But what he really meant could only be subscribed to the ancient Athenians—who were amply nationalistic (in its broadest sense) in their dealings with other city-states. Half way around the globe, at about the same time in China, Confucius also proclaimed, “A China without monarch still fairs better then the Barbarians with one” (“夷狄之有君不如诸夏之亡也”)

Admittedly, those are not the words chanted at the street protests in China nowadays. However, the point is—is there a common thread that links the sentiments now and then? If there is one, could we call it nationalism or proto-nationalism (since there wasn’t a “nation” back then)? If not, is my definition too broad or Anderson’s too narrow? If so, however, is nationalism still a product of modernity—and thus imagined?

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