There are some books, so dangerous in their citation by casual readers, that they ought to be chained to the library walls, or else kept under lock and key beneath the watchful eye of a librarian. One such is Edward Said’s Orientalism, a work of great literary power coupled with an angrily incoherent argument, which has proved catnip to a certain kind of middlebrow activist student. Yet in our current age of revivified nationalism, warring against yet largely summoned up by the post-national fantasies of aspiring Nineties cosmopolitans, perhaps the most dangerous, over-cited and least understood book of recent decades is Benedict Anderson’s 1983 Imagined Communities.
A work of great subtlety, Imagined Communities was fated to be skim-read by two generations of students, in the process coarsening its careful analysis of the spread of nationalist sentiment in New World creole societies into something far more destabilising to Old World nations. The “imagined” was taken to mean “imaginary”, and thus “fake”. The laborious deconstruction of their own national identities by Twitter bores — the lower-middlebrow purveyors of “St George was a Turkish migrant” and “fish and chips were invented by Jewish refugees” discourse — are all, in their own strange and sub-literate ways, downstream of this undergraduate misreading. Indeed, in his autobiography Anderson himself takes pains to stress that his researches on New World nationalisms were completely inapplicable to the Old World, a warning that has passed by most of those who invoke him. Yet this misreading is so widespread, and so destructive, that it is worth looking at Anderson again, beyond his most famous and misrepresented book, to determine what his analysis of nationalism as a category in general can offer, in a country undergoing its own new and particular nationalist ferment.
Like his brother Perry (whose real name, Benedict gleefully reveals in his autobiography, is the firmly Gaelic “Rory”), Benedict O’Gorman Anderson was a product of De Valera’s Ireland. Raised in Waterford, for which city his great-grandfather Major Purcell O’Gorman had been the Irish nationalist MP, Anderson would later recall a small-town world of huddling in the cinema, “along with shawlies, shamefaced young priests, mothers and snivelling children seeking some warmth in winter”. He also remembers fighting local Catholic boys, “who took us to be snobby, half-English and Protestant” on his way to and from his Quaker prep school. His Catholic ancestors, he was proud to relate, “had a long history of political activism against English imperialism and colonialism in Ireland”, being centrally involved in the failed 1798 Rising, and the later and more successful campaign for Catholic emancipation.
His Anglo-Irish Protestant side, on the other hand, maintained the long record of British imperial service customary of their tribe. “Had my father not been Irish,” Anderson reflects, “I might have been raised in England and fought overseas for the Empire.” Instead, reaching adulthood, and having been mocked at Eton for his “Irishisms”, Anderson chose an Irish national identity, unlike his brother Perry/Rory, who remains, in practical terms at least, a loyal subject of what he would later call “Ukania”. “I felt that I owed it to my father, who on my birth gave me the ‘tribal’ O’Gorman name, to apply for Eire citizenship,” Benedict later mused, a choice made for Leftist and anti-imperialist “political as well as personal reasons”. Anderson’s later intellectual work on the conflicted loyalties of colonial elites, and the politicised choice between national identities made by creole aristocrats, more or less openly derives from this ambivalent Irish family milieu.
Is it lazy biographical shorthand to derive a writer’s thinking from their ethnocultural hinterland? If it is, it is a sin Anderson himself happily engaged in. He observes that the great British theories of nationalism with which Imagined Communities was written to engage all derive, in differing ways, from the ethnic backgrounds of their proponents: “Almost all were written by Jews, though of widely different political outlooks.” For the Iraqi Jewish Elie Kedourie, writing from the political Right, as well as the Austrian Jewish Eric Hobsbawm and Czech Jewish Ernest Gellner, writing on different wings of the Left, nationalism was an irrational and disruptive force, breaking apart the tolerant cosmopolitanism of the great multinational empires. Such a viewpoint was natural from their situations: all were refugees from nationalisms of one form or another. Indeed, as Anderson remarks, all became “attached to the UK, partly because it was largely uncontaminated by fascism and violent anti-Semitism, and partly because the state, including England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, was felt to be more like supranational (if now defunct) Austro-Hungary than standard European nation-states such as France, Italy and Sweden”.
Yet unlike these wistfully cosmopolitan deconstructors of nationalist passions, Anderson himself was more enthused by the Scottish nationalism of Tom Nairn, which saw the Habsburg parallels for the British state not as a strength but as proof of the United Kingdom’s frailty. Coining the term Ukania for the United Kingdom, directly inspired by the Austrian writer Robert Musil’s Kakania for the polyglot and dysfunctional Habsburg state, Nairn saw the United Kingdom, just like its Austro-Hungarian analogue, as destined to be broken up by the nationalist sentiment of its homeland peoples. Nairn’s The Break-Up of Britain, Anderson observes, “was strongly attacked, especially by Hobsbawm, who declared that no true Marxist could be a nationalist”. Anderson himself disagreed: “I liked the book very much, for its own sake, but also as an Irishman (Southern Ireland, after centuries of English colonial rule, had only won its independence, by armed struggle, in 1922).”
“Unlike these wistfully cosmopolitan deconstructors of nationalist passions, Anderson himself was more enthused by the Scottish nationalism of Tom Nairn”.
Indeed, writing in the Field Day Journal, the influential Derry-based Irish nationalist intellectual review, Anderson would observe, with some satisfaction, that “the UK, one of the victors of World War I, lost one quarter of its ‘home’ territory, what came to be Éire, within five years of the war’s end”. The Western victor of the Great War had experienced a territorial dismemberment, in the face of nationalist revolt, otherwise only experienced by the war’s losers to the East, and for Anderson this outcome was both natural and just. Rather than a cosmopolitan deconstructor of nationalism, as his lazy adherents today assume, Anderson was, in his urbane and Marxist way, an Irish nationalist, who saw in nationalism great liberatory potential from the sprawling dysfunction of the great multinational empires. Happy to derive the anti-nationalist positions of his intellectual peers from their ethnic self-interest, Anderson’s own nationalism, he was pleased to report, was entirely rational and enlightened. A cynic may demur, just as a cynic would say that Nairn’s own quixotic support for Ulster’s Loyalists, which he struggled to bend into a Marxist shape, was more convincingly derived from instinctive tribal loyalty to his Scottish kin across the water than it was from any of the socialist principles he dubiously assembled.
Where does this leave us today? Unlike Hobsbawm, who famously claimed, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, that the age of nationalism was drawing to a close, Anderson correctly perceived its resurgence in a new era of internet communication and mass migration. Rather than ushering in its demise, the new world of globalisation was set to turbocharge nationalism. As he observed in his essay “Long-Distance Nationalism”, mass migration from the Third World into the West was bound to create an ‘“ethnicization” process, one sure “to draw a sharp line between the political nation and a putative original ethnos. Even if a black in the United Kingdom was born there, went to schools and university there, pays taxes there, votes there, and will be buried there, for the National Front he or she can never be genuinely English.” The interminable debates now happening online, on the Englishness of otherwise of Frank Bruno, Rishi Sunak, and David Lammy, were prefigured by Anderson’s appreciation that nationalism is not eroded, but instead created, by the mingling of peoples. For just as capitalism, in its sponsoring of transnational migration, creates the colonial settler, so does it create the native as a category, whose nativeness is directly constructed through comparison with the incomer: “Nationalism’s purities (and thus also cleansings) are set to emerge from exactly this hybridity.”
This process, for Anderson, is not merely a malady of the displaced native. Technological advance, particularly the ease of long-distance communications, meant that incoming peoples could no longer be assimilated, as in the case of the 19th-century New World: the American “melting pot” was a one-time only process, already in reversal even in the United States itself. The Greek migrant in Frankfurt, or Sri Lankan migrant in London, is now unable to set aside his homeland as his 19th-century predecessor could, instead living, beyond its borders, in an idealised, and politically radicalised homeland of his imagination. In this “long-distance nationalism”, Anderson divines “a probably menacing portent for the future”: one which has now become our present. “One emblem of the American variant is perhaps the espionage trial of Jonathan Pollard a few years back,” Anderson notes, referring to the US intelligence analyst who spied for Israel. “In the age of classical nationalism, the very idea that there could be something praiseworthy in an American citizen’s spying on America for another country would have seemed grotesque. But to the substantial number of Jewish-Americans who felt sympathetic to Pollard, the resentful spy was understood as representing a transnational ethnicity.”
For the newly unassimilable migrant, this engagement with the politics of the ancestral homeland is the means through which “an embattled ethnic identity is to be fashioned in the ethnicized nation state that he remains determined to inhabit. That same metropole that marginalizes and stigmatizes him simultaneously enables him to play, in a flash, on the other side of the planet, national hero.” One thinks here of the Middle Eastern or South Asian migrant in the West, demanding, with no apparent trace of self-awareness, that Israelis “return” to Poland: the blood-and-soil certainties of “home” rest on unstable ground. The result of all this, for Anderson, was the growing power of ethnic identities over assimilatory national ones, from which dynamic, he observes, “has emerged the ideological programme of multiculturalism, which implies that a simple nineteenth-century version of Americanism is no longer adequate or acceptable”. Multiculturalism, Anderson correctly perceives, is simply the proliferation of more meaningful ethnic identities, weakening the assimilatory power of the host nation. And so, rather than dissolving age-old ethnic bonds, as nationalists assume, instead “capitalism, in its eternal restlessness [is] producing new forms of nationalism.”
Yet, turning his anti-imperalist sentiment to the great hegemon of the time, Anderson welcomes this outcome, if in a qualified way. Rather than heralding a new age of multicultural fluidity, he suggests that globalisation is just a new, sprawling, polyglot imperial order to be challenged. “What is really unprecedented,” he writes, “is primarily the current hegemony of the United States… ‘globalization’ is simply an academic-bureaucratic euphemism for that hegemony.” Briskly dismissing the humanitarian justifications given for empire by its post-national cheerleaders, Anderson observes that “Hegemonic powers tend to posit ‘human rights’ as a universal, abstract and global value to be invoked at their liking”. Ultimately, in resisting “the barrenness of neoliberalism and hypocritical ‘human rights’ interventionism”, then whether one wishes it or not, “one of the most powerful weapons in the struggle is nationalism.” Indeed, “for all its weaknesses, the nation-state remains an indispensable institution through which those who so wish can work to restrain today’s ‘evil empire’.”
Wrongly deployed as intellectual ballast for post-national, globalised, multicultural projects by those who have misunderstood him, Anderson instead stands firmly against all these things: globalisation and human rights discourse are simply fig-leaves for an imperial order that will, as all its predecessors have done, crumble in the face of a nationalist wave it has itself created. Indeed, he observes, the intellectual animus against nationalism is directly attributable to imperial requirements. “Like all empires, the American empire needs enemies. ‘Dangerous nationalism’ (which of course did not include American nationalism) emerged to fill the vacuum left by the evaporation of ‘the communist threat’.” Instead, it is the nation-state, for Anderson as for his Marxist Brexiteer brother Perry, that enables human flourishing, even if the excesses of nationalism must be restrained. As Anderson puts it: “This is why what is increasingly needed is a sophisticated and serious blending of the emancipatory possibilities of both nationalism and internationalism.” Rather than its dismissive obituarist, anyway, it is time to reclaim Benedict Anderson as nationalism’s humane advocate — and its prophet.
