Imagined Communities

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

🎨 Impressions

It is a kinda of half Marxist, half academic book about how language primarily shaped nation-states and how written language is the primary factor of nationalism. Imagined comities, aka the nation as a concept, are shaped by languages.

It became obvious to me that if you consider the printing of books/printing press to be a capitalistic phenomenon, then nationalism is a capitalistic phenomenon. However, I still think it is a bit of a stretch to just take the assumptions as is. It is more complicated than that. I think that this is a bit of a stretch, then after those assumptions, everything is capitalistic. Ivar Aasen and New Norwegian as a driver of nationalism.

✍️ My Top Quotes

‘The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure.’
In 1649, Charles Stuart was beheaded in the first of the modern world’s revolutions, and during the 1650s one of the more important European states was ruled by a plebeian Protector rather than a king. Yet even in the age of Pope and Addison, Anne Stuart was still healing the sick by the laying on of royal hands, cures committed also by the Bourbons, Louis XV and XVI, in Enlightened France till the end of the ancien régime.
It has been estimated that in the 40-odd years between the publication of the Gutenberg Bible and the close of the fifteenth century, more than 20,000,000 printed volumes were produced in Europe. Between 1500 and 1600, the number manufactured had reached between 150,000,000 and 200,000,000.
These deaths bring us abruptly face to face with the central problem posed by nationalism: what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history (scarcely more than two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices
No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers. The public ceremonial reverence accorded these monuments precisely because they are either deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them, has no true precedents in earlier times.
With Debray we might say, ‘Yes, it is quite accidental that I am born French; but after all, France is eternal.’
For present purposes, the two relevant cultural systems are the religious community and the dynastic realm. For both of these, in their heydays, were taken-for-granted frames of reference, very much as nationality is today. It is therefore essential to consider what gave these cultural systems their self-evident plausibility, and at the same time to underline certain key elements in their decomposition.
So today mathematical language continues an old tradition. Of what the Thai call + Rumanians have no idea, and vice versa, but both comprehend the symbol.
The leaders of the burgeoning Finnish nationalist movement were ‘persons whose profession largely consisted of the handling of language: writers, teachers, pastors, and lawyers. The study of folklore and the rediscovery and piecing together of popular epic poetry went together with the publication of grammars and dictionaries, and led to the appearance of periodicals which served to standardize Finnish literary (i.e. print-)language, on behalf of which stronger political demands could be advanced.’
Yet they were national independence movements. Bolívar came to change his mind about slaves, and his fellow-liberator San Martín decreed in 1821 that ‘in the future the aborigines shall not be called Indians or natives; they are children and citizens of Peru and they shall be known as Peruvians.’
Before the age of print, Rome easily won every war against heresy in Western Europe because it always had better internal lines of communication than its challengers. But when in 1517 Martin Luther nailed his theses to the chapel-door in Wittenberg, they were printed up in German translation, and ‘within 15 days had been seen in every part of the country.’
All, including the USA, were creole states, formed and led by people who shared a common language and common descent with those against whom they fought.
Toussaint L’Ouverture led an insurrection of black slaves that produced in 1804 the second independent republic in the Western hemisphere – and terrified the great slave-owning planters of Venezuela.
Bunched geographically together, their market-centres in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were readily accessible to one another, and their populations were relatively tightly linked by print as well as commerce. The ‘United States’ could gradually multiply in numbers over the next 183 years, as old and new populations moved westwards out of the old east coast core.
Had a sizeable English-speaking community existed in California in the eighteenth century, is it not likely that an independent state would have arisen there to play Argentina to the Thirteen Colonies’ Peru?
Creole (Criollo) – person of (at least theoretically) pure European descent but born in the Americas (and, by later extension, anywhere outside Europe).
If we note that as late as 1840, even in Britain and France, the most advanced states in Europe, almost half the population was still illiterate (and in backward Russia almost 98 per cent), ‘reading classes’ meant people of some power.
Thus neither Arabs nor Chinese, though they ventured overseas in very large numbers during more or less the same centuries as the Western Europeans, successfully established coherent, wealthy, selfconsciously creole communities subordinated to a great metropolitan core. Hence, the world never saw the rise of New Basras or New Wuhans.
‘Russification’ of the heterogeneous population of the Czar’s subjects thus represented a violent, conscious welding of two opposing political orders, one ancient, one quite new.
Seton-Watson even goes so far as to venture that the Revolution of 1905 was ‘as much a revolution of non-Russians against Russification as it was a revolution of workers, peasants, and radical intellectuals against autocracy.
But there was more than an intellectual migration. Scottish politicians came south to legislate, and Scottish businessmen had open access to London’s markets. In effect, in complete contrast to the Thirteen Colonies (and to a lesser extent Ireland), there were no barricades on all these pilgrims’ paths towards the centre. (Compare the clear highway before Latin- and German-reading Hungarians to Vienna in the eighteenth century.) English had yet to become an ‘English’ language.
Declaring that ‘a single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia,’
Nothing more sharply underscores the fundamental contradiction of English official nationalism, i.e. the inner incompatibility of empire and nation.
That this nationalism took on an aggressive imperialist character, even outside ruling circles, can best be accounted for by two factors: the legacy of Japan’s long isolation and the power of the official-national model.
Second, as the words ‘Jews’ and ‘Orient’ suggest, the Anglicized monarch had imbibed the particular racisms of the English ruling class.
Much the most important thing about language is its capacity for generating imagined communities, building in effect particular solidarities.
Today it may be difficult to remember that until World War II Switzerland was a poor country, with a standard of living half that of England’s, and an overwhelmingly rural country.
As we have seen, ‘official nationalism’ was from the start a conscious, self-protective policy, intimately linked to the preservation of imperial-dynastic interests. But once ‘out there for all to see,’ it was as copyable as Prussia’s early-nineteenth-century military reforms, and by the same variety of political and social systems.
Dying for one’s country, which usually one does not choose, assumes a moral grandeur which dying for the Labour Party, the American Medical Association, or perhaps even Amnesty International can not rival, for these are all bodies one can join or leave at easy will.
South African racism has not, in the age of Vorster and Botha, stood in the way of amicable relations (however discreetly handled) with prominent black politicians in certain independent African states. If Jews suffer discrimination in the Soviet Union, that did not prevent respectful working relations between Brezhnev and Kissinger.
Contemporary nationalism is the heir to two centuries of historic change.
This difference owes much to census and map. New Guinea’s remoteness and rugged terrain created over the millennia an extraordinary linguistic fragmentation. When the Dutch left the region in 1963 they estimated that within the 700,000 population there existed well over 200 mostly mutually unintelligible languages.25 Many of the remoter ‘tribal’ groups were not even aware of one another’s existence.
(When one thinks of the sheer logistical problems involved, the ability of London and Madrid to carry on long counter-revolutionary wars against rebel American colonists is quite impressive.)
‘les massacres du Midi’ alluded to the extermination of the Albigensians across the broad zone between the Pyrenees and the Southern Alps, instigated by Innocent III, one of the guiltier in a long line of guilty popes?
‘la Saint-Barthélemy’ referred to the ferocious anti-Huguenot pogrom launched on 24 August 1572 by the Valois dynast Charles IX and his Florentine mother;
So I was not at all down hearted when a generally favourable reviewer still rather irritably described the book as being too Marxist for a liberal, and too liberal for a Marxist.