Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (review)

BOOK REVIEWS. Elliot A. Posner, editor Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism .......................... 150 Boltuck, Richard and Robert E. Litan, eds. Down in the Dumps: Administration of the Unfair Trade Laws ..................... 151 Constable, Pamela and Arturo Valenzuela, A Nation ofEnemies: Chile Under Pinochet .................................... 153 Ellis, Stephen and Tsepo Sechaba, Comrades Against Apartheid: The ANC and the South African Communist Party .............. 155 Harbel, Janette; trans. Jon Barnes, Cuba: The Revolution in Peril .............................. 157 Haus, Leah A., Globalizing the GATT: The Soviet Union's Successor States, Eastern Europe, and the International Trading System ..... 158 Joseph, William A., ed., China Briefing, 1991 ..................... 160 Lankford, Nelson D., OSS Against the Reich: The World War II Diaries of Colonel David K. E. Bruce .............................. 162 Sbragia, Alberta M., ed., Euro-Politics: Institutions and Policymaking in the "New" European Community .......................... 164 Serfaty, Simon, Taking Europe Seriously ......................... 166 Weaver, R. Kent, ed., The Collapse of Canada? .................... 169 Weber, Steve, Cooperation and Discord in U.S.-Soviet Arms Control .... 170 149 150 SAISREVIEW Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism . By Benedict Anderson. New York: Verso, 1983, revised, 1991. 224 pp. $14.95/Paperback. Reviewed by Richard Walter, M.A. Candidate, SAIS. While much has been written about nationalist struggles for independence, analyses ofthe development of "national" consciousness have often been lacking. At this time of conflict between and within the various republics of the former Soviet Union, the dissolution ofYugoslavia, the transitions occurring in Southern Africa and the continuing sub and transnational conflicts of the Kurds, the Eritreans, the Sikhs, and the East Timorese, the question of national consciousness is begging for attention: What are the processes by which a collective of people comes to view itself as a nation? This is the question Benedict Anderson addresses in his recently revised Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism. While states have existed throughout history, what we have come to understand as a "nation" could not be conceived, Anderson argues, while the following three beliefs bound human consciousness: the belief that particular script-languages offered "privileged access" to ontological truth (for example, "Church" Latin, Arabic, etc.); the belief that society was naturally organized around rulers whose legitimacy in part or in whole derived from some form of divine dispensation; and the belief in the unity of cosmology and history—that the origin of the world and of men were essentially identical. Once freed from these conceptions, new ways of "linking fraternity, power and time meaningfully together" would have to be found. Anderson does not attempt to explain all resistance to imperial ambitions in a nationalistic vein, but rather he tries to comprehend how resistance came to be expressed in "national" forms, whether the substance was issues of economic interest, arguments stemming from Liberalism or Enlightenment thinking, or indigenous discourse rejecting colonial domination. The development of print-capitalism and the subsequent rise of a vernacular-reading elite, Anderson maintains, opened the door to more temporal languages of power, providing the first precursor to nationalism. This secularization of language combined with the "national" experience of native administrators of colonial regimes. As an example of this source of "national" consciousness, he describes in detail the world of creole functionaries in the Spanish-American empire, where social mobility for members of the colonial administration was inherently limited to horizontal shifts rather than vertical ones leading to Madrid. This limitation and the development ofthe creole press, he continues, did not bring about a unified reaction to colonial domination in a pan-American vein, but it did provide the framework for a new consciousness that would give form to the various nationalistic struggles in Latin America. Anderson contends that the medium of print also provided models for copy of the independent national state throughout the rise of European nationalism in the nineteenth century. Especially after the French and American revolutions, a conceptual norm was available, if not for precise translation, then certainly for inspiration and adaptation. In the later part of the nineteenth century, this BOOK REVIEWS 151 so-called popular nationalism was transformed into a powerful tool of "official nationalism" in the hands of empire-builders. The imposition of new "national" languages accompanied imperial armies into...