Anderson, Benedict.

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and

Spread of Nationalism. Revised Edition ed. London and New York: Verso, 1991,
pp. 5-7.
"In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is
an imagined political community - - and imagined as both inherently limited and
sovereign.
"It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know
most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of
each lives the image of their communion. Renan referred to this imagining in his
suavely back-handed way when he wrote that 'Or lessence d'une nation est que
tons les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun, et aussi que tous aient
oubli bien des choses. With a certain ferocity Gellner makes a comparable point
when he rules that 'Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to selfconsciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.' The drawback to this
formulation, however, is that Gellner is so anxious to show that nationalism
masquerades under false pretences that he assimilates 'invention' to 'fabrication' and
'falsity', rather than to 'imagining' and 'creation'. In this way he implies that 'true'
communities exist which can be advantageously juxtaposed to nations. In fact, all
communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps
even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their
falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. Javanese villagers
have always known that they are connected to people they have never seen, but
these ties were once imagined particularistically-as indefinitely stretchable nets of
kinship and clientship. Until quite recently, the Javanese language had no word
meaning the abstraction 'society.' We may today think of the French aristocracy of
the ancien rgime as a class; but surely it was imagined this way only very late. To
the question 'Who is the Comte de X? the normal answer would have been, not 'a
member of the aristocracy,' but 'the lord of X, 'the uncle of the Baronne de Y,'or 'a
client of the Duc de Z.'
"The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them encompassing
perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which

lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The most
messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human
race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say,
Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet.
"It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which
Enlightenment and Revolution were destorying the legitamcy of the divinelyordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history
when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably
confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism between
each faith's ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free,
and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign
state.
"Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality
and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep,
horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the
past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to
die for such limited imaginings.
"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? I believe that the beginnings
of an answer lie in the cultural roots of nationalism."

Billig, Michael. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage Publications, 1995.

"... there is something misleading about this accepted use of the word nationalism.
It always seems to locate nationalism on the periphery. Separatists are often to be
found in the outer regions of states; the extremists lurk on the margins of political life
in established democracies, usually shunned by the sensible politicians of the centre.
The guerrilla figures, seeking to establish their new homelands, operate in conditions

where existing structures of state have collapsed, typically at a distance from the
established centres of the West. From the perspective of Paris, peripherally placed
on the edge of Europe. All these factors combine to make nationalism not merely an
exotic force, but a peripheral one. In consequence, those in established nations at
the centre of things are led to see nationalism as the property of others, not of us.
"This is where the accepted view becomes misleading: it overlooks the nationalism
of the Wests nation-states. In a world of nation-states, nationalism cannot be
confined to the peripheries. That might be conceded, but still it might be objected
that nationalism only strikes the established nation-states on special occasions.
Crises, such as the Falklands or Gulf Wars, infect a sore spot, causing bodily fevers:
the symptoms are an inflamed rhetoric and an outbreak of ensigns. But the irruption
soon dies down; the temperature passes; the flags are rolled up; and, then, it is
business as usual." (p. 5)
"... the term banal nationalism is introduced to cover the ideological habits which
enable the established nations of the West to be reproduced. It is argued that these
habits are not removed from everyday life, as some observers have supposed. Daily,
the nation is indicated, or flagged, in the lives of its citizenry. Nationalism, far from
being an intermittent mood in established nations, is the endemic condition." (p.6)
"The central thesis of the present book is that, in the established nations, there is a
continual flagging, or reminding, of nationhood. The established nations are those
states that have confidence in their own continuity, and that, particularly, are part of
what is conventionally described as the West. The political leaders of such nations
whether France, the USA, the United Kingdom or New Zealand are not typically
termed nationalists. However, as will be suggested, nationhood provides a continual
background for their political discourses, for cultural products, and even for the
structuring of newspapers. In so many little ways, the citizenry are daily reminded of
their national place in a world of nations. However, this reminding is so familiar, so
continual, that it is not consciously registered as reminding. The metonymic image of
banal nationalism is not a flag which is being consciously waved with fervent
passion; it is the flag hanging unnoticed on the public building.

"National identity embraces all these forgotten reminders. Consequently, an identity

is to be found in the embodied habits of social life. Such habits include those of
thinking and using language. To have a national identity is to possess ways of talking
about nationhood. As a number of critical social psychologists have been
emphasizing, the social psychological study of identity should involve the detailed
study of discourse. Having a national identity also involves being situated
physically, legally, socially, as well as emotionally: typically, it means being situated
within a homeland, which itself is situated within the world of nations. And, only if
people believe that they have national identities, will such homelands, and the world
of national homelands, be reproduced.
"In many ways, this book itself aims to be a reminder. Because the concept of
nationalism has been restricted to exotic and passionate exemplars, the routine and
familiar forms of nationalism have been overlooked. In this case, our daily
nationalism slips from attention. There is a growing body of opinion that nation-states
are declining. Nationalism, or so it is said, is no longer a major force: globalization is
the order of the day. But a reminder is necessary. Nationhood is still being
reproduced: it can still call for ultimate sacrifices; and, daily, its symbols and
assumptions are flagged." (pp.8-9)

Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

1983, pp. 6-7
"In fact, nations, like states, are a contingency, and not a universal necessity. Neither
nations nor states exist at all times and in all circumstances. Moreover, nations and
states are not the same contingency. Nationalism holds that they were destined for
each other; that either without the other is incomplete, and constitutes a tragedy. But
before they could become intended for each other, each of them had to emerge, and
their emergence was independent and contingent. The state has certainly emerged
without the help of the nation. Some nations have certainly emerged without the
blessings of their own state. It is more debatable whether the normative idea of the
nation, in its modern sense, did not presuppose the prior existence of the state.

"What then is this contingent, but in our age seemingly universal and normative, idea
of the nation? Discussion of two very makeshift, temporary definitions will help to
pinpoint this elusive concept.
1. "Two men are of the same nation if and only if they share the same culture, where
culture in turn means a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of
behaving and communicating.
2. "Two men are of the same nation if and only if they recognize each other as
belonging to the same nation. In other words, nations maketh man; nations are the
artefacts of men's convictions and loyalties and solidarities. A mere category of
persons (say, occupants of a given territory, or speakers of a given language, for
example) becomes a nation if and when the members of the category firmly
recognize certain mutual rights and duties to each other in virtue of their shared
membership of it. It is their recognition of each other as fellows of this kind which
turns them into a nation, and not the other shared attributes, whatever they might be,
which separate that category from non- members.
"Each of these provisional definitions, the cultural and the voluntaristic, has some
merit. Each of them singles out an element which is of real importance in the
understanding of nationalism. But neither is adequate. Definitions of culture,
presupposed by the first definition, in the anthropological rather than the normative
sense, are notoriously difficult and unsatisfactory. It is probably best to approach this
problem by using this term without attempting too much in the way of formal
definition, and looking at what culture does."

Hobsbawm, Eric J. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Neither objective nor subjective definitions are thus satisfactory, and both are
misleading. In any case, agnosticism is the best initial posture of a student in this

field, and so this book assumes no a priori definition of what constitutes a nation. As
an initial working assumption any sufficiently large body of people whose members
regard themselves as members of a 'nation', will be treated as such. However,
whether such a body of people does so regard itself cannot be established simply by
consulting writers or political spokesmen of organizations claiming the status of
'nation' for it. The appearance of a group of spokesmen for some 'national idea' is not
insignificant, but the word 'nation' is today used so widely and imprecisely that the
use of the vocabulary of nationalism today may mean very little indeed.
Nevertheless, in approaching 'the national question' 'it is more profitable to begin
with the concept of "the nation" (i.e. with "nationalism") than with the reality it
represents'. For 'The nation as conceived by nationalism, can be recognized
prospectively; the real "nation" can only be recognized a posteriori.'
This is the approach of the present book. It pays particular attention to the changes
and transformations of the concept, particularly towards the end of the nineteenth
century. Concepts, of course, are not part of free-floating philosophical discourse, but
socially, historically and locally rooted, and must be explained in terms of these
realities.
For the rest, the position of the writer may be summarized as follows.
1. I use the term 'nationalism' in the sense defined by Gellner, namely to mean
'primarily a principle which holds that the political and national unit should be
congruent.' I would add that this principle also implies that the political duty of
Ruritanians to the polity which encompasses and represents the Ruritanian nation,
overrides all other public obligations, and in extreme cases (such as wars) all other
obligations of whatever kind. This implication distinguishes modern nationalism from
other and less demanding forms of national or group identification which we shall
also encounter.
2. Like most serious students, I do not regard the 'nation' as a primary nor as an
unchanging social entity. It belongs exclusively to a particular, and historically recent,
period. It is a social entity only insofar as it relates to a certain kind of modern

territorial state, the 'nation-state', and it is pointless to discuss nation and nationality
except insofar as both relate to it. Moreover, with Gellner I would stress the element
of artifact, invention and social engineering which enters into the making of nations.
'Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent ... political
destiny, are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes preexisting cultures and
turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates preexisting
cultures: that is a reality.' In short, for the purposes of analysis nationalism comes
before nations. Nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way
round.
3. The 'national question', as the old Marxists called it, is situated at the point of
intersection of politics, technology and social transformation. Nations exist not only
as functions of a particular kind of territorial state or the aspiration to establish one broadly speaking, the citizen state of the French Revolution - but also in the context
of a particular stage of technological and economic development. Most students
today will agree that standard national languages, spoken or written, cannot emerge
as such before printing, mass literacy and hence, mass schooling. It has even been
argued that popular spoken Italian as an idiom capable of expressing the full range
of what a twentieth-century language needs outside the domestic and face-to-face
sphere of communication, is only being constructed today as a function of the needs
of national television programming. Nations and their associated phenomena must
therefore be analyzed in terms of political, technical, administrative, economic and
other conditions and requirements.
4. For this reason they are, in my view, dual phenomena, constructed essentially
from above, but which cannot be understood unless also analyzed from below, that
is in terms of the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary
people, which are not necessarily national and still less nationalist. If I have a major
criticism of Gellner's work it is that his preferred perspective of modernization from
above, makes it difficult to pay adequate attention to the view from below.
That view from below, i.e. the nation as seen not by governments and the
spokesmen and activists of nationalist (or non-nationalist) movements, but by the
ordinary persons who are the objects of their action and propaganda, is exceedingly

difficult to discover. Fortunately social historians have learned how to investigate the
history of ideas, opinions and feelings at the sub-literary level, so that we are today
less likely to confuse, as historians once habitually did, editorials in select
newspapers with public opinion. We do not know much for certain. However, three
things are clear.
First, official ideologies of states and movements are not guides to what it is in the
minds of even the most loyal citizens or supporters. Second, and more specifically,
we cannot assume that for most people national identification - when it exists excludes or is always or ever superior to, the remainder of the set of identifications
which constitute the social being. In fact, it is always combined with identifications of
another kind, even when it is felt to be superior to them. Thirdly, national
identification and what it is believed to imply, can change and shift in time, even in
the course of quite short periods. In my judgment this is the area of national studies
in which, thinking and research are most urgently needed today.
5. The development of nations and nationalism within old-established states such as
Britain and France, has not been studied very intensively, though it is now attracting
attention. The existence of this gap is illustrated by the neglect, in Britain, of any
problems connected with English nationalism - a term which in itself sounds odd to
many ears - compared to the attention paid to Scots, Welsh, not to mention Irish
nationalism. On the other hand there have in recent years been major advances in
the study of national movements aspiring to be states, mainly following Hroch's
pathbreaking comparative studies of small European national movements. Two
points in this excellent writer's analysis are embodied in my own. First, 'national
consciousness' develops unevenly among the social groupings and regions of a
country; this regional diversity and its reasons have in the past been notably
neglected. Most students would, incidentally, agree that, whatever the nature of the
social groups first captured by 'national consciousness', the popular masses workers, servants, peasants - are the last to be affected by it. Second, and in
consequence, I follow his useful division of the history of national movements into
three phases. In nineteenth-century Europe, for which it was developed, phase A
was purely cultural, literary and folkloric, and had no particular political or even
national implications, any more than the researches (by non-Romanies) of the Gypsy

Lore Society have for the subjects of these enquiries. In phase B we find a body of
pioneers and militants of 'the national idea' and the beginnings of political
campaigning for this idea. The bulk of Hroch's work is concerned with this phase and
the analysis of the origins, composition and distribution of this minorit agissante. My
own concern in this book is more with phase C when - and not before - nationalist
programmes acquire mass support, or at least some of the mass support that
nationalists always claim they represent. The transition from phase B to phase C is
evidently a crucial moment in the chronology of national movements. Sometimes, as
in Ireland, it occurs before the creation of a national state; probably very much more
often it occurs afterwards, as a consequence of that creation. Sometimes, as in the
so- called Third World, it does not happen even then.
Finally, I cannot but add that no serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a
committed political nationalist, except in the sense in which believers in the literal
truth of the Scriptures, while unable to make contributions to evolutionary theory, are
not precluded from making contributions to archaeology and Semitic philology.
Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so. As Renan said:
'Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.' Historians are professionally
obliged not to get it wrong, or at least to make an effort not to. To be Irish and proudly
attached to Ireland - even to be proudly Catholic-Irish or Ulster Protestant Irish - is
not in itself incompatible with the serious study of Irish history. To be a Fenian or an
Orangeman, I would judge, is not so compatible, any more than being a Zionist is
compatible with writing a genuinely serious history of the Jews; unless the historian
leaves his or her convictions behind when entering the library or the study. Some
nationalist historians have been unable to do so. Fortunately, in setting out to write
the present book I have not needed to leave my non-historical convictions behind.