Good piece. I've bothered to read Anderson's book (which is actually quite eccentric in many ways). As you've noted, for Anderson a national consciousness, that presupposes nationalism, is enabled by a cultural flattening of time/identity. When he first published Imagined Communities in 1983, there would've only been a handful of widely consumed broadcast channels. This would appear to be a vindication of his thesis about mass media no doubt. I dont think there had been radical change by the final edition (2006) either - facebook only started to take off in that year.
I've often wondered where his thesis sits now national communities have splintered into a gazillion different information ecosystems. It most certainly suggests there is something more fundamental about national identity than mass media.
Yes good point. National identity always surprises liberals and Marxists with its persistence, e.g. its revival during the collapse of the USSR, and it's clearly in evidence on say Twitter without any guiding force!
What's not often said: Anderson's book, as well as others mentioned, is just a bunch of opinions piled on historical facts (like the invention of the printing press and nationalist pamphlets). There's nothing irefutable in them in the ways a Physics equation is.
The arguments often change when it comes to Ukraine. Then it suddenly becomes imperative to recognize the inherently distinct Ukrainian ethnicity, and stand up against the Russian mudding of waters.
I don't want to focus on whether Ukraine "deserves" to be it's own nation and where we draw the line, are Croats just Catholic Serbs who belonged to the Habsburg empire, whether Slovaks are just Czechs who belonged to Hungary instead of Bohemia etc. I don't care about this here. I just want to note that suddenly in the case of Ukraine, the upper normie is suspiciously nationalistic all of a sudden.
Watching the war Ukraine is why I dropped my old views about nationalism being a dangerous relic of the past and how we are all citizens of the world. Reading accounts by Ukrainians themselves made clear to me just how crucial having a sense of collective identity was to defending any of the values I hold, and at the same time their opponents were often motivated non-national values such as personal loyalty to their ruler or simple money (this is obviously a gross oversimplification, nationalism is also a major factor for Russian forces).
I've come to realize that far from a golden era of cosmopolitanism, the destruction of Nation-states as a source of legitimacy would just mean that marauding barbarians controlled by blood tied and ruled by charismatic strongmen control life for everyone (this is basically a description of life outside of the very modern west).
Well... the way an actual Ukrainian explained this to me that it is all about Western Ukraine, Lvyv, Ruthenia, which never belonged to the Russian Empire, they tended to belong to Poland and Austria-Hungary, and had a Catholic-Jewish culture. After independence, Kyiv basically borrowed the whole Ruthenian identity wholesale. Because this felt to them "mostly Western", that is, high prestige, rich etc. But in 2012 a Kyiv businessman told me the status of Ruthenian - Ukrainian language in Kyiv is the status of Irish in Ireland, that is, you read poetry, watch a theatre play to mantain your identity, but you do business in English / Russian.
In what you call "upper normies" I still see echoes of the same assumptions: this attempt to destroy a sense of patriotism or national identity wherever possible. They ridicule & undermine the idea that Britain is in any way great, but almost never realise that theirs is in itself a bias - which will colour their judgement and make impartial analysis of history impossible. They can see the patriot's fondly-held bias, but not their own.
I tend to think that this, along with the attack on Christianity - come direct from the communist/Marxist approach to propaganda: attacking precisely those things that made the capitalist nations of the time strong. Hobsbawm etc were making the facts fit the theory, which is how dishonest politicians operate, but is the opposite of how a scientist should work.
Excellent good sense. Regino of Prum (d.915) came up with a fourfold definition of nation, based on Classical conceptions, that became the standard definition in medieval Europe:
Diversae nationes popularum interse discrepant genere moribus lingua legibus.
(The peoples of various nations differ by origin, customs, languages and laws.)
Where genere (origin) is ancestry. This concept turns up, for instance, in the internal divisions of the Knights of St John.
An excellent piece. One of the amusing things to think about in all of this is your one example of Palestinian nationalism. That is the best example of a modern nationalist movement that was completely invented, and yet it is one that is treated as sacrosanct. There are vast swathes of texts from the early 20th century showing that the "Palestinians" saw themselves as Syrians, and that the whole "national movement" that we recognise was largely created by outside forces (the PLO being established under guidance from Nasser's Egypt and the PFLP being created by the Soviets). The Palestinian Arab Congress in the 1920s saw Palestine as an integral part of the Syrian nation to be ruled from Damascus.
Interesting! It is a topic that I addressed years ago, brief summary:
1) Premodern nations were smaller nations: Bavaria or Venice, not Germany or Italy. It is the idea of unifying all speakers of a language into one country that is modern.
2) But even in premodern times, there was a commonality between speakers of a language, like how Italians even in the 1500s referred to non-Italians in Italy as barbarians
3) A curios case is a continent-wide linguistic nationalism: the name of Wales, Walloonia in Belgium, the nickname/slur welsh used by the German-Swiss against the French-Swiss, the name of the Wallachia region in Romania and the Hungarian name for Italians: olasz, all comes from the same Germanic word, which means "Latin-speaker" or "Romanized person", and it was quite derogatory.
4) It is true that kings came from a very international background and this led to curious policies, like how France before the Revolution was not very centralized, and there were trade barriers, tariffs inside the country and sometimes no tariffs outside because the Alsatians liked to trade with Germans, so sometimes premodern countries did not function like proper nation-states.
5) It is true that educated elites were very cosmopolitan, and sometimes switched loyalties. But most of them knew where their loyalties are supposed to be. For example the Hundred Years War is sometimes described as not a war between England and France, but a war between two dynasties for the French throne. For example, Normandy switched sides. But this is explained by the smaller nation model, Normandy was in itself seen as a nation, which is a vassal to the King of France, and they had different opinions on who is the proper king of France. This is more like a modern nation switching alliances. However, both dynasties tended to kick locals out from the lands they conquered and invite their own as settlers. The Plantagenets did understand that their "core constituency" are the English, even when they also had French people on their side.
TL;DR premodern nationhood was different, often more nebulous, and did not really correlate with statehood, but it did exist. Also the exact level of nebulousness was different. England and Hungary were very clearly defined nations. France less clearly. This is probably something about language. Neo-Latin forms all kinds of dialect continuums, English and Hungarian tends to be less so. So it is different when you sort of half-understand your neighbor than when you don't understand him at all.
Though regardless of if the idea of the modern 'nation state' existed before Westphalia, length of tradition is not a valid defence of Nationalism as a system. It's inherently divisive, competing nations can't solve the global problems we face, and as far back as the Greek city states it was being countered with Cosmopolitanism by that Cynics and Stoics. And there very much is a synthetic 'by the numbers' approach to the creation of Volksgeist for propaganda purposes -
Good piece. I've bothered to read Anderson's book (which is actually quite eccentric in many ways). As you've noted, for Anderson a national consciousness, that presupposes nationalism, is enabled by a cultural flattening of time/identity. When he first published Imagined Communities in 1983, there would've only been a handful of widely consumed broadcast channels. This would appear to be a vindication of his thesis about mass media no doubt. I dont think there had been radical change by the final edition (2006) either - facebook only started to take off in that year.
I've often wondered where his thesis sits now national communities have splintered into a gazillion different information ecosystems. It most certainly suggests there is something more fundamental about national identity than mass media.
Yes good point. National identity always surprises liberals and Marxists with its persistence, e.g. its revival during the collapse of the USSR, and it's clearly in evidence on say Twitter without any guiding force!
What's not often said: Anderson's book, as well as others mentioned, is just a bunch of opinions piled on historical facts (like the invention of the printing press and nationalist pamphlets). There's nothing irefutable in them in the ways a Physics equation is.
The arguments often change when it comes to Ukraine. Then it suddenly becomes imperative to recognize the inherently distinct Ukrainian ethnicity, and stand up against the Russian mudding of waters.
I don't want to focus on whether Ukraine "deserves" to be it's own nation and where we draw the line, are Croats just Catholic Serbs who belonged to the Habsburg empire, whether Slovaks are just Czechs who belonged to Hungary instead of Bohemia etc. I don't care about this here. I just want to note that suddenly in the case of Ukraine, the upper normie is suspiciously nationalistic all of a sudden.
Watching the war Ukraine is why I dropped my old views about nationalism being a dangerous relic of the past and how we are all citizens of the world. Reading accounts by Ukrainians themselves made clear to me just how crucial having a sense of collective identity was to defending any of the values I hold, and at the same time their opponents were often motivated non-national values such as personal loyalty to their ruler or simple money (this is obviously a gross oversimplification, nationalism is also a major factor for Russian forces).
I've come to realize that far from a golden era of cosmopolitanism, the destruction of Nation-states as a source of legitimacy would just mean that marauding barbarians controlled by blood tied and ruled by charismatic strongmen control life for everyone (this is basically a description of life outside of the very modern west).
Well... the way an actual Ukrainian explained this to me that it is all about Western Ukraine, Lvyv, Ruthenia, which never belonged to the Russian Empire, they tended to belong to Poland and Austria-Hungary, and had a Catholic-Jewish culture. After independence, Kyiv basically borrowed the whole Ruthenian identity wholesale. Because this felt to them "mostly Western", that is, high prestige, rich etc. But in 2012 a Kyiv businessman told me the status of Ruthenian - Ukrainian language in Kyiv is the status of Irish in Ireland, that is, you read poetry, watch a theatre play to mantain your identity, but you do business in English / Russian.
In what you call "upper normies" I still see echoes of the same assumptions: this attempt to destroy a sense of patriotism or national identity wherever possible. They ridicule & undermine the idea that Britain is in any way great, but almost never realise that theirs is in itself a bias - which will colour their judgement and make impartial analysis of history impossible. They can see the patriot's fondly-held bias, but not their own.
I tend to think that this, along with the attack on Christianity - come direct from the communist/Marxist approach to propaganda: attacking precisely those things that made the capitalist nations of the time strong. Hobsbawm etc were making the facts fit the theory, which is how dishonest politicians operate, but is the opposite of how a scientist should work.
Excellent good sense. Regino of Prum (d.915) came up with a fourfold definition of nation, based on Classical conceptions, that became the standard definition in medieval Europe:
Diversae nationes popularum interse discrepant genere moribus lingua legibus.
(The peoples of various nations differ by origin, customs, languages and laws.)
Where genere (origin) is ancestry. This concept turns up, for instance, in the internal divisions of the Knights of St John.
He was more accurate than many over a millennium later
An excellent piece. One of the amusing things to think about in all of this is your one example of Palestinian nationalism. That is the best example of a modern nationalist movement that was completely invented, and yet it is one that is treated as sacrosanct. There are vast swathes of texts from the early 20th century showing that the "Palestinians" saw themselves as Syrians, and that the whole "national movement" that we recognise was largely created by outside forces (the PLO being established under guidance from Nasser's Egypt and the PFLP being created by the Soviets). The Palestinian Arab Congress in the 1920s saw Palestine as an integral part of the Syrian nation to be ruled from Damascus.
Interesting! It is a topic that I addressed years ago, brief summary:
1) Premodern nations were smaller nations: Bavaria or Venice, not Germany or Italy. It is the idea of unifying all speakers of a language into one country that is modern.
2) But even in premodern times, there was a commonality between speakers of a language, like how Italians even in the 1500s referred to non-Italians in Italy as barbarians
3) A curios case is a continent-wide linguistic nationalism: the name of Wales, Walloonia in Belgium, the nickname/slur welsh used by the German-Swiss against the French-Swiss, the name of the Wallachia region in Romania and the Hungarian name for Italians: olasz, all comes from the same Germanic word, which means "Latin-speaker" or "Romanized person", and it was quite derogatory.
4) It is true that kings came from a very international background and this led to curious policies, like how France before the Revolution was not very centralized, and there were trade barriers, tariffs inside the country and sometimes no tariffs outside because the Alsatians liked to trade with Germans, so sometimes premodern countries did not function like proper nation-states.
5) It is true that educated elites were very cosmopolitan, and sometimes switched loyalties. But most of them knew where their loyalties are supposed to be. For example the Hundred Years War is sometimes described as not a war between England and France, but a war between two dynasties for the French throne. For example, Normandy switched sides. But this is explained by the smaller nation model, Normandy was in itself seen as a nation, which is a vassal to the King of France, and they had different opinions on who is the proper king of France. This is more like a modern nation switching alliances. However, both dynasties tended to kick locals out from the lands they conquered and invite their own as settlers. The Plantagenets did understand that their "core constituency" are the English, even when they also had French people on their side.
TL;DR premodern nationhood was different, often more nebulous, and did not really correlate with statehood, but it did exist. Also the exact level of nebulousness was different. England and Hungary were very clearly defined nations. France less clearly. This is probably something about language. Neo-Latin forms all kinds of dialect continuums, English and Hungarian tends to be less so. So it is different when you sort of half-understand your neighbor than when you don't understand him at all.
Though regardless of if the idea of the modern 'nation state' existed before Westphalia, length of tradition is not a valid defence of Nationalism as a system. It's inherently divisive, competing nations can't solve the global problems we face, and as far back as the Greek city states it was being countered with Cosmopolitanism by that Cynics and Stoics. And there very much is a synthetic 'by the numbers' approach to the creation of Volksgeist for propaganda purposes -
https://open.substack.com/pub/morewretchthansage/p/once-upon-a-time-in-a-nation-the?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1oiue6