Imagined Communities

During international football championships, something quite odd might happen in big European cities.

If you're from England, you are travelling to Spain and, let's say, England and France are playing against each other, and you want to feel at home when cheering for your team you could go to a British Pub even if you are not in the UK and, probably, be surrounded by fellow nationals.

As Benedict Anderson would argue, this is because England is an Imagined Community. To find out what that means, read on!

Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism is a non-fiction book by Benedict Anderson first published in 1983.Benedict Anderson was an Anglo-Irish political scientist and historian. His book is one of the fundamental applications of constructivism, a theory of International Relations.

Anderson’s book contributed to the above theory by explaining how nationalism and nation states are social constructions. Anderson tries to explain how the nation is constructed when there is a change from another system, such as imperialism, to the nation-state system. Anderson’s analysis covers the origins of nationalism from the late 18th century to the present.

Fig. 1 Map of part of Central Europe.

Imagined Community meaning

Anderson used the term imagined community to refer to the nation.

Anderson tells us that even if citizens never know most other national members, they feel connected and imagine a broader community.

According to the author, the way in which citizens construct the notion of the nation, or imagine such a community, is influenced by media and, in particular, by the print market. Indeed, the author traces the historical and cultural transformations that led to the birth of the nation as an imagined community. We will explore this in detail later in the summary.

Imagined Communities summary

Anderson tells us which historical and cultural events led to the birth of the nation understood as an Imagined Community.

Historically, he highlights the following events:

• The end of the Middle Ages and the weakening of religion as the base of the community.
• The diffusion of vernaculars, i.e. regional languages and dialects. This diffusion happened alongside the fall of Latin as the administrative and religious language.
• The fall of monarchies, such as the fall of the French Monarchy during the French Revolution. In general, the demise of divine right monarchies was crucial for the birth of nations.
• The diffusion of secularity as the organising principle of the state. Secularity signifies the division between the state and the Church.
• The beginning of the Industrial Revolution completely transformed the Northern and Central European socio-economic tissue from feudal to capitalist.
• The Reformation, i.e. the split of the Western Christian Church into Roman Catholics and Protestants. This was a crucial event because it was accompanied by the first translations of the Bible, from Latin to German. This process helped to unify German as a language.

All of the above events have one thing in common: they drove the construction of some shared ideational factors, such as languages in the case of the Reformation or republican symbols, in the case of the fall of monarchies.

Printing-press capitalism

Fig. 2 Printing press keys.

Furthermore, Anderson recognises the printing press as the technological revolution that, together with the above historical factors, has participated in the construction of nations.

Anderson tells us that the printing press led to a form of capitalism that he calls printing-press capitalism.

In the third chapter of the book, he mainly explains that the intertwinement of 3 factors brought to the birth of nationality as a community:

1. The printing press
2. Capitalism
3. Vernacular languages

Indeed, the market was dominated by Latin, the language of the literate, which were, however, bilingual and few. To capitalise on the reading market, communities had to become monoglots, meaning they all spoke the same language. This happened through the diffusion of vernacular languages and the demise of Latin as the administrative language. The Reformation participated in this process by creating new reading publics.

In sum, this linguistic transformation led to the decline of what he calls 'the imagined community of Christendom'¹ and the birth of new communities, the nations, not anymore organised under religious unity but under a shared sense of nationality.

From languages to nations

Therefore the process that connects languages to nations is the following:

1. More people started to communicate around territories, often via print and paper. This created the perception of the existence of unknown people that speak your same language, hence a sense of shared identity.
2. Print capitalism fixed dialects and vernaculars that were before fastly changing and had different variations in unified languages. Again, this is crucial for self-recognition with people that speak the same language.
3. The fixity of print languages created linguistic models, a process that makes the dialects more similar to the print language survive while the more different ones disappear.Therefore the process is:

Fig. 3 fewer dialects/one vernacular > one language that everyone reads and speaks > self-recognition in the language > shared sense of community > nation, StudySmarter original.

At the same time, you must understand that Anderson himself did not believe in an inherent causal relation between languages and nations. According to the author, the concurrence of particular historical and cultural factors, such as capitalism, the printing press, and the use of vernaculars, created the conditions, especially in Europe, for the birth of nations as imagined communities.

Imagined Communities examples

The effectiveness of the process explained above can be seen in the cohesion of some of today's nations. Anderson uses the example of Italy quite often in his book.

Anderson tells us that language's effectiveness for national unification brought some countries like Turkey and Thailand to strategically exploit it to render their nations more cohesive. This is a form of conscious language exploitation.

Beyond language

Even if the basis of Anderson's theory is developed around Europe, many chapters focus on understanding nationalism and imagined communities in the Americas. Indeed, Anderson’s book also analyses figures such as Simón Bolívar, the leader and national hero of Venezuela and a hero in the liberation of Spanish colonies. These nations shared the same language as Spain; however, they created their traditions and new Imagined Community.

However, as we have said before, languages and printing-press capitalism do not always lead to the formation of a nation. In most African countries, for example, a language does not correspond to a nation.

Imagined Communities analysis

In conclusion, let's analyse how Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson relates to other political ideologies and what contributions it brings.

Anderson offers a new analysis of nationalism, which illuminates how crucial nationalism is to the existence of states as we know them today. This centring of nationalism was a way to criticise liberalism and Marxism for not considering the power of nationality.

However, his account of nationalism has been countered by postcolonial thinkers. In particular, they believe that the nationalism that Anderson describes regarding colonies was positive for the elites and not for the whole population.

Indian theorist Chatterjee saw a neocolonial logic behind Anderson's theory of nationalism in relation to colonised countries. The author criticises how Anderson sees anti-colonial nationalism as borrowed from the West. Drawing on various examples, for instance, in India, the author proves how forms of nationalism were present in strata of the population where colonisers were asserting less power. They refer to these as "inner nationalism", a form of nationalism based on spiritual traditional values. This stood in opposition to "external nationalism", which is a form of nationalism developed by the elites with the consent of the colonisers, making nationalism, as described by Anderson, a European ideology imposed on colonies and making the process described in the book more complex in practice².