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"IMAGINED COMMUNITIES" (BENEDICT ANDERSON).
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Reviews work challenging conventional concept & understanding of nationalism.... More...
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Paper Abstract:
Reviews work challenging conventional concept & understanding of nationalism.
Paper Introduction:
The conventional picture of nationalism is that it is an ideology which grew up in Europe in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and became normative there in the course of the 19th century, finding expression on the one hand in the unifications of Germany and Italy, and on the other hand in the internal fissures which grew up within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, leading eventually to its dissolution after the First World War. Subsequently, in this conventional view, nationalism as an idea and ideology was spread to the rest of the world as a consequence of and reaction to European imperialism, leading in turn to the general dismantling of European empires, and the formation of new nations out of their former territories, in the decades after the Second World War.
In his book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson
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Albany: State University of New York Press.----------------------- [1]Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Originand Spread of Nationalism (NY: Verso, 1991), 1 . BibliographyAnderson, Benedict. [6]Ibid., 121-22. French nationalism is all about France, and Italiannationalism all about Italy; they have different heroes, different symbols,each peculiar to their own nation, not transferrable to any other. We cannot plausibly call the Jews a nation. The United States had noimmemorial ethnic or historical identity to lay claim to; it was a nationof immigrants, and one became American by acceptance of an ideology, a setof political beliefs that comprised "Americanism."[11] This choice was asopen to Jews as to others. Yet during this century they have come to understand the Ambonese as fellow- Indonesians,the Malays as foreigners.[5] The language we call Indonesian has grown up by sheer happenstance,adapted by Dutch colonialists from a merchants' lingua franca; had theychosen to use Dutch, it might be the language of Indonesian nationalism,just as Portuguese is the language of Angolian nationalism. (The USA became a single nation, Anderson suggests, largelybecause its initial phyical scale was much more compact, resulting in farmore intercommunication.)[3] In Hungary (as in Central Europe generally), the coalescing factor insecond-wave nationalism was language. Such assertions are impossible in the case of nationalism, which byits nature is particularistic and inseparable from individual nations.French nationalism and Italian nationalism do not differ on points ofdoctrine, as variant Marxisms do; instead they are wholly separate things,albeit parallel. In his view, it is incorrectto regard nationalism as an ideology in the sense that, say, Marxism orLiberalism is an ideology. In the medieval West, much of basic sociallife (such as marriage law) was governed by the Church. [5]Ibid., 12 . What are the Jews? This both isolatedJewish communities and strengthened their social cohesion. BibliographyAnderson, Benedict. Only an accident of history prevented a Kurdistan from cominginto being after the First World War. Legal bars to Jews entering professionswere gradually lowered; the enlightened absolute monarch was ready toreceive the loyal Jew as he would any loyal subject. The challenge he faces is that, by his own account, the types oflinks that give rise to national feelings vary enormously. The formativethread in Indonesia, suggests Anderson, was the colonial educationalsystem, which brought together from its disparate territories the childrenof local elites, who would continue to feel a common bond to their one-timefellow students.[6] In each of these cases, the common thread is an actual community ofelites, including administrators, intellectuals, and generally the upperand upper-middle classes, bound together by education, career opportunities(and restrictions), and more generally by a common universe of print--booksand especially newspapers that circulated within a nascent nation but notbeyond it. The republics of Latin America (excluding Brazil) all derive from acommon colonial past, that of imperial Spain. Even more significantly, while Jewishcommunities were scattered through both the Christian and Islamic worlds,and usually spoke the local languages where they lived, they were at onceoutsiders there, enclosed within their own communities, and at the sametime tied together by an intellectual and social network that crossed theChristian-Islamic frontier as freely as it crossed local frontiers.Everywhere they were outsiders, save to one another. By the 19th century, Jewish intellectuals were appearing frequently andprominently as Western intellectuals. Is a sense of absurdity avoidable?"[1] The Unknown Soldiers arerevered in their respective countries not because they died for aparticular formal cause or doctrine, but because they died for theircountry, for a community. [8]Ibid., 86, 89-9 . Until the late 18th century, theofficial language of the Austrian Empire was Latin; it was changed toGerman as a sheer matter of administrative convenience. Subsequently, in this conventional view, nationalism as an ideaand ideology was spread to the rest of the world as a consequence of andreaction to European imperialism, leading in turn to the generaldismantling of European empires, and the formation of new nations out oftheir former territories, in the decades after the Second World War. In Indonesia, a Dutch colonial territory became a nation even thoughthat territory embraced a host of separate languages, ethnicities, andheritages, which often had more traditional ties beyond Indonesia thanwithin it. The real challenge to American Jewishness comes from openness andmobility, leading to assimilation in general and intermarriage inparticular. "If one triesto imagine, say, a Tomb of the Unknown Marxist or a cenotaph for fallenLiberals. Anderson calls these "imagined communities," because in fact almostall nation-states are far too large to form any sort of community in thereal sense; whoever is buried in, say, France's Tomb of the UnknownSoldier, very few French people would have come from the same neighborhood,or know the same streets and families the Unknowns once did. What 19th century Zionists took for granted has become toAmerican Jews a matter of concern: will American Jewry slowly evaporateinto a population of Americans who no longer remember that they had aJewish great-grandparent? [1 ]Eisenstadt, 156. Jewishscholars could far more readily read works in these vernaculars than inclerical Latin, and were increasingly tempted to write in those languagesas well--thus entering into the general intellectual discourse of the West. It might be answered thatthere is also no Kurdish state, though there is a recognizable Kurdishnation, occupying a defineable territory and tied together by a commonlanguage. In his book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson challenges thisconventional understanding of both the nature of nationalism and itsgeographical origin. Jewish Civilization: The Jewish Historical Experience ina Comparative Perspective. Antisemitism has of course been widespread inAmerican life, but it is not more deeply rooted than a score of otherbigotries, and arguably far less so than the central tension of race. It is an actof mystical imagination for the French in general to think of him as "oneof us." Anderson's concern is with how these imagined communities comeinto being as something large numbers of people feel attached to stronglyenough to die for them. Some nationalists rejected thepossibility that a Jew could be a true member of the nation, or at leastcould do so only by ceasing to be a Jew; in the extreme case--married toracial theories that rejected assimilation and abandonment of Jewishness--this produced the Holocaust. [2]Ibid., 47-65. Exclusionist nationalism (though usually not in the most extremeform) predominated in Central Europe in the late 19th century, and theresponse it evoked was Zionism. Eisenstadt, Jewish Civilization: The Jewish HistoricalExperience in a Comparative Perspective (Albany: State University of NewYork Press, 1992), 1 . Eventhe occasional canard of divided loyalty vis a vis Israel is nothingpeculiar to American Jews; if American foreign policy is sometimes hostageto the Israel Lobby, who doubts that it is also hostage to, say, Cuban-Americans among others? That is, what common attribute, takencollectively, defines what we call the Jewish people? Atthe center of this strain is the collision of Jewish civilization with theforce of nationalism. NY: Verso, 1991.Eisenstadt, S.N. What, in contrast, bound together,say, Moroccan Jews and Polish Jews at that time, save Jewishness? They do notreally explain, though, why connections that arose among elites or para-elites (such as intellectuals) should have become "imagined communities" inwhole populations, and attained the enormous emotive force expressed inTombs of the Unknown Soldiers. Rev. ed. In Hungary, these bounds wereset by the happenstantial shift of Hapsburg imperial administration fromLatin to German, which left non-German speakers in Hungary excluded and ledthem to adopt a Magyar-language community as alternative. A reasonable answer offered by S.N.Eisenstadt is that they are a civilization, in the same general sense thatwe can speak of Western or Chinese civilizations. Hepoints to such embodiments as Tombs of the Unknown Soldier. The strain arose in the West, but has come to affect Jewseverywhere, including those in the Islamic region and most of all perhapsthe State of Israel, founded on a territory once predominantly Islamic. [7]S.N. Why, then, 18 separate republics? The same applies, in varying degrees, to Jewsthroughout the Diaspora. These same Sumatrans share neither mother-tongue, ethnicity, nor religion with the Ambonese, located on islandsthousands of miles further to the east. Both,however, retain a coherent and recognizable tradition, associated withConfucian or Western Christian heritages, but not bound by specificbeliefs. In the past three centuries, however, and especially the last 15 years, the coherency of Jewish civilization, as entity and concept, hasbeen strained. to [the people of Malaysia], butthey are ethnically related, understand each other's speech, have acommon religion, and so forth. NY: Verso, 1991. Orwill it persist, however transformed, and with a continuing element oftension, on the one hand between Jewishness and those societies where someJews live, and on the other hand a tension between Jewishness and onenation, Israel, that happens to be predominantly Jewish? Western civilization is no longer spokenof as Western Christendom, and it includes many non-Christians. The strain began to develop somewhat before nationalism itself did,the source of both being the partial decoupling of the West from itsspecifically Christian origins. [3]Ibid., 64. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Originand Spread of Nationalism. Eventoday, with a State of Israel in being, about half the world's Jews liveelsewhere, and American Jews regard themselves as exactly that, not asIsraelis living in the United States. The same underlying processworked to open social boundaries. In Spanish America these bounds operated on a smaller scalethan a cultural zone, in Indonesia on a larger scale, in each caseoriginally by colonial fiat and convenience. From antiquity tillfifty years ago, there was no Jewish state. Even more, nationalism, argues Anderson, is inherently mystical. Events, however, have worked out differently, because alongsideexclusionist nationalism there also existed inclusionist nationalism,expressed supremely in the United States. Rev. ed. For purely practicalreasons, kings or other local rulers gave de-facto recognition to Jewishauthority in these matters within Jewish communities. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Originand Spread of Nationalism. But also by the 19th century, Western secularism, having broken olderemotive bounds, was opening the way to new ones, particularly nationalism.Nationalism created what Benedict Anderson has called "imaginedcommunities," in which fellow-citizens of a state were invited and expectedto feel emotively, even quasi-mystically bound to one another.[9] The 18thcentury enlightened monarch asked only for passive obedience; the 19thcentury nationalist insisted on active belief and committment to the nationabove all else. Ideologies like Marxism are conceptuallyuniversalistic. The Church didnot acknowledge Jewish marriages or inheritances. Threecharacteristic examples will demonstrate the problem: Latin America (whichhe uses as his primary example of the formation of "first nations"),Hungary, and Indonesia. Two obvioussuggestions might be that they are a nation, or that they are a religiousfaith community. For Jews, nationalism created a pressure that could be variously feltas exclusionist or inclusionist. [11]Ibid., 124.----------------------- 7 (The same appliedunder Islamic rulers.) All this changed when Western states took full authority into theirown hands.[8] When, say, marriage law was governed by the state ratherthan the church, the state no longer regarded marriages among Jews assomething apart, in which it had no interest. They share a common languageand to a substantial degree a common culture (e.g., magical realism as aliterary genre is a shared creation of the region, not of an individualcountry). There may indeed be differences within a movement, evenfactions anathematizing one another as heretics. These explanations are persuasive so far as they go, in suggestinghow nation-state boundaries came to be drawn where they were. A brief consideration, however, will show that neither ofthese answers are persuasive. The sequence by which nationalism spread from Europe(especially central Europe) to the non-European world is left largelyuntouched in his alternate interpretation, but he demotes Europeannationalism to a second stage in the spread of nationalism, identifying aninitial stage that took place in the Americas. The effect was toleave Magyar-speaking Hungarians feeling reduced to second-class status--even though, in fact, large numbers, especially of the elite and even ofthe nascent middle class, did not speak Magyar as an everyday languageuntil a generation or so before Hungarian nationalism emerged as aforce.[4] The growth of a Magyar-language press and readership led almostto Hungarian national feelings and demands. If Jews could not quite be Germans orPoles, they could move to a Jewish state: Jewishness and Israeliness wouldnot be in tension, but be one and the same. Jewish agnostics andatheists abound; about half of Israeli Jews are self-identified as secular,viewing and being viewed by their religious compatriots with somesuspicion. Just as importantly, Anderson offers an alternate view of theessential nature of the nationalist impulse. Hence, upon independence,these subdivisions were each transformed into a separate nation-state, eachits own imagined community, though founded on the actual community of thelocal elite. Some of the peoples on the eastern coast of Sumatra are not only physically close ... It was indeed widely supposedamong early Zionists that Jews who did not emigrate would insteadassimilate, and gradually and quietly cease to be Jews.[1 ] The tensionbetween Jewishness and nationalism would thus evaporate: there would beGermans in Germany, Poles in Poland, and Jews in Israel. During the long period in which the Jews had no state or evenidentifiable territory of their own, they were nevertheless bound togetherby a tradition, a tradition rooted in religion but not confined tobelievers in that religion. In such disputes, however, each side claimedthat its own was the true doctrine, universally applicable. Moreover, in practicethese differences may fall along national lines, as in the Sino-Sovietsplit in the 196 s, when each side posed as champion of a different versionof "true" Marxism-Leninism. The conventional picture of nationalism is that it is an ideologywhich grew up in Europe in the aftermath of the French Revolution, andbecame normative there in the course of the 19th century, findingexpression on the one hand in the unifications of Germany and Italy, and onthe other hand in the internal fissures which grew up within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, leading eventually to its dissolution after the FirstWorld War. Nor can Jews be defined as members of a religious faith community.Judaism is indeed a religion, but one does not cease to be a Jew by ceasingto practice or even believe in it as a faith. More subtly, theadoption of vernacular languages lowered intellectual barriers. Anderson identifies a varietyof factors.[2] Spanish policy and sheer scale kept the varioussubdivisions of its American empire largely isolated from one another, andthe monopolization of higher office by those born in Spain meant that thesocial and political horizon even of local elites did not extend beyond theindividual viceroyalty or captain-generalcy. Nor are civilizations quite bound to territories, still less asingle political order; the West has never had a single political order,and though "the West" originated in Europe, Westerners (and to a degreeChinese) have taken their civilization with them when they moved elsewhere. [9]Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Originand Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 5-7. Will it dwindleaway, into on one hand the local society of one nation, Israel, and on theother hand one thread among many in the societies of other nations? What, then, are the Jews? What, then, is the fate of Jewish civilization? Both Toynbee and Weber indicated--or at least intimated--that the best way to explain [the Jewish] historicalexperience is by comparing it with those great civilizations that were closely linked with religions but cannot be understood solely on the basis of patterns of belief or worship.[7] China did not vanish as a civilization when Confucianism wasofficially rejected as its basis. [4]Ibid., 78-79, 1 1-1 9.
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