This leads Anderson to his well-known definition of the nation: ‘it is an imagined political community – and imagined as inherently limited and sovereign’ (Anderson, 1991: 6). It is ‘limited’ because it always has finite boundaries beyond which lie other nations. It is ‘sovereign’ because it emerges at a time when the ‘gage and emblem of … freedom is the sovereign state’ (p. 7). It is a ‘community’ because whatever real inequalities and exploitation prevail, it is imagined as a ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’ (p. 7).
Our first problem arises when we ask: Why did the weakening of religious and dynastic cultures produce the ‘idea’ of the nation? It is worth dwelling on Anderson’s answer.
Faced with the arbitrary character of ‘man’s’ (sic) mortality, the ineluctability of his particular genetic heritage, gender, ‘life-era’, physical capabilities and so on, he seeks meaning for his life. ‘The great merit of traditional religious world-views’, Anderson argues, has been their ability to give sense to the ‘overwhelming burden of human suffering – disease, mutilation, grief, age, and death’ (Anderson, 1991: 9). With the ebbing of religious belief, Anderson continues, death and deliverance seemed arbitrary and ridiculous. The ‘disintegration of paradise’ and the ‘absurdity of salvation’ required, in their place, a new ‘style of continuity’: a secular transformation of fatality into continuity and contingency into meaning. ‘Few things’, he continues, ‘were better placed to achieve this than an idea of the nation’, since nations always loom out of an immemorial past and glide into a limitless future (pp. 12–13). Anderson is saying that the nation ‘idea’ is an Enlightenment response to the ‘death of God’. Apparently, we all seek meaning and continuity where this takes the form of a will to immortality. The nation fulfils such needs because it is seemingly eternal.
Yet Anderson’s explanation begs more questions than it answers. Is the will to immortality not itself a religious idea, rather than a state of ‘man’s’ nature? If nations emerge from the eclipse of the religious imagination, then Anderson cannot account for them. Why are they imagined as quasi-religious objects? If they do not, then he also cannot account for them. If nations are consubstantial with religion, then, on their own terms, they cannot be products of a radically new style of imagining.3 This is the substance of Adrian Hastings’ critique of what he calls the ‘modernist school’, including Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner and John Breuilly. They have, he suggests, understated the importance of religious thinking to nationalism. He argues: ‘The Bible provided, for the Christian world at least, the original model of the nation. Without it and its Christian interpretation and implementation, it is arguable that nations and nationalism, as we know them, could never have existed’ (Hasting, 1997: 4; emphasis added).
What is at stake in this disagreement is before the periodisation of the origins of nations. Unlike the modernist school, for whom the nation does not exist prior to the 1780s – that is before the American and French Revolutions – Hastings is sure that ‘the sense of “nation” was already found in the fourteenth century’ (Hastings, 1997: 18). Starting with the English Bible, Hastings finds the term ‘nacion’ – a translation of the Vulgate text, which used the Latin ‘natio’ – employed as early as the mid-1340s. Thus Psalm 107.4 is translated by Richard Rolle of Hampole, who died in 1349, as ‘I sall singe til the in nacyuns’ (cited in Hastings, 1997: 16). This is not simply a coincidence of a term: ‘What is clear’, claims Hastings, ‘is that there has been a surprisingly firm continuity in usage across more than six hundred years’ (Hastings, 1997: 18). He is suggesting that the medieval term ‘nacyun’ or ‘nacion’, like the contemporary term ‘nation’, referred to a
historico-cultural community with a territory it regards as its own and over which it claims some sort of sovereignty so that the cultural community sees itself with a measure of self-awareness as also a territorial and political community, held together horizontally by its shared character rather than vertically by reason of the authority of the state (Hastings, 1997: 25).
Hastings is, ironically, drawing on Anderson’s own definition of a nation as a ‘deep horizontal comradeship’. Hastings’ point is that both the word and concept, ‘nation’, were already at the heart of the English linguistic, cultural and religious tradition from the Middle Ages, though they became more widespread with the Reformation and the diffusion of knowledge of the Bible achieved by Protestantism (Hastings, 1997: 18). What Hastings does is make clear a contradiction at the heart of Imagined Communities. If the nation is chiefly a cultural artefact, then its form precedes the Enlightenment.
Anthony Smith, for his part, finds the origin of national communities in pre-modern ethnic sentiments (Smith, 1986: 5), even finding an analogue for modern systems of nation states in the fourteenth century BC (Smith, 1986: 11). In this view, the nation as defined by Anderson and Hastings resembles what Smith calls an ethnic community (‘ethnie’) in that it is a community with ‘shared ancestry myths, histories and cultures, having an association with a specific territory and a sense of solidarity’ (Smith, 2003: 27). Yet if this is how we construe the nation, then, according to Smith, ‘such communities have been widespread in all eras of history, at least since the onset of the Bronze Age in the Middle East and Aegean’ (Smith, 2003: 27). Seyoum Hameso, for example, in his study of Ethnicity and Nationalism in Africa, simply substitutes for Smith’s term ethnie the word nation. Hence, where Smith suggests that ethnie is the basic force and process of the modern as well the pre-modern epochs (Smith, 1995: 57), Hameso simply renders this as: nations are the basic units of the modern and pre-modern periods (Hameso, 1997: 33).
What all these accounts have in common is that they elevate the cultural dimensions of the nation – its basic anthropology – and reduce its significance as a political community. In this regard, there is no sharp division between the modernist and pre-modernist accounts of the nation.
Ernest Gellner, someone for whom the nation is a modern phenomenon, for example, sees in it a functional response to the ‘Great Transformation’ – the emergence of industrial societies from agrarian ones. Accompanying this movement, he suggests, was a radical change in the nature of work. Physical labour (the ‘application of human muscle to matter’ [Gellner, 1999: 106]) was replaced by ‘controlling, managing and maintaining a machine’ and more usually by the ‘rapid manipulation of meanings and people through computers ... telephones and typewriters and faxes … and so on’ (p. 106). Industrial production presupposed that the system of symbols in use were immediately legible: that meaning, as Gellner puts it, ‘was carried by the message alone’ (p. 107). Rapid communication between sometimes-distant interlocutors, who were selected more and more on the basis of merit rather than rank (and, therefore, of different ranks), required an orderly, standardised system of ideas and rules for formulating and decoding messages (p. 107). This is what Gellner calls a ‘high culture’ (p. 107). With industrialisation, Gellner concludes, ‘the entire society must be pervaded by one standardised high culture, if it is to work at all’ (p. 107), i.e.
Society can no longer tolerate a wild proliferation of internal subcultures, all of them context-bound and severely inhibited in their mutual inter-communication. Access to the appropriate high culture, and acceptability within it, is a person’s most important and valued possession: it institutes a pre-condition of access not merely to employment, but to legal and moral citizenship, to all kinds of social participation. So a person identifies with his or her high culture, and is eager that he or she inhabits a political unit where various bureaucracies function in that same cultural idiom. … In other words, he or she is a nationalist (Gellner, 1999: 107–8).
Why does it follow, however, that a high culture is necessarily a national culture? This is the gist of the question that Miroslav Hroch addresses to Gellner. Hroch observes that most national movements had, for the most part, already acquired a