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The Inadvertence of Benedict Anderson: 

Engaging Imagined Communities  

 

Radhika Desai 

 

Benedict Anderson,  Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of 

Nationalism London: Verso, 2006, second revised edition (first published 1983, revised edition, 

1991). xv + 240 pp. ISBN 9781844670864 

 

Like celebrities who ‘need no introduction’, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities 

(hereinafter IC) should need no review. After all, it is one of the most widely cited works in its 

field and such academic ubiquity is surely review enough. Indeed, no single phrase occurs as 

widely and frequently in the literature on nationalism as ‘imagined communities’. That it is not 

always attributed to its original creator is testimony to its pervasive 

acceptance and adoption. However, I am probably not alone in having long 

felt a certain unease with IC: not on individual points, though many of these 

have been criticized (see Özkırımlı, 2000, for a convenient summary of the 

principal criticisms of IC), but with slippages between its stated aims and 

arguments and their real logic. My unease was recently heightened when I 

tried to place IC – the conjuncture in the development of nations and 

nationalisms at which it intervened and the contribution it made – within a 

larger historical perspective on nationalism’s evolution over recent centuries, 

and an intellectual historical perspective on attempts to comprehend it (Desai 

2009b). Re-reading IC in its new edition – now including a post-face 

detailing the impressive history of its translations and editions – nearly a 

quarter century after its original publication has served to crystallize vague 

unease into overall assessment.  

 

Inevitably, this assessment is made against the backdrop of the rather 

drastic swings of fortune which IC’s object of study – nationality, nation-

ness, nationalism (p. 4 [all numbers in brackets indicate page references in 

the 2006 edition]) – underwent since the book’s publication, including being 

consigned to the proverbial ‘dustbin of history’ by many, Anderson included (see Desai, 2009b). 

When IC was originally published in 1983, and in its 1991 new and expanded edition, Anderson 

insisted that ‘the “end of the era of nationalism,” so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight. 

Indeed, nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time’ (p. 

3). Then came that complex historical conjuncture when the Soviet Union broke up into its 

constituent national units and ‘globalization’ hit the newsstands. (The two were connected: one 

of the least fuzzy of globalization’s many meanings was the extension of the capitalist world 

over the former Communist bloc, re-establishing the global reach that had been broken by the 

Russian Revolution although even those who subscribed to it (Rosenberg 2005) overlooked the 

fact that this process had begun decades before the collapse of the Soviet Union with the US 

rapprochement with China.) This conjuncture seemed to have opposing implications for nations 

and nationalisms. While the fall of Communism added many more nations to the roster of the 

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United Nations, complete with outpourings of national sentiment, in its more widely accepted 

meanings, ‘globalization’ was deemed corrosive of nation-states and nationalisms, its increased 

commercialization and commodification dissolving national institutions and borders, rendering 

nation-states irrelevant. 

 

 

Though Anderson had, until at least 1991, insisted on the crucial importance of nations 

and nationalism, he now changed his assessment, relying not on any lines of analysis developed 

in IC, indeed, not even referring to them, but on the popular understanding that ‘globalization’ – 

migrations, the fall of Communism, technological, transport and communications revolutions, 

transnational investments and the like (Anderson, 1996: 8) – had made the future of nations and 

nationalisms unsure. While the central claims of globalization, including the claim that it was 

rendering nation-states ineffective and irrelevant, were beginning to be contested, (Hirst and 

Thompson 1999, Wade 1996, Weiss 1998; cf. Desai 2009e forthcoming), Anderson swallowed 

globalization discourse whole. He claimed that the break-up of the Soviet Union had merely 

created ‘a congeries of weak, economically fragile nation-states . . . some entirely new, others 

residues of the settlement of 1918; in either case, from many points of view a quarter of a 

century too late’. They were ‘unlikely to disturb global trends’ which portended ‘the impending 

crisis of the hyphen that for two hundred years yoked state and nation’. The hyphenation of the 

nationalist aspiration to statehood and the state’s need for loyalty and obedience had become 

radically uncertain and ‘[p]ortable nationality, read under the sign of “identity” is on the rapid 

rise as people everywhere are on the move’ (Anderson, 1996: 8). Older and better established 

states could also be expected to have their problems, particularly given the acceleration of 

technological change and cost-escalation in the military sphere:  

 

[s]tates incapable of militarily defending their citizens, and hard put to ensure them 

employment and ever-better life chances, may busy themselves with policing women’s 

bodies and schoolchildren’s curricula, but [he asked] is this kind of thing enough over the 

long term to sustain the grand demands of sovereignty? (Anderson, 1996: 9)  

 

Anderson’s new position was only apparently similar to Eric Hobsbawm’s complex 

historical verdict on post-Soviet nationalism. Hobsbawm had said already in 1990 that 

nationalism had ‘become historically less important’ (and was probably the interlocutor against 

whom, a year later, Anderson had insisted on the continuing historical importance of nations and 

nationalisms). For Hobsbawm it was already clear then that nationalism was ‘no longer . . . a 

global political programme, as it may be said to have been in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth 

centuries’ (Hobsbawm, 1990: 191).  

 

‘[N]ation’ and ‘nationalism’ are no longer adequate terms to describe, let alone analyse, 

the political entities described as such, or even the sentiments once described by these 

words. It is not impossible that nationalism will decline with the decline of the nation-

state, without which being English, Irish or Jewish, or a combination of all these, is only 

one way in which people describe their identity among the many others which they use 

for this purpose, as occasion demands. It would be absurd to claim that this day is already 

near. However, I hope it can at least be envisaged. (Hobsbawm, 1990: 192) 

 

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