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This judgement was merely confirmed by the apparent resurgence of nations and nationalisms 

produced by the fall of Communism: they were merely ‘The chickens of World War I coming 

home to roost’, a settling of past accounts, frozen by the rise of Communism and unfrozen by its 

fall (Hobsbawm, 1996: 259). This was the verdict of a historian of nations and nationalisms who 

had remained, throughout, sceptical of their claims and uneasy with their particularising thrust. It 

said merely that nations and nationalism had ceased to actively remake the map of the world, in 

effect that the generalisation of the nation-state system was substantially complete. Though it 

also recognised that nations and nationalisms were declining, they were doing so very gradually. 

Hobsbawm’s position differed from Anderson’s not only in its consistency with his earlier work, 

but also in having no truck with voguish ‘globalization’.  

 

That Anderson’s critical volte-face is not referred to, discussed or reflected upon, let 

alone made the basis of any reassessment of IC’s principal theses in the new edition, that IC, in 

its turn, is not referred to in the 1996 piece, makes one wonder how deep Anderson’s intellectual 

convictions really go, how firmly his scholarly judgements are rooted in an investigation and 

weighing of the evidence, and how seriously he takes the normal scholarly injunction to 

consistency. The only new material in the 2006 edition is a largely self-congratulatory, not to say 

cute, account of IC’s ‘subsequent travel-history in light of some of the book’s own central 

themes: print-capitalism, piracy in the positive, metaphorical sense, vernacularization, and 

nationalism’s undivorceable marriage to internationalism’ (p. 207). 

 

 

In this essay, I explore what I take to be the more important contradictions and 

ambiguities of IC. A first set of criticisms concerns the relationship of the book to the political 

occasion which avowedly inspired it: the relation turns out to be far more complex and 

ambiguous than Anderson gave his readers to understand. This leads on to an assessment of the 

book’s fulfilment of its aims, as originally stated in 1983 and later elaborated upon in the post-

face to the new edition of 2006. The critical nature of these reflections must not be taken to mean 

that IC broke no new ground. Two major achievements are noted: however, in the first case, 

Anderson himself seems unaware of the true significance of his theoretical move and, in the 

second, there is an inadvertence which makes full accreditation difficult. The essay closes with 

reflections on the inadvertent achievements and failures of the work.   

 

Political imposture 

The opening pages of IC inform us 

that it was occasioned by the wars in 

Indo-China which began in the late 

1970s. They underlined, for 

Anderson, the enduring importance of 

nationalism. 

 

While it was just possible to interpret 

the Sino-Soviet border clashes of 

1969, and the Soviet military 

interventions in Germany (1953), 

Hungary (1956) Czechoslovakia 

(1968), and Afghanistan (1980) in 

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terms of – according to taste – ‘social imperialism,’ ‘defending socialism’ etc., no one, I 

imagine, seriously believes that such vocabularies have much bearing on what has 

occurred in Indochina. (p. 1)  

 

Quite why ‘it was just possible’ to see European events in terms of class politics and ideology 

and not the events in Indochina is not explained and one cannot help wondering if, like so many 

writers, Anderson also reserves class categories for the West and national ones for the rest 

(Ahmad 1992). At any rate, the sub-text positions Anderson as a Marxist or someone 

sympathetic to Marxism, who was forced, at long last, to admit that the forces of narrow 

nationalism had betrayed Marxist ideals of 

socialist fraternity and internationalism. 

Casting around for an explanation, he then 

discovered that despite ‘the immense 

influence that nationalism has exerted on 

the modern world, plausible theory about it 

is conspicuously meagre’ (p. 3). Thus IC. 

Framed in this way, IC appears as a work of 

one with deep sympathies with the left, 

emerging at a critical moment to reflect on 

its past mistakes and failures.  

 

This is misleading in several respects. Though the wars in Indo-China disillusioned many 

Marxists, this was hardly because of they betrayed a hitherto unacknowledged nationalism, 

because disputes between European Communist nations were somehow possible to understand 

within Marxist terms and those between the Asian communist ones were not. While the Stalinist 

defence of ‘socialism in one country’ was certainly seen by Marxists to be a compromise of 

Communism’s global aspirations, national realities were not simply opposed to class ones by 

Marxists. The Soviet regime had to deal with nationalities internally from its earliest days and it 

supported national liberation abroad.  

 

Anderson’s stance is quite audacious and could only be credible to those ignorant of 

Marxist theoretical traditions and easily susceptible to stereotypes of it. Consistently IC attributes 

to Marxism a simplistic opposition between nation and class, between nationalism and 

Communism. In reality, of course, while there were always tensions, slippages and gaps in 

Marxist understandings of nationalism, such an opposition was a creation of Cold War anti-

Communism, not of Marxism or Communism. These intellectual and political traditions aimed, 

instead, to comprehend the interaction between these two principles, however well or badly this 

or that thinker accomplished the task. Whether it was Marx and Engels’ injunction to each 

working class to settle scores with its own bourgeoisie in the Communist Manifesto, Marx’s 

clarity about the importance of India’s independence for even her capitalist, let alone socialist, 

development, Engels’ notion of peoples with and without history, Luxemburg’s interventions on 

the question of Poland, Lenin’s and Bolshevik support for self-determination and their 

theorization of imperialism, Gramsci’s ideas about the ‘national-popular’ or the Austro-Marxists’ 

insights about the interaction of nationalism and social democracy in the context of the empire, 

classical Marxism sought to theorize the interaction of nationalism and Communism, of nation 

and class, in concrete circumstances of capitalism and imperialism. Nowhere does Anderson 

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