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clearly in no need for Anderson’s rescue operation. Declaring them bankrupt was merely 

Anderson’s flawed attempt to free himself from the burden of engaging with them. Nor was it 

clear that nationalism was only ‘cultural’. Anderson did not explain why it was not also political 

and economic. Certainly, neither a Nehru nor a Nkrumah nor yet a Sukarno or a Ho, neither a 

Jefferson nor a Bolivar nor yet a Mazzini, imagined otherwise when they led nationalist 

struggles. Projects of national development lay at the core of nationalist movements and even 

after they became the settled nationalisms of established states, nationalisms always embodied a 

distinctive political economy – typically its own version of national development – and not only 

a cultural politics (Desai 2009c). Each reflected 

the particular concerns of the classes that led 

them but these had to be compromised by the 

concessions each was forced to make to equity 

and other such popular concerns to the extent 

that their success was reliant on popular 

mobilization. This was as much the case in 

Europe and the Americas as it was in de-

colonized Asia and Africa in the 20

th

 century. 

The cultural content of these nationalisms were 

intimately tied to the requirements of their 

economic and political tasks (see the various 

contributions in Desai 2009a). Few could 

afford to celebrate inherited culture in simple 

ways, given the tasks of modernization. In the 

nationalism which lay at the core of the 

Communist revolution in China, for example, 

where traditional society and polity had failed 

so spectacularly against imperial pressures, 

‘Anti-traditionalism’ dominated and most 

intellectuals ‘believed that the Chinese national 

character had so many serious shortcomings 

that cultural and spiritual restructuring 

programs were urgently needed to cure and 

even, for some . . . to remake the nation’. Even conservatives who ‘advocated . . . restoring 

China’s traditional Confucian cultural values . . . admitted the necessity of a fundamental 

remaking of Chinese culture’. (Wu 2008: 477). In post-war Japan, political economy and cultural 

politics were even harder to distinguish: the largely cultural ideas of Japanese uniqueness which 

had powered pre-surrender nationalism were so comprehensively discredited by defeat as to that 

for the next several decades ideas about Japan’s national distinctiveness attached themselves to 

the national economy rather than to any specifically cultural themes (Hein 2008).  To what extent 

could a theory which focused on the cultural aspects of nationalisms alone ‘properly’ understand 

them? 

 

There remains the matter of the emotional legitimacy which nations enjoy, to which 

Anderson devotes a whole chapter (pp. 141–54). Emotional legitimacy forms the ineffable core 

of nationalism and it looms so large for Anderson that, incredible as it may seem, faced with it he 

brushes aside his own previously built up explanations of the phenomenon. Although he ‘tried to 

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delineate the processes by which the nation came to be imagined, and, once imagined, modelled, 

adapted and transformed’, such accounts of changes in society or consciousness do not  

 

in themselves do much to explain the attachment that peoples feel for the inventions of 

their imaginations – or to revive a question raised at the beginning of the text – why 

people are ready to die for these inventions. (p. 141) 

 

But Anderson cannot seem to make up his mind. Though ruling out explanation, and devoting 

the chapter exclusively to lyricizing this ‘emotional commitment’, Anderson goes on to invoke 

the ‘fatality’ of national belonging, its ‘purity’ and ‘disinterestedness’ as explanations for 

people’s emotional attachment to their nations. This is what elicits the sort of commitment which 

is capable of the ultimate sacrifice.  

 

A number of things may be said here. First of all, at a logical level, if all the long pages 

of explanation which precede this chapter ultimately fail to explain this deep core of nationalism 

in the way ‘fatality’ does, why bother to write them? What is their relationship to the lyric 

exposition in Chapter 8? Secondly, Anderson surely draws too easy and stark a contrast between 

national belonging, a ‘fatality’, and other forms of association which one may join and leave ‘at 

easy will’ (p. 142). All forms of enduring commitment – to democracy, science, socialism, 

religious belief, or human rights, e.g. – create 

attachments which are hardly possible to join or 

leave ‘at easy will’. As for willingness to die, 

people have fought and died for a variety of 

things other than nations – from crassly 

material things like land and resources to 

elevated ideals such as truth, democracy, rights 

and socialism. The nation is hardly the only 

form of community to elicit the ultimate 

sacrifice. Thirdly, as the history of deserters, 

conscientious objectors and the realities of 

soldiers’ responses in battlefields have 

recounted, the willingness to die for nations is 

not as ubiquitous as Anderson imagines. 

Finally, while Anderson is willing to suspect 

‘official nationalism’ of a lot, he does not 

entertain the possibility that the imputation of 

such profound devotion to the nation as to elicit 

the willingness to die for it, including the 

putting up of tombs of unknown soldiers, may 

be the work of official nationalism too. There is 

no doubt that national belonging has 

considerable force – emotional and ideological. 

However, Anderson’s lengthy discussion of the matter remains unconvincing: is national 

belonging really stronger than other forms of belonging always, everywhere and in all 

circumstances? Is it not more forceful in some countries than others? Here, as at so many other 

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