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places, Anderson clears space for his own reflections only by brushing a great deal under the 

proverbial carpet. 

 

To go on to the aims retrospectively announced in 2006, two of them were to ‘critically’ 

support Nairn, and to overcome not just Marxism’s but liberalism’s limitations on nationalism. 

We find, however, that IC’s few theoretical criticisms are reserved for Marxism: in IC Anderson 

does not have two interlocutors, only one: the Marxist Tom Nairn. All the references to Seton-

Watson are exegetical: relying on the rich historical detail, particularly on matters Eastern and 

Central European, of Nations and States, to illustrate this or that point, agreeing rather than 

disagreeing with him on all critical issues.  

 

Anderson’s theoretical thrusts against Nairn miss their mark. When he berates Nairn for 

applying the terms ‘pathology’, ‘neurosis’ and ‘dementia’ to nationalism, despite his broad 

sympathies for it (p. 5), Anderson overlooks the double-sidedness of Nairn’s appreciation of 

nationalism encapsulated in his designation of nationalism as the ‘modern Janus’, looking 

forward as well as back, emancipating as well as oppressing, modern as well as, avowedly at 

least, antique. In a largely imaginary contest which Anderson sets up between nation and class, 

Anderson surely has a point when he says that racism has its roots in class (pp. 148–9). But to 

claim that it has nothing to do with nationalism is to ignore how national inequality has been 

productive of racism from an international perspective as much as class inequality had been 

productive of racism in domestic contexts.  

 

Finally, we come to Anderson’s criticism of Nairn’s argument that nationalism was ‘tied 

to the political baptism of the lower classes’ (Nairn 1981: 41). Anderson’s refutation is 

inconsistent. In reference to Spanish America’s pioneering nationalisms, for example, he tells us 

at one point how the Creole nationalists feared the Negro working population and, a few lines 

later, that they sought to make nationals and citizens out of it (p. 49). This is a critical issue 

because Anderson uses this as an opening for the central argument of his book: that nationalism 

spread around the world in the wake of the American Declaration of Independence (and the 

French Revolution that came so close on its heels) because later nationalists were  

 

able to work from visible models provided by their distant, and after the convulsions of 

the French Revolution, not so distant, predecessors. The ‘nation’ thus became something 

capable of being consciously aspired to from early on, rather than a slowly sharpening 

frame of vision. Indeed, as we shall see, the ‘nation’ proved an invention on which it was 

impossible to secure a patent. It became available for pirating by widely different, and 

sometimes unexpected, hands. (67) 

 

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Rather than the entry of the 

lower classes into politics, 

nationalism’s origin and spread were, 

according to Anderson, better explained 

by the ‘modular’ character of 

nationalism and the ‘piracy’ of 

nationalism’s original ‘Creole’ model 

by nationalists who came later. But 

such ‘political baptism’ was merely as 

aspect of nationalism for Nairn, and not 

an explanation for the origin and spread 

of nationalism, to be supplanted by 

‘piracy’ and the ‘modular character of 

nationalism’. In attempting to best one 

of Nairn’s more insightful comments 

about the centrality of popular mobilization in nationalism – that ‘The new middle class 

intelligentsia of nationalism had to invite the masses into history; and the invitation card had to 

be written in a language they understood’ (Nairn, 1981: 340). Anderson claims that ‘it will be 

hard to see why the invitation came to seem so attractive, and 

why such different alliances were able to issue it, unless we turn 

finally to piracy’ (p. 80). This simply rings false. First, while 

usually educated middle-class nationalist leaders were aware of 

nationalist struggles of other times and places and undoubtedly 

applied aspects of this knowledge to their own situations (Why 

would they not? Why re-invent the wheel?), they also faced 

unique historical circumstances in which they had to lead 

struggles against actual or threatened foreign domination. They had to fashion nationalisms out 

of an equally unique set of resources offered by history. It was the structural similarity of the task 

that fell upon one nationalist leadership after another in the long story of the emergence of the 

nation-states system, and not some modular character it had, that imposed the broad similarities 

on nationalisms which have been so widely observed. Within the parameters of such structural 

similarities, however, nationalists could be more or less creative and more or less effective in 

accomplishing their tasks. Secondly, people responded to such ‘invitation cards’ on the basis of 

their understanding of the gains being offered – prosperity or equality, land or electricity, jobs or 

dignity, peace or revenge – not because they were sold on the idea of being nations in the image 

of some other nations.  

 

If Anderson’s criticisms of Nairn all fail, what remains of his promise to ‘critically 

support’ Nairn’s theory? Not much, given that he completely ignores the substance of Nairn’s 

account of nationalism in The Break-up of Britain. This is hardly the place for an exegesis of this 

argument and only its broad thrust may be outlined so as to gauge the extent of Anderson’s 

elision. Nairn’s argument is fundamentally materialist and in good part his ‘indictment’ of 

official Marxism was made with a view to invoking critical currents of Marxism to present a 

more fully historical materialist, i.e. Marxist, theory of nationalism. For Nairn took the 

development together of nationalism and capitalism, that is, of nation and class and nation, 

seriously. He criticized most accounts of nationalism for being ‘vitiated from the start by a 

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