Microsoft Word Inadvertence clean

“country-by-country” attitude . . . that human society consists essentially of several hundred 

different and discrete “nations”, each 

of which has (or ought to have) its own 

postage-stamps and national soul’. He 

argued, instead, that ‘the only 

framework of reference which is of 

any real utility here is world history as 

a whole’. Keeping in mind the overall 

evolution of the world order of 

capitalism, he insisted that ‘[I]t is the 

forest which “explains” the trees’. In 

this materialist and world-historical 

view, the origins of nationalism lay 

 

[n]ot in the folk, nor in the individual’s 

repressed passion for some sort of 

wholeness or identity, but in the machinery of world political economy. Not, however, in 

the process of that economy’s development as such – not simply as an inevitable 

concomitant of industrialization and urbanization . . . [but in] the uneven development of 

history since the eighteenth century. This unevenness is a material fact; one could argue 

that it is the most grossly material fact about modern history. The conclusion, at once 

satisfying and near-paradoxical, is that the most notoriously subjective and ‘idealistic’ of 

historical phenomena is in fact a by-product of the most brutally and hopelessly material 

side of the history of the last two centuries. (Nairn, 1981: 335–6). 

 

Nairn’s critical point was that capitalism produced not one but two kinds of inequality – social 

and regional or spatial – and these were productive of classes and nations. Nations were, 

therefore, material realities as much as classes were. How material they are can be appreciated 

from the fact that economic inequality within nations, great though it is has long been and though 

it has become even greater in recent decades, remains small compared to economic inequality 

between nations (Milanovic 2005, Freeman 2004). How material nations are can also be 

appreciated from the centrality of the 

‘developmental state’ – whether the US, 

German and Japanese, or more recent Asian 

and Latin American, and above all the 

Chinese – in earlier cases overcoming, and 

in later ones, at least mitigating – these 

international economic inequalities (Chang 

2002 and 2008; Reinert 2007). Of course, 

materiality could also work the other way, 

as the increase in class and regional 

inequalities in most countries under recent 

market-driven policies have also attested. 

And along with these new political 

economies came distinctly new forms of 

cultural politics in nations, as I and my 

---

contributors attested in our recent work on developmental and cultural nationalisms (Desai 

2009a). If one is to engage critically with Nairn in order to insist that nations were merely 

‘cultural artefacts’, it is essential to address this issue frontally. Not surprisingly, Anderson’s 

attempt to carve out a specific explanatory space for culture does not succeed. It cannot unless 

the equally specific explanatory weights of political and economic factors are duly considered 

and acknowledged. Anderson claimed that his theory of nationalism was  

 

intended less to explain the socio-economic basis of anti-metropolitan resistance in the 

Western Hemisphere between say, 1760 and 1830, than why the resistance was conceived 

in plural, ‘national’ forms – rather than in others. The economic interests at stake are 

well-known and obviously of fundamental importance. Liberalism and Enlightenment 

clearly had a powerful impact, above all in providing an arsenal of ideological criticisms 

of imperial and anciens régimes. What [he was] proposing is that neither economic 

interest, Liberalism nor Enlightenment could, or did, create in themselves the kind, or 

shape, of imagined community to be defended from these regimes’ depredations; to put it 

another way, none provided the framework for a new consciousness – the scarcely-seen 

periphery of its vision – as opposed to centre-field objects of its admiration or disgust. (p. 

65)  

 

However, Anderson could only claim this by ignoring the fact that, for Nairn, the geographical 

and social contours of uneven development explained precisely the kind and shape of the 

imagined community and that the focus on the ‘wood’ rather than the ‘trees’ enabled the reasons 

for the plural and national forms of resistance as opposed to single universal resistance based on 

class or some vaguer common humanity required by liberalism or the Enlightenment to emerge 

clearly in relief.     

 

Finally, how did Anderson ‘de-

Europeanize’ the study of nationalism? The 

short answer is, by Americanizing it, and worse, 

by Americanizing it in the sense of the USA, 

rather than of the Americas as a whole. By 

Anderson’s account, the USA was the first 

nation-state and founded the first of the models 

(the other two were European) which all others 

had to follow, as his argument about 

nationalism’s ‘modularity’ required. What little 

Anderson offered by way of a sociology of 

nationalism’s origins is confined to explaining 

the emergence of his three ‘models’ which the 

rest of the non-Euroamerican world was bound 

to imitate. One wonders how much of 

Anderson’s knowledge of Indonesia or 

Thailand was involved in coming to this 

conclusion. 

 

In the homelands of these models, 

---