Microsoft Word Inadvertence clean

Europe’. Now, as Anderson saw it, ‘the immediate genealogy should be traced to the imaginings 

of the colonial state’ (p. 163). Anderson is surely dissimulating when he suggests that this 

conclusion might appear ‘surprising’ because colonial states ‘were typically anti-nationalist’ (p. 

163). The view that nationalisms of the Third World borrowed from their colonial masters is 

simply too widespread. In any case, borrowing from Europeans when ‘at home’ as it were, was 

hard to distinguish from borrowing from them when ‘away’ in the colonies. Now the explanation 

of the shape of the nationalisms of the ‘last wave’ even dispensed with the agency of ‘bilingual’ 

elites who did the work of imitation and replaced it entirely with that of largely European 

colonial elites. Some ‘de-Europeanization’! Some nationalism! 

 

As already noted, the real problem with the argument about the modular character of 

nationalism was the implication that the similarities were the result of ‘copying’, not of the 

structural similarities in material circumstances and possibilities. While the idea of Third World 

nationalists copying American and European models hardly served to de-Europeanize anything, 

it completely neglected the level at which the true creativity of any nationalism may be found: 

below the level of the broad structural similarities where one found the various ways in which 

the nationalists deployed the differing social, political, economic and cultural resources they had 

and the effectiveness with which they were able to formulate and fulfil the equally various tasks 

of building nations.  

 

Reading IC, one might never suspect that third world nationalists coped with qualitatively 

new problems, economically, politically and culturally. One might never suspect that they sought 

to stem colonial resource and economic drain, to reverse deindustrialization and reorient 

economies from imperial to national priorities, e.g. by creating food self-sufficiency and 

recovering resources controlled by foreigners. One might never suspect that they overthrew or 

reformed ancient regimes – Empires, Caliphates or kingdoms – created national out of colonial 

bureaucracies, concocted ‘unity in diversity’ and ‘pancha sila’ long before anyone had ever 

thought of ‘multiculturalism’, 

displayed a precocious modernity 

in modernising available 

‘traditions’ to serve new ends as in 

India’s Panchayati Raj or 

Tanzania’s Ujamaa. One might 

never suspect that they laboured to 

unite nations against colonial 

‘divide and rule’, gave entirely new 

meanings to terms like secularism, 

as in India, or communism, as in 

China or Vietnam, or produced 

critiques of oppressive ‘traditional’ 

cultures often in the face of European romanticizations of the same.  Many of these initiatives 

failed or misfired. The fact remains that they testified to a creativity which is rarely referred to, 

let along acknowledged in Western discourses, including western discourses on nationalism.  

 

Ironically, Anderson arguably overlooked the real significance of his idea of ‘Creole 

pioneers.’ Anderson had complained in the Preface of the 1991 edition that this move had been 

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more or less completely neglected in the reception of the book’s first edition. To draw attention 

to it he re-titled the chapter about it ‘Creole Pioneers’. Neither the prefatory comments nor the 

new title substantially altered the situation, however, perhaps because Anderson himself did not 

fully grasp the implications of his move. Locating the origins of nationalism in a ‘first wave’ in 

the Americas – beginning with the revolt of Britain’s American colonies in 1776, thus predating 

the French Revolution, from which scholars of nationalism usually dated the beginnings of 

nationalism, by a critical few years – was IC’s most important theoretical move, and potentially 

its most original contribution to the study of nationalism, on two counts.  

 

First, it had the potential to link discussions of the geo-politics of capitalist modernity, 

including the politics of uneven and combined development and the spread of nation-states in 

response to it, with discussions of nationalisms: the two are undeniably, but still all-too-

obscurely, intertwined (see Desai, 2009a and 2009d), though the complete absence of any 

discussion of Holland’s 16

th

 century overthrow of Spanish rule and of England’s 17th-century 

Civil War and revolution was problematic. The potential could not be realized, however, given 

Anderson’s exclusive focus on matters cultural. Secondly, in order to locate the origins of 

nationalism in the Americas, Anderson argued against the grain of the study of nationalism 

hitherto, so long focused not only on Europe but also taking as 

paradigmatic its mid-19th century ‘ethno-linguistic’ nationalisms. The 

‘Creole Pioneers’ of nationalism were distinguished neither by ethnicity 

nor language from the mother countries against whom they defined their 

nationhood. This was a theoretical move which potentially could theorize 

(and legitimize) a greater variety of nationalisms, detaching nationalism 

from ethnicity and language, and potentially other ‘primordial’ elements 

with which nationalism has all too long been associated to the detriment 

of the understanding of its real historical and political character. 

 

Inadvertent success 

The most famous thing about IC was, of course, its title: Anderson lamented in the 2006 post-

face that ‘the vampires of banality have by now sucked almost all the blood’ (p. 207n) from it. 

However, there was a profound irony here, which Anderson did not note. As a catch-phrase, 

‘imagined communities’ inspired a great deal of scholarly output, largely of a humanist and 

postmodern sort. However, most of this writing worked themes of imagination, creativity, 

forging and forgery, and inventedness of this or that nation and, less frequently, of nationalisms 

in general (because so little of postmodern and humanist scholarship tends to be theoretical, and 

so much about particularities which are celebrated as such), themes which it was not Anderson’s 

aim to invoke at all. What he meant by the phrase turns out to be, in retrospect, rather banal: the 

nation’s imagined, as opposed to experienced character. In this sense, the nation was not the only 

sort of imagined community: a nation was ‘imagined’  

 

because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-

members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of 

their communion ... In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-

face contact (and perhaps even those) are imagined. (p. 6) 

 

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The idea of the inventedness of nations and nationalisms would have gone against the grain of 

Anderson’s very respectful treatment of the phenomena. Anderson complained about how there 

was ‘among cosmopolitan and polylingual intellectuals ... a certain condescension [towards 

nationalism]. Like Gertrude Stein in the face of Oakland, one can rather quickly conclude that 

there is “no there there”’’ (5). Such condescension also laced the work of scholars of nationalism 

who, like Renan, could, for example, be exasperated by the distance 

that separated nationalist from reliable accounts of history (Renan, 

1996). The idea of the inventedness of nations, with all the irreverence 

that came with the formulation, was better expressed in Eric Hobsbawm 

and Terence Ranger’s exploration of the inventedness of so much 

culture, in this case, imperial as well as national, that appeared in the 

same year as IC,  The Invention of Tradition (1983).   

 

The effects 

As I reflected on this strange record of failure to achieve declared aims 

and inadvertent success at that which was not even attempted, an 

analogy insistently forced itself on me. The failure of IC was no 

ordinary failure. James Ferguson (1990) showed how, in the case of 

development projects in Lesotho, the importance of certain 

undertakings lay not in their success in achieving their stated aims, but precisely in the political 

effects of their failures.  

 

‘Development’ institutions generate their own form of discourse, and this discourse 

simultaneously constructs Lesotho as a particular kind of object of knowledge, and 

creates a structure of knowledge around that object. Interventions are then organized on 

the basis of this structure of knowledge, which, while ‘failing’ on their own terms, 

nonetheless have regular effects, which include the expansion and entrenchment of 

bureaucratic state power, side by side with the projection of a representation of economic 

and social life which denies ‘politics’ and, to the extent that it is successful, suspends its 

effects. The short answer to the question of what the ‘development’ apparatus in Lesotho 

does, then, is found in the book’s title: it is an ‘antipolitics machine’, depoliticizing 

everything it touches, everywhere whisking political realities out of sight, all the while 

performing, almost unnoticed, its own pre-eminently political operation of expanding 

bureaucratic power. (Ferguson, 1990: xiv–xv) 

 

IC ‘while “failing” on [its] own terms, nonetheless [has] regular effects’ on the scholarly field in 

which it intervenes, inflecting it to the right, primarily by de-politicizing it and making 

nationalism a part of inconsequential cultural erudition while neoliberalism attempted to roll 

back the gains of national independence for so much of the Third World. For a whole generation 

of scholarship in the age of neo-liberalism, IC smoothed the path away from the rich traditions of 

theorizing politics, political economy and history, not to mention culture, in historical 

materialism by giving false reports of its bankruptcy. And, most ironically, it made the study of 

nationalism more Eurocentric than ever before while de-legitimizing Third World nationalisms 

as Western constructs at precisely the historical moment when neo-liberalism needed to be 

countered by progressive politics along national as well as class lines. At least part of the 

popularity of IC was the product of neoliberalism and its derivatives, ‘globalization’ and new 

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formulations of ‘empire’, all of which opposed national and social attempts to undo the harms of 

markets and capitalism. As these come crashing down in the world-wide economic crisis which 

marks the end of the century’s first decade, as it becomes clear just how national the responses to 

the crisis have been despite decades of neoliberal and postmodern and postcolonial anti-state 

discourses, one hopes that those interested in nationalisms and nation-states will turn to the 

traditions of scholarship which have better illuminated the dynamics of nationalist and 

revolutionary change than has IC.  

 

 

References  

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Anderson, Benedict (1996) ‘Introduction’, in Gopal Balakrishnan (ed.) Mapping the 

Nation, pp. 1–16. London: Verso. 

Castro-Klarén, Sara and Chasteen, John Charles (eds) (2003) Beyond Imagined 

Communities: Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America. 

Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 

Chang, Ha-Joon (2002) Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical 

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Radhika Desai is Professor of Political Studies at the Department of Political Studies, University 

of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. She is the author of Slouching Towards Ayodhya: From 

Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics (2004), Intellectuals and Socialism: ‘Social Democrats’ 

and the Labour Party (1994) and numerous articles in Economic and Political Weekly, New Left 

Review, Third World Quarterly and other journals and edited collections on parties, culture, 

political economy and nationalism. Most recently she has edited Developmental and Cultural 

Nationalisms, a special issue of Third World Quarterly (2008, 29(3)). She is 

currently working on two books – When Was Globalization? Origin and End of a US Strategy 

and The Making of the Indian Capitalist Class. email: [e-mail]]