Technology of nationalism

I was looking through Imagined Communities the other night again — the great book about the origins of nationalism by Benedict Anderson. What makes the book stand out in my opinion is that it ties the development of nationalism to the emergence and the rapid spread of a new mass media technology: the printing press — first books, then newspapers.

The concept of nationalism might be tricky to pin down but Anderson does a great job looking at why it arose when it did. And according to him, the printing press was a major element in the creation of this new and interesting ideology: an ideology that created new communities out of groups of people who never met each other and might not even be able to understand each other, yet rooted them in a mythical common past with a mythical common land that always belonged to them. Being a Soviet Jew, Zionism is the nationalism that I’m most familiar with on a personal level.

And if I understand Anderson correctly, he argues that nationalism would not have emerged or developed like it did without the invention of the printing press. The printed word created new national languages that homogenized what used to be hyper-local vernaculars and expanded people’s local cultural identity beyond their small scale communities to much larger fictional groups of people. The printed word — or, print capitalism — was key.

As he wrote:

Nothing served to ‘assemble’ related vernaculars more than capitalism, which, within the limits imposed by grammars and syntaxes, created mechanically reproduced print-languages capable of dissemination through the market.

These print-languages laid the bases for national consciousnesses in three distinct ways. First and foremost, they created unified fields of exchange and communication below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars. Speakers of the huge variety of Frenches, Englishes, or Spanishes, who might find it difficult or even impossible to understand one another in conversation, became capable of comprehending one another via print and paper. In the process, they gradually became aware of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in their particular language-field, and at the same time that only those hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged. These fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community.

Second, print-capitalism gave a new fixity to language, which in the long run helped to build that image of antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation. As Febvre and Martin remind us, the printed book kept a permanent form, capable of virtually infinite reproduction, temporally and spatially. It was no longer subject to the individualizing and ‘unconsciously modernizing’ habits of monastic scribes…

Reading Imagined Communities made me think about the Internet, the all-pervasive communications technology in which we all swim in like fish in water. Anderson’s theory about how print technology influenced culture and politics made me wonder about the ways in which our information networks have affected our society.

Is the Internet changing cultural conditions in a way that allows a new kind of ideology to spring up? Or is this tech just a more powerful extension of the printing press and all the other mass media technologies that followed it: film, radio, television?

I’d bet on the second option. My sense is that the Internet — although it seemed revolutionary at first — doesn’t depart much from what came before it. It’s a similar kind of technology and exerts a similar kind of technological force. It won’t be giving us new divergent ideologies, but will simply continue to reproduce what came before it. And looking at world around is today seems to bear this out: Despite the hype of the Internet and despite all the global information flows and all the cherished mixing of ideas and the cross-national, cross-linguistic conversations that are supposedly taking place, we still live in the age of nationalism. Nationalism still dominates — no matter where you look.

I can’t help but think about what’s going on right now in the Old Country where I was born — the war taking place between Russia and Ukraine, where nationalist mythologies about land and history are front and center in the fight…and where the Internet plays a central role in the spread of these ideas.

Trench warfare, Ukraine, 2022.

---

Anderson published his book in 1983, not long before the Soviet Union began to come apart. Back then, the various Soviet national republics splintered into societies that ultimately had little holding them together besides an embrace of capitalism and nationalism. Ethnic cleansing and wars fought over mythical national borders and mythical national identities came quickly and continue to this day, now three decades later — whether in Ukraine, Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, or Georgia. Nationalism is even more entrenched there now than it was 30 years ago. And the Internet has been a part of this national identity formation, not a hinderance to it.

—Yasha

---

---

Want to know more?

• The Racist Origins of Silicon Valley

• The Politics of Technology w/Joe Costello

• Lenin: Respect Ukrainian peasants, treat the Jews with an iron rod

---

PS: And nationalism has long crossed the left-right political divide. As Anderson discusses:

…since World War II every successful revolution has defined itself in national terms — the People’s Republic of China, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and so forth — and, in so doing, has grounded itself firmly in a territorial and social space inherited from the prerevolutionary past. Conversely, the fact that the Soviet Union shares with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland the rare distinction of refusing nationality in its naming suggests that it is as much the legatee of the prenational dynastic states of the nineteenth century as the precursor of a twenty-first century internationalist order.

Eric Hobsbawm is perfectly correct in stating that ‘Marxist movements and states have tended to become national not only in form but in substance, i.e., nationalist. There is nothing to suggest that this trend will not continue.’ Nor is the tendency confined to the socialist world. Almost every year the United Nations admits new members. And many ‘old nations,’ once thought fully consolidated, find themselves challenged by ‘sub’-nationalisms within their borders — nationalisms which, naturally, dream of shedding this sub-ness one happy day. The reality is quite plain: the ‘end of the era of nationalism,’ so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight. Indeed, nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time.

But if the facts are clear, their explanation remains a matter of long-standing dispute. Nation, nationality, nationalism — all have proved notoriously difficult to define, let alone to analyse. In contrast to the immense influence that nationalism has exerted on the modem world, plausible theory about it is conspicuously meagre. Hugh Seton-Watson, author of far the best and most comprehensive English-language text on nationalism, and heir to a vast tradition of liberal historiography and social science, sadly observes: ‘Thus I am driven to the conclusion that no “scientific definition” of the nation can be devised; yet the phenomenon has existed and exists.’ Tom Nairn, author of the path-breaking The Break-up of Britain, and heir to the scarcely less vast tradition of Marxist historiography and social science, candidly remarks: ‘The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure.’ But even this confession is somewhat misleading, insofar as it can be taken to imply the regrettable outcome of a long, self-conscious search for theoretical clarity. It would be more exact to say that nationalism has proved an uncomfortable anomaly for Marxist theory and, precisely for that reason, has been largely elided, rather than confronted. How else to explain Marx’s failure to explicate the crucial adjective in his memorable formulation of 1848: ‘The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie’? How else to account for the use, for over a century, of the concept ‘national bourgeoisie’ without any serious attempt to justify theoretically the relevance of the adjective? Why is this segmentation of the bourgeoisie-a world-class insofar as it is defined in terms of the relations of production theoretically significant?

---