Real an d Smagineb Communities When we try to build fair, supportive, face-to-face relationships with our neighbors, we find them deeply preoccupied with the their established roles. They feel harried, unable to seriously commit to creating genuine community. This preoccupation is determined in part by their membership in fantasy communities. The primary imaginary community is the Nation itself, full of unfathomably different interests, classes, opinions, religions, ethnicities and other sensibilities that somehow get forgotten when the Nation calls. The Nation has its own highly abstract morals, principles, language and history: unquestioned, universal and utopian. It is a collective dream, in our case the American Dream. Apparently since hundreds of millions of us understand each other so well, nobody really needs to get to know their neighbors. The national community wins the struggle for people’s attention without even needing to exist. But the existence of the nation’s image has major repercussions. When we think of nationalism we often think of massive chauvinism and severe minority repression: the term was invented by socialists to describe the rightward shift in national movements at the end of the 19th century. But many who feel part of such nations do not, of course, think of themselves as malevolent. Nationalists cherish feelings of selflessness, natural camaraderie, mutual support and mutual defense. If their ideals were self-consciously chauvinistic or repressive they would not be quite so popular. Yet the chauvinism and repression persist. In the US we recently saw how easily national sentiment can be awakened by war. Yet such sentiment, manipulated into the collective consciousness, arousing strong emotions throughout the land, is a modem phenomenon. The history of widespread national ideology is very brief: even today, when our school maps are so neatly divided into colored compartments, many people in the world do not consider themselves to be part of any nation. For most of this millennium. Kings, Queens and nobles in no way reflected the ethnicity of peoples in the territories they mled. They very often did not speak the same language: the French spoken at the court of Louis XIV was a foreign language to most people in his Kingdom. England was mled by a succession of Norman, Welsh, Scotch, Dutch, and German Kings. During World War I Britain's George V, as much a grandson of Queen Victoria as his enemy Kaiser Wilhelm, abandoned his German titles when faced with the surprising new force of British nationalism. In the 18th century the Hapsburgs mled Austria in Latin, and in the 19th mled Hungary in German. For centuries no one thought that mler and mled had much in common. Contrast this with the 1871 creation of Germany as a state based in a nation of German peoples, where the Kaiser eventually declared himself as one with the commoner; after the First World War the commoner wanted a divorce, and sent Wilhelm off to a Dutch suburb. The situation would have been inconceivable to his royal Hohenzollem ancestors Page 28 Rain Winter/Spring 1992 Volume XIV, Number 2 one hundred years earlier. National common interests, like the ones used to justify the First World War, are usually inventions. For example, today US leaders try to convince.a suspicious public to unite in an economic fight with Japan. Yet in such an opera only the top shareholders in multinational corporations will win, not the average citizen. The idea that nations “fight” is sheer deception, a lesson only learned by the masses after they do all the fighting and reap no spoils. Stump thumping nationalist rhetoric has always had a hollow knock. This is especially tme when it intimates purity. In 1860, at the moment of Italy's unification, only 2'/2% of the population spoke Italian. Led by an elite group, who themselves had barely more than Italian in common, the country was “unified” with geographically and politically expedient boundaries, not ethnic, linguistic or historical ones. But at the first meeting of parliament in the new Italian kingdom, Massimo d’Azeglio reminded his colleagues that “having made Italy, now we have to make Italians.” Making Italians, or any other nation’s citizens, requires media. In 15th century Europe, elites were producing increasing numbers of documents, matching the age's growth in commerce, population and state power. Merchants kept greater track of profits; churches and monarchies kept better tax records. The resulting expansion of literacy produced the debut of the printing press. The growth of the new printing industry was phenomenal: in the 40 years following Gutenberg’s Bible, published around 1456, some 20,000,000 volumes were printed. Within a hundred years, books were being published in everyday language, in vernaculars. Printing standardized languages and slowed down the rate of linguistic change for the expanding readership, though the educated merchant was still multilingual. By 1700, newspapers too reinforced linguistic stability, and a kind of elite camaraderie. The newspaper is a daily affirmation of an imagined community: whoever reads what you do also speaks your language and gets news from the same source as you. Probably they were taught to read at a school much like yours. They were the sort you bumped into regularly. Even though you haven't met them all, you understand and identify with these anonymous readers. They are part of your ‘nation’. In part through this knitting effect of the press, the new commercial elite managed to provoke a few revolutions and create some new nation-states. The unexpected effect was the emergence of patriotism among the masses, who now felt they had a stake in the nation. Later, when industrialism overturned traditional lifestyles, creating massive migration, poverty and dependence, people flocked in desperation to learn an elite language and to join the nearest national movement. Mass patriotism could provide great power. Napol6on had proven this by conquering Europe on the strength of
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