Alexander SEMYONOV. The book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism and the name of its author need no introduction for Russian readers. This book and other works were translated into Russian and have become part of the corpus of available theories of nationalism, referred to not only by sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists, but also historians.^[1]Yet, the nascent state of the field of nationalism studies in post-Soviet Russia necessitates a question on the intellectual origins and authorial intention in writing of Imagined Communities. Could you please describe for Russian readers your path (both personal and academic) to theoretical engagement with the problem of nationalism? How did academic training as a philologist and anthropologist influence your approach to nationalism as a cultural system or “cultural artifact?” What made you drift from the Indonesian case to a general overview of modern cultural transformations in the New and Old World? How did you position your contribution in the context of debates in theory of nationalism? Now, reviewers of the field of nationalism studies operate with a set of labels for describing the trends within theory of nationalism: essentialists, primordialists, modernists, constructivists, etc. What is your attitude toward these labels, and is it possible to contextualize your approach with the help of these characteristics?

Benedict ANDERSON. I could write many pages. Some of the answers are contained in the introductions to my Language and Power: Exploring Indonesian Cultures (1990) and the more recent The Spectre of Comparisons (1998).^[2] First, I should clear up an evident misunderstanding. By training I am neither an anthropologist nor a philologist. I got my Ph.D. in 1967 in what Cornell and Harvard still call “Government” but what in most other American universities is known as Political Science. (But it is true that I am an odd kind of political scientist, and some of my mail is addressed to me at our anthropology department.). Up to the time when I completed my BA at Cambridge University, my schooling was overwhelmingly in literature and history. I started learning Latin when I was eight; Greek when I was about twelve. My Cambridge degree was in Classics (Classical Literature, History, etc). I studied French intensively in high school, and visited France often during my adolescence. As a teenager I was overwhelmed by the Russian literature that I read in translation, and while still in high school I therefore studied the Russian language and attended (alone!) a special summer school for Russian language taught by two charming “White” refugees a little bit north of Dublin. I even once translated into English a boring text by Bukharin that had not previously been translated. The Russian literature I was reading started with Lermontov and Turgenev, then Goncharov, Dostoevsky, and a little Pushkin, and finally Tolstoi, Chekhov, and Gorky. Later I was fond of Mayakovsky, and the epigraph for The Spectre of Comparison comes from a poem of his that I know by heart. As a youngster my favorite film was Donskoi’s trilogy of Gorky’s autobiography, and I always dreamed one day of taking a boat down the Volga. But once in America my interests shifted to SEA, and I did not keep up my Russian, though I continued to read Russian literature in translation (especially Babel and Leskov).
I only became politically conscious at the age of 20 during the Suez/Hungarian crisis. It should be added that I have a curious family background, half rising middleclass North English (my mother’s side) and half Irish. The Irish half was also complicated: one half a string of Irish nationalist rebels and politicians starting in the 1790s, and continuing to the 1890s, and the other Protestant Anglo-Irish dating from the late 17th century, small landlords, military men in the British imperial army, and so on. So I had English and Irish relatives, as well as Catholic and Protestant ones. I was born in China, where my father worked as a customs inspector for the Chinese state, was evacuated to the US during the Pacific War, returned to Ireland in 1945 at the age of nine, and was sent to school in England at eleven, after my father’s death. So I did not have a very settled or rooted childhood. But I am emotionally attached to Ireland, and Imagined Communities was directly polemically at a British/English audience. You will see that although all the kings and queens of other European states mentioned in the book are titled “normally,” I went out of my way to refer to Kings and Queens of England as if they were ordinary people, e.g. Victoria von Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, or Anne Stuart.
In the United States I entered two fields new to me, “Government” and Southeast Asian Studies, and very much enjoyed them both. But my literary interests always remained, and a good many of my essays and articles have been about literature, something very odd for a political scientist in America. I set out to explain part of the modern political history of Indonesia for my doctoral dissertation, but in the two and a half years I spent doing fieldwork I more than dabbled in Javanese music, and indigenous arts and crafts. I was early convinced that an adequate understanding of Indonesian politics required a solid grasp of history and culture.
The timing of my research was also important. I arrived in Indonesia in January l962, just as the Vietnam tragedy was beginning to unfold, and only four years after a major CIA operation tried but failed to overthrow Indonesian President Sukarno. Most of the young scholars of my cohort were anti-imperialist, against American interventionism, and for local Asian nationalisms. In Indonesia I met for the first time in my life some communists, and liked many of them; but I also met nice (and nasty) Muslims, socialists, military men, and so on. It was a big education. By the time I got back to America in August 1964, the faked Gulf of Tonkin Incident was leading to a huge build up of the American war machine in Indochina. Like many others I was active in the anti-Vietnam War movement, and more and more regarded myself as a sort of anarchistic leftist. It was also in this period that I started to read the main Marxist classics of the nineteenth century and twentieth century, especially Marx and Lenin, partly because I enjoyed their writing style. At that point my plan was to spend the rest of my life as a scholar and teacher about Indonesia, and SE Asia.
Then came a good piece of bad luck. On October 1, 1965, a still partly mysterious “coup” was launched in Djakarta by junior officers of the Presidential Guard who claimed to be helping forestall a plot by senior Generals with CIA help to overthrow the increasingly leftist (rhetorically, mainly) government. Six top generals were killed. By the end of that day, the senior surviving General (Suharto) had destroyed the coup group, and a few days later an organized, pitiless campaign started to blame the Communist Party for the actions of the junior officers. Over the next 4-5 months, maybe a million people were murdered by the Army and its civilian allies, and hundreds of thousands of others were tortured, and imprisoned for many years without trial. With two other junior colleagues, including Ruth McVey, a Russian specialist who had changed her interest to Indonesia, I secretly wrote up in late December 1965 – early January 1966, a detailed study of the coup on the basis of the available evidence, with the conclusion that the version of events of October 1 now officially proclaimed by Suharto were unbelievable. We wanted the report kept secret (except from a few trusted colleagues) because we feared that if made public, the Suharto people would punish Indonesians we knew and were friendly with. But fairly soon the report was leaked, and the regime reacted with fury, denouncing us as New Left communist-sympathizers. The US government was also angry. But because we were very young – I was still writing my dissertation – the Indonesian government hoped I would see “reason” and repudiate our analysis. So I was allowed back briefly in 1967 and l968. But as I saw no reason to change my mind, I was finally expelled in April 1972, and was banned for the next 27 years. This forced me to diversify my research and in 1974 I turned to the study of Thailand (and in 1988 to the study of the Philippines). These experiences started to interest me in the problems of comparison. Indonesia was ex-colonial (Dutch), Republican and Muslim, Thailand uncolonized, monarchical and Buddhist, and the Philippines ex-colonial (Spanish-American), republican and Catholic.
Once comparison started, there was no very natural geographic limit. Hence at the end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s I began to try to situate “my region” in a global context. So I tried to read about many other pans of the world. I was also reading in the tradition of “Western Marxism,” especially the Frankfurt School. When I conceived Imagined Communities I did not think of it as fundamentally a scholarly book, nor was I much interested in existing theories of nationalism (which were indeed rather weak and rare then). I was interested, however, in the difficulties mainstream Marxism had in dealing seriously with nationalism (I don’t mean the superficial Stalin, but Marx and Lenin, and even Bauer). I was influenced (not always positively) by Tom Nairn’s “Scottish nationalist” book, The Breakup of Britain,^[3] and wanted to join the battle – on his side – in the intellectual controversy this book aroused. I did not then read Gellner’s 1983 book,^[4] only his early piece on nationalism in Thought and Change. I read Hobsbawm, but he is not really a theorist, and I almost completely missed Anthony Smith. My book was not intended as an intervention in the field of “nationalism-theory,” which then barely existed, but rather one into the field of contemporary leftist thinking, especially within the British Isles. The most important mainstream scholar for me was a quite sober, rather Conservative historian of Eastern Europe and the Russia (Seton-Watson), mainly because he had the originality to study “Eastern” (indeed global) nationalism and took language seriously into account and in great detail. It was from him that I got the terms “official nationalism” and “Russification.”^[5] He used “Russification” simply as a concrete term describing Romanov policies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but I turned it into a metaphor by showing that British imperial policy in India and elsewhere was quite similar. And made the metaphor polemical by calling British policies “Russification.” The intention was to provoke.
I do not think the labels you describe are very useful, even for taxonomic purposes. There is no serious thinker about nationalism who is not at various points a constructivist, a primordialist, a modernist, and an essentialist. The labels are very crude, and are only useful for beginners. I think I am more of a hybrid than the others, since my “theory” is grounded in a materialist view of history, and views nationalism as the outcome of profound economic, technical, and intellectual changes gathering speed for several centuries after the Renaissance. I absolutely don’t believe in “discourse” by itself without any concrete social ground. On the other hand, my literary interests, my close contact with some brilliant anthropologists, and my political past also made me much more interested in the complexities of culture than either Gellner, Hobsbawm, Smith, or Brubaker – none of whom knew much about Asia, let alone any Asian language.

AS. I cannot avoid asking you this question, though it may seem to you improper and you may choose to ignore it. Some reviewers of your book noted a somewhat apologetic tone in chapter on “Patriotism and Racism,” with which you seemed to defend the political program of modern nationalism, suggesting a different genealogical line of racism from the aristocratic culture of pre-modern society. They went even further by alluding to your Irish origin, which was thought to contribute to your “positive” perspective on nationalism. This question, of course, has a wider implication, but it does not reduce the epistemological complexity of nationalism studies to the issue of biographical background. The question addresses the core of your statement on the discursive nature of nationalism. How is it possible to study nationalism from within the dominant discourse that postulates the existence of nations?

BA. This question can be answered much more briefly. There are certainly passages in the chapter “Patriotism and Racism” which I now regret as sentimental and excessive. But I remain convinced that Patriotism and Racism have quite different ancestries. Patriotism is about place. Racism about skin and genes. Patriotism is externally oriented, and racism domestic.
Hitler got along fine with Tojo; Vorster dealt quite happily with Black leaders outside South Africa, and so on. There was a famous case in the newspapers in America in the early l960s when a Black American, denied admittance to many public facilities for racist reasons, had the idea of dressing himself up as a Black African leader, with glamorous robes, and a funny English accent. He then had no trouble getting into the best hotels and so on – until he was found out. In those days I was a nationalist for several nations – Ireland, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Indonesia was emotionally the most important at that time – because of my life there, because of the massacres in which people I knew were murdered, because of its huge domestic ethnic variety, and its novelty (the word Indonesia was invented in Germany in the 1870s, and wasn’t used by “Indonesians” till the 1920s). The opposite of Estonia, you could say. This nationalism was anti-imperialist (till 1965 at least), and it was part of the international coalition of anti-imperialist national states in Africa, Asia, South America, and even, alas Yugoslavia. Nationalism asked people to make sacrifices, as racism almost never does. I don’t see any problem studying nationalism outside the dominant discourse that postulates the existence of nations. First of all, nations and nationalism are historical phenomena; they came into being at particular times, and there is no reason to think they will exist forever. Probably we should think of a historical parabola, with 2003 being marked somewhere not too far past the highest point. I too think nations exist. But they exist in a manner that is closer to the way that Emma Bovary and Ivan Karamazov exist rather than that of the Eiffel Tower.

AS. In the foreword to the second edition of the “Imagined Communities” you note that since the first edition of your book the industry of theories of nationalism grew immensely. Your subsequent publications demonstrate that you remained interested in theoretical discussions of nationalism. How would you characterize the current state of the discussion? In particular, I would like to ask you to comment on the turn from structure to culture in theoretical thinking about nationalism (evidence of this turn abound, from Realms of Memory by P. Nora to Nation as Narrative, etc). This cultural turn certainly completes the shift from studies of nations to studies of nationalism (as a cultural system in your interpretation or as a “nationhood” in the proposition of Rogers Brubaker – and the proliferation of new terms for designation of cultural and discursive practices that frame and constitute national collectivity is the vivid proof of this shift, especially if we compare this terminology with notions like liberal and illiberal nationalism (nations with a full social structure and incomplete social structure). Did the cultural turn build on the achievements of structural and sociohistorical interpretation of nation-building? In the case of Imagined Communities, you seem to contradict E. Gellner in asserting the historical contingency of the appearance of the nationness as a cultural frame at the end of the 18th century, and yet you take into account the impact of social transformations (print capitalism, education, etc.) and state the universality of nationalism as a principle of legitimacy toward the 20th century. What insights were achieved with the cultural turn in our understanding of nationalism? Which cultural and discursive aspects of nation-formation and nationalism remain to be explored and what if at all are the limitations of cultural and discursive approach to nationalism?

BA. Without my really intending this, or even being aware of it, Imagined Communities is today read by many people as the onset of the “cultural turn” and a forerunner of postmodernist thinking. But this view of the book is quite misleading. Much of it is firmly historicist-structuralist. This is why capitalism of a certain kind is so central to it. But because I was doing a lot of thinking about books, newspapers, and other forms of publication, I had to face the problem that printed books were certainly “commodities” produced by capitalist processes, and exchanged through market mechanisms, just like textiles. Yet they were also peculiar in their immensely long lives, and the manner in which they were “consumed” – conversations in commodified, material bindings. This is why I coined the term print-capitalism to underscore a real, but decisive peculiarity within the general structure of capitalism. I also thought that traditional Marxism (and Anglo-Saxon liberalism) had largely overlooked this decisive peculiarity. I have the feeling that one reason for this was that thinkers in these traditions were focused on Ideas - because they were economists, philosophers – and Ideas are usually in the West regarded as universals, and thus move easily across languages without really changing their essence, almost invulnerable to translation. But I had been educated in languages, not economics, literature not political philosophy, so I was accustomed to thinking about Imagination as much as about Ideas. Literature isn’t naturally universal at all. Some of the most perfect sentences of Walter Benjamin and Marx depend for their power on the way that in German the appearance of the verb is postponed as long as possible, even to the end of the sentence. This can’t be done in English or Russian. French has a formal structure of feminine and masculine nouns which has very little to do with everyday social understandings of gender, so that, for example, the word for Army is feminine. This double gender system, which can be used for many beauties, is unavailable in English. I criticized Gellner mildly because I thought his account too functional, as if industrialism was a piece of machinery that needed the oil of nationalism to function. The thesis was difficult to accept given the early appearance of nationalism in the Americas at a time when industrialism did not exist there. It was also difficult to accept because it did not explain why nationalism mattered so emotionally to people. Gellner thought about language as a tool, a technique. He did not understand it as a gift and a destiny. He wholly underestimated the power of writing, and the way that writing moved much faster than industrialism. In the 1870s Filipinos were reading about elections, political panics, anarchists, and so could imagine them, even if these didn’t get started in the Philippines until thirty years later. The second chapter of my Spectre of Comparisons discusses this process in detail. If one understands this, one understands that it is exactly the power of nationalism that it is simultaneously a universal and a particular, and this is what makes people take the United Nations quite seriously, where a United Religions would seem absurd. Another part of this same thing (imagination) is the idea of each nation having its own history that is also part of World History.
I think what was unusual, even now, about Imagined Communities was that it tried seriously to combine materialism, universalism, imagination, and particularity in a world-wide comparative perspective. A great deal of subsequent work on nationalism has been focused on “discourse,” which is a good thing mainly, but most of these studies are not comparative, and most of them have forgotten the “material base.” If you look at Anthony Smith’s useful journal Nations and Nationalism,^[6] you will find it full of Estonians and Ukrainians, Lebanese, and Catalans using discourse analysis, but writing only about Estonia, Ukraine, Lebanon, and Catalonia. What they are often doing is simply a 19th-century romantic nationalism in a contemporary academic vocabulary. Not very creative actually. Without world trade, without war, without technological change, without migrations, real world-history, or even the microhistory of nationalism isn’t comprehensible, and for this aspect of things, the cultural turn is not (yet?) very useful.
What remains to be explored? Many things, since the world changes constantly. One obvious thing is the historical relationship between nationalism and the state. Most nationalisms until the end of the nineteenth century were popular movements against the imperial or dynastic state. In the twentieth century more and more nationalisms captured the state, or were captured by it, though not without many difficulties and serious consequences. Nationalism shows its most sinister face only after its marriage with raison d’йtat. Many of the largest surviving states owe their geographic form to empire. Russia and China and India today are the best examples. An important question here is the relationship of empire to nationalism. Characteristically in each empire the last social group to adopt nationalism was the core “ethnic” group. They controlled the state after all: English in the UK, Turks in the Ottoman Empire, Germans in Austro-Hungary, and Russians in the “All The Russias,” etc. Even Chinese nationalism really started among the overseas Chinese. The residues of all this are quite visible today in Putin’s odious and hopeless policies in the Caucasus, Peking’s in Tibet and Sichuan, Delhi’s in Assam, and so on. The question of contemporary migrations on a vast global scale is a huge subject for new research. I have suggested some ways to start in Chapter 3 of Spectre. We need to know about the imagining life of the Russian prostitute in Bangkok, the Filipino waiter in Rome, the Croatian settlers in Uruguay, and so on.

AS. Remaining for a moment with the cultural turn in theories of nationalism, it is interesting to note that with the turn to culture, processes of signification and narration of nation have the potential to revise the debate between “modernists” and “primordialists.” Indeed, if one focuses not only on cultural practices (such as memory as a synchronic operation on images of the past) but on the diachronic historical semantics of the canons and concepts with which the national discourse operates, one has to acknowledge the relativity of the boundary between nationalism as a modern cultural system and the pre-modern cultural systems that were created by dynastic states or religious communities. True, modern nationalism creates history anew by modifying images from the past in order to reiterate a sense of brotherhood and national solidarity (as it is demonstrated in the last chapter of the second edition of your book). However, historical semantics are not always that resilient to creative redefinition and manipulation. To the empirical end of the problem, historians have to take into account those cases in which persistent historical semantics of exclusivist canons of nationhood successfully resisted the attempts of integral nationalists to redefine them or, in the words of Renan, to forget what divides the nation as well as to remember. Those are the cases that abound in the history of Eastern Europe and Russia. The question, therefore, is of a theoretical nature. How is it possible to strike a balance between synchronic cultural practices and diachronic historical semantics (in a way between the “modernist” and “primordialist” perspectives on nationalism) within the cultural approach?
BA. My guess here is that my argument in the last chapter of Imagined Communities is not quite understood. The first time round I stupidly did not understand what Renan was really saying, which was that remembering and forgetting were simultaneous processes, and both were “secondary.” One didn’t remember things one had witnessed, but “remembered” things which bad happened hundreds of years earlier (thanks to either state or society) and this secondary remembering necessarily involved forgetting other things. What is brilliant about the phrase la St. Barthйlemy is simply its compactness; it is completely French, and you don’t know from the words alone what it refers to, who was killed or who killed. In fact, numbers of killers and killed did not think of themselves as French and did not speak French. This is even more the case with the Albigensian massacres, which is really a fake memory, like the Serbian “memory” of Kosovo. It survives because there is a political-cultural industry that wants it to, and it has to survive in a modern form – commodification, in fact. “France” wasn’t divided by the wars between Catholics and Protestants – all Europe was. To speak of la St. Barthйlemy as a “French” event is simply to speak the peculiar antihistorical language of nationalism. Theoretically, I see no problem; politically, of course, there are huge practical and other problems. I would be enormously interested to see today how the Soviet Union is figured in Russian nationalist imagining. The point being that the primordialists have most of the practical cards, and the “modernists”’ all the theoretical ones.

AS. Let me briefly return to the problem of the relationship between the structuralist and cultural approaches to nationalism. The structural theory of nation-formation stresses the process of modernization in creating social preconditions for the coming of the age of nationalism. The presumed universal (though not simultaneous) and internal character of this process in human societies (best explicated by E. Gellner) allows the structuralist theory to infer the universality of nationalism for a certain stage of historical evolution. In Imagined Communities you also stress the universal character of nationalism as a discourse or a cultural system that endows social reality with legitimacy. In the book you clarify that a historically-contingent emergence of nationalism in the New World is not a contradiction to the universal character of this discourse at a later stage. You seem to suggest that the spread of nationalism as a model of social and political organization across the world (either through the colonial empires and colonial states or through the powerful image of Europe that exerted such influence in the age of Eurocentrism) led to the universality of nationalism. You also note that the moment of reception of nationalist challenges conditioned different characters of nationalism in different cases. Nationalism thus appears to be a universal and yet heterogeneous cultural system. What holds this system together in the analytical sense, and how does one conduct a typology of nationalism, given the immense variety of nationalisms as cultural frames for thinking about the nation?

BA. Typologies in my view are rarely much use, because they are essentially static. Imagined Communities is organized historically more than typologically. I go out of my way to argue that at each new “stage” of nationalism’s spread, this stage tends to inherit from previous stages, “linguistic nationalism” borrowing from “creole,” “official” from both “creole” and “linguistic,” and so on. The later the form the more complex its internal character. Moreover, the regions where early forms of nationalism emerged did not stay still, but as they developed they re-borrowed back from the later forms. This process is still going on. I do not see a big problem here. You could think about nationalism as comparable to the newspaper, which is everywhere. What is inside any newspaper will be a language (or two), different events, emphases, and preoccupations, but the newspaper is recognizable everywhere by its very format, by its dating system, by its world concerns/news, by its separation of national from international news, and by the way it is bought and sold. Like newspapers, nationalism is astonishingly uniform in its structural form, and its superficial heterogeneity is much less important theoretically than its inner homogeneity. This doesn’t mean that most nationalists don’t continue to insist on uniqueness, only that they forget that every other nationalist also speaks of uniqueness, and in exactly the same format and syntax. They all have flags, 95% of which are rectangular, and all have national anthems not in 3/4 waltz time, but in 4/4 march time.

AS. To Russian readers it would be particularly interesting to learn the reasons and circumstances of the appearance of the Russian case in the chapter on “Official Nationalism.” Your book is one of the few in the corpus of theories of nationalism that has focused on and referred to the Russian case (one can also name J. Armstrong and L. Greenfeld, but none of them before or after you went as far as designating one of the models of nationalism based on the Russian term “Russification”). Why did the historical experience of the Russian empire attract your attention?

BA. I think I have already answered. Russia was very important for my adolescent cultural formation. Reading Seton-Watson gave me the term “Russification.” I wanted to use “Russification” to make a polemical attack on British imperialism and the UK. Nothing was designed to irritate conservative English empire-people than to be compared calmly with the “backward” Russian autocracy. Sheer malice on my part.

AS. The story of nationalism has usually been told from an Eurocentric viewpoint. Imagined Communities attempted to revise this perspective, particularly by positing the case of New World’s nationalism as the first appearance of this type of discourse. The book persists in this logic, ranging from Western Europe to Japan and Indonesia. It seems that you consciously selected peripheral situations, like the New World, to trace the novelty of nationalism (a cultural imagination that could not be tied to continuous historical traditions) or to obtain insights into the working of European nationalism (the problem of Scottish nationalism through the prism of the British empire). The case of Russian nationalism appears to be ambiguous in terms of a typology of nationalisms. One the one hand, it was certainly a reaction to the spurt of nationalism in Europe and from within the Russian empire, which was a way to uphold the integrity and dynastic character of the state. On the other hand, Russian nationalism was a by-product of the semi-colonial relationship between Western Europe and Eastern Europe (including Russia). It was colonial not in the sense of colonial empire, but in the meaning of semi-orientalistic practices of the simultaneous inclusion of Russia into the realm of European culture and its exclusion due to cultural inferiority. Therefore, studies of Russian nationalism are in need of comparative models that examine the emergence of nationalism in conditions of coloniality (in the broad sense of the term). What are the peculiarities of nationalist imagination in colonial or peripheral situations and how, in your opinion, can studies of nationalism in the “Third World” contribute to studies of nationalism in Eastern Europe?

BA. This is a topic on which you are certainly 100 times better informed than I am. But your angle of vision also strikes me as odd. Beginning in the 1870s, and especially after the 1890s, the prestige of Russian literature was enormously high all over Western Europe. The combination Turgenev-Tolstoy-Dostoevsky-Goncharov alone is far more impressive than any combination of the kind even in England and France. Russia played a dominant political role in Europe from at least the odious partition of Poland, the destruction of Napoleon, the reactionary Holy Alliance, the crushing of nationalism in 1848, and so on. Tsarist armies tramped about Europe repeatedly in the l9th century. Anything less “colonial” can hardly be imagined. This is to say nothing of the Tsarist rape of the Caucasus and the vast conquests across Siberia to the Sea of Japan.
One has also to remember that “the West” is really a mythological construct of much more recent vintage. Europe was internally ordered as a kind of pyramid with Paris at the top (thanks to the Enlightenment and the Revolution), London next, then a long way down, Berlin, Vienna, Petersburg, Prague, Rome, and Barcelona; then “darkness” at the periphery, rural Ireland, rural Portugal and Spain, rural Norway, and rural Holland. “Russia” also needs to be disentangled, as Petersburg, Moscow, and Odessa was distinguished from the steppes. In the 18th and 19th century, the elite in Amsterdam also spoke French, and the elite in Prague German. Aristocracies took pains to distinguish themselves as aristocracies from the rest of the population by their linguistic behavior. Gellner explains this very well. Russian intellectuals’ ideas about “the West” were not at all shared by the vast bulk of the people living in Central and Western Europe, most of whom were still illiterate until the 1860s! They express a kind of “competition” and ambition – see Dostoevsky – on the part of the Russian imperial intelligentsia. In the same way, Japanese imperial nationalists talked about quite a different “West” which was simply the competition for Japan’s ambitions. Russia was included in that West.
The last part of the question. The answer is really given in Imagined Communities and in the opening and final chapters of Spectre. At least insofar as I have any answers. If there is something peculiar about Eastern European nationalism is it nothing intrinsic, but arose from the fact that Europe right up to World War I had been for centuries the arena on which competing dynasties struggled for domination. This did not happen in China, nor in Japan nor in Tsarist Asia, nor in the Middle East. In all of these cases a single Empire stayed on top for centuries. Poles, Hunagrians, etc. were dragged into the tax bases, the armies, and the officialdoms of these competing empires, and pursued their ambitions within them. Also they made comparisons. Poles for example, were treated better by Vienna than by Petersburg or Berlin, not least because of a common Roman Catholicism. They were also often co-opted into the imperial dreams, in the way that the Scots ended up playing a huge role in the British Empire even while Scotland itself was depopulated and suppressed by London. But this didn’t happen to the Irish, or at least the Catholic majority.

AS. Though Imagined Communities is about nationalism, it also focuses on empire, both in the sense of the pre-modern dynastic and multiethnic state and in the sense of western colonial empires. Recently, many scholars began to argue that the nation state and nationalism experience a decline. They also suggest that social theory unfairly neglected the long existence of empires (as compared to the relatively short existence of nations and nation states) and undertheorized ethnic heterogeneity as a fact of social reality. The current processes of globalization, migration, and the formation of the European Union made scholars turn to the concept of empire as both a historical precursor of these processes and as a possible theoretical model for conceptualizing a new reality. In Russian studies there is also a heightened interest in the imperial dimension of Russian and Soviet history. What is your assessment of the vitality of nationalism in the post-modern age? How do empire and nation relate to one another as discourses or cultural systems? How can theories of nationalism contribute to conceptualization of empire?

BA. As mentioned above, I do think that there is a lot of important historical-cultural research needed on the breakup of the old empires (not yet finished) and the transition to national states, perhaps especially for the cases of Russia and China. It is also true that the history of nationalism is a short one, by comparison with that of the old empires. But this simply means, as we all know, that History is speeding up all the time. The history of the automobile and the steamship is also short compared to that of the horse cart and the sailing vessel. This does not mean that the horse cart and the sailing vessel have a bright future before them. The problem with “empire” is that, at least in English, it is a hopelessly blurred concept, which is also ceaselessly used for polemical purposes. To use the same word for Ancient Rome, Dutch Indonesia, Tsarist Russia, and Bush America, as well as Aztec Mesoamerica, shows clearly the difficulties. Whatever else the European Union is, it surely isn’t an Empire in any meaningful sense of the word. To see how polymorphously perverse the word has become we can also look at Negri’s strange book,^[7] perhaps only imaginable by an Italian! If one wishes to explore empire in Russian studies, it would be necessary to do it in a vigilantly critical and comparative spirit; otherwise, it is likely to become simply a mask for reactionary nationalist fantasies. There are comparable (minor) reactionary trends to re-imagine the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the British Empire, and even the French. In the US, empire is today sometimes used boastfully by the queer group of conservative academic politicians often trained in political philosophy and classical studies, who like to think of their “Pax Americana” as a glorious reenactment of the Pax Romana. Many others use the term polemically against the ambitions and stupidities of Washington. But most of this is metaphor and rhetoric, not serious comparative study. Here critical study of the Soviet Union seems to be far the most interesting area for research – precisely because Lenin presided over the fall of the Tsarist empire, because he envisioned the Soviet Union as without more than practical borders, saw it not as a national state, but one that transcended nationalism, and because in the end the project failed – very grandiose and quite unique. No later communist movement understood itself in these terms. What is especially striking, of course, is that at the same time he “recognized” a principle of nationalities within the policy-making and “federal” structure of the Soviet state and the party, a fascinating hybrid. Stalin’s USSR is much less interesting, but also deserves study. I recall those famous broadcasts of 1942 from Moscow invoking Kornilov and Dostoevsky. It is hard to imagine Lenin, even in the darkest moments, doing this. But Stalin was from the periphery...
I suppose the only other thing to note is that empires at least in the 18th and 19th and 20th century senses of the term are few and rare, by comparison with nations. In principle, comparative study should be easier, but in practice it is much harder because of the pervasiveness everywhere of the consciousnesses that succeeded empire, i.e. national consciousnesses. Furthermore, we study empires as we do dinosaurs, as things of the past, irretrievable except in the laboratory. Nations are still roaming the steppes and the prairies.
I don’t see many signs that nationalism as such is a fading force in the world, though the nation-state is in many places much weaker than it was 50 years ago. It is easy to speak of postmodernism as a fad among intellectuals, but obviously caution is needed. We do not know yet whether in 20 years it will seem as dated as Sartre’s existentialism and Levi-Strauss’s structuralism. (But intellectual fads have a way in the end of having unexpected social progeny in the larger society.) It is hard to see how one could go much further with Baudrillard than Baudrillard has already gone, and the same applies to Derrida. My guess is that probably there will be a “turn” in due course towards the material world once again. But who knows?
A final note that is quite personal. The most important cards in the hand of a good comparative student of both empire and nationalism are the Ace of Irony and the Queen of Empathy. The Queen helps one to imagine oneself in the place of others, and to try to see the world as they see it – this is useful against egoism and centrisms of every kind, as well as national conceit. The Ace is the best defense against sentimentality, myth-mongering, triumphalism, and bigotry. It is said that Man is the only animal that weeps. I am not sure if this is really so, but he certainly the only one who laughs. This is something no scholar should ever forget.