Imagined Communities: Reflections On The Origin And Spread Of Nationalism Quotes
"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."
"The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations."
"It is 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."
"The great weakness of all evolutionary/progressive styles of thought, not excluding Marxism, is that such questions are answered with impatient silence."
"The very possibility of imagining the nation only arose historically when, and where, three fundamental cultural conceptions, all of great antiquity, lost their axiomatic grip on men’s minds."
"It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny."
"The book, however – and here it prefigures the durables of our time – is a distinct, self-contained object, exactly reproduced on a large scale."
"The revolutionary vernacularizing thrust of capitalism was given further impetus by three extraneous factors, two of which contributed directly to the rise of national consciousness."
"The sign for this: if Mali disappears from the pages of The New York Times after two days of famine reportage, for months on end, readers do not for a moment imagine that Mali has disappeared or that famine has wiped out all its citizens."
In effect, the early printers established branches all over Europe: ‘in this way a veritable "international" of publishing houses, which ignored national frontiers, was created.’
"Certain dialects inevitably were ‘closer’ to each print-language and dominated their final forms."
"High German, the King’s English, and, later, Central Thai, were correspondingly elevated to a new politico-cultural eminence."
"In their origins, the fixing of print-languages and the differentiation of status between them were largely unselfconscious processes resulting from the explosive interaction between capitalism, technology and human linguistic diversity."
"The convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation."
"The potential stretch of these communities was inherently limited, and, at the same time, bore none but the most fortuitous relationship to existing political boundaries."
"While today almost all modern self-conceived nations – and also nation-states – have ‘national print-languages’, many of them have these languages in common."
"The nation-states of Spanish America or those of the ‘Anglo-Saxon family’ are conspicuous examples of the first outcome."
"The newspaper of Caracas quite naturally, and even apolitically, created an imagined community among a specific assemblage of fellow-readers."
"The ‘United States’ could gradually multiply in numbers over the next 183 years, as old and new populations moved westwards out of the old east coast core."
"The philological incendiaries thus presented the dynasts with a disagreeable dilemma which did not fail to sharpen over time."
"Official nationalisms can best be understood as a means for combining naturalization with retention of dynastic power."
"Romanovs ruled over Tatars and Letts, Germans and Armenians, Russians and Finns."
"The more the dynasty pressed German in its first capacity, the more it appeared to be siding with its German-speaking subjects, and the more it aroused antipathy among the rest."
"The Revolution of 1905 was as much a revolution of non-Russians against Russification as it was a revolution of workers, peasants, and radical intellectuals against autocracy."
"Enormous opportunities were after all available for Russian functionaries and entrepreneurs in the vast bureaucracy and expanding market that the empire provided."
"It is pure anachronism to expect [the Scots] to have demanded an independent state at this time."
"A single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia."
"In mind and manners, he was as much an Englishman as any Englishman."
"The advocates of expulsion [of the barbarians] viewed international relations from positions within the national hierarchy based on the supremacy of superiors over inferiors."
"National consciousness in Europe therefore bore from its inception the imprint of a consciousness of international society."
"The ‘spirit’ of these conquests was still fundamentally that of a prenational age."
"It was no small sacrifice for him, because in this way he completely estranged himself from the society of his own people and became socially and morally a pariah among them."
"In the absence of any higher normative standards with which to gauge international relations, power politics is bound to be the rule and yesterday’s timid defensiveness will become today’s unrestrained expansionism."
"The key point here is that already in the early seventeenth century large parts of what would one day be imagined as Scotland were English-speaking and had immediate access to print-English, provided a minimal degree of literacy existed."
"If I were a Dutchman, I would not organize an independence celebration in a country where the independence of the people has been stolen."
"Such a decision, waiting 600 years to be made, has its diverting aspects, and suggests already that modernity rather than antiquity characterizes Swiss nationalism."
"The first real Swiss citizenship, the introduction of direct (male) suffrage, and the ending of ‘internal’ tolls and customs areas were achievements of the Helvetic Republic forcibly brought into being by the French occupation of 1798."
"Until World War II Switzerland was a poor country, with a standard of living half that of England’s, and an overwhelmingly rural country."
"The secret of the long duration of the Confederacy was its double nature. Against outside enemies it produced a sufficient unity of peoples. Against internal rebellion, it produced a sufficient unity of oligarchies."
"Remarkably enough, in territories unalterably-denoted Catholic Protestantism was unlawful, and in those so-denoted Protestant Catholicism was illegal; and these laws were strictly enforced."
"The persistence of a large variety of sometimes mutually-unintelligible German idiolects suggests the late arrival of print-capitalism and standardized modern education to much of Swiss peasant society."
"It is perhaps surprising that in the second half of the nineteenth century – era of official nationalisms – Germanification was not attempted."
"Swiss nationalism is best understood as part of the ‘last wave’."
"The ‘last wave’ of nationalisms, most of them in the colonial territories of Asia and Africa, was in its origins a response to the new-style global imperialism made possible by the achievements of industrial capitalism."
"Nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love. The cultural products of nationalism – poetry, prose fiction, music, plastic arts – show this love very clearly in thousands of different forms and styles."
"Boundary-stones and similar markers did exist, and indeed multiplied along the western fringes of the realm as the British pressed in from Lower Burma."
"They were understood horizontally, at eye level, as extension points of royal power; not ‘from the air.’"
"Only in the 1870s did Thai leaders begin thinking of boundaries as segments of a continuous map-line corresponding to nothing visible on the ground."
"In terms of most communication theories and common sense, a map is a scientific abstraction of reality."
"A map anticipated spatial reality, not vice versa."
"The task of, as it were, ‘filling in’ the boxes was to be accomplished by explorers, surveyors, and military forces."
"In the history I have described, this relationship was reversed."
"A map was a model for, rather than a model of, what it purported to represent."
"A map was now necessary for the new administrative mechanisms and for the troops to back up their claims."
"The discourse of mapping was the paradigm which both administrative and military operations worked within and served."
"The Fondo de Cultura Económica was established in 1934 by the economist and diplomat Daniel Cosío Villegas, initially to provide Spanish-language texts for the recently founded National School of Economics, but soon broadening out to cover history, culture, literature, and so on."
"Nothing could be more different than Istanbul’s Metis Yayinlari."
"The Dutch translation (Verbeelde gemeenschappen) is interesting for two quite different reasons."
"The French translation (L’imaginaire national) was put out by La Découverte, directed by François Géze, a medium-sized ‘independent Left’ publisher."
"The Greek version (Phantasiakés Koinótites) is, however, another matter."
"The Norwegian translation (Forestilte fellesskap) may have come out of my friendship with Professor Harald Bøckman."
"As for the Italian translation (Comunità immaginate), it is probable that it emerged from a chance meeting with Marco d’Eramo in Chicago."
"Translations into Polish (Wspólotny wyobrazone) and Greek appeared in 1997."
"The stretch of this endeavour is such that it warrants a break with the strictly chronological ordering so far employed."
"The OSI’s Translation Project . . . started around 1994 with the aim to make available in the local languages of Eastern Europe at least the minimum of basic texts in the social sciences needed to renew higher education and to sustain informed public discussion of social and political issues."
"On most of these editions I have obtained little information beyond what Yana Genova has generously furnished."
"In 2001, a Danish translation (Forestillede fællesskaber) appeared at the hand of the Roskilde Universitetsforlag, with an engagingly enigmatic, ‘post-modern’ cover."
"It remains only to discuss briefly the story of seven translations published east of Europe after 1998."
"In attempting to grasp why IC ended up being so widely, and fairly rapidly, translated in ‘textbook’ form, the likeliest answers are as follows."
"The incomplete data available to me reveal some very striking patterns."
"A further paedagogical advantage in IC for teachers eager to develop students’ civic consciousness in a progressive, critical manner, was simply the unusual style of the comparisons it drew."
"In a substantial number of cases, the original stimulus for translation is not easy to trace."