A Contested Universal: Debating Nation and Modernity

In his Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson, the Marxist cultural critic, proposes as a truism that “In the modern world everyone will, can, should ‘have’ a nation as he or she ‘has’ a gender.” Commanding everywhere “profound emotional legitimacy” (14), “nation-ness,” according to Anderson, is “the most universally legitimate value of political life in our time” (12). Anderson's historico-cultural account and assessment of this condition of global convergence—how and why everyone here, there, and everywhere has come to subscribe to the nation-form as the norm of (self )- identification—registers as a humanist-universalist approbation of this development of modern history without being sentimental. The global diffusion and institution of nation-ness, “a complex composite of French and American [revolutionary] elements” (78 n. 34), reads as a great story of human differences universally equalized. Anderson's contribution, in one critic's approving evaluation of Imagined Communities, stands out as “a reminder that, at its best, imagined nationhood in all its crudity has been the entry ticket for the wretched of the earth into world history.”

On the other hand, in his Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, Partha Chatterjee, who, like Anderson, is looking at the nation-form in the unfolding of a universal history, aims to assess the legitimacy of the conjoint nationalist basis upon which modernity here, there, and everywhere has been established. Chatterjee focuses his critical eyes firmly on the colonial encounters between the West and “the Rest,” and what he sees in these encounters is a dominant West shaping unequal structural and cultural relations between itself and others, and profiting from this inequality. It is the “dominance of the West in the world, [that has] made nationality the canon,” as Liah Greenfeld has pointed out. Given this circumstance, the question uppermost for Chatterjee is how, and for whom really, the universal history of nationalism—the story retold by Anderson as modernity’s triumphant global march—is launched.