Nationalism in today’s terms is defined as “a feeling that people have of being loyal to and proud of their country often with the belief that it is better and more important than other countries” however in his book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson defines the nation before being able to define nationalism as “it is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (Anderson, 2006, pg. 49)
I’ll be focusing on community in Britain for most if this and how it is viewed and portrayed in comparison to other places.
Nation is viewed and portrayed in different ways for different countries, for example in Britain we have our basically one defining feature: the royal family. We may not say it often and many pretend to not care but the fact that we have a royal family is our defining feature and if we lost it there would be riots in the streets. Even if keeping the royal family does mean that to the rest of the world the rest of England doesn’t exist apart from London.
The trope of England being a tea drinking, queen worshipping and high cultured place is so overused even we in Britain start to believe it if we aren’t already from London. But in fact if any of the people who thought this were to actually come to England they’d more than likely get quite a shock in finding that we aren’t all from London, we don’t all drink tea and to be honest a fair few of us could do with a little more culture. And to be honest at least most of us understand that there are problems instead of blindly sticking our heads in the sand and pretending everything is hunky dory, like some.
Speaking of which, America are completely different in their nationalism to England. America has gone nation crazy to the point that to the rest of the world the loud american patriot is basically a funny trope. Everything in America is essentially a mess, let’s be honest here. America likes to view itself as the great nation, even citing in their national anthem that they are the “land of the free and the home of the brave” and they pretty much never fail to bring that up to anyone that questions them. Especially now considering the presidential election is going on.
Now obviously we can all see where the problems would be in each nation, even our own, but as we can see Anderson does state that “it is imagined as a community because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.”
Essentially what he is saying is that despite the obvious problems that each nation has many will choose to stand by it out of instinct and in a blind sense of loyalty to the community that they have imagined.
References:
- Anderson, B. (2006) Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso
