Nations Are Younger Than You Think

When Italy was unified in 1861, somewhere between two and a half and ten per cent of the population spoke Italian. The rest spoke regional languages that were frequently not mutually intelligible: a Piedmontese peasant and a Sicilian one could not have held a conversation. Massimo d'Azeglio's line, that we have made Italy and must now make Italians, is usually quoted as a witticism. It was a description of a work programme, and the programme took seventy years.

This is the central fact about nations, and it is counterintuitive because every nation tells a story in which it is very old.

Benedict Anderson's formulation is the one that stuck: a nation is an imagined community. The word imagined is constantly misread as imaginary, and he is explicit that it is not. Every community larger than a village where everyone knows everyone is imagined in his sense; you picture the membership, because you cannot meet it. What is distinctive about the national version is the particular shape of the picture: limited, so it stops at a border; sovereign, so it is the thing the state belongs to; and horizontal, so a stranger a hundred miles away counts as one of yours in a way that a neighbour across a nearby border does not.

Anderson's account of where that picture comes from is print capitalism, and it is more mechanical than it sounds. Printers needed markets, and the market for Latin was small, so they printed in vernaculars, which required choosing a standard version out of many competing dialects, and thereby demoting the rest to accents. Then thousands of people read the same newspaper on the same morning, each one aware that thousands of others were doing exactly that. It is the simultaneity that does the work. A shared present, experienced by strangers, is the raw material a national imagination is built out of.

Hobsbawm and Ranger supplied the other half in 1983 with the phrase invented tradition. Their collection assembled the cases: Scottish clan tartans largely designed in the nineteenth century, much of British royal ceremonial dating from the same period, revived Welsh eisteddfodau, and a great deal else that presents itself as immemorial. Their argument is not that these are frauds, and an invented tradition can be entirely sincere and deeply meaningful. It is that claims of antiquity cluster suspiciously around the moments when a new identity needed a past, and that this is therefore a claim to be checked rather than accepted.

What the checking usually finds is the state, doing administrative work. Eugen Weber traced it in France in a book called Peasants into Frenchmen: villagers who thought of themselves as belonging to a valley came to think of themselves as French through schools teaching in Paris French, an army that mixed young men from every region, roads, railways, a national calendar and a census that required everyone to have one answer to the question of what they were. It is slow, unglamorous and bureaucratic, which is why it never appears in the story a nation tells about itself.

None of this makes nations weak, and it is the most common misunderstanding of the argument. People die for imagined communities and not for demonstrably older things like guilds or dialects. Recent does not mean shallow.

But it does make one question useful. When a movement claims its nation has existed continuously for a thousand years, ask what the continuous thing was. Something usually did persist: a place name, a liturgy, a dynasty, a dialect. What almost never persists is the bundle: a people, a language, a territory and a state all aligned, because that alignment is a nineteenth-century idea about how the world ought to be arranged. Asking which strand is being claimed turns a slogan into a question with an answer.