WESTERN NATIONALISM AND EASTERN NATIONALISM https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii9/articles/benedict-anderson-western-nationalism-and-eastern-nationalism
The highlight of this article, is that globalisation, financialisation, migration, communications, internet has made a new kind of virulent nationalism.. the pravasi nationalism.. long-distance nationalism: a nationalism that no longer depends as it once did on territorial location in a home country. Some of the most vehement Sikh nationalists are Australians, Croatian nationalists, Canadians; Algerian nationalists, French; and Chinese, Americans. (check this
My notes on this article:
Imagined Communities : nationalisms of all varieties cannot be understood without reflecting on the older political forms out of which they emerged: kingdoms, and especially empires of the pre-modern and early modern sorts.
The earliest form of nationalism—one that I have called creole nationalism—arose out of the vast expansion of some of these empires overseas, often, but not always, very far away. It was pioneered by settler populations from the Old Country, who shared religion, language and customs with the metropole but increasingly felt oppressed by and alienated from it. The United States and the various states of Latin America which became independent between 1776 and 1830 are the famous examples of this type of nationalism.
A second form of nationalism, extensively discussed in Imagined Communities, and which seems relevant here, is what I have called, following Hugh Seton-Watson, official nationalism. This form of nationalism arose historically as a reactionary response to popular nationalisms from below, directed against rulers, aristocrats and imperial centres. The most famous example is provided by Imperial Russia, where the Tsars ruled over hundreds of ethnic groups and many religious communities, and in their own circles spoke French—a sign of their civilized difference from their subjects. It was as if only peasants spoke Russian. ..London tried to anglicize Ireland (with substantial success), Imperial Germany tried to germanify its share of Poland (with very little success), Imperial France imposed French on Italian-speaking Corsica (partial success) and the Ottoman Empire Turkish on the Arab world (with no success). ..
However, by far the most spectacular and ironical case is provided by the Celestial Empire, ruled from 1644 till its collapse, less than 90 years ago, by a Manchu—and also Manchu-speaking—dynasty. the dynasty vanished in 1911 and, to some extent, the Manchus as well.
When Chinese nationalism did finally arise, it was rather late in world-historical time...China was deeply penetrated by the various imperialisms of the age, including Japanese, but it was not actually colonized. There were too many competing imperialisms by then, and even Great Britain, which was having trouble swallowing vast India, blanched at the thought of swallowing even vaster imperial China...They thus without much thought, the popular nationalism of the worldwide anti-imperialist movement with the official nationalism of the late nineteenth century; and we know that this latter was a nationalism which emanated from the state, not the people, and thought in terms of territorial control, not popular liberation. ..Imperial China came, at different times, to accept the kinds of boundaries and new states that imperialism and anticolonial nationalism were forging, at least at the periphery: Mongolia, Korea, Vietnam, Burma, India and Pakistan.
It is probably fair to say that all organized societies in former times depended (in part) for their cohesion on visions of the past which were not too antagonistic to one another. These visions were transmitted by oral tradition, folk poetry, religious teachings, court chronicles, and so forth... When nationalism entered the world late in the eighteenth century, however, all this changed fundamentally. The accelerating speed with which social, cultural, economic and political change took hold, motored by the industrial revolution and modern communications systems, made the nation the first political–moral form which based itself firmly on the idea of progress.
What has happened in effect is that though there are countless traces of the past around us—monuments, temples, written records, tombs, artefacts, and so on—this past is increasingly inaccessible, external to us. At the same time, for all kinds of reasons, we feel we need it, if only as some sort of anchor. But this means that our relationship to the past is today far more political, ideological, contested, fragmentary, and even opportunistic than in ages gone by.
Let me finally turn to another form of nationalism, which, so far as I can tell, is clearly European in origin, and ask whether it can be said still to be Western in any useful sense. This form I call linguistic nationalism... Both India and the Philippines have failed—if that is the right word—to create a generally accepted national language. The colonial language—English and American—remains the effective language of the state and of the national elite. A vigorous English-language—and nationalist—literary culture exists in both places, and has accommodated itself to no less vigorous Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Tagalog and Cebuano cultures. Old Pakistan broke into two separate nations partly because of Karachi’s suppression of the Bengali language, which then became the motor for a linguistic nationalism in Bangladesh that looks very similar to earlier linguistic nationalisms in Greece, Norway and Old Czechoslovakia. The newest nation-state in Asia, East Timor, which, in spite of its small size, contains over twenty ethnolinguistic groups, has opted for Portuguese as its language of state, and a simple lingua franca (Tetun) as the language of national unity. .
One could even argue, as I have done in another context, that electronic communications, combined with the huge migrations created by the present world-economic system, are creating a virulent new form of nationalism, which I call long-distance nationalism: a nationalism that no longer depends as it once did on territorial location in a home country. Some of the most vehement Sikh nationalists are Australians, Croatian nationalists, Canadians; Algerian nationalists, French; and Chinese, Americans. The internet, electronic banking and cheap international travel are allowing such people to have a powerful influence on the politics of their country of origin, even if they have no intention any longer of living there. This is one of the main ironic consequences of the processes popularly called globalization; it is yet another reason to believe that any sharp and unequivocal distinction between Asian and European nationalism lacks all validity.