Benedict Anderson

Anderson argues that the main causes of nationalism and the creation of an imagined community are the reduction of privileged access to particular script languages (e.g. Latin), the movement to abolish the ideas of divine rule and monarchy, as well as the emergence of theprinting press under a system of capitalism (or, as Anderson calls it, 'print-capitalism').

Anderson's view of nationalism places the roots of the notion of 'nation' at the end of the 18th century. While Ernest Gellner considers the spread of nationalism in connection with industrialism in Western Europe (and thus not explaining sufficiently nationalism in the eastern non-industrialised European regions), Elie Kedourie connects nationalism with ideas of the Enlightenment, with the French revolution and the birth of the centralised French state, Anderson contends that the European nation-state came into being as a response to nationalism in the European diaspora beyond the ocean, in colonies, namely in both Americas.

He considers nation state building as imitative action, in which new political entities were ‘pirating’ the model of the nation state. As Anderson sees it, the large cluster of political entities that sprang up in North America and South America between 1778 and 1838, almost all of which self-consciously defined themselves as nations, were historically the first such states to emerge and therefore inevitably provided the first real model of what such states should look like. If, for the more elite-centric theorizing of Kedourie, it was the Enlightenment and Kant who produced the ‘nation’, Anderson holds that nationalism, as an instrument of nation-state building, began in the Americas and France. He calls this first wave nationalism, and ascribes to it a civic nationalist character, differentiating it from the ethnic nationalism of the second wave.