Imagined Communities

The nation is imagined as limited because even tile largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. The idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down history. The cultural products of nationalism – poetry, prose fiction, music, plastic arts – show this love very clearly in thousands of different forms and styles. The reality is quite plain: the 'end of the era of nationalism,' so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight. In contrast to the immense influence that nationalism has exerted on the modern world, plausible theory about it is conspicuously meagre. No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers.