What is Nationalism - Essay Example

This social life of the mid 17th century civil war on agrarian elite landlordism is in a new form and economic foundation but categorically not in the urban which later became the protagonist of modern European development. The widespread pattern of modern state was the middle class within a social revolution that turned for assistance to the people to throw off the burden of traditional society. This society suffered internal pressures and threats than any other in history. Combined trauma of Spanish war lost most of the Spain’s Empire in the 19th century (Hoelscher 1999, p. 534). Colonies came with high developed military, marine, governmental and entrepreneurial capabilities. England started their colonies in both West Indies and North America as they had the ability to build ocean-worthy ships though they did not have a strong history of colonisation on foreign land as Spain did. Benedict Anderson, the author of one of the most important concept in political geography described nations as imagined communities. Born in Kunming, China, and brought up in California then after he moved to Ireland. The major factors contributing to nationalism in the past three centuries as Anderson described were the use of historical materialist or the Marxist approach (Jackson and Penrose 1998, p. 1). In respect to this, Anderson argued that Marxist thought had included nationalism but had proved an uncomfortable irregularity for this theory. He defined a nation as imagined political community seen as both inherently limited and sovereign arguing that the main cause of nationalism and the creation of an imagined community is the reduction of access to particular script language in this case Latin. The other cause is the movement to abolish the ideas of the celestial rule and monarchy, as well as the appearance of the printing press under a scheme of capitalism. The introduction of imagined communities was as a result of reconciling Marxist theories and nationalism and also to put into consideration what Anderson envisaged as a twisted context for the appraisal of nationalism. This distortion still continues both within and outside the academy. In Latin America and Indonesia, Anderson defined a nation as an imagined political community and put it as both inherently limited and sovereign. Marshall (2007, p. 448) describes the concept of imagined communities as currently standard within geographical books. The concept does not necessarily mean that a nation is false but refers to a nation as being constructed from popular processes through which residents share nationality in common. The understanding of this statement shapes and is also shaped by political and cultural institutions as people are made to imagine that they share general beliefs, attitudes and distinguish a collective population as having similar judgment and sentiments to their own. The second aspect is that the nation is generally imagined as being limited. This is because even the largest among them encompassing almost a billion human beings, has limited, elastic boundaries beyond which other nations lie. Anderson then argues for the social construction of nations as political entities that have limited spatial and demographic extent rather than organic, external entities. Nationalism is further imagined as sovereign, this is because the concept was introduced in an age which enlightenment and revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the ordained, hierarchical dynastic monarchy. He argues that the thought of a nation developed in the eighteenth century as a societal structure was to replace preceding monarchical orders. This means that a nation was a new way of conceptualizing state sovereignty and regulation. This regulation would be limited to a distinct population and territory over which the state could exercise power in the name of nationality. Finally, nationalism is imagined as a community. This is because despite the actual inequality and exploitation that may reign in each, the nation will always be conceived as a deep and a horizontal companionship. Ultimately, this fraternity makes it possible for the past two centuries. He also said that in war, nationalists are equal and no class boundaries present in the communal struggle for national survival and greatness. The second key feature of the development of nationalism is the role of Creole pioneers. In North and South America, people who fought for national independence in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries had similar ancestries, language and traditions as those of the colonising powers they opposed. According to Anderson (1999) these Creole communities developed nationalist politics before Europe. This was because as colonies, they were largely administrating territorial units this made the residents conceive their belongings to a potentially sovereign community. Much of Anderson’s thesis relies on print capitalism as he argued that the standardization of national calendars, time and language was personified in books and publications of the newspapers. This brought about a sense of national experiences for people became aware of events occurring in their own nation and other nations. These publications made people compare themselves in relation to others. This convergence of capitalism and of print technology created the possibility of a new form of imagined community which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation. The impact of imagined communities led to a revised edition in 1991.In this; Anderson had become uneasily aware that what he had believed was to be a significantly new contribution to nationalism instead was changing over time. In 1988, Anderson argued that maps contributed to legalization of the political space (Mitchell 2000). He noted that the Creole pioneers of Latin America and the financial contribution from overseas to the Irish Republican Army as he maintained that the nationalist movements were initiated mostly by expatriates. Anderson later appeared to the press and questioned the United Nations and the US committees regarding Indonesia and East Timor, about human rights abuses. Issues of space, place and territory have led Andersons work be utilized in the geographical research. The imagined communities have currently been used as clichés of literature and the results being that invocation in some cases have been a substitute for analysis. A critic of the imagined communities comes from a feminist perspective. This is by focusing on the fraternity experienced by the members of the nation, the protagonists in Anderson’s conceptions of nationalism are typically assumed to be male. The other challenge is from the Don Mitchell who argues that as well as the imagining communities, there must also be the attention to practice power through which these bonds are to be produced. This raises the question about who defines the nation and how it is defined. In this case, Anderson’s proposal is narrowed. United States traces its origin back to its colonies which were founded by the England kingdom in early 1600. Every colony was governed independently and was under the authority of the Crown. In 1732 the England Kingdom had 13 colonies established in British America later these colonies faced several grievances over some acts passed by the British parliament which included taxation without representation. As this dispute escalated, some colonists started to view the British rule as very hostile and oppressive thus they sought cooperation with other colonies. This led to the contingent congress and the declaration of independence, American Revolution and eventually independence. The ties between states strengthened with the help of the US constitution (McClintock 1995). At the end of the eighteenth century, at least in South and Central America the European- style was still significant. The first novel of Spanish-American was published in 1816. This was after the independence war broke out. Leadership was at this time held by substantial landowners, allied with smaller numbers of merchants as well as professionals. Away from seeking to induct the lower classes into the political life one major factor that spurred the drive for independence from Madrid, in important cases as Venezuela, Mexico and Peru, was the fear of the lower-class political mobilisations to humour Indian uprisings. In Peru, 1791, Toussaint L Ouverture led an insurrection of black slaves that produced the second independent republic in Western hemisphere. Spanish planters resisted the law and procured its delay in 1794. One reason that made Madrid make a successful comeback to Venezuela from the 1814-1816 where they were held remote till 1820 was that she had formally won the support of slaves and had later won that of India (Mitchell 2000). This made Madrid impose taxes, made collection of taxes more efficient, enforced commercial monopolies in the metropolitans, restricted the intra-hemispheric trade and centralized administrative hierarchies as well as promoting heavy immigration of peninsular. Debray (1977, p. 25) states that in Mexico, for example in the early eighteenth century the Crown was provided with annual revenue of about 3million pesos the sum had quintupled to 14 million by the end of the century. The level of peninsular migration by then was five times as high as it had been in1710-1730. The development of the Trans-Atlantic communication and the reality that Americans used the same language resulted to a relatively rapid and ease of transmission of new economic and political doctrines produced in Western Europe (Smith and Jackson 1999, p. 367). The aggressiveness of Madrid and spirit of liberalism, while central to any understanding of the impulse of resistance in the Spanish Americas do not explain why entities for instance Chile, Venezuela, Mexico turned out to be emotionally credible and politically feasible. On the eve of the Mexican revolution, there was only one Creole bishop, although creoles in viceroyalty were more than the peninsular. It was unheard of for a Creole to rise to the position of significance in Spain. From the sovereign vision, American Creole had grown to a large number and increased local rootedness with every succeeding generation as they presented a political problem (Blaut 1987). The growth of Creole communities especially in America and other parts such as Asia and Europe led inevitably to the appearance of Eurasians, Eurafricans, and finally the Euramericans as visible social groups. Their appearance legalized a style of thinking which foreshadowed contemporary racism. This enlightment influenced the crystallization of a fatal distinction between the metropolitans and the Creole. It was too easy to make a convenient, vulgar deduction that Creole, born in a savage hemisphere, was naturally different from the metropolitans and therefore unfit for higher office. Our attention focuses on the worlds of functionaries in the America but also in small worlds. Cramped vice royal pilgrimages had no decisive consequences until their territorial stretch could be imagined as nations in other words the arrival of the print- capitalism (Chatterjee 1993). Print spread early to New Spain but remained under the control of crown and church till the end of the seventeenth century. The figure of Benjamin Franklin is permanently associated with Creole nationalism in the northern America. This time they had discovered a new source of income which was the news paper. Hence, the printer’s office became the key to North American communications and community intellectual life. One trait with the newspapers was their provinciality. Colonial Creole could read a Madrid newspaper if there was a chance but for many peninsular officials, living down the same street could not make them read the Caracas production. In reference to this, failure of the Spanish-American experience to generate a permanent nationalism reflects both the general level of development of capitalism and technology in the late eighteenth century (Spencer and Wolman 2002). The Protestants who were English speakers to the north were more favourably situated for realizing the idea of America. The thirteen colonies comprised an area that was smaller than Venezuela. Put geographically together, their market centres were readily accessible to one another and their population was linked with print and commerce. The US could gradually multiply their numbers for the next 183n years as the old and the new populations moved to the west. In the case of USA there were elements of relative failure of non absorption of English-speaking Canada (Crang 1998). In conclusion, it is appropriate to reemphasize the limited and specific thrust of the argument. It is less intended to explain the social-economic bases of anti metropolitan resistance in the western hemisphere in 1760 and 1830. The economic interests at stake are known and obviously of fundamental importance. In addition, liberalisation and enlightenment clearly had a powerful impact; this was to provide an arsenal of ideological criticisms of imperial and ancients’ regimes. Neither of the above created the shape of imagined communities. In accomplishing this task, pilgrim Creole functionaries and provincial Creole played the decisive historic role. References Anderson, B 1999, The spectra of comparisons, Cornell university college of arts and sciences newsletter, vol. 20 (2), viewed 2 October 2002, Blaut, JM 1987, The national question: Decolonizing the theory of nationalism. Zed Books, London. Chatterjee, P 1993, The nation and its fragments: Colonial and postcolonial histories, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Crang, M 1998, Cultural geography, Routledge, London. Debray, R 1977, Marxism and the national question: New left review, pp. 25–41. Hoelscher, S 1999, ‘From sedition to patriotism: performance, place, and the reinterpretation of American ethnic identity’, Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 25. no. 4, pp. 534–558. Jackson & Penrose 1998, Constructions of race, place and nation, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. 1–23. Marshall, C 2007, The history of Latin America: Collision of cultures, Palgrave Macmillan, p.448. Martin, AK 1997, ‘The practice of identity and an Irish sense of place’, Gender, place and culture, vol. 4. Pp. 89–113. McClintock, A 1995, Imperial leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest, Routledge, London. Mitchell, D 2000, Cultural geography: A critical introduction, Blackwell, Oxford. Smith, G and Jackson, P 1999, ‘Narrating the nation ‘‘imagined community’’ of Ukrainians’ in Bradford’, Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 367–387. Spencer, P and Wolman, H 2002, Nationalism: A critical introduction, Sage, London. Read More