Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

MAKING NATIONS 35
much attention, it was a significant stage in the further discussion of the
concept of the nation. 18 Deutsch had insufficient data, and his methodological
apparatus was awkward, but he showed extraordinary intuition in discerning
the socioeconomic processes of modernization that underlie the formation
of the nation. The need for a new kind of communication for the alienated
urban masses, uprooted from the array of agrarian forms of communication,
prompted the integration or disintegration of national groupings. Mass democratic
politics, he argued, completed the consolidation. In Deutsch's second
work on the nation, published sixteen years later, he continued to develop the
thesis in a historical description of social, cultural and political aggregations
that underlay the process of nationalization. 19
Three decades passed after Deutsch's first book before another breakthrough
was made in this field of research. The rapid communications
revolution in the final quarter of the twentieth century, and the gradual conversion
of human labor in the West into an activity of symbols and signs, provided
a congenial setting in which to reexamine the old issue. It is possible, too,
that the first signs of the declining status of classical nationalism, in precisely
the territory that had first produced national consciousness, contributed to
the appearance of the new paradigms. Two landmark books on the subject
appeared in Britain in 1983: Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities and
Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalism. From then on, the issue of nationalism
would be examined primarily through a sociocultural prism. The nation
became an unmistakable cultural project.
Anderson's life, too, was one of wandering across large cultural-linguistic
expanses. Born in China to an Irish father and an English mother, he was taken
to California as a child but was educated mainly in Britain, where he graduated
with a degree in international relations, a discipline that led him to divide
his time between Indonesia and the United States. His life story resonates in
his book on national communities, which critically rejects any position that
smacks of Eurocentrism. This attitude led him to assert, though not very
convincingly, that the pioneers of national consciousness in modern history
were the Creoles—the locally born offspring of settlers in the Americas.
For the present purpose, it is the original definition that he offers in his book
that is most significant: "the nation ... is an imagined political community—
and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign." 20 Indeed, every
18 Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication, New York: MIT Press,
1953.
19 Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Its Alternatives, New York: A. A. Knopf, 1969.
20 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6.