Nation Like An Imagined Political Communities example essay topic

It was always difficult to determine nationalism. What is this? Is it simply a great love and devotion to the nation, or cultural and personal feeling of it? In his work, Benedict Anderson, examines the topic of nations and nationalism, and spreading of the imagined communities of nationality. Anderson determines a nation like an imagined political communities. He points that it is limited and sovereign from the very beginning.

The author proves that nationality is imagined, based his arguments on the fact that the members of any (even small) community will never know most of others. But in our minds we can create the imagined boundaries of a nation, though they are not physically exist. It proves that only small villages, in which neighbors know each other well, are an exception. A nation is considered to be limited according to Anderson, because people of one nation recognize the difference in ethical, social and cultural structures among mankind. It is deep in our consciousness the confidence, that beyond the imagined boundaries there are other nations, quite differ from us. Thats why the idea of uniting in one massive nation seems to be unreal.

And, finally, as a symbol of the freedom from previous structures, a nation is sovereign. It means that though there are some typical schemes for any regime, but each nation is sovereign in order to organize a society. The process of creating imagined community included a lot of factors, as it was pointed; among them there are (according to religious faith), changes of old regimes, and interaction between society and progress. As an imagined community, a nation is a deep comradeship, and the links inside is so strong, that drive men to heroic deaths in nationalistic base.

It proves that the beginning of nationalism has deep cultural roots. In his work Anderson depicts a historical background of nationalism and emphasizes, that it is a modern political main strengths. It goes without saying that nationalism and nationalistic movement reached its culmination at a time of changes. Those changes can be pointed as the changes in the religious community; changes of the ruling classes; and changes of conceptions of time.

Taking into account these changes nationalism can be definite as a large cultural system that preceded self consciousness. Lets examine the events from the Middle Ages to the nearest ones. Religious communities had transformation from fatality into continuity and then into meaning. After the Middle age we see unselfconscious links of religion. It was provoked with the exploration of the world.

Old communities lost their confidence and political ideologies led to self consciousness. It is known that states had centers, and they were defined by them. But with the fall of monarchy, high centers declined..