ABSTRACT
The year 1983 saw the publication of two seminal books for the study of nationalism. The first, entitled The Invention of Tradition, contained a series of essays on a variety of political rituals, and was edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, with an introductory chapter by Hobsbawm. The second, by Benedict Anderson, under the title Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, put forward some general hypotheses about the development of nationalism in various parts of the world, together with some case studies. Both books stemmed from a Marxist tradition, but sought to move beyond its usual concerns with political economy into the realm of culture by reworking and supplementing them with themes drawn from the analysis of narratives and discourse developed by ‘postmodernist’ deconstructionism. In both cases, this led to a reading of the nation and nationalism as a central text of modern times, which needed to be unmasked and deconstructed. For both, nations and nationalism are constructs and cultural artefacts; the task of the analyst is to uncover their forms and contents, in order to reveal the needs and interests of those elites and strata which benefit or use their narratives. Hence, in both books a modernist project is overlaid by ‘postmodernist’ themes and language. The implications of this for the modernist paradigm of nationalism will be explored later.1
