AHR Forum

To What Can Late Eighteenth-Century French, British, and American Anxieties Be Compared? Comment on
Three Papers

BENEDICT ANDERSON

The peculiarity of nations and nationalisms is that they are never alone, and never original. They live by comparison and seriality, which is why we think of the United Nations as perfectly normal and would find a United Religions, a United Races, or a United Ethnicities bizarre if not grotesque. Accordingly, specific studies of any particular nationalism necessarily exist in a complex comparative field, both practical and theoretical. In the comment that follows on three first-class articles dealing with the discursive politics of "England," "America," and "France" during the last third of the eighteenth century, and the opening of the nineteenth, I will try to set in a somewhat wider comparative frame some of the questions the authors raise, in the hope of thereby opening up further discussion. The first section compares the ambiguous identities of "Americans" and "English" in the 1770s, so finely detailed in Dror Wahrman's article "The English Problem of Identity in the American Revolution," with the no less ambiguous identities of contemporary Taiwanese, Mainland Chinese, and Singaporeans, within the broad subset of "settler" or "creole" nationalisms. The next section responds to David A. Bell's lucid examination of the anxieties of French intellectuals about "the French" in the period immediately before and during the revolution, by considering the long positional "world war" between Legitimacy and Nationalism that began in 1776–1789 and ended in 1918, as well as the implications of the shift from the "royal we" to "We The People." The third section focuses primarily on Andrew W. Robertson's engaging inspection of the oscillations between national solidarity and vituperative factionalism during the first decades of America's independence, in his "'Look on This Picture . . . And on This!'" An attempt is made to expand our understanding of these oscillations by situating them against the background of the First Cold War (1793–1815), in which America appears rather like Australia in the Second, and by comparing them with the postrevolutionary crises of ex-Spanish America.	1
Over the past two or three years, people who happen to visit electronic chat-rooms frequented by male students from the Chinese People's Republic have noted something curious. On the one hand, there are plenty of brutal messages insisting that the Taiwanese are not really and truly Chinese. They are said to be the ultimate products of sexual relations, violent or consensual, between local women and Japanese men during the fifty years of Japanese colonization of the island (1895–1945). It is their mongrel (shall we say mestizo?) racial-ethnic identity that explains their treasonable demands for Formosan independence and their obsequious dependence on America and Japan. It appears, however, that all may not be entirely lost. Chatters have urged their countrymen to invade Taiwan and violate all Taiwanese women, thereby putting some honest mainland spermatozoa into them, out of which more genuinely Chinese children will be produced. Some even propose that Taiwanese men be raped, to put some mainland manliness into their effete, westernized, Japanified bodies. On the other hand, the chatters also typically insist that "Taiwan" is Chinese, even if the Taiwanese are only residually so. The Place belongs to the ci-devant Middle Kingdom and its descendants, even if perhaps the People do not.	2
The ugliness of these conversations need not be taken too seriously, since they are evidently an expression of the sexual frustration many mainland male students suffer on American campuses and the jealousy they feel toward their suaver, richer, more Americanized, less patriarchal Taiwanese competitors. But the anxiety about "who" the Taiwanese are is palpable and fascinating. This anxiety has increased to the degree that the post-1949 hostility between Peking and Taipei can no longer be easily understood as one between right-wing (Kuomintang) and left-wing (Communist) Chinese fighting for control of "China." A bloody civil war was perhaps easier to deal with psychologically than what has succeeded it.	3
On Taiwan itself, there are also plenty of anxieties about identity. A powerful minority of mainlanders (and their children) who fled to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, and dominated the "Republic of China" until the end of the 1990s, stick to their Chineseness and their "civil war" view of the hostility and suspicion across the Taiwan Straits. But time and tide are running against them, and more and more a Taiwanese "national identity" and Taiwanese nationalism are gaining strength. Broadcasts in the Taiwanese language (basically, Hokkien) are growing steadily at the expense of Mandarin. The small communities of aborigines (related to the peoples of the Philippines and Indonesia) once regarded as "savages" are being repositioned as Native Taiwanese, along the lines of Native Americans, treated more generously in everyday practice and more romantically in everyday popular culture. Mixed (mestizo) descent can have its own chic. The early European name for the island, Formosa ("Beautiful" in Latin), more and more crops up in advertising and popular magazines. Yet there are also plenty of Taiwanese patriots who revere the "Chinese classics," Confucian morality, and so on. And everyone reads the "written Chinese" that is read on the mainland.	4
Furthermore, not that far over the horizon, there is the soi-disant nation-state of Singapore, with a population overwhelmingly "Chinese" (originally from the mainland's Southeast littoral) but declaring itself Singaporean/Not Chinese. The mainland seems to have no difficulty in dealing with these "Chinese" as if they belonged to another nation. But the durable dictatorship of Lee Kuan-yew's People's Action Party (1957 to the present) has shown interesting anxieties. For several decades, "Chinese-language schools" were repressed in favor of English-language schools, not least because the violently anti-Communist regime had started life with the idea that Singapore, too, was another battlefield in the Chinese civil war, as well as in the larger Cold War. During the 1980s, however, angered and perhaps worried by Western criticism of its repressive practices and the growing influence of American culture on local youth, the regime re-stressed the importance of Mandarin and developed an elaborate (and ultimately futile) program to revive and deepen Confucianism as a core "Asian Value."	5
If, in these sketchy notes on Taiwan, mainland China (or just China?), and Singapore, there are clear and strong resonances with major themes in the articles of Wahrman and Robertson, we should not really be surprised. Colonists from the mainland arrived (spontaneously) in significant numbers in the same seventeenth century that saw the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers and their epigones on the northeast coast of the Atlantic. The rise of the Manchu Ch'ing dynasty after 1644 eventually brought Formosa under notional imperial rule (perhaps like the United States' various Pacific "possessions"). At various times and places, Japanese, Portuguese, Dutch, and Spaniards established outposts and created limited zones of control. Aboriginal inhabitants were increasingly marginalized and mistreated. Imperial administration, such as it was, grew more rapacious and corrupt as time passed. But the island only became formally a "regular" province of the empire toward the end of the nineteenth century. Not long afterward, the (first) Sino-Japanese War broke out, Peking was defeated, and had to cede Taiwan to Tokyo (1895). This cession did not cause a great deal of pain in China, because it occurred in a monarchical-imperial world-era in which state borders waxed and waned with military success or failure and diplomatic horsetrading. (Nothing offers a greater contrast to this era than our own, where national borders are sacred. The United States "acquired" Alaska by deal and purchase only thirty years before Japan "acquired" Taiwan by deal and force, but selling it has long since become literally inconceivable.)	6
The resonances between contemporary Taiwan-China and the Thirteen Colonies–United Kingdom of the late eighteenth century suggest a broader comparative framework for some kinds of historical and theoretical investigation. This framework would allow us to think about "settler" or, more clearly, "creole" communities right across the Americas from Argentina and Chile, through Mexico and the United States as far as Anglo-Canada and French Canada, as well as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Taiwan, and Singapore. All came into being in the era of High Monarchy. All were created by maritime expansion of the imperial core, often over vast distances. All experienced mestization of one kind or another (out of sexual relations with aborigines, imported slaves, natives, or Europeans originating outside the empire). All, at different times and to different degrees, felt themselves slighted and misruled by the metropole's political, military, and/or ecclesiastical emissaries. In the historical era of nationalism, all faced/face the ambiguities of their "mongrel origins," as Daniel Defoe would have said.	7
In later eighteenth-century Spain, "pureblood" Spanish creoles from, say, Argentina and Mexico were called, disparagingly, americanos in Madrid and Salamanca. This adjective did not exactly mean that they were not Spanish at all but rather a degenerate, morally dubious, uncouth "sort-of" Spanish. In London, until fairly recently, "Australian" and "New Zealander" had exactly the same disparaging "poor cousin with a shady past" connotation. (This scorn was usually returned in kind, in such anti-metropolitan epithets as maturrango and "pommie.") Conversely, there were always plenty of creoles and mestizos for whom the allure of the metropole and its high civilization engendered substantial loyalties, even in the gravest crises. The long war for American independence and the far longer and more devastating wars for the independence of the Spanish colonies are surely inexplicable without these loyalties. Australia still hesitates to declare itself a republic. Settler New Zealanders are only now toying with the idea of calling themselves pakeha according to the Maori idiom. And the grandchildren of Kuomintang "settlers" are self-consciously "trying to become Taiwanese."	8
If in this transhistorical frame, we can line up all the creoles/mestizos together: English, Scottish, German in the United States, Spanish in Spanish America, French in Canada, Portuguese in Brazil, English and Irish in Australia, Dutch and English in South Africa, Chinese in Taiwan and Singapore (should one add English and Scots in Ireland?)—still, that transhistoricity conceals or can conceal some important distinctions. Wahrman's "English Problem with Identity" strikingly underscores one of these: the absence of any well-understood and accepted idea of "normal nationalism" in the 1770s and 1780s. The (American) Declaration of Independence was made in the name of a People who still had no name. The situation was not too different in Spanish America. When José Francisco de San Martín, marching in from Argentina, destroyed the last citadel of imperial Spanish power in the viceroyalty of Peru, he had, as it were, to baptize its residents as peruanos, including the "Indian" communities speaking nothing but Aymara and Quechua. Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador—these states did not come into being instantly, without tergiversations, and free from fiats, fantasy, and firepower.	9
After the French Revolution, which only became "French" by a sort of unconscious esprit d'escalier, nationalism gradually developed into a normative international framing. It did not become hegemonic until the formation of the League of Nations after The Great War and almost a century and a half after George Washington's triumph. Nonetheless, as time passed, people more and more knew what they had to do and what they had to "look like." The Philippine Revolution against Spain in the 1890s worked from by-then well-established models of nationness, with which the Liberator was not blessed. But even its great hero, José Rizal, of part Spanish, Tagalog, Chinese, and perhaps Japanese descent, wrote his astounding nationalist novels in Spanish, not his native language, Tagalog, partly because he wanted to be read in Spain. And it took him almost a decade to abandon the imagery of Spain as an indifferent, cruel Mother.	10
From this vantage point, the roughly 150 years that elapsed between the American Declaration of Independence and the formation of the League of Nations ought to be read also as the period of a tenacious, defensive war of position on the part of nationalism's early enemy: Legitimacy—marvelously understood as the opposite of nationalism's lowercase legitimacy.	11
If one considers the Declaration of Independence, for example, eighteen of its twenty-three paragraphs (one of these has nine subparagraphs each beginning with "For") commence accusingly with the word "He," and only two commence with "We." The enemy is George III, King of Great Britain, not of the English nor of Linda Colley's British, who are never in fact referred to. One does not get any sense that this language is merely a tactical ruse, designed to win sympathy in the metropole, in the way that, in our time, Argentineans could tactically denounce "Thatcher's War in the Malvinas" to left-wing English reporters. The eighteen chanted He's of Thomas Jefferson's text show us two simple things: the first is that it is partly an anachronism to write about the transatlantic crisis of the 1770s in terms of conflicts between two nations, and therefore ambiguities about who the Americans or the British were were not simply "identitarian questions" such as are familiar to us today but were deeply connected to the quagmire of changing ideas about fealty. George III was the monarch of many territories in Europe, the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia, and the fealty he required was to his person, not at all to any function as the "representative" of a nation. (Even today, many patriotic Australians feel loyal to Elizabeth II but not in the least to Tony Blair or Great Britain.) The fact that George III's grandfather George I knew almost no English, and his father, George II, not a great deal more, was a matter of general indifference. Indeed, the House of Hanover did not bother to anglicize itself to House of Windsor until the middle of the Great War!	12
It has not been sufficiently noticed that far the largest part of Europe's extra-European empires (to say nothing of intra-European ones such as Austro-Hungary) were accumulated under the sign of Legitimacy. This is plainly true of Britain, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Russia. The Netherlands acquired the "Netherlands East Indies" at the same moment that it acquired for the first time a monarchy (1815). France might appear to be the exception, but the great "French" expansions in India, North America, and the Caribbean took place under the ancien régime. French Algeria, Cambodia, Vietnam, Guinea, Senegal, the Ivory Coast, and Djibouti were all projects of Charles X, Louis-Philippe, and Louis Napoléon. The conquests of 1880–1905, mainly in Africa, were essentially logical extensions of what had previously been achieved under Legitimacy.	13
The peculiarity of High Monarchy (Empire in the classical sense) was that it had no permanent boundaries: these could collapse completely and even disappear (the Kingdom of Poland or Burgundy) or could expand seemingly without limit. It did not absolutely require a permanent capital. (The most powerful ruler of early sixteenth-century Europe, Charles V, was on the move almost all his life.) It was not until quite late that the "big" monarchs were understood as mere "representatives" of national or ethnic groups. This is why Victoria was unembarrassedly related to every ruling house in Europe, why Wittelbachs ruled in Athens and Munich, Hohenzollerns in Bucharest and Berlin, Habsburgs in Vienna and Madrid, Bourbons in Madrid and Paris, and so on. The Romanovs were Czars of All the Russias, the Habsburgs and Bourbons Kings of (All) the Spains—which included Naples, the Philippines, and Cuba—the Hanoverians from Victoria's time Empresses/Emperors of India as well as Kings/Queens of Great Britain. It was exactly this "absence" of apical nationality that made imperial fealty possible. And how grand it seemed! Monarchs were a species set apart. When they married in older times, their queens brought vast territories, peoples, industries, and strategic fortresses along as dowries. They were rightly famous for their ingratitude, but they regarded themselves as responsible only to the one higher authority in Heaven.	14
From this angle, we can see that what doomed the great European empires—starting with the Spanish at the beginning of the nineteenth century—was the slow decline of Legitimacy itself. It was not necessary for a monarch to be a racist to rule an empire, since his family was above any other. But for a post-(serious) monarchical regime to create, expand, or retain an empire, in the name of a nation, racism was absolutely essential. Finally, when these monarchies were gone, they were really gone, fffffft, so to speak. Today, one can speak poignantly of genocide but not of dynasticide, let alone of impericide. Even regicide has an archaic smell to it.	15
But it did not have this smell, perhaps, until Ekaterinburg, 1918, just as the League of Nations was trying on its party clothes. Certainly not in seventeenth-century England or in late eighteenth-century France. Execution of a "divine monarch"—in public, not by intrapalace assassination—was understood everywhere as something completely extraordinary: damnable or heroic. Nothing shows this more clearly than the ludicrous weepings of the generally sensible Edmund Burke over the death of the terminally vapid Marie Antoinette (clearly the ancestor of equally ludicrous weepings of too many British intellectuals over "Princess Di"). But who was entitled to sentence the Monarch to death? Execution in the name of what? Furthermore, once he or she was executed, that dynasty was thought to be ended for good. To be replaced by what/who? Something interesting shows up already in the language of the Declaration of Independence. Here, the "royal we" is signally, cautiously displaced by another we—We The People. (But if George III had fallen into Washington's hands, can one imagine him being tried and executed?)	16
The guillotining of Louis Bourbon on January 21 of the Year II, at the behest of a National Assembly elected by universal male suffrage (which in the United States had to wait a further century and a half for its realization) clearly marks the pivotal moment at which divine monarchy and the nation-state passed each other on human history's moving escalators. Before this act, it was possible for jurists, publicists, and intellectuals to speak about the "nation" of France, with a certain légèreté—without it mattering a great deal and with plenty of ambiguities. But beheading a king (even if he and his ancestors had had hundreds or thousands of lesser mortals beheaded over the years) was an enormous political and ideological blow against a system of social and religious ordering that had dominated Europe for centuries. It could only be justified by a new Sovereign We, before whom the former Monarch was placed as just another—delinquent, treasonous—Frenchman.	17
The new Sovereign was bound to have a character different from that of its predecessor. Executions also showed this difference. A monarch could have people executed while dallying with a mistress or out hunting for deer. He was immune to the laws by which his servants carried out the killings he decreed. He could be "light" if he felt so inclined, since behind him stood God. But the National We who guillotined Louis Bourbon could not be "light," since its legitimacy did not come from God but rather from some self-generated Good.	18
The Goodness of the Nation was a new and remarkable idea, since it appeared in the face of plenty of contrary evidence. Some of this type of evidence is nicely displayed in David A. Bell's article "The Unbearable Lightness of Being French." If French intellectuals, politicians, and publicists worried about the frivolity, decadence, debauchery, selfishness, superficiality, and lack of patriotism of their fellow countrymen (and this could not entirely be attributed to the example and influence of the monarch, the aristocracy, and the prelates) at the same time that they endorsed the new guillotining Sovereign, it would be a mistake to regard the apparent contradiction as an incoherence or an aporia.	19
The Nation was the first historical polity for which the Future was an essential foundation. Moving onward through Walter Benjamin's "empty, homogeneous time," it was not headed for the Day of Judgment, and it knew it had no place in Heaven or in Hell. So it thought, and continues to think, about future Frenchmen and future Americans, who in their uncountable numbers stand lining up in Limbo for their entrance onto the national territory. These ghostly French and Americans, innocent of any crimes, frivolities, and other sins, are those before whom presently living citizens are morally arraigned, and to whose standards of virtue they are asked to do obeisance. They are understood as the guarantee that no matter how appalling the behavior and morals of "actually existing" French and Americans, We The People in the transcendent sense, and in the sense of Rousseau's General Will, is always Good. One might even go so far as to wonder whether this exalted Goodness does not generally require a lot of worry and dissatisfaction about the present condition of the nation. In this sense, the France of the 1780s and 1790s does not seem so different from the United States of today, which, depending on the observer, can be seen as teeming with inner-city gangsters and rapists, drug dealers and addicts, corrupt politicians, welfare cheats, fascist Minutemen, shady lawyers, grasping HMOs, witless generals, intolerable teenagers, environment muggers, whining ethnics, corporate psychopaths, etc. etc. without these perceptions in the least undermining the solid conviction that—somehow—America is Good.	20
If the John Adams administration enacted the repressive Sedition Acts against its political rivals in 1798, and the deafening level of vituperation between the rivalrous Federalists and Republicans persisted well into Jefferson's regime, these episodes were immediately preceded by the solidarity of the revolutionary years, and followed by the Era of Good Feeling. Explaining these oscillations is complicated by the fact, not well recognized in our time in these United States, that in the world of the 1790s America was a rather unimportant country on the periphery of the international system, a bit like Australia in the 1990s. The Big Powers were all in Europe. Between 1792 and 1815, London and Paris were almost continuously engaged in warfare for dominance in Europe and other parts of the world, and in these wars a large number of lesser powers were lined up with one or another side. Until Robespierre's fall in 1794, during Washington's second term, this conflict had a genuine and powerful ideological character. But this character faded during the Directory, and can be said to have ended with Bonaparte's coup d'état of November 7, 1799, at the halfway point of the Adams administration. Jefferson concluded the Louisiana Purchase at the end of 1803 only months before Napoleon's grandiose coronation as Emperor took place (presided over, amusingly, by a calmly kidnapped pope). Furthermore, the First Consul's restoration of slavery and the slave trade for the Paris-controlled empire in 1802 not only reversed the emancipatory policy of Robespierre and the Jacobins, and reassured Southern slaveowners terrified by Haiti, but opened the way for London to take the decisive abolitionist step in 1808. Two years into James Madison's administration, the Horrible He of 1776 went permanently mad, and the regency of his raffish son began. Four years later, Napoleon was gone, and monarchy was restored or imposed everywhere in Europe. Reactionary He-Britain become abolitionist, Radical France welcoming its first-ever Emperor and the restoration of slavery: rather confusing for everyone, especially those who had from a distance identified with the initial positions of one or the other.	21
In retrospect, the oscillation of that time can seem not too different from the years of the Cold War in the U.S. of A.: huge national solidarity during the battle against Hitler and Hirohito; in its immediate aftermath, the violent and rancorous partisanship of the McCarthy era more or less spanning the time from the Berlin Blockade to Stalin's death; a subsequent Era of (relative) Good Feeling under the Eisenhower-Kennedy-and-Khrushchev era as the conditions emerged in which it began to be possible for conservative American journalists, scholars, and diplomats to speak with unconscious irony of dangerous "conservatives" rather than "Reds" in the Kremlin.	22
The moments of violent partisan attachments in the time of Adams and early Jefferson, as in that of Truman and early Eisenhower, look today like the periodic small storms that disturb the placidity of nationalist democracies and give them new energy without seriously endangering them—the Dreyfus Affair, the General Strike of 1926, the mini-revolution of Pieter Troelstra's Dutch labor movement in 1918. In the angry 1790s, Republicans and Federalists still envisioned the same ghostly Good Americans up ahead—and this deep unity lasted until the War Between the States six decades later.	23
The partisan conflicts, in any case, pale by comparison with what happened in South and Central America. Over large parts of the continent, the first half-century after independence was a time of endless internal warfare and caudillist rule. The striking exception was the biggest country of them all: Brazil. One could ask oneself whether the exceptional stability of the United States (until 1860) and monarchical Brazil (until 1888) was not partly due to the fact that these were the only two countries where slavery was not abolished in the same decades during which independence was achieved. It is interesting to imagine what would have happened to the United States if the remarkable Washington had the far more remarkable Liberator's vision, audacity—and profoundly antagonistic constituencies!	24
Benedict R. O'G. Anderson is Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor of International Studies (Emeritus) at Cornell University. He is a specialist in the modern politics of Southeast Asia, as well as the theory and practice of nationalism in general. He took his PhD in government at Cornell University in 1967 under the direction of George McT. Kahin. His major publications are Java in a Time of Revolution (1972), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1983; revised and expanded, 1991), Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (1990), and The Spectre of Comparisons: Southeast Asia, Nationalism, and the World (1999).

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