When someone dies for their country, what is their sacrifice actually for? According to Anderson, it is for an idea: nations are emotional and cultural phenomena, not concrete ones. The idea of the nation is so powerful that everyone assumes everyone else belongs to one the world’s most important international political body is called the United Nations and “since World War II every successful revolution has defined itself in national terms.” And yet, Anderson notes, nobody really knows or agrees on what “nation, nationality, nationalism” even mean, and the more scholars look for explanations or justifications for nationalism, the less sense it seems to make. This shows that nationalism is different from other political -isms: nobody would die for the idea of liberalism, but thousands of people die for their nations every year.

But these countries put their nationalist ideologies above their Marxist ones, letting their historical grievances and concepts of ethnic identity get in the way of their long-term political goals. This is remarkable because all three countries were Marxist, so they had aligned goals in the international sphere and would be expected to side with one another during wars, not fight against each other. In 19, Vietnam invaded Cambodia, and then China invaded Vietnam.

In his introduction, Anderson illustrates what is special about nationalism with a case study. But he also turns to the radical differences between nations, both in the eras when they formed and today, to point out the way they depend on history and show how they preserve many of the structures, tendencies, and inequalities inherent to the forms of social and political organization they superseded. To understand the essential features of nations and the remarkable power they seem to hold over their citizens, Anderson points to the continuities among nations that formed in different eras and places, many of which he argues result from countries simply copying one another. Instead, Anderson describes the nation as a cultural construct, with a particular history rooted in the fall of monarchies and empires, as well as specific advancements in literacy, technology, and capitalism. Benedict Anderson’s landmark study of nationalism, Imagined Communities, starts by rejecting the assumption that nations are a natural or inevitable social unit.

Imagined communities