– But today I no longer have such an attachment to England. To think that an Englishman could behave like that! I witnessed how the arrogant upper class lads beat up Sri Lankan students demonstrating against Britain’s role in the Suez Crisis. I first became politically engaged when I was 20 and a student at Cambridge University. – When I was young I was ashamed of England. – Well, that’s certainly changed during my life, he begins. He answers only after taking some time to think. It is a question that he clearly has not thought much about. To go a little deeper in to the theme “shame” it might be relevant to ask him which country he feels shame for. Since the early 1970s he has lived mainly in the USA. Born to an English mother and Irish father, he grew up in China, studied in England and the USA, and did research in Indonesia and Thailand. And, shame can be contagious.īenedict Anderson himself has – like many other researchers of nationalism – a mixed background. – If you feel no shame for your country you cannot be a nationalist, he says. – Without shame no nationalismĪ key word in his understanding of nationalism is shame. Some of the most ardent Sikh nationalist are situated in Australia and Canada – thanks to the Internet and cheap airline tickets. Newer examples of nationalism are the long-distance nationalisms of migrants: Jews in the USA fighting for a state in the Middle East, or Tamils in Norway working for their own state in Sri Lanka. Despite all the talk of transnationalism and fluid identity, nationalism is in the best of health. In a debate chaired by Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Benedict Anderson spoke about new forms of nationalism. The questions which were posed in the debate were: What does it mean to belong to a nation? In the 21st Century do we still need a national state with which to identify ? How deeply ingrained in us is the feeling of nationality, patriotism, chauvinism and nationalism? The nation was the main theme for the literature and free speech festival, Kapittel 05. How could we otherwise even know about each other? Anderson attaches importance to modern communication, by way of books, the telephone and more recently radio and TV, as a condition for the existence of a national community. A nation is, in a manner, a Utopian community. Imagined because never – not even in the smallest nations – can one know all the members of the nation.

One of the main points in Anderson’s book is that nations are imagined communities. Benedict Anderson: “Nationalism encourages good behaviour.” Foto: Chen Cheng-Chang, Tapei Times

Benedict anderson