Imagined Communities Against the Tide? the Questioned Political Projection of Nationalism1
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DEBATS · Annual Review, 1 · 2016 — 17 / 27 ISSN 0212-0585 (print) ISSN 2530-3074 (electronic) Imagined communities against the tide? The questioned political projection of nationalism1 Albert Moncusí Ferré UNIVERSITAT DE VALÈNCIA [email protected] ORCID: 0000-0003-2604-4098 Received: 24/04/2016 Accepted: 03/06/2016 ABSTRACT This article deals with the validity of Anderson’s definition of imagined communities and the future of imagination typical of nationalism. It is based on bibliographic review and research on the case of Cerdanya. Three questions of Anderson’s definition are revised: the limitation of the nation, its supposedly inherent sovereignty and the sense of community among unknown people. In this last point, the text focuses also on the consequences that imagined community is embodied for known people every day. It concludes that the production of local identities and dynamics in global, local and regional level represents a challenge for the political projection of imagined communities. Nevertheless, that production is not absolutely questioned. Denationalisation dynamics are produced in sovereignty and delimitation becomes more porous but it carries on the cultural production of community limits by education, army and communications. In addition, some global alternatives to national communities arise, but the nationalist grammar remains intact as a base of community categories and identifications. Keywords: Nation-state, culture, power, territory, globalisation, ethnicity Corresponding author: Albert Moncusí Ferré. Universitat de València, Departamento de Sociología y Antropología Social. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales. Av. Tarongers, 4b 46021 València. Suggested citation: Moncusí, A. (2016). Imagined communities against the tide? The questioned political projection of nationalism. Debats. Journal on Culture, Power and Society. 1, 17–27 This is a curious force in history: at the same is no time or place in which the State has been time it is an illusion, a powerful affirmation of fully realised (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2000: 323) authority, a cultural artifact, a present absence and an absent presence, a principle of unity that masks I lived in Puigcerdà, the capital of the Catalan and institutional disjointedness. At bottom, the State Franco-Spanish county of La Cerdanya, in the Pyrenees. has always been rooted in work-in-progress. There I undertook an ethnographic study back then and 1 I want to acknowledge Dr. Joaquim Maria Puigvert for the opportunity to revisit the Cerdanya case recently. Part of what I discuss in this paper would not have been possible without his invitation to hold a debate, with him and his students of the degree of History of the University of Girona, about the book I published in 2005. 18 — DEBATS · Annual Review, 1 · 2016 ALBERT MONCUSÍ FERRÉ during later visits. The purpose of the study was to see in September 2014. My earlier work had revealed the impact on the county’s residents of the Franco- two difficulties that might arise in the project: the Spanish border that runs through the valley2 and prejudices of French users and administrative problems. the superimposition of the collective categories and identities they were invited to share. The magnificent During the defence of my doctoral thesis, one of the study carried out by Peter Sahlins (1993) helped guide jury members — Dr. Joaquim Pais de Brito — asked me. The by-line for my study was “The Construction me about death and its ritualisation in the county. of France and Spain in La Cerdanya”, foreshadowing I had not attended any burials and as a result my my thesis that the international border and its marches ethnographic studies had not shed any light on played a key role in the construction of the Nation-State. death rites in La Cerdanya. I recalled the question My study (Moncusí, 2005) revealed the continuity of a because another issue arose in connection with the process that was deeply marked by wars in the first half dead during my last visit. What happens when a of the Twentieth Century and the political, social and French or Spanish citizen dies on the other side of economic changes that came in their wake. Somewhat the border? Does having the border nearby help when paradoxically, the implementation of the Schengen repatriating the corpse or does it instead highlight the Accords heightened La Cerdanya residents’ awareness contradictions of living in a border area? Someone of the border. Yet this was a paradox in appearance only who worked at the hospital told me that the latter was for the process of building the EU had not involved any the case. The hospital was built in Spanish territory, substantial transfer of sovereignty by Member States. close to the border with France. Yet for a Frenchman This point had already been clearly demonstrated who dies in the new hospital, the hundred yards or by various authors — Mann (1993), Connor (1994), so that separate Puigcerdà and Bourg-Madame [La Llobera (2003), who revealed the fears and suspicions Guingueta] on each side of the border might just as of Member States. Furthermore, the process was felt well be the four thousand leagues that lie between in different ways on each side of the Franco-Spanish Paris and Dunedin (New Zealand). That is because border as a result of historical vicissitudes, differences in repatriation of a corpse is a bureaucratic nightmare. political organisation, regional loyalties, and the civic and cultural links between population and State. One This instance reveals that the Nation-State is still alive of the key comparative elements was the consolidation and kicking in a world that facilitates movement of a virtual Catalan State on the southern side of the and has the potential for scrapping borders (Castells, border. Even so, the inhabitants of La Cerdanya showed 2000; Appadurai, 2001; Abèlés, 2008). The hospital considerable skill in exploiting the various cultural puts La Cerdanya at the cutting edge of EU political codes to turn the territorial division to their advantage. construction, posing administrative challenges to the two Member States in making the EU relevant I returned to La Cerdanya in December 2015. The first to their citizens’ daily lives. When the hospital trans-national hospital in Europe had been set up near opened its doors, the Press echoed concerns about Puigcerdà’s town pond and just a stone’s throw from the need for specific procedures for repatriating the Franco-Spanish border. The flags of Catalonia, corpses, police measures for interrogating suspects the EU, France and Spain fly from the building. The admitted to hospital, the registration of births and the hospital is jointly managed by the Catalan Government administration of medicines (El Periódico newspaper, (60%) and the French State (40%). It opened its doors 5/09/2014; La Vanguardia newspaper, 19/09/2014). The hospital managers were called upon to adopt a practical 2 Translator’s Note: Prior to the Treaty of The Pyrenees (1659), approach to overcoming bureaucratic hurdles. Here, Catalonia included Rosselló (Roussillion). The treaty sundered one should note that the inhabitants of La Cerdanya Catalonia along a new Franco-Spanish border running have a long history of grappling with Spain and France through The Pyrenees — a cause of bitter resentment to this day. to allow cross-border movement and use of resources. Imagined communities against the tide? The questioned political projection of nationalism DEBATS · Annual Review, 1 · 2016 — 19 ‘Spain’, ‘France’ and ‘Catalonia’ configure what was built on a useful ideology for maintaining order Benedict Anderson termed “imagined communities”, and was reinforced by the fact that it constituted which the author defined as “inherently limited and both a political doctrine and the basis for identity sovereign” (2005: 24). Anderson considered that (Guibernau, 2004). The issue lay in defining what the members of an ‘imagined community’ feel the ‘order’ meant, with the premise that whatever might bonds of kinship even though they do not know happen should be subject to State control. The one another. That said, under certain circumstances nation’s survival coincided with State power and collective imagination may have shortcomings as required obeying the Law and loyalty to the State’s a basis for a given notion of ‘community’. The interests (Bauman, 2002). Under such conditions, the modern formula of Nation-State was built on this State institutionalised the ‘imagined community’ to collective imagination that had cultural roots (often a furnish limits and sovereignty. common language) and political, social and economic articulation of the territory. That said, the institutional Biology and culture as challenges structure of the Nation-State is both unfinished and With regard to limitation of the community, it questioned. The construction of collective identities was necessary to produce a State-sized society. This requires an effort in terms of cultural and social often involved the use of violence in sweeping away representation that has often flown in the face of regional differences and identities and imposing a cold reality (Pujadas, 1993; Hall, 2003). This conflict notion of State (Pérez Agote, 1993). Consolidation of is particularly sharp in the case of national identities, a Nation-State depends on social consensus on the given their abstract nature and how they link with the bonds forged. Nationalists think of the nation as a State’s political engineering. ‘Imagined communities’ collective individual, a kind of super-organism with its find themselves under stress in places such as La own soul, history and destiny that renders it unique Cerdanya, where it seems the process of building a and that takes cultural form. The existence of the nationalist imagination goes against the tide. The nation is considered by its subjects as something that purpose of this paper is to Anderson’s premises to is natural (Handler, 1984). It therefore gives rise to a explore ways in which the collective imagination may process of mythification through natural history and turned into a dream that is rendered either more or institutional action that turns life into an ‘imaginary’ less realisable.