Even reactionary European nationalisms had to adopt populist inclusion because the model required it
Evidence
But precisely because it was by then a known model, it imposed certain ‘standards’ from which too-marked deviations were impermissible. Even backward and reactionary Hungarian and Polish gentries were hard put to it not to make a show of ‘inviting in’ (if only to the pantry) their oppressed compatriots. If you like, the logic of San Martín’s Peruvianization was at work. If ‘Hungarians’ deserved a national state, then that meant Hungarians, all of them; it meant a state in which the ultimate locus of sovereignty had to be the collectivity of Hungarian-speakers and readers; and, in due course, the liquidation of serfdom, the promotion of popular education, the expansion of the suffrage, and so on. Thus the ‘populist’ character of the early European nationalism, even when led, demagogically, by the most backward social groups, was deeper than in the Americas: serfdom had to go, legal slavery was unimaginable – not least because the conceptual model was set in ineradicable place. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 315
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The argument that a pirated ideological model retroactively constrains its own users toward inclusion — reactionary Hungarian gentry forced into populist postures by the ‘standards’ of the American blueprint — is a genuinely non-obvious mechanism worth sitting with.