Official nationalism invited colonized peoples to assimilate but barred full inclusion

Evidence

In almost every case, official nationalism concealed a discrepancy between nation and dynastic realm. Hence a world-wide contradiction: Slovaks were to be Magyarized, Indians Anglicized, and Koreans Japanified, but they would not be permitted to join pilgrimages which would allow them to administer Magyars, Englishmen, or Japanese. The banquet to which they were invited always turned out to be a Barmecide feast. The reason for all this was not simply racism; it was also the fact that at the core of the empires nations too were emerging – Hungarian, English, and Japanese. And these nations were also instinctively resistant to ‘foreign’ rule. Imperialist ideology in the post-1850 era thus typically had the character of a conjuring-trick. How much it was a conjuring-trick is suggested by the equanimity with which metropolitan popular classes eventually shrugged off the ‘losses’ of the colonies, even in cases like Algeria where the colony had been legally incorporated into the metropole. In the end, it is always the ruling classes, bourgeois certainly, but above all aristocratic, that long mourn the empires, and their grief always has a stagey quality to it. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 401

Categorization

• DEFINE: The Barmecide feast is Anderson’s core image for assimilation-without-inclusion — a banquet laid with empty dishes.
• XREF: Directly scaffolds the Islamophobia readings: the Muslim who is invited to integrate but denied full membership mirrors this Barmecide feast structure. — connects to: Britain transplanted its nation through colonization rather than building a multi-peopled empire; Rising national consciousness forced the state to recognize only nationals as citizens; Weak state peoples could not assimilate self-confident minorities (+5 more)
• ADDENDUM: The ‘grief always has a stagey quality’ line connects to the sacrifice article’s framing of the ruling classes’ theatrical mourning.

Related

• Colonial assimilation always stopped short of permitting rule over the colonizer (similarity 0.85)
• Weak state peoples could not assimilate self-confident minorities (similarity 0.83)
• Britain transplanted its nation through colonization rather than building a multi-peopled empire (similarity 0.82)
• Rising national consciousness forced the state to recognize only nationals as citizens (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Imperial language instruction did not guarantee colonized people entry into the imperial nation #corroborates (0.90)