Resurgent nationalism fuses invented tradition with narcissistic minor-difference resentment.

Evidence

Wachirawut, his son and successor (r. 1910–1925), had to pick up the pieces, modelling himself this time on the self-naturalizing dynasts of Europe. Although – and because – he was educated in late Victorian England, he dramatized himself as his country’s ‘first nationalist.’ The target of this nationalism, however, was neither the United Kingdom, which controlled 90 per cent of Siam’s trade, nor France, which had recently made off with easterly segments of the old realm: it was the Chinese whom his father had so recently and blithely imported. The style of his anti-Chinese stance is suggested by the titles of two of his most famous pamphlets: The Jews of the Orient (1914), and Clogs on Our Wheels (1915). — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 382 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

The origin of the second ‘appendix’ was the humiliating recognition that in 1983 I had quoted Renan without the slightest understanding of what he had actually said: I had taken as something easily ironical what was in fact utterly bizarre. The humiliation also forced me to realize that I had offered no intelligible explanation of exactly how, and why, new-emerging nations imagined themselves antique. What appeared in most of the scholarly writings as Machiavellian hocus-pocus, or as bourgeois fantasy, or as disinterred historical truth, struck me now as deeper and more interesting. Supposing ‘antiquity’ were, at a certain historical juncture, the necessary consequence of ‘novelty’? If nationalism was, as I supposed it, the expression of a radically changed form of consciousness, should not awareness of that break, and the necessary forgetting of the older consciousness, create its own narrative? Seen from this perspective, the atavistic fantasizing characteristic of most nationalist thought after the 1820s appears an epiphenomenon; what is really important is the structural alignment of post-1820s nationalist ‘memory’ with the inner premises and conventions of modern biography and autobiography. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 25 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Official nationalism redirected resentment onto imported ethnic minorities — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 382; Nationalism’s invented antiquity structurally aligns with modern autobiography’s inner premises — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 25; Barred pilgrimages, not ethnic pluralism, fractured national community — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 529 (+3 more)

Related

• Official nationalism redirected resentment onto imported ethnic minorities (similarity 0.86)
• Nationalism’s invented antiquity structurally aligns with modern autobiography’s inner premises (similarity 0.85)
• Migration and foreign labor eroded the nation-state’s prestige (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Official nationalism redirected resentment onto imported ethnic minorities #exemplifies (0.78) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 382
• Nationalism’s invented antiquity structurally aligns with modern autobiography’s inner premises #complicates (0.72) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 25