Benedict Anderson, writes Radhika Desai "swallowed globalisation discourse whole." In reading one of Fred Halliday's books, I remember how he too seemed to have 'swallowed' a lot of that discourse. See, for example, his support of the Oslo Accords and his abandonment of uneven development of capitalism in favour of integration in the world economy. Am I accurate here?
The Citation: Radhika Desai on Benedict Anderson
The Parallel Shift: Fred Halliday
1. Support for the Oslo Accords
- The Critique: Left-wing critics (such as Edward Said) viewed the Oslo Accords as a neoliberal, neo-colonial trap that bypassed Palestinian self-determination in favor of integrating the region into Western security and economic spheres.
- Halliday's Stance: Halliday defended the accords because he came to view international legal frameworks, global norms, and institutional integration as more pragmatic vehicles for peace than revolutionary struggle. [6, 7]
2. Abandonment of "Uneven and Combined Development"
- The Shift: In his later works on globalization, Halliday shifted toward a belief in "competitive homogenization". He began arguing that capitalism was no longer just producing uneven fractures; instead, the world economy was successfully integrating and flattening different societies into a singular, interconnected global system. He prioritized the transformative, modernizing capacity of global capital over its tendency to exploit unevenly. [4, 8, 10]
Comparison of the Intellectual Shifts
| Intellectual | Original Marxist Focus | Adoption of "Globalization Discourse" | Concrete Manifestation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Benedict Anderson | The resilience and structural necessity of the nation-state. | Believed global capital and connectivity rendered the nation-state ineffective and outmoded. | Post-1991 writings on "portable nationality" and the decline of the state. |
| Fred Halliday | Uneven and combined development; anti-imperialist revolution. | Believed the world economy was successfully integrating and homogenizing international society. | Support for liberal peace frameworks (Oslo) and global institutional integration. |
Anderson’s new position was only apparently similar to Eric Hobsbawm’s complex historical verdict on post-Soviet nationalism. Hobsbawm had said already in 1990 that nationalism had ‘become historically less important’ (and was probably the interlocutor against whom, a year later, Anderson had insisted on the continuing historical importance of nations and nationalisms). For Hobsbawm it was already clear then that nationalism was ‘no longer . . . a global political programme, as it may be said to have been in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries’ (Hobsbawm, 1990: 191).
‘[N]ation’ and ‘nationalism’ are no longer adequate terms to describe, let alone analyse, the political entities described as such, or even the sentiments once described by these words. It is not impossible that nationalism will decline with the decline of the nation-state, without which being English, Irish or Jewish, or a combination of all these, is only one way in which people describe their identity among the many others which they use for this purpose, as occasion demands. It would be absurd to claim that this day is already near. However, I hope it can at least be envisaged. (Hobsbawm, 1990: 192)
This judgement was merely confirmed by the apparent resurgence of nations and nationalisms produced by the fall of Communism: they were merely ‘The chickens of World War I coming home to roost’, a settling of past accounts, frozen by the rise of Communism and unfrozen by its fall (Hobsbawm, 1996: 259). This was the verdict of a historian of nations and nationalisms who had remained, throughout, sceptical of their claims and uneasy with their particularising thrust. It said merely that nations and nationalism had ceased to actively remake the map of the world, in effect that the generalisation of the nation-state system was substantially complete.
Though it also recognised that nations and nationalisms were declining, they were doing so very gradually. Hobsbawm’s position differed from Anderson’s not only in its consistency with his earlier work, but also in having no truck with voguish ‘globalization’.
—Radhika Desai, The Inadvertence of Benedict Anderson: Engaging Imagined Communities, The Asia-Pacific Journal, March 16, 2009 (update: “[E]conomic inequality within nations, great though it is has long been and though it has become even greater in recent decades, remains small compared to economic inequality between nations (Milanovic 2005, Freeman 200).” Dessi, p. 12. As of 2026 inequality has become less between nations and greater within nations.
Imagined Community[IC] “‘while "failing" on [its] own terms, nonetheless [has] regular effects'” on the scholarly field in which it intervenes, inflecting it to the right, primarily by de-politicising it and making nationalism a part of inconsequential cultural erudition while neoliberalism attempted to roll back the gains of national independence for so much of the Third World. For a whole generation of scholarship in the age of neo-liberalism, IC smoothed the path away from the rich traditions of theorising politics, political economy and history, not to mention culture, in historical materialism by giving false reports of its bankruptcy. And, most ironically, it made the study of nationalism more Eurocentric than ever before while de-legitimizing Third World nationalisms as Western constructs at precisely the historical moment when neo-liberalism needed to be countered by progressive politics along national as well as class lines. At least part of the popularity of IC was the product of neoliberalism and its derivatives, ‘globalisation' and new formulations of ‘empire', all of which opposed national and social attempts to undo the harms of markets and capitalism. As these come crashing down in the world-wide economic crisis which marks the end of the century's first decade, as it becomes clear just how national the responses to the crisis have been despite decades of neoliberal and postmodern and postcolonial anti-state discourses, one hopes that those interested in nationalisms and nation-states will turn to the traditions of scholarship which have better illuminated the dynamics of nationalist and revolutionary change than has IC.” (Desai, p. 19)
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