I was reading Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities and came across this quote by Tom Nairn.
" “Nationalism" is the pathology of modern developmental history, as inescapable as “neurosis" in the individual, with much the same essential ambiguity attaching to it, a similar built-in capacity for descent into dementia, rooted in the dilemmas of helplessness thrust upon most of the world (the equivalent of infantilism for societies) and largely incurable."
I don't quite understand the analogy and I hope someone here can better explain it for me?
Many thanks!
I think the key to understanding this analogy lies in the fact that Nairn is a marxist / socialist (I'm not sure precisely how he would describe himself but I think this is a fair description) and his writings look at nationalism from this (oppositional) perspective. The next line of the Nairn quote in your question, omitted by Anderson, reads "Socialism over a sufficiently large part of the world may represent the necessary condition for a cure one day."
As you're reading Imagined Communities, you'll have seen that in the introduction Anderson states that one of motivations for writing the book is that "nationalism has proved an uncomfortable anomaly for Marxist theory" (he quotes Nairn again, who says 'The theory of nationalism represents Marxism's great historical failure.'), and that "[t]he aim of this book is to offer some tentative suggestions for a more satisfactory interpretation of the 'anomaly' of nationalism."
My interpretation of what this all means is this: the modernist perspective on nationalism taken by Nairn and Anderson (and other famous writers like Hobsbawm and Gellner) treats nationalism as a political (and social, depending on the writer) movement that arose in the conditions of modernity, and could not have arisen before this point. Marxism and socialism are also movements that are specific to modernity in the same way, and the universalism of marxism / socialism has constantly clashed with the specificity of nationalism throughout this time. From a marxist or international socialist perspective, nationalism is a form of false consciousness propagated by elites to gain the loyalty of the people and prevent them from uniting based on their class interests.
So nationalism can be described as a 'pathology of modernity', in that, as a modern phenomenon not rooted in history, it represents 'modernity gone wrong', whereas from the Marxist perspective, Marxism is 'modernity gone right'. This 'going wrong' can be seen (as described again by Anderson in his introduction) in the fact that there is a tendency for Marxist movements and states to become nationalist over time. Therefore for Nairn, due to certain conditions, modernity, which has the potential to lead to socialism, 'becomes sick' with nationalism.