The Nation is a Town: The Netherlands and the Urban Content of the National ‘Imagined Community’

Abstract

Since it was created, the European Union has increasingly determined the politics of the member states. Yet ‘public opinion’ remains an almost exclusively national phenomenon, and Europeans consider themselves as citizens of a national state instead of the Union. Many Europeans still cannot imagine the Union as anything other than a reproduction of their own country on a larger scale.1 Even though the Union has existed for quite some time now, apparently it is still not easy really to imagine politics outside the scope of a national arena. Using the Dutch example, I will argue that the nineteenth century provides a parallel to this situation. At that time, the modern nation-state was a rather recent invention, and most people still pictured national politics as local politics writ large. Their conception of citizenship was in fact derived from their idea of local citizenship. If the nation was an abstract ‘imagined community’, the content of that image was provided by the very concrete local community.2 People ‘imagined’ the nation based on the concrete experience of the urban community they participated in on a daily basis. It is therefore a pity that classic literature about nationalism does not pay much attention to the local urban context in which much modern nationalism developed. It is a pity not because local identities differed from or were opposed to national identity, but because the image of the nation was filled with elements derived from the local context. Even those who were ‘nationalists’ or had a ‘national consciousness’ at least partly derived their image of the nation from the locality they lived in. And even if their nationalism was ‘modern’ in the sense that the nation belongs to modernity, their image of the nation might be traditional, in the sense that they imagined the nation as if it was a large version of the local town they inhabited.