 In this quick video we're going to have a look at what constitutes a nation. One of the most important thinkers in this area is Benedict Anderson who wrote a book called Imagined Communities – Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Benedict Anderson defines the nation as an imagined political community and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. Anderson describes the nation as imagined because, as he writes, the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. Let's think on this for a moment. Think about what comes to mind when the term fellow Australians is used and how do we conceive of being members of a national identity in a way that relates us to our fellow Australians. Think also about the relationship between the nation as an idea and the concept of the border. For instance, a border is only ever imagined, even in Australia where, in a rare instance, the ocean naturally creates a border and yet this division between what is not or is the nation is made real only through words. We have never walked the perimeter of the border and yet we are told that its importance shapes who we are. Anderson suggests that the modern age of nationalism began in Western Europe in the 18th century for a complex variety of reasons, including the rise of print capitalism, meaning that the wide circulation of reading material to the masses in one common dialect rather than exclusively Latin brought dispersed locales together through a new and shared language. An important question to ask at this point is how Anderson describes imagined communities as political, in one sense as he writes, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail, the nation is always conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible for so many millions of people not so much to kill as willingly die for such limited imaginings. Another question to ask is how does an imagined community become so real in the minds of its individual members so as to render such sacrifice unquestionable and even expected? For Anderson, the answer lies somewhere in the construction of nationalism. For example, the state can construct a nationalist sentiment through the idea of the unknown soldier. The unknown soldier represents not so much a person, but an ideal and becomes a site unto which discourses about the nation come together that one can and should sacrifice their life for their nation. This has been just a brief introduction to Benedict Anderson's ideas on imagined communities. Thanks for watching.