The conventional picture of nationalism is that it is an ideology which grew up in Europe in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and became normative there in the course of the 19th century, finding expression on the one hand in the unifications of Germany and Italy, and on the other hand in the internal fissures which grew up within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, leading eventually to its dissolution after the First World War. Subsequently, in this conventional view, nationalism as an idea and ideology was spread to the rest of the world as a consequence of and reaction to European imperialism, leading in turn to the general dismantling of European empires, and the formation of new nations out of their former territories, in the decades after the Second World War.
In his book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson challenges this conventional understanding of both the nature of nationalism and its geographical origin. The sequence by which nationalism spread from Europe (especially central Europe) to the non-European world is left largely untouched in his alternate interpretation, but he demotes European nationalism to a second stage in the spread of nationalism, identifying an initial stage that took place in the Americas.
Just as importantly, Anderson offers an alternate view of the essential nature of the nationalist impulse. In his view, it is incorrect to regard nationalism as an ideology in the sense that, say, Marxism or Liberalism is an ideology. Ideologies like Marxism are conceptually universalistic. There may indeed be differences within a movement, even factions anathematizing one another as heretics. Moreover, in practice these differences may fall along national lines, as in the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, when each side posed as champion of a different version of "true" Marxism-Leninism. In such disputes, however, each side claimed that its own was the true doctrine, universally applicable.
...