of imperial Spain. They share a common language and to a substantial degree a common culture (e.g., magical realism as a literary genre is a shared creation of the region, not of an individual country). Why, then, 18 separate republics? Anderson identifies a variety of factors. Spanish policy and sheer scale kept the various subdivisions of its American empire largely isolated from one another, and the monopolization of higher office by those born in Spain meant that the social and political horizon even of local elites did not extend beyond the individual viceroyalty or captain-generalcy. Hence, upon independence, these subdivisions were each transformed into a separate nation-state, each its own imagined community, though founded on the actual community of the local elite. (The USA became a single nation, Anderson suggests, largely because its initial phyical scale was much more compact, resulting in far more intercommunication.)
In Hungary (as in Central Europe generally), the coalescing factor in second-wave nationalism was language. Until the
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