You will never meet most of the people you call your countrymen. You could not — there are too many of them and you have one lifetime. Yet you read about them, are counted alongside them, learn a shared past in school, and, at the sharp end, may be asked to die for them. In 1983 Benedict Anderson proposed that a nation is an imagined political community: not imagined in the sense of fake, but imagined in the sense of held in the mind, because at that scale it cannot be held any other way. Open the gap first, then switch on the devices that fill it, then load five real cases.
A hamlet of forty
Known face to face — people you could actually meet100%
Imagined as fellow nationals — devices doing the work0%
The gapdrag the slider to open it
a hamleta nation
Imagined is not the same as made up. Anderson’s point was that every community larger than a face-to-face village is imagined, so nations are not to be sorted into true ones and false ones — only into the different styles in which they are imagined. Eric Hobsbawm made the same move about invented tradition: invented does not mean insincere. And Anthony D. Smith pressed from the other side, arguing that nation-builders cannot work from nothing. They draw on pre-existing ethnies — populations with real myths of common descent, shared memories and symbols — which is why some invented traditions take root and others never catch on.