Anderson's arguments:

•  “[The nation] is imagined because 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 images of their communion .... The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them encompassing perhaps a billion living beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.”

•  “It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely ordered, hierarchical dynastic realm.”

•  “Finally, it is imagined as a community because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.”

•  “Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.”

Therefore the idea of nationhood that has come through us was never there as a cultural or linguistic given. It came about as a result of historically contingent events and the enlightenment and revolution ultimately led to the carving out of the nation.