360 Resisting Publics
manning the native posts of the Empire, not plotting to destroy it. While
most did return well equipped to become the doctors, lawyers, engineers,
and civil servants of the colony, they also knew how to organize secret
societies, set up printing presses, and write the sort of articles that could
land them in jail. Many of these men would directly challenge the impe-
rial order during and after the future Great War, and several were mentors
to the next generation of colonial leaders.
n examining the role of these young expatriates in sustaining the I
nationalist movements of their native colonies, we can see that the use
of European space, both physically and conceptually, was crucial to the
political development of anti-imperial movements. It was in Europe that
nationalists from across the British Empire met and then collaborated for
the first decades of the twentieth century. These connections were main-
tained even after the individuals involved returned to their homes, either
through personal communication or through the living network of peo-
ple and publications that was woven from the geographical base of the
metropoles. This network played an important part in the growth, intel-
lectually and in numbers, of the nationalist movements.
t was also through this network that an “imagined community” was I
created, one that included multiple nationalisms. Together the expatriates
imagined a world in which “nations” would be the primary unit of politi-
cal organization and empires would be not merely defunct but unaccept-
able.^2 Thus, the Habermasian “public space” provided by the metropoles
was not just one of noncoercive democratic discourse among individu-
als, but an arena in which nationalisms could define themselves horizon-
tally among each other, as opposed to vertically against the colonial Great
Powers, and posit an alternative future. This future, however, required that
the public space be used in ways that undermined the power of the societ-
ies that were physically hosting it.
Habermas abroad
Habermas’s own work concerns the public sphere and civil society that
originally developed in Europe during the eighteenth century as a result
of the rise of bourgeois society. Habermas argues that this class of citizens