20 July 2003

Hannah Arendt on nation and state

One more book I've been reading recently is Ronald Beiner's Liberalism, Nationalism, Citizenship: Essays on the Problem of Political Community, also a collection of previously published essays. His "Hannah Arendt As a Critic of Nationalism" reminds us of some of the features of Arendt's argument in her classic Origins of Totalitarianism, particularly the middle section on Imperialism. She believes that there is a tension between nation and state, as indicated in the following passage:

The state inherited as its supreme function the protection of all inhabitants in its territory no matter what their nationality [i.e., ethnicity], and was supposed to act as a supreme legal institution. The tragedy of the nation-state was that the people's rising national consciousness interfered with these functions. In the name of the will of the people the state was forced to recognize only "nationals" as citizens, to grant full civil and political rights only to those who belonged to the national community by right of origin and fact of birth. This meant that the state was partly transformed from an instrument of law into an instrument of the nation (p. 110).

Arendt's scepticism towards nationalism of any kind made her a nonzionist champion of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. More than half a century later this may sound like an oxymoron, but in the 1940s this stance would likely have been more comprehensible.

Beiner judges that Arendt's critique of nationalism is too historicist and that she would have done better to mount a normative counter-argument. Yet given her penchant for free political action and her dislike for the application of abstract theorizing to politics, she may not have been able to bring herself to do so.

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