Divide-and-rule government bred tribal nationalism by teaching that nationhood requires oppressing others

Evidence

The Dual Monarchy, on the contrary, dominated its troublesome nationalities by giving to them just enough freedom to oppress other nationalities, with the result that these became the real mass basis for the ideology of the pan-movements. The secret of the survival of the House of Hapsburg in the nineteenth century lay in careful balance and support of a supranational machinery by the mutual antagonism and exploitation of Czechs by Germans, of Slovaks by Hungarians, of Ruthenians by Poles, and so on. For all of them it became a matter of course that one might achieve nationhood at the expense of the others and that one would gladly be deprived of freedom if the oppression came from one’s own national government. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 599

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: A concrete mechanism of how imperial administration manufactures the very national antagonisms it then leans on — relevant to how modern bureaucracies enable exclusion.

Related

• Supranational empires educated subject nations in tribal nationalism by pitting nationalities against each other (similarity 0.88)
• Excluding one nationality could shatter a multinational empire’s bureaucratic balance. (similarity 0.83)
• The pan-movements arose from peoples denied national emancipation and sovereignty (similarity 0.82)
• Nationalism in multinational empires disrupts internally instead of unifying as in nation-states (similarity 0.80)
• Pan-ideologies materialized in the decaying Dual Monarchy as contempt for government (similarity 0.79)
• Nationalism’s internal contradictions pushed ill-fitted nations toward imperial oppression bridged by racism (similarity 0.79)