Dynasts who adopted national identities became vulnerable to charges of betraying their nations

Evidence

Romanovs discovered they were Great Russians, Hanoverians that they were English, Hohenzollerns that they were Germans – and with rather more difficulty their cousins turned Romanian, Greek, and so forth. On the one hand, these new identifications shored up legitimacies which, in an age of capitalism, scepticism, and science, could less and less safely rest on putative sacrality and sheer antiquity. On the other hand, they posed new dangers. If Kaiser Wilhelm II cast himself as ‘No. 1 German,’ he implicitly conceded that he was one among many of the same kind as himself, that he had a representative function, and therefore could, in principle, be a traitor to his fellow-Germans (something inconceivable in the dynasty’s heyday. Traitor to whom or to what?). — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 346

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘shell of the nation stretched over the empire’ theme is central scaffolding for how states naturalize their own exclusions in later Islamophobia readings. — connects to: Jews and nobility shared pre-national allegiances that the nation-state attacked; National self-identification made rulers subject to popular verdicts of treason — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 346; The nation was born from the decline of dynastic and religious legitimacy. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 40

Related

• Jews and nobility shared pre-national allegiances that the nation-state attacked (similarity 0.89)
• National self-identification made rulers subject to popular verdicts of treason (similarity 0.87)
• The nation was born from the decline of dynastic and religious legitimacy. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• National self-identification made rulers subject to popular verdicts of treason #corroborates (0.95) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 346