Eastern national liberation movements functioned like Western proletarian class struggles

Evidence

Much stronger was the impossibility of arguing away any longer the more than 100 million Europeans who had never reached the stage of national freedom and self-determination to which colonial peoples already aspired and which was being held out to them. It was indeed true that the role of the Western and Central European proletariat, the oppressed history-suffering group whose emancipation was a matter of life and death for the whole European social system, was played in the East by “peoples without a history.” The national liberation movements of the East were revolutionary in much the same way as the workers’ movements in the West; both represented the “unhistorical” strata of Europe’s population and both strove to secure recognition and participation in public affairs. Since the object was to conserve the European status quo, the granting of national self-determination and sovereignty to all European peoples seemed indeed inevitable; the alternative would have been to condemn them ruthlessly to the status of colonial peoples (something the pan-movements had always proposed) and to introduce colonial methods into European affairs. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 674

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt maps ‘peoples without a history’ onto the proletariat as the oppressed stratum seeking recognition — a central concept.
• XREF: Connects to the imagined-community and the construction of the Other readings in the Islamophobia scaffolding. — connects to: Postwar national liberation struggles worldwide rattled the centers of imperialism
• SEED: The parallel between Eastern national liberation and Western class struggle suggests an essay on how ‘unhistorical’ peoples become recognized only through sovereignty.