Imperialism masked Europe’s internal disintegration through a deceptive outward stability

Evidence

As matters stood, imperialism spirited away all troubles and produced that deceptive feeling of security, so universal in pre-war Europe, which deceived all but the most sensitive minds. Péguy in France and Chesterton in England knew instinctively that they lived in a world of hollow pretense and that its stability was the greatest pretense of all. Until everything began to crumble, the stability of obviously outdated political structures was a fact, and their stubborn unconcerned longevity seemed to give the lie to those who felt the ground tremble under their feet. The solution of the riddle was imperialism. The answer to the fateful question: why did the European comity of nations allow this evil to spread until everything was destroyed, the good as well as the bad, is that all governments knew very well that their countries were secretly disintegrating, that the body politic was being destroyed from within, and that they lived on borrowed time. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 405

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes Arendt’s core thesis claim: unstable pre-war political structures were sustained only by imperial expansion, a mechanism central to the toolkit.
• XREF: Connects to the later ‘The Decline of the Nation-State’ theme and to the imagined-community/mass-exclusion trajectory; also parallels T.S. Eliot’s ‘hollow men’ sensibility of the era. — connects to: Western theory’s self-contained account of Europe conceals its production by imperialism — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1783