National self-determination triumph triggered the nation-state’s own disintegration

Evidence

Certainly the danger of this development had been inherent in the structure of the nation-state since the beginning. But insofar as the establishment of nation-states coincided with the establishment of constitutional government, they always had represented and been based upon the rule of law as against the rule of arbitrary administration and despotism. So that when the precarious balance between nation and state, between national interest and legal institutions broke down, the disintegration of this form of government and of organization of peoples came about with terrifying swiftness. Its disintegration, curiously enough, started at precisely the moment when the right to national self-determination was recognized for all of Europe and when its essential conviction, the supremacy of the will of the nation over all legal and “abstract” institutions, was universally accepted. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 680

Categorization

• XREF: The paradox of self-determination causing collapse directly feeds the reader’s toolkit on the imagined community of the nation and its exclusions. — connects to: Independence triggered a major outburst of lawmaking in every state — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 580; High-capacity states’ homogenization efforts paradoxically breed rival nationalist claims to self-determination — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 1021
• QUESTION: Arendt says self-determination was both the state’s triumph and its undoing — worth chasing how that double-move operates in later critiques of nationalism.
• CANDY: A genuinely counterintuitive paradox: granting every nation self-rule destroyed the constitutional state that protected rights.