Nationalism in multinational empires disrupts internally instead of unifying as in nation-states

Evidence

There are no movements without hatred of the state, and this was virtually unknown to the German Pan-Germans in the relative stability of pre-war Germany. The movements originated in Austria-Hungary, where hatred of the state was an expression of patriotism for the oppressed nationalities and where the parties—with the exception of the Social Demo cratic Party (next to the Christian-Social Party the only one sincerely loyal to Austria)—were formed along national, and not along class lines. This was possible because economic and national interests were almost identical here and because economic and social status depended largely on nationality; nationalism, therefore, which had been a unifying force in the nation-states, here became at once a principle of internal disruption, which resulted in a decisive difference in the structure of the parties as compared with those of nation-states. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 651

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the imagined-community toolkit: nationalism’s function flips depending on state structure, echoing how the colonial state manufactures race-thinking. — connects to: the MOC “The Tongue of Power: When Language Becomes the Battlefield of Empire”