Nationalism was historically bounded by law and territory, limits the Pan-German racial distinction removed.

Evidence

Nationalism always preserved this initial intimate loyalty to the government and never quite lost its function of preserving a precarious balance between nation and state on one hand, between the nationals of an atomized society on the other. Native citizens of a nation-state frequently looked down upon naturalized citizens, those who had received their rights by law and not by birth, from the state and not from the nation; but they never went so far as to propose the Pan-German distinction between “Staatsfremde,” aliens of the state, and “Volksfremde,” aliens of the nation, which was later incorporated into Nazi legislation. Insofar as the state, even in its perverted form, remained a legal institution, nationalism was controlled by some law, and insofar as it had sprung from the identification of nationals with their territory, it was limited by definite boundaries. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 588

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the Staatsfremde vs. Volksfremde distinction that later became Nazi legal doctrine.
• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s broader theme of how the nation-state’s legal grounding gets eroded — relevant to how exclusionary categories like ‘Volk’ precondition later racial citizenship laws.