Pan-movement ideology made nationality a permanent, God-given quality detached from history.

Evidence

The pan-movements preached the divine origin of their own people as against the Jewish-Christian faith in the divine origin of Man. According to them, man, belonging inevitably to some people, received his divine origin only indirectly through membership in a people. The individual, therefore, has his divine value only as long as he belongs to the people singled out for divine origin. He forfeits this whenever he decides to change his nationality, in which case he severs all bonds through which he was endowed with divine origin and falls, as it were, into metaphysical homelessness. The political advantage of this concept was twofold. It made nationality a permanent quality which no longer could be touched by history, no matter what happened to a given people—emigration, conquest, dispersion. Of even more immediate impact, however, was that in the absolute contrast between the divine origin of one’s own people and all other nondivine peoples all differences between the individual members of the people disappeared, whether social or economic or psychological. Divine origin changed the people into a uniform “chosen” mass of arrogant robots. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 593

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the mechanism of pan-movement ideology: divine origin as a way of rendering nationality permanent and homogenizing the people into a uniform mass — a key conceptual tool for understanding racialized national identity construction.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s scaffolding toolkit on construction of the ‘Other’ and racialized selfhood — this is the theoretical mechanism by which a people becomes a ‘chosen’ homogeneous mass with individuals effaced.