Pan-movements defined peoplehood by hostility to, not ownership of, the state

Evidence

Hostility to the state as an institution runs through the theories of all pan-movements. The Slavophiles’ opposition to the state has been rightly described as “entirely different from anything to be found in the system of official nationalism”; the state by its very nature was held to be alien to the people. Slav superiority was felt to lie in the Russian people’s indifference to the state, in their keeping themselves as a corpus separatum from their own government. This is what the Slavophiles meant when they called the Russians a “stateless people” and this made it possible for these “liberals” to reconcile themselves to despotism; it was in accord with the demand of despotism that the people not “interfere with state power,” that is, with the absoluteness of that power. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 601

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the core pan-movement concept of a ‘stateless people’ whose superiority lies in indifference to government.
• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s broader argument in this book about the separation of peoplehood from the state as groundwork for later statelessness analysis.