Post-WWI migrations and minority populations corroded the nation-state’s legitimacy

Evidence

The decay of the Continental party system went hand in hand with a decline of the prestige of the nation-state. National homogeneity was severely disturbed by migrations and France, the nation par excellence, became in a matter of years utterly dependent on foreign labor; a restrictive immigration policy, inadequate to new needs, was still truly “national,” but made it all the more obvious that the nation-state was no longer capable of facing the major political issues of the time. Even more serious was the ill-fated effort of the peace treaties of 1919 to introduce national state organizations into Eastern and Southern Europe where the state people frequently had only a relative majority and were outnumbered by the combined “minorities.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 654

Categorization

• XREF: This mechanism — the imagined homogeneity of the nation-state undermined by actual demographic heterogeneity — prefigures later readings on race-thinking, statelessness, and the nation as imagined community (Anderson). — connects to: Claims of national uniqueness are constitutive features of migrant-group status — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 105
• QUESTION: Arendt treats the 1919 treaties’ imposition of national territorialism on heterogeneous populations as a root cause of later instability — worth carrying into how postcolonial state formation repeats the pattern.