Rising national consciousness transformed the state from legal instrument into national instrument

Evidence

While consciousness of nationality is a comparatively recent development, the structure of the state was derived from centuries of monarchy and enlightened despotism. Whether in the form of a new republic or of a reformed constitutional monarchy, the state inherited as its supreme function the protection of all inhabitants in its territory no matter what their nationality, and was supposed to act as a supreme legal institution. The tragedy of the nation-state was that the people’s rising national consciousness interfered with these functions. In the name of the will of the people the state was forced to recognize only “nationals” as citizens, to grant full civil and political rights only to those who belonged to the national community by right of origin and fact of birth. This meant that the state was partly transformed from an instrument of the law into an instrument of the nation. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 584

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core mechanism: national consciousness forces the state to privilege ‘nationals’ over law-protected inhabitants — the friction at the heart of the nation-state’s tragedy.
• XREF: Central to the reader’s scaffolding toolkit: citizenship-recognized-by-origin-and-birth is the mechanism that later produces statelessness, a concept on the reader’s list. — connects to: National consciousness deepened through schooling, press, railroads, and war. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 2038
• SEED: The law-versus-nation tension is a lever for essays on how citizenship regimes construct who counts as human — directly transferable to Islamophobia readings on exclusion.