Socialist internationalism lacked a device to become a working political concept among sovereign states

Evidence

The socialists kept implicitly intact the original concept of a “nation among nations,” all of which belong to the family of mankind, but they never found a device by which to transform this idea into a working concept in the world of sovereign states. Their internationalism, consequently, remained a personal Conviction shared by everybody, and their healthy disinterest in national sovereignty turned into a quite unhealthy and unrealistic indifference to foreign politics. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 156

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to later readings on how left parties failed to produce a positive theory of the nation, leaving the field to antisemitic supranationalists — a gap that echoes in Anderson’s imagined-communities framework. — connects to: Socialism lacks an intrinsic art of government and must invent one — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 586; Externalizing socialist practice leaves nationalism as the only conceptual frame available — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 364