Socialist parties fit the nation-state better than antisemitic ones did

Evidence

Even at the end of the last century, and especially since the Franco-Prussian War, more and more people felt that the national organization of Europe was antiquated because it could no longer adequately respond to new economic challenges. This feeling had been a powerful supporting argument for the international organization of socialism and had, in turn, been strengthened by it. The conviction that identical interests existed all over Europe was spreading through the masses. Whereas the international socialist organizations remained passive and uninterested in all foreign policy issues (that is in precisely those questions where their internationalism might have been tested), the antisemites started with problems of foreign policy and even promised solution of domestic problems on a supranational basis. To take ideologies less at their face value and to look more closely at the actual programs of the respective parties is to discover that the socialists, who were more concerned with domestic issues, fitted much better into the nation-state than the antisemites. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 155

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses surface expectation — the ‘internationalist’ socialists were actually more nation-state-compatible than the nominally nationalist antisemites; connects to how ideology and actual program diverge, relevant to later Islamophobia readings on appearances vs mechanisms.