Stateless refugees empowered police to rule independently of law and government

Evidence

The nation-state, incapable of providing a law for those who had lost the protection of a national government, transferred the whole matter to the police. This was the first time the police in Western Europe had received authority to act on its own, to rule directly over people; in one sphere of public life it was no longer an instrument to carry out and enforce the law, but had become a ruling authority independent of government and ministries. Its strength and its emancipation from law and government grew in direct proportion to the influx of refugees. The greater the ratio of stateless and potentially stateless to the population at large—in prewar France it had reached 10 per cent of the total—the greater the danger of a gradual transformation into a police state. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 698

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the mechanism by which the nation-state’s failure to protect the stateless converts police from law-enforcement instrument into independent ruling authority.
• XREF: Directly connects to later Islamophobia readings on states of exception, sovereign power, and administrative discretion over noncitizens; also echoes Foucault’s genealogy of the police state. — connects to: Juridical limitations on the police state were external, not internal, to it — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 175
• ADDENDUM: Offers a mechanism for how bureaucratic/administrative exclusion operates that parallels the tree-infrastructure piece’s account of how infrastructure quietly becomes authority in its own right.
• DEEPTHINKING: The causal chain — nation-state failure converts police into unaccountable sovereign over a defined population — is a foundational mechanism for understanding how modern states administer exclusion.