Supranational empires educated subject nations in tribal nationalism by pitting nationalities against each other

Evidence

It is true that the system of rule in Austria-Hungary and Czarist Russia served as a veritable education in tribal nationalism, based as it was upon the oppression of nationalities. In Russia this oppression was the exclusive monopoly of the bureaucracy which also oppressed the Russian people with the result that only the Russian intelligentsia became Pan-Slav. The Dual Monarchy, on the contrary, dominated its troublesome nationalities by giving to them just enough freedom to oppress other nationalities, with the result that these became the real mass basis for the ideology of the pan-movements. The secret of the survival of the House of Hapsburg in the nineteenth century lay in careful balance and support of a supranational machinery by the mutual antagonism and exploitation of Czechs by Germans, of Slovaks by Hungarians, of Ruthenians by Poles, and so on. For all of them it became a matter of course that one might achieve nationhood at the expense of the others and that one would gladly be deprived of freedom if the oppression came from one’s own national government. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 599

Categorization

• XREF: Directly builds the toolkit concept Arendt develops across the book: how imperial rule manufactures the very nationalist categories that later explode into totalitarian mass movements; connects to the divide-et-impera mechanism also seen in colonial settings and to later readings on how colonial subjects internalize hierarchy. — connects to: Nationalists borrow others’ sacralized land narratives as strategic templates — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 184; High-capacity states’ homogenization efforts paradoxically breed rival nationalist claims to self-determination — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 1021
• DEFINE: Clarifies ‘the pan-movements’ as ideologies whose mass basis emerged from Habsburg-style nationality oppression rather than from the empires proper.