The nation-state’s authority rested on the neutrality of its civil servants.

Evidence

Government officials engaged more actively than any other group in the nationalist brand of imperialism and were chiefly responsible for the confusion of imperialism with nationalism. The nation-states had created and depended upon the civil services as a permanent body of officials who served regardless of class interest and governmental changes. Their professional honor and self-respect—especially in England and Germany—derived from their being servants of the nation as a whole. They were the only group with a direct interest in supporting the state’s fundamental claim to independence of classes and factions. That the authority of the nation-state itself depended largely on the economic independence and political neutrality of its civil servants becomes obvious in our time; the decline of nations has invariably started with the corruption of its permanent administration and the general conviction that civil servants are in the pay, not of the state, but of the owning classes. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 419

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Foundations Module’s theme of how modern bureaucratic rationality enables mass exclusion — the civil service as the pivot between state authority and class capture is a mechanism later Islamophobia readings can assume.