The nation-state’s drive to fill all space left no room for supranational groups.
Evidence
This originally praised achievement rebounded on them with a vengeance once dynastic heirlooms turned into truly national, and nationalistic, states: the purpose of the war became the destruction of the enemy, and patriotism replaced loyalty to the king, while the dream of supremacy silenced the craving for peace. In a world fully and exhaustively divided into national domains, there was no space left for internationalism, and each scrap of the no-man’s-land had become a standing invitation to aggression. The world tightly packed with nations and nation-states abhorred the non-national void. Jews were in such a void: they were such a void. They were suspect for the very reason of being able to negotiate where the only permissibile communication was to be conducted through the barrel of the gun. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 159
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reading purpose’s ‘imagined community of the nation’ concept and how national closure produces the proto-Other before explicit racism. — connects to: National communities bore no determined relation to existing political borders — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 191
Related
- Statelessness proved nationality could exist without territory or state institutions (similarity 0.79)
- European nationalism supplied the ideological template for Jewish statehood claims (similarity 0.79)
- Nations are bounded by principle in a way universal religions were not. (similarity 0.79)
- A nationless people undermines the native-foreigner binary nationhood sustains (similarity 0.78)
Broader Connections
- National communities bore no determined relation to existing political borders
#expands(0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 191