The stateless problem turned the police into an independent ruling authority

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

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Mechanism of the ‘police state’ connects directly to the biopolitics/necropolitics module — the police as sovereign over populations outside the law.
• QUESTION: The 10 per cent figure for prewar France is worth chasing — where does it come from and how were stateless counted?

Related

• Stateless refugees empowered police to rule independently of law and government (similarity 0.90)