When parties represent private class interests, the state needs nationalism to secure public support.

Evidence

It is consistent with this system that the Continental state philosophy recognized men to be citizens only insofar as they were not party members, i.e., in their individual unorganized relationship to the state (Staatsbürger) or in their patriotic enthusiasm in times of emergency (citoyens) This was the unfortunate result of the transformation of the citoyen of the French Revolution into the bourgeois of the nineteenth century on one hand, and of the antagonism between state and society on the other. … The point is that such nationalistic deformation was almost inevitable in a system that created political parties out of private interests, so that the public good had to depend upon force from above and a vague generous self-sacrifice from below which could be achieved only by arousing nationalistic passions. In England, on the contrary, antagonism between private and national interest never played a decisive role in politics. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 641

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Islamophobia field’s treatment of nationalism and the imagined community (Anderson) that the reader’s fundamentals module covers.