The Origins of Totalitarianism (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Hannah Arendt

Yet, this purpose could have been equally well served by the Pan-Germans’ furious hatred of the Slav nationalities, a hatred which had been well established long before the movement turned antisemitic and which had been approved by its Jewish members.

What made the antisemitism of the pan-movements so effective that it could survive the general decline of antisemitic propaganda during the deceptive quiet that preceded the outbreak of the first World War was its merger with the tribal nationalism of Eastern Europe. For there existed an inherent affinity between the pan-movements’ theories about peoples and the rootless existence of the Jewish people.

the Jews were the example of a people who without any home at all had been able to keep their identity through the centuries and could therefore be cited as proof that no territory was needed to constitute a nationality.

But what drove the Jews into the center of these racial ideologies more than anything else was the even more obvious fact that the pan-movements’ claim to chosenness could clash seriously only with the Jewish claim. It did not matter that the Jewish concept had nothing in common with the tribal theories about the divine origin of one’s own people.

As their own national pride was independent of all achievements, so their hatred of the Jews had emancipated itself from all specific Jewish deeds and misdeeds.

The hatred of the racists against the Jews sprang from a superstitious apprehension that it actually might be the Jews, and not themselves, whom God had chosen, to whom success was granted by divine providence.

civil services which frequently accompanied the decline of the nation-state – as, notably, in France. There the administration has survived all changes in regime since the Revolution, entrenched itself like a parasite in the body politic, developed its own class interests, and become a useless organism whose only purpose appears to be chicanery and prevention of normal economic and political development.

if the French people have made the very serious mistake of accepting their administration as a necessary evil, they have never committed the fatal error of allowing it to rule the country – even though the consequence has been that nobody rules it.

Pan-Slavism, in contrast to Pan-Germanism, did not have to invent a new ideology to suit the needs of the Slavic soul and its movement, but could interpret – and make a mystery of – Czarism as the anti-Western, anticonstitutional, antistate expression of the movement itself.

colossal herd, obedient to the arbitrary will of one man, ruled neither by law nor interest, but kept together solely by the cohesive force of their numbers and the conviction of their own holiness.

These men began to tell the mob that each of its members could become such a lofty all-important walking embodiment of something ideal if he would only join the movement. Then he no longer had to be loyal or generous or courageous, he would automatically be the very incarnation of Loyalty, Generosity, Courage. Pan-Germanism showed itself somewhat superior in organizational theory, insofar as it shrewdly deprived the individual German of all these wondrous qualities if he did not adhere to the movement (thereby foreshadowing the spiteful contempt which Nazism later expressed for the non-Party members of the German people), whereas Pan-Slavism, absorbed deeply in its limitless speculations about the Slav soul, assumed that every Slav consciously or unconsciously possessed such a soul no matter whether he was properly organized or not. It needed Stalin’s ruthlessness to introduce into Bolshevism the same contempt for the Russian people that the Nazis showed toward the Germans.

It is true that the actual disintegration of the European party system was brought about, not by the pan- but by the totalitarian movements. The pan-movements, however, which found their place somewhere between the small and comparatively harmless imperialist societies and the totalitarian movements, were forerunners of the totalitarians, insofar as they had already discarded the element of snobbery so conspicuous in all imperialist leagues, whether the snobbery of wealth and birth in England or of education in Germany, and therefore could take advantage of the deep popular hatred for those institutions which were supposed to represent the people.fn80 It is not surprising that the appeal of movements in Europe has not been hurt much by the defeat of Nazism and the growing fear of Bolshevism.

Even if the improbable happens and an absolute majority of one party dominates Parliament and results in one-party rule, this can only end either in dictatorship, because the system is not prepared for such government, or in the bad conscience of a still truly democratic leadership which, accustomed to thinking of itself only as part of the whole, will naturally be afraid of using its power.

The Germans tended to consider patriotism an obedient self-oblivion before the authorities and the French an enthusiastic loyalty to the phantom of ‘eternal France.’ In both cases, patriotism meant an abandonment of one’s party and partial interests in favor of the government and the national interest. 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 France, ruled by party alliances, no real government has been possible since the establishment of the Third Republic and its fantastic record of cabinets. Her weakness was the opposite of the German one; she had liquidated the state which was above the parties and above Parliament without reorganizing her party system into a body capable of governing.

Even though the totalitarian movements and their predecessors, the pan-movements, were not ‘parties above parties’ aspiring to seize the state machine but movements aiming at the destruction of the state, the Nazis found it very convenient to pose as such, that is, to pretend to follow faithfully the Italian model of Fascism.

It was partly due to this authentic element of belated national development and partly to the wisdom of the Church, which very sagely recognized that Fascism was neither anti-Christian nor totalitarian in principle and only established a separation of Church and State which already existed in other countries, that the initial anticlerical flavor of Fascist nationalism subsided rather quickly and gave way to a modus vivendi as in Italy, or to a positive alliance, as in Spain and Portugal.

Italian Fascism that has become the only example of a modern mass movement organized within the framework of an existing state, inspired solely by extreme nationalism, and which transformed the people permanently into such Staatsbürger or patriotes as the nation-state had mobilized only in times of emergency and union sacrée.fn99

In contrast to the propaganda for Hindenburg that appealed to those who wanted the status quo at any price – and in 1932 that meant unemployment for almost half the German people – the candidates of the movements had to reckon with those who wanted change at any price (even at the price of destruction of all legal institutions), and these were at least as numerous as the ever-growing millions of unemployed and their families. The Nazis therefore did not wince at the absurdity that ‘a vote for Thälmann is a vote for Hindenburg,’ the Communists did not hesitate to reply that ‘a vote for Hitler is a vote for Hindenburg,’ both threatening their voters with the menace of the status quo in exactly the same way their opponents had threatened their members with the specter of the revolution.

When one considers the extraordinarily rapid decline of the Continental party system, one should bear in mind the very short life span of the whole institution. It existed nowhere before the nineteenth century, and in most European countries the formation of political parties took place only after 1848, so that its reign as an unchallenged institution in national politics lasted hardly four decades.

With the emergence of the minorities in Eastern and Southern Europe and with the stateless people driven into Central and Western Europe, a completely new element of disintegration was introduced into postwar Europe. Denationalization became a powerful weapon of totalitarian politics, and the constitutional inability of European nation-states to guarantee human rights to those who had lost nationally guaranteed rights, made it possible for the persecuting governments to impose their standard of values even upon their opponents.

Those whom the persecutor had singled out as scum of the earth – Jews, Trotskyites, etc. – actually were received as scum of the earth everywhere; those whom persecution had called undesirable became the indésirables of Europe.

The point, of course, is that the European status quo could not be preserved and that it became clear only after the downfall of the last remnants of European autocracy that Europe had been ruled by a system which had never taken into account or responded to the needs of at least 25 percent of her population. This evil, however, was not cured with the establishment of the succession states, because about 30 per cent of their roughly 100 million inhabitants were officially recognized as exceptions who had to be specially protected by minority treaties.

The worst factor in this situation was not even that it became a matter of course for the nationalities to be disloyal to their imposed government and for the governments to oppress their nationalities as efficiently as possible, but that the nationally frustrated population was firmly convinced – as was everybody else – that true freedom, true emancipation, and true popular sovereignty could be attained only with full national emancipation, that people without their own national government were deprived of human rights.

it now developed that the Treaties had been conceived merely as a painless and humane method of assimilation, an interpretation which naturally enraged the minorities.fn10

The embittered nationalities, completely disregarding the League of Nations, soon decided to take matters into their own hands. They banded together in a minority congress which was remarkable in more than one respect. It contradicted the very idea behind the League treaties by calling itself officially the ‘Congress of Organized National Groups in European States,’ thereby nullifying the great labor spent during the peace negotiations to avoid the ominous word

The real significance of the Minority Treaties lies not in their practical application but in the fact that they were guaranteed by an international body, the League of Nations. Minorities had existed before,fn16 but the minority as a permanent institution, the recognition that millions of people lived outside normal legal protection and needed an additional guarantee of their elementary rights from an outside body, and the assumption that this state of affairs was not temporary but that the Treaties were needed in order to establish a lasting modus vivendi – all this was something new, certainly on such a scale, in European history.

more often than one would imagine, people took refuge in statelessness after the first World War in order to remain where they were and avoid being deported to a ‘homeland’ where they would be strangers (as in the case of many Polish and Rumanian Jews in France and Germany, mercifully helped by the antisemitic attitude of their respective consulates).

No paradox of contemporary politics is filled with a more poignant irony than the discrepancy between the efforts of well-meaning idealists who stubbornly insist on regarding as ‘inalienable’ those human rights, which are enjoyed only by citizens of the most prosperous and civilized countries, and the situation of the rightless themselves.

Even the terminology applied to the stateless has deteriorated. The term ‘stateless’ at least acknowledged the fact that these persons had lost the protection of their government and required international agreements for safeguarding their legal status. The postwar term ‘displaced persons’ was invented during the war for the express purpose of liquidating statelessness once and for all by ignoring its existence.

Nonrecognition of statelessness always means repatriation, i.e., deportation to a country of origin, which either refuses to recognize the prospective repatriate as a citizen, or, on the contrary, urgently wants him back for punishment.

The second great shock that the European world suffered through the arrival of the refugeesfn29 was the realization that it was impossible to get rid of them or transform them into nationals of the country of refuge. From the beginning everybody had agreed that there were only two ways to solve the problem: repatriation or naturalization.

Among the minorities the Jews and the Armenians ran the greatest risks and soon showed the highest proportion of statelessness; but they proved also that minority treaties did not necessarily offer protection but could also serve as an instrument to single out certain groups for eventual expulsion.

This was the lesson of the Spanish Civil War and one of the reasons why the governments were so frightened by the International Brigade.

What the European governments were so afraid of in this process was that the new stateless people could no longer be said to be of dubious or doubtful nationality (de nationalité indéterminée). Even though they had renounced their citizenship, no longer had any connection with or loyalty to their country of origin, and did not identify their nationality with a visible, fully recognized government, they retained a strong attachment to their nationality.

Repatriation measures naturally failed when there was no country to which these people could be deported. They failed not because of consideration for the stateless person (as it may appear today when Soviet Russia claims its former citizens and the democratic countries must protect them from a repatriation they do not want); and not because of humanitarian sentiments on the part of the countries that were swamped with refugees; but because neither the country of origin nor any other agreed to accept the stateless person.

the man without a state was ‘an anomaly for whom there is no appropriate niche in the framework of the general law’fn35 – an outlaw by definition – he was completely at the mercy of the police, which itself did not worry too much about committing a few illegal acts in order to diminish the country’s burden of indésirables.fn36 In other words, the state, insisting on its sovereign right of expulsion, was forced by the illegal nature of statelessness into admittedly illegal acts.fn37 It smuggled its expelled stateless into the neighboring countries, with the result that the latter retaliated in kind.

The consequences of this smuggling were petty wars between the police at the frontiers, which did not exactly contribute to good international relations, and an accumulation of jail sentences for the stateless who, with the help of the police of one country, had passed ‘illegally’ into the territory of another.

The second World War and the DP camps were not necessary to show that the only practical substitute for a nonexistent homeland was an internment camp. Indeed, as early as the thirties this was the only ‘country’ the world had to offer the stateless.

Essentially naturalization was an appendage to the nation-state’s legislation that reckoned only with ‘nationals,’ people born in its territory and citizens by birth. Naturalization was needed in exceptional cases, for single individuals whom circumstances might have driven into a foreign territory.

Instead of naturalizing at least a small portion of the new arrivals, the countries began to cancel earlier naturalizations, partly because of general panic and partly because the arrival of great masses of newcomers actually changed the always precarious position of naturalized citizens of the same origin.

denaturalizationfn41 shattered what little confidence the refugees might have retained in the possibility of adjusting themselves to a new normal life; if assimilation to the new country once looked a little shabby or disloyal, it was now simply ridiculous.

Explosive events were no longer necessary. Once a number of stateless people were admitted to an otherwise normal country, statelessness spread like a contagious disease. Not only were naturalized citizens in danger of reverting to the status of statelessness, but living conditions for all aliens markedly deteriorated.

The stateless person, without right to residence and without the right to work, had of course constantly to transgress the law. He was liable to jail sentences without ever committing a crime. More than that, the entire hierarchy of values which pertain in civilized countries was reversed in his case. Since he was the anomaly for whom the general law did not provide, it was better for him to become an anomaly for which it did provide, that of the criminal.

The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale of the law is to ask if he would benefit by committing a crime. If a small burglary is likely to improve his legal position, at least temporarily, one may be sure he has been deprived of human rights. For then a criminal offense becomes the best opportunity to regain some kind of human equality, even if it be as a recognized exception to the norm.

Only as an offender against the law can he gain protection from it. As long as his trial and his sentence last, he will be safe from that arbitrary police rule against which there are no lawyers and no appeals.

He is no longer the scum of the earth but important enough to be informed of all the details of the law under which he will be tried. He has become a respectable person.

and it is true that the chances of the famous refugee are improved just as a dog with a name has a better chance to survive than a stray dog who is just a dog in general.

if the Nazis put a person in a concentration camp and if he made a successful escape, say, to Holland, the Dutch would put him in an internment camp.

police in a number of Western countries, under the pretext of ‘national security,’ had on their own initiative established close connections with the Gestapo and the GPU, so that one might say there existed an independent foreign policy of the police.