Summary
The three integral components of imperialism that would find another life in totalitarian movements are racism, bureaucracy and the "pan-" movements. We have already briefly discussed the first two, but Arendt begins this section with discussion of the third. Unlike its siblings, the pan-movements were the offspring of continental imperialism and formed the clear spiritual precursors to Nazism and Bolshevism (Stalinism): Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism.
Continental imperialism, as opposed to overseas imperialism, is distinguished by the belief that expansion must not include geographical distance between the colony and the nation. Furthermore, due to this proximity to the home government, continental imperialism had to be much more explicit and open about its disregard for the law. While bureaucracy in a distinct imperial territory could separate the lawlessness of, for example, India from the common law upheld in Britain, the pan-movements of the continent had to be explicitly hostile to law in general in order to create or support any similar type of bureaucracy.
Here Arendt further fleshes out the concept of bureaucracy. She makes the important distinction between a bureaucracy proper and the deformation or corruption of civil services. The corrupt civil servants may be a parasite on society, but they do not rule it. The bureaucracy rules society through what Arendt calls “pseudomysticism.” Pseudomysticism arises from the efficiency with which bureaucracy operates: in rule through decree, all that matters is the “brutal, naked event” which cannot be explained by reason or politics, but emanates from a power above and not beholden to society. This first stops men from participating in politics, but when expanded through totalitarianism goes so far as to stamp out all individual private spontaneity and freedom.
Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism are unique developments in history because they are not parties, but movements. While parties risked degenerating into bureaucracies, movements actively sought to use bureaucratic regimes as models of organization. They were also more explicitly anti-state, since they had no stake in the party politics that the state mediated. The movements seized upon the mob in order to instill in the masses that they could become an embodiment of the movement ideal by joining the movement. The rise of such movements corresponds to the decline of the continental party system.
The lifespan of the continental party system was actually quite short. The formation of political parties in Europe only occurred in 1848, and almost from the get-go imperialist “parties above parties” found opposition to the system a useful way to garner popular support for aggressive, foreign expansion. The "pan-" movements took this a step further by opposing the nation-state as a whole. The “totalitarian state” is not a one-party dictatorship, nor really a state at all; rather, the totalitarian movement comes to stand above both the state and the people, both of whom are mere means to realizing an ideology.
The crisis of the nation-state that has been the subject of Arendt's analysis thus far came to a head with the outbreak of the first World War, which caused the complete breakdown of the European comity of nations. This was compounded by the civil wars that followed the war’s conclusion, creating millions of refugees who became the first “stateless” peoples. While during the Religious Wars, for example, refugees fleeing from persecution were not nearly as large in number and were accepted by other nations and assimilated more or less successfully into the body politic, the stateless in the interwar period and after were people without law. They could not go back to their homes, and no nation would accept them as legal citizens, so at best they were protected only under a special set of international laws called “Minority Treaties.”
For Arendt, the situation of the stateless is a symptom of the failure of the Rights of Man. These rights were supposed to be inalienable, and yet they were unable to protect those stateless persons who were not citizens of a sovereign state. Therefore Arendt concludes that it is the loss of community, not the loss of rights, which comes first. This is rather peculiar, given how the Rights of Man were originally defined. In the 18th century when they were codified by the American and French revolutions, the "Rights of Man" were described as “inalienable” and coming from nature—”natural rights.” But Arendt argues that, in the 20th century, man has become alienated not only from history but from nature itself. This means that neither nature nor history can serve as the basis for humanity's existence. Because humanity tries to absolutely dominate both nature and the supposedly natural "laws" of its own history, neither nature nor history can serve as an external "guarantee" of the "Rights of Man." Now, it is humanity itself that must guarantee these rights; but, after the events of the two World Wars, Arendt is not sure that this is possible. Because of the deterioration of society and the violence that followed, Arendt thinks that history has proved that humanity cannot enforce the Rights of Man itself. This conclusion confirms the argument of Burke, who claimed that the French Revolution was too radical, and that "Rights of Man" were not possible, but only the Rights of Englishmen, or the Rights of Frenchmen. Humanity itself is too abstract and cannot act as the basis for rights. Since neither nature nor history can serve as the basis for rights, the nation or the community, according to Burke, is the only thing left that can uphold rights.
The further irony of the stateless person is that when he is cast out of his community and loses his rights he becomes, for the first time, a human “in general.” Thus the plight of the stateless becomes more than a mere refugee crisis: if the destruction of states at large were to take place and humanity were to be “generalized” into one international community of the stateless, this might consist of people living in the “conditions of savages,” which is to say that the generalization of humanity under a totalitarian regime might return humanity to a more animal-like state: barbarism.
Analysis
What is particularly striking about this section is Arendt's argument that the “irreparable” decay of the party system is proven by the abject failure of attempts to return to the status quo (266). In fact, attempts to preserve the nation-state and the party system only increased the appeal of totalitarianism to the masses. This failure of all attempts to return to the status quo suggests that totalitarianism was fueled by the need for a change in society. The question following most naturally from this conclusion is, how could the European nations have met the necessity of revolutionary change without taking the obviously horrific and undesirable road offered by movements such as Nazism?
But for Arendt, the process that led to the concentration camps had already started, and indeed had taken on a life of its own. We've already seen how important the new belief in self-sustaining "movement" is to Arendt's argument about the origins of totalitarianism. For example, she calls the bureaucratic decree "the incarnation of power itself" (246). Furthermore, she quotes a Pan-Slavist who says that movements are "[set] in motion at every moment by a single movement," forming a "machine [that] is entirely animated by inherited emotions" (247). In both examples, the accumulation of power through bureaucracy or the motion of the movement is almost completely devoid of human action or will. The motion itself has a movement independent of and above human actors. The same could be said of the expansion of imperialism, which is always described as expansion for the sake of expansion.
This is expounded in her critique of the Rights of Man at the end of this section. Since the Rights of Man have no stable basis but are only enforced by man, Arendt argues that they cannot succeed in forming the basis of modern society. According to Arendt, history has proven Edmund Burke right, since only the basis of the nation was able to enforce the equality of rights of its citizen nationals. This is ironic because Arendt has spent most of the book showing that the nation-state can no longer stand, thus rendering even Burke's “Rights of Englishmen” untenable. It only in the loss of the nation-state that its position as the basis of rights is finally proven.
The key to understanding the autonomy of "movement" is the waning of rule in modern society. In the absence of a ruling class, bourgeois interests and property relations become the basis of society's development. But these interests come into conflict with other interests in society. Interests refer to the specific desires and methods of ruling society that belong to different classes in modern society. Such conflicts would be suppressed if there were a ruling class, since the ruling class would decide the interests of all of society. The politics of modernity are the clashing of these different interests through conflicting political parties. Conflicting interests in society lead to the disintegration of the nation-state and politics that creates imperialism.
This argument, which would come to characterize much of the thought of the 20th century, was a direct argument against Marxism, which was still quite popular even in the nontotalitarian world during Arendt's time. While Marx argued that bourgeois society revealed an opportunity to create freedom for the first time in human history through socialism, Arendt argues in this piece that this process seems to have only led to destruction and suffering. Since the conflicting interests of modern society lead to its disintegration, imperialism and totalitarian ideologies are able to take hold and crush human spontaneity. Since individuals can no longer act spontaneously in a community, they are not free. This process, according to Arendt, is the result of the very basis of modern society and could not have been avoided without overthrowing the basis of modern society and finding an alternative.
Another important aspect of Arendt's analysis of imperialism is how she links racism and totalitarianism. According to Robert Bernasconi in "When the Real Crime Began," many philosophers have refused to recognize the connection between totalitarian ideology and racism more generally. Bernasconi believes that Arendt provides a theoretical framework for those who want to consider the phenomenon of racism at large as part of the process of modern society that she is critiquing.
