'The nation has conquered the state": arendtian insights on the internal contradictions of the nation-state/ Peter J. Verovsek

The globalisation of political power into structures ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ the nation-state has increasingly
been called into question as part of a ‘sovereigntist turn’ in contemporary politics. While such demands for
local control by bounded peoples may be democratic, empirically they often also take a nationalist form.
Building on Hannah Arendt’s analysis of how ‘the nation conquered the state’, this article argues that the slippage from
democratic to national sovereigntism is rooted in fundamental conceptual instabilities within the concept
of the nation-state. Whereas the first term in this hyphenated construct favours certain individuals based on
their ethnic background, the latter is a universal concept that demands the equal treatment of all. The basic
thesis is that these internal contradictions help to explain the nationalist tendency in calls to return political
power to the nation-state. It illustrates these points by drawing on examples from the ‘illiberal democracies’
of Central-Eastern Europe, focusing on Poland and Hungary.

SOVEREIGNTY, POLITICAL POWER, NEWARTICLS