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June 15, 2007

Arendt seeks to underscore the political paradoxes of the nation-state. If the nation-state secures the rights of citizens, then surely it is a necessity; but if the nation-state relies on nationalism and invariably produces massive numbers of stateless people, it clearly needs to be opposed. Statelessness was not a Jewish problem, but a recurrent 20th-century predicament of the nation-state.

If the nation-state is opposed, then what, if anything, serves as its alternative?

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:41 PM | | Comments (1)
Comments

Comments

EU?

The EU is just a super-sized form of federalism. We will probably see those structures more and more - and maybe one where the super-structure guarantees rights. IIRC Britain uses the EU (or UN) human rights as the statutorial basis for its political rights.

Daniel Bell said:

The nation-state is now too small for the big problems of life. And too big for the small problems in life.

So we will probably see bigger stuff, like the EU, and smaller stuff like province/state sovereignty from the nation-state inside the supra-structure. Kind of like the smaller EU nation-states who have outsourced the capital intensive and expensive parts of being a nation-state to the EU - like currency.