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?
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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:
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.