2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(2) limitations to its economic expansion’. 7 At the beginning of ‘Imperialism’, Arendt contrasts the imperialist ‘expansion’ of European nation-states — especially after the 1884 Berlin Conference — to the ‘conquests’ of earlier empires: Conquest as well as empire building had fallen into disrepute for very good reasons. They had been carried out successfully only by governments which, like the Roman Republic, were based primarily on law, so that conquest could be followed by integration of the most heterogeneous peoples by imposing upon them a common law. The nation-state, however, based upon a homogeneous population’s active consent to its government (‘le plebiscite de tous les jours’), lacked such a unifying principle and would, in the case of conquest, have to assimilate rather than to integrate, to enforce consent rather than justice, that is, to degenerate into tyranny.8 The French parenthesis (‘the daily plebiscite’) is a reference to Ernest Renan’s 1882 essay, What is a Nation?. 9 Renan’s main argument in that essay was that a nation is not a ‘natural’ unit defined by language, religion, or race, but an artifice that needs to be continually reconstituted through the consent of the members of the national community, a consent to sharing a ‘rich legacy of memories’, 10 a ‘soul’, 11 a ‘spiritual principle’, 12 or a ‘moral consciousness’, 13 and a consent to sacrifice, if necessary, their lives for that ‘soul’. 14 Renan strongly opposed the substitution of an ‘ethnographic principle … for a national one’, 15 which he considered ‘a very great error, which, if it were to become dominant, would destroy European civilization’. 16 According to Arendt, this is exactly what happened to European nation-states when they expanded beyond the limits of their European territory: the degeneration of a voluntarist, cultural and moral conception of the nation, first into what Renan called an ‘ethnographic’ conception and which might today be called cultural essentialism, and finally into a biological, racial one. 17 Arendt thus follows Renan’s analysis of what a nation is, as well as Renan’s analysis of the pitfalls of a nation. However, Arendt strongly disagrees with Renan’s optimistic belief in the possibility of applying the nation principle universally and consistently. For Renan naively writes: ‘If doubts arise regarding its [a nation’s] frontiers, consult the populations in the areas under dispute’. 18 By contrast, Arendt argues in ‘Imperialism’ that the idea that each national community can have its own state on its own territory was always a fantasy, even if the calamitous consequences of this fantasy only manifest themselves in the twentieth century with the outbreak of World War I, the collapse of the Austro– Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires, and the partition of Europe into new 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (n 1) 125. ibid 125 (citations omitted). Ernest Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’, tr Martin Thom in Homi K Bhabha (ed), Nation and Narration (Routledge 1990) 8. ibid 19. See ibid 18. ibid. ibid 20. ibid. ibid 13. ibid. Arendt briefly discusses Renan’s writings on race. See Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (n 1) 174, 242. Renan (n 9) 20. 198