Parties, Movements, and Classes
HANNAH ARENDT
THE
FffiST
World Vvar, the war to end war, ended with a peace
which ended peace. The Second and Total War, the war to liberate
peoples, has ended with the total abolition of national sovereignty for
all but the Big Three--Qr rather the Big Two-and with a global fear
of a Last War which, according to Hobbes, would "provide for every–
body by Victory or by Death." In the meantime the European gov–
ernments are busy restoring their national states on the ruins of na–
tional sovereignty. And the more the Teal relationships of power make
national sovereignty a mockery, the more they care about its appear–
lmce, called prestige.
This means that the business of restoration had to begin in the
sphere of foreign policy-with the creation of new frontier conflict<>,
with urgent claims for the full recovery of overseas possessions, with
the renewed use of colonial methods in bombing villages out of ex–
istence, and so on. All these actions arc accompanied by a peculiar
change of diplomatic style and manners, or rather by the discarding
of both. What is most noticeable is the refusal to compromise or
negotiate-once the basic requirement of international relationships–
and a corresponding eagerness to yield quickly and unhesitatingly to
the threat of brutal force.
_,
What makes these policies of exalted clairns and equally exalted
obedience even more fantastic is the utterly disintegrated political
structure from which they are seemingly derived. It is true that
chauvinism has ever been the sure sign of decay of the body politic
and that a nation in a state of decomposition provides fertile soil
for the growth of imperi::tlism. But what yesterday was still the attempt
to maintain a badly damaged structure by enlarging its facade, has
become today, when the entire building is in ruins, the insane deter–
mination to replace the ruined building with a castle in the air. It
would seem as if the course embarked upon by the European peoples:
many decades ::.1.go when they adopted imperialist methods and pro–
grams keeps dictating its own laws without any consideration for
reason or common sense or even mere
self-pre~ervation,
for so far
