ABSTRACT
Hannah Arendt (1951, 230–31) describes the conquest and instrumentalization of the state by the nation that occurred in Europe after the Enlightenment and through the nineteenth century. In this process of conquest, citizenship became synonymous with nationality and citizens came to be defined as nationals. Shared origins were emphasized as a basis for membership of a national community with the commonality framed in ethnic, racial, cultural, or religious terms. Arendt argued that the discourse of the time positioned those outside of the boundaries of a national community, namely minorities, with the expectation of divorcing themselves from their origins and assimilating (Arendt 1951, 275). Furthermore, Bauman (2001, 90) describes the nation-building process and the pursuit of the ‘one-state, one-nation’ principle as designed to rid the nation of differences in language or custom that were not yet fully extinct in order to facilitate the pursuit of a homogeneous community and the denial of ethnic minorities.
