NEWS
& POLITICS
What Nazis Driving People from Homes Taught Philosopher Hannah
Arendt about Refugee Rights
That millions of refugees exist in
legal limbo, sadly, is not a new story.
July 6,
2018, 5:42 AM GMT
Facing
a political revolt over immigration policies from the Christian Social Union
partner in her coalition government, German Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed to a compromise, which would create
“transit zones” or refugee camps along Germany’s southern border.
Under
the agreement, migrants would be housed in designated transit areas, until
German authorities determined their eligibility. If found to have registered in
another EU country, immigrants would be turned back, assuming that country
would accept them.
Merkel
had earlier opposed this step, fearing it would trigger border closures.
Already, Italy and Austria have refused to accept returnees. And these are not
the only ones. In the United States, in Hungary, and in Italy, governments are justifying policies
of expulsion and restrictive immigration. Inflammatory language is often being used
to defend policies aimed against the most vulnerable peoples.
That
millions of refugees exist in legal limbo, sadly, is not a new story. The
twentieth century Jewish political theorist, Hannah Arendt, analyzed refugees’
plight in the period between and after the two world wars. As a scholar of Arendt’s political thought, I
believe her writing is relevant to understanding today’s refugee crisis and
their lack of rights.
Who was
Hannah Arendt?
Born
in Hanover, Germany in 1906, Hannah Arendt studied theology and philosophy
during her university years. The explosion of anti-Semitism in the late 1920s led
Arendt to turn her attention to politics and questions of human rights.
A
few months after the Nazis gained power in 1933, they deprived certain German
citizens, particularly Jews and Communists, of basic rights, subjecting many to
detention in prisons. Becoming stateless, Arendt fled to France, where she
worked for Jewish causes. When France declared war on Germany in September
1939, the French government began ordering refugees to internment camps. In May
1940, Arendt was sent to a concentration camp in Gurs, France, along with
thousands of other Jewish women considered to be “enemy aliens.”
Taking
advantage of imperfect security at the camp, Arendt escaped. Helped by the
American journalist, Varion Fry, who secured asylum for
several thousand people in danger of being turned over to the Nazis, Arendt and
her husband Heinrich Blücher, immigrated to the United States in 1941.
History of
suppressed rights
In
1943 – two years after she arrived in New York – Arendt wrote “We Refugees,” an essay expressing her
outrage at the existential crisis her people faced.
Driven
from one country to another not because of anything they’d done, but simply
because of who they were, she explained how Jews had been forced to seek refuge
wherever they could find it in a world increasingly hostile to their existence.
Seven years later, in her monumental work, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Arendt
pursued the question of refugees’ rights further.
If
human rights were inalienable, she asked, why hadn’t those rights protected
asylum-seekers or precluded Jewish expulsion and extermination throughout
Europe?
To
Arendt, the answer lay in breakdown of the delicate balance between state and
nation resulting in national interest taking priority over law.
Following
World War I, European states redrew their boundaries,
breaking up empires, such as czarist Russia and Austria-Hungary, into single
nation-states populated by a dominant ethnic group, identified as citizen
nationals or “state peoples.” Several minority groups also resided in the same
territory, but lacked the same rights.
In
these new states, minority rights were supposed to be protected through
Minority Treaties guaranteed by the League of Nations, an organization established after World
War I to foster international cooperation and prevent further conflict. Yet,
increasingly in the 1920s, these treaties proved unenforceable, leaving
millions subject to national governments arbitrarily denying minorities their
rights. The treaties, along with the League, collapsed with the outbreak of
World War II.
Minorities
in newly formed states, such as Ukrainians and Jews in Poland and Croatians in Yugoslavia, lacked equal rights.
At the same time, growing numbers of stateless peoples, deported or otherwise
forced from their countries of origin as a result of civil wars or other
conflicts, such as the Armenians in Turkey, were dispersed throughout
Europe and the Middle East in this same period.
Arendt
identified statelessness with the refugee question or the “existence of
ever-growing new people … who live outside the pale of law.” She explained how these new refugees were
persecuted “because of what they unchangeably were – born into the wrong kind
of race or the wrong kind of class or drafted by the wrong kind of government.”
Without
legally enforceable rights they were treated as less than human, forced to live
under what Arendt called conditions of “absolute lawlessness.” Even if they
were fed, clothed and housed by some public or private agency, their lives were
being prolonged by charity, not rights. No law existed that could have forced
the nations of the world to feed or house them.
The right
to have rights
The
postwar presence of growing numbers of stateless refugees, who lacked the legal
right to residence in countries to which they had been sent or sought to enter,
brought into sharper relief a fundamental conflict at the heart of
international law.
States
had long recognized the right of someone persecuted in her home country to seek
asylum in another country. Yet, these same states asserted the right to
sovereign control over nationality, immigration and expulsion.
Arendt
identified this conflict as a paradox at the heart of the long-held belief
that human rights were inalienable. In the absence
of enforceable laws mandating states accept asylum-seekers, refugees remained
at the mercy of the receiving authority, which established its own rules
governing who, if any, would be allowed to stay within its national borders.
Without
legal residence, refugees lack basic rights long considered intrinsic to being
human.
In
reality, Arendt argued, human rights, supposedly independent of citizenship and
nationality, are guaranteed only as the rights of citizens or, most
restrictively, as the right of nationals of a “folk” or ethnic identity.
Thinking
about the stateless led Arendt to identify something more fundamental than the
right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. She called it “the right to have rights,”
or the right to belong fully to a political community, even if it was not one’s
native land. She said,
“[T]he right to have rights,
or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by
humanity itself. It is by no means certain whether this is possible…[because]
the present sphere of international law… still operates in terms of reciprocal
agreements and treaties between sovereign states.”
Arendt’s
resonance today
Indeed,
there are international laws related to refugee
protection. These laws and treaties create “exceptions” to a state’s sovereign
right to control which “noncitizens” can enter and remain within its territory.
In some case, they could grant at least temporary asylum to refugees.
However,
no legal means currently exist that could require sovereign states to comply
with international conventions and rules. Individual states, thus, retain the
power to deny parts of humanity “the right to have rights” simply by asserting
national sovereignty.
This
is evident when far-right political parties in Germany, Austria, Italy and
Hungary, along with the current administration in Washington, call for harsher, draconian border policies to
prevent refugees from seeking asylum.
With
the precarious conditions that are affecting ever-growing populations of minorities and the economically vulnerable refugees across the globe, Arendt’s words
matter more than ever today.
The idea of
humanity, excluding no one, Arendt wrote, “is the only guarantee we have
that one ‘superior race’ after another may not feel obligated to follow the
‘natural law’ of the right of the powerful, and exterminate ‘inferior races
unworthy of survival.’” As she herself witnessed, the first steps are the
abrogation of minority rights and the refusal of asylum to refugees.
Kathleen B. Jones, Professor Emerita of
Women's Studies, San Diego State University
This
article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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