June 3, 2006
Hannah Arendt's chapter 5 of her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) is dedicated to the problem of refugees. It is entitled "The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man" and it is to be found in the volume on imperialism. This formulation inextricably links the fates of the rights of man and the modern national state within a declinist narrative.
Matt Golding
Does Arendt's formulation imply that the end of the latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former? Or is it excessive nationalism and imperialism not the notion of nation-states and citizenship, that gives rise the problem of the refugee?
As we have previously seen , Arendt wrote:
"The concept of the Rights of man based on the supposed existence of a human being as such, collapsed in ruins as soon as those who professed it found themselves for the first time before men who had truly lost every other specific quality and connection except for the mere fact of being humans."
Today, as Giorgio Agamben observes in the system of the nation-state the refugee represents a disquieting element: it breaks up the identity between man and citizen and between nativity and nationality.
So the refugee throws into crisis the original fiction of sovereignty. However, I'm not sure what Arendt and Agamben meant by 'the end of the nation state.' That system still seems to be going strong in a globalised world from where I live.
So what did Arendt mean by the ' Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man' ? She explored this in terms of the manner in which the First World War destroyed the facade of a civilized structure to the community of nations. The phenomena of statelessness with its 'institutional solution' of the internment camp foreshadows Arendt's account of the later developments of totalitarianism and the horrors of the concentration camp. From this, Arendt observes that what secures the most basic projection of individuals is not legal or political rights, but rather the fundamental belonging to a political community. Consequently, those outside of political community are essentially stripped of their capacity to be political agents.
What Arendt argued is that the European state system, which was a ciivlized legalorder premised on protecting the rights of all the inhabitants in its territory became a national state through making the Jewish people stateless. Only those who could successfully claim membership in the nation could claim rights. Natural rights were empty: escaping from a concentration camp in Germany and fleeing to Holland meant ending up in a Dutch internment camp.
Thus, during and after World War I, thousands of people, considered either ethnic or political minorities in their countries (such as Jews, communists), became undesirable for the states where they were rooted and were consequently expelled. They were forced to take refuge in other countries. As they became classified as "stateless," "refugees," or "displaced persons," their uncertain political status deprived them of human rights, oth within the territory from which they fled, and within the territory where they subsequently resided. So the loss of home and political status become identical with the expulsion from humanity.
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Pls, I just want to have a free manual of philosophy?
Thanks.