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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

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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.

GoldingA2.jpg
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.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:57 PM | | Comments (6)
Comments

Comments

Pls, I just want to have a free manual of philosophy?

Thanks.

Ogunware,
thanks for drawing my attention to the post not uploading properly.

Do you think the turn to image works? Can we take cartoons seriously in political philosophy? Should we?

The nation-state doesnt seem to be going away in a hurry, and it remains the best institution to maintain civil law and order. Though John Robb likes to point out Costa Rica (IIRC) which has overlapping soverignty inside its borders even though the rest of the world treats it as a nation-state.

The refugee is a flaw of nationalism and the constitutional and legislative system that maintain it. The nation-state is predicated on nationalism, rather than a universal liberalism, and domestic politics is always good for a quick reflexive collapse to the government based on a nationalist issue.

Maybe we need to remove the aspects of nationalism that keep incumbents in power. So politics doesnt become dependent on nationalism to remain in government.

Cameron,
Agamben goes in to say that:

... the novelty of our era, which threatens the very foundations of the nation-state, is that growing portions of humanity can no longer be represented within it. For this reason - that is, inasmuch as the refugee unhinges the old trinity of state/nation/territory - this apparently marginal figure deserves rather to be considered the central figure of our political history...When the rights of man are no longer the rights of the citizen, then he is truly sacred, in the sense that this term had in archaic Roman law: destined to die.

So though the nation-state continues to exist, the refugee stands outside its borders or boundaries, so much so that Agamben says:
The refugee should be considered for what he is, that is, nothing less than a border concept that radically calls into question the principles of the nation-state and, at the same time, helps clear the field for a no-longer-delayable renewal of categories.

What the industrialized states are faced with today is a permanently resident mass of noncitizens, who neither can be nor want to be naturalized or repatriated.

Gary, The diasporan is part of the resident mass of non-citizens too. It will only increase with globalisation IMO. The nation-state could change the definition of citizen to something more cosmopolitan, like anyone who is under the juridiction of the government, but central governments reliant on nationalism for reflexive support don't want that.

It is probably legislatively unachievable let alone constitutional achievable.

Cameron,
'though the diasporan is part of the resident mass of non-citizens too', they are not stateless. Refugees are.

As Agamben says

It would be well not to forget that the first camps in Europe were built as places to control refugees, and that the progression - internment camps, concentration camps, extermination camps - represents a perfectly real filiation.

True the disaporia (Germans, Italians, Japanese) did end up in internment camps in liberal democracies during WW2.

Agamben adds that for these noncitizen residents[Diasporia] T. Hammar created the neologism denizens, which has the merit of showing that the concept citizen is no longer adequate to describe the sociopolitical reality of modern states. He goes on to say that nation-states must find the courage to call into question the very principle of the inscription of nativity and the trinity of state/nation/territory which is based on it.