Lecture Overview

1. Introduction to Arendt

2. Historical Background (new nation-states 1918+)

3. Decline of Nation-State: HR Paradox

4. Rights, Citizenship and Law: Totalitarianism exploits

a) nation-state doctrine

b) idealism of human rights

5. The “Right to have Rights”

Introduction to Arendt

• Politics: unique mode of human interaction

• Through politics rise above mere givenness

• Secure Distinction and a Place in the World through speech and action

• Can only occur in relation with others

• Sheer joy of collection action with equals

Introduction

Human rights “became for all concerned—victims, persecutors, and onlookers alike—the evidence of hopeless idealism or fumbling feeble-minded hypocrisy” (268)

Historical Background

• “Nation-State” (People-State-Territory)

• Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” (Feb 1918)– principle of national self-determination– covenant to League of Nations

• Peace Treaties establish new nation-states (“successor” states) in Eastern Europe

Historical Background

• Problem: people don’t live in neat territorial packages– 30 million living outside their nation-states

– Jews, Roma, Armenians: minorities par excellence

• Minority Treaties– Equality before the law, equal civil & pol. rights

– Protection of linguistic, cultural and religious rights

– Minorities could petition League of Nations when breaches of minority obligations

Problems with Minority Treaties

• Tacit acknowledgement that states not responsible for rights of non-nationals

• “Fumbling, feeble-minded hypocrisy”– Applied only to successor states: seen as

arbitrary– Weak enforcement mechanism – “Humane method of assimilation” (p. 271)– Supposed to be a law of exception

Decline of the Nation-State

• Human rights paradox: primacy of the nation as constitutional nation-state disintegrates

• Crux of Problem: Conflation of Rights of Man and National Sovereignty (287-288)

Decline of the Nation-State

• French Decl. of Rights of Man & Citizen– People, not individual, as image of man

– HR guarantee in people’s sovereignty

• People secure Rights of Man through legislation or revolution (290)

• Constitutional government– Based on rule of law: equal protection of the law to all

citizens

Decline of the Nation-State

• Transformation of law: “Right is what is good for the German people”

• Supremacy of the will of the nation over all legal and “abstract” institutions (274)

Decline of the Nation-State

• Statelessness as mass phenomenon– those produced by Peace Treaties of 1919– denationalized “enemies of origin”– displaced persons (internment camps)

• Statelessness as rightlessness– “None is too many” (Abella and Troper)– “shadowy existence” of right of asylum

Jews: minority par excellence– Loss of homes– Loss of legal status– Loss of life

“before [the Germans] set the gas chambers into motion they had carefully tested the ground and found out to their satisfaction that no country would claim these people. The point is that a condition of complete rightlessness was created before the right to live was challenged” (p. 293)

Rights, Citizenship and Law

Totalitarianism exploits:

1) International legal and political supremacy of the nation-state

2) Idealism of human rights as natural or higher law

1) Exploiting Nation-State doctrine

• Denationalized enemies of origin: pre-totalitarian state structure that would rather lose citizens than tolerate difference

• Smuggling expelled people across borders– state commits illegal acts– Increase in police power– Nazis found it “shamefully easy” to rule

conquered European countries with native police forces

•To enjoy human rights, must have status as a legal person

•To have status as a legal person, must have political status of citizenship

1) Exploiting Nation-State Doctrine

•Equal Protection of the law for nationals only

• Stateless: “outlaws by definition”– merits of criminality– genius and distinction– dog with no name

1) Exploiting Nation-State Doctrine cont.

“The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion—formulas which were designed to solve problems within given communities—but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them” (293).

• “ironical, bitter and belated confirmation” of Burke’s argument (295)

• “The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of a human being” (295)

• Natural man is savage; animal qualities

• Distinctive qualities of the political

2) Exploiting Human Rights Idealism

“We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights” (297)

2) Exploiting Human Rights Idealism cont.

“Not the loss of specific rights, then, but the loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever has been the calamity which has befallen ever-increasing numbers of people. Man, it turns out, can lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his human dignity. Only the loss of polity itself expels him from humanity” (295)

The Right to Have Rights“...human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities" (preface to first edn, p. ix).

The Right to have Rights

• “Right to belong to some kind of organized community”

• Right to “to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions

The Right to have Rights

• Equal membership in a political community backed by law

– Moral right on basis of humanity: belonging

– Citizens’ rights on basis of community: legal consociates, reciprocal obligations, mutual identification

Questions1. Why does Arendt not talk about the

UDHR?

2. Given the rise of global civil society and the international codification of human rights, is it still necessary to speak of the right to have rights?

3. How might Arendt’s argument relate to the failures to intervene in Rwanda?