Refugees entering Europe
Chapter nine of Hannah Arendt’s 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, is the last chapter in part two of the book, Imperialism. Here, Arendt describes the breakdown of the European Nation-State and the rise of the Nation in the period between the two World Wars. The Nation-State had been the guarantor of basic human rights for stateless people, refugees and small numbers of asylum seekers. After the demise of the Nation-State, only the right to asylum survived to some extent and even that was under attack by the Nation. Asylum was never established to protect large numbers of people. Masses of people who were being persecuted in their own countries and tried to flee to another country were simply designated as “stateless”. Stateless status left those people outside all legal structures that could serve to guarantee basic rights, including the right to be alive. No nation wanted stateless people, so unlike all prior history there was no place anywhere for masses of displaced people to go to resettle.
Later, the Nazis under Hitler used this situation to strip all citizenship status from hated populations such as German Jews, converting them into stateless people. Since such people had no human rights whatever, there was no law to prevent putting stateless people in interment camps and then murdering all of them. The breakdown of the Nation-State into the Nation helped pave the way for Hitler and the unspeakable savagery he unleashed.
Arendt writes:
Civil wars which ushered in and spread over the twenty years of uneasy peace were not only bloodier and more cruel than all their predecessors; they were followed by migrations of groups who, unlike their happier predecessors in the religious wars, were welcomed nowhere and could be assimilated nowhere. Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless, once they left their state they became stateless, the scum of the Earth. . . . . Every event had the finality of a last judgment, a judgment that was passed neither by God nor the devil, but looked rather like the expression of some irredeemably stupid fatality. . . . . Hatred, certainly not lacking in the pre-war world began to play a central role in public affairs everywhere . . . . . This atmosphere of disintegration, though characteristic of the whole of Europe between the two wars, was more visible in the defeated than the victorious countries, and it developed fully in the states newly established after the liquidation of the Dual Monarchy and the Czarist Empire. . . . . The very phrase “human rights” became for all concerned – victims, prosecutors, and onlookers alike – the evidence of hopeless idealism or fumbling feeble-minded hypocrisy.
The fall of the Nation-State: Arendt asserts that the Peace Treaties in the wake of WWI failed because the framers of the peace did not understand that conditions for the Nation-State, a homogenous population and firm rootedness to the soil. Those were the social conditions necessary for a Nation-State. One contemporary observer, Kurt Tramples, commented that it was preposterous to think that the Peace Treaties could lead to the rise of a Nation-State: “One glance at the demographic map of Europe should be sufficient to show that the nation-state principle cannot be introduced into Eastern Europe.” It was obvious even then that various ethnic groups would never see one another as equals and when lumped into a single state, they would work to undermine each other. The Treaties were nothing more than an idealistic illusion that arbitrarily “handed out rule to some and servitude to others.”
The political upshot was rather simple: In the transition from Nation-State to Nation, public and government sympathies moved from virtuous rule with equality of all people, including minorities, to protection of the nation, with its despotic and arbitrary form of governance. The new governments in Eastern Europe were opposed in principle by minorities comprising about 25-50% of their populations. On seeing this play out, defenders of the Treaties changed their rationale. Now, the Treaties “had been conceived merely as a painless and humane method of assimilation, an interpretation which naturally enraged the minorities.” Arendt argues this was cynical: “The representatives of the great nations knew only too well that minorities within nation-states must sooner or later be either assimilated or liquidated.” The problem was that assimilation was not effective and it was clear to everyone.
Consciously or not, the Peace Treaties made it plain that only nationals could be full-blown citizens with the full protection of legal institutions and the rule of law. Stripping minorities of their nationality status to render them stateless scum was a preferred tactic. Maybe today that would be called racial or ethnic cleansing. In the rise of stateless masses, Arendt saw that “the transformation of the state from an instrument of the law into an instrument of the nation had been completed; the nation had conquered the state, the national interest had priority over law long before Hitler could pronounce ‘right is what is good for the German people.’”
Fleeing to Slovenia
The fall of the Rights of Man: The Peace Treaties after WWI were argued to have been founded on the Rights of Man, which suffered from problems that no one knew how to define or how to defend whatever those rights are conceived to be. Arendt writes of the consequences:
The Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable . . . . The first loss which the rightless suffered was the loss of their homes, and this meant the loss of the entire social texture into which they were born . . . . . What is unprecedented is not the loss of a home but the impossibility of finding a new one. . . . . The second loss . . . . . was the loss of government protection, and this did not imply just the loss of legal status in their own, but in all countries. . . . . One of the surprising aspects of our experience with stateless people who benefit legally from committing a crime has been the fact that it seems to be easier to deprive a completely innocent person of legality than someone who has committed an offense.
In other words, a stateless person had more legal protection as a convicted criminal than as an innocent. For example, if an applicable law prohibited arbitrary beating of prisoners by the police or guards, that constituted more protection than what statelessness provided. Once a stateless person became a convicted criminal, they had their rights as a criminal. This helps put in context what statelessness actually meant for millions of people in this bizarre status of legal non-existence.
Arendt touches on attempts to define the Rights of Man. In America it boiled down to the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the meaning of which is still contested today and always will be. In France they were conceived to be equality before the law, liberty, protection of property, and national sovereignty. That is also ambiguous, or in the case of an absolute right to property, unworkable in modern civilization.
The Rights of Man was conceived as inalienable human rights flowing from natural law or nature and not from any God, government or tyrant. Some observers, e.g., Edmund Burke (1729-1797), saw danger in that conception of rights and man, and argued against it. Arendt writes:
. . . . stateless people could see without Burke’s arguments that the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human was their greatest danger. Because of it they were regarded as savages, and afraid they might end by being considered beasts, they insisted on their nationality as their only remaining and recognized tie with humanity. Their distrust of natural [Rights of Man], their preference for national, rights comes precisely from their realization that natural rights are granted even to savages. Burke had already feared that natural “inalienable” rights would confirm only the ‘right of the naked savage,’ and therefore reduce civilized nations to the status of savagery. . . . . It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man. This is one of the reasons why it is far more difficult to destroy the legal personality of a criminal . . . . . than of a man who has been disallowed all common human responsibilities.
The human condition: Arendt points to the ancient origins of this line of thinking and her conclusions as to its modern meaning:
Since the Greeks, we have known that highly political life breeds a deep-rooted suspicion of this private sphere, a deep resentment against the disturbing miracle contained in the fact that each of us is made as he is – single, unique, unchangeable. This whole sphere of the merely given, relegated to private life in civilized society, is a permanent threat to the public sphere, because the public sphere is consistently based on the law of equality as the private sphere is based on the law of universal difference and differentiation. . . . . 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.
. . . . . The reason why highly developed communities, such as ancient city-states or modern nation-states, so often insist on ethnic homogeneity is that they hope to eliminate as far as possible those always present differences and differentiations which by themselves arouse dumb hatred, mistrust and discrimination because they indicate all too clearly those spheres where men cannot act and change at will, i.e., the limitations of human artifice. (emphasis added)
Arendt ends chapter nine with this warning:
Deadly danger to any civilization is no longer likely to come from without. Nature has been mastered and no barbarians threaten to destroy what they cannot understand, as the Mongolians threatened Europe for centuries. Even the emergence of totalitarian governments is a phenomenon from within, not outside our civilization. The danger is that a global interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages.
Here, Arendt can be forgiven for ignoring asteroid collisions, supervolcano eruptions and the causes of mass extinctions as sources of a slide from civilization to savagery. A question Arendt raises asks if America today has a barbarian leader that arose from our own midst. One can plausibly argue that point. One can also look at nations like China, North Korea and Russia and ask if barbarians aren’t already in control there.
B&B orig: 1/21/19
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