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Giorgio Agamben Beyond Human Rights

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Giorgio Agamben Beyond Human Rights Giorgio Agamben Beyond Human Rights In 1943, Hannah Arendt published an fifty years has lost none of its relevance. article titled ‘We Refugees’ in a small It is not only the case that the problem English-language Jewish publication, presents itself inside and outside of the Menorab journall. At the end of this Europe with just as much urgency as brief but significant piece of writing, then. It is also the case that, given the after having polemically sketched the by now unstoppable decline of the portrait of Mr. Cohn, the assimilated nation-state and the general corrosion Jew who, after having been 150 percent of traditional political-juridical catego- German, 150 percent Viennese, 150 ries, the refugee is perhaps the only percent French, must bitterly realize in thinkable figure for the people of our the end that ‘on ne parvient pas deux time and the only category in which fois,’ she turns the condition of coun- one may see today – at least until the tryless refugee – a condition she herself process of dissolution of the nation- was living – upside down in order to state and of its sovereignty has achieved present it as the paradigm of a new his- full completion – the forms and limits torical consciousness. The refugees who of a coming political community. It have lost all rights and who, however, is even possible that, if we want to be no longer want to be assimilated at all equal to the absolutely new tasks ahead, costs in a new national identity, but we will have to abandon decidedly, want instead to contemplate lucidly without reservation, the fundamental their condition, receive in exchange for concepts through which we have so far assured unpopularity a priceless advan- represented the subjects of the politi- tage: ‘History is no longer a closed cal (Man, the Citizen and its rights, but book to them and politics is no longer also the sovereign people, the worker, the privilege of Gentiles. They know and so forth) and build our political that the outlawing of the Jewish people philosophy anew starting from the one of Europe has been followed closely and only figure of the refugee. by the outlawing of most European nations. Refugees driven from country The first appearance of refugees as a to country repre- 1. Hannah Arendt, ‘We mass phenomenon took place at the Refugees’, Menorah sent the vanguard Journall, no.1 (1943), 77. end of World War I, when the fall of of their peoples.’1 the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and One ought to reflect on the Ottoman empires, along with the new meaning of this analysis, which after order created by the peace treaties, 90 Open 2008/No. 15/Social Engineering upset profoundly the demographic new Turkish and Soviet governments. It and territorial constitution of Central is important to note how, starting with Eastern Europe. In a short period, 1.5 World War I, many European states million White Russians, seven hundred began to pass laws allowing the denatu- thousand Armenians, five hundred ralization and denationalization of their thousand Bulgarians, a million own citizens: France was first, in 1915, Greeks, and hundreds of thousands of with regard to naturalized citizens of Germans, Hungarians, and Romanians ‘enemy origin’; in 1922, Belgium fol- left their countries. To these moving lowed this example by revoking the masses, one needs to add the explosive naturalization of those citizens who had situation determined by the fact that committed ‘antinational’ acts during about 30 percent of the population in the war; in 1926, the Italian Fascist the new states created by the peace treaa- regime passed an analogous law with ties on the model of the nation-state regard to citizens who had shown them- (Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, for selves ‘undeserving of Italian citizen- example), was constituted by minorities ship’; in 1933, it was Austria’s turn; and that had to be safeguarded by a series so on, until in 1935 the Nuremberg of international treaties – the so-called Laws divided German citizens into citi- Minority Treaties – which very often zens with full rights and citizens without were not enforced. A few years later, the political rights. Such laws – and the racial laws in Germany and the civil war mass statelessness resulting from them in Spain dispersed throughout Europe – mark a decisive turn in the life of the a new and important contingent of modern nation-state as well as its defini- refugees. tive emancipation from naive notions of We are used to distinguishing the citizen and a people. between refugees and stateless people, This is not the place to retrace the but this distinction was not then as history of the various international simple as it may seem at first glance, organizations through which single nor is it even today. From the begin- states, the League of Nations, and later, ning, many refugees, who were not the United Nations have tried to face technically stateless, preferred to the refugee problem, from the Nansen become such rather than return to Bureau for the Russian and Armenian their country. (This was the case with refugees (1921) to the High Com- the Polish and Romanian Jews who mission for Refugees from Germany were in France or Germany at the end (1936) to the Intergovernmental of the war, and today it is the case with Committee for Refugees (1938) to the those who are politically persecuted or UN’s International Refugee Organizaa- for whom returning to their countries tion (1946) to the present Office of would mean putting their own survival the High Commissioner for Refugees at risk.) On the other hand, Russian, (1951), whose activity, according to Armenian, and Hungarian refugees its statute, does not have a political were promptly denationalized by the character but rather only a ‘social and Beyond Human Rights 91 humanitarian’ one. What is essential is being as such, Arendt tells us, proves that each and every time refugees no to be untenable as soon as those who longer represent individual cases but profess it find themselves confronted rather a mass phenomenon (as was the for the first time with people who have case between the two world wars and is really lost every quality and every spe- now once again), these organizations as cific relation except for the pure fact well as the single states – all the solemn of being human.3 In the system of the evocations of the inalienable rights of nation-state, so- 3. Ibid., 290-295. human beings notwithstanding – have called sacred and inalienable human proved to be absolutely incapable not rights are revealed to be without any only of solving the problem but also of protection precisely when it is no facing it in an adequate manner. The longer possible to conceive of them as whole question, therefore, was handed rights of the citizens of a state. This is over to humanitarian organizations and implicit, after all, in the ambiguity of to the police. the very title of the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, in which it The reasons for such impotence lie not is unclear whether the two terms are to only in the selfishness and blindness of name two distinct realities or whether bureaucratic apparatuses, but also in they are to form, instead, a hendiadys the very ambiguity of the fundamental in which the first term is actually always notions regulating the inscription of already contained in the second. the nativee (that is, of life) in the juridi- That there is no autonomous space cal order of the nation-state. Hannah in the political order of the nation-state Arendt titled the chapter of her book for something like the pure human in Imperialismm that concerns the refugee itself is evident at the very least from problem ‘The Decline of the Nation- the fact that, even in the best of cases, State and the End of the Rights of the status of refugee has always been Man’.2 One should try to take seriously considered a temporary condition that this formulation, 2. Hannah Arendt, Imperi- ought to lead either to naturalization or alism, Part II off The Origins which indissolubly of Totalitarianismm (New to repatriation. A stable statute for the links the fate of the York: Harcourt Brace, human in itself is inconceivable in the 1951), 266-298. Rights of Man with law of the nation-state. the fate of the modern nation-state in such a way that the waning of the latter It is time to cease to look at all the dec- necessarily implies the obsolescence of larations of rights from 1789 to the the former. Here the paradox is that present day as proclamations of eternal precisely the figure that should have metajuridical values aimed at binding embodied human rights more than any the legislator to the respect of such other – namely, the refugee – marked values; it is time, rather, to understand instead the radical crisis of the concept. them according to their real function The conception of human rights based in the modern state. Human rights, in on the supposed existence of a human fact, represent first of all the originary 92 Open 2008/No. 15/Social Engineering figure for the inscription of natural sovereignty to crisis. Single exceptions naked life in the political-juridical to such a principle, of course, have order of the nation-state. Naked life always existed. What is new in our time (the human being), which in antiquity is that growing sections of humankind belonged to God and in the classical are no longer representable inside the world was clearly distinct (as zoe) from nation-state – and this novelty threatt- political life (bios), comes to the fore- ens the very foundations of the latter.
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