Rightlessness
in an Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants,
by Ayten Gündoğlu: Book Note
(Note: I wrote this book review for Human Rights Quarterly: I am posting it
with the permission of the editor, Bert Lockwood; the publication information
is New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)
In The Origins
of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt famously called for the “right to have rights.” Reflecting on her own status as a
stateless refugee from Germany, Arendt broadened her analysis to include the
problem of statelessness as a whole. Ayten Gündoğdu engages with the entirety
of Arendt’s opus, especially with The
Human Condition and On Revolution
as well as with The Origins, to
unpack the various meanings and implications of this call.
Gündoğdu starts with what Arendt called the
“perplexity” of the contradiction between state sovereignty and the universal enjoyment
of human rights. Then and now, rights are protected--or not--by sovereign
states that normally extend their protection only to their citizens, and
perhaps non-citizens legally in their territory. The naked human being,
unmoored from the state-people-territory framework, has no rights.
Gündoğdu extends Arendt’s argument to cover all
migrants, not only stateless people, focusing on their powerlessness and
dehumanization. She grounds her analysis empirically in the dehumanization
experienced by residents of camps for refugees and displaced people. She also
refers to the appalling detention camps now dotting the world’s island
geography, where potential refugee claimants live in endless limbo.
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| Hannah Arendt |
Gündoğdu discusses the ways in which human beings
actually manufacture, claim, and win human rights. She notes that Arendt
criticized the “urge to approach social issues with a moralistic framework
centered on compassion,” positioning those who faced injustice as
“victims…erasing their singularity and denying them equal standing.”(p. 57) Gündoğdu
analyzes the limits of compassion in the treatment of camp-dwellers, people
without political agency who are mere objects to be administered. She is
correct that compassion is not the best basis for solidarity. Camp dwellers
cannot rely on compassion if they are to be treated as equal human beings enjoying
liberty. Compassion and charity leave the human being at the mercy of others,
mostly those of higher status who cannot help but look down upon those who are
their administrative objects.
Nevertheless, the real problem here is not that
residents of refugee camps must rely on the compassion of those who administer
them. Such administrators are probably well aware of the problems of subjecting
residents to charity, but they are limited in what they can do by financial
constraints and the state system. The UNHRC, other agencies of the UN system
such as UNICEF, and non-governmental organizations such as Médecins sans Frontières are dependent upon voluntary financial
contributions from states and compassionate private citizens. These voluntary
contributions rarely, if ever, reach the amount needed merely to ensure that
residents are not riddled by disease or suffering from malnutrition.
Gündoğdu defends Arendt against charges of élitism
made by other philosophers with whose work she engages. Arendt is criticized
for denigrating manual and other kinds of labor, but Gündoğdu argues that she
views both labor and work as crucial to human dignity. According to Gündoğdu,
Arendt defined labor as day-to-day bodily maintenance and maintenance of one’s
home and surroundings. This labor grounds the individual in the material world
and provides her with a sense of routine, permanence, and community with
others. By work, Arendt apparently meant creativity, the ability to make or
build something new and worthwhile. Both labor and work are denied to residents
of camps. Dependent for their every need on the compassion of others, they endure
lives of complete boredom without social roles or responsibilities. This is a
degraded form of “life,” without meaning or substance.
Gündoğdu argues that Arendt did not rely on what philosophers
call foundational principles of human rights. Rather, Arendt used an approach
that Gündoğdu calls “founding.” Rights, she argues along with Arendt, are
founded in political action, including “inaugural speech acts that bring forth
new rights,” such as the French and American revolutionary documents (p. 209). To
show how founding still applies, Gündoğdu describes the political movement of sans-papiers (people without papers) in
France in the 1990s. Deliberately referencing the urban sans-culottes of the 1789 Revolution, this late twentieth-century
movement demanded the same rights as citizens of France, claiming “rights that
they [were] not yet authorized to claim” (p. 189).
Gündoğdu discusses the 18th century foundational
principle for human rights, what Ētienne Balibar calls “equaliberty” (p. 23). This
conjoining of the principles of equality and liberty is not enough, however, to
ensure the rights of twenty-first century migrants. Indeed, it is not enough to
ensure the rights of anyone, including citizens of rights-protective democratic
states. Even if citizens enjoy formal legal and political equality and the
liberty to pursue their own interests, they may not be able to enjoy all their
other human rights, especially their economic and social rights. Enjoyment of
these rights requires a sense of community among all citizens and a state that
engages in distributive and redistributive measures that ensure everyone’s
access to a basic minimum of material security, as well as access to
educational and cultural resources that permit all citizens to be efficacious
members of their own political community.
How to extend this sense of community to strangers
is a difficult question, however. Such extension requires recognition of
“others” as human beings, whatever their differences. But such recognition does not mean that these
others will be welcomed as full citizens into states that are otherwise
democratic and rights-protective. Probably all Gündoğdu’s readers will agree
with her principal concerns, that migrants should have human rights, that they
should not have to rely on charity or compassion, and that they should be
permitted to engage in political action and organization, whether within the
camps to which they are confined or in the countries in which they enjoy no or precarious
residency rights. These principles, however, confront limited material
resources and limited integrational capacities, even in states that welcome
(carefully-controlled numbers of ) refugees and immigrants. And they confront
everywhere racist and nativist reactions against perceived foreigners. Sadly,
the right to belong to humanity does not yet mean the right to citizenship.
While Gündoğdu’s reading of Arendt and other
philosophers is profound and her arguments persuasive, her book ignores some
legal and political realities. From the point of view of actual law and politics,
her conflation of different types of people who no longer live in their
homeland is confusing.
Of the 232 million people that the United Nations
tells us are people living outside the countries of their birth, some are legal
migrants in or naturalized citizens of their new countries: for example, about
twenty per cent of Canada’s 36 million residents are foreign-born, among whom
most are legal residents and a substantial number are citizens. Figures
differentiating naturalized citizens, legal migrants, migrants without legal
status, refugees, refugee claimants, and stateless people would have served
Gündoğdu’s analysis well. There are only about 12 million stateless people, the
paradigmatic group with which her analysis is concerned. While this is 12
million people too many, it is also a far cry from 232 million people. While
many migrants are de facto stateless, as Gündoğlu observes (p.4), many others
continue to enjoy the legal protections of their natal states as well as of the
states to which they move. Not all migrants are seen as “undeserving intruders”
(p. 123): this is particularly so in the current round of globalization in
which many high-status, highly-educated and wealthy people move easily across
borders. Moreover, the book’s title suggests that Gündoğdu confines herself to
migrants, but her analysis of the camps applies as much to those containing technically
non-migrant, internally displaced people as to camps where migrants or refugees
live.
Arendt may have used the philosophical term,
“perplexity” to describe the plight of the naked human being without the
protection of a state, but to a political scientist there is nothing perplexing
about the contradiction between state sovereignty and human rights. The states
that drafted the International Bill of Human Rights were anxious to maintain
their sovereignty: just as anxious, if not more so, are the new states formed
from ex-colonies since the end of the Second World War. Thus, while the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaims everyone’s right to seek
asylum, no one has a right to asylum itself, as Gündoğdu notes: indeed, while
everyone has the right to re-enter her own country, no one has the right to
enter any other country. What commentators such as Gündoğdu call a crisis of
statelessness (p. 35) is not a crisis for actual states, whose governors take
for granted that they have no legal obligations to non-citizens who are not
resident in their territories.
Nor will political scientists find Gündoğdu’s
argument for basing human rights in human action—the “founding” of human
rights—rather than in foundational philosophical principles particularly
enlightening. That human rights are what human beings claim ought to be their
rights is well known. Human rights are bound up in struggle, as Gündoğdu
acknowledges. Rights claims change, as
do the rights that (some) states grant, as new social groups enter the rights
discourse and new aspects of human dignity such as respect for sexual
orientation and gender identity are made.
Despite these criticisms, this is a very interesting
book well worth reading. While it will be of principal interest to political
philosophers, especially those engaged with Arendt’s work, others will also
benefit from Gündoğdu’s discussion of the entirety of Arendt’s thought and how
it applies to migrants and camp-dwellers of all kinds. Gündoğdu is a brilliant
analyst, whose thinking is informed throughout by great empathy and by the very
compassion that she herself criticizes.
