I have been dipping into the writings of Hannah Arendt recently, encouraged to do so by Richard Bernstein’s Why Read Hannah Arendt Now? She is not a writer I’d been attracted to, solely because I found her style uncongenial. But I have found a better acquaintance with her work helpful, as this blog betrays.
I will focus mostly on aspects of Arendt’s analysis of the nation-state and nationalism. Wanting to understand the phenomenon of statelessness, not least because of her own experiences as a German Jewish refugee during WW2 (who ended up in the USA), she first tackles the concept of the nation state. This is a term currently used to refer to sovereign nations that govern bounded territories. Arendt is more precise. The modern nation-state arose in Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century. Arendt distinguishes ‘nation’ from ‘state’. ‘Nation’ in her lexicon refers to the dominant group with its culture, language and shared history living in a bounded territory. ‘State’ on the other hand refers to the ‘legal’ status of persons living in a territory; that is , those who are considered citizens with legal rights. From the late eighteenth century on, Arendt rightly insists, there has existed a tension between nation and state. Which people living in a territory should be counted as citizens and accorded legal rights, and which people should be excluded as non-citizens? A very pertinent question indeed in the UK in the wake of Brexit (see my A Sociology of Shame and Blame: Insiders Versus Outsiders).
In this context Arendt refers to the Minorities Treaties after the conclusion of WW1. These treaties may have been designed to protect minorities living in the newly created nation-states in Central and Eastern Europe, but they stated, quoting Arendt, ‘that only nationals could be citizens, only people of the same national origin could enjoy the full protection of legal institutions, that persons of different nationalities needed some law of exception until or unless they were completely assimilated and divorced from their origin.’ No effective international or state mechanism existed to protect the rights of minorities. The (unintended) consequence of the Minorities Treaties was therefore to create new categories of stateless people: minorities fleeing from persecution in their ‘home’ countries. In effect, in Bernstein’s words, ‘nation and nationalism triumphed over state and the protection of legal rights.’ This ‘danger’ was inherent in the notion of the nation-state from the outset. The salience of Arendt’s analysis for the present is obvious: newly resurgent right-wing (proto-fascist) parties proclaim that only those who ‘truly’ belong to a national culture deserve full legal rights.
Arendt makes reference also to people who are ‘denationalised’, which was the fate of Jews in Germany long before the final solution of extermination. Nor was denationalisation an exclusively Nazi practice. Most European countries set about ridding themselves of ‘undesirables’. Updating this narrative, Bernstein writes:
‘when reading Arendt today on the tensions of nation and state, the ever new addition of masses of refugees, the plight of refugees who can’t find a country to accept them, the mushrooming of refugee and internment camps, there is an eerie sense of contemporary relevance. The categories, causes, and regions where there are refugees today are certainly different. Yet it continues to be true that political events add ever new masses of stateless persons and refugees. Refugees are still the most symptomatic group in contemporary politics.’
All sorts of subterfuges, Bernstein adds, are used to keep out refugees, and the concept of sovereignty is being abused to this end: it is deployed primarily to keep out ‘undesirable’ refugees. The policies of the UK government – check out the ongoing scandal of Yarl’s Wood – are of course a case in point, as I discuss in my book on shame and blame. Expect further amplification post-Brexit.
Arendt also discusses the ‘total domination’ that totalitarian regimes aspire to accomplish. She outlines a three-stage logic of total domination. The first stage is to kill the juridical person in humans. This occurs when people are stripped of their legal rights. This policy was initiated by the Nazis via the Nuremberg lawslong before the ‘final solution’. In the concentration camps nobody had any rights at all. The second stage ‘in preparing living corpses’ is the murder of the moral person. This happens when even martyrdom is impossible. Decisions of conscience become impossible, as when the Nazis asked of a Greek mother which of her three children should be killed. The third stage of total domination hinges on the destruction of sponaneity and individuality: ‘to destroy individuality is to destroy spontaneity, man’s power to begin something new out of his own resources, something that cannot be explained on the basis of reactions to environments and events’ (Arendt). ‘The ultimate aim of totalitarianism is to make human beings as human beings superfluous’ (Bernstein). People become living corpses (as in Levi’s concept of the Musselmann in the Nazi ‘corpse factories’, or death camps).
Bernstein emphasis the last sentence of Arendt’s Origins: ‘totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up wherever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social and economic misery in a manner worthy of man.’
The last segment of Arendt’s work that I want to mention concerns her analysis and response to Zionism. Once again, it is an analysis – and personal stance – of special relevance to contemporary events. Arendt initially worked with Zionists. As the terrors of the Nazi death camps were revealed, so there emerged a growing sympathy for the plight of European Jews. The British, who had been assigned a Mandate over Palestine by the League of Nations, were anxious to give up this Mandate in the face of growing unrest. Zionists saw this as an opportunity to create a Jewish state. Arendt grew alarmed at the way Zionists typically ignored ‘the Arab question’: the majority living in Palestine were Arabs, not Jews. She vigorously opposed the programme that the Zionists adopted, ‘whereby it was proposed that the Jews in Palestine would grant minority rights to the majority population (the Arabs).’ Bernstein again:
Arendt’s sharpest critique of Zionism was provoked by a resolution adopted unanimously at the October 1944 meeting of the American Zionists (and later affirmed by the World Zionist Organisation). The resolution called for the establishment of a ‘free and democratic Jewish commonwealth … (which) shall embrace the whole of Palestine, undivided and undiminished’.
For Arendt this represented a capitulation on the part of moderate Zionists to ‘more extremist revisionists’. Needless to say, her intervention caused uproar (she was dismissed at the time as an antisemite and a ‘bad Jew’).
There is of course a link here with Arendt’s analysis of nation and state. She argued for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, not a Jewish nation-state. Bernstein writes:
A Jewish homeland would be a place where Jewish culture could grow and thrive, a place where Jews would learn to live with Arabs in a joint community, where all citizens would have equal rights. For most Zionists at the time this was not only an absurd utopian proposal; it was act of betrayal. They saw no alternative to the Zionists’ dream of founding a Jewish nation-state. Arendt anticipated that the creation of such a Jewish state would foster militant nationalism among both Jews and Arabs.’
There is plenty in this overly abbreviated blog (it’s the nature of the beast I guess) to encourage us to read Arendt. Those fragments of her work I have referred to here, with the help of Bernstein, are more than enough to reveal her conceptual innovation and her shrewdness and prescience.