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1. In 1943, in a small jewish periodical,
The Menorah Journal, Hannah Arendt
published an article titled "We Refugees." In
this brief but important essay, after sketching
a polemical portrait of Mr. Cohn, the
assimilated Jew who had been 150 percent German,
150 percent Viennese, and 150 percent French but
finally realizes bitterly that "on ne parvient
pas deux fois," Arendt overturns the condition
of refugee and person without a country - in
which she herself was living - in order to
propose this condition as the paradigm of a new
historical consciousness. The refugee who has
lost all rights, yet stops wanting to be
assimilated at any cost to a new national
identity so as to contemplate his condition
lucidly, receives, in exchange for certain
unpopularity, an inestimable advantage: "For him
history is no longer a closed book, and politics
ceases to be the privilege of the Gentiles. He
knows that the banishment of the Jewish people
in Europe was followed immediately by that of
the majority of the European peoples. Refugees
expelled from one country to the next represent
the avant-garde of their people."
It is worth reflecting on the sense of this
analysis, which today, precisely fifty years
later, has not lost any of its currency. Not
only does the problem arise with the same
urgency, both in Europe and elsewhere, but also,
in the context of the inexorable decline of the
nation-state and the general corrosion of
traditional legal-political categories, the
refugee is perhaps the only imaginable figure of
the people in our day. At least until the
process of the dissolution of the nation-state
and its sovereignty has come to an end, the
refugee is the sole category in which it is
possible today to perceive the forms and limits
of a political community to come. Indeed, it may
be that if we want to be equal to the absolutely
novel tasks that face us, we will have to
abandon without misgivings the basic concepts in
which we have represented political subjects up
to now (man and citizen with their rights, but
also the sovereign people, the worker, etc.) and
to reconstruct our political philosophy
beginning with this unique figure.
2. The first appearance of refugees as a mass
phenomenon occurred at the end of World War I,
when the collapse of the Russian,
Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires, and the
new order created by the peace treaties,
profoundly upset the demographic and territorial
structure of Central and Eastern Europe. In just
a short time, a million and a half White
Russians, seven hundred thousand Armenians, five
hundred thousand Bulgarians, a million Greeks,
and hundreds of thousands of Germans,
Hungarians, and Romanians left their countries
and moved elsewhere. To these masses in motion
should be added the explosive situation
determined by the fact that in the new states
created by the peace treaties on the model of
the nation-state (for example, in Yugoslavia and
in Czechoslovakia), some 30 percent of the
populations comprised minorities that had to be
protected through a series of international
treaties (the so-called Minority Treaties),
which very often remained a dead letter. A few
years later, the racial laws in Germany and the
Civil War in Spain disseminated a new and
substantial contingent of refugees throughout
Europe.
We are accustomed to distinguishing between
stateless persons and refugees, but this
distinction, now as then, is not as simple as it
might at first glance appear. From the
beginning, many refugees who technically were
not stateless preferred to become so rather than
to return to their homeland (this is the case of
Polish and Romanian Jews who were in France or
Germany at the end of the war, or today of
victims of political persecution as well as of
those for whom returning to their homeland would
mean the impossibility of survival). On the
other hand, the Russian, Armenian and Hungarian
refugees were promptly denationalized by the new
Soviet or Turkish governments, etc. It is
important to note that starting with the period
of World War I, many European states began to
introduce laws which permitted their own
citizens to be denaturalized and denationalized.
The first was France, in 1915, with regard to
naturalized citizens of "enemy" origins; in 1922
the example was followed by Belgium, which
revoked the naturalization of citizens who had
committed "anti-national" acts during the war;
in 1926 the Fascist regime in Italy passed a
similar law concerning citizens who had shown
themselves to be "unworthy of Italian
citizenship"; in 1933 it was Austria's turn, and
so forth, until in 1935 the Nuremberg Laws
divided German citizens into full citizens and
citizens without political rights. These laws -
and the mass statelessness that resulted - mark
a decisive turning point in the life of the
modern nation-state and its definitive
emancipation from the naive notions of "people"
and "citizen."
This is not the place to review the history
of the various international commissions through
which the states, the League of Nations, and
later, the United Nations stempted to deal with
the problem of refugees - from the Nansen Bureau
for Russian and Armenian refugees (1921), to the
High Commission for Refugees from Germany
(1936), the Intergovernmental Committee for
Refugees (1938), and the International Refugee
Organization of the United Nations (1946), up to
the present High Commission for Refugees (1951)
- whose activity, according to its statute, has
only a "humanitarian and social," not political,
character. The basic point is that every time
refugees no longer represent individual cases
but rather a mass phenomenon (as happened
between the two wars, and has happened again
now), both these organizations and the single
states have proven, despite the solemn
evocations of the inalienable rights of man, to
be absolutely incapable not only of resolving
the problem but also simply of dealing with it
adequately. In this way the entire ques- tion
was transferred into the hands of the police and
of humanitarian organizations.
3. The reasons for this impotence lie not
only in the selfishness and blindness of
bureaucratic machines, but in the basic notions
themselves that regulate the inscription of the
native (that is, of life) in the legal order of
the nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled chapter 5
of her book Imperialism, dedicated to the
problem of refugees, "The Decline of the
Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man."
This formulation - which inextricably links the
fates of the rights of man and the modern
national state, such that the end of the latter
necessarily implies the obsolescence of the
former - should be taken seriously. The paradox
here is that precisely the figure that should
have incarnated the rights of man par
excellence, the refugee, constitutes
instead the radical crisis of this concept. "The
concept of the Rights of man," Arendt writes,
"based on the supposed existence of a human
being as such, collapsed in ruins as soon as
those who professed it found themselves for the
first time before men who had truly lost every
other specific quality and connection except for
the mere fact of being humans." In the
nation-state system, the so-called sacred and
inalienable rights of man prove to be completely
unprotected at the very moment it is no longer
possible to characterize them as rights of the
citizens of a state. This is implicit, if one
thinks about it, in the ambiguity of the very
title of the Declaration of 1789,
Declaration des droits de I'homme et du
citoyen, in which it is unclear whether the
two terms name two realities, or whether instead
they form a hendiadys, in which the second term
is, in reality, already contained in the
first.
That there is no autonomous space within the
political order of the nation-state for
something like the pure man in himself is
evident at least in the fact that, even in the
best of cases, the status of the refugee is
always considered a temporary condition that
should lead either to naturalization or to
repatriation. A permanent status of man in
himself is inconceivable for the law of the
nation-state.
4. It is time to stop looking at the
Declarations of Rights from 1789 to the present
as if they were proclamations of eternal,
metajuridical values that bind legislators to
respect them, and to consider them instead
according to their real function in the modern
state. In fact, the Rights of Man represent
above all the original figure of the inscription
of bare natural life in the legal-political
order of the nation-state. That bare life (the
human creature) which in the ancien
regime belonged to God, and in the
classical world was clearly distinct (as
zoe) from political life (bios),
now takes center stage in the state's concerns
and becomes, so to speak, its terrestrial
foundation. Nation-state means a state that
makes nativity or birth (that is, of the bare
human life) the foundation of its own
sovereignty. This is the (not even very obscure)
sense of the first three articles of the
Declaration of 1789: only because it wrote the
native element into the core of any political
association (arts. 1 and 2) could it firmly tie
(in art. 3) the principle of sovereignty to the
nation (in accordance with its etymon,
natio originally meant simply "birth").
The fiction implicit here is that birth
immediately becomes nation, such that
there can be no distinction between the two
moments. Rights, that is, are attributable to
man only in the degree to which he is
the immediately vanishing presupposition
(indeed, he must never appear simply as man) of
the citizen.
5. If in the system of the nation-state the
refugee represents such a disquieting element,
it is above all because by breaking up the
identity between man and citizen, between
nativity and nationality, the refugee throws
into crisis the original fiction of sovereignty.
Single exceptions to this principle have always
existed, of course; the novelty of our era,
which threatens the very foundations of the
nation-state, is that growing portions of
humanity can no longer be represented within it.
For this reason - that is, inasmuch as the
refugee unhinges the old trinity of
state/nation/territory - this apparently
marginal figure deserves rather to be considered
the central figure of our political history. It
would be well not to forget that the first camps
in Europe were built as places to control
refugees, and that the progression - internment
camps, concentration camps, extermination camps
- represents a perfectly real filiation. One of
the few rules the Nazis faithfully observed in
the course of the "final solution" was that only
after the Jews and gypsies were completely
denationalized (even of that second-class
citizenship that belonged to them after the
Nuremberg laws) could they be sent to the
extermination camps. When the rights of man are
no longer the rights of the citizen, then he is
truly sacred, in the sense that this
term had in archaic Roman law: destined to
die.
6. It is necessary resolutely to separate the
concept of the refugee from that of the "Rights
of man," and to cease considering the right of
asylum (which in any case is being drastically
restricted in the legislation of the European
states) as the conceptual category in which the
phenomenon should be impressed (a glance at the
recent Test sul diritto d'asilo by A.
Heller shows that today this can lead only to
nauseating confusion). The refugee should be
considered for what he is, that is, nothing less
than a border concept that radically calls into
question the principles of the nation-state and,
at the same time, helps clear the field for a
no-longer-delayable renewal of categories. In
the meantime, the phenomenon of so-called
illegal immigration into the countries of the
European Community has assumed (and will
increasingly assume in coming years, with a
foreseen 20 million immigrants from the
countries of central Europe) features and
proportions such as to fully justify this
revolution in perspective. What the
industrialized states are faced with today is a
permanently resident mass of
noncitizens, who neither can be nor want to
be naturalized or repatriated. Often these
noncitizens have a nationality of origin, but
inasmuch as they prefer not to make use of their
state's protection they are, like refugees,
"stateless de facto" For these
noncitizen residents, T. Hammar created the
neologism denizens, which has the merit
of showing that the concept citizen is no longer
adequate to describe the sociopolitical reality
of modern states. On the other hand, citizens of
the advanced industrialized states (both in the
United States and in Europe) manifest, by their
growing desertion of the codified instances of
political participation, an evident tendency to
transform themselves into denizens,
into conformity with the well-known principle
that substantial assimilation in the presence of
formal differences exasperates hatred and
intolerance, xenophobic reactions and defensive
mobilizations will increase.
7. Before the extermination camps are
reopened in Europe (which is already starting to
happen), nation-states must find the courage to
call into question the very principle of the
inscription of nativity and the trinity of
state/nation/territory which is based on it. It
is sufficient here to suggest one possible
direction. As is well known, one of the options
considered for the problem of Jerusalem is that
it become the capital, contemporaneously and
without territorial divisions, of two different
states. The paradoxical condition of reciprocal
extraterritoriality (or, better,
aterritoriality) that this would imply could be
generalized as a model of new international
relations. Instead of two national states
separated by uncertain and threatening
boundaries, one could imagine two political
communities dwelling in the same region and in
exodus one into the other, divided from each
other by a series of reciprocal
extraterritorialities, in which the guiding
concept would no longer be the ius of
the citizen, but rather the refugium of
the individual. In a similar sense, we could
look to Europe not as an impossible "Europe of
nations," whose catastrophic results can already
be perceived in the short term, but as an
aterritorial or extraterritorial space in which
all the residents of the European states
(citizens and noncitizens) would be in a
position of exodus or refuge, and the status of
European would mean the citizen's
being-in-exodus (obviously also immobile). The
European space would thus represent an
unbridgeable gap between birth and nation, in
which the old concept of people (which, as is
well known, is always a minority) could again
find a political sense by decisively opposing
the concept of nation (which until now has
unduly usurped it).
This space would not coincide with any
homogeneous national territory, nor with their
topographical sum, but would act on
these territories, making holes in them and
dividing them topologically like in a
Leiden jar or in a Moebius strip, where exterior
and interior are indeterminate. In this new
space, the European cities, entering into a
relationship of reciprocal extraterritoriality,
would rediscover their ancient vocation as
cities of the world. Today, in a sort of
no-man's-land between Lebanon and Israel, there
are four hundred and twenty-five Palestinians
who were expelled by the state of Israel.
According to Hannah Arendt's suggestion, these
men constitute "the avant-garde of
their people." But this does not necessarily or
only mean that they might form the original
nucleus of a future national state, which would
probably resolve the Palestinian problem just as
inadequately as Israel has resolved the Jewish
question. Rather, the no-man's-land where they
have found refuge has retroacted on the
territory of the state of Israel, making holes
in it and altering it in such a way that the
image of that snow-covered hill has become more
an internal part of that territory than any
other region of Heretz Israel. It is only in a
land where the spaces of states will have been
perforated and topologically deformed, and the
citizen will have learned to acknowledge the
refugee that he himself is, that man's political
survival today is imaginable.
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