Statelessness and Refugees

I have always believed that, no matter how abstract our theories may sound or how consistent our arguments may appear, there are incidents and stories behind them which at least for ourselves, contain in a nutshell the full meaning of whatever we have to say. Thought itself – to the extent that it is more than a technical, logical operation which electronic machines may be better equipped to perform than the human brain – arises out of the actuality of incidents, and incidents of living experience must remain its guideposts by which thinking soars, or into the depths to which it descends. (Arendt 2018: 200–1)

This passage reveals a profound characteristic of Arendt as a thinker. She believed that serious thinking should be grounded in one’s lived experience. Arendt’s primary experience from the time that she escaped Germany, fled France, and arrived in New York was as a stateless German–Jewish refugee. If Arendt had not been aided by refugee organizations, she would not have received a visa or the financial aid to travel to the United States. When she arrived in New York, she was modestly assisted by refugee organizations in getting settled. Throughout her life, many of Arendt’s closest friends were also refugees who had fled from the Nazis. Her lived experience as a stateless refugee shaped her earliest thinking in Paris and New York. Arendt tells us that, as a child, she was barely aware of her Jewishness. But during the 1920s she became aware of the viciousness of Nazi antisemitism. In an interview reflecting on this period of her life she writes: “I realized what I then expressed time and time again in the sentence: If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man, or whatever” (Arendt 1994: 11–12).

During the 1930s and 1940s most of her writings dealt with various aspects of the Jewish Question and Zionism. She became a regular columnist for the German-Jewish newspaper Aufbau, published in New York and read primarily by other German–Jewish exiles. She argued fervently for the creation of an international Jewish army to fight Hitler – even before the United States entered into the Second World War. In 1943, just two years after her arrival in New York, she published “We Refugees” in an obscure Jewish journal. She wrote about refugees with insight, wit, irony, and a deep sense of melancholy. She opens her article by declaring: “In the first place, we don’t like to be called ‘refugees.’ We ourselves call each other ‘newcomers’ or ‘immigrants’” (Arendt 2007: 264). At one time a refugee was a person driven to seek refuge because of some act committed or some political opinion held. But this has now changed because most of those who fled never dreamed of holding radical opinions. Arendt declares that we were forced to become refugees not because of anything we did or said, but because the Nazis condemned all of us as members of the Jewish race. “With us the meaning of the term ‘refugee’ had changed. Now ‘refugees’ are those of us who have been so unfortunate as to arrive in a new country without means and have to be helped by refugee committees” (Arendt 2007: 264). Many refugees professed to be optimistic, hoping to build new lives in a new country. Mocking the absurdities of the aspiration to adjust rapidly and assimilate to a new country, Arendt tells the story of the German Jew who, having arrived in France, “founded one of these societies of adjustment in which German Jews asserted to each other that they were already Frenchmen. In his first speech, he said: ‘We have been good Germans in Germany and therefore we shall be good Frenchmen in France.’ The public applauded enthusiastically and nobody laughed; we were happy to have learned how to prove our loyalty” (Arendt 2007: 272). But the sad truth, Arendt claimed, was that we lost our homes, we lost our occupations, and we lost our language. We lost many of our family and friends who had been killed in concentration camps. We were given “friendly advice” to forget and not talk about past horrors. Nobody wants to hear about that. But there was something superficial and false about this professed optimism. Such optimism could easily turn into speechless pessimism – and some of us even turned on the gas and committed suicide.

Arendt knew that she was speaking about unpopular facts. She felt that behind the facade of optimistic cheerfulness there was a constant struggle with despair and a deep confusion about identity. Arendt was always far more independent than many of her fellow refugees, but she wrote:

The less we are free to decide who we are or to live as we like, the more we try to put up a front, to hide the facts, and to play roles. We were expelled from Germany because we were Jews. But having hardly crossed the French borderline, we were changed into boches [French slang for Germans – RJB]. We were even told that we had to accept this designation if we really were against Hitler’s racial theories. During seven years we played the ridiculous role of trying to be Frenchmen – at least, prospective citizens; but at the beginning of the war we were interned as boches all the same. In the meantime, however, most of us had become such loyal Frenchmen that we could not even criticize a French government order; thus we declared it was all right to be interned. We were the first prisionniers volontaires history has ever seen. After the Germans invaded the country, the French government had only to change the name of the firm; having been jailed because we were Germans, we were not freed because we were Jews. (Arendt 2007: 270)

Arendt graphically describes the troubled fate of Jewish refugees who were kicked about from one country to another, but she was concerned with a deeper issue. She wanted to understand the phenomenon of the masses of stateless human beings and refugees that had plagued Europe ever since the First World War. She concludes “We Refugees” with a more general claim about the political consequences of this new mass phenomenon. “Refugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their peoples – if they keep their identity. For the first time Jewish history is not separate but tied up with that of other nations. The comity of European peoples went to pieces when, and because, it allowed its weakest member to be excluded and persecuted” (Arendt 2007: 274).

“We Refugees,” based on Arendt’s personal experiences with her fellow refugees, raises fundamental questions about statelessness and refugees. She addresses these more forthrightly in a remarkable chapter in The Origins, “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man.” Statelessness is “the newest mass phenomenon in contemporary history, and the existence of an ever-growing new people comprised of stateless persons [is] the most symptomatic group in contemporary politics” (Arendt 1976: 277).

Their existence can hardly be blamed on one factor alone, but if we consider the different groups among the stateless it appears that every political event since the end of the first World War inevitably added a new category of those who lived outside the pale of law, while none of the categories, no matter how the original constellation changed, could ever be renormalized. (Arendt 1976: 277, my emphasis)

When Arendt wrote this, she could scarcely have realized how relevant her observations would be in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Almost every significant political event during the past hundred years has resulted in the multiplication of new categories of refugees. Arendt focused primarily on European refugees, but this phenomenon is now global. There appears to be no end in sight to the increase in the numbers and categories of refugees. There is (with very few exceptions) increasing resistance to accepting refugees by sovereign nations. There are millions of persons in refugee camps with little hope that they will be able to return to their homes or find a new home. Arendt was one of the first major political thinkers to warn that the ever increasing categories and numbers of stateless persons and refugees would be the most symptomatic group of contemporary politics.

Arendt traces the beginning of the mass phenomenon of statelessness to the decline of the nation-state. The term “nation-state” is used today in a general manner to identify sovereign nations that govern bounded territories, but Arendt uses the expression in a much more precise manner. The modern nation-state arose in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. She carefully distinguishes “nation” from “state.” “Nation” refers to the dominant group with its culture, language, and shared history living in a bounded territory. “State” refers to the legal status of persons living in a territory – who are considered to be citizens with legal rights. From the time of the origins of the modern nation-state there was a tension between nation and state. Questions were raised about which persons were taken to be “true” members of a nation – which persons living in a territory were to be counted as citizens who deserved legal rights and which persons were to be excluded as...