The Colonialism of Human Rights. Colin Samson
groups. Both Germany and the Soviet Union along with numerous other European countries, de-nationalized and disowned population groups. Most notoriously, German Jews lost all rights of nationality overnight under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. This became the groundwork for the murder of 6 million Jews by the German state.
One response to this horror was the migration of European Jews to Palestine, followed by the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 out of the British Mandate colonial administration. But, as Arendt notes, this ‘produced a new category of refugee, Arabs, thereby increasing the number of rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people’.86 As a Jewish state, Israel established differential citizenship rights according to ethnicity and religion, as have other countries up to the present. In 2019, India’s lower chamber passed a bill that would grant residency and citizenship to non-Muslim migrants only.87 The stripping of citizenship was given great force by the Bush administration policy during the Iraq war by asserting that those they captured were ‘unlawful combatants’ who had no rights under the Geneva Convention. In such a scenario, all means of violent and inhumane practices could be, and were, exercised against them because they were rendered stateless, and, hence, rightless. No international enunciation of the human rights of refugees has been able to affect any of these state actions that, in effect, seal the fate of hundreds of thousands of people as being without the right to have rights.
Under the rubric of the Global War on Terror, several Western liberal states, including Britain, the USA, Australia, the Netherlands and Austria, have taken measures to compel citizens to denationalize. Although ‘the force of Arendt’s “right to have rights” aphorism may seem attenuated, at least with respect to liberal democratic states of the twenty first century’, as Macklin points out, this depends on the ‘right to enter and remain in the state’.88 In 2017, 100 British ISIS fighters were rendered stateless by the UK government as the caliphate succumbed to military defeat.89 Added to this number was the tragic case of the pregnant teenage ISIS bride Shamima Begum, who in 2019 attracted media attention because she was found by a BBC journalist in a refugee camp in Syria. Home Secretary Sajid Javid argued that Ms Begum would not be stateless because she was entitled to Bangladeshi nationality through her parents. Denied both British and Bangladeshi rights, she had to remain in Syria, where her infant child died, largely due to physical conditions in the refugee camp shortly after Javid’s pronouncement. Actions such as these amount to an admission of varied British citizenship categories, because citizens with foreign parents can more easily be stripped of their nationality,90 resulting in the rightlessness of the camp.
Other countries have removed citizenship from their nationals under global counter-terrorism and security legislation. While these instances had internal causes, it is not insignificant that such legislation was globalized by the US and British-led war on terrorism. Bahrain, for example, denationalized almost 1,000 people, including some minors, and part of this was done through mass trials of defendants in absentia. Michelle Bachelet, the Director of the UN HRC, criticized Bahrain for violating the right to a nationality under Article 15 of the UDHR.91 India did the same on a much larger scale to residents of Assam, who had to prove that they had lived in India before the Pakistan civil war of 1971 in which many were forced to flee what is now Bangladesh. In 2019, the final National Registrar of Citizens list determined that 1.9 million people were illegal immigrants subject to detention and deportation. As of August 2019, 1,000 people failing appeals at the Foreigners’ Tribunal have been placed in detention centres, and children separated from parents.92
Arendt speculates that the alternative to refugee status or rightlessness would be to condemn such people to the status of colonial peoples.93 This, however, was not unthinkable, and is the subject of Mark Mazower’s Hitler’s Empire, in which the historian argues that part of Hitler’s plan was to reproduce the colonial relationships Britain had created outside Europe. The Nazis saw little difference between the racial superiority the British used to justify colonialism and their own variant. ‘The mighty British Empire’, Mazower concludes, ‘had long set the bar for German imperialists’,94 and the Führer was a great admirer of British colonialism. Once refugees were present within nation-states, there were three main options, according to Arendt. Firstly, these populations could be assimilated by re-education and citizenship classes, all of which were intended to cause the disappearance of non-national cultural uniqueness. This became necessary for the maintaining of the national cultural homogeneity, and was, incidentally, already a major policy for indigenous peoples in settler colonial states such as Canada, Australia and the USA. Secondly, they could be deported or forced to migrate, and many did go to the Americas, Australia, Palestine and South Africa; or, thirdly, they could be liquidated, which was the choice of the European fascist regimes that took power in the 1930s. By the end of World War II, as Timothy Snyder has documented,95 German forces had killed about 10 million civilians in mass extermination actions, over half of them Jews. Another 3 million Soviet soldiers died of starvation in German prisoner-of-war camps. The Soviet government killed 15 million Soviet civilians, many of whom were national minorities such as Ukrainians, Kazakhs and Byelorussians, in the 1930s and 1940s. About half a million Germans and Hungarians starved to death while prisoners of the Soviets.
By comparison, ‘civic stratification’ seems tepid, but Arendt shows how ethnic, national or racial differentiations in human rights can become ratcheted up to genocide. If rights become, as they always have been, the enforceable prerogative of the nation, then the kinds of actions undertaken by Nazi Germany and other European states in the 1930s and 1940s to deprive non-nationals of the same rights as the citizen, even though they may have been born in the territory, are always possible. The Third Reich issued mandates by which Jews who left Germany under pressure from pogroms and racial laws, or were deported from it, had no rights of return. The stateless, being rightless, were, as Arendt argues, at the mercy of the police forces, who took it upon themselves to enforce whatever they chose. In fact, the very being of the stateless person was criminalized. They had no rights to work, but, if they did, they were committing a criminal offence. The irony was that only by committing a criminal act could the stateless person gain rights – as a criminal in the state criminal justice system. The paralysing effects of this are described in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, as German decrees on the Jewish Czech population meant that, among other restrictions of her rights, the protagonist’s mother ‘could go shopping only at certain times; she must not take a taxi, she could sit only in the last carriage of the tram, she could not visit a coffeehouse or cinema, or attend a concert or any other event’.96
If nothing else, Arendt’s ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’ points to the dangers of the nation-state being the guarantor of human rights, and here we realize that the abstract ‘Rights of Man’ was a guarantee to individuals only insofar as they were under the protection of the state. The state, as Arendt contends, under its self-asserted sovereignty, is free to act with no recourse to any concept of natural rights. Indeed, as Schmitt argues, states as political entities construct differentiations between internal friend and enemy.97 This means that human rights do not elevate anyone from the condition of ‘bare life’, since rights can be removed at any time, depending on politically concocted human taxonomies. In Agamben’s reading, this precarity of ‘bare life’ is enabled by the French Declaration of Rights itself, which asserts the rights of man and citizens, leaving open the possibility that universal rights are subsumed under citizenship rights, and the sovereign enters into ‘more intimate symbiosis’ with the jurist, doctor scientist, expert and priest.98 Therefore, the sovereign power over the individual is absolute, creating ‘a new living dead man’,99 signifying a major shift, at least in the European world, from earlier, more diverse sources of authority.
Shortly after World War II, under Article 14 of the UDHR, all persons were given the right to seek asylum, and all peoples ‘are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law’ in Article 7. Subsequent human rights instruments, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Article 26, also granted all persons equality before the law, free from discrimination. These enunciations, however, face the contradiction that, while the state was urged to guarantee these rights, it was also the guarantor