Beyond the Nation State: Rereading Hannah Arendt’s “We Refugees” Eighty Years Later

Abstract

Hannah Arendt’s seminal yet overlooked essay “We Refugees” was written and published in Menorah Journal in 1943 while she was still a stateless refugee. In this essay, Arendt vividly describes the impossible situation that the stateless Jewish refugees faced before and during Second World War. However, Arendt does not reduce it to a series of individual tragedies, but instead develops a highly original analysis of refugees as a systematic political phenomenon that exposes the limitations of the nation-state system and simultaneously points beyond it. This analysis remains more relevant than ever today, eighty years after its initial publication.

Keywords:

• Hannah Arendt
• We Refugees
• migration
• refugees
• nation state
• Bernard Lazare
• Giorgio Agamben
• statelessness
• human rights
• the right to have rights

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Sanja Golubovic, Christoffer Basse Eriksen, Anna Meera Gaonkar, Yancé Myah Harrison, Martin Lemberg-Pedersen, Marie Groth Bastiansen, Mikkel Thorup, Juliane Wammen, and the two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on previous versions of this article, which was originally composed as a reflection on my translation of “We Refugees” into Danish in 2016. The author would also like to thank the History Department at UC Berkeley (especially Martin Jay) for hosting him as a visiting scholar during the period where he translated the text and Danmark-Amerika Fondet for funding his research stay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Hebrew term Shoah (שואה) meaning “calamity” or “catastrophe” is deployed to describe the National Socialists’ systematic attempt to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. It is preferable to the Holocaust, derived from Greek, meaning burnt offering, due to this term’s religious significance and antisemitic history. Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth About Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1980), 7; Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 780–2.

2 Consider for instance Howard Adelman and Elazar Barkan, No Return, No Refuge: Rites and Rights in Minority Repatriation (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011), 223–7, 235; Agamben, Omnibus, 105ff; Michel Agier, Managing the Undesirables: Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Government (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 15–18; Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 49–70; Richard Bernstein, “Hannah Arendt on the Stateless,” Parallax: 11/1 (2005): 46–60; Peg Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006); Stephanie Degooyer, Alastair Hunt, Lida Maxwell, Samuel Moyn and Astra Taylor, The Right to Have Rights (London: Verso, 2018); Patrick Hayden, “From Exclusion to Containment: Arendt, Sovereign Power and Statelessness,” Societies without Borders 3 (2009): 248–69; Frank Michelman, “Parsing ‘a Right to have Rights,’” Constellations 3/2 (1996): 200–8; Peter Nyers, Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006). Note that there is also a small subcurrent in the literature that conceive refugees as a symptom of the decline or demise of the nation state and nationalism, for instance, Giorgio Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights” in Means without Ends: Notes on Politics (USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2000 [1993]), 15–26; Zygmunt Bauman, “Jews and Other Europeans, Old and New,” European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe 42/1 (2009): 121–33.

3 Seyla Benhabib, Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 21, 186; Leon Botstein, “Liberating the Pariah: Politics, The Jews, and Hannah Arendt,” Salmagundi 60 (1983): 73–106; Ron Feldman, “The Pariah as Rebel: Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Writings,” in Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, ed. Roger Berkowitz, Thomas Keenan, and Jeffrey Katz (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2010), 200, 205; Jennifer Ring, “The Pariah as Hero: Hannah Arendt’s Political Actor,” Political Theory 19/3 (1991): 433–52; Wolfgang Heuer, “Europe and its Refugees: Arendt on the Politicization of Minorities,” Social Research 74/4 (2007): 1159–72.

4 Hannah Arendt, “‘What Remains? The Language Remains:’ A Conversation with Günter Gaus” in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (London: Penguin 2003 [1964]), 19.

5 The best and most authoritative biographical account of Hannah Arendt’s life, which I rely on throughout this section remains Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).

6 Arendt, “What Remains?” 8.

7 Arendt, “What Remains?” 9, 12; see also Hannah Arendt, “The Jewish Army – The Beginning of Jewish Politics? (Aufbau, November 14, 1941),” in The Jewish Writings, eds. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York City, NY: Schocken Books, 2007 [1941]), 137; Hannah Arendt, “That ‘Infinitely Complex Red-tape Existence’: From a Letter to Karl Jaspers” in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (London: Penguin 2003 [1946]), 28; this may also be supplemented by the decisively unsentimental account of her Jewishness and insistence on her independence in her correspondence with Gershom Scholem: Hannah Arendt, “A ‘Daughter of our People: A Response to Gershom Scholem’,” in The Portable Hannah Arendt ed. Peter Baehr (London: Penguin 2003 [1963]), 292–3, 295.

8 Hannah Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin. Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1929), https://monoskop.org/images/7/77/Arendt_Hannah_Der_Liebesbegriff_bei_Augustin_1929.pdf, accessed 28. November 2022; a partially revised version was posthumously published in English, see Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustin, eds. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

9 Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (Baltimore, MD, John Hopkins University Press, 1958); see also Hanna Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2000), 19–33; Haun Saussy, “The Refugee Speaks of Parvenus and Their Beautiful Illusions: A Rediscovered 1934 Text by Hannah Arendt,” Critical Inquiry: 40/1 (2013): 1–14.

10 See Paul von Hindenburg, Adolf Hitler, Wilhelm Frick & Franz Gürtner, “Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of Volk and State” in The Third Reich Sourcebook, eds. Anson Rabinbach and Sander Gilman (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013 [1933]), 47–8; Paul von Hindenburg, Adolf Hitler, Konstantin von Neurath, Johann Ludwig Schwerin von Krosigk, “Law to Remedy the State of Emergency of Volk and Reich,” in The Third Reich Sourcebook, eds. Anson Rabinbach and Sander Gilman (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013 [1933]), 52–3.

11 See in particular Adolf Hitler & Wilhelm Frick, “Reich Citizenship Law,” in The Third Reich Sourcebook, eds. Anson Rabinbach and Sander Gilman (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013 [1935]), 209.

12 Arendt, “What Remains?” 5–6.

13 Young-Bruehl, Love of World, 102–3, 105–6; Arendt, “What Remains?” 6–7.

14 Young-Bruehl, Love of World, 107, 113.

15 Young-Bruehl, Love of World, 152-6, 158–9, 163.

16 Young-Bruehl, Love of World, 164, 169.

17 Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” in The Jewish Writings, eds. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York City, NY: Schocken Books, 2007 [1943]), 269, 266; Arendt, “That ‘Infinitely Complex Red-tape Existence,’” 27; Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1997).

18 Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., “The Constitution of the United States,” in Sources and Documents Illustrating the American Revolution, 1764-1788 and the Formation of the Federal Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965 [1787]), 292. On the discursive constitution of the people see Jacques Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971-2001 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 46–54; Bonnie Honig, “Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic,” American Political Science Review: 85/1 (1991): 97–113.

19 Arendt, “We Refugees,” 264.

20 Ibid, 273. Arendt also describes how “contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings […] that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends” (p. 265).

21 Arendt, “We Refugees,” 266.

22 Ibid, 272.

23 Pitkin, Attack of the Blob, 21–2.

24 Arendt, Rachel Varnhagen, 256. Arendt had finished the majority of the manuscript in 1933 but wrote the last two chapters in the summer of 1938. See Young-Bruehl, Love of World, 91 Julie Kristeva, Hannah Arendt (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2001), 6.

25 Arendt, “We Refugees,” 270–1. Arendt’s harsh critique of these parvenus’ antisemitic behaviour may resonate with her controversial comments about the collaboration of some Jewish leaders in the Shoah reported during Adolph Eichmann’s trial, which she covered for the New Yorker. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin, 1994 [1963]), 91, 115–25, 169, but also consider the post-script to the revised edition, especially pages 283-4, as well as Arendt, “A ‘Daughter of Our People,’” 394-5; for historical context see also Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under German Occupation (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1972).

26 Arendt, “We Refugees,” 274.

27 Ibid.

28 Hannah Arendt, “The Minority Question” in The Jewish Writings eds. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York City, NY: Schocken Books, 2007 [1940]), 127–32. Arendt further developed this analysis in chapter nine of The Origins of Totalitarianism, which has also been used to indirectly supplement the preceding historical analysis. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973 [1951]), 267–302.

29 Arendt, “We Refugees,” 274; see in particular Bernard Lazare, “Jewish Nationalism,” in Job’s Dungheap: Essays on Jewish Nationalism and Social Revolution, with a Portrait of Bernard Lazare by Charles Péguy, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York City, NY: Schocken Books, 1984 [1898]), 54–79; Hannah Arendt, “Herzl and Lazare,” in The Jewish Writings eds. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York City, NY: Schocken Books, 2007 [1942]), 338–42; Young-Bruehl, Love of World, 121–2. The concept of pariah is an anglicized derivative of the Tamil word paraiyar designating a subordinate caste in parts of Southern India from whence the term was imported to Britain and came to be used to refer to outcasts. Arendt considered the Jewish people pariahs par excellence. See Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 21; Stefan Vogt and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “An Interview with Dipesh Chakrabarty,” in Unacknowledged Kinships: Postcolonial Studies and the Historiography of Zionism, eds. Stefan Vogt Derek J. Penslar, and Arieh Saposnik (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2023), 279–80.

30 This political potential is therefore not limited to refugees. They were simply the first to be thrown into this structural position (against their wills). The conception of the stateless refugees’ universal political potential defined by their exclusion within the political system implicitly reiterates Abbé Sieyès conceptualization of the third estate in 1789 and Karl Marx’s of the proletariat in 1844. See Emmanuel Sieyès, “What is the Third Estate,” in Political Writings, ed. Michael Sonenscher (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2003 [1789]), 92–162; Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction,” in Early Writings (London: Penguin, 1975 [1844]), 254–7.

31 Arendt, “We Refugees,” 274; for an elaboration of their specific characteristics and significance to Arendt, see Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” in The Jewish Writings, eds. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York City, NY: Schocken Books, 2007 [1944]), 275–97; see also Judith Butler, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 80–1.

32 Arendt, “We Refugees,” 274.

33 Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah,” 284.

34 Arendt, “We Refugees,” 273, 270, 265.

35 See Arendt, “The Minority Question,” 125–33; Hannah Arendt, “The Way Toward the Reconciliation of Peoples,” in The Jewish Writings, eds. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York City, NY: Schocken Books, 2007 [1842]), 258–63; Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis of Zionism,” in The Jewish Writings, eds. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York City, NY: Schocken Books, 2007 [written 1943]), 329–37; Hannah Arendt, “Can the Jewish-Arab Question be Solved? [I],” in The Jewish Writings, eds. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York City, NY: Schocken Books, 2007 [1943]), 193–6; Hannah Arendt, “Approaches to the ‘German Problem’,” in Essays in Understanding 1930-1954: Formation, Exile and Totalitarianism, eds. Jerome Kohn (New York City, NY: Schocken Books, 1994 [1945]), 113–20; see also Christopher Volk, “The Decline of Order: Hannah Arendt and the Paradoxes of the Nation-State,” in Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 172–98; Douglas Klusmeyer. “Hannah Arendt’s Case for Federalism,” Publius 1 (2010): 31–58.

36 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism; Young-Bruehl, Love of World, 222–3, 157; Roy Tsao, “The Three Phases of Arendt’s Theory of Totalitarianism” in Social Research: 69 (2002): 579–619.

37 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 300–2, 267, 459; see also Benhabib, The Rights of Others, 64; pace Jacques Ranciére, Dissensus: On Aesthetics and Politics (New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2013), 71–9; Butler, Performative Theory of Assembly, 78; Arendt also seems to have abandoned her commitment to the political form of the federation by 1957, see for instance Hannah Arendt, “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?” Men in Dark Times (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968 [1957]), 81–94; but see also her subsequent highly positive (re-)evaluation of the federation in Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 2006 [1963]), 168–71. It is worth noting that Peter Verovšek has recently begun to explore the road not taken by Arendt, developing a promising critique of the nation state on the basis of Origins of Totalitarianism. See Peter Verovšek “‘The nation has conquered the state’: Arendtian insights on the internal contradictions of the nation-state” Review of International Studies (2023).

38 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1998 [1958]); Arendt, On Revolution, 49–105; see also Butler, Performative Theory of Assembly, 44–6, 78, 86–7; some of the most disturbing results of her insistence on this demarcation are found in Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (London: Penguin 2003 [1959]), 231–46. For an alternative reading that explores the possibility that Arendt remained critical of the nation state throughout her life, see Judith Butler, “I Merely Belong to Them,” London Review of Books 29/9 (2007): 26–8.

39 Bernstein, “Hannah Arendt on the Stateless,” 54.

40 Most subsequent interpreters have followed Hannah Arendt’s trajectory, either ignoring the radical insights of “We Refugees” or subsuming them to the account contained in Origins of Totalitarianism. See note 2 for further details.

41 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 292, 300.

42 see Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 56–68 and 65n26, 67.

43 Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” 19, 16. Agamben had already encountered Hannah Arendt’s works in 1969, which he identified as a “decisive experience.” See Giorgio Agamben “Letter from Giorgio Agamben to Hannah Arendt, 21. Feb. 1970,” Diacritics 39/4 (2009): 111.

44 Agamben, Omnibus, 13; Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2006 [1922]), 5.

45 Agamben, Omnibus, 13, 13, 137ff, 161-245; see also Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michal Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006 [1942]), 392.

46 Agamben, Omnibus, 90, 74–5, 235; Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Il Potere Sovrano e la Nuda Vita (Torino: Einaudi, 1995); Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Nullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996 [1921]), 236-252; Walter Benjamin, “Zur Kritik der Gewalt,” in Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften, Volume II.I, ed. Rolf Tidemann and Herman Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1999 [1921]), 179–204. It is, moreover, also identified with the obscure roman figure “homo sacer” denoting a person that is set outside of the law and may thus be killed with absolute impunity, see Agamben, Omnibus, 10ff.

47 Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” 16; Agamben, Omnibus, 105–13; passim; Mikkel Flohr “Stasis: Civil War, Revolution and Destitution in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer-series,” Parrhesia: 37 (2023), 12–48; on the continued relevance of the nation state today, see Hayden, “From Exclusion to Containment.”.

48 Giorgio Agamben, Where are we Now? The Epidemic as Politics (London: Eris, 2021); Flohr, “Stasis,” 177–185, 201n35; Adam Kotsko, “What Happened to Giorgio Agamben,” Slate (2022), https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/02/giorgio-agamben-covid-holocaust-comparison-right-wing-protest.html

49 Agamben, Where are we Now, 66–7, 18.

50 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2021 (Copenhagen: UNHCR, 2022), https://www.unhcr.org/62a9d1494/global-trends-report-2021

51 However, tellingly, article 15 continues to claim that “[e]veryone has the right to a nationality” and “[n]o one shall be arbitrarily deprived of [their] nationality,” thereby compounding rather than resolving the inherent limitations of the nation state system that created the stateless refugees in the first place by emphasizing nationality over political organization and protection.

52 See United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees (Geneva: UNHCR, 2010), https://www.unhcr.org/3b66c2aa10

53 Arendt, “We Refugees,” 273, 265; Hannah Arendt, “‘The Rights of Man: What are They?,” in The Modern Review (1949): 22–37; Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 290–302; see also Benhabib, The Rights of Others, 49–65.

54 Maissa Almustafa, “Reframing refugee crisis: A ‘European crisis of migration’ or a ‘crisis of protection,’” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space: 40, no. 5 (2021): 1064–1082; Amnesty International, Amnesty International Report 2021/22: The State of The World’s Human Rights (London: Amnesty International, 2022), 17–18, 44, 47–8, 27, 33. For analyses of the proliferation of borders see in particular Wendy Brown’s prescient Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York, NY: Zone Books, 2010) and Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labour (London: Duke University Press, 2013).

55 Arendt, “We Refugees,” 274.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Carlsbergfondet.