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

Hannah Arendt’s “We Refugees” has for too long been overshadowed by her subsequent writings but contains unique insights that are perhaps more relevant than ever today. Hannah Arendt was a stateless refugee from 1933 to 1951 and wrote the essay as the horrors of the Second World War and the Shoah were unfolding.¹ In the essay, she vividly describes the terrible personal costs and existential dilemmas that characterized the Jewish refugees’ existence outside of any legal and political protection. While her essay departs from their tragic situation, it is also concerned with the political system that turned them into refugees. Arendt refused to reduce their tragic fates to a series of individual tragedies, but insists that their exclusion was a systematic, political phenomenon that subsequently also befell large parts of Europe’s population during the war. Refugees therefore should not be understood as a marginal phenomenon but a central part of the political system of nation states that reveals its most fundamental limitations – as well as the possibility of moving beyond them – and this is the reason that it remains relevant to revisit this text today.

This article contributes a rereading of this highly original but frequently overlooked essay, which highlights its distinct political insights and their contemporary relevance. More specifically, it highlights Arendt’s identification of refugees as a systematic political phenomenon that reveals the inherent limitations of the international system of nation states and, potentially, also point beyond them insofar the refugees might consciously embrace their exclusion as the basis of constituting a collective political subject that can move beyond the nation state system. The majority of the literature that engages with Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on refugees tends to focus on her subsequent analysis in The Origins of Totalitarianism, where refugees are defined by their exclusion from the nation state system and deprivation of any legal and political protection (for example, “the right to have rights”), there is little to no consideration of the agency and radical political potential identified by Arendt in her 1943 essay.² The few authors that engage with this essay and the conscious pariah’s radical potential tends to reduce it to an individual strategy or behavior, often drawing on Arendt’s subsequent conceptualization of political action in The Human Condition.³ However, by recontextualizing and rereading Arendt’s “We Refugees” in its own context and not reducing it to her subsequent works, this article recovers its highly original analysis of the political significance and potential of the refugees, which is perhaps more pertinent today than ever before.

The article is divided into five sections. The initial section outlines the historical, biographical, and intellectual context of “We Refugees,” which frames and facilitates the subsequent analysis of the text. Section two examines Arendt’s analysis of the impossible situation of the stateless Jewish refugees and the futility of individual and assimilationist strategies for resolving their situation. Arendt argued that their situation was the result of the inherent limitations of the international system of nation states as I show in section three. The fourth section turns to examine how these refugees, according to Hannah Arendt, not only mark the inherent limits of this political system, but also the possibility of moving beyond it collectively. The fifth and final section turns to examine the subsequent fate of this analysis, more specifically how it was largely displaced and forgotten, and makes the case for its relevance today.

The Text in Context

In an interview with Gunter Gauss in 1964, Hannah Arendt asserted “I do not believe that there is any thought process possible without personal experience. Every thought is an afterthought, that is, a reflection on some matter or event.”⁴ This pronouncement is particularly relevant to her 1943 essay “We Refugees” insofar as it recounts and analyses her personal experiences as a stateless refugee in Europe. It is therefore relevant to commence the rereading and -interpretation of this seminal essay with a biographical and historical contextualization, which will frame and facilitate the subsequent analysis of its contents.

Johanna “Hannah” Arendt was born on October 14, 1906 in Hanover and grew up in Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad in Russia).⁵ She was the only child of Paul and Martha Arendt. Her father died when she was a child. The parents were well-educated, left-wing Jews; something that was not passed over in silence in Germany at that time. Hannah Arendt later recalled that she became aware of her Jewish background very early in her life through antisemitic remarks made by other children.⁶ She also remembered that her mother gave her clear instructions to leave the school immediately and report to her at home if the teachers made antisemitic remarks. The mother then prepared and submitted an official complaint. But if the antisemitic comments came from other children, it was up to the young Hannah Arendt to resolve the problem, and there could be no question of ignoring it or denying her background, as she would later reiterate “if one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew” – a position she in many ways maintained throughout her life.⁷

Hannah Arendt commenced her studies at the University of Marburg at the age of eighteen. She studied philosophy under the celebrated philosopher (and later National Socialist) Martin Heidegger, with whom she also had an affair. She wrote her thesis on the church father Saint Augustine’s concept of love under the supervision and guidance of the famous philosopher Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg. The thesis was published as a book in 1929.⁸ That year Hannah Arendt also married the author Günther Stern (later primarily known under the name Günther Anders), and they moved to Berlin together, where she began writing a book about the German-Jewish author Rahel Varnhagen, intended as her Habilitationsschrift, which was not published until 1958.⁹

Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933. Four weeks later, the Reichstag was burned down and a young Dutch council communist was arrested and accused of the crime. The next day, a state of emergency was declared: thousands of communists and other political dissidents were rounded up and imprisoned. Soon after, elections were called, and the National Socialists succeeded in securing a majority for the Enabling Act [Ermächtigungsgesetz; formally Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich] of March 23, which together with the previous Reichstag Fire Decree [Reichstagsbrandverordnung; formally Verordnung des Reichspräsidenten zum Schutz von Volk und Staat] of February 28, gave Adolf Hitler almost unlimited power and constituted the legal basis of the National Socialist regime.¹⁰ In 1935, Germany implemented the Nuremberg Laws, which revoked the citizenship and rights of those without “German or kindred blood” and laid the legal basis for the subsequent genocide.¹¹

The National Socialists’ takeover of power and the explosive situation pushed Arendt to get involved politically – as she would later explain, it was not possible to remain neutral in 1933.¹² She helped hide communists, Jewish activists and others fleeing National Socialist repression and also helped her close friend Kurt Blumenfeld, the head of the German Zionist organization [Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland], document the extent of antisemitism and discrimination in Germany at the time. It was in connection with this work that she was denounced by a librarian at the Prussian State Library and arrested (along with her mother) by the Gestapo [Geheime Staatspolizei]. Fortunately, the officer in charge had no interest in Arendt’s activities, and she was released eight days later.¹³

Soon after her release, Hannah Arendt fled to Prague and from there she continued to Geneva before finally reaching Paris, where she would remain until 1941. In Paris, she worked for an organization that helped young Jews to safety in British Mandate Palestine (“Youth Aliyah”) and worked for Baroness Germaine de Rothschild among other things. She also divorced her former husband and married the German communist Heinrich Blücher on January 16, 1940.¹⁴ Shortly after Germany’s invasion of France, she was interned alongside other resident, exiled, and denationalized Germans as well as political dissidents, and so on, in an internment camp in Gurs in Southwestern France. She managed to escape the camp in the chaos immediately following France’s defeat and sought refuge with friends in Montauban (close to Toulouse), where she was almost miraculously reunited with her husband. They managed to secure emergency visas and flee to the United States via Portugal. The Jews that remained in Gurs were later deported to Auschwitz.¹⁵

Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher arrived in New York in May 1941. The couple rented two rooms, which they shared with Hannah Arendt’s mother, who arrived soon after them. The family initially lived on a monthly stipend of seventy-five dollars from the American Zionist Organization. Hannah Arendt taught herself English and found work as a teacher and writer for various publications (most notably the German-language Aufbau).¹⁶ Although the family had managed to escape Europe, they did not feel entirely safe. They continued to encounter antisemitism in their everyday lives and after the US joined the war, the government classified people of German, Italian and Japanese background as “enemy aliens.” Those who were deemed hostile (mostly of Japanese background) or lived in strategically important areas, including most of the US West Coast, were either relocated, interned in camps or had to live under curfew.¹⁷

It was during this period, as a stateless refugee in a strange and often seemingly hostile country with nothing but her immediate family around her and with infrequent but deeply disturbing news from friends and acquaintances in Europe, that Hannah Arendt composed her seminal essay “We Refugees” for the Jewish magazine Menorah Journal, which I will analyse in the following three sections. I start with an outline of Arendt’s analysis of the impossible situation of the stateless refugees as individuals excluded from legal and political protection, I then proceed to analyse this situation’s basis in the inherent limitations of the international system of nation states, before finally turning to the radical potential of the refugees, which potentially points beyond this system.

The Impossible Situation of the Refugees

The essay was published in January 1943 and took up nine pages in the magazine (pages 69-77). It is a remarkable text insofar as it speaks on behalf of those that do not usually have a voice in the public sphere. Not only does it claim to speak for them but it also speaks to them, its title refers to “We Refugees” and thereby invokes and in a sense also constitutes its subject as a political collectivity; paralleling the opening sentence of her new host country’s constitution: “We, the people.”¹⁸ However, Arendt immediately notes its contemporary limitations “we don’t like to be called ‘refugees’” but instead prefer “‘newcomers’ or ‘immigrants,’” since they (“we”) are not a political subject as such, but defined by their exclusion from the political system, a condition that they often try to downplay and avoid drawing attention to for the sake of social ease as well as survival.¹⁹

The majority of the essay is concerned with outlining the extreme personal cost and existential challenges associated with their existence as mere human beings excluded from the political system “unprotected by any specific law or political convention.”²⁰ Hannah Arendt describes the attitude that this situation prompted amongst many of the stateless refugees as a paradoxical combination of optimism and fatalism, which could just as easily find expression in overly enthusiastic patriotism for their new host-country as it could in suicide – an attempt to ensure survival that could just as quickly turn into its opposite. She describes this attitude with a corresponding combination of compassion and cynical irony:

[T]here is something wrong with our optimism. There are those odd optimists among us who, having made a lot of optimistic speeches, go home and turn on the gas or make use of a skyscraper in quite an unexpected way.²¹

She proceeded to explain that “under the cover of our ‘optimism’ you can easily detect the hopeless sadness of assimilationists.”²² Hannah Arendt knew this attitude and the situation that fostered it very well. She had no doubt that it was a dead end. The plight of the refugees was a fundamentally political phenomenon that individual strategies such as assimilation and suicide could never solve.

Hannah Arendt strongly criticized the Jews who tried to assimilate and become part of the local bourgeoisie by denying their status as Jews, pariahs and/or stateless refugees. She consistently described them as “parvenus” (and occasionally “upstarts”) – a term she borrowed from the French-Jewish anarchist thinker and activist Bernard Lazare’s critique of the Jewish bourgeoisie. The term comes from French and literally means someone who has arrived. It was used pejoratively by French aristocrats to designate the nouveau riche, who sought to move beyond their socio-economic origins without ever being truly accepted as part of the upper class.²³ Lasalle’s and Arendt’s critique of the parvenus is formulated from the opposite side of the social hierarchy, from the perspective of the excluded and oppressed, but likewise insists that the parvenus should not seek to become part of the upper class albeit for entirely different reasons. Arendt was critical of the parvenus’ attempts to be accepted by the very system and people that would exclude them simply because they were Jewish and devoted particular attention to their common adoption of antisemitic attitudes. In the summer of 1938, she had summarized the problem:

In a society on the whole hostile to the Jews – and that situation obtained in all countries in which Jews lived, down to the twentieth century – it is possible to assimilate only by assimilating to anti-Semitism also.²⁴

In “We Refugees,” Hannah Arendt denounced the French-Jewish parvenus’ rejection of her and other German-Jewish refugees when they first arrived in France.²⁵ But despite the parvenus’ immediately privileged position, neither their social status, assimilation nor antisemitism would save them in the end. A society that was systematically antisemitic might tolerate them temporarily, but would eventually turn against them, as had already happened in Germany and would later happen in other parts of Europe. That was why assimilation and adoptive patriotism in fundamentally antisemitic societies was so closely linked to suicide amongst the stateless Jewish refugees.

Refugees as a Political Phenomenon

“We Refugees” is not merely a description of the refugees’ impossible situation. It is also a political analysis of it. Hannah Arendt’s essay shows that the situation of the Jewish refugees was not just a collection of individual accidents or personal tragedies, but a systematic political phenomenon produced by the international system of nation states. Her analysis shows the double significance of the refugees: on the one hand, they reveal the fundamental limitations of the political system; on the other hand, they also point to the possibility of moving beyond these limitations. In this section, I will explicate the former and, on this basis, proceed to examine the latter in the following section.

Hannah Arendt points out that the Jews were among the first to be excluded and persecuted, but they were far from the last: national minorities, political dissidents, and subsequently whole peoples met a similar fate before and especially during the Second World War:

[T]he outlawing of the Jewish people in Europe has been followed closely by the outlawing of most European nations. Refugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their people.²⁶

Modern antisemitism as such was not just a Jewish problem – the Jews were just the first victims of a larger, systematic political development. Hannah Arendt insists that the exclusion of the Jews was the forerunner of a more general political development that would later turn large parts of Europe’s population into state- and rightless refugees: “for the first time Jewish history is not separate but tied up with that of all other nations” as she explained.²⁷ The stateless Jewish refugees’ exclusion from the political system was not just a marginal phenomenon, but testified to its fundamental limitations.

This political system consisted of nation states. The nation state became the dominant political form in Europe after the First World War and the associated collapse of the large multinational empires such as the Russian, the Austria-Hungarian and the Ottoman Empires. The modern nation state is per definition limited to a single nation that defines and legitimizes it. The nation state is thus implicitly based on the exclusion of anyone that is not considered part of the nation. The groups that are excluded from a specific national political community constitute, in theory at least, another national political community within the framework of the international political system. But the reality of post-war Europe was very different. After the First World War, new borders, displaced peoples, and the collapse of the large multinational empires meant that huge population groups existed outside the framework, territory, and protection of a nation state. The international community tried to secure the rights of these populations and groups through minority treaties and agreements albeit without any real effect.

The exclusive definition of the nation state meant that domestic and foreign policy was oriented towards narrow (national) interests – often in conflict with other nation states and minorities. Moreover, several of the European nation states attempted to incorporate parts of the nation that were outside the state’s existing borders while expelling supposedly “foreign elements” without ceding territory by denationalizing, persecuting, or relocating minorities as well as political dissidents. The exclusivity of the European nation states intensified and excluded larger and larger groups who faced uncertain futures as unprotected, stateless refugees. There were also groups such as the Jews and the Roma and Sinti who did not have the backing of a nation state and were thus almost universally excluded pariahs who marked, more clearly than anyone else, the fundamental limitations of this political system, that is to say, the exclusivity of the nation state.²⁸

The Political Potential of the Refugees

The refugees’ impossible existence revealed not only the political system’s fundamental limitations but also pointed beyond them as I will argue in this section. The refugees already stood outside of the political system, and thereby they also represented the possibility of moving beyond and existing outside of this system – however precariously – as such, the refugees potentially also constituted an avant-garde in the classic political sense of the term. Hannah Arendt describes the refugees’ political potential in the last part of the essay, at the same time that she introduces Bernard Lazare and his concept of the “conscious pariahs.” Hannah Arendt had gotten to know the works of the French-Jewish, anarchist thinker, and activist through Kurt Blumenfeld, and it was from his works that she picked up the twin-concepts of pariah and parvenu. In the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, Bernard Lazare argued that the Jews had to abandon any notion of political emancipation through assimilation and instead recognize their inherent status as oppressed and excluded pariahs and ally with other groups in similar situations to fight the system that oppressed and excluded them. He argued that such conscious pariahs could potentially overthrow the political system and change the world.²⁹

But it was only a potential. It was not progressive in itself to be Jewish, a pariah or a refugee, as Arendt also makes clear in the essay. The refugees’ political potential is negatively defined by their structural exclusion within the political system.³⁰ In order to use this potential to change their situation, the refugees first of all had to acknowledge their situation; they had to become “conscious pariahs” – that is, recognize that their exclusion and oppression was not an individual problem but attested to a political system that systematically excluded and oppressed minorities and political dissidents – a political system that neither could nor would accept human beings merely as human beings, but only as members of the nation and obedient citizens. The existence of the refugees testified to the fundamental limitations of this political system and both the need to and possibility of moving beyond them.

Although the examples of conscious pariahs she introduces are individual artists and activists such as Franz Kafka, Charlie Chaplin, Heinrich Heine, Rahel Varnhagen, Sholem Aleichem, and Bernard Lazare, it is clear that this must be a collective political project: common conditions can only be changed collectively.³¹ Arendt had already outlined how useless individual strategies such as assimilation, economic success, adoptive patriotism, and suicide were and addressed the refugees as a distinctly collective subject, that is, “we refugees.” The refugees were already the vanguard of the European peoples in a negative sense insofar as they were excluded and persecuted before everyone else. The refugees’ only possibility of overcoming this impossible situation was to consciously pursue the inherently radical political potential of being outside of the political system and become the vanguard of the European peoples in a positive political sense, leading them beyond the limits of the nation state system.

Such a project was obviously highly dangerous. The stateless refugees already existed in a political and legal vacuum – outside the protection of the political system: assimilated parvenus and overly patriotic new arrivals might (temporarily) hide their background and status (or, rather, the lack thereof), whereas the conscious pariahs stood out and became extremely exposed insofar as they politicized themselves and their exclusion. In exchange for this exposure and associated vulnerability, they were able to move beyond the political exclusion that otherwise defined them: “History is no longer a closed book to them and politics is no longer the privilege of gentiles.”³² The politicization of their exclusion challenged it in one and the same movement, as Arendt explained in an essay the following year:

As soon as the pariah enters the arena of politics and translates his status into political terms, he becomes perforce a rebel.³³

The conscious pariah who enters the public or political arena is per definition a rebel, because their mere presence breaks with the structure and logic of the system. The political system is defined by the exclusivity of nation states; as such, the refugees’ insistence on enjoying a political existence and being politically active is a rebellion against the strictures of the established political system of nation states, manifesting the possibility of a different political practice and a different political system beyond its limitations. “We Refugees” is itself such a gesture, a public statement of a conscious pariah that insists on highlighting and politicizing the exclusion that she and her compatriots confront, in an effort to constitute “we refugees” as a collective political subject created by, but simultaneously also pointing beyond, the limitations of the international system of nation states.

Hannah Arendt does not explain what sort of alternative political system she has in mind. But it is nonetheless possible to derive a basic outline from her scattered commentaries and essays from this period. The future politics that she imagines takes the exclusion of refugees within the present political system as its starting point. In several places, she describes the refugees as being reduced to their basic humanity (as opposed to citizenship in a nation state). A political alternative that starts from their situation must therefore be understood as a form of humanism that is not bound by national or political affiliations, a humanism beyond borders in other words.³⁴ The institutional form she imagined could live up to this ideal was the federation. In several of her contemporary essays and articles, she describes the necessity of establishing a European federation after the war, where different peoples could achieve self-determination and an equal form of coexistence within the framework of a common political system; a system that would shift the identification of people and state and thereby make it impossible for national affiliations to limit the political form and content of the future.³⁵

“We Refugees” and Posterity

Hannah Arendt’s “We Refugees” anticipates many of the central themes of her later writing, especially Origins of Totalitarianism, which was published eight years after “We Refugees” but was largely composed previously.³⁶ However, there are also several major differences. In Origins of Totalitarianism, she entirely loses sight of the radical potential of the refugees. She focuses almost exclusively on membership and participation in existing political communities, that is, nation states, at the expense of everything that falls outside, which she now claimed “threaten our political life” and rejected as potentially totalitarian (curiously, she also identified the rise of totalitarianism with “the decline of the nation state” in this work).³⁷ From The Human Condition published in 1958 and onwards, the more or less arbitrary demarcations of the political community from its outside, excluding specific individuals and groups were increasingly depoliticized and defended by Hannah Arendt.³⁸ As Richard Bernstein summarizes this development: “it is as if Arendt’s experience of, and reflection upon, statelessness taught her what politics means, and why it is so essential to be a citizen in a polity to live a fully human life.”³⁹ However, the implications for those excluded from these polities, which generally took the form of nation states, who were thereby reduced to a less-than-human existence, was neglected in her subsequent works, as were the radical political possibilities she had previously identified.⁴⁰

In 1943, when Hannah Arendt wrote “We Refugees,” she was seemingly closer to Bernard Lazare and the radical left-wing tradition that he represented. It was this tradition that enabled her to identify the radical political potential in the refugees’ impossible situation. But this potential remained unfulfilled, and the system of nation states survived the Second World War. In Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt lamented the fact that many of the stateless refugees grouped and organized themselves nationally in order to fight for their rights and interests (rather than constituting “We refugees” as a political collective capable of moving beyond the nation state).⁴¹ It is telling that while Arendt revisits Lasalle’s concepts of pariah and parvenu at length in this work, she only refers twice to the previously central concept of “conscious pariahs.”⁴² Perhaps it was disappointment that led to this shift in her thinking? We can only guess as to the reasons, but we should not abandon the highly original and incisive insights of this essay.

It is largely thanks to the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben that we can reread and reinterpret this essay without reducing it to Arendt’s later works. In a short text from 1993 entitled “Beyond Human Rights,” he outlined some of the most radical implications of “We Refugees,” which had been published fifty years earlier. More specifically, he highlighted her fundamental insight “that the figure that should have embodied human rights more than any other – namely, the refugee – marked instead the radical crisis of the concept” because these human rights were inscribed within an international system of nation states, which neither could nor would extend legal and political protection beyond the members of the nation. Moreover, he seemed to follow the Hannah Arendt of 1943 closely in his insistence that “the refugee is […] the only category in which one may see today […] the forms and limits of a coming political community.”⁴³

Agamben’s short text in many ways anticipated the Homo Sacer-series, which can be read as an attempt to understand the paradoxical legal and political status of refugees and/as what he also refers to as “bare life” within a system of sovereign nation states; included in this political system solely through their exclusion. In the initial volume of the series, Agamben conceptualized sovereign power on the model of Carl Schmitt’s 1922 Political Theology, as “who decides on the [state of] exception.”⁴⁴ Sovereign power, in this view, is both the origin and necessary guarantor of the legal system, which can, at any time, suspend the legal system in order to protect it, in and as a state of exception. Since the circumstances that might warrant such measures are, per definition, exceptional, they cannot be anticipated or codified in law, and it is therefore up to the sovereign to make the decision about when to declare a state of exception, which are becoming more and more frequent, threatening to become the norm, according to Agamben.⁴⁵ In a state of exception everyone’s legal protections can be suspended, reducing them to “bare life” [nuda vita], a translation of Walter Benjamin’s Bloßes Leben, which does not denotes the mere fact of biological life, but, rather, a life defined by its exclusion within a political community, where it is left without any legal status or protection, entirely at the mercy of the sovereign.⁴⁶

However, there are also some significant differences between Agamben’s “Beyond Human Rights” and the subsequent Homo Sacer-series. Most notably, in the former text, refugees were identified as a symptom of “the by now unstoppable decline of the nation-state,” whereas in the latter, the nation state reigns supreme, and refugees (qua “bare life”) are reduced to the passive product and victim of an ever-increasing sovereign power in constantly expanding states of exception that defines modern politics. This, ultimately, amounts to a theoretical totalization of the sovereign nation state, which renders it entirely inescapable and overlooks the agency and the radical political potential implicit in the situation of the refugees that Hannah Arendt outlined in “We Refugees” (much like she would later do herself in Origins of Totalitarianism).⁴⁷ This produces a series of political aporias that continues to haunt Agamben throughout the Homo Sacer-series and has, more recently, led him to some rather paranoid conclusions about the Covid-19 pandemic as a pretext invented to legitimize states’ invocation and expansion of emergency powers, which he likened to the National Socialist regime.⁴⁸

In spite of the theoretical and analytical deficiencies of his subsequent works and interventions, Agamben’s initial impulse to return to reread Hannah Arendt’s “We Refugees” as the starting point of a critique of the international system of sovereign nation states and its inherent limitations remains relevant to this day, even if he missed one of its most central insights, namely the possibility of moving beyond it. In an interview from May 2020, he was asked about his 1993 text on Hannah Arendt’s “We Refugees” and affirmed that the refugee still marked “the foundation of a new horizon of politics” insofar as “citizens are being reduced to their bare biological existences.” However, only a few months prior, he had explicitly rejected the existence of any collective radical possibilities in this situation, insisting that “bare life, and the fear of losing it, is not something that unites people; rather it blinds and separates them.”⁴⁹

“We Refugees” is a distinct humanist voice from a dark time; a voice that speaks clearly to our own times – from contemporary debates about migration to the so-called refugee crisis, that is to say, the 89.3 million forcibly displaced persons across the world today (out of which 27.1 are categorized as refugees by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees).⁵⁰ Of course, one should always be careful when comparing different historical eras: we are not living in interwar Europe or a period that can be compared to the horrors of the Second World War or the Shoah. But that is not what Hannah Arendt’s essay is about. The essay is about refugees; it is about the inherent limitations of the nation state system and the need to move beyond them. “We Refugees,” in other words, is about institutions and challenges that are still with us today and are perhaps more pronounced than ever.

Much has changed since the interwar period. Article 14 of the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights recognized the right of persecuted individuals and groups to seek and receive asylum.⁵¹ This was further elaborated in the 1951 Refugee Convention (updated and extended in 1967) as well as the Convention for the Restriction of Statelessness from 1961, which further defined refugees and their right to protection.⁵² The purpose of these declarations and conventions was to prevent individuals and groups from ending up in the same impossible situation as the stateless refugees in the interwar period; systematically excluded and persecuted across the political system. However, Arendt had already warned that the political rights of human beings within a political system composed of nation states could only be guaranteed by membership within a nation state. Those who fell outside of the nation state would remain unprotected by them in spite of the many well-meaning declarations and conventions.⁵³ Contemporary political developments have affirmed her argument. Nationalist European politicians have consistently worked to undermine these declarations and conventions, since the beginning of the so-called “refugee crisis” in 2015, reintroducing national border controls and militarizing the European Union’s external borders, while successive U.S. administrations have increased border and migration controls and policing.⁵⁴

Contemporary politics in the Global North is characterized by nationalist rhetoric and policies based on narrowly defined national(/-ist) interests: restricting access to asylum, reintroducing border controls and militarizing external borders – ineffective and short-sighted attempts to exclude refugees and asylum-seekers. The international system of nation-states does not seem able or willing to resolve this situation. Hannah Arendt warned us, that this should not be considered an accident; it is not a migrant or refugee crisis, but a systematic crisis of the political system that is rooted in the inherent exclusivity and limitations of the nation state. And as long as responses are dictated by nationalism and narrow national interests, finding a solution remains impossible.

“We refugees” question the political institutions we take for granted and challenge us to reconsider whether they are capable of solving the challenges we face today, where millions of people are fleeing persecution and war within or between nation states as well as extreme poverty and climate change – and even more will follow. The international system of nation states seems incapable of resolving this situation. Hannah Arendt’s “We Refugees” allows us to understand the implications of this situation for individuals, while showing beyond any measure of a doubt that this is not a “refugee crisis,” but a fundamental political crisis, a crisis of the nation state system itself. The question is whether it is still possible for us to think of refugees as the people’s potential vanguard today; as the figure that reveals the fundamental limitations of our political system and the possibility of moving beyond them. The alternative is worrying, as the final lines of “We Refugees” reminds us:

The comity of the European peoples went to pieces when, and because, it allowed its weakest members to be excluded and persecuted.⁵⁵

The inherent exclusivity and parochialism of the modern nation-state is not a marginal phenomenon but constitutes a central feature of our political system, which is likely to spread unless contained, and, as such, we are all likely to be forced to confront it one way or the other.

Conclusion

This article has revisited and reinterpreted Hannah Arendt brilliant but often overlooked essay “We Refugees,” which she wrote and published during the Second World War, while she was still a stateless refugee. The essay vividly describes the impossible legal and political situation of the stateless Jewish refugees during this period as well as its personal implications. However, Arendt refused to reduce the refugees’ tragic fates to individual incidents but a central part of the political system of nation states. She drew on the work of Bernard Lazare to develop an highly original analysis of the refugees as a systematic political phenomenon that revealed the inherent limitations of the nation state system and simultaneously pointed beyond it; an analysis that remains acutely relevant today.

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).

Correction Statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Carlsbergfondet.

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.