Europe and its refugees: Arendt on the politicization of minorities

Social Research, Winter, 2007 by Wolfgang Heuer

IN JANUARY 1940, A FEW MONTHS BEFORE HER INTERNMENT IN FRANCE, Hannah Arendt wrote in a very distinct and programmatic letter to her friend Erich Cohn-Bendit that "All minority policies, not only those affecting the Jewish minority, are doomed to failure as a result of the continued existence of state sovereignty" (Arendt, 2000: 231). "With the beginning of Russian mass migration," she continued,

   at the latest in 1923/24, ... we can see the emergence
   of a completely new European class of people: the stateless.
   If we consider European history as the development
   of European nations or as the development of European
   peoples into nations, then the stateless are the most
   significant product of recent history. Since 1920, almost all
   European states have hosted huge masses of people who
   have no right of residence anywhere, no consular protection
   anywhere--modern pariahs.... The impossibility of
   absorbing this mass of people clearly shows that the very
   fact of assimilation has lost its significance to an enormous
   extent. Assimilation no longer exists in Europe, nations
   are too developed and too old. Assimilation is no longer
   possible for Jews either. The opportunities to assimilate in
   the 19th century ... were in fact the result of a new constituting
   of peoples caused by the French Revolution and
   their development into nations. However, this process is
   now over. Nothing else can be added. In fact the opposite is
   taking place: the outsourcing of huge masses of people and
   their depravation to pariahs. Now the pariahs, although
   Europeans, are cut off from any interests that are specifically
   national, they are the first to be interested in pan-European
   politics (Arendt, 2000: 231).

Under these conditions, Arendt wrote, minority rights are completely inadequate, and can only mean cultural autonomy. But "culture without politics, that is, without a historical or national context, becomes featherbrained folklore and folkish barbarism" (231).

Hannah Arendt's letter culminates in a plea for a "new European federal system." "It doesn't seem utopian to me to hope for the possibility of a union of nations with a European parliament," where the Jewish people would also be recognized and represented as a European nation (231).

This letter could be described as Arendt's political manifesto and is reflected in the rest of her work. In the second volume of The Origins of Totalitarianism she presents a more detailed analysis of what she calls the decline of the nation-state and the end of the rights of man, and the emergence of the nation of minorities and the stateless people. Her letter already contains the idea of a federation as an alternative to the sovereign nation state, an idea she is encouraged in by her encounter with the United States, which was to become her second country of exile. Moreover, the letter includes a move toward political action. Minorities and the stateless deprived of their rights, the insecure and the faceless, all victims stepping out of the darkness of lawlessness and facelessness into the light of politics: as pariahs they become actors. During the 1930s, Hannah Arendt finished her book on Rahel Varnhagen's failed attempts at assimilation, describing the latter's conscious rejection of assimilation and her decision to live the life of a pariah. In 1943, she also published a disturbing article in the Menorah Journal entitled "We Refugees," in which she pleaded that refugees demonstrate political self-confidence as pariahs. A year later "The Hidden Tradition" appeared, promoting the pariah rebellion as the sole chance of survival.

These texts undoubtedly refer to the specific situation after World War I, which saw the emergence of vast numbers of stateless people and refugees following the dissolution of the Russian, Austrian, and Ottoman Empires. It was at this time that totalitarian movements, particularly that of Germany, began to look for a "final solution" to their insecure existence. Although the situation in Europe is now different--after all, we have the European Union so favored by Arendt and, like her, are aware of the importance of the right to have rights--the threat to free societies arising from unsolved problems and their aggravation still prevails today.

I will first address these dangers and then discuss the significance of Arendt's shift in perspective from victim to acting pariah. Arendt discusses both topics politically, making it politicization of minorities in a twofold sense.

I.

THE DANGERS EMANATING FROM UNSOLVED POLITICAL PROBLEMS affected first and foremost, of course, the stateless and the refugees themselves. Following her analysis in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt was able to outline a fatal process in retrospect, which she summarized at a course on statelessness in Berkeley in 1955:

   When the number of refugees and stateless people swelled,
   the European politicans first tried to do justice to their
   ambiguous status by issuing refugee passports, the so-called
   Nansen passports, supervised by the League of Nations.
   When it turned out that the refugees were not temporary
   but permanent, this passport lost its validity. The politicians
   now chose to ignore the problem by cancelling the
   distinction between refugees and stateless people and
   discontinuing refugee aid of any kind. As a consequence
   the now exclusively stateless people were declared "undesirable"
   (Arendt, 1955).