2020 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2(2) Human Rights Perspective: Emphasising the Nation-State Hannah Arendt, in her famous book The Origins of Totalitarianism, coined the phrase ‘the right to have rights’ to describe the situation of stateless persons. 41 Careful analysis of her position on statelessness shows that, in order to have or enjoy other human rights, being merely human is not enough. Rather, one must have a right of nationality first or be a part of a political community. 42 Thus, Arendt rejected the normative claims of universal rights. 43 Arendt concludes that what stateless people lack is the fundamental ‘right to have rights’; the political and legal recognition that would come with being a member of a certain political community. 44 Brad Blitz and Miguel Otero-Iglesias summarised this position on statelessness: For Arendt, statelessness illustrated a situation of ‘rightlessness’ which involved three distinct losses: of a home, as a result of being thrust into exile; of government protection, as a result of denaturalisation or the severing of the bond between the state and the individual; and of ‘a place in the world’ where the individual could belong, be heard and express his or her opinions. Statelessness therefore entailed the loss of the right to have rights. 45 The presence of stateless people led Arendt to claim that human rights, supposedly universal, have no meaning unless they can be anchored to an effective source of protection and, for her, the only option is the state. 46 Giorgio Agamben also rejected the idea that human rights are guaranteed to human beings just because they are human. 47 Unlike Arendt, said John Lechte and Saul Newman, Agamben believes that zoē [‘bare life’] is appropriated by the mechanisms of sovereign political power even as the excluded and abandoned entity, caught, as he puts it, in the relation of the ban. In other words, to be subject to the ban or to be consigned to the status of homo sacer — the ‘sacred’ man who may be killed but not sacrificed — is to be placed on a terrain of radical freedom (as in the State of Nature), but, on the contrary, to be abandoned by the law and removed from its protections, and thus to be subject to lawless sovereign violence. 48 This situation of abandonment by law or the sovereign ‘ban’ applies to the situation of stateless people. 49 Both Arendt and Agamben were critical of the sovereignty of the state, but at the same time, they did not offer us any other way to conceptualise or define statelessness. Notably, Arendt’s critical stance of 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (new edn, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976) 302. ibid. See Brad K Blitz and Miguel Otero-Iglesias, ‘Stateless by Any Other Name: Refused AsylumSeekers in the United Kingdom’ (2011) 37(4) Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 657, 658–60. John Lechte and Saul Newman, ‘Agamben, Arendt and Human Rights: Bearing Witness to the Human’ (2012) 15(4) European Journal of Social Theory 522, 523. Blitz and Otero-Iglesias (n 43) 659 (emphasis in original). See Brad K Blitz, ‘The State and the Stateless: The Legacy of Hannah Arendt Reconsidered’ in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2017) 70. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University Press 1998). Lechte and Newman (n 44) 524 (emphasis in original), discussing Agamben (n 47) 110. ibid 525. 280