2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(2) However, if Arendt’s categories might allow for such an interpretation of We Are Here’s name, interpreting their camp-demonstration, and subsequent squatdemonstrations, as a political enactment of the right to have rights runs up against Arendt’s fundamental opposition of politics to what she calls ‘the dark background of mere givenness’. 100 I argued in the previous section that Arendt’s opposition of politics to ‘the dark background of mere givenness’ needs to be critiqued when this ‘dark background’, and the ways in which it is opposed to the realm of politics, are not merely given, but have themselves been produced by humans. This political production of the ‘dark background of mere givenness’ includes not only the illegalisation of residence and the discouragement policy’s myriad ways of putting people in extremely precarious positions that necessitates a focus on basic bodily needs such as the need for food and shelter, but also the imperialist and post-imperialist relations of exploitation and violence between Europe or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the regions of origin of the members of We Are Here in Africa and the Middle East. Indeed, We Are Here has participated in innumerable demonstrations, not just calling attention to their own plight but also protesting such issues as the European Union’s 2016 refugee barter with Turkey, arms manufacturing and trading and racism. 101 Although the racist actions against We Are Here are easily dismissed as isolated incidents by marginal groups, Arendt’s critique of the post-imperialist nation-state suggests a more structural explanation of the ways in which militant defenses of the nation, in violent opposition to racialised others, take the place of participation in politics. As I discussed in Part III, Arendt’s narrative in ‘Imperialism’ begins with the limitless expansion of capital, which produces a ‘superfluous’ ‘excess population’ within European nation-states that gets exported to the colonies. According to Arendt, the antipolitical mode of existence of this excess population has its origins in Thomas Hobbes’s antipolitical, ‘bourgeois’ philosophy that sees human beings primarily as isolated individuals concerned exclusively with their own biological survival and with furthering their private interests. 102 But this antipolitical mode of existence manifests itself fully only in the mutually dehumanising encounter of the European excess populations with African colonial subjects, which undermines politics within Europe as well when it gets imported back into the European nation-states. It is therefore worth recalling that the discouragement policy that I mentioned earlier in this section — an intensification of the political exclusions diagnosed by Arendt in 1951 — was developed in tandem with the ‘reforms’ and privatisations of the 1990s, which were enacted in the Netherlands by supposedly postideological government coalitions of right-of-center liberal parties and ‘Third Way’ Social Democrats. The discouragement policy seeks to ‘incentivise’ people to leave the Netherlands by means of strong negative ‘stimuli’, but many other policies govern nationals in a similar way: as bodies ‘responsible’ for reacting to incentives, rather than as speaking and acting citizens. Like the substitution of culturalist or racial identifications for political participation, this substitution of population management for politics suggests that the extent to which the post- 100 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (n 1) 301. 101 See ‘Protest Tegen Racisme in Amsterdam’, Hart van Nederland (online, 23 March 2019) <www.hartvannederland.nl/nieuws/2019/protest-tegen-racisme-in-amsterdam-een-sociaalen-economisch-rechtvaardig-nederland/>. 102 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (n 1) 139–43. 212