2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(2) corrupting, violent interactions between the English and their colonial subjects: Arendt repeatedly cites Burke’s warning that ‘“the breakers of the law in India” might become “the makers of law for England”’. 29 Arendt’s diagnosis, in ch 9, of the predicament of stateless people, refugees, and minorities in the mid-twentieth century is the culmination of this analysis of the nation-state in an age of imperialism. Arendt’s argument in the first half of ch 9 is that because nation-states are the states of culturally, linguistically, religiously, ethnically and/or racially homogeneous nations, they inevitably produce an excess of outsiders who live on their territory but do not belong to these nations and cannot be assimilated by them. This structural political flaw of the principle of the nation-state did not manifest itself (historically) until after World War I, when new nation-states proliferated after the collapse of the Austro–Hungarian, Czarist and Ottoman empires. For instance, the creation of a Polish nation-state produced an excess of Russians and Jews who did not belong to the Polish nation; 30 the creation of Turkey produced an excess of Armenians, Greeks and Kurds. 31 The production of inassimilable excess populations was accelerated after World War II, when the collapse of the Western-European colonial empires caused an even greater proliferation of new nation-states. For instance, the creation of a Jewish nation-state produced an excess of Palestinians; 32 the creation of an Indian nationstate produced an excess of Muslims.33 Whereas stateless people and refugees in earlier centuries could found new political communities elsewhere, Arendt argues the predicament of stateless people and refugees in the mid-twentieth century is that the entire globe is occupied by a closed system of nation-states, so that there is nowhere else to go. Political structures like the European Union have arguably exacerbated the problem diagnosed by Arendt: because European Union citizenship is linked to national citizenship, exclusion from national citizenship also means exclusion from EU citizenship. 34 III POLITICAL MECHANISMS OF DEHUMANISATION: ARENDT’S AMBIVALENCE ABOUT ‘SAVAGES’ It is at this point that Arendt introduces her critique of human rights. Her provocative argument in the second half of ch 9, on ‘The Perplexities of the Rights of Man’, is that the closed system of nation-states that occupies the entire globe produces minorities, stateless people and refugees not just as an excess of nonnationals, but as an excess of non-humans. 35 The reason is the following. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen at the end of the eighteenth century broke with the idea that law emanates from ‘social, spiritual, and religious 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 ibid 130, 183, citing Edmund Burke, Reflections on The Revolution in France (1790) 38. See also Luke Gibbons, ‘“Subtilized into Savages”: Edmund Burke, Progress, and Primitivism’ (2001) 100(1) The South Atlantic Quarterly 83. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (n 1) 273. ibid 285. Arendt does not discuss the Kurds. ibid 290. ibid. Étienne Balibar analyses this double exclusion. See Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton University Press 2004), particularly ch 1, titled ‘At the Borders of Europe’. On this point, see Étienne Balibar, ‘(De)Constructing the Human as Human Institution: A Reflection on the Coherence of Hannah Arendt’s Practical Philosophy’ (2007) 74(3) Social Research 727. 200