The idea of the Rights of Man is thought by Arendt to be impracticable. Once a person ceases to be under the protection of the government of a nation-state, there is no higher agency left which can shelter them and assure them of their basic rights. In this manner, the Rights of Men is an exclusive one which only applies to individuals who are citizens of the nation-state, and not something which is universal and inalienable and recognised as part of every human being.
Even if an individual comes under the protection of the state, the idea of state sovereignty means that the state also the right to deny some human rights to its own citizens. Besides the extreme cases of human rights abuse, there are also cases where the state sees fit to remove citizens’ rights because of national security, for example, post-9/11 United States where the threat of terrorism sees the government ‘legitimately’ denying people their human and civil rights.
The international system of state sovereignty and co-operation both restricts as well as safeguards sovereignty in the way that the liberal democratic nation-state restricts and safeguards individual rights. Only by international co-operation can the rights of a nation-state be recognised. Yet, by exercising their sovereignty in choosing their own citizens, the state encroaches on the rights of other states to do so.
The current system of international co-operation means that the rights of each individual citizen’s rights can be guaranteed worldwide by virtue of their belonging to a certain state. However, this also means that once the an individual does not belong to any particular community, he would be excluded from all other communities as well since he does not come under the protection of any government. While there might be international agreements for asylum seekers and such, the government can find ways to get around them. For example, by creating internment camps where refugees are neither in one state nor another; since the refugees are not technically on the soil of a nation-state, the state’s government does not need to grant them asylum.
Once an individual ceases to belong to a state, he loses whatever human rights he supposedly should have as stated in the Rights of Man. Without membership to a political community, he becomes even worse than a slave, as he loses his voice in community and is denied of the chance to even contribute to society as it is. Thus, the stateless person loses his or her right to have rights, and seems to lose his place in humanity.
Arendt believes that the stark reality of plight stateless people and refugees show how human rights remain something that is theoretically ideal, yet practically impossible. Even supranational laws regarding human rights seem to only enforce the rights of citizens and even so, are merely guidelines. She believes that the only the right to citizenship as a supranational law can protect the rights of stateless people and refugees who would otherwise be deprived of their basic human rights. While she does advocate that such a supranational law, she does not say how this can be done or enforced in practical terms.
However, by following her arguments and examples of the plight of refugees and stateless people, we can think about present political theory and practice and how it threatens the theory of man having basic human rights. In any case, while theoretically, man have naturally universal and inalienable rights, this has not been practically possible as yet since laws and agreements have been based on the international system of nation-states and state sovereignty, which both conflicts with and is dependent on the so-called human rights.
Bibliography
The Portable Hannah Arendt (Ed Baehr Peter) Penguin, 2003
