Hannah Arendt on the Stateless
(Richard J. Bernstein, Parallax, 11:1, 2005)
When we lose our sense of – or are forcibly
kept from – sharing a common world from a plurality of perspectives with our fellow
human beings, we lose something of our humanity. The fundamental deprivation that
occurs when one is stripped of the right to have rights is that an individual no longer
has the opportunity to act. This right is even more basic than those of freedom and
justice in the sense that a presupposition of becoming a citizen (where freedom and
justice are relevant) is the ability to act, to initiate, and to form opinions on a shared,
common world.
The most basic right is ‘the right to have rights (and that means to live in a framework
where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some kind
of organized community’. The full shock of witnessing what happened when millions
of people suddenly appear who have lost, and cannot regain, this ‘right to have rights’
taught Arendt how the sudden loss of home, of one’s place in the world, of one’s
political status, ‘[became] identical with expulsion from humanity altogether’: