2 - “The right to have rights”: Hannah Arendt on the contradictions of the nation-state

Summary

The previous chapter analyzed Kant's formulation and defense of cosmopolitan right and argued that the text left unclear which of the following premises justified the cosmopolitan right to hospitality: the right to seek human association, which in fact, could be viewed as an extension of the human claim to freedom; or the premise of the sphericality of the earth's surface and the juridical fiction of the common possession of the earth. Kant's discussion of cosmopolitan right, whatever its shortcomings, delineates a new terrain in the history of political thought. In formulating a sphere of right – in the juridical and moral senses of the term – between domestic constitutional and customary international law, Kant charted a terrain onto which the nations of this world began to venture only at the end two world wars. Kant was concerned that the granting of the right to permanent residency (Gastrecht) should remain a privilege of self-governing republican communities. Naturalization is a sovereign privilege. The obverse side of naturalization is “denationalization,” or loss of citizenship status.

After Kant, it was Hannah Arendt who turned to the ambiguous legacy of cosmopolitan law, and who dissected the paradoxes at the heart of the territorially based sovereign state system. One of the great political thinkers of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt argued that the twin phenomena of “political evil” and “statelessness” would remain the most daunting problems into the twenty-first century as well (Arendt 1994, 134; [1951] 1968; see Benhabib [1996] 2003).