Arendt discovered what she called the “right to have rights” through painful personal experience. In 1933, she, along with other Jews, was forced to flee to Paris to escape rising anti-Semitism in Germany. Two years later the Nuremberg Laws formally enacted what she already knew to be the case: she and all other German Jews were no longer citizens of the Reich. Effectively they were stateless refugees.
After the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, Arendt applied in desperation for asylum at the US embassy in Marseilles. But the US State Department discouraged the issuance of visas to any of the thousands of people fleeing the Nazis, even directly targeted Jews such as Arendt. If it were not for an American diplomat who defied his government’s directives and helped Arendt secure illegal travel documents to the US, Arendt might not have survived the war. In 1951, after 18 years without an official nationality, she was naturalized as a US citizen.
That same year, Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism. In the book’s ninth chapter, she reflected on what her experience as a refugee had taught her about the ways in which individuals come to lose and gain rights. What especially struck her was that after being stripped of German citizenship, she was unable to enjoy the rights that were thought to be hers by virtue of being human.
Human rights had not gotten Arendt out of Europe. Her situation only improved when she was recognized as a refugee and potential citizen by another country. This reality led her to an important insight: being recognized as a member of a functioning political community—as opposed to merely being human—proves decisive for having rights.
Arendt’s insight flew in the face of the new orthodoxy in international politics, which had emerged just a few years earlier under the banner of “human rights.” According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which appeared in 1948, human beings have fundamental rights simply by virtue of being human. To this day, human rights are said to be intrinsic to the very existence of human beings, regardless of nationality, gender, language, religion, ethnicity, or any other specific status. Since they are thought to be secured by the fact of humanity as such—and not bestowed by an earthly power—they cannot, or so the theory goes, be taken away by any earthly power. When all else is lost, human rights are what humans fall back on as a natural, inalienable birthright.
In the decades before World War II, Arendt knew that the notion of human rights had already been put to the test, and found wanting. The sudden emergence after World War I of two groups of people who lived in European countries, but were not citizens of any of them, made the failure of human rights all the more distressingly apparent.
“National minorities” in the new countries formed out of the dissolution of the large multiethnic empires at the end of the war—such as Slovaks in Czechoslovakia, a successor state to the Austro-Hungarian Empire—were, in principle, citizens of the country in which they lived. But as separate minorities within the dominant national culture, they could not depend on their government to guarantee them the standard legal protections routinely enjoyed by other citizens. Even worse was the situation of “stateless persons,” such as Arendt herself and countless others from Spain, Turkey, Hungary, and Germany. For they were neither functionally nor formally citizens of any country. They had been stripped of any citizenship they had possessed through governmental acts of mass denationalization.
It is at this point, when people are human in this most reductive sense, that human rights should have provided relief for these persons.