The Refugee: Contravening State Sovereignty
Zvjezdana Kragic asks whether the existing state-centric international system can be sustained under the influx of climate change refugees.
In Hannah Arendt’s highly influential philosophical work, On Totalitarianism, the legacy of the twentieth century – that is, the establishment of human rights – is systematically critiqued.
The challenge to this system only became apparent after World War II, with the failure to accommodate the “people forced to live outside the scope of all tangible law”. The expulsion of minorities from political society – such as the Jewish community, among others – provided refugees with no recourse other than to claim protection under any human rights law. This was mainly as a result of the state being privileged with the provision of human rights.
More importantly, Arendt recognises that the international community, faced with the novelty of the refugee, did not know exactly which rights were lost. Though the refugee mourns the destruction of the family home, the disintegration of cultural practices, and loss of communal ties, there is one right not recognised. As a political being, the refugee ultimately loses the right to have rights.
The right to have rights is not so much concerned with substantive rights, such as the abovementioned basic needs, but rather the assumption “that no law exists for [the refugee] … that nobody wants to ever oppress them”. The refugee becomes existentially transparent.
State sovereignty, Arendt argues, is the main motivation behind the apathy to reintegrate the refugee back into society. States fiercely guard the right to determine who participates in their political communities.
The growing failure of the state to meet its moral obligations towards the refugee threatens its legitimacy.
Immigration control becomes problematic when refugee numbers rise to a critical level, which is the expectation with climate change refugees. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Norman Myers of Oxford University conservatively predict 150 million environmental refugees by 2050, representing 1.5 per cent of the expected world population of 10 billion. Thus, climate change refugees raise a practical political problem. Arendt argues that the growing failure of the state to meet its moral obligations towards the refugee threatens its legitimacy.
Historical Debris of Human Rights
Arendt traces the association between ‘the right to have rights’ and ‘recognised membership’ of a polity in historical developments. As the popularity of the state emerged, its role as the primary protector and provider of human rights became entrenched.
The notion of human rights emerged during the French Revolution, when man was proclaimed to be the very ‘source’ of rights. The emancipatory movement also provided man with the ‘right’ to determine his own sovereign: thus the citizen was born. Ironically, man was then instantaneously incorporated back into the masses: that is, the political community. This contradiction between autonomy and political allegiance continues to plague both the citizen and the foreigner.
Every man was born somewhere and, by that logic, has the right to citizenship of some kind. As a result, outsiders face the challenge of being reintegrated back into a polity.
The Rise of the Refugee
A climate change refugee is defined as a person displaced due to environmental disasters. A debate has emerged over whether ‘refugee’ is an accurate term to refer to the environmental circumstance of homelessness. That ambiguity does not necessarily pose a concern to this article. Rather, any person that has lost his or her place in a particular community is accorded the status of an outsider, and in the broader international sense, a ‘refugee’.
Although the number of refugees is continuously rising as a result of civil wars, poverty and terrorism, the potentially instantaneous influx of climate change refugees requires a rapid and flexible response by the global community.
Moreover, organising communities into tightly bounded states excludes the opportunity to recognise the problem itself. At the instance of expulsion, the refugee cannot appeal against his or her loss of rights. His or her standing before the law becomes unrecognised, and forces the refugee to remain in a vacuum of illegality and permanent displacement.
The refugee, by his or her very existence, questions the purpose and worth of international human rights, if the right to have rights cannot be protected or systematically enforced.
The physical manifestation of the very source of human rights stands outside state borders, naked in its pure humanity. No longer can the individual hide behind the veil of citizenship. Fundamentally, the dilemma for the refugee is exemplified by the loss of polity being equated with the loss of humanity.
Relating to the Refugee
Since the right to have rights becomes apparent only with expulsion from a political community, the concept is a revolutionary one, because this right stands apart from legal frameworks.
According to Arendt, mercy and friendship are the only means by which the outsider can be welcomed back into a political community.
The question then becomes how to encourage states to recognise the obligation of this relatively abstract right and, more importantly, how to implement it practically.
The response cannot simply be to place the right to have rights within the political context. It cannot become a right in itself, because it is only by virtue of a lack of membership that the right becomes relevant. Once man is entailed in a political community, he transgresses and leaves the right to have rights for substantive rights that underpin community relations. Thus, reintegration becomes an act of hospitality as a response to a moral obligation.
But why should states accept the moral burden of a foreigner, given the multitude of problems associated with integration?
The refugee must live somewhere and so he or she lives alongside the citizen as a fellow human, but exists as a shadow under the law. The continuous and strained relationship between the citizen and the refugee forces the outsider into the “conditions of savages”, as described by Arendt.
Arendt’s critique is an analysis of the relation that develops between the included and the excluded. In reality, refugees have few options. As reported by The Washington Post in 2008, when half of Bhola Island flooded, leaving 500,000 destitute, most moved into the nearby Bangladeshi Dhaka slums.
Accordingly, the citizen would come to view the conditions of the refugee as a moral failure on behalf of the state. Eventually, the citizen begins to question the legitimacy of the state. Dealing with the potential repercussions of a disgruntled citizenry and foreign guests requires an approach beyond the law and some would argue a re-conceptualisation of the role of the state.
Reconstructing State Hegemony
So how can we reconstruct the problem? Thomas Pogge, a contemporary political philosopher, advocates a controversial but potentially workable approach. In World Poverty and Human Rights, Pogge outlines an institutional design in response to the culmination of sovereignty at the level of state hegemony: vertical dispersion of sovereignty.
Fundamentally, the dilemma for the refugee is exemplified by the loss of polity being equated with the loss of humanity.
This system is somewhat akin to the development of the European Union (EU). Although the EU has faced a barrage of problems, the motivation to become part of the regional body has broadened the alliances of European citizens. There is a hope that conceiving of political membership beyond nationalistic ties might provide an alternative avenue for the reintegration of the refugee into some sort of wider political community.
Would distributing authority on a number of institutional levels become complex and bureaucratic? Perhaps. But it would also allow individuals to become part of more than one sphere of influence: the local, national, regional and global. In addition to political associations, individuals would participate in non-governmental organisations and global social institutions.
Crucially, as the citizen partakes in a “transnational scheme of social institutions”, the right to have rights would be recognised beyond the state level. Furthermore, moral obligations would be easier to accept because the citizen would recognise his greater influence in reconstructing institutions to align with general moral inclinations.
An Internal Paradox
It must be stressed that vertically dispersing sovereignty would not necessarily imply institutionalising the right to have rights. Essentially, there remains an internal tension within the concept of the right to have rights that cannot be resolved within any institutional system.
Arising out of conditions of exclusion, the right to have rights inherently asks whether ‘the right to membership’ can be legally instigated. But since the refugee stands outside the legal system (whether national or international), against whom does he or she make claims to restore those rights?
Presumably, refugees rely solely on the mercy of fellow human beings to welcome them back into a political community.
Including the right to have rights within transnational human rights will still not bring about any legal avenue within which to pursue the provision of that right.
This paradox is not intrinsic to the concept of the right to have rights. Rather, it is inherent to the political methodology used to structure the relation between law and rights.
Ultimately, we have a system in which rights and obligations – derived from moral intuitions – become available to us only through legal counterparts for practical purposes.
Conclusion
Finally, in anticipation of the potential criticism that this article may have neglected the realities of the current international relations system – namely, the scarcity of resources such as land, as well as continuing tensions between cultural groups – my aim was to provide a philosophical reinterpretation of the duty and function of nation-states in the face of an emerging power: the political outsider.
Conglomerating individuals into artificially bounded societies, and disposing of unlimited sovereignty within those bounds, interferes with the duty to promote human rights: the right to have rights being a primary obligation.
Addressing the issues of the outsider will require thinking and perceiving of our world in a drastically different way. Although theorists have difficulty offering a framework within which to incorporate the right to have rights, Pogge and Arendt’s critiques relocate responsibility from the arbitrary state to the fellow human.
It is hoped that membership in social and political institutions, which extend beyond state borders, would increase citizens’ responsiveness to the knock on their doors by a flood of refugees. But it remains a door that can only ever be opened voluntarily.
