Totalitarianism: Reasons Why Human Dignity Need a New Guarantee - Essay Example

Totalitarianism: Reasons Why Human Dignity Need a New Guarantee Introduction Arendt believes strongly that today’s political regimes are consequences of the political philosophies of the western traditions. Totalitarianism is a political ideology that is characterized by the government enforcing total control over all aspects of the lives of the citizens or her subjects. The government permits no freedom to the people and seeks to take charge of basically all aspects of human life and exercises a strong central rule to the subjects. The system was initially designed in a positive motive and bore the slogan “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” However, the concept was gradually corrupted to evoke the feeling of extreme authoritarianism. The rights of man were only established and designed by man. She saw refugees as the bad fruits of the current political ideologies and hence she challenges the purpose and effectiveness of the current political practices and thoughts. By her moving away from the concept of inalienable or natural rights and focusing on the right of individual membership within a community for the purpose of human dignity, she instigates a favorable foundation for human rights. Hannah Arendt’s article on the new guarantee was triggered by the resultant repercussion of the Second World War and the holocaust. She sought to address the issue of human dignity and rights. Many people were left without a state identity and left as destitute refugees both in their original native countries and also in foreign countries (Arendt p.274-277). In the Preface to Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt claims human dignity requires a new pledge that can only be established in a new principle (political). This study intends to understand why human dignity needs a new political guarantee as proposed by Hannah Arendt and what necessitates the need. Arendt insists that a new guarantee is necessary so as to ascertain human dignity. This is after the nineteenth century idea of peaceful cosmopolitan in the respect of human rights was destroyed. The loss of human rights defines the state of being a refugee. Arendt says that the state of being a refugee is best understood from different perspectives; physical, social and political displacement of an individual. Lack of a physical place to live in and settle defines the refugee state to a large extent. However, other aspects also come in handy such as the deprivation of an individual right to action and to freedom of opinion. The collective sum of the modern displacement and the degradation are what Arendt terms as “wordlessness”. She sighted the remedy to the state of wordlessness as being embedded on the need to revisit the foundations of ethics of human rights especially at such a time as this when liberal policies on natural rights have lost credibility; understanding the incompatibility of national sovereignty with civic responsibility and human dignity, as well as the importance of the citizens to understand their right in affording political empowerment. The concern of Arendt arose from the increased number of refugees in liberal democratic state of Europe over the time. The sovereign authority in the state embraced universal individual rights and national sovereignty. However, the sovereign states restricted people from acquiring citizenship or the right to entry into her territories. This is a contradiction of the liberal state’s sovereignty and universalism and thus denying citizenship to person or group of people or turning away refugees of other states is a wrong principle. She argues that such rights cannot be realized without the state acknowledgement to sovereign power and that a relationship abides between the state rights and individual rights. Refugees are thus the resultant product when the state rights and individual rights conflict (Arendt p. 267-270). The problem of statelessness would be solved by the creation of one universal law consisting of one human right and allow citizens to belong to a specific political community, according to Arendt. She argued that the only way to understand the contradictions and failures of the current political thought and practice is by evaluating the experiences of the victims or those who lack the rights and those with nonexistent and marginal regal status (Cotter, p.5-6). In evaluation of the lives or experiences by the victims, Arendt found out that there are three major concerns that need be evaluated. First, Arendt cited problems in the foundations of human rights. She found out that there were confrontations between the sovereignty of the people and the individual sovereignty in the liberal political theory. The ultimate result and the source of human law can only be traced in and out on man himself. They were seen as inalienable and as though they needed no higher authority for their execution. However, the execution of the so called inalienable laws proved un-working later and there was a need for the collective rights of the people. Guarantee was only found in the collectiveness of the people and not in the sovereign self-government. It was also noted that the invention of “the people” was simultaneous with the invention of the “individual”. She argues that the tag of contention between the nation and the individual resulted in a conflict between the nation and the state, and which the nation won. She says that the conflict only came to be understood at the birth of modern state when the rights of man and the national sovereignty demand were combined by the French Revolution (Cotter, p.1-3). In addition, the rights of man are unfeasible. Human rights are alienable and every person has a legal right to universal rights. While outside one’s nation, it is impossible to assume the guarantee of rights. However, international agreements protect state sovereignty. This was clearly seen when the Nazism refugees, after being expelled from their homelands, only got a temporal acceptance into other states or they lacked acceptance at all. This led to the conclusion that human rights were indeed alienable and thus such a phrase as human rights as a scheme to represent hypocrisy are hopeless idealism. Arendt says that the rights of a man are an idea that was never properly instituted or enforced. She argued that if proper laws existed they ought to be affordable to all with no conditions whatsoever so long as a person is member to the human race. There is a conflict between the man and state sovereignty and universalism and inalienability. In this regard, the ability to choose membership depicts full sovereign power in totality. She stated that in the international law sphere, sovereignty is more absolute in among other maters nationality, naturalization, emigration and expulsion. On the issue of state sovereignty, there are crucial contradictory notes. A basic paradox is observable in the principle of the sovereignty of the state, according to Arendt. She identifies that the sovereignty of a state is dependent on the agreement of international community. Her agreement protects and constrains the state sovereignty. She sees the system in international scene as being more characterized by politics of power. There is a common point of convergence between man and communities where communities are believed to spring from man but not from the nature. Arendt therefore proposes for international cooperation to guarantee new international understanding of the state or lack of state. However, there is a lead to some conclusion that there is already some international cooperation as long as there is a state system. She therefore reasons that in the absence of mutual cooperation and respect there would be no lasting security to be experienced. She says that risk of invasion is by no means guaranteed by simply monopolizing violence and declaring a state sovereign within the borders. In the contrary, the reality of a sovereign state is only understood and realized in international cooperation. International agreements guarantee and restrict the sovereignty of the state in the like manner that liberal state limits and guarantees the individual sovereignty. If the government disrespects other states, then this is the only time the sovereign right to expel can be exercised. This implies that the exercise of total sovereignty in the exclusion matters is degradation of the same principle in that it impinges on the sovereignty on equal states. Helis says that the state of statelessness is normally exacerbated by the actual comprehensiveness of the nation state system. The comprehensiveness of the system makes more permanent the modern day refugee displacement. Today, we are living in a new global political system and this means that the ability of people to loose and never raging their right to belong is too high. This is because the world we are living in today has become more of a small village (Helis, p. 73-78). The common treaties and international agreements enable the citizens of any country to access legal aid whenever one is. In a like manner, a stateless individual carries with himself his political status of statelessness every where he goes. The loss of one’s own government simply indicates the loss of one’s own protection from the government. Refugees find it rough in fitting in the context because there is no land that would be deemed vacant hence they could occupy and set up their own village. It’s only the state that guarantees each and every individual the right to be protected and to belong and without a government, the refugee gets excluded from family and the nation. Naturalism is the traditional mode of solving the problem. It covers nationals only, citizens by birth and the people born in the territory. Naturalization as a law incorporates all residents in a nation. This equally leads to the initial point of concern that there should be no separation between citizens and nationals. However, a large number of exceptions are being recorded by the countries and these lenders governments not competent in attending to the cases. Nevertheless, there was a traditional way to deal with the issue of mass movement and this was through the right of asylum. It has been the only international law at play over the time. Arendt acknowledges the right and states that “it was the only right that ever figured as a symbol of the Rights of Man in the sphere of international relations.” (p. 284). However, the right to asylum is in contradiction to the international rights of the state. In the past, the rights to asylum were protection both to the refugees and the countries of the refugees. This assured the persecuted and non citizens’ security had protected the refuge country from any act of lawlessness. However, the need for state sovereignty led to the unacceptability of the right of asylum because the state sovereignty was meant to suffice the national’s even while outside the nation. The right of asylum served to protect the refugee as well as her country. Highly exceptional cases involving the refugees of political violence received special consideration in matters of the right of asylum (Arendt p.280). This also was intended to give solace to victims of persecution on political conditions. Arendt’s also showed that countries are able to sideline citizens within their borders and thus contradicting the more liberal democratic principles. Through this, individual rights to persons are denied on the need and those with marginal conditions. According to Arendt, such marginalized cases are normally at the verge of total exclusion in the state of statelessness. In a great way, she argues that the way the minorities are treated in the nation – state – indicate the liberal nature between territory, nationality and the citizenship. One’s right to have rights are determined by national origin. It has been the case that naturalized citizens are demeaned by the natives because it is argued that they “receive their rights by law and not by birth, from the state and not from the nation.” The scenario of multitudes of refugees brought to a halt the illusion that the rights of man only could safeguard those of whose nationality had been compromised from a particular territory. This clear evidence of the dependence of human rights on national sovereignty reveals the fact that the human rights regarded by “well-meaning idealists” as “inalienable” are actually “enjoyed only by citizens of the most prosperous and civilized countries.” Human status loss is constituted by the loss of citizenship. Arendt argues from the point of failure of international efforts to protect human rights. She reasons that it is a clear indication of a failure of the international efforts when we have refugees. The failure can rightly be described by lack of stable or crash of the supranational law as the law that overrides national sovereignty. He explains the argument by Arendt that refugee’s do not necessarily lose their right to association or speech but rather loose the context in which association and speech is meaningful. The “man” without all worldly attributes forms the basis upon which all human rights are based. This scenario, on the other hand, represents a person who is all vulnerable and thus no one would desire to be such. It is in this regard that Arendt argues that the state is in total want or re-correction. Having lost all the attributes of humanity, then the man would only fit to receive the treatment of an incomplete man or in actual sense receive no humanly treatment. Though with a lot of resource such as in education, these people are rendered useless and their ultimate destiny is death or ceases to exist without having done anything valuable on to the world. Therefore, Arendt argues that without one’s citizen ship, one is as good as extinct with the current state. One ends up missing the relevance of speech and all other human attributes and ends up in an animal like state of valuelessness (Cotter, p.8-19). Finally, one thing appears dormant that refugees are not by the virtual of competence of a state but rather by the fact of in competence of a state. Refugees are thus better interpreted to be the resultant of the anomalies of the current political systems. This, therefore, forms the basis of Arendt’s feeling that the current political thought and paradigms are not holistically efficient. Rights according to Arendt are conventions or the product to all the collective human agreements and hence an integral part of human artifice. This necessitates the commonality of the human being in pluralistic state. She concludes that “The concept of human rights can again be meaningful only if they are redefined as a right to the human condition itself, which depends upon belonging to some human community, the right never to be dependent upon some inborn human dignity which de facto, aside from its guarantee by fellow-men...does not exist...” (281). All rights are fragile and so are human agreements. They rely on human agreement and not so much on natural rights. All mankind therefore has a great role to play in starting and maintaining these agreements. All men should have a right to belong, and choice is inevitable as to the rights and privileges to be accorded to each (Arendt p.279-281). Following the above refugee case scenario, it is thus acceptable to reason as Arendt does that indeed human race would require a new law so as to guarantee human dignity. Human laws and agreements are made by man and in no one way can be without the man himself. However, authority is instigated to oversee the workability of the laws. Nevertheless, the existing laws have to a large extent been seen to fail and this would necessitate review and possible designing of others in order to facilitate the rightful living and coexistence between people. Failure with the government is equally to blame for the desperation with citizens by her failure to guarantee security and general responsibility. A relationship abides between the state rights and individual rights and would need great stewardship, which may not be readily available with the current ideological existence (Helis, p. 73-78). Bibliography Arendt, H 1962, The Origins Of Totalitarianism, The World Publishing Company, Cleveland Ohio. Cotter, B n.d, Hannah Arendt and “the Right to Have Rights”, viewed 19 November 2012, Helis, J 2008, ‘Hannah Arendt and Human Dignity: Theoretical Foundations and Constitutional Protection of Human Rights.’ Journal of Politics and Law, vol. 1, No. 3. Read More