Statelessness: The making and unmaking of political identity

1 [Published in The European Legacy 1, no. 2 (1996)] STATELESSNESS: THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF POLITICAL IDENTITY Nicholas Xenos In her report on the trial of Adolph Eichmann, Hannah Arendt observes that a series of legal measures were taken by the government of the Third Reich to prepare the ground of legitimation for the Final Solution. The infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935 established two levels of participation in the state; deprived of their citizenship (Reichsbürger), Jews would nevertheless remain members of the state (Staatsangehörige) and thus retain some civil rights. A 1941 decree amended the nationality law to state that a Jew would not be considered a German national if he or she lived outside the territory of the Reich. A further regulation, issued in 1942, declared all deported Jews to be "hostile to the nation and the state."(1) Once removed from the Reich to concentration camps, and thus made stateless, German Jews were left without even the pretense of legal protection and were prey to extermination. In almost all territories occupied by German forces, the first to be deported were the already stateless, followed by those subsequently rendered stateless through anti-Jewish legislation.(2) The Holocaust represents an extreme example of what is a commonplace fact; namely, that modern states define not only citizenship but also nationality. To be a citizen of a modern state is to manifest a simultaneous membership in a nation. Adult residents of a nation who are not full citizens are generally members of a nationality other than that of the citizens, but the accession to citizenship means incorporation into the citizens' nationality. What must be kept in mind, however, is that all of these concepts and 2 relationships are fluid. What is to be the criterion for citizenship and how the nation is defined are issues that may manifest customary or legal continuity, but they are always subject to revision. Hence German Jews suddenly found themselves deprived of German nationality by decree of the state. Today we are daily confronted with such acts of redefinition in the Baltic states, in the former Yugoslavia, in Africa, and elsewhere. * The confluence of nationality and citizenship is a peculiarity of the aptly named nation-state. The European tradition that coalesced into the modern nation-state produced two principal categorical types of collective identity. For my purposes here, I will call these the natural and the conventional. By the natural, I mean categories of identity that are presumed to be the result of unintentional circumstance. Such categories include the Greek genos, phratry, or ethnos and the Roman gens, each describing a real or presumed common kinship group (families, tribes, or clans). These categories are to be distinguished from polis and civitas, both of which denote a self-governing community. Citizenship, membership in that community, was originally a function of birth, and therefore bridged the natural and the conventional, linking city and clan, though that direct connection became attenuated over time in both the Greek and Roman experiences. In medieval Europe, the familial principle became the province of lordly lineage and entailed in the pyramidal control of territory, while citizenship emerged around the eleventh century as membership in more or less politically independent communes, particularly in the city republics of northern Italy. In these cities, too, citizenship remained a function of birth. But while the citizens may have created all sorts of myths of origin for their cities, the idea that the citizens themselves descended from common birth was no longer a part of the collective imagination. Those cities served as the sites of commerce in goods, people, and ideas, and it was in the universities that they spawned that a new category of collective identity appeared; namely, the nation. Interestingly, given its subsequent history, the term "nation" 3 was originally applied to a community of foreigners and referred to a common place of birth.(3) Thus the scholastic meaning of nation places it in proximity to the German term Heimat, which connotes both home and native place, the latter meaning being close to the English "hamlet." By the time the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen announced that "sovereignty resides in the nation," and that citizenship would henceforward be inextricably linked to it, the term had taken on a somewhat different meaning and was now deployed to distinguish between the authentic inhabitants of the state's territory and their "foreign" adversaries. Everything now hinged on how the nation would be defined, and the ensuing struggle for control of the state in France was largely a struggle for control over the definition of the nation.(4) The familial principle temporarily faded away with the aristocracy, which was defined out of the nation, yet the natural pole of identity did not entirely disappear with it. Instead, the family has reappeared in the guise of the national family, a fictional, even mythical community whose native place--whose house--is the homeland. ** That political struggles under the conditions of the modern nation-state are importantly struggles over identity is because the national state is, in the jargon of social science, both a territorial and a membership organization.(5) This distinguishes the modern state from the parceled sovereignties that preceded it, in which control over territory was coextensive with control over people. Previously to the modern state, being resident in a territory was sufficient to determine one's political identity, which changed along with the dominant regime. Residents of a particular territory were passed along as subjects together with the title to the land. Free cities fell outside this system of parceled sovereignty until they fell victim to dominant military power. Residents of Parma, for example, were citizens of their city republic until it fell to the Spanish, making the Parmigianese subject to the Spanish crown. Afterward, they were transferred to French 4 domination. This accounts for subtle differences in the dialect of Parma as opposed to that of nearby Reggio nell' Emilia, which fell into the control of the d'Este family of Ferrara and later to the Papal States. Later still, both Parmigianese and Reggianese, long accustomed to accentuate their differences rather than their similarities, jointly became citizens of the new nation-state of Italy. An example that will help to show the difference between this pattern and that of the national state can be found in the Middle East, where the people we now call Palestinians were accustomed to leaving their homes between the Jordan river and the sea during periods of warfare, and then returning afterwards. One time they returned and they were subject to Turkish domination. Another time it was the British. Both of these powers were imperial and therefore indifferent to the identities of those who came along with the territories they commanded. When many Palestinians attempted to return to their homes after the war of 1948, however, they were unable to do so, because now a national state had come into being and these Palestinians could not be citizens of that state because they didn't fit its definition of national membership. So, instead, they became refugees.(6) These Palestinian Arabs kept alive the idea of a return to their homes for decades, freezing images of their houses and fruit trees in their memory long after their remembered villages had become Israeli towns. Some Palestinians, who had been consigned to refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, were able to seek out their houses after the 1967 war, when Israel occupied those territories. What they found were someone else's homes, houses that had become part of someone else's life story. Many of these Palestinian Arabs, and especially their children, who had had no immediate experience of these particular buildings, knowing them only in the form of older people's stories, came to reconfigure their notion of what their home was, replacing the particular houses and fruit trees of their memory or their stories with a more abstract notion of a homeland. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) had rejected the term refugees in favor of "returnees" (a'idoun), and the site of return gradually shifted from expropriated houses to 5 "the stolen homeland."(7) What was to be gained was a national state for the Palestinians that had not existed before. In the construction of this state, the returnees would in actuality be "returned" to a home that had not existed before and to a political identity that would be new.(8) In one perspective, the formation of this new identity is the product of the struggle for nationhood itself, and resembles the creation of Greek or Italian identity in the nineteenth century. As in those instances, the heroes and villains of the struggle, the episodes of temporary setback and ultimate victory are incorporated into a narrative of destiny that comes to define the collective identity of a particular people on the model of a nineteenth-century Bildungsroman; the story of a national character coming into being modeled on that of an individual. And what ties the Palestinians, ironically perhaps, to the Israeli Jews, is that, like their foes, the Palestinians came to identify themselves as a nation needing a place to call home. Part of their narrative of national character is structured around their previous statelessness. With border controls, police forces, flags, and stamps, the Palestinian state in Gaza and Jericho becomes the homeland of the Palestinians. It is what they collectively gain in exchange for the loss of their now ambivalently-because individually--remembered homes. This transition from statelessness to the creation of a state conceptualized as a homeland reveals a transformation in identity undertaken by the modern national state that is more difficult to see in examples such as those of Italy or Greece or other instances where territorial continuity is post facto assumed for the collectivity in question. However, if we recall the connection between the nation as representing a native place of birth and the German term Heimat we can see that the uprootedness associated with statelessness is an extreme form of a shift that is common to the experience of the modern state. That shift lies in the substitution, as in the Palestinian case, of the homeland for the home. The Peace Treaties that ended the First World War used two terms to describe those who had been turned into refugees as a result of that war and of the collapse of the 6 Russian, Austrian-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires. One was the French apatrides; the other the German Heimatlosen. The first term, to be without a patria, is itself ambivalent, though the intent seems clearly to have been to signify stateless. The second term, "homeless," is the one on which I wish to focus. Since those Treaties also established the principle that nationality should be the basis of statehood, I take it that homeless means in this context "without a national state." In other words, the principle was established that individuals belonged to groups who collectively were deprived of a home in the world. For a people so understood, only the establishment of a state of its own would satisfy the establishment of a home. This is the logic that applied to the establishment of the state of Israel almost thirty years after the Treaties. It is a logic of Realpolitik because in the world as currently organized politically, only a state can assure the recognition of rights and of a secure place in the world. But it is also a logic of bitter irony because such places are as much sites of exclusion as they are of inclusive identity, as the example of Israel shows. But in addition to this, the notion that everyone belongs to a nationality and that each nationality has its homeland can lead to the absurd situation that people are forced to leave their individual homes in order to go home to the homeland in state-sponsored programs of population exchanges and resettlements. Such was the fate of Greeks and Turks earlier in this century. Such is the fate of many Serbs and Croats and Bosnian Muslims today.(9) *** If the nineteenth century was the century of national construction in Europe, the twentieth century has become the century of the stateless, not only in Europe but throughout the world. The second phenomenon is more than a semantic consequence of the first. Excluded from the nationality of the states from which they flee as well as from those to which they flee, refugees who are caught in-between the borders of states are termed "refugees in orbit" in the phraseology of refugee affairs. It is a cruel but apt phrase since such people are not of this world. They exist but reside nowhere, since to be 7 at home now requires residence in a nation state. They are therefore devoid of any identity other than that which describes their condition: they are refugees, stateless, homeless.(10) Primo Levi described this condition in his memoir of Auschwitz, Se questo e un uomo. Arrested by a fascist antipartisan squad in the mountains of northern Italy during the period of the so-called Republic of Salo, Levi was not shot as a partisan, and therefore as an enemy of the puppet government, but rather turned over to German forces because he was a Jew.(11) His Italian identity was now disavowed by the fascist state in precisely the same pattern described by Hannah Arendt and he was sent to a concentration camp.(12) There, during a stint in the infirmary, Levi and the other inmates had the opportunity to reflect on their condition: When one works, one suffers and there is no time to think: our homes are less than a memory. But here the time is ours: from bunk to bunk, despite the prohibition, we exchange visits and we talk and we talk. The wooden hut, crammed with suffering humanity, is full of words, memories and of another pain. "Heimweh" the Germans call this pain; it is a beautiful word, it means "longing for one's home."(13) He goes on to write of the death of the spirit that had already been inflicted upon himself and his fellows and of his knowledge that he would not return. The state in its most extreme form had severed his past from any possible future. In rendering him homeless by rendering him stateless, it had deprived him and the other victims of the Holocaust of their identity. It may be true, as Benedict Anderson has argued, that "all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined" and therefore that the nation is merely one way to imagine collective identity, even if the most pervasive and deeply felt in the world today.(14) It is no doubt true, too, that "home" 8 is no less imaginary than is the nation. But the fact that the modern state has recourse to familial metaphors is a sign of the essential contingency and consequent need for legitimation of political institutions, a legitimacy that is thought to inhere in the natural, which is but one way to think of necessity. In imagining the national state in this way, individual identities are sublimated into common nationalities, heterogeneous experiences of home erased and rewritten as homogeneous myths of the homeland. Stories such as those told by Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt teach us that in the age of the nation state, the stateless--refugees, the victims of genocide--are not a temporarily unresolved epiphenomenon of the system of states but rather its essential product. Under the guise of necessity, political identity has been rendered more contingent than ever before, subject to revision or deletion virtually at any moment. The extraordinary reveals the ordinary. Nicholas Xenos University of Massachusetts at Amherst Department of Political Science Thompson Hall University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA 01003 U.S.A. 9 1 . Quoted in Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977): 158. The Nuremberg Laws and subsequent legal developments are also outlined in Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992): 165-68. The history behind the concept of Staatsgehörigkeit is discussed in ibid., pp. 6971. 2 . Arendt, Eichmann, pp. 151-219. 3 . Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, 4th ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993): 5-6. 4 . I have discussed this in a paper for an earlier conference of the ISSEI. See Nicholas Xenos, "The State, Rights, and the Homogeneous Nation," History of European Ideas 15, nos. 1-3 (1992): 77-82. For a comprehensive account, see Pierre Nora, "Nation," in François Furet and Mona Ozuf, eds., A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989): 74253. 5 . Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, pp. 21-22, 62-63. 6 . Danny Rubinstein, The People of Nowhere: The Palestinian Vision of Home, trans. Ina Friedman (New York: Times Books, Random House, 1991): 19-23. 7 . Ibid., p. 60. See also ibid., chap. 7. 8 . I have discussed this, in somewhat different terms, in Nicholas Xenos, "Intifadah," Grand Street 9, no. 2 (Autumn 1989): 229-36. 9 . See Nicholas Xenos, "Refugees: The Modern Political Condition," Alternatives 18 (1993): 419-30. 10 . For a description of this condition, as well as an insightful discussion of identity en- tailed in it, see Hannah Arendt, "We Refugees," in The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity 10 and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978): 55-66. 11 . The story of his capture is told in Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Schocken, 1984): 127-38. 12 . Levi writes that, under interrogation, "I admitted to being a Jew: partly because I was tired, partly out of an irrational digging in of pride." Ibid., p. 134. This pride, the assertion of an outlaw identity, is akin to Hannah Arendt's notion of the conscious pariah, in Arendt, "We Refugees," pp. 63-66. 13 . Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Collier Books, Macmillan, 1961): 49. 14 . Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991): 6.