When the Nation Conquered the State: Arendt’s Importance Today

• Author: Kathleen R. Arnold
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221104510
• Published date: 01 April 2023
• Date: 01 April 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221104510

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(2) 355 –381

© The Author(s) 2022

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/00905917221104510

journals.sagepub.com/home/ptx

Article

When the Nation

Conquered the State:

Arendt’s Importance

Today

Kathleen R. Arnold1

Abstract

This essay focuses on the contemporary relevance of Hannah Arendt’s

work insofar as it relates to US racism, imperialism, and migration. While

Arendt denied that US migration policy and racism were linked or even

similar to exercises of racialized sovereignty, totalitarian tactics, and mass

displacement in Europe, I suggest that her analyses help us to understand

important racialized dialectics between prison and camp, citizen and

stateless, and external displacement and internal displacement. In effect,

this essay suggests that many of Arendt’s analyses of racism, migration, and

camps are more relevant to US history and contemporary US reality than

she did or would have admitted. Arendt’s work importantly suggested that

the stateless were so rightless that they lacked even criminal rights. In many

respects, the criminal-stateless binary accurately illustrates the rightlessness

of refugees in contrast to the rights of US citizen-criminals. However, she

partly fails to recognize how the dialectical opposition between foreigner and

citizen-criminal could lead to less visible forms of overlap and convergence.

Arendt’s binary also indicates an adherence to crypto-normativity, despite

her professed antifoundational approach to political issues. Together,

her theoretical strengths and certain failures illuminate our own (mis)

understandings of a set of complex circumstances experienced today.

1Director of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, Political Science, DePaul University,

Chicago, IL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Kathleen R. Arnold, Director of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, Political Science,

DePaul University, 990 W Fullerton Ave., Chicago, IL 60614, USA.

Email: karnol14@depaul.edu or katy@mcom.com

1104510PTXXXX10.1177/00905917221104510Political TheoryArnold

research-article2022

356 Political Theory 51(2)

Keywords

Arendt, racism, statelessness, imperialism, migration, displacement

Introduction

Anecdotal evidence suggests that Hannah Arendt’s political writing became

increasingly popular in the past few years, with the election of Donald Trump

(see Grenier 2017; Williams 2017). As greater attention was brought on harsh

migration policies in the United States, from detention conditions to forced

family separation at the border, some leaders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

invoked Arendt’s concepts of totalitarianism and the camp to understand

what might be occurring on US soil (Kelly 2019). Less frequently have peo-

ple connected Arendt’s ideas to a reframing of foreign policy, including US

relations with former colonies such as Palestine, or a recognition of how the

diminishment of prisoners’ rights brings them closer to the rightless status of

stateless individuals. In this essay, I will analyze the brilliance of ideas in the

Origins of Totalitarianism (OT) (1979) that Arendt held were limited to

European cases, suggesting that they are relevant and helpful to understand-

ing past and present US policies. This includes US racism, migration policy,

and policies that do not count internally displaced people as refugees (par-

ticularly in decolonizing areas).

In the first section, I focus on three important dialectical binaries in OT

that are triggered by the emergence of systematic, pseudoscientific racial

policies: the racialized nation versus the state that produces a dialectic

between foreigner and citizen, the stateless individual versus the criminal,

and the camp versus the prison. As I explain, Arendt’s brief theory of racist

ideology is important to understand the depth and complexity of these

binaries (1979, ch. 6). Specifically, her arguments highlight the impor-

tance of race in understanding how criminally innocent civilians can be

locked up for crimes of status rather than a moral violation. As these civil-

ians are detained without charges and experience violations of so-called

inalienable rights, the camp is conceived of as the dialectical opposite of

the prison as it legally suspends the law and denationalizes national terri-

tory. That is, the camp is a geospatial site of arbitrary power where any-

thing can happen. Under racial classifications, the stateless subject is not

merely abandoned and rightless but also cast as an existential enemy or

“outlaw” (Arendt 1979, ch. 9).