Forced Displacement and the Paradox of Human Rights
Forced Displacement and the Paradox of Human Rights
It is appropriate to ask what elements allow us to discover the social and political actions within the experience of the Peace Communities that are directed at the construction of the state. To this end, it is vital to break with the opinion that forced displacement is a multiple violation of human rights. Even though this common idea perceives the problem in a general sense, it is by nature vague and does not reveal the concrete content of such rights.
When Hannah Arendt reflects on the situation of post-World War II Europe in Chapter 9 of The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt 1987), she examines the condition of minorities and stateless people to show how they reveal the decadence of the Nation-State, the crisis of which stems from the fate of the human rights regime.
For the author, the Declaration of the Rights of Man constitutes one of the most important moments in history, as it meant that the source of law was no longer based on the commandments of God or on historically defined customs, but rather to be found in Man himself. From this per- spective, such rights appear as formal, abstract principles based on the assumed existence of human beings as such, rather than being dependent on men belonging to a certain political community (Arendt 1987: 368). With regard to origin, these rights are not deducible to any other principle; while the legal order upholds these rights, it is assumed that no specific laws are necessary to protect them.
Confusion over the nature of rights nonetheless surfaced over the assumption that, if the Rights of Man served as the basis of law, then they must also be part of the rights of people orga- nized into a state and, consequently, it was assumed that only a fully emancipated and sovereign people could effectively guarantee such rights. In political practice, this produced the identification between the Rights of Man and the Rights of the Citizen, such that the protection of the former was left in the hands of the state in relation to its own citizens.
The arbitrary link between these two types of rights only became evident after the First World War with the appearance of groups of pariahs who fled their country of origin because their ethnic characteristics made them targets for extermination. Such people therefore were no longer associated with any nationality, meaning that they now had nothing more than their basic human condition and, as a result, no government would commit to guaranteeing their rights.
The Rights of Man had, after all, been defined as “inalienable” because it was assumed that they were independent of all governments. Yet it turned out that, when human beings were left without their own governments and had to resort to their minimum rights, there was no authority left to protect them and no institution with any desire to guarantee them (Arendt 1987: 370; Agamben 2000: 81).
The proclamation of Human Rights as the basis for the nation-state in the first modern consti- tutions is essentially linked to the specific individual’s association with a concrete political commu- nity: a certain nationality. That is precisely why a strategic understanding of the problem of forced displacement implies the knowledge that—even if at first sight this phenomenon appears as a pro- found and multiple violations of human rights—it should be approached from a civic perspective, as rights are generally only exercised and guaranteed in a concrete political community. In this per- spective, the simple demand for human rights outside of a political community is an empty state- ment that lacks mechanisms for enforcement. Accordingly, only in an emancipated state that can exercise its sovereignty based on political recognition of different social actors, is it possible to ensure citizen—and therefore human—rights.
To the extent that we can consider internal forced displacement as a perversion of the cat- egory of citizenship, we can understand that the dilemmas and contradictions implied in this phe- nomenon are not only humanitarian in nature, but also fundamentally political. What is at stake with forced displacement is the very political condition of citizens and therefore the efforts at resisting such a terrible social event can be understood as a struggle for political recognition and the social inclusion of the displaced communities.
In the concrete case of the Peace Communities, their justifications are aimed at the construc- tion of an organized community structure based on the sovereign will of their members, in which the structure also serves as a medium for the protection of human rights. The arguments employed to this end are an expression of the struggle for socio-political recognition of their culture and traditions.