Statelessness forced states into the very illegality they claimed to police.

Evidence

The real trouble started as soon as the two recognized remedies, repatriation and naturalization, were tried. Repatriation measures naturally failed when there was no country to which these people could be deported. They failed not because of consideration for the stateless person (as it may appear today when Soviet Russia claims its former citizens and the democratic countries must protect them from a repatriation they do not want); and not because of humanitarian sentiments on the part of the countries that were swamped with refugees; but because neither the country of origin nor any other agreed to accept the stateless person. It would seem that the very undeportability of the stateless person should have prevented a government’s expelling him; but since the man without a state was “an anomaly for whom there is no appropriate niche in the framework of the general law”34—an outlaw by definition—he was completely at the mercy of the police, which itself did not worry too much about committing a few illegal acts in order to diminish the country’s burden of indésirables. In other words, the state, insisting on its sovereign right of expulsion, was forced by the illegal nature of statelessness into admittedly illegal acts. It smuggled its expelled stateless into the neighboring countries, with the result that the latter retaliated in kind. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 691

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the stateless person as ‘an outlaw by definition’ — a person with no niche in the framework of general law — which is a core concept for the scaffolding toolkit.
• XREF: Connects directly to the concept of homo sacer and biopolitics; the stateless person as life stripped of legal protection anticipates Agamben.