The inability to treat stateless people as legal persons threatens all citizens’ legal equality
Evidence
For the nation-state cannot exist once its principle of equality before the law has broken down. Without this legal equality, which originally was destined to replace the older laws and orders of the feudal society, the nation dissolves into an anarchic mass of overand underprivileged individuals. Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states. The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 704
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Connects to the scaffold on colonial psychology/racialized selfhood — the mechanism of how a state’s exception for one group degrades rights for all echoes Arendt’s later theme of totalitarian rule by police decree.
Related
- Statelessness destroys the structure of legal national institutions and inverts civilized values (similarity 0.82)
- Loss of national rights and human rights are experienced as identical by the stateless. (similarity 0.80)
- The legal order presupposes every person must belong to some deportable territory (similarity 0.79)
- Every political event since 1919 added new irreversible categories of stateless people (similarity 0.79)
- Stateless people can be deprived of all legal rights regardless of any specific crime. (similarity 0.79)
- Statelessness forced states into the very illegality they claimed to police. (similarity 0.78)
- The nation-state’s inability to protect the stateless lets persecutors impose their values (similarity 0.78)