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      Statelessness

      A stateless person is someone who is like a ghost—they are invisible to all the things we take for granted.

      —UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Barbara Hendricks

       Historical and Contemporary Statelessness

      Statelessness is not a new phenomenon. People have been displaced from formal belonging in the state in various ways since the 1800s. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, individuals were rendered stateless as a form of punishment for criminal activities or because they were deemed threats to social order.¹ Even today, many countries’ laws allow for denaturalization of an individual if he or she is deemed a threat to “social order.” It was not until the twentieth century, however, that statelessness became a group, as opposed to an individual, problem.² With the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, groups of people found themselves stateless when they were prevented from acquiring citizenship in the newly formed states. Hannah Arendt, herself a stateless person for many years, called this group the Heimatlosen, the “oldest group of stateless people” ([1948] 2004, 353).³ Jews were the primary group affected by these events, although other minority groups, such as Armenians and Roma, were also affected.

      The establishment of totalitarian regimes of different persuasions added to the growing number of stateless persons in Europe during the early to mid-twentieth century. “Denationalization became a powerful weapon of totalitarian politics” (Arendt [1948] 2004, 343). Individuals fleeing Communism in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, for example, were summarily denationalized and many of those fleeing Fascist Italy, Japan, and Germany were also rendered stateless (Torpey 2000, 124–26). While Jews and Armenians “showed the highest proportion of statelessness” from such discriminatory denationalization procedures during this time (Arendt [1948] 2004, 358; see also 367), “Trotskyites,” Spanish Republicans, and other political enemies were also targeted (343). In fact, Marc Vishniak lists the following groups as affected by statelessness during this period:

      Armenians who had escaped from Kurdish and Turkish massacres; Russians who had fled from the Soviet Union; the inhabitants of the Saar who had voted for France or for the League of Nations at the time of the Saar plebiscite; the Assyro-Chaldeans and Assyrians who had left Iraq after the massacres in that country; the Jews, democrats and socialists who had fled Nazi Germany; Austrian Jews, monarchists, democrats and socialists; Rumanians who opposed the dictatorship, and Rumanian Jews; anti-Fascist Italians and Italian Jews; Spanish Republicans, Czechoslovakian democrats, etc. After the outbreak of the war Poles, Norwegians, Netherlanders, Belgians, Frenchmen, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Estonians, Lithuanians and others joined their ranks. (Vishniak 1945, 34)

      During this time of economic decline, “disintegration” and “hatred” (Arendt [1948] 2004, 342), statelessness became a pervasive, and serious, problem. Arendt likened statelessness to being expelled “from humanity altogether” (377). Once individuals no longer belonged formally to some state through citizenship, they became “outlaw(s)” (360, 363) and “barbarians” (384) whose only way of escaping from their political and legal nonexistence was either to commit a crime or to demonstrate some sort of genius (364). In a world of sovereign states, premised as it was and continues to be on individuals belonging formally to some state, Arendt argued that the stateless represented a possible regression from civilization (382). They were—and still are—liminal subjects, caught in the space of the “betwixt and between” that lies outside states’ nationality classifications.⁴

      Although the exact number of stateless persons during this period is unknown, and although the stateless were a diverse lot, Arendt’s account describes certain commonalities among them. First, statelessness was largely the result of denaturalization and denationalization campaigns. That is, individuals became stateless because they were stripped of citizenship ([1948] 2004, 353–54, 365, 577), often on political grounds, not because they were born into statelessness, as occurs in The Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere today.

      Second, also in contrast to the present era, statelessness was associated with border-crossings. The stateless were arrivals from elsewhere (Arendt ([1948] 2004, 341, 352, 356) and therefore had a country of origin: “Nonrecognition of statelessness always means repatriation, i.e., deportation to a country of origin” (355). As I illustrate in this book, however, the stateless today do not necessarily have a country of origin to which to be deported and the majority do not cross international borders to escape persecution.

      Third, loss of citizenship entailed the loss of rights: the right to a home (Arendt ([1948] 2004, 372), the right to government protection and a legal status (373, 577), the right to an identity (364–65), the right to belong to a community (375, 377) and, in some instances, the right to life (375). Without citizenship, they “lost all other qualities and specific relationships—except that they were still human” (380).⁵ Of all the rights violations that the stateless suffered during this time, Arendt felt that the loss of a community to which to belong was the gravest, as it led to the deprivation of all other rights. “The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion … but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever” (375).

      As noted in Chapter 1, Arendt consequently insisted on the “right to have rights,” which comprised the “right to belong to some kind of organized community” where one’s opinion and actions mattered and one’s rights could be guaranteed (376, 377). It was because Arendt believed that human rights rested not on some sort of inherent human dignity,⁶ but rather on belonging as an equal to a political community,⁷ she insisted that “man as man has only one right that transcends his various rights as a citizen: the right never to be excluded from the rights granted by his community” (628).

      While much has changed since Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism more than sixty years ago—human rights have become part and parcel of international and local discourses, many governments incorporate such rights into their legislation and policies, and UNHCR has taken on the mandate of preventing and reducing statelessness globally—statelessness persists. UNHCR’s Statistical Online Population Database has data on just over 3.49 million stateless people in seventy states (UNHCR 2015b), but the agency estimates that more than ten million people are de jure stateless worldwide (2012b). It admits, however, that it has a “tough task determining the true number of stateless people” (2012b n. pag.) and others surmise that the problem of “de jure

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