Hannah Arendt's “Right to Have Rights”: A Philosophical Context for Human Security

Abstract

Contemporary international legal theorists and policymakers have endorsed the concept of “human security” in an effort to mitigate the same categories of suffering that Hannah Arendt sought to address with her concept of a “right to have rights.” Like Arendt, human security theorists and practitioners today focus on the plight of individuals in distress as a consequence of the unrealizability in practice of their human rights. But despite the popularity of the goal of human security, the content of this concept remains unsettled. This article argues that Arendt's notion of a right to have rights offers important insights to those who wish to develop the idea of human security in a way that primarily serves humanitarian, rather than strategic, goals, and who seek an interculturally legitimizable basis for human rights, rather than a conventionally universalist foundation.

Faculty of Social Sciences & Humanities. She has published in the areas of philosophy of law, Aboriginal rights, ethics, and international human rights. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript examining the ethical and legal philosophical implications of the responsibility to protect and human security. Many thanks to Terezia Zoric for her support in the preparation of this manuscript.

Notes

1. The question that faces us today is whether the achievement of public autonomy through democratic constitutionalism is inextricably tied to the territorial boundedness of modern nation-states, or whether new forms of political agency made possible by the contemporary disaggregation of citizenship can create alternative forms of public autonomy and accountability. The new forms of democratic citizenship arising in the EU, for example, appear to revolve around a cosmopolitan solidarity based upon shared allegiance to human rights, as Habermas (2006) has argued.

2. Onora O’Neill makes a complementary argument regarding the nature of our obligations to “distant strangers.” Her “practical approach” to determining the proper scope of our moral concern for those far away requires us to investigate “what assumptions we are already building into our action, habits, practices and institutions.” O’Neill concludes that in numerous prosaic activities—those of banks, importers, and broadcasters, for example—we treat “distant others as if they have the abilities to act and respond”; in other words, we unreflectively treat far away strangers as if they were agents and subjects. And, on pain of inconsistency, “what we assume in acting, we cannot selectively revoke in reaching ethical judgments,” O’Neill asserts (2000: 192).

3. Compare with Charles Taylor's Arendt-inspired account of our dialogical constitution as human beings in “The Politics of Recognition” (1995).

4. Benhabib's dissatisfaction with the moral foundations provided by Arendt for her commitments to “social and political justice” arises in part as a result of her conflation of her own project with Arendt's. While Benhabib has devoted herself in recent years to fleshing out a moral philosophical argument justifying universal human rights and the normative and institutional prerequisites of cosmopolitan citizenship (see her The Rights of Others [2004] and her contributions to The Inclusion of the Other [2004]), Arendt's interest lay in celebrating and defining the necessary conditions of political action. While human rights, equality, and respect for others are deeply implicated in this exercise, their observance cannot be justified, for Arendt, in terms of a moral universalism (see for example, The Origins of Totalitarianism [2000: 298]). Lisa Disch reaches a similar conclusion in Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy, observing that Arendt “would reject as utopian the attempt to restore the pillars of public order on the premise of the rational or reasonable individual… [for Arendt, the Holocaust revealed] that human rationality is not a faculty or property that is somehow essentially in all human beings and constitutive of human individuality but a possibility that is contingent on the legal and social instantiations of plurality and publicity” (1994: 207).

5. See also Serena Parekh's useful discussion of the common in Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2008) at 68.

6. Arendt's disdain for the realm of necessity undoubtedly sits oddly with a discussion of the right to have rights interpreted in light of the contemporary concept of human security. But her own analysis of public space in ancient Greece in The Human Condition makes it apparent that the physical and emotional needs that she believes were once dealt with exclusively in the private realm simultaneously precede and depend for their satisfaction upon the political realm's existence in a way not fully acknowledged by Arendt. Her lament over the colonization of public space by the social obscures an insight central to her work on the right to have rights—that the resolution of basic needs for food, shelter, and medical attention is largely at the mercy of political choices and events, and that only the provision of these basic needs can create the opportunity for full participation in public space (see Gutmann [2001: ix–x] for a useful variant of this argument); thus, the having of rights through membership is a necessarily political goal.

7. These human rights advocates follow Charles Taylor (1996) in applying Rawls’ overlapping consensus concept, which was originally devised to describe a form of functional political agreement over a domestic society's norms of political justice, to the transnational debate over the range of application of human rights standards. These authors hold positions that at one end of the spectrum include Donnelly's claim that an overlapping consensus currently exists on most of the human rights concepts contained within the UDHR, through Josh Cohen's view that such a consensus does not yet exist but should be sought regarding a negotiable but comprehensive panoply of human rights. Amy Gutmann offers a more austere version of overlapping consensus universality, with her argument in favor of seeking agreement on culturally distinct grounds for protection against cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, along with subsistence rights and basic political liberties in a way that leaves room for moral pluralism (Ignatieff 2001: xi). Michael Ignatieff's more controversial human rights minimalism, which aims to limit the list of human rights for which international agreement is sought to those concerned with bodily security, defines the outer boundary of this family of positions, both because it rests upon what is arguably an ontologically universalist conception of dignity (although Ignatieff has marginally modified this foundation in response to criticism [2001: 164–167]), and because this foundation leaves little margin for a consensus on these minimal human rights to have an “overlapping” character.

8. See, for example, her comments in “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?” (Arendt 1968c: 94).

9. These regional human rights instruments include the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man (1948), the European Convention on the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1953), the American Convention of Human Rights (1978), and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (1986); in addition, the OAS, EU, and AU have all established institutions to implement and monitor these agreements, such as, for example, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Nonbinding declarations have also been adopted by other regional groups; for example, The Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (The Organisation of the Islamic Conference, 1990) and The Bangkok Declaration (The Association of Southeast Asian Nations [ASEAN] 1967).

10. With changes of government, Canada's foreign policy commitment to human security has undergone significant alterations. In May 2008, the Human Security Program, once the centerpiece of Canada's foreign policy, was renamed, and all references to the concept of human security were removed from government Web pages regarding the program (http://geo.international.gc.ca/cip-pic/cip-pic/aboutthegbp-en.aspx).

11. The Commission on Human Security provides a typical example of such a definition: Human security means … protecting people from critical and pervasive threats and situations, building on their strengths and aspirations. It also means creating systems that give people the building blocks of survival, dignity and livelihood. Human security connects different types of freedoms—freedom from want, freedom from fear and freedom to take action on one's own behalf. To do this, it offers two general strategies: protection and empowerment. Protection shields people from dangers. It requires concerted effort to develop norms, processes and institutions that systematically address insecurities. Empowerment enables people to develop their potential and become full participants in decision-making. Protection and empowerment are mutually reinforcing, and both are required in most situations. (Commission on Human Security 2003: 1, my emphasis) Additional examples include the Government of Japan's current definition of human security as both freedom from want and freedom from fear (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan 2007) and former Secretary-General Kofi Annan's coupling of the two concepts as early as 2000 (Annan 2000).

12. This view is not universally endorsed. Some authors interpret the responsibility to protect as simply a repackaging of the well-established practice of military intervention in the service of the imperial interests of great powers. Stephen Krasner regards the hegemonic international law that such a re-presentation serves as the regnant mode of international legal evolution; Gerry Simpson sees hegemonic dominance by great powers as a dominant trend in that evolutionary process (Krasner 1999; Simpson 2004; see Zolo 2002 for supporting evidence).

13. This effort has not been wholly successful. In the concept note distributed by the Office of the President of the UN General Assembly prior to the 2009 thematic debate on the responsibility to protect, strong emphasis is placed on the danger that the R2P might become a “jemmy in the door of national sovereignty” (2009: 2).

14. Aristotle refers here specifically to the ancient Greek polis, the most comprehensive form of koinonia, or community, that then existed. Its closest analogue today is generally agreed to be the state.

15. I take up this question in the concluding chapter of “A Philosophical Investigation of the Responsibility to Protect in International Law,” (D. Jur. diss., Osgoode Hall Law School of York University, 2010).

16. See Nathaniel Berman's excellent discussion of the history of this concept in his “Sovereignty in Abeyance: Self-Determination and International Law” (2000: 51–75).

17. However, the general acceptance of the responsibility to protect and human security implied by UN General Assembly and Security Council endorsement (see below) is misleading. Both China and Russia, among others, have raised significant objections to attempts to operationalize the responsibility to protect. The two countries’ dissenting votes against the January 12, 2007 draft SC resolution on Burma following the military government's violent crackdown on peaceful protests by Buddhist monks offers a clear illustration of their discomfort with these principles. Efforts by France to have the responsibility to protect principle invoked by the EU and the Security Council as a justification for intervening with aid and expert assistance after the May 2008 cyclone in Myanmar/Burma were discouraged by a range of countries including not only China and Russia but also the United Kingdom, Vietnam, and South Africa.

18. Edward Luck was appointed Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on the Responsibility to Protect on February 28, 2008.

19. For critical analysis of this vision, see for example, Danilo Zolo (2002: chap. 2, 3) and Susan Marks (2000: chap. 3, 5).

20. In what follows, I will focus my remarks on the ICISS definition of human security because of its close connection to the influential responsibility to protect principle, and of the intercultural consultation process that gave rise to this relatively austere account, which encompasses elements of both the freedom from fear and the freedom from want agendas: “Human security means the security of people—their physical safety, their economic and social well-being, respect for their dignity and worth as human beings, and the protection of their human rights and fundamental freedoms” (ICISS 2001: 15).