Human Rights and Popular Sovereignty

We now turn our attention to two contemporary controversies that strike the general imagination as both pressing and necessary to consider in consultation with Arendt, namely claims concerning the rights of migrants, especially forced migrants, be they asylum seekers or refugees; and the populist impulse often unleashed within democratic societies in their wake. Arendt’s work, especially The Origins of Totalitarianism and “We Refugees”—a very rich and reflective essay drawing on her own experience as a forced migrant—is generally considered canonical for anyone who wishes to confront issues surrounding the normative basis for what Seyla Benhabib (2004) calls “the rights of others,” meaning what is owed politically by democratic states to those who are not their citizens but are within their sphere of influence, domestically or abroad. This is attested by the plethora of works available that address this issue while working closely with Arendt’s mid-twentieth-century discussions of these issues; this chapter will primarily focus on Ayten Gündoğdu’s (2015) recent reformulation and application of Arendt’s arguments concerning statelessness and the international human rights regime that was just emerging when Arendt wrote Origins. Alongside this, many turn to Arendt today for an analysis of the populist tendencies that continuously reappear under conditions of popular sovereignty, especially as displayed in the electoral politics of the past decade and its controversial use of the plebiscite, most strikingly in the case of Brexit. Here, we cite in particular the work of Margaret Canovan (1981, 1999, 2002), which, having been written before the shocks that followed the breakdown of the mainstream consensus about the putative “end of history” and global hegemony of the liberal democratic order, seems to us the first resource to which we should turn to gain a perspective on the rise of populism and renewed (ethno)nationalism since the 2007–8 global economic crisis. Our central novel intervention in this chapter is to argue that Arendt’s engagement with the issues of statelessness and human rights, on the one hand, and of populism and popular sovereignty, on the other, may be read more consistently together, expressly as regards their relevance for politics today.