In a famous passage at the end of the second volume of Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt highlights the paradox at the heart of human rights discourse. Human rights are said to be "inalienable" and "imprescriptible", because they are supposed to be independent of any specific collective affiliation. Yet it is precisely when human beings are deprived of a government of their own, and can therefore no longer rely on resources other than their "natural" rights, that they find themselves "without rights". The example of the stateless between the wars shows that the first human right, the one that conditions all others, is belonging to a given political community.
Yet the formula of a "right to have rights" is not easy to decipher. According to one interpretation, human rights can only be embodied within a given community. This would support the primacy of a communitarian conception of politics, which would seem to endorse Edmund Burke's arguments on the ineffectiveness of human rights in the absence of national allegiances and state allegiances. According to a second reading, which seeks to denounce the duplicity of a certain type of humanism, Arendt's text would be an invitation to decree the obsolescence of human rights inextricably linked to the affirmation of the sovereign violence of a nation-state in decay today.
Against this double misunderstanding, this seminar will propose an alternative reading of the "right to have rights", with a view to outlining the contours of a cosmopolitical citizenship. Far from a world government - which would undermine the plurality of nationalities, cultures and political identities - a "political" conception of human rights should enable us to envisage a relativization of sovereignty, a proliferation of counter-powers and a limitation of the power of nation-states through a combination of citizens' initiatives and international jurisdictions.
