ABSTRACT

The term ‘exile’ is no longer a fashionable one. The current trend in politics is to differentiate between types of exile: ‘asylum seeker’, ‘economic migrant’ and ‘illegal immigrant’ are all common terms in political and journalistic parlance, each carrying with it its particular imputation of danger to state and national identity. This terminology has replaced that familiar in the 1930s and 1940s, which referred to ‘exiles’ and ‘refugees’ (as well as the disturbing term ‘aliens’, with its deliberate concentration on otherness), as if to escape from the connotations of persecution with which the known facts of history have invested these words. When choosing a theory by which to comprehend the past situation, it is helpful to find one which speaks also to the present. Hannah Arendt’s brief passages on exile and statelessness in her first major work in English, The Origins o f Totalitarianism, reflect on the problems of statelessness (and its corresponding loss of human rights) in a manner which seems to bear just as strongly on the situation of refugees at the beginning of the third millennium a d as in the years leading up to and including the Second World War. For instance, she writes:

The stateless person, without right to residence and without the right to work, had o f course constantly to transgress the law. He was liable to jail sentences without ever committing a crime. More than that, the entire hierarchy of values which pertain in civilized countries was reversed in his case. Since he was the anomaly for whom the general law did not provide, it was better for him to become an anomaly for which it did provide, that o f the criminal.