ABSTRACT
Starting from Hannah Arendt's discussion of the right to have rights, this chapter explores the relationships between citizenship rights, migrant rights and universal human rights. Writing just before the launching of the UDHR, and in the absence of a developed system of international law, Arendt was reflecting on the fact that outside of citizenship there was no effective means of claiming those rights that were notionally construed as ‘inalienable’ human rights. Despite the subsequent development of a range of rights beyond citizenship, enforcible by international law, this chapter shows how the outcome is best viewed in terms of the ad hoc elaboration of partial membership. Rather than an emergent post-national society, modelled on the basis of cosmopolitan principles, we see the construction of a stratified system of rights in which conditionality is harnessed as a mode of control that extends to both citizens and non-citizens alike.
