Reaping the Whirlwind

When the fighting stopped on the Western Front at the end of 1918 – it would continue on the Eastern Front for another three years – the victorious powers decided to redraw the maps of Central Europe and the Middle East. The vanquished empires (Germany, Austria and Turkey) lost their possessions. In Europe new nation-states were given borders, and elsewhere sovereignty changed hands with mostly British and French mandates. The new European frontiers brought together ethnic, linguistic and religious differences in a struggle for majority rule. The question of minorities and what to do with them became an increasing source of tensions during the 1920s and 30s. There were also large numbers of stateless people who had fled or been driven out by civil war and oppression. Western Europe saw an influx of refugees from Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Italy and, finally, Germany and Spain. Minorities and the growing flow of stateless refugees created conditions that were instrumental in the build-up to war. Hannah Arendt described this extensively in The Origins of Totalitarianism, and her words have an astounding resonance.

The second great shock that the European world suffered through the arrival of refugees was the realisation that it was impossible to get rid of them or transform them into nationals of the country of refuge. When the example of the first Russian and Armenian waves proved that neither way gave any tangible results, the countries of refuge simply refused to recognise statelessness in all later arrivals, thereby making the situation of the refugees even more intolerable. (1)

The reason for this desperate attempt at promptness was the fear of all governments that even the smallest positive gesture “might encourage countries to get rid of their unwanted people and that many might emigrate who would otherwise remain in their countries even under serious disabilities”. (2)

The stateless person, without right to residence and without the right to work, had of 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 civilised countries was reversed in his case. Since he was an anomaly for whom the general law did not provide, it was better for him to become an anomaly for which it did provide, that of the criminal. […] The same man who was in jail yesterday because of his mere presence in this world, who had no rights whatever and lived under threat of deportation, or who was dispatched without sentence and without trial to some kind of internment because he had tried to work and make a living, may become a full-fledged citizen because of a little theft. (3)

Not only were people expelled from country and citizenship, but more and more persons of all countries, including Western democracies, volunteered to fight in civil wars abroad even when this meant cutting themselves off from their national communities. This was the lesson of the Spanish Civil War and one of the reasons why the governments were so frightened by the International Brigade. (4)

Arendt’s book was first published in 1951, by which time the “Iron Curtain” announced by Churchill in 1946 had divided Europe along new lines and provoked new movements of populations.

No paradox of contemporary politics is filled with more poignant irony than the discrepancy between the efforts of well-meaning idealists who stubbornly insist on regarding as “inalienable” those human rights, which are enjoyed only by citizens of the most prosperous and civilised countries, and the situation of the rightless themselves. […] The postwar (WW2) term “displaced persons” was invented during the war for the express purpose of liquidating statelessness once and for all by ignoring its existence. Nonrecognition of statelessness always means repatriation, i.e., deportation to a country of origin, which either refuses to recognise the prospective repatriate as a citizen, or, on the contrary, urgently wants him back for punishment. (5)

Today the displaced are labelled migrants, which suggests a flock of birds that comes and goes. Something of no concern, except when the numbers get out of hand, or when the flock sets up residence. Mass migrations are the harbingers of troubled times. When the flow of people from the periphery to the imperial heartlands becomes a torrent, it is no longer the attraction of power and wealth that drives them. When throngs of people flee their native land, it means their life is threatened if they stay. The unsolvable dilemma of minority communities within the nation-state that plagued Europe after both World Wars has spread to all the other artificial constructions of its colonial past. By drawing lines on maps and imposing nationhood, Europe put the world on course to follow its own deadly path. Across the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, minorities are struggling for survival. To avoid annihilation they are migrating or they are in armed rebellion. The apparent solution is to gun-down the rebels with sophisticated war machines and to place the migrants in camps and detention centres. Is this still viable when the whole planet is moving and fighting? And, as it escalates, what impact will it have on the privileged minority world and what will a prolongation of Euro-American supremacy cost? In 1967 Arendt wrote:

[…] in retrospect one is tempted to look upon the last two decades as the time-span during which the two most powerful countries of the earth jockeyed for position in a competitive struggle for predominance in more or less the same regions in which European nations had ruled before. In the same vein one is tempted to look upon the new uneasy détente between Russia and America as the result of the emergence of a third potential world power, China, rather than as the healthy and natural consequence of Russia’s detotalitarization after Stalin’s death. And if further developments should validate such tentative interpretations, it would mean in historical terms that we are back, on an enormously enlarged scale, where we started from, in the imperialist era and on the collision course that led to World War I. (6)

That confrontation has occurred. Now the vanquished contender is building up for a second round, with his opponents floundering in recession, submerged by waves of immigrants and bogged down in counterinsurgent operations, and with the third protagonist biding his time. Technological evolution changes conditions and ideas, and prevents history from repeating itself in an identical manner, but an extreme concentration of power and wealth provokes the same devastating results again and again. Who knows how destructive the storm will be in a digital age?

1. The Origins of Totalitarianism, part two, chapter nine, (Harvest Book) page 281

2. p. 281, note 31

3. p. 286

4. p. 282

5. p. 279

6. Preface to part two, p. xviii