October, 2009

A popular idea in the science of politics is that the role of the government is like that of a Hobbesian Leviathan—in which all humans live in an anarchic “state of nature” where individuals are forced to engage in a bellum omnium contra omnes—and the government as the mystical, yet all-powerful creature, offers contractual security to those citizens weary and unable to fend for themselves, on the condition that they be willing to give up some of their (civil) liberties. This concept of a social contract, however, is becoming defunct in a world where market societies and nation-states take center stage, as observed by Margaret Somers who contends in her article reflecting the status quo of citizenship in 21st century that such ideas can no longer be accepted as commonplace in a world in which individuals are afforded the “rights to have rights” as a foundational right of citizenship.

The rise of modern liberalism and the civil society made way for the idea of “natural rights,” which states that all humans, regardless of their ethnicity or allegiance to government, are birthed are entitled to a basic set of rights as human beings. Somers notes that this form of “human rights”—or “Rights of Man” as she quotes/calls it—is threatened by the contractualization and commodification of citizenship , a process many governments of nation-states have been undergoing as a ways of consolidating the social contract with the needs of the modern world.

The core of Somers’ argument surrounds an Arendtian manifesto which states that human personhood is distinguished from biological life by membership in an organized political body and full citizenship in a nation-state , and that individuals can be and have been deprived of such personhood by their respective governing bodies and rendered “stateless” in cases where contractual citizenship fail to consolidate with the nation-state.

Somers provides two major examples of such cases which outlines the heterogeneity of the social contract and the nation-state politics. The first is that of post-communist Eastern Europe where ethnic groups have continually been displaced and re-placed as citizens in Eastern Bloc countries such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia together with the trend of the (majority) ethnos ruling over the demos, which Somers refers to as an unstable marriage which has historically made up the unity of the nation-state ; the second example is that of Third Reich Germany where an ethnic majority was successfully able to confer all political power into a government ruled by the majority, in an act which effectively stripped and deprived a specific ethnic minority of all rights and claims in both society and politics.

In both examples of what in terms of human rights were disastrous chapters of human history, the ethnos rule over the demos combined with a distorted form of the social contract provided an unmistakable monopoly of political rights and power to the majority in power. In the case of the Eastern Bloc, many nation-states such as Czechoslovakia and Romania experienced continuous regime change as ethnic groups continuously struggled for political dominance, which saw the political alignment (i.e. from communism to something other than communism) and official language of a few nation-states continually shift back and forth over brief intervals of time effectively stripping and re-issuing citizenship to ethnic groups every time a different ethnic majority came to power. The case of Nazi Germany harbored a more lethal outcome than that of the Eastern Bloc as the ethnic majority in power systematically stripped the minority of their citizenship and turn them into “stateless” peoples , and committed a mass genocide of that minority under the justification that “stateless” peoples who have been expelled from a political community would “no longer induce social recognition,” and thus provoke repulsion in even the most liberal of states.

A third example of the social contract’s failure to adapt to the modern nation-state hits a little closer to home in pre-19th century America, where the ethnic majority debunked an entire minority group as second-class citizens and placed them under forced servitude to the ethnic majority. Setting aside the technicalities of neither ethnic groups being indigenous to the nation-state in question and the fact that the ethical standards of slavery back then did not quite live up to those of today, the “principles of political freedom and of natural justice” were not extended to the then second-class citizens , and instead the second-class citizens were made to suffer injustices purely because of their status as the distinguishable ethnic minority; Frederick Douglass recounts in a speech given on a Fourth of July that the injustice suffered by the minorities were so great that no nation measured up to the United States who were “guilty of practices more shocking and bloody.”

Whereas the security-liberty tradeoff as introduced by the social contract is a sensible concept and is still being employed to various degrees by governments and nation-states all around the world, examples in modern political history shows that contractual citizenship does not bode well with the idea of “natural rights” and the “right to have rights” as it requires the conferring of the monopoly of violence (and through that extent political power and rights) to the government—in a world where civil society mandates that all humans are born with inalienable human rights which cannot be stripped by any form of power or governing body, the ability of being able to confer those inalienable rights to a higher form of power seems anomalous, if not contradictory to the idea itself.