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Article: Europe and its refugees: Arendt on the politicization of minorities.(Hannah Arendt)(Critical essay)
- Article from:
- Social Research
- Article date:
- December 22, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 New School for Social Research. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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IN JANUARY 1940, A FEW MONTHS BEFORE HER INTERNMENT IN FRANCE, Hannah Arendt wrote in a very distinct and programmatic letter to her friend Erich Cohn-Bendit that "All minority policies, not only those affecting the Jewish minority, are doomed to failure as a result of the continued existence of state sovereignty" (Arendt, 2000: 231). "With the beginning of Russian mass migration," she continued,
at the latest in 1923/24, ... we can see the emergence
of a completely new European class of people: the stateless.
If we consider European history as the development
of European nations or as the development of European
peoples into nations, then the ...