Limitations of the Right to Have Rights: The Case of Denmark

Abstract

AbstractThe growing dimensions of the global refugee crisis have led to considerable attention being paid by theorists to Hannah Arendt’s notion of the ‘right to have rights’ (RTHR), concerning the right to asylum. There is a historical asylum case which Arendt privileged as exemplary, in relation to both asylum and political action: the refuge provided by Denmark for its Jewish citizens, and some Jewish refugees, during the Second World War. I argue that reading Arendt’s reflections on the RTHR alongside her writings on the Denmark case provides greater illumination of both. The scope of the rescue of Jewish people in Denmark is arguably not as laudable as Arendt maintained, as Denmark placed restrictions upon the entry of refugees into its territory. This critique reconfigures the import of the RTHR in relation to Arendt’s writings on plurality as the ‘law of the earth’.