John Leer's Response #1

Judt’s discussion in the Epilogue of exiles, namely Jewish exiles, during and after WWII provides a clear analytical framework that demonstrates the conceptual and practical necessity of postnational governing bodies such as the European Union.

The statist system formalized in the Treaty of Westphalia grants states complete sovereignty over the treatment of the state’s resources and population. In many ways, WWII and Nazi Germany serve as an end, at least conceptually, to this system in that it becomes clear that humans have certain rights not by virtue of their status as a citizen but, rather, by virtue of their status as humans. Thus, the criminals indicted at the Nuremberg Trials were charged with ‘crimes against humanity’. In charging the Nazis with this crime, the Allied Forces (and later the signatories of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights) essentially said that there are limits to a state’s sovereignty.

Once we grant that states’ actions must fall within certain boundaries and that they must fulfill certain obligations to their citizens by virtue of them being humans, the problem becomes ensuring that those people who are not citizens are still granted this obligatory status. Judt discusses at length the problems facing deportees and exiles during and after the war; they were consistently and systematically excluded from the benefits enjoyed by ‘full citizens’ and found it nearly impossible to file grievances in search of compensation. Among many other similar excerpts, Judt writes:

Indeed, in Belgium the exclusion of Jews from any post-war benefits was taken a step further. Since 95 percent of the Jews deported from Belgium had been foreign nationals or stateless, it was determined by a post-war law that – unless they had also fought in the organized resistance movements – surviving Jews who ended up in Belgium after the war would not be eligible for any public aid. (805)

In fact, by 1945 the Swiss had taken in just 28,000 Jews—seven thousand of them before the war began. …the Swiss had made strenuous efforts to keep Jews out… (813)

Upon making similar historical observations, Hannah Arendt accurately comments that exiles and deportees suffer not just from a lack of rights, but rather from a lack of rights to have rights. In other words, these non-citizens are not the sort of entity that can bear rights within a strictly statist system. Thus, although the Nuremberg Trials clearly asserted that humans enjoy certain rights above those that stem from citizenship, it remained the case that one had to be a citizen in order to receive them.

The political (as opposed to the economic) development of the EU has taken great strides to remedy this conflict in establishing the European Court of Justice, thereby granting exiles an avenue to seek justice. However, a great separation still exists between citizens and non-citizens with respect to issues of positive right, namely regarding welfare benefits.