Issue of human rights in the context of national state: Biopolitical aspect

• Main Author: Aleksey V. Yarkeev
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Philosophy and Law 2019-12-01
• Series: Антиномии
• Subjects: biopolitics; naked life; human rights; citizen's rights; national state; refugees; people; imperialism; fascism
• Online Access: http://yearbook.uran.ru/images/files/4-19_2.pdf

The article shows the biopolitical essence of human rights in the national state, which sovereignty based on a birth as a biological fact (natio) establishes the identity between birth and nationality. The mechanism by which national sovereignty inscribes biological existence («inalienable» human rights) into the political space (citizen's rights) eliminating the gap between biological existence and political existence is shown. Human being is understood as the core of the citizen, and human rights – as the conditions for inclusion into political community. Within the framework of the notion of national sovereignty, rights are conferred on a person only to the extent that s/he is seen an immediately disappearing prerequisite of the citizen. If a nation is interpreted as a natural-organic «closed society», to which a person belongs by right of birth, and in which political equality is replaced by natural equality, then the state is understood as an «open society» that governs the territory through the establishment and maintenance of law and order. The merger of the state as a political institution, and the institution of law and order with the nation as a biological substance leads to a confusion of citizen’s rights with rights of «compatriots upon birth»; thus, there are national rights. Such identification of nation and state is the meaning of the national state as a biopolitical entity when the state becomes an instrument of the nation. Through identification with the state, the nation demands expansion as its national right; it demands an increase in the power and prosperity of the state in the name of the well-being of the nation, which often almost automatically leads to imperialism. The article examines the figure of the refugee or the stateless individual, which destroys the biological and political identity making visible the fictitious national sovereignty, and bringing to light the powerless «bare life» (homo sacer) without covering its mask of a citizen. In this regard, the author substantiates the problem of ensuring human rights in the modern world, which has lost their own citizenship de facto or de jure.