Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Partiality: community, citizenship and the defence of closure
- 2 Impartiality: freedom, equality and open borders
- 3 The Federal Republic of Germany: the rise and fall of a right to asylum
- 4 The United Kingdom: the value of asylum
- 5 The United States: the making and breaking of a refugee consensus
- 6 Australia: restricting asylum, resettling refugees
- 7 From ideal to non-ideal theory: reckoning with the state, politics and consequences
- 8 Liberal democratic states and ethically defensible asylum practices
- List of references
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Partiality: community, citizenship and the defence of closure
- 2 Impartiality: freedom, equality and open borders
- 3 The Federal Republic of Germany: the rise and fall of a right to asylum
- 4 The United Kingdom: the value of asylum
- 5 The United States: the making and breaking of a refugee consensus
- 6 Australia: restricting asylum, resettling refugees
- 7 From ideal to non-ideal theory: reckoning with the state, politics and consequences
- 8 Liberal democratic states and ethically defensible asylum practices
- List of references
- Index
Summary
Not the loss of specific rights, then, but the loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever, has been the calamity that has befallen ever-increasing numbers of people. Man, it turns out, can lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity.
Hannah Arendt 1986 [1951]The dwellers in refugee camps can best be compared to America's African slaves. And as we look on helplessly at the ever-growing numbers of human refuse heaps, we might perhaps listen to the voice of conscience. At the very least we might re-examine anew the claims that are made for and against the call of conscience in the face of group loyalty.
Judith N. Shklar 1993Over the last twenty years, asylum has become one of the central issues in the politics of liberal democratic states. In 1993 the German Parliament embarked upon the politically onerous task of amending the country's constitution, the Basic Law, in order to slow the arrival of asylum seekers on to state territory. One year later, the Clinton Administration in the US, faced with criticism over its policy of summarily interdicting asylum seekers on boats heading for Florida, launched a military intervention into the island nation of Haiti, largely to restore a regime less likely to produce refugees.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Ethics and Politics of AsylumLiberal Democracy and the Response to Refugees, pp. 1 - 22Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004