Statelessness

A Modern History

Mira L. Siegelberg

• Editorial: Harvard University Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780674240513
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts

The story of how a much-contested legal category—statelessness—transformed the international legal order and redefined the relationship between states and their citizens. Two world wars left millions stranded in Europe. The collapse of empires and the rise of independent states in the twentieth century produced an unprecedented number of people without national belonging and with nowhere to go. Mira Siegelberg's innovative history weaves together ideas about law and politics, rights and citizenship, with the intimate plight of stateless persons, to explore how and why the problem of statelessness compelled a new understanding of the international order in the twentieth century and beyond.In the years following the First World War, the legal category of statelessness generated novel visions of cosmopolitan political and legal organization and challenged efforts to limit the boundaries of national membership and international authority. Yet, as Siegelberg shows, the emergence of mass statelessness ultimately gave rise to the rights regime created after World War II, which empowered the territorial state as the fundamental source of protection and rights, against alternative political configurations.Today we live with the results: more than twelve million people are stateless and millions more belong to categories of recent invention, including refugees and asylum seekers. By uncovering the ideological origins of the international agreements that define categories of citizenship and non-citizenship, Statelessness better equips us to confront current dilemmas of political organization and authority at the global level.

1

From a Subject of Fiction to a Legal Reality

STATELESSNESS DID NOT BEGIN with the First World War, but the war and its aftermath transformed its significance for international politics. When Max Stoeck first arrived in London after leaving his native Prussia in 1896, he gave little thought to naturalizing as a legal subject of the British Crown. In London he advanced to the position of managing director of the Concordia Elektrizitäts-Aktiengesellschaft (CEAG), a German-based corporation that designed and marketed electric lamps for industrial use. While he worked to establish a CEAG branch in the UK, Stoeck maintained his connection to other German speakers through the German Gymnastic Society in St. Pancras and traveled frequently between England and Germany to strengthen ties between the two firms.¹

These easy crossings came to an end in September 1914. When war broke out in Europe, nationality already defined the international legal dimension of citizenship, formally linking individuals to particular governments, though the laws determining how someone became a legal subject or citizen (or lost this connection altogether) varied considerably from place to place. Within a few weeks of the declaration of war, Stoeck tried to naturalize as a British subject, but by the time that he submitted his application, it was already too late. In the years that followed, Stoeck’s status evolved from cosmopolitan business agent to enemy alien—a relatively novel identification forged in the course of the war—and finally to stateless person. In Stoeck v. Public Trustee, a suit that he brought before the Chancery Division of the High Court in England in 1921, a British judge affirmed Stoeck’s claim that he had lost his legal connection to the German Reich years earlier and, since he had never been naturalized in Britain, was therefore a person of “no nationality.” According to the judgment, “statelessness” represented a legal identification distinct from the ordinary division between nationals protected by a government’s civil law and foreigners protected by their governments from abroad.²

Stoeck’s life was transformed as a result of the war and the nationalization of borders, but his case is not the typical way we generally understand statelessness in the twentieth century. A manager of a multinational corporation, Stoeck pursued recognition as a person with no national status in order to recover the property seized by the British government due to his identification as a foreigner from an enemy country. He faced the upheaval of internment, the confiscation of his property, and the dissolution of his marriage, all as a direct result of his identification during the war as the legal subject of an enemy nation. Yet becoming stateless in legal terms represented a strategic identification for Stoeck, a way of freeing himself from the constraints placed on nationals from enemy countries and on private economic actors during the First World War. His case therefore does not fully capture the novel scale of vulnerability in the twentieth century resulting from political revolution, the nationalization of boundaries, and exclusionary political movements. From the perspective of these wider revolutions of modern politics, the court’s recognition of the fact that Stoeck had no nationality appears to be merely a symptom, a by-product of a much deeper shift toward more exclusive forms of legal and political identification.³

However, Stoeck v. Public Trustee is a significant event in the history of statelessness because it provides an altogether different picture of the category’s mainstream emergence after World War I. The question of whether to acknowledge statelessness in law prompted explicit reflection and argument about the conventions governing interstate order and the broader significance of the court’s acknowledgment of this legal status. Stoeck’s case underscores the fundamental ambiguities surrounding the meaning of statehood and sovereignty as the war came to a close. The arguments produced in the course of the suit, and the reception of the judge’s decision to recognize Stoeck as a stateless person, establish why statelessness became so significant intellectually in the years that followed. Moreover, as we will see, the judgment itself directly shaped the international response to the growing number of people without a nationality in the decade after the First World War.⁴

At first glance, the rise of statelessness as a mass phenomenon in the interwar period reflects the sharpened divide between domestic and international relations. Indeed, the Stoeck decision did affirm that the ultimate power to determine the legal bond between an individual and a state lay within the sovereign power of that government. However, the recognition that stateless people existed within the boundaries of the Western state system reveals a key dimension of the reordering of diplomatic relations after the war because it challenged an earlier premise in Western political thought that statelessness was an unrecognized status within the boundary of civilized states. Governments had been reluctant to acknowledge that an individual could be stateless, without a legal connection to any government that could provide protection and identification. The acceptance of claims to statelessness therefore broke with earlier patterns of imperial and interstate relations, when empires and states tussled over questions of imperial subjecthood, protection, and national identification. Statelessness transformed from a “subject of fiction”—a status confined mainly to works of literature—to an acknowledged political reality. Once we understand the meaning of the decision in the context of prior legal history and the history of international thought we can appreciate why the legal recognition of statelessness threw the future of political order within and without the frontiers of nations and empires into question.

This chapter and the two that follow establish how the category of statelessness entered into international society and international law. All three seek to show the uncertainty surrounding the meaning of sovereignty and the basic principles of interstate political order after World War I. As we will see, recognition of the category generated expectations about the future of international law and legal order. For those who envisioned the expansion of international law’s jurisdiction, the recognition of statelessness presented new possibilities for legal authority beyond the confines of the state. And in order to understand why, it is necessary to comprehend the argumentative terms of the case and its wider reception.

I

One could certainly appreciate the details of Stoeck’s biography in terms of a broader historical transformation: from a period of intense economic and technological globalization during the mid-nineteenth century to one of policed borders during the First World War. Born in 1872 in the Rhine region of Prussia, one year after the unification of the German Empire, Stoeck left Germany for Belgium at the age of twenty-three. Once there, he applied to the imperial German government to grant him discharge papers relieving him of his rights and responsibilities as a German national. Stoeck was already beyond the years of military service, so German officials handed over the document confirming that he no longer remained a legal subject of the empire. From Belgium, Stoeck moved to London in 1896, though he never saw the need to naturalize as a British subject. That ease of movement across borders would continue, until it came to a sudden stop.⁵

Stoeck moved to London in a period when many countries, including Britain, had begun turning against unrestricted immigration. A few decades earlier, cross-border movement had been easier for all social classes, but by the 1890s the laboring poor faced increasing restrictions on migration. However, businessmen like Stoeck generally managed to stay above all the paperwork. Their lives exemplified how capitalism nurtured the connection between world citizenship and commerce. In Britain, they were prevented from owning land but were otherwise free to live and conduct business as legal residents.⁶ From the perspective of the entrepreneur pursuing opportunity and profit, borders and nationality hindered global sociability and commerce. Throughout the nineteenth century, the expansion of legal and bureaucratic mechanisms to control migration developed in tandem with the liberal argument that progress depended on the capacity of individuals and capital to flow freely around the world.⁷

By relinquishing his legal ties to the Reich, Stoeck found himself in the company of some better-known subjects of the German Empire who wished to pursue their own interests without the burden of national attachment. In the name of personal freedom and convenience, individuals could avoid the growing demands on the subjects of industrializing and militarizing European states of the later nineteenth century. In his letters, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche expressed an eminently practical attitude toward this voluntary loss of nationality, presenting the obligations of citizenship as an administrative annoyance. Nietzsche wrote, “From 1869 until 1879 I was at Basel; I had to give up my German citizenship, because as an officer (mounted artillery) I would have been drafted too frequently and disturbed my academic duties.”⁸

The great technological breakthroughs of the nineteenth century, including railroads, steamships, and electronic communication, conquered the challenges of distance; new ideas about space and time buttressed the internationalist spirit of the fin de siècle.⁹ Internationalist movements in Europe, the United States, and Latin America nurtured the growth of political and social interdependence through new economic institutions and legal innovations. For example, in the later decades of the nineteenth century, jurists worked to systematize and rationalize private international law, the field governing cross-border legal relationships around a commercially connected globe. Unlike public law, which defined the field covering topics such as sovereignty and the boundaries of the state’s authority, private law designated a legal arena responsible for the enforcement of contracts between individuals and corporations as private agents regardless of national status.¹⁰ Between 1900 and 1909, 119 international organizations were established, and an additional 112 were formed in the five-year period just before the war.¹¹

Stoeck’s company, CEAG, exemplified the economic internationalism of the era of liberal capitalist ascendency, with shares divided equally between German and British nationals. The company’s technological contributions to the mining industry were celebrated in 1912 when the British Home Office awarded the CEAG lamp—designed by a German engineer—first prize in an international competition for the best electric miner’s safety lamp.¹² Stoeck remained loyal to the company over his entire career as an inventor and corporate manager. Following the competition, Stoeck traveled to British mining districts exhibiting the prize-winning lamp. He also oversaw the expansion of the company from its base in Dortmund, Germany, to a new factory in Barnsley, England.¹³

Change came suddenly. War intensified the distinction between nationals and aliens or foreigners who belonged in a formal legal sense to other sovereign nations. When the war broke out in August 1914, retired British military and naval officers taking the waters at German health resorts found that they had become enemies in the eyes of the German government. Within weeks of declaring war, Western liberal democracies such as France, the United Kingdom, and the United States introduced restrictions on the ability of their citizens to travel abroad in order to preserve military manpower and to prevent the movement of politically suspect individuals.¹⁴ Those who had enjoyed the relative ease of cross-border movement and residence faced the consequences of the nationalization of people and of industry. Outside of Europe, foreigners who had enjoyed extraterritorial legal privileges as they conducted business in the Ottoman Empire in previous decades were granted forty-eight hours to renounce their foreign citizenship once the Ottoman Empire allied with the German and Habsburg Empires. Only a week after entering the conflict, Sultan Mehmed V signed an official declaration abolishing the system of legal rights that had ensured that Westerners were not subject to the jurisdiction of Ottoman law in the second half of the nineteenth century.¹⁵

It became paramount for individuals and corporations to label themselves clearly as national security took priority over private industry. CEAG divested from its German shareholders and reconstituted as a purely “English” limited liability company.¹⁶ As a non-British national originally from an enemy country, Stoeck quickly realized the imperative to naturalize as a British subject. Britain had already begun to make life more difficult for legal residents before the formal outbreak of hostilities through the 1914 Aliens Restrictions Bill, which authorized the roundup of aliens suspected of espionage. As a result, thousands of suspected aliens began lining up daily outside of police headquarters in London to register their status as legal aliens after the August 1914 British Nationality and the Status of Aliens Act, which placed the burden of proof on the suspected party.¹⁷ Stoeck’s application to naturalize as a British subject from August 12, 1914, submitted a few days after the passage of the Nationality and Status of Aliens Act, indicates how he tried to affirm the national status of his company, CEAG, and to argue for its vital importance to the British economy and war effort. Stoeck described himself as a “merchant and managing director of an English Limited Liability Company,” which produced safety lamps for English mining companies.¹⁸ Corporations, whose stockholders and employees had been multinational, nationalized as well once warring governments began to investigate who really owned the companies registered in their countries. Despite a great deal of litigation, contracts between British subjects and nationals from enemy countries were eventually suspended during the war.¹⁹ Great Britain was among the countries, including France, Austria, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands, to implement legislation allowing for emergency powers, including the power to seize property such as railways for the public defense. Coal mines in Britain, owned before the war by 1,500 different companies, were brought under the control of the Board of Trade by 1916 as the British state became more involved in regulating industry to ensure that it could meet wartime demands.²⁰

Though his naturalization request was denied, Stoeck continued to hold out hope that his position within CEAG would allow him to avoid the difficulties facing anyone defined as an enemy alien. The creation of the enemy alien category entailed considerable invention on the part of legislators and state bureaucrats since before World War I governments generally avoided formal measures against enemy subjects residing in their territory during times of war.²¹ Stoeck argued in letters to the Home Office, the British ministry responsible for immigration and naturalization, that his safety lamps were vital for the war effort and the general mining interests in Britain.²² Indeed, officials fretted over the decision to designate Stoeck as an enemy alien since CEAG was the main producer of safety lamps for mines across the British Empire, and held exclusive contracts with the War Department to produce lamps for use in sapping and trench warfare. Deliberations over Stoeck’s status indicate the level of detail that went into such bureaucratic decisions and the indeterminacy of the new categorization. Designating him as an enemy alien was hardly an exercise in rubber-stamping; officials at the Home Office interviewed employees at the Barnsley factory to determine Stoeck’s importance for daily operations.²³

As he faced the possibility of internment as an alien enemy, Stoeck relied on the London-based law firm of Cruesemann and Rouse to advocate on his behalf. His lawyers initially succeeded in keeping him out of internment by arguing that Stoeck was too important to the English mining industry to lock up.²⁴ His application was ultimately denied, and on May 24, 1916, nearly two years after he applied for naturalization, the Home Office determined that Stoeck was an enemy alien and dispatched a letter to the commissioner of police stating that he should be interned.²⁵ Cruesemann and Rouse did not abandon their client, and continued to argue for leniency so that he could attend board meetings outside of the internment camp at Alexandra Palace. They also represented him when he appealed to the courts to declare that he was not an enemy alien. Stoeck and others in a similar position faced the difficulty of internment as well as the loss of their property and personal possessions once legislation early in the war granted a new agency called the Public Trustee custodianship over enemy property. The suit filed by Cruesemann and Rouse to free Stoeck from the enemy alien label was not successful, but the Public Trustee designated the proceeds from his shares of CEAG for his bank account though Stoeck himself remained interned.

Any flexibility that Stoeck had enjoyed as an internee came to an end once he was sent to Holland as a civilian prisoner in March 1918 and from there to Germany. Stoeck’s return to Germany authorized the Board of Trade to consider him an enemy under the terms of the 1914 “Trading with the Enemy Act,” which in turn allowed the Public Trustee to seize the proceeds from the sale of Stoeck’s CEAG shares.²⁶ When the war was over, the peace treaty between Britain, its allies, and the German Empire, which was signed at the French palace of Versailles and came into force in January 1920, granted the German govern...