With this paragraph Martin Conway begins his conclusions to the proceedings of a conference on European exile communities in Britain during the Second World War (Conway and Gotovitch, p. 255). The Oxford historian breaks with old views ascribing important influences to the Belgian, Dutch, Polish, Czechoslovakian, French and other exiles staying in London. He clearly shows that their role as architects of postwar Europe, trailblazers of European integration or designers of social-economic welfare models was much smaller than has generally been accepted. Instead, he attributes only certain long-term effects to the London exiles, such as the resurgence in state power (which could develop in exile without the pressure of civil society) and the consolidation of social-democratic ideology (which inherited a principal anti-communism from exile in Britain).

Conway's chapter is a beautiful illustration of the current research on politics in exile. On the one hand, it reveals the contrast between ‘national historians’, who usually credit ‘their’ exiles with great roles and influences in ‘their’ national history, and other scholars who treat the subject with more distance and are therefore more easily inclined to demythologise the role of exiles. On the other hand, it illustrates the need for comparisons. Indeed, although radical exiles in the Romantic era, Russian exiles in the 1920s, Spanish exiles in the 1930s, West European exiles in the 1940s, East European exiles during the Cold War, and Third World exiles in more recent decades seem to have had nothing in common but their exile, political scientists are especially keen to investigate their living conditions and political activities from a comparative perspective. However, Conway's final verdict contrasts with the conclusions of these political scientists. While Conway is ‘tempt[ed] to dismiss the exile regimes as no more than an épisode entre parenthèses, remarkable not for what they subsequently achieved but for the fact that they existed at all’ (p. 268), political scientists are much more likely to appreciate political activities in exile.

This review article wants to take a closer look at these findings, or more generally at the methods and conclusions of this comparative research of politics in exile. Exiles are defined as refugees or immigrants engaging themselves in opposition politics against their homeland. This definition, which is used by most of the political scientists discussed in this article, obviously departs from the etymology of the word ‘exile’ (from the Latin ‘ex(s)ilium’ – ‘banishment’), but clearly defines the group that will be studied.Footnote ¹ Other scholars did not specify precisely what they meant by exile, or used the term as a synonym for refugee. M. R. Marrus, for instance, stated in his standard work on refugees since 1880 that ‘the nineteenth century was mainly preoccupied with exiles – individuals who left their native country for political reasons, usually after having engaged in revolutionary activity’.Footnote ² Some migration historians even banished the word from their vocabulary. In the index of her integral study on European migration, L. P. Moch referred to terms such as ‘coerced migration’, ‘displaced persons’ and ‘refugees’, but made no mention of ‘exiles’.Footnote ³

This review article consists of three parts. First, I have a look at some main features of a ‘national’ approach to exiles, briefly referring to a recent example: the monograph by Jean-Michel Palmier on German exiles. Afterwards, I shall discuss the most important studies which try to compare the political activities of exiles belonging to different countries and living in different eras. Some of these studies are more descriptive than analytical (e.g. the compilation edited by Peter Rose), but other successfully create new concepts and paradigms to compare the efficiency of exile politics. However, they all focus on a particular group of exiles: those who claim legitimacy, that is, they pretend to be the real representatives of their country. In the third and last part of this review article I therefore discuss the problem of the legitimacy of exiles. I will briefly analyse to what extent legitimacy stimulated (or counteracted) the efficacy of exile politics in three fields in which exiles could be successful (changing politics, publishing information and developing new ideas).

Exiles in national histories

Many exile studies are confined to the national level and are written either by the exiles themselves or their successors, or by their political heirs – that is, by historians in the homeland ruled by a regime the exiles had been fighting for. Polish political emigration in the nineteenth century, for instance, began to be studied only after Polish independence in 1918 (apart from some earlier monographs written during the emigration); research on Polish exiles in London after 1945 became one of the most popular subjects in the 1990s.Footnote ⁴ Of course, not all of these studies glorify, but one cannot deny that exiles receive a great deal of attention and that their history is often written by a sympathetic hand. Indeed, exiles can demonstrate that the current regime had been prepared for a long time, or that the previous regime or dictatorship was not approved by all the members of the nation.

In Germany, for instance, Exilforschung (the study of exile) has received a large amount of attention exactly for this last reason. In the first decades after the war German exiles were largely forgotten within the German Federal Republic (not in the GDR), almost as if their activities were equated with desertion and treason. However, in the 1970s a change took place. In 1973, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) proclaimed the 1930s exiles to be a central research field. Dozens of projects were launched, such as a multi-volume biographical dictionary, monographs on specific regions or professions, and numerous literary criticisms of authors in exile. After more than ten years the whole undertaking was rounded off with a large conference in Hamburg. In the meanwhile, a Gesellschaft für Exilforschung (Society for the Study of Exile) had been founded which edited not only a yearbook (and still does), but also circulated a newsletter containing various announcements, obituaries of exiles and an exhaustive current bibliography (including radio broadcasts, movies, and compositions).Footnote ⁵ Up until now, Exilforschung in Germany appears to have been an almost distinct scientific field that proves to be very multi-disciplinary, but that lacks any scope for international comparison. The most recent synthesis (of more than 800 pages), the monumental Weimar in Exile, completely fits into this frame. Although its author Jean-Michel Palmier is an ‘outsider’ (a French historian of German artistic movements in the 1920s and 1930s), it is characterised by national frameworks, miscellaneous themes (from theatre to politics), biographical excursions and, last but not least, positive (though not uncritical) views.

Indeed, national research on exiles is not only characterised by a great quantity of studies, but often also by the great quality attributed to the activities of exiles. Although there have always been scholars who have treated the subject in a more critical way, most studies seem to rate the exiles very highly. The assessment of Polish exiles by Polish historians, for instance, is almost unanimously positive. In an article on ‘the meaning of political emigration for the Polish nation’, as the translated title reads, the word ‘enormous’ is the most frequent predicate, in the introduction as well as in the conclusion, in combination with the words ‘meaning’, ‘role’ and ‘influence’, in a cultural as well as in a political sense, and concerning both Polish history and European civilisation.Footnote ⁶ This assessment is certainly not exceptional: the article appeared in an authoritative compilation on Polish emigration and has not been questioned by the other authors. On the contrary, there even exists a kind of distinct historiographical tradition in Poland which substantiates the exiles’ influences by enumerating names and examples, and elaborating cases of Polish exiles who had contributed to one or another development.

This recognition of exiles is not typically Polish. Other countries praise their former exiles too, if only for their passive role as guardians of national independence or democratic traditions, and as treasurers of a certain continuity. The Spanish republicans ‘were a symbol of democracy and peaceful coexistence for many young people in Spain . . . [,] played an important role in delegitimizing the Franco regime in international opinion . . . [and] were a constant testimony to the fact that the Franco regime had been born of civil war and a prior suppression of democratic liberties’.Footnote ⁷ The Baltic governments in exile after the Second World War are held in high esteem, despite their passivity: ‘Through their very existence, the Baltic offices serve as a constant reminder of the usurped sovereignty in their homelands.’Footnote ⁸

The commonly positive approach to exiles can be explained by several factors. First, ‘influence’ and ‘role’ are concepts that cannot be measured. Sometimes they can be posited indisputably, but in most cases it remains a matter of discussion to what extent influence was indeed ‘great’ or even ‘enormous’. Second, as already mentioned, historical research on exiles started only after the political revolution intended by the exiles had taken place. Not surprisingly, the attitude of many historians towards the exiles is permeated by respect, gratitude, heroification and mystification.Footnote ⁹ A third reason for the positive appreciation of exiles is the fact that collective memory has a great deal of room for the success stories of individuals who were afterwards put in the right by history, and for the heroism of heavily fought cases that were doomed to fail: ‘a lost cause will always win a last victory in men's imaginations’.

Comparative studies of exile politics

In order to achieve more objective conclusions, in recent years many scholars have approached exile politics comparatively. The compilation by Conway and Gotovitch is a first and successful attempt. It focuses exclusively on the Second World War and consists of chapters on national case studies, but has a highly interesting concluding chapter. It is much more interesting than the comparable volume by Rose. Although the latter book also owes its origin to a project and several symposia, it does not succeed in achieving a comparison or synthesis. Some of its contributions are very original, but many of them have a very local character (concentrating on New England, for example) and even include personal reminiscences (several articles are excerpts from memoirs). It therefore perfectly illustrates the fact that exiles love to write their own history.

A third recent compilation, Exile Armies, again focuses on a specific item: the common problems associated with military forces operating outside their homeland. The contributors – all but one lecturers at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst – elaborate diverse cases (both European – from the Second World War until Kosovo – and, for instance, Cuban, South African, Bengali and Iraqi exile forces), but in the editors’ introduction and conclusion, interesting comparisons are made. On the one hand, common features and problems are cited: the need for legitimacy, the danger of factionalism, the stress on ideology, the dependence on host countries and sponsors, and the difficulty in acquiring adequate manpower. On the other hand, the volume shows that ‘there is no perfect model for exile forces to achieve their aims’.

Some monographs originating in doctoral dissertations are even more penetrating.Footnote ¹⁰The Frontier of Loyalty. Political Exiles in the Age of the Nation-State is an adaptation of a dissertation at Yale University which first appeared in 1989 with Wesleyan University Press and was republished in 2005. Its author, the Israeli political scientist Yossi Shain, also edited a book entitled Governments-in-Exile in Contemporary World Politics (1991). His Parisian colleague Stéphane Dufoix compared the Hungarian, Polish and Czechoslovak exiles in France after the Second World War in a dissertation defended at the Sorbonne in 1997 and published in 2002.

Shain and Dufoix consider exile to be a kind of condition or framework with unusual particularities, giving specific colours to political action. Dufoix even proposes a name for this ‘espace politique spécifique’: ‘exopolitie’ (derived from ‘exile’ and ‘politics’) (p. 28). A large part of their comparative research is aimed at revealing these particularities and their consequences. For example, features of exile such as the uncertainty, impotence, loss of control, social degradation, financial problems and geographical scattering lead to numerous discussions and division among exiles. This methodology offers a broad spectrum, but sometimes leads to a kaleidoscope of conditions, circumstances and consequences. Shain, for example, offers five different attitudes that a host country can adopt towards exiles (from enthusiasm to restrictiveness and prohibition), or three factors that increase the chance of action from the home regime against the exile activities (which are very general: ‘(1) the home regime's perception . . . of the exiles’ threat; (2) the regime's available options and skills for suppressing the exiles’ threat through coercion; and (3) the regime's cost-benefit calculation of such coercive activities’) (pp. 121ff. and 161ff.)

Both authors try to move beyond this descriptive level by means of a more general research question: the ways in which governments in exile legitimise themselves. Shain in particular has conducted very profound research in this field and has looked for the core of legitimacy in the manner in which it was justified and the criteria by which it was recognized. One of his most important findings is the political and scientific impracticability of the concept, since it lacks empirical validation or measurability and has never been the real basis for recognising a government (although it was always referred to). Shain proposes to replace the concept by loyalty (in the national realm) and recognition (on the international level) (pp. 165–6). Dufoix comes to similar, but less sharply formulated conclusions: ‘The social history of exile, which is still embryonic, could generate new lines for the study of political legitimization. For that purpose, however, it is indispensable not to base it a priori on a juridical distinction between “legality” and “illegality”’ (p. 79).

By analysing legitimacy or loyalty these scholars pretend to touch the essence of politics in exile. They use their analysis of the extent to which legitimacy is realised as a parameter in the analysis of the efficiency of exile politics. Shain writes that ‘success in exile is measured by an organizational ability to generate and maintain loyalty and recognition at the expense of the home regime’ (p. 167).Footnote ¹¹ Dufoix also expresses this very strongly: ‘Exile cannot exist without the construction of a certain number of arguments that make possible and even legitimize the formation of political movements that pretend to “be” the real depositories of the national authority of the “real” country.’Footnote ¹² Like Shain and Dufoix, Bennett and Latawski, the editors of Exile Armies, describe legitimacy as ‘fundamental to the political context in which an exile army operates’ (p. 171).

As a result of this focus, the political activities of exiles who did not claim legitimacy remains outside the scope of these comparative studies. Shain explicitly takes only exiles contesting the official regime into consideration. As a consequence he does not study groups demanding the realignment of frontiers (e.g. independence) or rejecting a total claim to power and thus requiring only the overthrow of the homeland regime (as did, for instance, the exiled anti-fascist opposition to Mussolini). Dufoix does not limit himself to national committees and governments in exile, and also analyses politicised social organisations and ‘intellectual’ exiles – that is, publicists who do not fit into a structure that is dominated by a political organisation (pp. 54–5, 186). However, he assumes that they all claimed legitimacy and had ambitions to represent their aims. This is not true: some of them even explicitly rejected such claims, viewing their own set-up rather as an open discussion forum. Dufoix avoids this problem by giving them ‘universal aspirations’, just like religious organizations in exile (pp. 131–4, 185ff.). But this is an obvious reduction of the complexity of reality. Dufoix states that there are no fundamental differences between the Paris monthly Kultura and the other Polish exiles and that Kultura fully participated in the ‘exopolitie’ (pp. 228–9). However, as a matter of fact, the Polish government in London and Kultura were always at daggers drawn, precisely because the former fiercely condemned each legitimacy claim in exile.Footnote ¹³

Legitimacy and the efficiency of exile politics

Exiles who did not claim legitimacy have thus not yet been analysed in a systematic and comparative way. However, they too seem to have been important in history. Even more, they sometimes seem to have played a more important role than their fellow compatriots who claimed to be the legitimate representatives of their nations. Legitimacy, indeed, might have been more of an obstacle to the efficiency of exile politics than a useful instrument. This hypothesis is paradoxical but crucial, since the comparative study of exile politics has concentrated only on the strategies of exiles claiming legitimacy. It obviously cannot be checked thoroughly within the framework of this review article, but it can be tested preliminarily by examining some examples. We shall therefore look into the ways in which legitimacy influenced the realisation of three main objectives of exile politics: the changing of policy (in both the home and the host land), the informing and influencing of public opinion, and the development of new ideas.

At first sight, the hypothesis seems wrong. Legitimacy (and recognition) was often an essential factor in the success of exiles who managed to overthrow the homeland regime they had been opposing.Footnote ¹⁴ It was a way to preserve continuity (for instance, during the Second World War) or to prepare itself for future administration (as did for instance the government of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, which developed in exile from a ‘tribal to a national system’, adopting ‘replicas of the European constitutional model’).Footnote ¹⁵ For armed forces too, legitimacy was ‘a necessary hurdle to overcome’ (Bennett and Latawski, p. 171).

However, it was not a guarantee of success. On the contrary, Bennett and Latawski come to the conclusion that ‘what is striking about the case studies examined in this collection is the diversity and uncertainty of outcomes’ (p. 4). The Polish and Czech armies were backed by a legal government, while De Gaulle was not (he gained legitimacy from his towering personality); but the latter was successful and the former were not. Legitimacy claims could even have the opposite effect. Among Cuban exiles in the United States they led to the involvement of ‘old guard’ figures, whose presence undermined the credibility of attempts by the exile movement to appeal for the overthrow of Castro (Bennett and Latawski, p. 73).

Moreover, legitimacy was rarely the crucial element in the success of exiles. All scholars agree that another aspect made the difference: international support. Indeed, exiles are fundamentally dependent on the international community. Even a charismatic and internationally fully recognised exile such as the Dalai Lama is not able to realise his final ambition – Tibetan autonomy or independence – because the international world does not want to force a breaking point. This external dependence applies not only to the changing of the situation at home, but also to the exile's influence on the host country's policy. If exiles succeeded in pushing a government to issue favourable measures, this was in the first place because the government was receptive to their case, and only on a secondary level because the exiles’ lobbying had been effective or their legitimacy was recognised. In the end, success was only possible when exiles had an instrumental value for their hosts. In international politics, most exiles were cards, not players.

In fact they could shake off this inborn feature and become players by leaving their legitimacy claims behind and integrating into the political structure of their home countries. The American Cubans created the Cuban American National Foundation that ‘followed the traditional formula of legitimate U.S. interest groups: campaign contributions, political fundraisers, lobbying, information dissemination, media relations, etc.’. They managed to elect three first-generation migrants to Congress in the 1980s and the 1990s and to rule whole American cities – at the beginning of the twenty-first century the Miami mayor and six of the thirteen Miami-Dade County commissioners were Cuban. As a result, ‘Cuban exiles have become major players in sustaining and strengthening the policy that the United States had established towards the island.’Footnote ¹⁶

Their influence might seem exceptional, but there are other examples, such as the Pole Zbigniew Brzeziński (who became national security advisor to Jimmy Carter) and the Czech Jiří Pelikán (who was elected a member of the European Parliament for the Italian Socialist Party in 1979). Although such exiles have not yet been studied systematically, one may assume that they had much more influence than their compatriots who continued to claim that they were the real representative of their nation. Even so, such integrated exiles had limited power and were thus unable to achieve many things and also had to deal with other problems such as double loyalty. Aleksander Walewski, for instance, the illegitimate son of Napoleon Bonaparte, no longer defended Polish interests once he had become Napoleon III's foreign minister (in spite of his activities in the 1830s and 1840s, while still an agent in Adam Jerzy Czartoryski's diplomatic network in exile).Footnote ¹⁷

How dependent were exiles on another field: the dissemination of information? Although exiles used numerous strategies – from demonstrations to publications – to remind the world of their case, their influence remains a matter of discussion. Jean-Michel Palmier (pp. 299 ff.) considers propaganda to be one of the most important activities of the German exiles (also because political parties broke up into factions and were not influential). He gives several concrete examples of successful propaganda (for instance the publication of the Braunbuch über Reichtagsbrand und Hitlerterror and the organization of a counter-trial in London in August 1933, which would have prevented the accused communists at home from being beheaded). However, Leopold Unger, a journalist in exile, puts his role into perspective by paraphrasing one of the most famous exiled writers: ‘The West has never lacked information sources. “Thirty books – as observes Solzhenitsyn – have been written about the Archipelago, but they have not been noticed”.’Footnote ¹⁸

However, from our perspective, it is significant that the influence of writers was much more powerful because of elements other than legitimacy, such as the charisma of the author or the quality of his writing. The most influential writers – apart from Solzhenitsyn, for instance Victor Hugo, Bertolt Brecht, Czesław Miłosz, or Edward Said – had no legitimacy claims. Moreover, legitimacy seems to be a barrier to success, as it often distracted the attention towards one's own private claims and therefore reduced the contents of the information. Dufoix recognizes this, but only implicitly and superficially (pp. 213–14 and 259–63).

This is also visible in a third important role of exiles: the development of new ideas. Exiles played indeed a significant role in the making of new ideologies, the building of nations, or the borrowing of Western thought and its adaptation for domestic situations. The best-known example is of course the participation of Romantic exiles in the forming of the emancipatory ideas of the nineteenth century. However, this was generally made possible only when legitimacy claims were dropped. Legitimacy fundamentally interfered with intellectual production. On the one hand, it was a permanent source of discussion and division since it was only very exceptionally realised (political scientists have therefore proposed to replace the concept by loyalty and recognition). In itself, debate could be fruitful, but the issue of legitimacy rather limited its range. Instead of discussing and developing new ideas and thoughts, exiles only questioned each other's legitimacy and disputed who was the authentic representative of the nation or the national interests. On the other hand, legitimacy, with its respect for continuity and former institutions, could keep exiles in the past and close their eyes to new evolution. Even in the 1970s, some Polish exiles claimed to represent the Second Polish Republic of the interwar period and did not accept the loss of Vilnius and Lviv. What is more, they did not see fit to have contacts with the opposition at home because of their belief that the real nation was in exile. In this way, legitimacy could isolate exiles, not only from the host country but also from their homeland. Precisely because they had lost contact with the political realities, their intellectual work could not be successful.

Conclusions: the temptation of legitimacy

Legitimacy apparently does not stimulate the success of exile politics; worse still, it seems to counteract it. It could not solve the problem of the exiles’ instrumentality and reduced the horizon of their activities. Exiles who did not claim any legitimacy, dropping the heritage of the past and integrating into the structure of the host country, seem to have played a more crucial role. Unfortunately, a lot of exiles were tempted by legitimacy. They did not accept history, and continued to consider themselves as the only representatives of their nation. In anticipation of a more favourable future they directed their action towards preparing and unifying the emigration. They thought that their most important task was to safeguard continuity, to conserve the former institutions and organisations in order to reimport them afterwards to the home country, just like Noah had conserved all animal species on his Ark.

Scholars comparing exile politics have also given in to the temptation of concentrating their research only on exiles claiming legitimacy. They did so for several reasons, and most of them are very legitimate: interest in the political functioning of legitimacy and loyalty outside the nation-state, choice of a rather homogeneous category for comparison and the abundance of case studies on governmental organisations in exile. Shain and Dufoix, especially, are very successful in answering these questions from a very broad perspective. However, their claim to research exile politics in its totality is false. Other questions still need to be answered. Which factors have stimulated some exiles to claim legitimacy, and why have others not done so? And above all, can one support the hypothesis that exiles who did not claim legitimacy were more influential?