These two books constitute an important shift in the historiography of modern citizenship. Christopher Casey looks at the arbitration of individual, group, and corporate claims to protection under international law from the mid-nineteenth to the twenty-first century, whereas Nimisha Barton examines the history of naturalization and citizen rights in the French Third Republic up to the end of the Second World War.
Intellectual and political historians tend to analyze the relationship between states and populations using concepts such as sovereignty or citizenship. However, both concepts—rooted in early modern understandings of the political—provide a limited understanding of the legal experience of numerous people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a time of mass migration as well as globalisation. Static and mobile populations experienced a parting of fortunes which has also been mirrored in the historiography of rights and identities. These two books instead analyse citizenship as a messy category of social experience, which emerges from the interactions of multiple actors operating on local, national and international scales, and in a rapidly changing world.
Christopher Casey highlights the presence throughout this period of a neglected political condition: individuals and groups who were either located outside the state of their citizenship without having moved, or mobile individuals, groups, and represented populations who claimed rights of citizenship without having been made stateless. In making sense of their de facto status under international law, Casey describes them as sovereign, thus turning the conventional representation of the relationship between individuals and political jurisdictions on its head.
As subjects of his investigations, Casey's “nationals abroad” change in quality at different historical moments. In the international legal world of the pre-World War I era—the subject of his first section—he deals with individuals seeking the protection of states outside of their places of residence and origin. The individuals in this book are seen as active agents in international arenas. They probe the boundaries of legal entitlement in their own day and their records in history pose eye-opening riddles to historians and their contemporaries alike. Their ability to mobilize states to protect them despite having only a very loose personal connection to these jurisdictions could be described as moral luck or the good fortune of a prosperous elite. There is Don Pacifico, a leading figure in the Jewish community of Athens, a victim of a pogrom who eventually succeeded in mobilizing British support for demanding justice in Greece, all by virtue of his status as a British subject. Another example is Alexander Herzen, the well-known Russian liberal and patriot in exile, who was also—and this is less widely known—a Swiss citizen.
The second section paints a more complex picture of the international legal world of the interwar period. Here, the “nationals abroad” are groups such as minorities, corporations, and uprooted individuals. The 1920s, Casey shows, were a period in which an entirely new body of thought challenged and negotiated established ideas of individual and group right. Such challenge was made not through direct appeals to citizenship but by means of negotiating different claims to territory, the right of passage, or corporate assets. The contexts for all of this range from the protection of minorities in mandated colonial territories under the League of Nations to the mining industry in the Soviet Union at the time of the New Economic Policy. One of the “sovereign” corporations to arise between the emergent Soviet Union and the international system of private law was a mining corporation of uncertain citizenship, Lena Goldfields Ltd., which was predominantly British, but had shareholders in Russia, France, and the United States. Initially at least, it successfully renegotiated its concession from the Soviet government under international law until it was eventually nationalized.
The last section of the book jumps to the period after World War II in which populations were “unmixed,” while a more global, but United States-dominated financial sector emerged, which had specific effects both on Europe and on the recently decolonized Global South. A case in point is an episode in the aftermath of World War II, in 1955, in which, a Guatemalan citizen of German extraction who had purchased citizenship in Liechtenstein during the war failed in his demand for legal compensation from Liechtenstein for his loss of property. The fact that he lost the case highlights a fundamental shift that had occurred toward the end of the nineteenth century: persons had to belong to a community in order to have its protection and help in restoring their belongings. Interestingly, this case marks the end of Mira Siegelberg's recent Statelessness: A Modern History. By the mid-twentieth century, this idea had become fully entrenched in international legal thinking.
By focusing on cases of private international law rather than normative ideas about citizenship and human rights, Casey is able to effectively develop his analysis for the later twentieth century. His book straddles a range of previously disconnected narratives relevant to international history, decolonization, and revolution, and highlights the myriad states of multiple subjecthood spanning a period from the mid-nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. Overall, the “nationals abroad” who were most successful in claiming rights were those who had property (193). As a critical corollary to viewing the period from the 1970s as a time of successes for human rights claims, Casey analyzes the institution of the European Court of Human Rights. As he underlines, this court has in fact granted its largest award for a mass human rights violation not to individuals as rights-holders but to anonymous shareholders, those of Russian oil company Yukos (188). This sober conclusion takes Casey's narrative of international arbitration and rights out of the previous paradigm of the history of human rights from the Nuremberg Trials to the international court rulings about Yugoslavia. Instead, he roots these discourses on rights firmly in the longer history of private international law.
The interest in cases and lived experience rather than in discourse and norms is also what connects Casey's approach to that offered by Nimisha Barton in Reproductive Citizens. Anyone trying to make sense of immigration in the context of the French Third Republic would previously have reflexively thought that the rise of the French right, the Vichy regime, and its emerging population regimes would be the dominant themes of such a book. But Barton's is an unusual immigration history, one that does not solely contextualize immigration through “hierarchies of exclusion,” racism, and xenophobia (5), but also identifies pro-immigration sentiment among right-wing natalists who see naturalization as an “ideal solution to the population crisis” (5). She suggests that immigrants were, first, viewed in certain contexts as being the hope of the French nation, and, second,, actively mobilized this perspective in making their own claims for naturalization and protection. Looked at through the lens of the ideology and language of populationism, it becomes visible to what extent women in particular have been overlooked not only as agents for their own rights but also as thinkers. Too often, Barton argues—correctly, I might add—that scholars of citizenship have equated the rights of citizens with the status of citizenship. Using instead a variety of understandings of social citizenship and related benefits, Barton broadens the understanding of the lived experience of immigrants in addition to filling the conceptual history of citizenship and allegiance with meaning that contextualizes these ideas within the history of Nazi rule in Europe, and France's colonial empire.
Barton also succeeds in drawing attention to multiple forms of agency, allegiance, and attachment among immigrants. In her writing, one encounters people not so much in their group identity (such as Rumanian immigrants or Jewish women) but in their lived relationship with others: as workers or mothers, husbands or neighbors. She is thus able to show both how they positioned themselves toward state bureaucracies, and how bureaucrats classified them. Looking at the link between two essential categories of demographic thought—birth and immigration—Barton establishes a continuous bureaucratic as well as ideological link between “natalism” and “immigration.” Although this book is a history of citizenship, it is also a history of neighborhoods and horizontal relationships, as well as one that accounts for France's status as a colonial power that is nervous about the potential power of its indigènes to change the structure of power in its home metropole.
The first section of the book begins in rural France, where Barton follows the trajectories of foreign-born people in agricultural labor and factories. The idea of citizenship in this context is represented through the institutional reality of organizations supplying France with labor from Eastern and Southern Europe as well as from North Africa, the Office Nationale de la Main d’ Oeuvre Agricole, and the Service d’ organisation des travailleurs coloniaux (SOTC), to compensate for French labor shortages. The state acts in the interest of French employers who struggled to keep foreign laborers in residence unless social cohesion was legally facilitated (23). The solution was marriage, which tied foreign-born immigrants to the French state (44). Conversely, in this period, which so many identify as the “roaring” twenties, France actually experienced an “acute moment of heteronormative conformity” as “couples who failed to conform to the conjugal model” invited “bureaucratic distrust” (46).
At the same time, Barton shows, there was also a growing rift between the colonial order of pre-World War I France and the society that came after. Despite the discourse on the illicit nature of inter-racial liaisons, bureaucrats themselves admitted that they could not prevent such “evidently grotesque liaisons” as the marriage of men from Indochina to middle class French women (62). In 1919, Minister of War Georges Clemenceau, for example, declared via a confidential circular that colonial workers and soldiers were to be immediately repatriated to their countries, but with some exceptions, including marriage or being the father of a French child (64–65).
After three chapters that look at the social history of state bureaucracies in interwar Paris, the book culminates in a chapter that discusses life and legal practice under the German occupation. It has been a central preoccupation of historians of modern Europe to explain the comparatively higher survival rates of Jews in occupied France, in contrast to in other Western European occupied states. Barton's earlier chapters on the social fabric and neighborhood experiences of immigration and naturalization add further insight to this story. It is an account that oscillates between the Vichy Government's Commission de Revisions de Naturalisation (CRN) (199), which reviewed the naturalization process of the interwar period, and the numerous bureaucrats as well as civilian organizations that performed non-compliant activities including shuttling Jewish children to rural “colonies de vacances.” The picture Barton paints is one of a multitude of participants giving shape to the French Third Republic, in which family law was deployed to respond to population crises, and changing political winds at the national level affected individuals in neighborhoods differently.
Throughout the later twentieth century, there emerged a dominant perspective that allowed authors from Hannah Arendt to Lynn Hunt to examine individual rights in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a history of moral successes or failures of political institutions that, one way or another, hearkened back to the ideologies of the French Revolution. What connects the books by Christopher Casey and Nimisha Barton is their willingness to depart from this familiar blueprint, which elevated normative orders in history even as they examined their failings, and begin their analysis with a history of case studies.
This is also true of the way’ ideas of “left” and “right” in relation to individual and citizen rights are treated in Casey's and Barton's accounts. Both authors underline that theorists of modern states and international law, such as Max Weber and Friedrich Savigny, as well as politicians, such as Georges Clemenceau, were often unsure of the practical uses of normative understandings of political order, including their own. Moreover, the twentieth-century fortunes of earlier doctrines were also varied. Ever since Malthus's famous remark in Essay on Population that virtue was the only way to balance the “power of population” (i.e., the capacity of populations to grow) against the capacity of land to ensure its subsistence, a dominant view of “populationism” has equated this statement to a doctrine supporting anything from anti-immigration legislation to eugenics.
Barton shows, without whitewashing the racist and genocidal policies of the French state under Vichy, that populationism could also have a different face: namely, one that gave immigrants a place in a society at risk of depopulation caiused by a combination of political and economic crises. Similarly, even though not mentioned directly, Casey's “nationals abroad” with their ambiguous forms of sovereignty also provide valuable context for the most recent uses of the term “sovereignty” to describe the rights of individuals above or beyond states. Such includes the United States “sovereign citizen movement” and the German “Reichsbürger” movement, both on the far right. On a more general level, during the current pandemic, the idea of the protection of “lives and livelihoods” has become one of these characteristic catchphrases of our times, a convenient alliteration that comes so easily to politicians wishing to appeal to electorates in a bipartisan way. Staying clear of moral discourses about human rights, Casey's and Barton's books provide the legal and historical explanation for understanding why this appeal survives not only in rhetoric, but also in legal reasoning.
