Who belongs? Stateless in the shadow of empires

Abstract

For most of our shared history, humans have lived in empires. From ancient Rome through the great colonial powers of early modern Europe to imperial resurrections in our present day, ideologies of empire firmly laid claim to some kind of universal superiority—whether moral, political, or legal—as one among many modes of justification. Understood loosely to embody a universal set of beliefs about the legitimacy of certain ways of life and political formations, however, empires have always been subject to historical contingency. The only certainty that followed their rise was their decline and eventual fall. The decline of empires generally came as a result of immoderate greatness and untampered violent conquest, and, contrary to common belief, many of them tended to rest on rather fragile structures. The only surprising fact about their inevitable fall, as Edward Gibbon observed in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is not how they came to ruin but why they lasted for as long as they did. However, the question of what kind of political organisation followed after the disintegration of empires remains murky, and the rise of the nation-state came out of deeply contested post-imperial spaces. Mira Siegelberg’s book is a much-needed reminder that the dominance of the nation-state, which has become so ubiquitous in our political experience today, did not really emerge until only after World War II—and that, in its early history, it sought to define itself in the shadow of empire. Concomitant with the rise of the state was the formalisation of citizenship, which secured a set of rights in a world of states. This story is as much about inclusion and belonging as it is about exclusion and neglect. Siegelberg chooses to interpret a wide-ranging story of large historical significance through a seemingly small, if not, for some, inconsequential category of the stateless. In weaving the multifaceted story of the transition from empires to states, she anchors legality as the core tool through which to examine the making of the post-imperial international order. The modern history of statelessness is then explored exclusively through the perspective of legal history. Such a choice is less arbitrary when one considers the fact that statelessness attained legal recognition during the interwar period: even though it evolved as a contested legal category, statelessness remained a key player in the larger dynamics of rights, sovereignty, international law and order. But the book’s other virtue in telling the story of statelessness lies in pondering the possible alternatives to the state as the basic political unit. Since the early seventeenth century, generally speaking, when the language of rights