The promise and peril of statelessness

Abstract

In his 1749 treatise on international law, the Prussian philosopher and jurist Christian Wolff considered the condition of the exile, one who is ‘deprived of the soil of his native land,’ (Wolff 2017, 113). Like many of the emigr e jurists who populate Mira Siegelberg’s study of statelessness in the twentieth century, the topic was not unfamiliar to Wolff, who had been expelled from his home in Halle in 1723 for his controversial views, only to return at the invitation of Frederick II in 1740. In this treatise, Wolff defended the authority of rulers to exile whomever they wished as punishment but urged that the condition of exile was ‘indicative of disaster, not disgrace,’ and exiles were particularly deserving of compassion for their suffering (§150). Moreover, Wolff insisted that because the earth was originally owned in common, ‘by nature the right belongs to an exile to dwell anywhere in the world’ (§147). Lacking a compelling reason otherwise, states were bound by the law of nations to admit an exile to live permanently on their land, because ‘he who is driven into exile cannot be driven out of the entire earth, for this cannot be done... unless life is destroyed,’ (§147). Yet Wolff left it unclear how the exile’s entitlement to world citizenship might be enforced. His idea of international law referred to the authority of the civitas maxima, a hypothesised world state, but it remained a theoretical proposition rather than an entity imbued with coercive power. No state could be compelled to accept exiles. This brief section of Wolff’s encapsulates many of the dynamics of Siegelberg’s complex account of modern statelessness, in which questions of the state’s sovereign right to regulate its own membership immediately prompted fundamental questions about the nature of the international. While Siegelberg focuses on the twentieth century, her book stimulates essential questions for the much longer history of inclusion and exclusion in international political thought. In her impressive study, Siegelberg inverts the way that scholars have usually told the history of statelessness. According to the conventional story, in the late nineteenth century and even more so after the First World War, the triumphant rise of nation-states coincided with both expulsions and tightening of nationality laws across Europe, resulting in countless persons becoming de facto, if not always de jure, stateless, lacking the protection of any state. Thus, received wisdom suggests that nation-states produced statelessness. This story, however, lies on the faulty premise that in the early twentieth century the nation-state, and accordingly, a global order defined by the exclusive membership of such states, was already dominant. But that was not the case,