On statelessness: a modern history, the Francesco Guicciardini prize forum

Mira Siegelberg has written an important and challenging book. It began as a doctoral dissertation that I was privileged to discuss with her as it took shape. The dissertation, in turn, originated with a profound question that presented both theoretical and practical challenges and I believe has continued as the underlying thread: what does statelessness imply in a world covered by and divided into states? How is it conceptually and legally accommodated? How does the condition of statelessness help define the world of nation-states? What is the civic status of the stateless subject, often expelled from his or her homeland, who lacks the credentials to claim entry elsewhere? To this end, Siegelberg has immersed herself in a century and a half of difficult legal thought, some of it well-known, but a great deal unearthed as the usually ignored articulations of our everyday practices. Her account pivots on key decision points with ramifications for international law, starting with the 1921 Stoeck case in Britain, where the supplicant living in Britain successfully claimed that he had divested himself of German citizenship and could not therefore be subject to the seizure of enemy alien property that Britain imposed in World War I. She examines the international conferences of the 1930s that sought without much success to codify the criteria for nationality, and she addresses the implications of the 1955 Nottebohm case a generation later in which the International Court of Justice ruled that effective citizenship required a substantive connection to a country (a criterion now undercut by some countries’ granting of nationality in return for investments, thus commodifying citizenship). Throughout, Siegelberg follows the arguments of notable legal scholars and political theorists, such as Hersch Lauterpacht, Hans Kelsen, and Hannah Arendt. She explains why Kelsen’s highly abstract legal theories, which to later readers could seem empty and formalist, were an important intervention. By and large she has discerned two remedial approaches: one seeking to compel individual states to mitigate the problem (a sad effort in the face of Soviet and National Socialist behaviour), the other creating international institutions that would provide the rights of travel, domicile, and minimal welfare that citizens of a state normally enjoy. Over the decades, she argues, the terms of debate changed from the initial sparring over whether individuals might even be recognised as subjects of international law to a richer consideration of what it meant to belong to a state or, conversely, to be deprived of that civic anchorage. The intellectual