Citizenship and Those Who Leave: The Politics of Emigration and Expatriation

Introduction

introduction Nancy L. Green and François Weil Exit, like entry, has helped define citizenship over the last two centuries, yet little attention has been given to what could be called the politics of emigration. Most of the migration literature of the last few decades, as seen from the major countries of arrival, has been resolutely a literature of immigration .As immigration studies took off during the ethnic renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s, and as immigration remains front-page news, it is not surprising that most migration history is written from where we are: the countries of immigration, past and present. Indeed, immigration has come to be seen as a litmus test for how nations define themselves. The expanding field of citizenship studies has raised fundamental questions about hospitality and sovereignty from the perspective of the state, focusing on admissions policies, the integration of foreigners, the acquisition (or not) of rights and eventually political citizenship, and the definition of foreignness as perceived by host countries. All of these issues have to do with perceptions of the Other, and with defining the nation itself. We propose here to reverse this perspective in order to examine how nations also have defined themselves by their attitudes toward those who leave. Surprisingly little attention has been given to the history of policies and attitudes of the state with regard to departure. How have countries impeded or facilitated leave-taking? How have they perceived and regulated those who leave? What relations do they seek to maintain with their citizens abroad, and why? Citizenship is conceptualized not just through entry but through exit as well.1 The emigration perspective is important for two reasons. First, emigration is intimately related to immigration. This has been recognized for the migrants, with repeated calls for better integrating the stories of their past with stories of their present.2 However, the recent debates and historical scholarship on citizenship have been framed almost entirely within the perspective of the countries of immigration.3 We can look to the history of migrations past—even before the “invention of the passport”4 —in order to re-examine the ways in which countries have perceived those who left. A study of the politics of emigration could range in time from colonial policies of the nineteenth century to taxation regimes for business expatriates in the late twentieth century. Emigration can be a strategy encouraged in the name of imperialism, or it can be perceived as a loss of labor or a “brain drain.” At one extreme, countries have expelled their citizens for political or religious reasons; local potentates have sold their subjects into slavery.At the other, totalitarian regimes have prohibited their citizens from leaving, creating everything from administrative barriers to physical walls. We concentrate here between the extremes, on free movement during the mass migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We ask how voluntary leave-taking—motivated, as we know, by a combination of economic , demographic, political, religious, and individual factors, and often with the intent (if not the reality) of return—was conceptualized by the sending countries. The material reasons for departure have been documented , but the political perceptions of departure have never been studied in a comparative perspective. In what ways did the state accompany, encourage , or impede exit? With this volume, we argue for the importance of a multifaceted study of emigration, from the laws governing departure and the formal ties that bind citizens (from military service to consular services), to research into society’s attitudes about departure and about those left behind. Emigration may be encouraged or discouraged by the sending societies. It may be seen as a form of diffuse ambassadorship—the spread of civilization or the avant-garde of investment abroad—or it may be lamented as a drain of resources or feared as treason. freedom of movement The right to exit is not a historical given, and, over the last two centuries, the limitations on internal and external mobility have been many. Until the end of serfdom, after all, the first impediment to movement was internal: people were bound to the soil; voluntary leaving was proscribed. Interregional movement or internal colonization was often regulated, if not organized , by the state. In chapter 1, John Torpey dates the modern notion of free departure to the French Revolution, arguing that the freedom to leave has corresponded to a free labor market. He contrasts these norms, which spread throughout Western Europe, with the Soviet Union and with internal...