Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Torpey
Read between
June 20 - July 11, 2020
Boundaries between persons that are rooted in the legal category of nationality can only be maintained, it turns out, by documents indicating a person’s nationality, for there simply is no other way to know this fact about someone. Accordingly, a study that began
I argue that, in the course of the past few centuries, states have successfully usurped from rival claimants such as churches and private enterprises the “monopoly of the legitimate ‘means of movement’” – that is, their development as states has depended on effectively distinguishing between citizens/subjects and possible interlopers, and regulating the movements of each.
This process of “monopolization” is associated with the fact that states must develop the capacity to “embrace” their own citizens in order to extract from them the resources they need to reproduce themselves over time. States’ ability to “embrace” their own subjects and to make distinctions between nationals and nonnationals, and to track the movements of persons in order to sustain the boundary between these two groups (whether at the border or not), has depended to a considerable extent on the creation of documents that make the relevant differences knowable and thus enforceable.
begin with the French Revolution because of its canonical status as the “birth of the nation-state.”
where I recount how the French revolutionaries publicly debated the issue of passport controls on movement for the first time in European history.
To paraphrase Marx, states make their own policy, “but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given, and transmitted” from the outside.
The project has been motivated in considerable part by the uneasy feeling that much sociological writing about states is insupportably abstract, failing to tell us how states actually constitute and maintain themselves as ongoing concerns.
Foucault somewhere described as the “humble modalities” of power, I hope to contribute to a more adequate understanding of the capacity that states have amassed to intrude into our lives over the past two centuries.
The result of this process was that workers were deprived of the capacity to produce on their own and became dependent upon wages from the owners of the means of production for their survival.
In the modern world, in contrast to the medieval period in Europe and much historical experience elsewhere, only states could “legitimately” use violence; all other would-be wielders of violence must be licensed by states to do so. Those not so licensed were thus deprived of the freedom to employ violence against others.
The result of this process has been to deprive people of the freedom to move across certain spaces and to render them dependent on states and the state system for the authorization to do so – an authority widely held in private hands theretofore.
me emphasize that I am not claiming that states and the state system effectively control all movements of persons, but only that they have monopolized the authority to restrict movement vis-a-vis other potential claimants, such as private economic or religious entities.
Meanwhile, analyses of migration and migration policies have tended to take the existence of states largely for granted, typically attributing migration to a variety of socioeconomic processes (“push-pull” processes, “chain migration,” “transnational communities,” etc.) without paying adequate attention to territorial states’ need to distinguish “on the ground” among different populations or to the ways in which the activities of states – especially war-making and state-building – result in population movements. The chief exception to this generalization is found in the writings of Aristide
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Aristide Zolberg
seek to supersede these partial perspectives and to show that states’ monopolization of the right to authorize and regulate movement has been intrinsic to the very construction of states since the rise of absolutism in early modern Europe.
the ambiguous nature of modern states, which are at once sheltering and dominating. These reasons include such objectives as the extraction of military service, taxes, and labor; the facilitation of law enforcement; the control of “brain drain” (i.e., limitation of departure in order to forestall the loss of workers with particularly valued skills); the restriction of access to areas deemed off-limits by the state, whether for “security” reasons or to protect people from unexpected or unacknowledged harms; the exclusion, surveillance, and containment of “undesirable elements,” whether these
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The process decisively depended on what Gérard Noiriel has called the “révolution identificatoire,” the development of “cards” and “codes” that identified people (more or less) unambiguously and distinguished among them for administrative purposes.
Gerard Noiriel
As modern states advanced and systems of forced labor such as slavery and serfdom declined, however, states and the international state system stripped private entities of the power to authorize and forbid movement and gathered that power unto themselves.
The transition from private to state control over movement was an essential aspect of the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
Where pronounced state controls on movement operate within a state today, especially when these are to the detriment of particular “negatively privileged” status groups, we can reliably expect to find an authoritarian state (or worse). The cases of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, apartheid-era South Africa, and Communist China bear witness to this generalization.11
the product of centuries-long labors of slow, painstaking bureaucratic construction – thus signaled the dawn of a new era in human affairs, in which individual states and the international state system as a whole successfully monopolized the legitimate authority to permit movement within and across their jurisdictions. The point here is obviously not that there is no unauthorized (international) migration, but rather that such movement is specifically “illegal”; that is, we speak of “illegal” (often, indeed, of “undocumented”) migration as a result of states’ monopolization of the legitimate
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Historical evidence indicates clearly that, well into the nineteenth century, people routinely regarded as “foreign” those from the next province every bit as much as those who came from other “countries.”
If, along with their efforts to monopolize the legitimate use of violence, modern states also seek to monopolize the legitimate “means of movement”, they must have means to implement the constraints they enunciate in this domain. In order to do so, they must be able to construct an enduring relationship between the sundry agencies that constitute states and both the individuals they govern and possible interlopers.
My use of the term “embrace” derives from the German word erfassen, which means to “grasp” or “lay hold of in the sense of register.” Thus, for example, foreigners registered at the Ausländerbehörde (Agency for Foreigners) are said to be ausländerbehördlich erfasst – i.e., registered for purposes of surveillance, administration, and regulation by that agency. People are also erfasst by the census. It says something important about the divergent processes of state-building on the European continent and in the Anglo-American world that we lack ordinary English equivalents for the German erfassen
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This subjectivist approach, given powerful impetus by the wide and much-deserved attention given to Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities,” tends to ignore the extent to which identities must become codified and institutionalized in order to become socially significant. Noiriel has made this point in the strongest possible terms with respect to immigrants: “It is often overlooked that legal registration, identification documents, and laws are what, in the final analysis, determine the ‘identity’ of immigrants.”20
“We should not ask ‘what is a nation’ but rather: how is nationhood as a political and cultural form institutionalized within and among states?”23 Brubaker’s institutionalist constructionism provides an important corrective to those views (typically held above all by nationalists themselves) that suggest that “the nation” is a real, enduring historical entity. Failing their institutionalization, “nations” must remain ephemeral and fuzzy.
Charles Tilly has noted that the French Revolution’s inauguration of what he aptly calls “direct rule” gave rulers “access to citizens and the resources they controlled through household taxation, mass conscription, censuses, police systems, and many other invasions of small-scale social life.”
Achievement of this aim necessitated greater precision in identifying them. Yet at the same time, the rise of liberal and natural law ideas proclaiming individual freedom and the inviolability of the person cast into disfavor older habits of “writing on the body” such as branding, scarification, and tattooing, as well as dress codes as means for identifying persons (except when these methods of marking are voluntarily assumed, of course). As a result, states with a rising interest in embracing their populations had to develop less invasive means to identify people. The approach they adopted
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Techniques for “reading off the body” have become more and more sophisticated over time, shifting from unreliable subjective descriptions and anthropometric measurements to photographs (themselves at first often considered unreliable by police), fingerprinting, electronically scanned palm prints, DNA fingerprinting, and the retina scans dramatized in the film version of Mission: Impossible.
The ability of states uniquely and unambiguously to identify persons, whether “their own” or others, is at the heart of the process whereby states, and the international state system, have succeeded over time in monopolizing the legitimate “means of movement” in the modern world.
Such rulers began to move away, however unintentionally, from a “political map [that] was an inextricably superimposed and tangled one, in which different juridical instances were geographically interwoven and stratified, and plural allegiances, asymmetrical suzerainties and anomalous enclaves abounded.”
By the seventeenth century, German rulers made laws intended to tie servants more firmly to their masters, and thus also to squelch those bogeys of the officialdom, vagrancy and itinerancy.35 Meanwhile, across the Channel, similar developments had been afoot for some time. Despite the guarantee of the English subject’s freedom to depart in the Magna Carta, a statute of 1381 forbade all but peers, notable merchants, and soldiers to leave the kingdom without a license.36 Early modern English rulers were especially concerned that uncontrolled departures would facilitate religious deviance.
These laws governing movement helped to codify in law – and to implement in practice – a distinction between “local” and “foreign” poor, and notably referred to the place to which illegal settlers should be removed as their “native” residence. The act of removing oneself from one’s place of birth thus appears to have been regarded as an anomaly, and may indeed have constituted a violation of the law without proper papers.
Peter’s modernizing reforms arose primarily from a desire to improve the country’s military capabilities. In this enterprise Peter was smashingly successful, for by 1725 he had created the largest standing army in Europe.39
One means for the state to gain such access was to restrict mobility by requiring documentation of movement and residence. Consistent with this aim, the czar in the early eighteenth century promulgated a series of decrees regulating the domicile and travel of Russian subjects.
This ukase only broadened the provisions of the legal code of 1649 that had originally consolidated the Russian pattern of serfdom, the very essence of which lay in its controls on peasant movements.
The use of documents as mechanisms of control made serfdom’s legal restrictions on peasant movements easier to enforce. These examples demonstrate clearly that restrictions on personal freedom of movement related directly to two central questions facing burgeoning modern states: (1) how the economic advantages available in a particular area were to be divided up, whether these involved access to work or to poor relief; and (2) who would be required to perform military service, and how they would be constrained to do so.
In the course of these developments, rulers seeking to expand their domains and their grip on populations increasingly asserted their authority to determine who could come and go in their territories. For example, during the late medieval period in France, the legal concept of the “foreigner” shifted from the local to the “national” level (at this point the term can still only be applied anachronistically), and from the private realm to that of the state, as a consequence of the royal usurpation from the seigneur of the so-called droit d’aubaine, according to which foreigners had been defined
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Isser Woloch has noted that “passports and certificates of residence [became] extremely important documents as conscription became a way of life,” and that “birth registers [were] the key to the whole process” of conscription, a process Woloch rightly regards as the revolutionaries’ most significant, enduring, yet improbable institutional achievement.1
Passport controls, in particular, had been a vital mechanism of domination under the old regime in France, and were clearly regarded as such by those who made the revolution there in the late eighteenth century. Among the many restrictions to which the French revolutionaries objected was a 1669 edict of Louis XIV that had forbidden his subjects to leave the territory of France, as well as to related requirements that those quitting the kingdom be in possession of a passport authorizing them to do so.
The principal purpose of these documentary requirements was to forestall any undesired migration to the cities, especially Paris. They were at least occasionally effective in achieving their aims. Yet, as Richard Cobb has pointed out: “France had a population that, in its vast majority, walked; and there is no one more difficult to control than the pedestrian.”
Even the most unsavory figures apparently found it possible thus to get their hands on the papers they needed, even though they might have been denied them by the authorities in their place of origin. “Hence,” as Olwen Hufton has put it, “possession of a passport was not conclusive evidence of innocence, and lack of one did not prove guilt.”
As a consequence of the Tennis Court Oath, according to which the revolutionaries had pledged in late June 1789 not to leave Paris without completing work on a new constitution,8 the assembly ironically found itself on October 9, 1789 discussing the freedom of its own members to move about. The
In the end, the Assembly granted its president the authority to issue passports to its members, thus making the liberal choice that freedom of movement was to be preferred to constraint, even under conditions of substantial domestic political tension.9 The
With the outbreak of the revolution, France had welcomed into its bosom a considerable number of persons not of French origin, many of whom were political refugees from their noble-dominated countries and favorably predisposed toward revolutionary ideology. Such “friends of liberty” were widely indulged in the cosmopolitanism of the revolutionaries.11 Second and more importantly, one must bear in mind that this was a period of grain riots, rural revolt, and, ultimately, the threat of foreign invasion and war. Many people long familiar with the restrictions on movement characteristic of the
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The persistence of these kinds of restrictions soon provoked the ire of a commentator named “Peuchet,” who was given space in Le Moniteur, one of the principal outlets for revolutionary debate, to publish a scathing indictment of “the slavery of passports” in mid-1790. Insisting that the French state had delivered up the individual’s “movements and his conduct to a surveillance as extensive as it is dangerous” and that every person should be free “to breathe the air he chooses without having to ask permission from a master that can refuse him that right,” Peuchet declared passports “contrary
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Peuchet’s liberal view, passport controls were part and parcel of the tyrannical, freedom-choking strictures of the ancien régime.
abolition of passports would allegedly allow them to escape the grasp of the law, Peuchet retorted that this was far from his aim, which concerned the fundamental human right to come and go: “To allow a man to travel is to allow him to do something that one has no right to deny: it is a social injustice.”
In February, the departure of the king’s aunts had caused a furor in the radical press and given rise to stillborn efforts of the Constituent Assembly to stiffen emigration controls.
Then, in March and April, Pope Pius VI officially condemned both the principles of the revolution and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and “in an act of incalculable importance the Church of Rome opposed its doctrine to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.”16 Those inclined toward counterrevolutionary activity were greatly heartened by the Church’s stance. Against this background, Louis XVI absconded for Varennes disguised as a valet. In a state of shocked alarm at the king’s attempted escape, the National Assembly mandated a complete halt to departures from the kingdom and
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Ultimately, Montmorin was absolved of having surreptitiously issued the passports under assumed names. The king had masqueraded as a valet during the escape attempt, but he was able to do this because passports for the nobility typically included a number of persons listed by their function but without further description (“a valet”), and not as a result of any connivance on the foreign minister’s part.
