BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Head Shop >

repatriation

  
 
Jackie Susann
21:48 / 11.10.01
help with my thesis time (being its due in less than two weeks) --

does anyone know whether or to what extent repatriation was used as a political tool before the first world war? i have a reasonable grasp of the 20th century history, and my intuition is that exile and excommunication were more common than repatriation before that. anyone know? or know references to check?

thanks loves.
 
 
Jackie Susann
21:57 / 11.10.01
and while you're at it, tell me whether you think i've carried this point:

>>Prior to this shift in the notion of the foreign, as Sassen writes, ‘any outsider was a “foreigner”’, but in a system of ‘vast empires encompassing several nations or multiple small provincial realms’, the ‘foreign’ couldn’t be a perjorative or stigmatising term.

"It [was] only with World War I and the formation of the inter-state system that… the coupling of state sovereignty and nationalism with border control made the “foreigner” an outsider. The State was correspondingly able to define refugees as not belonging to the national society, as not being entitled to the rights of citizens. Unlike refugees of an earlier period who had been outsiders in the same way the transients or vagabonds were, refugees in the twentieth century were identified as a distinctive category." (Sassen 78)

This conceptual shift – which of course was double, reflecting a new understanding of the national as much as of the foreign – produced both the mass denaturalisations which followed the first World War (Arendt 278) and the mass repatriations which followed the second. The latter, as Arendt writes, ‘naturally failed’ (283), but here I want to emphasise the way the conceptual shift Sassen identifies is tied to the event by which repatriation – literally, return to the fatherland – becomes a widespread political strategy. The relation of the citizen to State and nation is, from this point on, increasingly oedipally coded; the nation as home- or fatherland but, as much, the non-native as a kind of disobedient or runaway child whose maturation will be, in the most literal way, the return to the law of the father.<<
 
 
agapanthus
11:38 / 12.10.01
Just a shot in the dark, but regarding the question of pre-WW1 use of repatriation as political tool, Hugh Seton-Watson's "Nations and States" mightshed some light (can't really remember though, it's been a while since I read parts of it).

Re "carrying your point", in the 2nd post: its a bit hard to gauge the forcefulness/ lucidity of "your point" without context, but it seems quite clear, to paraphrase; the concept of 'foreigner' altered with the changes precipitated by WW1 on the relation of citizens to nation-states, and this alteration revealed an increasing oedipal coding.

What's unclear, left hanging in the air, is the 'understanding' of "which was of course double". But I don't have the context, which might explain this.

Crunchy,hope this is of some use to you.
 
 
Jackie Susann
12:05 / 12.10.01
yeah, you rule.
 
 
Medea Zero
04:42 / 14.10.01
This is a bit of a mumbled, hurried attempt to reply to this in a constructive way... Anyway...

I think you make this point well, and I think that, historically, its pretty astute. I think that the twentieth century has been a big century for sovereign power, for nationalism, the institutionalisation of the liberal nation-state in the [dare I say] West, etc. etc. This point has been made by people like Stephen Krasner in Sovereignty: Organised Hypocrisy and even by Daniel Philpott in Revolutions in Sovereignty [although his text is incredibly explicit in effecting a judaeo-christian reading of history]. I think this is partly due also to a kind of imperial politics; about imperial power relations, the remapping and in many cases arbitrary redrawing of boundaries [think the former Yugoslavia, the division of Germany, the carving up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and of the USSR, then CIS] and the responses to the massive ammounts of people moving as a consequence of transport technologies, and the refugees as a consequence of both world wars I & II. This imperial politic might also explain the shifts in the rhetoric of the "foreign", if you follow the kinds of self/other relations that imperialism is generally considered to deploy and produce. I think the work you use by Sassen and Arendt demonstrates this well.

I am unsure about the point you make about oedipal codings; given that the originary myth of Oedipus concerns a son's love for his mother. Even Freud fucks this one up, in his own over-determining way, for Oedipus is, in most authoritative accounts, lovers with his mother without knowing that she is in fact his mother, and as a consequence of his discovery, he gouges out his eyes in shame. At least, this is what I remember of the myth; we're going back years, and I'm much more a fan of Medea and other Euripidean escapades, and lets not forget about the role of translation. But I digress... nonetheless, the refugee thing whether understood as being about repatriation or an exilic politics is, I think, a gendered relation, because of the rhetorical power of gender and family in politics we can see eveyrwhere. Richard Falk has been one of the people to describe this as "patriarchal" without necessarily subscribing to the dodgy feminist strategies usually associated with the p- word. I do think the law of the father is resonant, and forceful; and you should go with it. This idea of the law of the father might also tie in with the kinds of powers and strategies Foucault demonstrates as being specific to governmentality, bio-power, and sovereignty.

[ 14-10-2001: Message edited by: medea zero ]
 
 
grant
18:45 / 15.10.01
As is all-too common, I can only reply anecdotally, but:

My mother's family were German aristocrats living in what is now the Czech Republic, well outside the borders of what is (and was) considered Germany. They spoke German and lived in a castle in the middle of a village where everyone else spoke Czech (and worked in the castle).
The family lived there, died there, had a cemetary on the site, gave birth to babies either on site or in a nearby hospital. But they weren't Czech, they were German.

I think the idea of national boundaries was really souped up in the late 19th, early 20th century, but before that, the idea of nationhood had more to do with ethnicity and less to do with geography.
(As if "ethnicity" isn't its own can o' worms.)

I can't help with sources, but it might be profitable to either look for instances of aristocratic rule like the one I mentioned, or similar kinds of moves in colonial Africa (or any of the colonies, really) where borders were sort of arbitrarily put up over lands shared by several different tribes.
Or even South Africa's bantustans/homelands - which were "tribal homes" often miles and miles away from a specific tribal family's ancestral lands. In that case, "repatriation" was actually exile. {Although that was 20th century, not pre-war, now that I think of it.)
 
  
Add Your Reply