State borders and passports: why do we accept being divided up?
The journalist and novelist Joseph Roth persisted in questioning state borders and border control and pointed out how they dehumanize us. Especially those of us without the ‘right’ nationality or without any nationality at all.
While working on the First World War, transnational resistance against fascism and 1940s displacement it dawned on me I needed to further explore the topic of statelessness: people without a nationality, not recognized by any state as part of their population.
Statelessness links all the big questions that have been on my mind since I started trying to make sense of the “Big World Out There” when I was a child bewildered by what I saw on tv and in the schoolyard: Who belongs? Who is the outsider? Who decides about that? Why are people often so violent when it comes to making groups?
Statelessness in its current form is a relatively new phenomenon: you need a specific kind of state for it and specific ideas about citizenship. In many historical (and probably future) circumstances, statelessness was irrelevant. In a world governed by nation-states and bureaucracies, however, it does matter. You owe the state things like taxes, military service, obedience to its laws, etc. Vice versa that state may promise you things like rule of law, some form of protection or belonging. When the whole planet is covered with states and there is no state that claims or accepts you as part of its population, you fall out of the system.
Statelessness became urgent in the era of the First World War: while states tried to mobilize all possible (human) resources and simultaneously eliminate all possibly disloyal people within their borders, they created a pool of stateless people.
Think, for instance, of women who lost their nationality upon marriage to a non-national because of patriarchal marital laws. Before the war this may not have meant much in daily life. But during the war it could become a matter of life and death: your husband might now be considered an ‘enemy alien’, and thus, so were you and your children. Or your husband might turn out stateless and thus so were you and your children. In the UK, this could mean the loss of economic security or even liberty due to state regulations. But it could also entail exclusion from families and neighborhoods: because neighbors or even family members asked themselves whether you, branded as ‘other’ by the state, could still be trusted during this ‘war for survival’.
Other groups of stateless people came into being because of the unravelling of the big multi-ethnic Ottoman, Russian and Austria-Hungarian empires. Some people experienced extreme persecution during the war years or the immediate aftermath. The Armenians are perhaps the best-known example here. Another well-known example are the Russians who opposed Bolshevism during the Russian Civil War and as a consequence were deprived of their nationality by the victorious communist leadership.
A third group came into being because of the drawing of new borders in the context of the various peace treaties following 1918. The redrawing of borders meant that people could become part of a different country even without actually moving anywhere: their town or village suddenly belonged to a new state. Some turned into a ‘minority’. Some decided it safer to leave. Some just tried to carry on without fully grasping the consequences of the new European political map or being aware of their fragile legal status.
By the 1920s having a legal identity propped up by the right documents had become radically more important than only a few years earlier. This was not a law of nature, nor a sign of progress, modernization or professionalization. It was a response to a totalizing war and the many wars that were fought within and beyond that war, propelled forward by radicalizing technological, cultural and bureaucratic developments. The urge to discriminate between who was deemed loyal and who was a danger.
By the end of the First World War, Joseph Roth was a demobilized soldier and young journalist. But he was also part of the third group of potentially stateless people mentioned above. Roth had been born in a small town near Lemberg/Lvov in Galicia, then part of the Austrian-Hungarian empire. The Treaty of Saint Germain (1919) decided this region became part of the new Polish republic. Roth, like so many others, had to make known to the new authorities which state he wanted to belong to. Being of Jewish descent, like Roth, didn’t make it easier to attain full citizenship in any of the new states in central and eastern Europe. Roth, stubbornly identifying as a Hapsburg monarchist, opted for Austria.
This, however, meant a bureaucratic struggle: those who wanted Austrian citizenship had a small window of time to apply and needed to prove their connection to Austria through language and ‘race.’ It drove Roth, although he was a journalist writing in German and had fought in the imperial army during the war, to secure a false document stating he had been baptized and thus become a Catholic. Roth received Austrian citizenship and would travel on an Austrian passport — until these passports were proclaimed invalid after the so-called ‘Anschluss’ of Austria with Nazi-Germany in 1938.
In the context of imperial collapse, a violent short-lived socialist revolution, food scarcity, weapons abound and defeat in war, Roth noticed the specific violence and violent potential of the bureaucratic procedures around citizenship. As a journalist he explored the borders that were coming into existence between the successor states of Austria-Hungary.
To cross these borders Roth needed documents to show to disorganized soldiers or gendarmes: all kinds of identity papers, stamps and clearances. It abhorred him. In the days that Austria signed the Treaty of Saint Germain, Roth wrote an article called “Die Kugel am Bein” (Ball and Chain), in which he reflected on the nature of the new borders:
Es hätte ja sein können, daß die Grenzen der neuentstandenen und der alten Staaten Eintrittspforten mit Willkommensgrüßen für nachbarliche Gäste werden. Die Grenze hätte in der Hauptsache den Zweck haben können, überschritten zu werden. Jetzt hat sie den, eingehalten zu werden. Möglichkeiten sind ja vorhanden. Es kann geschehen, daß ein Wunsch, ein Wille stärker wird als das System. Man kann Grenzen unter Umständen auch überschreiten. Aber nicht grundsätzlich. Es sind keine Grenzen mehr. Es sind — Rapporte … (Roth, Werke, I, 146)
Borders could have been created with entry gates to welcome guests and to be places of cross-over and exchange. But what he saw was different. Roth, drawing on his army experiences, showed how in fact they had transplanted military logic into civil life:
Unsere Generation hat die Notwendigkeiten des Militarismus ins Zivile übersetzt. (Idem, 146)
The gates were not there to welcome people, but to stop them. Not through guns and canons at border control. Something stronger than steel and iron now ruled their lives: papers. That was the heavy ball they would have to drag with them from now on: the passport.
Roth wanted to resist having to carry around a document stating a list of incidental facts, like his place of birth and place of residence. Such a document separates me from others, he wrote. Instead he wanted to carry with him what united him with his fellow human beings. (Idem, 146)
His passport didn’t prove he was himself, it only proved that he was ‘some sort of I (…) a citizen of a state.’
…irgendein ich (…). Daß ich Staatsbürger bin. (Idem, 147)
And through the passport, his state invited other state bureaucracies to believe this and let him pass the border. This may seem like a benevolent way of opening the gates and making border crossings possible. But in fact, Roth wrote, this story of recognizing passports and citizens is a fiction. The state and border control conspire. At some point this system will lead to the annihilation of human beings, he warned: the passport was a letter of Uriah. (Idem, 147)
What Roth meant here was that the passport could at any moment become a device for deep betrayal by the state. Like Uriah carrying the deceitful letter from King David with him in battle, the carrier of the passport could at any moment end up standing alone, the forces that had promised to protect him and stand by him retreating to leave him in a place of utter vulnerability and no escape.
In 1920 Roth moved from Vienna to Berlin and in 1926 traveled through Poland to the Soviet Union for the Frankfurter Zeitung. In his articles, he described the waiting and red tape at the borders, the visa issues and the general feeling of dehumanization in these ‘bureaucratic contact zones.’ In the early 1930s Roth settled in Paris and kept writing about the lives of migrants and refugees, especially the stateless ones: the people with a letter of Uriah in their hands, an expired identity document, a passport stamped ‘canceled’, a temporary document needing renewed validation by the Paris Préfecture…
Roth awaited the war that would defeat Hitler. He did not try to leave France like many of his friends and fellow (stateless) refugees. He died just before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.
Passports and identity documents played a crucial role in persecution, (post)colonial violence and genocide in the 20th century and until today. They make it possible to keep people out, or filter them out and round them up.
We need to be aware of the link that Roth pointed out to us: hard borders between states and the need for all kinds of documents to cross them emerged as a response to totalizing war and perpetuate our idea that other human beings are our enemy, don’t belong and need to stay out or be deported. Or in other words: the idea that we are separate from other human beings instead of connected. What Roth proclaimed in 1919 is still valid: we should demonstrate that we are united, not let us be divided up.
References
Kaleigh Bagnor, Joseph Roth’s Autoethnographic Response to Bureaucratic Contact Zones, in: S. Kleimann et.al, Kontaktzonen und Grenzregionen. Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven, Leipziger Universitätsverlag GmbH 2019, 235–256
Joseph Roth, Werke, I, Das journalistische Werk, 1915–1923, Lizenzausgabe für die Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1994
