Denationalization

“ In the spirit of this theory of the unity of the Russian nation, the politics of the Russian state have, for more than two centuries, aimed incessantly to hinder the development of the Ukrainian nation, by means of the most ruthless oppression, and to degrade it to an ethnographic mass which, thru its increasing denationalization, should strengthen the Russian state and support its political expansion. ”

“ In short, it has been established for almost 50 years that Congress under some circumstances may, without providing for a criminal trial, make expatriation the consequence of the voluntary conduct of a United States citizen, irrespective of the citizen's subjective intention to renounce his nationality, and irrespective too of his awareness that denationalization will be the result of his conduct. ”

“ When a consequence as drastic as denationalization may be the effect of such conduct, it is not inappropriate that the Government should be charged with proving that the citizen's conduct was a response, not to the command of the statute, but to his own direction. ”

“ One cannot help remarking that prior to this war those now worrying over the possible oppression of a German minority by a majority of Czecho-Slovaks were little concerned about the oppression of the majority by the minority, which has been going on for centuries. It should also be noted that a policy of denationalization of other peoples is one peculiar almost wholly to the Germans. ”

“ This view of deportation may be highly fictional, but even if its validity is conceded, it is wholly inapplicable to this case. No one contends that the Government has, in addition to the power to exclude all aliens, a sweeping power to denationalize all citizens. Nor does comparison to denaturalization eliminate the penal effect of denationalization in this case. Denaturalization is not imposed to penalize the alien for having falsified his application for citizenship; if it were, it would be a punishment. ”

“ Negatively, assimilation is a process of denationalization, and this is, in fact, the form it has taken in Europe.
The difference between Europe and America, in relation to the problem of cultures, is that in Europe difficulties have arisen from the forcible incorporation of minor cultural groups, i.e., nationalities, within the limits of a larger political unit, i.e., an empire. In America the problem has arisen from the voluntary migration to this country of peoples who have abandoned the political allegiances of the old country and are gradually acquiring the culture of the new. ”

“ Be not reasonable with punitive denationalizations, ex post facto deportations, labels of disloyalty, and all the other stratagems for outlawing human beings from the community of mankind. These devices have put us to shame. ”

“ We cannot change the citizenship of a man who went abroad, who was born in the United States.
'Mr. Flournoy. You can make certain acts of his result in a loss of citizenship.
'Mr. Rees. Surely, that way.' It is thus clear that the purpose governing the formulation of most of the loss-of-nationality provisions of the codification was the specification of acts that would of themselves show a voluntary abandonment of citizenship. Congress did not assume it was empowered to use denationalization as a weapon to aid in the exercise of its general powers. Nor should we. ”

“ The forcible suppression and denationalisation is a tremendous loss of energy, a lowering of the moral level; it hurts also the dominant oppressing nation in that it commits violence and does not amalgamate with itself the best characteristics of the oppressed nation. ”

“ But the cold truth of history is that when England embarked upon her career of imperialism under Disraeli, when she started to seize the helpless lands and helpless people of the world, Germany and Italy and France followed her example, and it became a race, not between nations seeking to defend themselves but by nations seeking to exploit the earth. Every man who looked at the facts as they were knew that those conditions were liable at any time to produce a clash, and that clash finally came. ”

“ Ireland, India, Egypt, Persia, Korea, and numerous other peoples, are being decimated and exploited even more ruthlessly than before the advent of the Great Prophet of World Democracy; “self-determination” has become a by-word, nay, a crime, and world-wide imperialism has gotten a strangle hold upon humanity. ”

“ The civilized world would not recognize its transfer, unless transferred to somebody. Renunciation under such circumstances would have been equivalent in International Law to abandonment, and that would have been equivalent to anarchy and a race for seizure among the nations that could get there quickest.
We could, of course, have refused to accept the obligations of a civilized, responsible nation. After breaking down government in those commercial centers, we could have refused to set up anything in its stead, and simply washed our hands of the whole business ”

“ But because certain individuals have to be restrained, we do not crush individual liberty, self-expression and the free play of development. There are diseases of nationalism—the lust for power and territory, the desire to impose the will, the language and the customs, on smaller units. When a nation hands over its foreign policy and its personal morality to the state, which is only the machinery of a nation, and when the machine, operated by a little group of imperialists instead of by the collective will of the nation, turns to organized aggression, there is catastrophe. ”

“ Particularly acute becomes the yoke of national oppression and the striving for annexations, i.e., the violation of national independence (for annexation is nothing else but a violation of the right of a nation to dispose of itself) . Hilferding justly draws attention to the relation between imperialism and the strengthening of national oppression. "Where-ever there are new countries," he writes, "the capital imported into them intensifies contradictions and antagonisms and excites the growing resistance of the people, who are awakened to national consciousness against the intruders. ”

“ Each party desirous of belonging to the Third International shall be bound to denounce without any mercy all the tricks of "its own" imperialists in the colonies, supporting not in words only, but in deeds, all liberation movements in the colonies. It must demand the expulsion of its own imperialists from such colonies, and cultivate in the hearts of the workmen of its own country a truly fraternal attitude towards the worker population of the colonies and oppressed nationalities, and carry on a systematic agitation in its own army against any oppression of the colonial population. ”

“ It could, e.g., whilst laying the foundations for the security of countries against wilful attacks lay down opinions about the just settlement of disputed questions of nationality and the liberation of nations or part of such from allegiance to a state or empire of different or mixed nationalities. It seems to become a necessity to make clear whether a Power or coalition of such can be justified to put in the list of their war aims the liberation of nationalities without sufficient proof that the latter all want to sever their connection with the state or empire to which they just belong. ”

“ Culture cannot be knocked and drubbed into nations. If the Germans speak of their being supporters of civilisation—"Kulturtrager"—it is only a pretext. A Polish politician is absolutely right in denouncing forced denationalisation as one of the great social evils. ”

“ And yet, in the great outcry raised by post-war nationalism in blindly defending and upholding the unfettered supremacy of its own sovereignty, and in repudiating unreservedly the conception of a world super-state, can we not discern the re-enactment only on a larger scale of the dramatic struggles that heralded the birth of the reconstructed and unified nations of the West? ”

“ How strange to modern ears this thrill of recognition, when one exile, even among the dead, meets another, of their common citizenship of "no mean city!" Of this classic "patriotism" the world requires a Renaissance, that we may be saved from the shallowness of artificial commercial Empires. The new "inter-nationalism" is the sinister product of a generation that has grown "deracinated," that has lost its roots in the soil. It is an Anglo-Germanic thing and opposed to it the proud tenacity of the Latin race turns, even today, to what Barres calls the "worship of one's Dead." ”

“ At times each country found itself drawn into defending persons because of their nationality who deserved no protection from any one. Sometimes the rules of international law, which were intended to promote good relations among nations, seemed to be the chief cause of entanglements. For example, it was not always easy to differentiate border raids from "revolutions" or either of these from the Indian depredations, which even down to our own day have continued to be a source of disturbance along the boundary. ”

“ So it was with Poland. The beaten factions did what fighting aristocracies always do when fearful of defeat, or embittered by it,—the vilest thing they can do, and the most dangerous—they intrigued for foreign intervention.
Of all things, this is most fatal to nationality. Going openly over to the enemy is bad; but intrigues with foreign powers, hostile by interest and tradition, are unutterably vile.
Yet there is not a nation where a class pursuing separate and distinct rights is tolerated, where such intrigues have not been frequent. ”

“ The denial of nationality, therefore, implies the denial of political liberty.
The greatest adversary of the rights of nationality is the modern theory of nationality. By making the State and the nation commensurate with each other in theory, it reduces practically to a subject condition all other nationalities that may be within the boundary. It cannot admit them to an equality with the ruling nation which constitutes the State, because the State would then cease to be national, which would be a contradiction of the principle of its existence. ”

“ In a word, they gathered up all the widely scattered explosives of imperialism, nationalism, and internationalism, and, having added to their destructiveness, passed them on to the peoples of the world as represented by the League of Nations. Some of them deplored the mess in which they were leaving the nations, without, however, admitting the causal nexus between it and their own achievements. ”

“ Now of what practical use is a league of nations devoid of supernational forces and faced by a numerous, virile, and united race, smarting under a sense of injustice, thirsting for the opportunities for development denied to it, but granted to nations which it despises as inferior? ”

“ The cause of this outgrowth of patriotic feeling has been the belief that a conspiracy has been on foot to betray this country into annexation. The McKinley Bill was part of the scheme. But are you, the men of Welland, the men whose fathers abandoned everything—their homes, and lands and the graves of their dead—to come here penniless, to live under the flag of their ancestors, are you likely to sell your allegiance, your flag and your country, for a few cents a bushel on grain, or a cent or two a dozen on eggs? (Loud applause.) No! the men of this country are loyal. ”

“ The right of subjects to denationalize or expatriate themselves, except to escape a tyranny or an oppression which would forfeit the rights of power and warrant forcible resistance to it, does not exist, any more than the right of foreigners to become citizens, unless by the consent and authorization of the sovereign; for the citizen or subject belongs to the state, and is bound to it.
The solidarity of the individuals composing the population of a territory or country under one political head is a truth ”

“ It is this hope that has already inflicted deep injury upon our country, exciting monarchical or despotic interference with our domestic as well as foreign affairs, and inducing their interposition, not only in our elections, but in diplomatic intercourse, to arrest our progress, to limit our influence and power, depriving us of great advantages in peaceful territorial expansion, as well as in trade with the nations of the world. ”

“ It is all too often under the guise of territorial disputes and through the medium of subversive activity directed against legitimate governments that the foreign influences which we seek to bar from our continent endeavour to exert their power and establish for themselves a foothold from which to expand their activities. We must guard against the insidious substitution of one form of dominance and rule for another; we must be vigilant to inhibit the growth of what is called neo-colonialism. ”

“ With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the Governments that have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have recognized, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States. ”

“ The League can make it certain that deliberate war undertaken for national aggrandizement will end, not in profit, but in ruinous loss.
There should be no wars caused by the irresistible desire to escape from foreign oppression or intolerable conditions. They are made unnecessary by provisions enabling any oppressed nation to lay its case before the Assembly or Council and obtain such redress as the most disinterested tribunal can give. ”

“ He has refused, for a long time after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the State remaining, in the meantime, exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose, obstructing the laws of naturalization of foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage their migration thither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands. ”