| Special Workshop Title: | European Citizenship in the New EU Member States |
| Author: |
William E. Conklin, Faculty of Law and Department of Philosophy, University of Windsor |
| Paper Title: | Statelessness, Territory and National Identity in a System of Sovereign States |
| Abstract: |
Since Renaissance Italy, a system of equal sovereign
states has come to dominate the manner in which international relations
is conducted. Complex and detailed laws have come to regulate the
relations amongst the sovereign states. International lawyers and
jurists are presently debating whether and the extent to which a
paradigm of human rights has displaced the paradigm of a sovereign state
system during recent years. Whether or not it has, the problematic of
statelessness has remained. Statelessness arises when a person or group
of persons lack any state that will protect them. This phenomenon, which
is surprisingly very common and largely peculiar to the 20th
century, has frequently preceded large-scale expulsions of peoples from
their territorial home, mass starvation, large-scale confiscation of
homes and businesses, disappearances, break-up of families and genocide.
The phenomenon of statelessness has sometimes characterised the states
that have come to the fore with the collapse of the Soviet regime. The
phenomenon of statelessness has arisen because sovereign states have,
since the 1600’s, had a reserve domaine that included ‘who
may be a national?’ and ‘who may not?’ In addition, sovereignty
has been associated with the legal authority of the state to expel
aliens. Indeed, even the concept of an ‘alien’ has been understood
to be someone who possessed the nationality of another state. Stateless
persons have remained unprotected under the international law of
nationality and even under human rights treaty and customary
international law.
I shall examine the phenomenon of statelessness with the dissolution of the Soviet system against the background of the historic understanding of public international law in terms of the spatiality or territoriality of the sovereign state system in Renaissance Italy. I shall briefly summarise what I mean by the dimension of space and how such a dimension has been manifested in public international law and in jurists’ treatment of mass de-naturalisation. I shall then argue that the state has needed an outsider or foreigner, as a consequence, in order for the state to gain its own identity in a system that requires that the state possess an identity before it will be recognised as a juridical person. The consequences for human suffering has not been surprising. |
This page was last updated on: 2003-05-04.