Preliminary Programme

This paper intends to understand the making of the international passport system after WWI and to seize the practices of documented and undocumented circulation across the borders of European Western countries. The focus will be on the process that involved, mainly in the League of Nations’ network, the institutional and individual actors in the ruling of trans-border mobility. The tensions between free market orientations, protection of foreign workers, surveillance of individuals and prevention of illegal immigration, aggravated by the development of the refugee question, interrogate the subsequent nature and the evolutions of the European passport system. How the routinization of paperwork at the borders and the responses to illegal practices have, together with the influence of national orientations and political crisis, contributed to the changing of the international system will be discussed as an essential aspect of this paper. (Show less)

The proposal concentrates on the procedures and techniques of establishing/manifesting/checking the official bond between the (early) modern territorial authority (state) and the non-sedentary people. In comparison wiht the multitude of titles of belonging and obedience, the formal border of a state or a country seems not to be so significant before the arrival of the territorial state. The control of one’s “identity“ didn’t often take place while crossing the state/country borders, but the bond to an authority could have been checked on many other occasion.
The (not) belonging to a country could have had penal consequences especially for the persons/groups who have been formally banished from it – in the Habsburg monarchy, the Gypsies, lacking of any seigniorial bond, were threatened by death in case of being repeatedly caught before circa 1760. For them it was of special importance to assert their belonging to the country and the non-violation of laws during the trials. The severe attitude towards the Gypsies changed during the second half of the 18th century as the enlightened measures concering the settlement of the population were applied in the Habsburg monarchy.
Based mainly on inquisitional depositions and the official evidence from the 17th-19th century Bohemia, the paper will focus on the strategies of how the interrogated persons asserted their belonging to the country (often contested by authorities) as well as on the perception and construction of “foreing” people by these authorities and sedentary population. Special attention will be paid to the changing significance of (state) borders in the Habsburg monarchy in the 18th and 19th century.
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During the 1720s and 1730s the Habsburg Monarchy established a sanitary cordon on its land borders with the Ottoman Empire. From that moment onwards, the border was closely guarded, all communication was supervised and controlled. The initial purpose of this arrangement was to protect the Habsburg lands from epidemics of plague and other infectious diseases, endemic in the Ottoman Empire. The cordon existed for next century and a half, introducing strict mobility regime.
The paper investigates legislation and administrative regulation concerning the mobility control on the sanitary cordon. In addition, it examines the development of border facilities used to control migrants, particularly quarantine stations on the western half of the Habsburg-Ottoman border, between the Banat of Temesvár and the Adriatic Sea. It argues that the sanitary cordon should not be regarded only as the institution for the protection of public health. It was part of a wider mobility control regime. This was visible from the examination of the cordon’s additional functions. Already in the first decades of the cordon’s existence the central government in Vienna was very interested to determine the political and legal status of migrants that were entering the Monarchy – whether they were domestic Habsburg subjects or foreign subjects of Ottoman sultans. The quarantine records were also used to supervise Ottoman trade and commerce. Finally, from the late 1760s onwards the border and the quarantine stations became an important part of the comprehensive supervision of Ottoman migrants inside the Habsburg realm.
The paper investigates the role and significance of non-public health related functions of the border through the examination of legal and administrative regulation, the operation of quarantine stations and control procedures. The development of these additional functions indicates that the border mobility regime was a part of the broader effort of the Habsburg central government in the first decades of the eighteenth century to increase its control over mobile groups. In addition to marginal groups and traveling artisans, the Monarchy targeted Ottoman foreigners, especially Ottoman merchants. The comprehensive and state-wide character of these measures suggests that important elements of mobility control regime were in place several decades before it was officially enforced to supervise general population. The effort to make a clear distinction between foreign and domestic subjects indicates that Vienna made an effort already in the first half of the eighteenth century to define more clearly the limits of its authority and to establish more direct relationship with the individuals. (Show less)

The paper explores the relation between ethnicity and social status in early nineteenth-century Finland by examining the Finnish Roma (‘Gypsies’) and their relation to other low status people, notably those labelled as vagrants. Around Europe, vagrancy policies have substantially affected the ways in which the social statuses of the Roma groups have been shaped. This paper will ask how vagrancy was understood at the grass roots by looking at vagrancy control operations in two Finnish provinces, focusing especially on the years 1805 and 1806. It is based on interrogation protocols of suspected vagrants of the provinces of Uusimaa ja Häme, situated in southern Finland, and Kymenkartano, situated in eastern Finland. These provinces offer an interesting area of study during the period since the eastern province was the border province with Russia whereas, in 1804, the southern province saw the establishment of a particular workhouse for those condemned for vagrancy.
The following themes will be addressed in the paper:
Ethnicity: Did the people categorised as ‘Gypsies’ stand out as a clearly separate group among suspected vagrants? How was ethnicity articulated in the interrogation protocols? Did the backgrounds or the interrogations of suspected vagrants differ based on ethnicity? Did the decisions given for suspected vagrants differ based on ethnicity?
Border: Did the vicinity of the Russian border influence the implementation of vagrancy policies? What kind of possibilities did the border offer for the targets of vagrancy control?
Army: What kind of a role did the army play in the backgrounds of suspected vagrants? How did the military influence vagrancy control? Can any differences be distinguished between the two provinces concerning this influence?

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The paper is a preliminary research report describing the development of modern expelling policy in 19-20th Century Nordic countries, more specifically Finland, Sweden and Denmark. Contrary to common preconceptions, these countries have long immigration histories, and have also expelled ‘unwanted’ non-citizens throughout the 19-20th centuries. What kind of social and political logic has there been in Nordic expelling policies, and how did nation- and state-building affect this? How were expulsions legitimized? To what degree did ideas of ethnic, racial or social hierarchies affect contested deportation decisions, and how did the development of allegedly universalistic welfare states change the conceptual framing of expulsion policies?

The paper is based on 1) case studies of individual “border cases”, in which different level authorities and other policy actors were forced to explicate the logic of particular expelling decisions 2) parliamentary and public debates on expulsion policies in Finland, Sweden and Denmark 3) available expulsion figures, 1880-1950.
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