By Maria Trovato
Florida State University professor Will Hanley spoke to UMD students Nov. 1 about the history of nationality and citizenship around the world.
The lecture was organized Center for Global Migration Studies.
He used evidence from his book, “Identifying with Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in Alexandria,” to discuss citizenship in Alexandria, Egypt, at the turn of the 20th century.
At that time, the area had a “fragmented authority,” he said. It was also a major site of trade and migration, so there were foreigners and different ethnic groups living in one state.
Hanley examined cases in Alexandria at the time, in which people would claim different nationalities in order to manipulate the criminal justice system or other systems. He also looked at sources such as records of people’s nationalities.
Hanley said it became clear that these people didn’t really identify with their nationalities or refer to them in their everyday lives, unless questioned under rare circumstances.
“Again and again, I found individuals were confronted with a need to learn and perform nationality identification, once and only once,” Hanley said. “People would have to discover their nationality, but the moment they discovered it, they could then leave it behind.”
Hanley differentiated between nationality and citizenship, saying that nationality is the status one holds in an international context, while citizenship is the status they hold in the territory that they are a member of within.
“In the American context, we can think about enslaved persons, about women, about colonial subjects such as Puerto Ricans who have been nationals,” Hanley said, “which is to say that they’re fully American and nothing else when they’re abroad, but at home they’re not really citizens. They’re suffering various legal disabilities.”
Hanley also pointed out how one’s nationality does not begin to describe the complexities of their identity.
“International law requires that everyone be able to answer the question, ‘What is your nationality?’ when they’re in an international context, but the particularities of underlying status, like religion, class, race, gender, mean that that identical answers to this question can have different meanings,” Hanley said.
Hanley said his findings demonstrate that the modern way of understanding citizenship has not been true through history.
“Modern laws of citizenship and migration assume that everyone ought to possess clear status and that those who do not — the stateless, the refugees — are problems to be fixed,” Hanley said. “One way to display this false consensus is to show all the ways that it has never been true.”
Marsha Rozenblit is a history professor at the University of Maryland and a historian who specializes in the Jews of Central Europe. She participated in the discussion to question Hanley’s definition of nationality.
“You defined [nationality] just in terms of membership in a state structure, but there are huge swatches of the world in which that’s not at all what it meant, in the same period you’re talking about,” Rozenblit said. “There were all these groups across Eastern Europe and in the Ottoman Empire, actually, and other places, who consider themselves national groups, and it wasn’t about territory. And it wasn’t about states. It was about identification in some vaguer sense.”
Peter Wien is an associate professor for Modern Middle Eastern History and associate chair of the History Department at UMD. He was involved in organizing the event and introduced Hanley. He said Hanley’s findings relate to refugee crises that we see around the world.
“If their own living situation is not providing them with means to survive, or protect them and provide security for them,” Wien questioned, “Where do they go and what do they do if nationality laws internationally, migration laws, and asylum legislation…are making it difficult to for them to move from one place to another?”