Connected
Learning Community
Legal History 2022-2023
The EUTopia Connected
Learning Community Legal History is working around the theme labour
migration during the academic year 2022-2023.
Labour migration
The
legal framework governing transnational, intra- or inter-imperial flows of
human migration is an ideally suitable topic for our student driven community,
which connects the campuses of the VUB (Brussels, Prof. Frederik Dhondt), CY
Paris (Cergy, Prof. Caroula Argyriadis-Kervégan), Warwick (dr. Jane Bryan/dr.
Rosie Doyle), Lisbon (Nova University, Prof. Christiana Nogueira da Silva) and
Ljubljana (Prof. Katja Skrubej). Migration is very present and visible in our
contemporary European cities and universities alike. It is linked with memory and intercultural exchange but
also with relations of colonial/imperial exploitation[1]
and the question of race, gender[2]
and social hierarchy. Economic motives can act as push as well as
pull-factors,[3]
alongside persecution and political strife or natural disasters.
Historically,
those migrating to another country in a subordinate economic position could not
rely on the law for stability and security. Before the development of labour
law to protect the weaker party in a labour contract, the classical civil codes
of Europe clung to a formal liberalism that portrayed employer and labourer as
equal contracting parties. The infamous article 1781 of the Napoleonic Code
Civil went even further:
« Le maître est
cru sur son affirmation, pour la quotité des gages ; pour le payement du
salaire de l’année échue, et pour les à-compte donnés pour l’année
courante. »
Bourgeois
prejudice on the inferior status of house personnel (to whom this article
applied) could be found openly in doctrine, as here (with the socially
progressive but paternalist Liberal François Laurent):
« L’ignorance des
classes inférieures dans lesquelles se recrutent les domestiques est la réponse
à notre question. Si l’on exigeait une preuve écrite, il faudrait avoir recours
à un notaire ; ce qui est impraticable quand on songe que, dans les
grandes villes, la durée du service ne dépasse, le plus souvent, pas quelques
mois […]
On ne pouvait admettre la preuve testimoniale sans ouvrir la porte aux
fraudes : admettrait-on les ouvriers et domestiques à se servir de témoins
entre eux ? […] On voulait donc prévenir une espèce de coalition,
et de la pire espèce, celle du mensonge et de la fraude. »[4]
The
conquest and assertion of rights lead to the integration of migrating
employees within domestic society, but also to opposition to other social
groups. One example was paradoxically enough the labour movement, which tried
to protect the domestic labour market from increased competition and thus lower
wages. Migration has become the subject of a considerable social, economic and
cultural historiography after World War II, partly as a consequence of the millions
of displaced persons, the failures of the restrictive asylum policies of the
1930s[5]
and the attention for demographic questions within the United Nations.
Within the European Union, migration for economic motives is linked to
the fundamental freedom of movement as a pillar of the internal market. The
extent of this freedom in an union of unequal social protection is a bone of
contention, even among the actors traditionally defending the rights of
labourers.[6]
In
the current debate on migration from non EU- (or EEA-)nationals, economic motives
are seen as undesirable, save for those professional categories where labour
shortages are real (e.g. personal care, IT…).[7]
The twin objectives of protecting aliens in a different political community ànd
workers in a hierarchical relationship with their employer resulted in attempts
to devise international and supranational norms advocating equality.[8]
Conversely, the precarious social situation of undocumented individuals eases
their exploitation.
Yet,
the social phenomenon of (non-forced) migration is much older than the
last seven decades.[9]
The same is true for the legal definition of a migrant or a foreigner (aubain)[10].
The latter can be seen in opposition to members of the body politic,
whose size could range from a lordship or town to a whole empire.[11]
Inclusion and exclusion were social standards, often linked to customary rules.
Whereas the dynamics of enlightened human rights universalism tend to
attribute equality before the law to all human beings (within the metropolis),
this had been quite the opposite for centuries: the conquest of either unilateral
privileges or -bilaterally- waivers by treaty as an exception to sovereign
power was an objective.[12]
Full citizenship, involving the ius suffragii, was often not required to
rise to great social standing and acquire wealth.[13]
This,
however, did not do away with a foreigner’s incapacity to be hired in
supreme administrative and judicial functions,[14]
or with the greater sovereign leeway to ‘make the foreigners pay’,[15]
for instance by confiscating their goods at decease or levying an exit tax (‘droit
d'issue’)[16],
or to foresee extra fiscal thresholds for them.[17]
The cautio iudicatum solvi (obligation to provide a security when
engaging in litigation) can be seen as a relict of Old Regime anti-foreigner
bias.[18]
The
definition of the nation by constitution and law throughout the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries had stronger political consequences.[19]
A national or a citizen was defined on the basis of allegiance to a territory
and/or community.[20]
In the Age of Revolution (1830-1917) and beyond, migrants were often seen as
carriers of dangerous ideas such as anti-monarchical nationalism, socialism and
anarchism.[21] Surveillance
by the police and intelligence services could be explained by a similar
aversion to potentially ‘dangerous’ foreigners. The Belgian Law of 12 February
1897 stated the following (art. 1) :
« L’étranger
résidant en Belgique qui par sa conduite compromet la tranquillité publique,
ou celui qui est poursuivi ou a été condamné à l’étranger pour des crimes et
délits qui donnent lieu à l’extradition, peut être contraint par le
gouvernement de s’éloigner d’un certain lieu, d’habiter dans un lieu déterminé,
ou même de sortir du royaume.
L’arrêté royal enjoignant à un étranger de sortir du royaume parce qu’il
compromet la tranquillité publique sera délibéré en conseil des
ministres. »[22]
However,
the mixed domestic and international nature of the legal relationship between
the individual in question and the Belgian state resurfaced in a string of
exceptions (art. 2) applicable in peacetime: those who had obtained
authorisation to register in Belgium; those who had married a Belgian woman and
had subsequently become parents or had resided permanently as a couple for at
least five years; those born in Belgium from foreign parents and still eligible
to obtain Belgian nationality.[23]
Connecting students, connecting cases
The
aim of this year’s work is to connect our students’ stories. Their angle of
approach depends on the imperial, national, regional or urban history of every
institution and sometimes every person involved in the cases studied by
our students. Depending on the spatial connection of the migratory
movement, links can go up and down the hierarchy of empire, for instance from
the British Isles to Asia, America or Africa; from Europe to the United States
(e.g. from Ljubljana via Trieste); from Latin America to the British Isles; or
circulate throughout Europe, for instance from the fifteen-century Low
Countries to England.[24]
Our students can accessorily dive into archives (foreigners’ police, litigation
records), newspapers and parliamentary debates or the databases
of migration history, such as immibel[25]
or the Ellis Island records.[26]
What
unites us is legal documents from the past (normative, regulatory,
public and private, domestic and international) and the contextual legal
history of migration movements (labour law, administrative law, criminal
law, private law sensu stricto, private and public international law,
commercial law, procedure and jurisdiction). As such, this approach transcends
and combines the summa divisio of private and public law, focusing on
the exercise of state and private power.[27]
The legislator, the judge and the professor, to name the three classical actors
of lawmaking[28],
can be complemented with studies on intellectual background, public opinion and
the economic underpinnings of labour migration.
At
the end of their journey, the students will be able to connect with positive
national, European and international norms applicable today.[29]
Oral history as a method to map motives of asylum seekers in the UK and
their lived experiences help to construct the contemporary historical
framework.
Engaging with experts
The
Launch Event of the Connected Learning Community took place on MS Teams
on 21 October 2022. At the proposal of Prof. Christiana Nogueira da Silva, ERC
Advanced Grantee Prof. Cristiana Bastos (University of Lisbon) presented her work
on indentured labour in the aftermath of abolition. This session was recorded
and shared with lecturers and students and provided conceptual handles as well
as inspiration.
On
9 and 10 March 2023, the Peak Event will take place in Ljubljana,
at the invitation of Prof. Katja Skrubej. Dr. Daniel Grafenauer
(Institute of Ethnic Studies, Ljubljana) will intervene as external expert. The
full program will be anounced on our blog.
Outcome: the second CoLeCo online
exhibition
The
Connected Learning Community Labour Migration aims at producing an online
exhibition by late May/early June 2023. Building further on the pilot
edition (2021-2022), students are encouraged and empowered to use digitized
documents, images, campus and urban architecture, audiovisual
material and sound to bring visitors into the law of the past, starting
from their own experience. At present, both the Belgian State Archives[30]
and the Parisian Musée de l’Immigration[31]
have created online exhibitions related to the topic.
[1] Gérard Noiriel, Etat,
Nation et immigration. Vers une histoire du pouvoir (Paris : Belin,
2001) ; Le creuset français, Histoire de l’immigration (XIXe-XXe
siècle) (Paris : Seuil, 2006) ; Une histoire populaire de la
France : de la guerre de Cent Ans à nos jours (Marseille : Agone,
2018).
[2] Pamela Sharpe (ed.), Women, Gender and Labour
Migration: Historical and Global Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2005).
[3] E.g. The decision by Sully to grant letters of
naturalisation to Flemish tapestry weavers to leave for France, a measure
repeated under Louis XIV and Colbert for the Manufacture des Gobelins
(Jean-François Dubost, “Étrangers en France », in : Lucien Bély
(dir.), Dictionnaire de l’Ancien Régime (Paris : PUF, 2000), 521). See on the
“battle against emigration” in the Flemish tapestry production centre of
Oudenaarde: Martine Vanwelden, Productie van wandtapijten in de regio
Oudenaarde: een symbiose tussen stad en platteland (15de tot 17de
eeuw) (Leuven: Universitaire Pers, 2006), 262-265.
[4] François
Laurent, Principes de droit civil français (Bruxelles : Bruylant,
1876), vol. XXV, 551-552.
[5] Frank Caestecker, Alien policy in Belgium,
1840-1940: the creation of guest workers, refugees and illegal aliens (New
York: Berghahn Books, 2000).
[6] Bastien Cabot,
« Immigration », in : Razmig Keucheyan, Jean-Numa Ducange &
Stéphanie Roza (eds.), Histoire globale des socialismes, XIXe-XXIe
siècles (Paris : PUF, 2021), 15-21.
[7] Danièle Lochak,
« Protéger ou refouler : le droit d’asile à l’épreuve des politiques
migratoires », in : Patrick Boucheron (dir.), Migrations,
réfugiés, exil (Paris : Odile Jacob, 2017), 289-316.
[8] Paul de Guchteneire,
Antoine Pécoud, « Les obstacles à la ratification de la Convention des
Nations Unies sur la protection des droits des travailleurs immigrants », Droit
et Société n° 75 (2010/2), 431-451, DOI 10.3917/drs.075.0431.
[9] Jean-Jacques
Hubin, “Deux millions d’année de migrations », in : Boucheron (dir.),
Migrations, réfugiés, exil, 13-32.
[10] Dubost,
« Étrangers en France », 519. The
word aubain (cf. droit d’aubanité) would have originated in the
Carolingian era (820).
[11] Wim Blockmans, Medezeggenschap.
Politieke participatie in Europa voor 1800 (Amsterdam : Prometheus,
2020) ; Jean-Philippe Genet & François Foronda (dir.), Des chartes
aux constitutions. Autour de l’idée constitutionnelle en Europe (XIIe-XVIIe
siècle) (Paris : Editions de la Sorbonne, 2019).
[12] E.g. Treaty between Louis XV of France and
Charles-Nicolas d’Oultremont, Prince-Bishop of Liège, Fontainebleau, 6 December
1768 on the abolition of the droit d’aubaine between their subjects;
Commercial treaties often included provisions on jurisdiction (providing for
consular jurisdiction of under one’s own nation, or the direct competence of
the sovereigns’ central courts, rather than the local ones) or applicable law
for the division of inheritances and taxation. The Peace treaties of Utrecht
(11 April 1713) and Aix-la-Chapelle (18 October 1748) confirmed the abolition
of the droit d’aubaine for movable property between subjects of France
and the United Kingdom. Exceptions from the general rule could concern
nationals of another sovereign, but also citizens of a town, or traders
connected to a nation, or even specific groups of individuals. Treaty-based
exceptions to the droit d’aubaine could be limited to inhabitants of a
border principality or province: e.g. Catalans and inhabitants of the French Roussillon
after 1659 (Treaty of the Pyrenees). Outside of the bordering province, they
were subjected to taxes in the rest of the realms of the King of Spain or the
King of France (Dubost, “Etrangers en France”, o.c.., 519-520).
[13] E.g. Goswin de
Wynants, Mémoires contenant des notions générales de tout ce qui concerne le
Gouvernement des Païs-Bas (Vienne, 1730 ; Bibliothèque
patrimoniale de la Ville d’Anvers), f. 83r° « des lettres de
naturalité […[ toutes simples » did not involve anything more
than the promise to be treated « comme régicnoles ». The highest degree of assimilation was mirrored in
the « lettres de Brabantisation », which allowed foreigners to
exercise offices constitutionally reserved to citizens of the Duchy of Brabant
(e.g. a seat on the Duke’s sovereign court of law). This distinction was taken
over by the Belgian Constitution of 1831 and the Law of 27 September 1835,
which reserved the « grande naturalisation » (successor to the
« Brabantisation ») to the enjoyment of all civil and political
rights. F.G.J.
Thimus, Traité de droit public, ou exposition méthodique des principes du
droit public de la Belgique (Liège : Dessain, 1844), vol. I, 100.
[14] Louis
Gilliodts-Van Severen (dir.), La coutume du Bourg de Bruges
(Bruxelles : Commission Royale pour la Publication des Anciennes Lois et
Ordonnances, 1883), vol. II, 360
(quoting Cardin Le Bret cited by Merlin de Douai on the limitations on foreigners’
rights in the Kingdom of France).
[15] Jean-François Dubost
& Peter Sahlins, Et si on faisait payer les étrangers ? Louis XIV,
les immigrés et quelques autres (Paris : Flammarion, 1999).
[16] Gilliodts-Van Severen,
o.c. : « La législation sur les étrangers restait empreinte
de barbarie ». Where lordships
were concerned, the local lords (and not the sovereign) often kept the
possibility to simply confiscate the inheritance when a foreigner deceased.
Only from the sixteenth century on did the légistes of the French
monarchy state that the droit d’aubaine was a corollary of (central)
sovereign power. Dubost, “Etrangers en France”, o.c., 519. This right
did not include movable property of merchants who had not chosen to reside
permanently in the Kingdom of France (ergo: it did apply to those of foreign
origin who did not reside there in a more than ephemerous way). Ironically, by
the leasing out of revenue from the royal domain to private contractors (les
fermiers généraux)… the droit d’aubaine benefited the private tax
collectors, from the sixteenth century on.
[17] E.g. Charter of Emperor Charles VI for the craft of
barrel-maker or hooper in the City of Namur, Bruxelles, 9 October 1724, art. 14:
inhabitants of the County of Namur pay 18 florins to be admitted. Nationals of
the Austrian Low Countries disburse 24 florins. Subjects of any other sovereign
36 (or double the tariff for dwellers of Namur itself). Art. 19: If any foreigner
complains and is found to be wrong, he will pay “douze patards” as a fine.
Art. 31: a penalty of ten florins for any master in the craft (or any other
grade) when it has turned out that he produced a piece on account of a
foreigner (Louis-Prosper Gachard (ed.), Recueil des ordonnances des Pays-Bas
Autrichiens, Troisième série (1700-1994), t. III (Ordonnances du 2 janvier
1716 au 29 décembre 1725), (Bruxelles: Commission Royale pour la Publication
des Anciennes Lois et Ordonnances, 1873), 439-440).
[18] E.g. Belgian Civil
Procedure Code, Part I, Book II, Title IX, art. 166: « Tous étrangers,
demandeurs principaux ou intervenants, seront tenus, si le défendeur le
requiert, avant toute exception, de fournir caution de payer les frais et
dommages-intérêts auxquelles ils pourraient être condamnés ».
Belgian Civil Code, Book I, Title I, art. 16 : « En toutes
matières, autres que celles de commerce, l’étranger qui sera demandeur sera
tenu de donner caution pour le payement des frais et dommages-intérêts
résultant du procès, à moins qu’il ne possède en France [Belgique] des
immeubles d’une valeur suffisante pour assurer ce payement ». Treaties could provide for an exception, as they had
already done in the Old Regime, e.g. Treaty between Belgium and Uruguay (1858,
but denunciated by the Belgian State in 1909), Treaty with Nicaragua (1860),
Hawaï (1864), Venezuela (1886), Paraguay (1894), Greece (1895), Mexico (1896),
Japan (1896) and Serbia (1908). The 1905 Hague Convention on Civil Procedure
further watered down the obligation (art. 17: « aucune caution ni dépôt […] aux nationaux d’un des Etats contractants »: signatory states being Belgium, the German Empire,
the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, Denmark, Spain, France, Italy, Luxemburg,
Norway, the Netherlands, Portugal, Rumania, Russia, Sweden and Switzerland.
[19] In the nuanced world of primarily local identity of
the Ancien Régime, “naturalisation” meant permanent -and retroactive- exception
from the “droit d’aubaine”, or basically regularising a de facto
situation. Dubost explains the origin of the droit d’aubaine in 1526,
when Francis I of France had to recognise Charles of Habsburg’s full
sovereignty and thus give up French overlordship on the County of Flanders and
that of Artois (Dubost, “Étrangers en France”, 521).
[20] Paul Lagarde, “Nationalité”,
in: Denis Alland & Stéphane Rials (dir.), Dictionnaire de la culture
juridique (Paris : PUF, 2003), 1052. For France, the ius soli-principle did not constitute a rupture
with the Old Regime. Napoleon had personally insisted on keeping it :
otherwise, children born from immigrants, ‘who had established themselves
massively in France’, would not have been submitted to conscription for his
armies (Laurent, Principes, vol. I, 421). The factor of ‘the conscience
of nationality’ was seen by proponents of the ‘nationality principle’, as
Johann Kaspar Bluntschli (1808-1881), as the logical result of ‘les oeuvres
de la langue, la literature, et surtout la presse périodique’, which shaped
a common public opinion (Johann Kaspar Bluntschli, Theorie générale de
l’État (transl. Armand de Riedmatten), (Paris: Guillaumin, 1881), 71).
[21] Anne Morelli (dir.), Le Bruxelles des
révolutoinnaires : de 1830 à nos jours (Bruxelles : CFC Editions,
2016) ; Janet Polasky, Revolutions Without Borders : the Call to
Liberty in the Atlantic World (New Haven (Conn.) : Yale UP, 2015). See also “La Belgique versus Marx” (Belgian
State Archives, 18 January 2022), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-HDrlH3JVI.
[22] Law of 12 February 1897 on Foreigners, M.B.
14 February 1897.
[23] Expulsion was prescribed in a quite detailed way:
the Royal Decree deciding on expulsion had to mention (art. 4) the frontier to
be used to leave the country, as well as a detailed “feuille de route”
prescribing intermediary stops and time limits in every Belgian town or village
on his way. Contraveners (art. 6) exposed themselves to a prison time of six
months before being expulsed again.
[24] E.g. Bart Lambert, ““I, Edmund”: A Microhistory of
an Immigrant Churchwarden in Fifteenth-Century Colchester”, In: G. Dodd, H.
Lacey, & A. Musson (Eds.), People, Power and Identity in the Late Middle
Ages: Essays in Memory of W. Mark Ormrod (London: Routledge, 2021), 92-114,
open
access.
[27] E.g. Martti Koskenniemi, “What should international
legal history become?”, in: Stefan Kadelbach, Thomas Kleinlein & David
Roth-Isigkeit (eds.), System, Order, and International Law. The Early
History of International Legal Thought from Machiavelli to Hegel (Oxford:
OUP, 2017), 381-397, DOI 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198768586.003.0019.
[28] Raoul C. Van Caenegem, Judges, legislators and
professors : chapters in European legal history (Cambridge: CUP, 1987), DOI
10.1017/CBO9780511599361.
[29] Vincent
Chétail & Céline Bauloz (eds.), Research Handbook on International Law
and Migration (Cheltenham: E. Elgar, 2014); Richard Plender (ed.), Basic
Documents on International Migration Law (Leiden/Boston: Martinus Nijhoff,
Brill, 2006), DOI 10.1163/ej.9789004152397.i-850.
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