Geography restricts aspiration among stateless people

Around the world masses of people are on the move in search of a safe, new and better life. Mass displacement, voluntarily or involuntarily, from Nagorno-Karabakh to Syria and Myanmar, and migrant pressures on the borders of Britain, the US, Turkey, Libya, Italy and Greece, have increased significantly since 2008.

In June the UN High Commission for Refugees reported that about 110-million people were displaced worldwide. In most cases this can be attributed to perceived or actual threats of violence, or people in search of economic opportunities.

Apart from the habitual ways of looking at the issue of refugees, there is a tacit understanding that for the majority of national citizens, geography is destiny. People belong where they were born, and all hopes and aspirations are restricted to the end of their street.

Never mind the antiglobalists and economic nationalists, the ethnopurism and exceptionalism of the “chosen people” who claim to have a divine right to specific territories, I have the stubborn habit of repeating that early fossil records show that we have been on the move for at least 2-million years and that this has generally been a good thing for humanity.

At the same time, it would be disingenuous to ignore the fact that it is far easier for a graduate of, say, the Harvard Business School or the Leysin American School in Switzerland to move around the world and join contemporaries in their professional class in Tokyo, Frankfurt, Riyad, Singapore or Buenos Aires. What does one make of the millions of homeless, stateless, displaced and effectively abandoned people of the world? Where or when did it all begin?

I acknowledge proximity bias. Until World War 2, Europeans (mainly though not exclusively) imagined a world of limitless exploration and opportunities. About 100 years ago John Maynard Keynes summed up this unlimited privilege when he said that someone in London “could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth ... and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes ... in any continent that fancy or information might recommend. He could secure forthwith ... cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality ... and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference ... most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain and permanent.”

How right Keynes was about the Londoner, yet how wrong he would prove to be for most people in the rest of the world. He was reflecting on the era of peace between the European powers from 1871 to 1914. That was an era when formal and informal trade with and between colonies soared because there were virtually no trade barriers, and when local currencies were part of currency unions. During the colonial era European property rights were protected, and Europeans could traverse the world freely after their militaries had established beachheads.

Causation is almost always difficult to fully determine. There is an argument to be made, nonetheless, that the enclosure of land during the 18th and 19th century began a process of restricting, or at least limiting, the movement of people. The colonial enclosures gave new meaning to “trophy properties”, “land concentration” and “vagrancy”.

Closer to our time, a combination of private property and national boundaries further normalised and rendered such restrictions and limitations as commonsensical.

Do we not all aspire to own a piece of property, enclosed and protected from trespassers, invaders, foreigners and “others”? After the end of World War 2 “new enclosures” would spread globally with the institutionalisation of liberalisation based, as it has been, on the free movement of goods and services, and less so labour. A hammer can make its way across borders more readily than a tailor or bricklayer.

German poet Bertolt Brecht wrote, “The passport is the person’s most precious organ ... the passport is

EARLY FOSSIL RECORDS SHOW THAT WE HAVE BEEN ON THE MOVE FOR AT LEAST 2-MILLION YEARS AND THAT THIS HAS GENERALLY BEEN A GOOD THING FOR HUMANITY

accepted when it is a good one, while the person could be excellent and still not accepted”. Painfully prescient he was. States issue passports. States also determine who is and is not accepted. Since we do not live in a libertarian utopia, all of us — citizens, insiders, outsiders, commoners or elites — still turn to states for validation.

Just how any of this applies to the 110-million (and growing) stateless people in the world is a mystery. All we can say with some confidence is that the future of stateless people is, for now, where they are. We call it a paradox when they have aspirations that are greater than where they are or what they are able to afford.