Controlling the Marginalised: Internal Mobility Control, Ideological Illiberalism, and Nation-State Development

Jasper T Kauth, Nuffield College, University of Oxford

Throughout their histories and well into the 20th century, today’s liberal democracies have routinely restricted the mobility of people living within their territories. Until the turn of the last century, these restrictions even exceeded those on entry to a state’s territory. Statutes such as vagrancy laws or internal expulsions, were based on vague legal definitions enabling local authorities to threaten all individuals deemed ‘undesirable’ with severe punishment – not only for exercising their freedom of movement but also for their mere presence in public spaces. Why? Especially in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, internal mobility control was used to de facto exclude marginalised groups, especially those stricken with poverty, ethnic, racial, religious, sexual, and gender minorities, but also political activists, from full societal membership. Whereas the prevalence of such measures has diminished in liberal democracies since World War II, in this paper, focusing on Europe, the United States, and the British Empire, I argue that they impacted the development of nation-states and modern migration control. Based on a comparative analysis of archival documents and secondary literature, I seek to advance three claims: (1) States employed internal mobility control at critical moments of their political development in attempts to prevent societal crises from challenging the political status quo. (2) As part of ideologically illiberal efforts to create homogenous nation-states, this meant drawing geographical and societal boundaries of belonging. (3) These boundaries created internal tensions between different subunits of the political entity fuelling an illiberal race to the bottom. With this paper I aim to theorise internal mobility control as a general concept of nation-state development, unifying so far unconnected historical and social science literatures on the legacies of nation-state formation, migration, colonialism, and the illiberal exclusion of marginalised groups.

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 Presented in Session 10. Citizensip: Histories of Exclusion and Processes of Change