1869, Ep. 158 with Rachel Chin & Samuel Huneke, co-editors of Reimagining Citizenship in Postwar Europe
CCornell University PressFeb 26 at 7:14 pm31min
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00:09Jonathan Hall
Welcome to 1869, the Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. In this episode, we speak with Rachel Chin and Samuel Huneke, co-editors of the new book Reimagining Citizenship in Postwar Europe. Rachel chin is a lecturer in war Studies at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of war of words. Samuel hunacki is Associate Professor of History at George Mason University. He is the author of states of liberation and a queer theory of the state. We spoke to Rachel and Samuel about the many different dimensions of citizenship, the impact that 10s of 1000s of refugees and migrants had in post war Europe, and what we can learn from this history to help us understand where today's Europe is heading in regards to citizenship. Hello, Rachel and Sam, welcome to the podcast.
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01:07Rachel Chin
Hello Jonathan. Thanks very much for having us. We're so pleased to be here today.
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01:12Samuel Huneke
Yeah, thanks for having us. We're excited for this conversation,
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01:15Jonathan Hall
of course. Well, I'm excited as well. You are the editors of a new volume re imagining citizenship in post war Europe. Altogether, it looks like you have 14 scholars including yourself, talking about citizenship in post war Europe. Tell us how this project came to be. Tell us the backstory.
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01:36Rachel Chin
Well, I think actually the backstory is much longer than than the book project itself, and it really started when we met in 2011 as master students at the London School of Economics. And we weren't even studying the same subject. We were just living in the same student accommodation, and our relationship kind of like a friendship, but also an intellectual relationship. Grew up out of of meeting as as master students. And after that, we went away. We pursued our PhDs in history in the United States and and down in England, respectively. And we'd always talked about maybe having a project, doing something together, because we were we were good friends. We thought we might work well together. And I suppose that at one point the time just seemed right. We were both interested in 20th century Europe. We were both interested in questions around citizenship. We were both interested in broadly similar periods and and we just decided, you know, why not? Let's, let's get this started. Let's bring this project together. And we were early career scholars as well. And we thought, you know, let's, let's do a book project that really celebrates a whole range of experience and expertise, that brings together established scholars, alongside early career researchers and even doctoral candidates, so that we can share knowledge and exchange together. And out of those conversations, have a book, but have those conversations as something that's really anchoring the book itself.
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03:17Samuel Huneke
I think Rachel said it really well. This exactly blossomed out of this friendship that we've had for over a decade. Now, I think I just want to stress that it really was important to us to have that whole range of scholars. And we do, in fact, in this book, have everyone from people who were at least doctoral candidates when they started, at least one of them now has a tenure track job, which is incredibly exciting, all the way up to named professors with established research reputations. I think the other thing that was really important for us was having a genuinely collaborative environment. We started thinking of this during the COVID pandemic, and so there were a series of workshops we had for zoom to get everyone to actually collaboratively talk about and CO edit these pieces. And I think that when people read Reimagining Citizenship in Postwar Europe, they'll see that it doesn't feel like a traditional sort of stilted or disjointed edited volume, but you can actually see where different chapters are building off of each other.
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04:24Jonathan Hall
That's great. That's great. Thanks for sharing that. And one thing that I'm excited about, in addition to the book being out and all the work that you've done, is that your book is open access. So anyone listen to this, if you're interested in the book, of course, you can buy a copy, but also you can just go to Amazon, go to our website, go to any place that has books. And reimagining citizenship in post war Europe is at your fingertips. You can download it and read it on your phone, tablet, computer, what have you. So that's exciting. So getting back to the book citizenship there, this is a what you're focused on, and you call citizenship. A multi dimensional phenomenon tell us about these different dimensions of citizenship.
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05:07Samuel Huneke
So I think one of the really exciting things about this book is that it is incredibly theoretically ambitious and sophisticated, and that's something that came out of these workshops that we had these conversations with the 12 different scholars who wrote all of these chapters, and when we wrote our introduction to the book, we wanted to capture that theoretical ambition and sophistication. And through conversations that Rachel and I had, we came up with this kind of model of citizenship as being multi dimensional, as you say. And that resulted, not only from the discussions we had had with the authors in these workshops, but also from a frustration with the historical literature on citizenship, which, over time, as we as we explained in the introduction, has encompassed more and more and more. It used to be that studies of citizenship just looked at, say, voting rights and the right to travel, and over time, it became richer and richer and richer. These are oftentimes referred to as sort of thick ideas of citizenship. And while that's amazing and has led to incredibly rich and productive scholarship, we were sort of frustrated that there was a mushiness to it, or there wasn't a structure to how we talked about it. And so we came up with this idea that at least in our study in this book, there were two large scale kind of dimensions to what we were talking about. One was what we call a vertical dimension, which means that when we talk about citizenship, it's something that's happening at lots of different levels. It's not just something that's happening at the level of the nation, state or federal government. It's happening in local communities. It's happening through international organizations and NGOs, and it's being negotiated among all of these different levels, both by states or organizations and ordinary people. At the same time we identified, and I think this is what's really exciting about this work a temporal element to citizenship, meaning both that when these debates happen makes a real difference, and one of the key arguments of the book is that this post war era is incredibly important to determining current structures or ideas of citizenship, but also that when people talk about citizenship, when they're having those vertical debates about what citizenship is, they have in their minds a temporality about when citizenship can be granted, when a people or an individual is sort of ripe for the rights associated with citizenship.
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07:39Rachel Chin
Sam, yeah, I don't know if I can really say anything more to to develop what Sam has said already, because it was so nicely put, and I wouldn't want to attempt that. But I think perhaps another thing just to tack on, is that we think that this framework is really useful, also for thinking through this discursive aspect of citizenship, how people talk about it at different levels between different actors that you might think about as you know, perhaps sitting at different layers or levels, and that these conversations are really important because they might influence citizenship as a kind of policy or a legal construct, but they also influence how people think about themselves as citizens, how they interact with this idea of citizenship and, relatedly, of belonging as well, and that these conversations play a really important role in actually shaping how people understand the concept of citizenship and belonging themselves.
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09:05Jonathan Hall
That makes sense, that makes sense, that's great. So, so there are these multi dimensions to the phenomenon and many different lenses to look at it, and that's why you as creditors, were able to bring together 12 of these scholars with many different viewpoints into this cohesive whole that you've made into this book many different topics all interrelated, including women's suffrage, race and racism, gender history. Several chapters are focusing on the impact of 10s of 1000s of refugees and migrants in post war Europe, and that mirrors concerns in the modern day tell us more about this post war migration and what we can learn from this history to help us understand the present.
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09:48Rachel Chin
A big question, I think, in terms of first thinking about this period of time, so from 1945 which is when the war in Europe is. Kind of officially declared to be over. It's really difficult to draw a stark line between what we think about as the war time period and the post war period, because of course, Europe has experienced such a an extended time of intense conflict, and the lives of people have been so disrupted that this kind of upheaval lasts for years and decades after 1945 and we think that one of the areas in which this is most visible is in the displacement of people, which happens for many different reasons, during the war itself, and also in in the years after the war is formally over. So in Europe, if we think about just as a really brief example of the kind of different types of displacement that would have happened. Obviously, you have a lot of foreign people in Europe who are perhaps fighting the war itself. You have people who have been displaced from their homes as a result of the Holocaust. For instance, you have people that have been displaced and moved around as workers. You have others who, after the formal end of the war, are being moved over borders because of changes in in the way that kind of nations and states look. And it takes years and decades to to kind of settle some of those questions. And added to all of this, of course, you have other kind of interlinked questions around migration from empires as well, which is happening at the same time. So it's not exclusively a kind of European question. It really extends, you know, into something of a global question. And this brought up so many questions, I think, which at an emotional level, included questions and angst around who belongs where? Who has the right to belong in particular places? Where is your home? Is that home where you were originally at the time that the war broke out? Or is it somewhere else? If you go back to that home, will you be welcome there? Will you be seen as a legitimate, you know, citizen of that community? And I think these discussions and feelings echo a lot of the kind of discussions and conversations that we're also having today about who has the right to move around the world, who has the right to belong in a particular place, and how can those notions around rights and belonging be changed and challenged at any given time because, of course, your citizenship. We like to think of that as a kind of static thing, is a fixed thing. But as we can see, I think from what's been happening in the world, it very much. It isn't you can lose your citizenship, you can gain new citizenships. And so it's, I think, a more flexible concept than we've perhaps been accustomed to thinking about it. And I think this period, this post war period really reflects that, but it's also reflected in the conversations that we're having today. I don't have a lot
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13:27Samuel Huneke
to add on to that wonderful answer. I think I would just add that from from my perspective, at least, I wound up being a little surprised at how central migration and refugees were to the story that this book is telling. I just flipped back through the table of contents and fully a half of the 12 chapters, six of the 12 chapters, deal either exclusively or primarily with these questions of refugee status and migration. And oftentimes these chapters took us to really unexpected places and had really unexpected conclusions. So the very first chapter by Laura Hilton, who's a chaired professor, one of the most established professors, scholars we have in this book, has a brilliant chapter on how stateless people after World War Two, essentially were carving out their own niches, using new international norms to try and belong, oftentimes, preferring to remain stateless, which is sort of a surprising conclusion. Another chapter I just want to quickly highlight is chapter 11 by Sarah Jacobson, which looks at Italian migrants, both in Italy, internal migrants from the south going to the north, as well as those who went to West Germany and how, again, thinking vertically, at these very local levels, were making claims to citizenship, which just didn't necessarily mean that they were claiming the right to vote or the right to have certain benefits, but rather, they were claiming a very local right to housing and. Looks at how they're making similar claims in these two countries, despite the fact that in one country, they are legal citizens. In Italy and in West Germany, they weren't. And I could go on and on about the really interesting sort of stories that are are here, but I do just want to underline again that migration wound up being one of the central elements to the story of how citizenship changed after World War Two.
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15:22Jonathan Hall
Yeah, it's fascinating just reading through the book, just to see what a what a I mean, the war itself was traumatic, but to have all these displaced populations all over the continent, I can't even imagine how disruptive that was for so many people's lives and the desire for stability. So in addition to migration, democracy was an issue, and it's currently an issue now, I mean, the war itself was, was a fight against fascism versus democracy. In your book, there's a focus on fascism and also communist states that what were their forms of citizenship and belonging.
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16:00Samuel Huneke
So this was something that was really important to me. I'm a historian of modern Germany, and in that capacity, I study Nazi Germany, which was a fascist state. I study East Germany, a communist state. And so when we were thinking of this book and putting it together, it was important to me that we weren't just focusing on Western capitalist democracies, but we were thinking expansively about the different state forms that Europe encompassed in the post war period. And so we have a really wonderful chapter about Franco as Spain, and about the sort of fascist concession of citizenship that evolves there. And I think the really scary thing about this is that what this chapter does is not just unearth what's going on in Spain, but also all of the international connections with these legal scholars in Spain to the post war Christian Democratic right and center right in democratic Europe. And I think we can actually see a lot of these corporatist ideas that this chapter unearths gaining greater purchase today, on the right in both the United States and in Europe, in terms of the socialist countries, we have a couple chapters that deal with the construction of socialist citizenship. These chapters in particular, deal with gender and the construction of socialist citizens citizenship. And I think what they do is show the tensions between national identity and the sort of national underpinnings of citizenship and the Universalist ideals of socialism. And this is particularly evident in the case of Czechoslovakia, in a wonderful chapter by Nicola Toma, where she's analyzing the communist Greek refugees, again, going back to refugees who come to Czechoslovakia and are offered citizenship there, but ultimately, many of them don't want it, because, despite the fact that they buy into this Universalist socialist ideal, they want citizenship in their home country of Greece, which has been stripped of them.
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18:02Rachel Chin
Yes, and I think I would add as well, there's a another chapter in the book by Rachel Weiser, which also addresses or explores this idea of socialist citizenship, which we found so interesting in the conversations that we had around the book, how these kind of alternate forms of almost community or politically based citizenship were being constructed. But I think we did find it extremely interesting in kind of exploring, as Sam was saying, these tensions between, you know, a nationalist belonging that was really resistant to alternate forms of citizenship, which came out so well in Nicolas chapter, which Sam mentioned. And one of the other areas that the book, I think, also explores on or touches upon is also some ideas around empire and citizenship, which obviously aren't in, you know, these two fascist or kind of socialist forms of citizenship. But I think we're also really evident and quite important at the end of the war, when large Imperial states like Britain and France were trying to renegotiate the bounds of their identities as empires and trying to kind of craft alternate forms of citizenship that would align with their new kind of diminished situations in the post World War world. So it also introduced a lot of interesting questions around the status and standing of people in CO in in kind of Imperial states or colonies. And bring brought up other ideas around Imperial citizenship, if such a thing could exist, and the relation. Partnership between colonies and the kind of Imperial metropole. And I think these questions are still relevant today as well, because there's so many kind of linkages and continuities and leftover pieces and tensions around the Imperial past and how it continues to impact states, states today, and the relationships those states have with around the world and also with, you know, the former imperial metropole
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20:36Samuel Huneke
and Max I'll also add, if I can tack on a little bit there. I think part of what Rachel's also getting at there with these questions of Empire is that the book is not just interested in unearthing fascist and communist ideas of citizenship in the post war world, but also showing how citizenship is being debated and undermined and curtailed and democratic states in ways that are fundamentally kind of similar to what we would expect from authoritarian states. And all of these types of citizenship kind of exist on a continuum, rather than there being a stark divide between Democratic states on one hand and authoritarian states on the other. And I think the best example of this is Nicholas cortman's chapter about migration policies and naturalization policies in West Germany after World War Two, where he shows real continuities of racist thought between the Nazi era and the Democratic post war West German government. And really has a sort of smoking gun from the archival research that he's done. So again, I think although we do talk about fascist states and communist states and democratic states, the one of the goals of the books is to show that kind of continuity or continuum of how all these states are grappling with citizenship as a result of changes after World War Two.
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22:00Jonathan Hall
I like that a lot. Do you know it's easy for us to get wrapped up somewhat in nationalistic pride and say, Oh, as a democracy, we're at the pinnacle of, you know, freedom. We have the ultimate freedom, versus the fascist or the communist states. But to see the the linkages and the the similarities between the two is That's fascinating. It's fascinating to see in your introduction, you have this paragraph or the sentence I thought was really good. It is our claim that returning to a specific time and place in history, in this case, the years after World War Two in Europe, can recoup some precision in our understanding of how citizenship has changed over time, and encourage us to once again reimagine what it might mean to belong in the modern world. That's what your book does. That's what all these scholars do. And we've touched on how the post war European experience has many parallels to our experience today. In Europe's experience today, in your opinion, knowing what you know and what the book explores, where are things heading now in Europe, I know Europe's a huge area, and you could focus on one country or even one region in a country, but in your opinion, where are things heading now in Europe in regards to citizenship? Well,
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23:15Rachel Chin
I think that's a difficult question. Um, I would like to be presents an optimistic response that I think that feels somewhat challenging at the moment, when I was thinking about this over the last couple of days, I think that we can say that there still remains a real appetite for ideas like free movement for something for policies and realities that will allow people to move around freely and to work and live in different places and to have something of a European citizenship. I think that things this is probably a very obvious statement, but the reality of things like Brexit have shifted that substantially. But I think it's also important to remember that there are still many people in the UK, for instance, that wish that the outcome of that particular referendum had not gone in the way that it did. And I think that reflects in many ways, that people celebrated having that as an opportunity and that it's really unfortunate. I think there are still, there are a lot of challenges linked to economic pressures that are ongoing in Europe. We can see that in the debates in Spain around the you know, the tourism that's been happening over the summer. Is presenting challenges around, you know, people living in the country, challenges around housing that have brought up proposals to increase taxes and policies around that to make it more difficult to own. You know, homes in Spain, if you're not Spanish, and I think on a whole, there is a there is still a strong tendency in many European countries to continue to view particular migrants as a threat. And I think until we can somehow shift that discourse away from those ideas of migration as presenting threats to people or being a problem, or, you know, having to have a solution, all of these kinds of problem based things, it will be really difficult to have a more open conversation about, you know, things like free movement, things like welcoming people from different countries and facilitating their movement, and thinking about migration, and with that kind of expanded citizenship as something that will bolster a country rather than bring it down, have
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26:22Samuel Huneke
a lot to add to that wonderful answer. I think right now, it's hard to feel optimistic, especially sitting in the United States like I am, where we have a new administration that is committed to an extreme anti migrant policy, and in fact, just yesterday, announced that they were going to build a new camp in Guantanamo Bay to hold 30,000 people who are accused of being in this country illegally. I think what I'll add, though, to try and end on a slightly more optimistic note, is that part of what our book shows is that despite all of the very uplifting and at times utopian rhetoric of universal rights and free movement that emerged after World War Two, many of the ways in which these ideas were implemented were Still colored by racism and xenophobia, and that bureaucrats and governments still found ways of oppressing, persecuting, harassing migrants, and that even as we've mentioned in some of these more socialist Universalist conceptions of citizenship, The idea of national belonging continued to have a really tenacious hold on people's imaginations. And so even though this feels like a very frightening moment to people, both in the United States and in Western Europe and in Eastern Europe, I think we've been here before, and that many of the games in rights and the realization of universal human rights have always come from the grassroots and from people on the ground, and that a lot of these chapters do show migrants, ordinary People, not being granted citizenship by governments, but fighting for their citizenship. And so I hope that as scholars and people outside of academia hopefully read through this book, they don't just find warnings about how citizenship can be curtailed or misused, but hopefully also inspiration and optimism about how everyone, each one of us, ultimately constructs our own citizenship and ensures our own rights.
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28:51Jonathan Hall
Thanks to both of you for these very thoughtful insights onto what's going on right now, and I hear from both of you that it's it's a hard time to be optimistic. But what I'm hearing from both of you as well is that there is hope for optimism in that that we do have to these things don't just come naturally, that there will be fights, hopefully not violent, but nonetheless resistance against this steering towards less freedom, less opportunities for citizenship, and more of the ideal that we all are striving for for everyone. So again, I want to thank you for coming on to the podcast, but more importantly for, uh, wrangling all these scholars together and creating this amazing book, Reimagining Citizenship in Postwar Europe. It's available as open access, meaning you can, after you listen to this podcast, you can go to Cornell press.cornell.edu and find the book and download it and read it right now. So we strongly encourage you to do that, and I want to thank both you. Rachel. And Sam for for this conversation and for CO editing the book.
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30:04Samuel Huneke
Thank you so much. Thank you.
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30:06Rachel Chin
It's our pleasure. Thank you.
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30:09Jonathan Hall
Thank you. That was Rachel Chin and Samuel Huneke, co editors of the new book, Reimagining Citizenship in Postwar Europe. Their book is open access, so you can download a free copy of the e book at our website. Cornell press.cornell.edu. If you want to buy the print edition, go to our website and use the promo code 09 pod to save 30% off if you live in the UK. Use the discount code CSANNOUNCE and visit the website combined academic.co.uk Thank you For listening to 1869 the Cornell University Press podcast. You
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