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The Temptation of Legitimacy: Exile Politics from a Comparative Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2007

IDESBALD GODDEERIS
IDESBALD GODDEERIS*
Affiliation:
K.U. Leuven, Slavic Studies Department, Blijde Inkomststraat 21, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium; [email protected]
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Extract

Exile is the experience of impotence. This, at least, would seem to be the lesson of the mid-twentieth century. The heterogeneous groups of Russian exiles scattered across Europe after the Bolshevik seizure of power and the opponents of Franco forced to flee from Spain in the 1930s all had plenty of time to brood on Karl Marx's dictum that exile was no more than ‘a school of scandal and of meanness’. If the causes they espoused were eventually in some limited sense vindicated, this victory owed almost nothing to their efforts, and few of the original exiles had the ambivalent pleasure of living long enough to witness the downfall of their opponents. More recently, the central European exiles who found refuge in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s followed a largely similar path: unable to shake Soviet communist rule in their erstwhile homelands, they were obliged to survive on the long-term exile's meagre diet of propaganda, ritual, rumour and intrigue.

Type
Review Article
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , August 2007 , pp. 395 - 405
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

1 About the problems of defining exiles, refugees and political migrants, see Shain (7–13) and Dufoix (23–7, 49–53).

2 Marrus, M. R. , The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 9, 15Google Scholar.

3 Moch, L. P. , Moving Europeans. Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

4 The position of S. Dufoix, who wrote that Polish exile politics have not been studied by Polish historians (16–18, 301), is totally untenable: Polish exile politics, just like Czech, Hungarian and Slovakian exile politics, is a popular theme in post-communist historical research in these countries, as can be illustrated by the historiographical introduction by Wandycz, P., Deák, I. and Lukes, I., ‘Polish, Hungarian and Czechoslovak Political Emigration and the Origins of the Cold War’, The Polish Review, 47 (2002), 317–43Google Scholar.

5 See among others the editorials and reports in Gesellschaft für Exilforschung. Nachrichtenbrief, 1–2 (1983), 5–8; 3 (1984), 11–23; 5–6 (1986), 21–4; 14–15 (1992–3), 5–7 and Exilforschung. Ein internationales Jahrbuch. Herausgegeben in Auftrag der Gesellschaft für Exilforschung (Munich), 1 (1983) – 21 (2003) ff.

6 Jerzy, Kozłowski , ‘Znaczenie emigracji politycznej dla narodu polskiego w dobie zabiorów’, in Szydłowska-Ceglowa, B. , ed., Polonia w Europie (Poznań: Polska Akademia Nauk, 1992), 61–75Google Scholar.

7 Javier, Tusell and Alicia, Alted, ‘The Government of the Spanish Republic in Exile (1939–1977)’, in Yossi, Shain , ed., Governments-in-Exile in Contemporary World Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 161Google Scholar.

8 Romuald J. Misiunas, ‘Sovereignty without Government: Baltic Diplomatic and Consular Representation, 1940–1990’, in Shain, Governments-in-Exile, 143.

9 Although sometimes they were initially perceived as the ones who escape, e.g. in postwar Germany or Italy (fuoruscito).

10 Of course they are not the first scholars who analysed political activities in exile from a wider perspective. Several scholars came to comparative research from a Polish background, e.g. the German historian Hans Henning Hahn (Aussenpolitik in der Emigration. Die Exildiplomatie Adam Jerzy Czartoryskis 1830–1840 (Munich and Vienna: Oldenbourg, R. , 1978) and ‘Möglichkeiten und Formen politischen Handelns in der Emigration. Ein historisch-systematischer Deutungsversuch am Beispiel des Exils in Europa nach 1830 und ein Plädoyer für eine international vergleichende Exilforschung’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 23 (1983), 123–61)Google Scholar and the Polish sociologist Alicja Iwańska (Exiled Governments: Spanish and Polish. An Essay in Political Sociology (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1981). Just like Shain and Dufoix, Hahn (Aussenpolitik, 11) and Iwańska (14) concentrate on legitimacy (see below). Another study, by Paul Tabori, is a very good introduction and overview of exiles in human history and even the animal world, but is less useful for this research because of its very broad definition of exiles (Paul Tabori, The Anatomy of Exile: A Semantic and Historical Study (London: Harrap, 1972). The proceedings of an international colloquium on political emigration in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries contain excellent case studies, but they do not offer comparative or general conclusions (Pierre Milza, ed., L'émigration politique en Europe aux XIXe et XXe siècles (Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 1991)). The same is true for some journals with special issues on politics in exile, e.g. Third World Quarterly, 9, 1 (1987); Journal of Political Science (1990); Relations internationales, 74 (1993); Revue d'Histoire du XIXe Siècle, 11 (1995); Matériaux pour l'histoire de notre temps, 44 (1996); Revue d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 46, 2 (1999); and Genèses, 38 (2000).

11 Yet, as illustrated at the beginning, his findings that ‘at the end of the war the governments-in-exile of Norway and the Benelux countries, in particular, contributed significantly to the re-democratization of their countries’, are contested by Conway (quotation from Yossi Shain, ‘Introduction: Governments-in-Exile and the Age of Democratic Transitions’, in Shain, Governments-in-Exile, 4).

12 Stéphane, Dufoix , ‘Les légitimations politiques de l'exil’, Genèses, 34 (1999), 53Google Scholar. In his monograph he tones this down somewhat by using other concepts, such as ‘continuity’, and analysing exile politics in action (more than their results or efficiency), but he does not leave the principle of legitimacy behind (e.g. p. 64).

13 See, e.g., Andrzej, Stanisław Kowalczyk , Giedroyc i ‘Kultura’ (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Dolnośląskie, 1999)Google Scholar. In some fragments (e.g. pp. 108, 127), Dufoix appears to recognise this difference, but he never seems to be aware of its scope. Perhaps he relied on Iwańska (Exiled Governments, 53), who had wrongly integrated Kultura in her analysis of the Polish government in London.

14 Although it was always ‘only one factor in determining a victorious homecoming’ (Shain, p. 167).

15 Claude, Bontems , ‘The Government of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic’, Third World Quarterly, 9 (1987), 168–86Google Scholar. The Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, a largely unrecognised de facto state, was occupied shortly after Spain relinquished its sovereignty in 1976, first by Mauritania (until 1979), then by Morocco (until 1991; the majority of the territory is still administered by Morocco).

16 Grenier, G. J. and Pérez, L., The Legacy of Exile. Cubans in the United States (Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 2003), 98Google Scholar.

17 Regina Renz, ‘Aleksander Walewski w słuźbie wojskowej i dyplomatycznej dziewiętnastowiecznej Francji’, in Agata Judycka and Zbigniew Judycki, eds., Polacy i osoby polskiego pochodzenia w siłach zbrojnych i policji państw obcych. Historia i współczesność (Toruń: Oficyna Wydawnicza Kucharski, 2001), 409–13.

18 Le Soir, 17 Jan. 1976. About Unger, see Aagje Weynants and Idesbald Goddeeris, ‘Leopold Unger alias “Brukselczyk”, Specialist of European Integration in the Paris Monthly “Kultura”?’, in Michel Dumoulin and Idesbald Goddeeris, eds., Integration or Representation? Polish Exiles in Belgium and the European Construction (Louvain-la-Neuve: Academia Bruylant, 2005), 141–54.