[BRIEF NOTE] Voting with your feet
Oct. 20th, 2005 10:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldWhy did 2.5 million East Germans leave their country before the Berlin Wall was built? Why did 10% of the population of Laos flee between 1975 and 1992? Why did hundreds of thousands of French Huguenots flee the country after Louis XVI's 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes? Why, for that matter, did forty thousand Americans--well over 1% of the American population in 1783--decide to become United Empire Loyalists, leaving an established prosperous country for the barren unsettled wastes of Upper Canada and Nova Scotia?
Politics. The phenomenon of political migration, as imperfectly explored by Wikipedia, is a migration motivated "primarily by political interests," whether on the part of individuals' own alignments or government policy. Whether it's repopulating the Vojvodina and Silesia or heading west across the inter-German frontier for a better life, fleeing an unstable new regime or heading to a promising new one, it's a real factor. By the standards of the UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, the only thing that would prevent all of the groups I named above from being considered refugees in the legal sense is the fact that these refugee flights occurred long before the 20th century.
Even the Loyalists? Yes, even them. Granted that economic factors played a role in inspiring tens of thousands of people to flee. How could they not, considering that the many economic problems of the young United States, ranging from war damage to the collapse of traditional trade patterns to a crushing economic depression that, some dead-paper sources of mine claim, never really lifted until the War of 1812. Given what we in the 20th century know now about anti-colonial revolutionary wars of independence, with examples in Angola and Indonesia and Chechnya, it would be most surprising if the political factor--the fact that many Loyalists honestly and faithfully supported Britain--wasn't cause. Keep in mind Jefferson's maxim about the need to water the tree of liberty to the blood of patriots. This quote, and his broader attitude, inspired Conor Cruise O'Brien's controversial 1996 article in The Atlantic in which he claimed that Jefferson was little more than a destructive Jacobin. Jefferson, it should be noted, was the third president of the United States.
Did these mass migrations suggest that something was terribly wrong with the polities being left behind? Arguably, yes. East Germany is now a defunct polity, and Communist Laos is one of the poorest countries in Asia. True, I think that the United States has turned out all right, and France has survived the 18th century halving of its Protestant population. At the time, I doubt that the ideals of radical republicanism and royal absolutism, respectively, did a good job making people feel fed and safe. Politics first leaves the people behind.
UPDATE (11:07 PM) : Thanks to Peter for catching my mistake on Jefferson's presidency.
Politics. The phenomenon of political migration, as imperfectly explored by Wikipedia, is a migration motivated "primarily by political interests," whether on the part of individuals' own alignments or government policy. Whether it's repopulating the Vojvodina and Silesia or heading west across the inter-German frontier for a better life, fleeing an unstable new regime or heading to a promising new one, it's a real factor. By the standards of the UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, the only thing that would prevent all of the groups I named above from being considered refugees in the legal sense is the fact that these refugee flights occurred long before the 20th century.
Even the Loyalists? Yes, even them. Granted that economic factors played a role in inspiring tens of thousands of people to flee. How could they not, considering that the many economic problems of the young United States, ranging from war damage to the collapse of traditional trade patterns to a crushing economic depression that, some dead-paper sources of mine claim, never really lifted until the War of 1812. Given what we in the 20th century know now about anti-colonial revolutionary wars of independence, with examples in Angola and Indonesia and Chechnya, it would be most surprising if the political factor--the fact that many Loyalists honestly and faithfully supported Britain--wasn't cause. Keep in mind Jefferson's maxim about the need to water the tree of liberty to the blood of patriots. This quote, and his broader attitude, inspired Conor Cruise O'Brien's controversial 1996 article in The Atlantic in which he claimed that Jefferson was little more than a destructive Jacobin. Jefferson, it should be noted, was the third president of the United States.
Did these mass migrations suggest that something was terribly wrong with the polities being left behind? Arguably, yes. East Germany is now a defunct polity, and Communist Laos is one of the poorest countries in Asia. True, I think that the United States has turned out all right, and France has survived the 18th century halving of its Protestant population. At the time, I doubt that the ideals of radical republicanism and royal absolutism, respectively, did a good job making people feel fed and safe. Politics first leaves the people behind.
UPDATE (11:07 PM) : Thanks to Peter for catching my mistake on Jefferson's presidency.
