The legal history of migration has been developing in recent decades as a specific field of research. Fostered by the contemporary relevance of migration issues, it has benefitted from new methodological approaches such as global and postcolonial legal history, as well as from a growing interest in the history of international law. Following this latter line of investigation, »L’orde des circulations?« analyses the contribution of the Institute of International Law (IIL) to the debate concerning migration issues between its foundation in 1873 and World War I. Confronted with mass migration waves, the building of the welfare state, the development of an international labour movement and growing fear of socialism and anarchism, the IIL’s jurists tried to build and defend a liberal legal order of movement. In the first two chapters, the founders and members of the Institute are presented as a mainly northwest European intellectual elite, advocates of liberalism strongly convinced that goods, capital and people should freely move within a (Western) world regulated by sovereign states. The IIL suffered, as the book explains, the same ambiguities and contradictions of late nineteenth century Western liberalism: colonialism was tempered but not questioned, racial discrimination between civilized and uncivilized nations was accepted, and international law was conceived of as a legal order governing relationships between sovereign states where human rights had virtually no relevance.
Review of Philippe Rygiel, L’ordre des circulations? L’Institut de Droit international et la régulation des migrations (1870–1920), Paris (Éditions de la Sorbonne), 2021, 349 p. (Histoire contemporaine, 31), ISBN 979-10-351-0634-8, EUR 28,00.
M. Pifferi
2022
Abstract
The legal history of migration has been developing in recent decades as a specific field of research. Fostered by the contemporary relevance of migration issues, it has benefitted from new methodological approaches such as global and postcolonial legal history, as well as from a growing interest in the history of international law. Following this latter line of investigation, »L’orde des circulations?« analyses the contribution of the Institute of International Law (IIL) to the debate concerning migration issues between its foundation in 1873 and World War I. Confronted with mass migration waves, the building of the welfare state, the development of an international labour movement and growing fear of socialism and anarchism, the IIL’s jurists tried to build and defend a liberal legal order of movement. In the first two chapters, the founders and members of the Institute are presented as a mainly northwest European intellectual elite, advocates of liberalism strongly convinced that goods, capital and people should freely move within a (Western) world regulated by sovereign states. The IIL suffered, as the book explains, the same ambiguities and contradictions of late nineteenth century Western liberalism: colonialism was tempered but not questioned, racial discrimination between civilized and uncivilized nations was accepted, and international law was conceived of as a legal order governing relationships between sovereign states where human rights had virtually no relevance.I documenti in SFERA sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
