弹性宪法之争:英国国籍与委任中的保护

IF 0.1 4区 历史学 Q3 HISTORY
Augusta Waldie
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引用次数: 0

摘要

目前对英国公民身份和国籍的研究忽视了二战前法律框架的发展。在2017年“风之风”丑闻的鼓舞下,越来越多的文学作品将帝国公民身份的崩溃描绘为20世纪60年代以来英国去殖民化的一个方面。与此相反,本文分析了大英帝国的民族归属框架在20世纪20年代早期是如何变得紧张的,因为自治领领导人越来越多地主张自己的国家意识,国际联盟的委托制度引入了新的帝国统治形式。这篇文章考虑了Jan Smuts将军为居住在西南非洲托管区的7000名德国殖民者提供英国国籍的决定。联盟官员认为Smuts的计划破坏了公约的反兼并“精神”,因为大规模归化代表了南非主权的实际宣言。与此同时,英国内政部、殖民地部和外交部的官员们认为,史密斯的政策将破坏帝国在正式和非正式帝国治理领土区域之间的宪法区别。他们还担心这会激发其他受英国保护的外国地区的次等居民,尤其是强制统治的巴勒斯坦和印度土邦,同样要求归化,以便为自己作为英国臣民主张更强的法律权利。最终,斯穆茨利用自己的政治地位,争取到了英国和联盟对他的计划的同意。为了保持宪法的一致性和对大都会的控制,白厅官员们将斯穆茨的入籍计划重新定义为帝国的反常行为。英国托管的非欧洲居民,以及更广泛的非正式帝国,被授予未经编纂的,不确定的“英国受保护人员”(BPPs)地位。最近的学术研究已将BPP身份认定为事实上的无国籍状态。这篇文章显示,两次世界大战期间,英国内政部和殖民地办公室的政策制定者也做出了类似的类比。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
Contesting an Elastic Constitution: British Nationality and Protection in the Mandates
Current studies of British citizenship and nationality neglect the development of legal frameworks prior to the Second World War. A growing body of literature, invigorated by the 2017 Windrush scandal, charts the collapse of imperial citizenship as a dimension of British decolonisation from the 1960s onwards. In contrast, this article analyses how the British empire’s framework of national belonging became strained during the early 1920s, as Dominion leaders increasingly asserted their own sense of statehood and the League of Nations mandates system introduced new forms of imperial rule. The article considers General Jan Smuts’ decision to afford British naturalisation to 7,000 German colonists residing in the mandate of South-West Africa. League officials argued that Smuts’ scheme undermined the anti-annexationist ‘spirit’ of the Covenant, because mass naturalisation represented a practical declaration of South African sovereignty in the mandate. Meanwhile, British mandarins in the Home, Colonial, and Foreign Offices believed Smuts’ policy would destabilise the empire’s constitutional distinctions between territorial zones of formal and informal imperial governance. They also feared it would inspire subaltern inhabitants of other British-protected foreign spaces, especially mandatory Palestine and the Indian princely states, to similarly demand naturalisation in order to claim stronger legal rights for themselves as British subjects. Ultimately, Smuts leveraged his political stature to secure British and League consent for his plan. To maintain a façade of constitutional coherence and metropolitan control, Whitehall mandarins recast Smuts’ naturalisation scheme as an imperial anomaly. Non-European inhabitants of the British mandates, and the wider informal empire, were granted the uncodified, indeterminate status of ‘British Protected Persons’ (BPPs). Recent scholarship has recognised BPP status as a form of de facto statelessness. Inter-war policymakers in the Home and Colonial Offices drew similar parallels, this article shows.
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