Lebanese Migration To Frech West Africa

Comparative Studies in Society and History 2011;53(3):450478. 0010-4175/11 $15.
00 # Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2011 doi:10.1017/S0010417511000211
Failing to Stem the Tide: Lebanese Migration to French West Africa and the Competing Prerogatives of the Imperial State
A N D R E W KE R I M A R S A N
Princeton University
In the years before 1939, the functionaries of Afrique Occidentale Franaise, or AOF, as Frances West African possessions were known, consistently failed to introduce effective legislative controls upon Eastern Mediterranean migration under their purview.1 This was not for lack of trying; from 1905 onwards, administrators both in the territorial government of Guinea and in the GovernmentGeneral of the Federation in Dakar repeatedly attempted to close their gates to these interlopers of empire, most of them from present-day Lebanon, who first began to venture into West Africa in the last years of the nineteenth century. By the late 1930s, some six thousand citizens of the Mandatory states of Lebanon and Syria resided across AOF.2 Most worked as produce brokers,
Acknowledgments: The author wishes to thank the anonymous CSSH reviewers, as well as the participants in the France and the Arab World workshop held at the University of Edinburgh in September 2009, for their helpful comments. Simon Jackson and Ben White, in particular, proved insightful and generous readers. Megan Vaughan read through more versions of this paper than she would care to remember; her suggestions have proved invaluable. David Akin has been an understanding and sensitive editor, and I am grateful to him for clarifying both my thoughts and my muddy syntax. 1 The Federation of Afrique Occidentale Franaise was created in 1895 as a union of Senegal, Soudan, Guinea, and Cte dIvoire. In 1902, its separate territorial administrations were subordinated to a Government-General, whose seat lay first in Saint-Louis, then from 1904 in Dakar. It was also in 1904 that Dahomey was included in this group of colonies. Mauritania and Niger remained territoires militaires, administered by military men answering to the Ministry of Defence until the 1920s and the 1940s, respectively, while the colony of Haute-Volta (present-day Burkina Faso) was created only in the 1920s. For accounts of the shifting makeup of AOF, see Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch and Odile Goerg, eds., LAfrique Occidentale au Temps des Franais: Colonisateurs et Coloniss, c. 18601960 (Paris, 1992); and Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Empire in France and West Africa, 18951930 (Stanford, 1997). 2 Jean-Gabriel Desbordes provides the aggregate figure of 5,792 for 1936, in LImmigration Libano-Syrienne en Afrique Occidentale Franaise (Poitiers, 1938), 18. Robert Delavignette
450
FA I L I N G TO S T E M T H E T I D E
451
shopkeepers, and traders, buying up groundnuts, palm oil, or kola nuts from African producers, and supplying them in turn with consumer goods such as textiles and clothes, processed foodstuffs, alcohol, and matches.3 Despite their attempts to channel and stem this flow of men and women, AOF administrators proved unable to impose effective legislative checks upon their movements. This failure is particularly striking when one remembers that these years witnessed a formidable bolstering of the bulwarks against human movement across the world.4 It has recently been recognized that such efforts began well before the outbreak of global conflict in 1914. As early as the 1880s and 1890s, decades long regarded by scholars as the heyday of untrammeled migration, administrators and politicians in the United States, France, Australia, and South Africa sought to regulate the movements of itinerant peoples and migrants deemed undesirable on racial grounds.5 They did so not only by imposing restrictions upon entry, but also by wielding powers of expulsion.6 These measures grew increasingly rigid during the First World War, when passport controls were widely reintroduced, and were cemented in its wake by legislation like the American Reed-Johnson Acts of 1921 and 1924, which imposed a series of quotas upon migration from various parts of the world.7
estimates that 6,235 Lebanese and Syrians were dwelling in AOF at the close of the 1930s, in Les Vrais Chefs de lEmpire (Paris, 1939), 37. The slight discrepancy can be explained by lax methods of enumeration and the fluidity of this community. 3 On the history of these communities, see Andrew Arsan, Lebanese Migrants in French West Africa, 18981939, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2009; Sad Boumedouha, The Lebanese in Senegal: A History of the Relationship between an Immigrant Community and Its French and African Rulers, PhD thesis, Centre for West African Studies, University of Birmingham, 1987; Salma Kojok, Les Libanais en Cte dIvoire, PhD thesis, Universit de Nantes, 2002. 4 For broad surveys of these changes, see Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York, 2008); and John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge, 2000), esp. chs. 45. 5 See, on the United States, Aristide Zolberg, The Great Wall against China: Responses to the First Immigration Crisis, 18851925, in Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, eds., Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (Berne, 1997), 291315; and Adam McKeown, Ritualization of Regulation: The Enforcement of Chinese Exclusion in the United States and China, American Historical Review 108, 2 (2003): 377403. For a comparative approach, see Patrick Weil, Races at the Gate: Racial Distinctions in Immigration Policy: A Comparison between France and the United States, in Andreas Fahrmeir, Olivier Faron, and Patrick Weil, eds., Migration Control in the North Atlantic World: The Evolution of State Practices in Europe and the United States from the French Revolution to the Interwar Period (New York, 2003), 27197. On efforts to check the movements of itinerant peoples in metropolitan France, see Christophe Delclitte, La Catgorie Juridique Nomade dans la Loi de 1912, Hommes et Migrations 11881189 (1995): 2330. 6 Franck Caestecker, The Transformation of Nineteenth-Century Expulsion Policy, 1880 1914, in Andreas Fahrmeir, Olivier Faron, and Patrick Weil, eds., Migration Control in the North Atlantic World (New York, 2003), 12037. 7 For details of these measures, see Edward P. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 17981965 (Philadelphia, 1981); and Aristide Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).
452
ANDREW KERIM ARSAN
The second of these measures was particularly significant, for it gave a central role to the strategy of remote control, as Aristide Zolberg and others have named the screening of migrants at their point of departure.8 This regulation, which required ship passengers to present a visa granted by appropriate consular authorities before boarding, was quickly replicated by governments elsewhere.9 Thus the early years of the twentieth century saw not simply a gradual erosion of the liberty of movement but also the proliferation of increasingly sophisticated administrative initiatives. As John Torpey has argued, these decades brought a shift from efforts to supervise migrants on a countrys own territory, to checking their entry at the border, and finally toward remote control. Innovations in one country were rapidly emulated and augmented by others keen to bolster their defenses against human movement. In the words of Adam McKeown, this period witnessed the universalization of the basic principles of border control, which came to serve increasingly as the foundation of sovereignty for all states within the [international] system.10 By World War II, many states had come to resemble, at least on paper, the wall-enclosed towns of the medieval period.11 While governments everywhere were fastening their bolts, the administrators of AOF kept their doors reluctantly open. Their failure was, in essence, a consequence not of lack of administrative wherewithal, but rather of external pressures that significantly constrained their capacity to act. Particularly important here was the unyielding position of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Quai dOrsay, whose functionaries insisted that Lebanese and Syrian migrants be accorded lenient treatment both on grounds of diplomatic reciprocity and, more significantly, in order to protect Frances cherished interests in the Eastern Mediterranean. Much is revealed by a sustained examination of the frustrated legislative schemes of the administrators of AOF and their fraught exchanges with both the Quai dOrsay, always quick to protect aggressively its own prerogatives, and with migrants who, when faced with unfavorable rulings, sought to capitalize upon Frances political and sentimental commitments in the Eastern Mediterranean in order to obtain clemency. This exercise elucidates ways in which imperatives of governance and diplomatic reciprocity could impede the
8 Aristide Zolberg, Matters of State: Theorizing Immigration Policy, in Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz, and Josh DeWind, eds., The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience (New York, 1999), 7576; and, The Archaeology of Remote Control, in Andreas Fahrmeir, Olivier Faron, and Patrick Weil, eds., Migration Control in the North Atlantic World (New York, 2003), 195222. 9 Andreas Fahrmeir, Olivier Faron, and Patrick Weil, Introduction, to Migration Control in the North Atlantic World (New York, 2003), 7. 10 McKeown, Melancholy Order, 23. 11 Zolberg, Matters of State, 71.
453
seemingly impermeable controls upon human movement erected in the first half of the century. My goal here is not simply to retell the familiar tales of inconsistency, evasion, and fraud, or to underscore the eternal disjuncture between the neatness of paper schemes and the messy reality of practical inefficacy. Rather, I want to highlight an often-neglected aspect of this story: the ways in which administrative endeavor was stymied by prevailing reason of state. I also want to flesh out our understanding of the ways in which colonial states operated, or failed to operate. I do so in several ways that are closely interlinked. First, I will describe the far-flung webs of interest in which administrators in any particular colonial territory were regularly enmeshed, which left their own powers severely curtailed by priorities well beyond their purview.12 Scholars of colonial statecraft can easily overlook that territorial administrations and those who staffed them did not dwell in isolation. They were but part of an overarching imperial system, albeit one markedly unsystematic in its composition, remaining to the end a patchwork of varying administrative arrangements and contested prerogatives.13 Indeedand this is my second pointrelations between the numerous departments that made up the French empire-state, with its sprawling congeries of agencies and administrations, were marked by clear and deep asymmetries of power that allowed some to assert their own priorities of rule above those of others. I will argue that this unevenness in both the power of departments and the status of territories was a structural feature of Frances empire. The density of the Quai dOrsays strategic and affective investment in the Eastern Mediterranean, as much as its superior position to the Ministry of Colonies, determined the fate of the legal endeavors of the functionaries of AOF in the years before World War I. The Mandate states of Lebanon and Syria, meanwhile, were no simple colonial territories.14 Rather, they were ambivalent annexes of
12 See Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, Introduction: Bodies, Empires, and World Histories, in T. Ballantyne and A. Burton, eds., Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, N.C., 2005), 115. 13 Martin Thomas, The French Empire between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and Society (Manchester, 2005), 1. See also Frederick Cooper, States, Empires, and Political Imagination, in Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, 2005), 153203; Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago, 2005), esp. 27, 36; and Unthinking French History: Colonial Studies beyond National Identity, in Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham, N.C., 2003), 12543. 14 There has been a revival of interest in the Mandate states in recent years. See, in particular, Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York, 2000). For two helpful collections of essays concerned with teasing out the particularities of French rule over Lebanon and Syria, see Nadine Mouchy and Peter Sluglett, eds., The British and French Mandates in Comparative Perspective (Leiden, 2004); Nadine Mouchy, ed., France, Syrie et Liban 19181946: Les Ambiguts et les Dynamiques de la Relation Mandataire (Damascus, 2002). On the high political life of Lebanon and Syria, see Meir Zamir, Lebanons Quest: The Road to Statehood 19261939 (London, 1997); Kais Firro,
454
ANDREW KERIM ARSAN
empire, at once within and outside its formal realm. The relations of French functionaries to the constituents of these novel constructs were marked by a profound ambiguity. On one hand, they retained a distinctly imperial attachment to the territories of the Eastern Mediterranean, often considering them, in what was perhaps never more than wishful thinking, as zones of uncontested French sovereignty. On the other, they sought to craft these polities in the image of the universal ideal of the sovereign state. In their willingness to treat Lebanon and Syria as entities that stood apart from the main body of the French empire, and their inhabitants as that most paradoxical of creatures colonial citizensthey participated in efforts to rework the Westphalian system on a global, extra-European basis.15 While the citizens of Lebanon and Syria in many regards bore the brunt of the post-war settlement, they were, in one important respect, its beneficiaries, for Frances Mandatory commitments enshrined their right to free movement within both metropolitan France and its empire. Indeed, the tale I recount here of the frustrated endeavors of AOF functionaries might equally be told of the administrators of Guadeloupe and Martinique, who encountered many of the same difficulties in their efforts to erect boundaries against Eastern Mediterranean migrants.16 But, crucially, this right was accorded to them not as imperial subjects, but as citizens of most favored nations. Lebanon and Syria were considered in this regardif not in other, perhaps more significant domains of sovereigntyto be independent entities bound to France by treaties of reciprocity. This is a pertinent reminder of the inconsistent, incoherent legal basis upon which rested the new migration regime brought into being in the interwar years by the French governments ratification of a raft of bilateral agreements with countries such as Italy, Poland, Spain, and Czechoslovakia.17 No doubt these agreements, as Mary Dewhurst Lewis has stated, created new inequalities among migrants which reflected the uneven power relations between nations in Europe and European countries and their colonies, granting foreign nationals from treaty countries more substantive rights than were accorded to migrants from within the French empire. But equally striking is that Lebanese and Syrian migrants did not fall prey to such prejudicial measures, as did the Moroccans and Tunisians who nominally benefited from Frances protection. Instead, they were granted a privileged position within the complex system of stratifications by which various mobile
Inventing Lebanon: Nationalism and the State under the Mandate (London, 2003); and Philip Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate (Princeton, 1987). 15 Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied (London, 2003), 1. The notion of a colonial citizenry is borrowed from Elizabeth Thompson. 16 See Grard Lafleur, Les Libanais et les Syriens de Guadeloupe (Paris, 1999), 69. 17 Clifford Rosenberg, Policing Paris: The Origins of Modern Immigration Control between the Wars (Ithaca, 2006), 12425.
455
populations were accorded social rights within the French body politic.18 The stance of the French functionaries of the Quai dOrsay and the Mandatory High Commission toward their Lebanese and Syrian charges was, then, Janus-faced; Eastern Mediterranean migrants were granted freedom of movement as the citizens of nominally sovereign polities, but they were accorded this right only because French officials believed them to be bound to France by the ties of imperial benevolence and appreciation.19 Frances imperial entanglement with the Eastern Mediterranean, though coded in languages and practices of dominance and possession, remained amorously defined. Its investment in the region, always as much sentimental as it was strategic, was bounded by and invested in demonstrations of love. Its contours were discursively shaped by an amorous lexicon of reciprocal feeling, and a marked insistence upon the familial ties that ruled the relations between the Christian communities of the Eastern Mediterranean, in particular, and Francetheir tender mother and secular protector.20 As Ann Laura Stoler has contended, such harping upon affect was more than a smokescreen of rule, a ruse masking the dispassionate calculations that preoccupy states. Rather, imperial reason of state rested upon a visceral register, on the constant deployment and management of notions of honor, charity, and reciprocity, on contemptuous anger or kindly concern.21 The duty of care and protection enshrined in the Mandate was one that functionaries at the Quai dOrsay and the High Commission in Beirut seem to have taken seriously, if only because it permitted the management of affective states, the cultivation of feeling. Elizabeth Thompson has tracked the ways in which Mandatory rule over the states the French constructed from the smoldering remains of the Ottoman Empire was marked by the emergence of a colonial civic order. While administrative practice shifted perceptibly in the mid-1930s with the creation of a colonial welfare state providing social benefits directly, in place of the more paternalistic treatment previously meted out by French administrators through their local intermediaries, these bureaucrats remained committed in one form or another to the well being of their charges throughout the interwar years.22 As Thompson understood, this process was by no means unilateral; Lebanese and Syrian citizens participated in this new order by negotiating and
18 Mary Dewhurst Lewis, The Boundaries of the Republic: Migrants Rights and the Limits of Universalism in France, 19181940 (Stanford, 2007), 1921. See also Rosenberg, Policing Paris, 10. 19 Jane Samson, Imperial Benevolence: Making British Authority in the Pacific Islands (Honolulu, 1998). 20 Matt Matsuda, Empire of Love: Histories of France and the Pacific (Oxford, 2005), 34, 15. 21 Ann Laura Stoler, Affective States, in David Nugent and Joan Vincent, eds., A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics (Oxford, 2004), 67; and Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Commonsense (Princeton, 2009), 4041, 63. 22 Thompson, Colonial Citizens, 1, 12, 67.
456
ANDREW KERIM ARSAN
defining their entitlements and rights through regular interactions with functionaries, routine transactions conducted across the desks and tables of government offices.23 As I will argue in the final part of this article, migrants faced with orders of expulsionand the Lebanese dignitaries and French functionaries whose assistance they enlistedadroitly played the game of juridical politics, nagging at small tears in the legal fabric of empire until they succeeded in overturning the decisions of administrators in AOF.24 Despite the existence of a clear legal framework, the latter found it difficult to frame their work within the fixed rules of laws or administrative regulations.25 There was, as Grard Noiriel has observed, little Weberian about a process in which administrators remained compelled by circumstance, continuingas they had long done to consider individual, always particular, cases rather than reaching decisions based upon abstract criteria, identical in all circumstances. Moreover, transactions between officials and migrants and their intercessors remained profoundly personal throughout this period, and lacked the anonymous detachment of bureaucratic practice. Not only were these often conducted directly between migrants (or those lending them assistance) and high functionaries like the governor-general or the minister of colonies, but they also drew upon Christian norms of charity far more than upon administrative principles. They retained many of the features of private correspondence in place of the form-filling and standardized language of bureaucratic process.26 By retracing the often-protracted tractations around migration controls and their application, we can follow the uneven workings of a messy imperial order, riven with inconsistency and imbalances of power. It also enables us to understand the ways in which Eastern Mediterranean migrants exploited this convoluted web of legal obligations and pragmatic considerations. Scholars like Frederick Cooper and Peter Zinoman have in recent years come to query conceptions of colonial states as purposeful, monolithic institutions capable not only of performing the essential functions of sovereignty retaining the monopoly over violence, enumerating people, gathering taxes,
Ibid., 1. This is a paraphrase of Lauren Bentons highly useful notion of jurisdictional politics; see Colonial Law and Cultural Difference: Jurisdictional Politics and the Formation of the Colonial State, Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, 3 (1999): 56388. For further uses of the term, see Mary Dewhurst Lewis, Geographies of Power: The Tunisian Civic Order, Jurisdictional Politics, and Imperial Rivalry in the Mediterranean, 18811935, Journal of Modern History 80 (2008): 791830, esp. 797; and James McDougall, The Secular States Islamic Empire: Muslim Spaces and Subjects of Jurisdiction in Paris and Algiers, 19051957, Comparative Studies in Society and History 52, 3 (2010): 55380. See also Frederick Cooper, Decolonisation and African Society: The Labour Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, 1996). 25 Max Weber, Bureaucracy, in From Max Weber: Essays in Society, H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, trans. and eds. (London, 1991), 196. 26 Grard Noiriel, La Tyrannie du National: Le Droit dAsile en Europe 17931993 (Paris, 1991), 6061, 26063.
24
23
457
and of course securing the integrity of the territories under their supervision but also of modifying and molding the behavior of their subjects.27 They have instead insisted that they were messy congeries of competing agencies and agendas, constantly frustrated by material circumstances and incapable of broadcastingto borrow Jeffrey Herbsts termtheir authority beyond a few scattered points.28 Thus, Zinoman has argued that French Indochinas decentralized and heterogeneous penal system, with its brutality, squalor and corruption embodied the chaotic and unsystematic workings of the colonial state.29 Cooper, meanwhile, has maintained that power in colonial societies was more arterial than capillary; far from diffusing through society, insidiously working away at the site of the individual, it was concentrated spatially and socially, not very nourishing beyond such domains, and in need of a pump to push it from moment to moment and place to place.30 In this perspective, colonial administrations were not antiseptic laboratories of modernity in which administrators could escape the constraints of metropolitan governance31 so much as faltering, belabored enterprises, creaking, jerking, jostling, gasping declensions of the forms of state-craft elaborated in Europe during this time.32 Such visions of colonial governance have increasingly come to hold sway in recent years. But they illuminate only what we might call the inner story of colonial power, its intimate failures and intrinsic weaknesses. The power the capacity to actof colonial functionaries was undermined not only by their administrations impecuniousness and their lack of numbers, but also by external exigencies that affected what they could and could not do, which in some cases considerably narrowed the range of options available to them. As Torpey has pointed out, a states sovereignty does not rest simply upon
27 For a statement of this view, see Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven, 1994). For discussions of distinctly colonial forms of rationality, see John Comaroff, Governmentality, Materiality, Legality, Modernity: On the Colonial State in Africa, in Jan-Georg Deutsch, Peter Probst, and Heike Schmidt, eds., African Modernities: Entangled Meanings in Current Debates (Oxford, 2002); David Scott Colonial Governmentality, Social Text 43 (1995): 191220. 28 Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton, 2000), 1. 29 Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 18621940 (Berkeley, 2001), 70. 30 Frederick Cooper, Conflict and Connection: Rethinking African Colonial History, American Historical Review 99, 5 (Dec. 1994): 1533. 31 For an examination of the hopes and ambitions of one such administrator, Lyautey, and his endeavors to escape Third Republic politicking and create a new social order in Morocco, see Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), esp. 28991. 32 This quote is from Nadine Gordimers wonderfully uneasy short story, Train From Rhodesia, in which the locomotive stands as a synecdoche for a defective, strained version of colonial modernity. In Selected Stories (Harmondsworth, 1983), 50.
458
ANDREW KERIM ARSAN
its capacity to exercise authority within its realm; affirmations of sovereign power can acquire meaning only with the assent of a wider society of states, and are governed by a set of norms and prescriptions to which individual [polities] must respond.33 This is all the truer of colonial administrations like those of AOF: the Federations territories were not islands of authority, self-contained entities cut off from wider currents, but rather elements of a far more extensive imperial polity. Because they were but one part of this overarching entity, their interests and the ability of their administrators to reach decisions independent of the metropolitan state could be, and indeed were, dismissed in particular instances. It may well be that French commandants de cercle scattered through the administrative districts of AOF were, before 1939, the almost undisputed masters of this empire in most matters. These men gleefully seized upon the Government-Generals inability to broadcast its own directives to assert their own will, paying little heed to the growing pile of official journals and explanatory circulars that Maurice Delafosse, an administrator in pre-First World War Cte dIvoire before he became an influential ethnographer, recalled stashing beneath his head before he fell to peaceful sleep at night.34 However, commandants de cercle had no control over entry to the Federation, or the power to expel undesirable migrants. They could only pass to their superiors their recommendations, which would then travel up the administrative hierarchy before being decided upon by the governor-general himself in Dakar. In this area of policy, at least, decision making remained highly centralized. More significant still, the governors-general themselves, though nominally designated as depositor[ies] of the powers of the Republic, were never in practice proconsuls with plenipotentiary authority over the territories in their trusteeship. The deep-seated fears of both the governors of individual West African territories and functionaries at the Ministry of Colonies, that the creation of a powerful central executive in Dakar would wear down their own prerogatives, led to the slow construction, often through jurisprudence of a set of constraints upon the autonomy of the governors-general. These administrators, while they certainly did retain a degree of latitude, were ultimately bound to the metropolitan government in matters of legislation, particularly those that might impact upon Frances foreign relations.35 In turn, the lowly position of the Ministry of the Colonies within the ministerial pecking order left it at a distinct disadvantage in its dealings with other
33 34
Torpey, Invention of the Passport, 3. William Cohen, Rulers of Empire: The French Colonial Service in Africa (Stanford, 1971),
57.
35 Bernard Durand, Les Pouvoirs du Gouverneur Gnral de lAOF, in Charles Becker, Saliou MBaye, and Ibrahima Thioub, eds., AOF: Ralits et Hritages. Socits Ouest-africaines et Ordre Colonial, 18951960 (Dakar, 1997), 50, 5657.
459
departments of state, and militated against the imposition of a special regime regulating the entry of Eastern Mediterranean migrants to AOF. Formed only in 1894until which point the Ministry of the Navy administered, with a few exceptions, Frances overseas possessionsthe fledgling colonial administration established at the Rue Oudinot was still regarded some twenty years later as the Cinderella ministry. It consistently faced hostility from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and that of the Interior, both of which were disdainful of this poor and somewhat embarrassing relation and wary of any attack upon their prerogatives in North Africa. The Ministry of the Colonies was further hampered by its own chaotic organizationa muddled assemblage of small bureaucratic contrivances, as a 1911 internal report put itand by chronic internal discord; the inability of all its officials to arrive at general views or to coordinate their efforts became infamous in Parisian administrative circles.36 Under such circumstances, functionaries at the Rue Oudinot could hardly hope to provide any tangible opposition to the desires of their counterparts at the Quai dOrsay. There can be no doubt, then, that formidable institutional impediments stood in the way of any attempts by administrators in AOF to develop a migration policy away from the scrutiny and strictures of their superiors at the Ministry of Colonies, or, crucially, the Quai dOrsay. If, as Torpey has maintained, the monopoly to authorize and restrict movement must be considered an essential attribute of the state, it was one that was never held solely by administrators in AOF, who effectively lacked the capacity to decide alone on the legal status of Lebanese migrants.37 They had to pay heed to the will of metropolitan agencies of state. In the years before the establishment of the Mandate, the Quai dOrsay opposed the introduction in AOF of prohibitive measures targeting Eastern Mediterranean migrants. This was born of a deep-seated and growing concern for the safeguard of French political, commercial, educational, and religious interests in the Eastern Mediterranean. In particular, Frances vaunted moral protectorate over the Maronite and Greek Catholic populations of Greater Syrialong a cornerstone of its policy in the regiontook on greater significance as its position in the Ottoman Empire came under increasing pressure from foreign competition.38 While Wilhelmine Germany secured
36 Christopher Andrew and A. S. Kanya-Forstner, France Overseas: The Great War and the Climax of French Imperial Expansion (London, 1981), 19, 21. 37 Torpey, Invention of the Passport, 45. 38 Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, France Overseas, 42. See also Colin Burrows, Mission Civilisatrice: French Cultural Policy in the Middle East, 18601914, Historical Journal 29 (1986): 10335; Dominique Chevallier, Aux Bases dune Intervention: Lyon et la Syrie en 1919, in Villes et Travail en Syrie du XIXe au XXe Sicles (Paris, 1982), 4186; William Shorrock, French Imperialism in the Middle East: The Failure of Policy in Lebanon and Syria 19001914 (Madison, 1976); John P. Spagnolo, France and Ottoman Lebanon, 18611914 (London, 1977).
460
ANDREW KERIM ARSAN
economic concessions like the Baghdad railway, Italian and Anglo-American missionary establishments threatened the spiritual monopoly of French education. As Maurice Pernot, the editor of the Journal des Dbats, declared in 1913, In certain parts of Lebanon, where we assume our influence to be preponderant, English is certainly better known than French; Italian is making rapid progress at certain points along the coast. Elsewhere, we are holding our own, but nowhere are we gaining ground.39 This was all the more worrying because, as John Spagnolo has noted, French diplomats saw their nations presence in the Eastern Mediterranean as inextricably linked to favorable relations with their political clients in Lebanon.40 Frances economic interests were dispersed widely throughout what remained of the empire: it held a considerable stake in the Ottoman public debt, but also in financial institutions such as the Imperial Ottoman Bank, which controlled the state tobacco monopoly and a number of public utilities and railway companies; in port concessions at Beirut, Tripoli, Haifa, and Jaffa; and in mines, road construction, and various other operations.41 However, the Ottoman Empire was, for many of those most intimately involved in furthering French interests in the Eastern Mediterranean, not merely a field of economic activity for France. It [was] also, and above all, a territory for the radiation of its intellect and the expansion of its culture.42 As French colonial propagandists and Catholic missionaries never ceased to reiterate, None of the Catholic communities of the Orient calling upon Frances protection since the Crusades has shown greater gratitude and devotion than the Maronites.43 In a series of articles, pamphlets, and books, historians and journalists elaborated in florid terms a narrative of an enduring and secular reciprocal friendship, stressing equally the love for France with which the towns of Mount Lebanon humm[ed] and vibrat[ed] and Frances own obligations toward their Uniate inhabitants.44 As Gabriel Hanotaux put it, the Maronites who saved their liberty, their religion, their race, simply by holding out, when others elsewhere richer and more powerful bowed their heads, were indissolubly bound to France. He insisted that France simply could not relinquish its longstanding obligations towards them, since, These peasants, whose friendship for France has been handed down from father to son for twelve centuries lived, from afar, the lives of our own fathers
39 Comit de Dfense des Intrts Franais en Orient, Rapport sur un Voyage en Egypte et en Turquie dAsie (Janvier-Aot 1912), par Maurice Pernot (Paris, 1913), 224. 40 Spagnolo, France and Ottoman Lebanon, 1. 41 Shorrock, French Imperialism, 13839. On French economic activity in the Ottoman Empire, see also Jacques Thobies immense, scrupulously detailed Intrts Franais dans lEmpire Ottoman (18951914) (Paris, 1977). 42 Gabriel Hanotaux and Alfred Martineau, Histoire des Colonies Franaises et de lExpansion de la France dans le Monde, Vol. I: Introduction Gnrale (Paris, 1929), xvixvii. 43 Ren Ristelhueber, Les Traditions Franaises au Liban (Paris, 1925), 5. 44 Maurice Barrs, Une Enqute aux Pays du Levant (Paris, 1923), vol. 1, 70.
461
they are, all in all, ours; they possess a part of our thoughts, our will, our heart. France has never abandoned them; and she will not abandon them.45 These words were more than fig leaves covering the cruder designs of power; a set of deeply-rooted conceptions of the Orient as an inherently spiritual place, and an idealist understanding of the world, led both statesmen and thinkers to insist that Frances position in the Eastern Mediterranean rested upon sentimental ties to its Christian populations. Strategic considerations obviously figured in such a political calculus. As George Leygues, one of the architects of Frances Syrian policy during the First World War, declared, It is in the Mediterranean that can be found the axis of French [strategy]. One of its poles passes, to the West, through Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. The other must be to the east, through Syria, Lebanon and Palestine.46 However, mere power alone could not suffice, for as Jules Cambon put it, religion and nationality were indistinguishable in the Orient, making the religious protectorate a considerable force which benefited Frances moral influence and, hence, political authority.47 Moreover, for figures like Maurice Barrs, who traveled to the Eastern Mediterranean on the eve of global conflict, Frances entanglement with the world was quite distinct from that of other states. To others, sometimes, it conceded the primacy of force and business but to us, always and in spite of everything [falls] the friendship of souls. Jaurs supposed insistence that it is both right and inevitable that intellectual preponderance should belong to those who are economically dominant was, to Barrs, both wrongheaded and dangerous. After all, the belief in a material law of the world, according to which only economic ascendancy, and the prestige of the trader and the engineer, could generate spiritual actions, was not simply difficult to square with the sight in Canada, in the Philippines, of an intensive commerce with the United States [which] has hardly affected moral dispositions; it also threatened to undermine the edifice of Frances spiritual power in the world.48 Such an expansive sense of sentimental commitment informed policymaking at the highest levels, for as Ann Laura Stoler has suggested, political rationalit[y] that strategically reasoned, administrative common sense, was grounded in affect and its cultivation.49 The majority of those involved in formulating the Quai dOrsays line on the Middle East were members of the Comit de lAsie Franaise, dedicated to furthering Frances interests from Asia
45 Gabriel Hanotaux, Prface, in Ren Ristelhueber, Les Traditions Franaises au Liban (Paris, 1925), vi. 46 Quoted in Etienne Flandin, Groupe Snatorial pour la Dfense des Intrts Franais lEtranger, Rapport sur la Syrie et la Palestine Prsent par M. Etienne Flandin, Snateur (Paris, 1915), 6. 47 Jules Cambon, Le Diplomate (Paris, 1926), 76, my italics. 48 Barrs, Enqute, vol. 1, 5; vol. 2, 18384. 49 Stoler, Affective States, 5.
462
ANDREW KERIM ARSAN
Minor to Japan.50 Their numbers included prominent figures like Franois Georges-Picot and Robert de Caix, whose vision of a constellation of statelets under French tutelage was implemented in the years after 1920.51 Stephen Pichon, meanwhile, a staunch supporter of imperial expansion in the Middle East as Minister of Foreign Affairs between 1917 and 1920, served in the pre-war years as president of the Comit dOrient, and was one of the founders of the Comit de Dfense des Intrts Franais au Levant.52 These men were actively committed to protecting Frances interests in the Middle East, and keen to stress reciprocal ties to the regions Uniate communities and to cajole and placate their representativesmen like the migr journalists Shukri Ghanim and Georges Samna, who regarded themselves as the spokesmen of the peoples of Lebanon and Syria and lobbied the Quai dOrsay on their behalf. Figures like Flandin and Leygues, so prominent in the war years, had not only campaigned actively before 1914 for the reform of the Algerian indignat, but had also become convinced that Syria should have a far more liberal regime than that in place in French North Africaone standing, in other words, apart from Frances other possessions, and basking in the gentle light of a particularly benevolent mode of rule. These ties and convictions, together with Frances diplomatic obligations to the Ottoman Empire, led the ministrys functionaries in Paris, Istanbul, Beirut, and Damascus to obfuscate as best they could the efforts of their counterparts in Dakar and Conakry to erect boundaries against Eastern Mediterranean migration. The Quai dOrsays position on Lebanese migration to AOF in the years before World War I not only reflected the Middle Eastern commitments of its senior functionaries, but was also entirely consistent with the stance the ministry had adopted throughout the 1880s and 1890s in the face of proposals to implement a discriminatory tax on foreigners working on French territory. These proposals, though enormously popular with parliamentarians, were repeatedly vetoed by the ministrys officials, who argued it would contravene the clauses guaranteeing free circulation included in agreements with a number of other states. To introduce such legislation, maintained one legal scholar, would be tantamount to a self-imposed exile from the community of nations.53 The need to respect the binds of diplomatic reciprocity was repeatedly cited in the years before 1914 by both the Quai dOrsay and administrators in West Africa as a significant impediment to any exclusionary measures targeting
Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, France Overseas, 2728. Grard Khoury, Robert de Caix et Louis Massignon: Deux Visions de la Politique Franaise au Levant en 1920, in Nadine Mouchy and Peter Sluglett, eds., The British and French Mandates, 170. 52 Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, France Overseas, 28. 53 Grard Noiriel, Le Creuset Franais: Histoire de lImmigration XIXeXXe Sicles (Paris, 1988), 8485.
51 50
463
Eastern Mediterranean migrants. As early as 1904, the Ministry of Colonies advised Governor-General Roume that the French government had undertaken, by conventions agreed with most of the Powers, including Turkey, to assimilate to its own workers citizens of the signatory states [residing] in its overseas possessions.54 These obligations effectively prevented the creation of a special tax on Ottoman subjects in French West Africa, a measure Roume had sought to implement in order to stem the growing influx of Eastern Mediterranean migrants.55 For, as Frances consul in Damascus, Couget, understood, the protests of Syrian migrants, who will not fail to complain of measures which, if too rigorous, may be contrary to the clauses of our treaties with foreign powers, severely curtailed the choice of means available to our colonial administration.56 The stringent measures colonial administrators continued to press for may well have seemed to the Quai dOrsay not merely undesirable on grounds of diplomatic reciprocity, but also inconsistent with its own regular interventions on behalf of Lebanese migrants elsewhere in the world. It is true that this duty does not seem to have been a deliberate policy choice; it was forced upon French agents in Latin America who were pressed into playing the role of protectors by the repeated entreaties of Eastern Mediterranean migrants themselves. Such requests had become so frequent by the beginning of the twentieth century that the Minister of Foreign Affairs Delcass thought it necessary in 1902 to clarify that France could not officially and regularly consider the Syrians or other Ottoman subjects, whatever their religion as French protgs. The French protectorate over the Maronites in the Levant, he insisted, was simply a religious protectorate, which has no purpose beyond this region: In another country, a Maronite is no more than an ordinary Ottoman subject; our agents have no rights to act on his behalf, and he himself has no right whatsoever to request their official protection. However, Delcass went on to fudge significantly this seemingly unequivocal line. In practice, he acknowledged, French representatives had often intervened to protect these Orientals. While such a course of action could only be considered a favor, it fitted too well into Frances traditions of humanity to be discarded entirely. Moreover, he continued in more pragmatic terms, The traditions binding us to Syrias populations are too precious for us to run the risk of seeing them broken, or even weakened, by our refusal to grant our unofficial protection to these Orientals when this duty is in keeping
54 Paris, Centre dAccueil et de Recherche des Archives Nationales, Fonds AOF, Ancienne Srie (hereafter CARAN AOF/AS/) 21 G 33, Governor-General (GG) to Ministry of Colonies (MC), Dakar, n.d. (1918). 55 Desbordes, LImmigration, 5354. 56 Paris, Ministre des Affaires Etrangres, Turquie/Syrie-Liban/Nouvelle Srie (hereafter MAE T/SL/NS), 115, Couget to Minister of Foreign Affairs (MFA), a/s de lEmigration Syrienne vers la Guine et de la mission de M. Poulet, Damascus, 18 Apr. 1911.
464
ANDREW KERIM ARSAN
with our obligations towards the Ottoman government.57 The informal assistance in which Delcass acquiesced was, for all his evasions, little more than a thinly disguised attempt to spread the blanket of French protection over those Christian Ottoman citizens living far beyond the confines of their Eastern Mediterranean homelands. This directive served only to rubberstamp prevailing practice among French plenipotentiaries, which often went far beyond the bounds of appropriate behavior dictated by the Quai dOrsay. In 1903, Frances envoy to Port-au-Prince, Paul Desprez, citing the instructions of the Department [of Political Affairs] regarding the unofficial protection granted by the French government to the Syrian populations established in the Americas, sought to ensure repeal of an act that imposed upon all Syrians resident in Haiti the liquidation and closure of their wholesale and retail businesses and allowed them to trade only on consignment.58 However, Desprezs ultimately unsuccessful attempts to safeguard the commercial interests of Eastern Mediterranean migrants arose not in response to the instructions of the Quai dOrsay, but out of a longstanding engagement with Haitis Eastern Mediterranean population. He had not only kept a register of Ottoman subjects who had presented themselves to the French legation, but had gone so far as to issue some with passes to the interior of the country and, more rarely, travel documents to France and Beirut. In doing so, he effectively treated these migrants not as nationals of another power, but rather as his own consular charges. Desprez seems to have been particularly keen to indulge the conviction, which all new arrivals from the Eastern Mediterranean seemed to share, that they will find in Haiti a degree of protection at the very least equal to that which they receive in their country of origin.59 But for other plenipotentiaries like Boulard-Ponqueville, Frances ambassador to Colombia, the unofficial protection of Syrian Ottoman subjects offered real political interest not simply in the Ottoman Empire, but also in their own fields of operation in Latin America. Boulard-Ponqueville acknowledged that Eastern Mediterranean migrants, with their constant petty requests for assistance, could easily be seen as little more than pesky irritants, but he maintained that these men and women,
57 58
MAE T/SL/NS 108, Delcass, Paris, 29 Jan. 1902. MAE NS/Hati/10, Note pour la Direction des Affaires Politiques. Mesures prises contre les Syriens par le Gouvernement Hatien, Paris, 12 Sept. 1903. On the Eastern Mediterranean communities of Haiti, see David Nicholls, No Hawkers and Pedlars: Levantines in the Caribbean, Ethnic and Racial Studies 4, 4 (1981): 41531; and Brenda Gayle Plummer, Race, Nationality and Trade in the Caribbean: The Syrians in Haiti, 19031934, International History Review 3 (1981): 51739. 59 MAE T/SL/NS 108, Extrait dun rapport adress par M. Paul Desprez, Ministre de France en Hati, M. Delcass, Ministre des Affaires Etrangres, Port-au-Prince, 7 Mar. 1902. Delcass had explicitly circumscribed the keeping of registers, since such a measure effectively recognized the right to official protection of Ottoman subjects, and stressed that while the granting of passports was legally permissible, it should be scrupulously avoided beyond the direct confines of the territory where it was issued (MAE T/SL/NS 108, Delcass, Paris, 29 Jan. 1902).
465
with their commercial links to compatriots in France and preference for French manufactured goods, could lend the Republic invaluable assistance, helping to carry Frances reputation to the farthest reaches of countries where its prestige tends unfortunately to slip away a little further by the day. Their commercial activities could serve as a powerful means of propaganda and influence which others, should we abandon it, would be quick to seize upon.60 For some amongst the Quai dOrsays agents, then, Eastern Mediterranean migrants were not just passive pupils of French civilization and recipients of republican benevolence, bound to France by secular ties of sympathy; they could also serve as agents of the French civilizing mission in other parts of the world, working to buttress what diplomats regarded as its once-uncontested commercial reputation.61 Thus it is little surprise that the Quai dOrsay should have acted to overturn measures in Frances own West African possessions when these seemed injurious to both the ministrys obligations to the Porte and its duty to its Eastern Mediterranean protgs. Diplomatic reasons of state again compelled Roume to act in 1906, and he repealed two decrees instituted by Frzouls, the lieutenant-governor of Guinea, that had regulated the landing and residence of foreigners in the colony. The first of these required all migrants to present a passport upon entry, and to register within twenty-four hours of arrival with the local police or commandant de cercleonly upon fulfillment of this obligation would individuals be granted a residence permit. The second decree forbade all ship captains to allow their passengers to disembark without explicit authorization from the local authorities.62 Roume did not dispute the utility of safeguard[s] against the entry of undesirable migrants, but he argued that these measures constituted a breach of federal legislative arrangements. They required all decisions affecting foreign relations to receive the assent of the governorgeneral, and stipulated that the provision of punishments for offences beyond the ordinary purview of criminal law needed the approbation of metropolitan authorities. Further, he felt that these two acts, because they target all foreigners without any distinction of origin or situation, were both incapable of effectively regulating immigration, and likely to give rise to the objections, not only of individuals, but also of governments whose citizens are subject to the ordinary regulations of international law, or with which we have trade or shipping treaties.63 As Jean-Gabriel Desbordes was to point out, these
60 61
MAE T/SL/NS 108, Boulard-Ponqueville to MFA, Bogota, 25 Mar. 1902. On Frances cultural policies in Latin America in this period, see J. P. Daughton, When Argentina Was French: Rethinking Cultural Politics and European Imperialism in Belle-Epoque Buenos Aires, Journal of Modern History 80 (2008): 83164. 62 Journal Officiel de la Guine Franaise, 15 Nov. 1905, Arrts passed on 9 Nov. 1905. These measures were repealed by an Arrt on 18 Jan. 1906, and recorded in the Journal on 30 Jan. 1906. 63 CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 36, GG to Lieutenant-Governor (LG) of Guinea, a/s darrtsrelatifs lembarquement et au sjour des trangers en Guine, Dakar, 14 Jan. 1906.
466
ANDREW KERIM ARSAN
measures were more than a simple check; they constituted a veritable regulation of foreign immigration, which threatened to affect Frances foreign relations.64 Diplomatic imperatives dictated their abrogation. Such failures did not prevent administrators in French West Africa from presenting a new scheme for the imposition of a special tax on Ottoman subjects to their superiors at the Rue Oudinot in 1909.65 This, too, was turned away by an intransigent Quai dOrsay, which reiterated the stance it had relayed to the Ministry of Colonies in 1904, insisting that Ottoman subjects enjoying the treatment [accorded to nationals of] a most favored nation, should be assimilated to our own nationals in our overseas possessions, and that no consideration could allow at the present time any modification to the obligations incumbent upon the French government by dint of our treaties with foreign powers.66 This statement unambiguously placed reason of state ahead of the concerns of colonial administrators. The obduracy of the Quai dOrsay could not prevent Camille Guy, Guineas new lieutenant-governor, from finding in late 1910 a way to circumvent the obligations of international convention. With the support of Roumes successor, William Ponty, Guyprofoundly hostile to the Lebanese and Syrians, whom he was later to deem the Chinamen of West Africaimplemented a decree, applied at the federal level some six months later, that imposed a series of stringent checks upon new migrants to Guinea.67 Under its terms, residency would only be granted to those who could provide a birth certificate and an extrait de casier judiciaire confirming their unblemished criminal record, translated into French, certified, and accompanied by a photograph. Passengers wishing to disembark were now also to be subjected to a compulsory medical examination to check that they were free of epidemic and contagious diseases. They were also required upon arrival to deposit the costs of their repatriation with immigration officials.68 These measures, as Desbordes observed, could be seen as doing no more than establishing general administrative and sanitary control[s]. They therefore could not be charged with singling out Syrian migrants upon entry or of violating international obligations.69 However, as Ponty made clear, their apparently general character was an administrative ruse disguising a tightly circumscribed exclusionary measure. In a circular in which he sought to elucidate the exact scope of the new regulations, he informed the lieutenant-governors of the Federation that the principal objective of the legislation was to check
64 65 66 67 68
Desbordes, LImmigration, fn. 3, 55. Ibid., 58; Bulletin du Comit de lAfrique Franaise 21, 6 (June 1911): 202. CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 33, Angoulvant to MC, Dakar, n.d. (1918). Camille Guy, LAfrique Occidentale Franaise (Paris, 1929), 74. Journal Officiel de la Guine Franaise, 15 Dec. 1910, Arrt of 7 Dec. 1910; and 1 May Desbordes, LImmigration, 59.
1911.
69
467
Syrian immigration. Officials, he insisted, should not burden with unnecessary procedures passengers whose identity and morality they had little reason to doubt. Rather, they should take particular care to apply these measures without pause to Eastern Mediterranean migrants and call upon police commissioners to verify meticulously the required documents. In addition, he intimated, functionaries should not hesitate to exceed the letter of the law in their efforts to stem this particular stream of migration. Thus, he called upon administrators to remind physicians charged with carrying out medical examinations that they should not lose sight of the great powers entrusted in them to protect the colony against the deleterious consequences of migration, and, in doing so, to dismiss cases arbitrarily in order to check the number of Ottoman subjects entering the Federation.70 This legislation remained in place until 1921 but, despite its stringent requirements, it failed to stop the constant stream of new arrivals from the Eastern Mediterranean, who rapidly found means of supplying proof of their identity and probity, calling upon friends and relatives to vouch for them and to provide the costs of repatriation. It was augmented in May 1918 by a set of restrictions upon the circulation of Syrians and Ottoman subjects, prompted, belatedly, by the war. Observing that the frequent journeys these individuals undertook for extremely diverse and trivial causes were intolerable in wartime, Governor-General Angoulvant urged territorial administrators to turn away all requests for travel, save in cases of dire medical need or departure from the colonies.71 This ban was an essential element of a raft of prohibitive measures introduced in the spring and summer of that year in order to trammel the activities of these undesirable Lebanese, Asiatics whose mercantile ways posed a grave threat to the growth of French and indigenous trade.72 Under these measures, Ottoman subjects were forbidden to acquire land for the duration of the hostilities, while their movements and correspondence were to be closely controlled.73 Angoulvant also pressed the Ministry of Colonies to accede to his plans to prevent Eastern Mediterranean traders from participating in the annual traite in Senegalese groundnuts, now conducted, under wartime provisioning regulations, with a single purchaser: the colonial state itself. Angoulvant seems to have intended his actions to achieve nothing less than the elimination of Syrian business.74
70 CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 36, GG to LGs, a/s de larrt du 1er mai 1911, rglementant limmigration trangre en AOF, Dakar, 24 May 1911. 71 CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 34, GG to LG of Guinea, Dakar, 24 May 1918; and GG to LGs, Dakar, 24 May 1918. 72 CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 33, GG to MC, a/s des Syriens, Dakar, 9 Nov. 1918. 73 CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 33, GG to LGs, Dakar, 13 June 1918; and LG of Senegal to GG, a/s des trangers, Dakar, 11 Nov. 1918. 74 CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 33, GG to MC, a/s de la prochaine campagne darachides, Dakar, 1 Aug. 1918.
468
ANDREW KERIM ARSAN
Small vexatious measures, he argued, would no longer do in the face of a population who oppose our hygiene and public health regulations with an inertia equaled only by their esteem for dirt, whose noisy sometimes bloody quarrels disturbed the public peace, and whose fraudulent ways were an insolent and permanent challenge to public morality and commercial probity. While these arguments echoed the complaints of those colons and propagandists who had campaigned in the years before 1914 for prohibitive measures against Eastern Mediterranean migrants, Angoulvant said that the latters presence was to be feared all the more in wartime. Not only did their constant rumor-mongering and the suspicions of spying which hung over some of them mark them as a threat to the security of the colony; they had transformed their shops into veritable desertion agencies, and had trafficked in personal effects, sold disguises, and hidden absentee conscripts. Perhaps most significantly, the colony could no longer tolerate the boundless arrogance and insolent luxury of the Syrians, their noisome opulence so profoundly at odds with the contemplative dignity of the European and indigenous population, its apprehensions and hopes, and the vulgar fanfare of their pleasures that were an insult to our mourning.75 The governor-general called for the imposition of conscription upon all migrants resident in AOF for over a year. This, he maintained, was the sole adequate response to the constant abuses which had allowed men who, before the war, had scraped by in their miserable shops to accumulate vast sums and acquire sumptuous establishments. It also might prove fitting punishment for the disdain with which migrants had greeted the call to arms issued by the Lgion dOrient, created in 1916 to incorporate young Lebanese and Syrian men willing to fight under the French flag. While Frenchmen were struggling to secure the liberty of Lebanon and Syria, and to free these lands from the yoke of Turkish tyranny, migrants in AOF had profited from the absence of competitors gone to the front, and had accumulated vast sums by means both fair and, more often than not, foul.76 Such behavior, it might be argued, seemed utterly beyond the pale to Angoulvant. Migrants had reneged upon their obligation toward France by their stubborn refusal to take up arms in the Lgion dOrient, their ingratitude belying the myth of an enduring and reciprocal friendship between the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean and their secular protector. They had also, in doing so, made a show of their deep-rooted opportunism, dishonesty, and cowardice. These complaints were informed by a keen sense of the respective merits of Frances civilizing mission in the Eastern Mediterranean and West Africa, itself founded upon an essentially affective assessment of the two undertakings. For Angoulvant, there could be no doubt that African indignes
75 76
CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 33, GG to MC, Dakar, 15 Aug. 1918. CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 33, GG to MC, Dakar, 2 Mar. 1918.
469
were appropriate carriers and recipients of the sentiments of patriarchal benevolence which framed the mission civilisatrice77; Syrians were worthy only of contempt for the insolent indifference with which they treated the French authorities. For all the wounded eloquence of Angoulvants repeated entreaties to the Rue Oudinot, functionaries there refused to acquiesce to his demands for the introduction of conscription and the wholesale exclusion of Eastern Mediterranean migrants from the produce trade. While particular cases were open to consideration, general principles affecting all Syrians were inadmissible so long as allied aliens remained untouched by similar measures.78 The imposition of such severe impediments upon their commercial operations was prevented by the ambivalent legal status of Lebanese and Syrian migrants in particularthey were considered as neither allies nor enemies by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and the Interior, but rather as special protgs enjoying a certain degree of latitude.79 Angoulvant found himself compelled to implement a far less substantial set of strictures than he desired, but one in which the prohibition of movement took on a central importance. The Quai dOrsay responded to even these attenuated measures by issuing Angoulvant a severe, if diplomatically worded, rebuke. In a memorandum drafted in November 1918, the Directorate of Commercial and Political Affairs reminded its counterparts at the Rue Oudinot that the ministry had decided, upon the end of diplomatic relations with the Ottoman state, not to extend the status of enemy subjects to the numerous Ottoman subjects, for the most part not Muslims, who resided on French territory, and whose respectability, morality, and Francophile sentiments were well known. The decision to maintain the special protection these individuals had been accorded in the past had been vindicated, over the course of hostilities, by political necessities of an imperious kind. It seemed consistent, insisted this missive, that any measure intended to abrogate or even to restrict our benevolent measures towards our traditional clients would not only be discordant with our traditions of generosity but also, and most importantly, constitute a grave political fault. The Syrian colonies of French West Africa therefore have a right, as in the past, to benefit from our kindness. The memorandum further brushed away Angoulvants request for conscription, and insisted that French functionaries could not begrudge the Syrians of Dakar and other towns [in West Africa] their failure to enlist. Not only had the Government of the Republic not adopted at any moment this attitude towards the Syrians, Armenians, and other non-Muslim Ottoman subjects resident in the mtropole, but it was prevented from doing so by the international
77 78 79
Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 40. CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 33, MC to GG, Paris, 13 Nov. 1918. CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 39, MC to GG, Paris, 25 May 1917.
470
ANDREW KERIM ARSAN
agreements of The Hague, which forbade the executive to corral, even by indirect means, nationals of an enemy state into serving under our flag. Such an argument was, it could be said, not mere bluster but rather a means of putting Angoulvant in his place. Its author intimated that the course of action the governor-general had contemplated was driven by little more than resentment against a state of affairs created by conflict and not by the Syrians,80 who could not be blamed for their immunity, and stated unequivocally that Angoulvant had no grounds for considering the implementation of measures that were both rejected by the metropolitan government and contrary to international law. These, the memorandum made clear, held an authority far superior to that of a simple colonial governor, who was in no position to adopt a divergent course of action. In a letter to Angoulvant bundled together with this reprimand, the minister of colonies, while acknowledging that criticism of the Syrians could be justified by their lack of hygiene and their often disloyal competition, stressed, The Syrian question in French West Africa cannot be divorced from Frances policy in the Orient generally, and more particularly in Syria. The attitude of local authorities in our West African possessions can indeed not fail to have repercussions on this question, and threatens to hinder the actions of the Government of the Republic at a time when it is striving to attach the populations of Syria to France by a definitive settlement. Though careful not to disavow completely the measures Angoulvant had sought to implementinsisting that the Department of Political Affairs had long since been aware of the problems created by the introduction of Eastern Mediterranean migrants to AOFthe minister of colonies was compelled to recognize the paramount importance of the exigencies of Middle Eastern policy.81 It is clear that both the Ministry of Colonies and the Government-General of AOF had little choice but to bow to the diplomatic imperatives that the Quai dOrsay defended so vigorously. Frances precarious position in the Eastern Mediterranean was foremost in the minds of functionaries in 1918, with its claims to control over Bilad al-Sham threatened by both the rival claims of Sharif Faisal and the recalcitrance of the local population, but the establishment of a French Mandate over Lebanon and Syria in the early 1920s consecrated the Quai dOrsays commitment to a migration policy of the utmost tolerance both in the metropole and colonial territories like AOF. Indeed, intervention on behalf of Lebanese and Syrians in the mahjar, or the lands of migration, was no longer seen in the interwar years as a favor to be granted at the discretion of Frances
80 CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 34, Direction des Affaires Politiques et Commerciales, MFA, Paris, n.d. (Nov. 1918). 81 CARAN AOF/AS/21 G 34, MC to GG, Paris, 23 Nov. 1918.
471
plenipotentiaries, but rather as an obligation dictated by the terms of Article 3 of the League of Nations Mandate, which considered nationals of Syria and the Lebanon living outside the limits of the territory as being under the diplomatic and consular protection of the Mandate.82 This was in stark contrast with the status of other non-European migrants who sought to move between the various parts of the French empire in the 1920s and 1930s. The war years had witnessed a sharp increase in the number of North African, Indochinese, and Chinese laborers in metropolitan France as these men were recruited to compensate for the constant loss of Frenchmen to the front. Algerians in particular, freed in 1914 from the need to present permits for travel to the mtropole, had risen dramatically in number. However, with the close of hostilities the French state hastily sought not just to repatriate these workerswho, their usefulness exhausted, were viewed as an insidious danger to the body politicbut also to erect a series of administrative hurdles that significantly limited freedoms guaranteed to North African migrants by existing legislation. By 1921, only two hundred of the wartime laborers recruited from Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria remained, and fourteen hundred from Indochina and China.83 Migration did not cease, and picked up again with the shift from repatriation to improved surveillance on the soil of the metropole.84 The number of Algerians resident in France had risen by 1928 to more than sixty thousand.85 Nevertheless, both Algerianswho remained under the care of the Ministry of the Interiorand Moroccans and Tunisianswho, as subjects of nominal protectorates, depended on the Quai dOrsayhad to surmount a raft of measures designed as obstacles to free movement, such as requirements that they obtain nationality certificates, identity cards, medical certificates, and approval from the Ministry of Labor for their employment contracts.86 Eastern Mediterranean migrants were able to secure far more substantive entitlements from the French state than, say, Moroccans. The ambiguous status of Morocco certainly matched that of Lebanon and Syria, which were regarded as at once French possessions and foreign states, but this rarely afforded its constituents any privileges in metropolitan France. On the contrary, as one Moroccan migrant who appealed for compensation for a workplace injury was told, As a Moroccan you are a foreign worker; returning to Morocco which is not a colony but a protectorate, you cease to live in French territory. While reciprocity in Franco-Moroccan relations would
82 French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon, American Journal of International Law 17, 3 (1923): 178. 83 Rosenberg, Policing Paris, 14445, 124. 84 Martin Thomas, Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914 (Berkeley, 2008), 214. 85 Rosenberg, Policing Paris, 13031. 86 Ibid., 144; Thomas, Empires of Intelligence, 213.
472
ANDREW KERIM ARSAN
have seemed intolerable to French administrators, Lebanese and Syrian citizens were entitled to a share of social citizenship, which gave them not only freedom of movement between their own states and metropolitan France and its colonies, but also French protection elsewhere in the world.87 This commitment, enshrined in the terms of the Mandate, was pressed into service by French administrators in their efforts to manage the sentiments of Lebanese and Syrian citizens and to maintain at least a measure of acquiescence to the Mandatory presence. As oft-repeated pieties about the long attachment of these populations to France came to ring hollow in the face of the wearying realities of rule, the Quai dOrsay faced calls from officials in Beirut to assist Eastern Mediterranean migrants facing difficulties in the mahjar, in the hope that such intercession might bolster their own embattled position. As the high commissioner pointed out in 1929, intervention on behalf of migrants in Portuguese Guinea could have only beneficial results in the Mandatory territories themselves, since relations between Syrian and Lebanese migrants and their families remaining in the country of their birth are close and sustained, and the services the Mandatory Power might be able to provide the former can only serve to bring the latter to appreciate the utility of the Mandate.88 He was not alone in holding this perspective. As Simon Jackson has recently argued, the Syrian and Lebanese diaspora had by the close of World War I come to be seen as a powerful, and potentially unified, political and economic force. It is no surprise that the High Commission should have regarded these men and women as essential to the mise en valeur of their homeland, potential collaborators in our economic and moral expansion who might serve the double interest of France and the countries under French Mandate.89 Such pragmatic concerns were compelling enough to motivate officials in both Paris and Beirut to ensure that Lebanese and Syrian migrants were treated as nationals of most favored states not just in Frances own colonial possessions, but also in other territories. In 1928, the Quai dOrsay was drawn into a protracted dispute with the Liberian government by the latters decision to ban all trade by citizens of countries with which it had not agreed a commercial treatya measure which affected, in the main, Lebanese and Syrian traders. Upon being informed of this threat by the French consul to Monrovia, Peytaud, officials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs urged him to intervene firmly in order to obtain at the very least a stay of execution until League of Nations arbitration had run its course.90 They sought to resort to the terms of the Mandate in order to
Lewis, Boundaries of the Republic, 2122. MAE Nouvelle Srie, E, Syrie-Liban (hereafter NS/E/SL) 129, High Commissioner to MFA, a/s Protection consulaire des Syriens et Libanais en Guine Portugaise, Beirut, 22 June 1929. 89 Simon Jackson, Mandatory Development: The Political Economy of the French Mandate in Syria and Lebanon, 19151939, PhD diss., New York University, 2009, 39495, 397. 90 MAE NS/E/SL 413, answer attached to Peytaud, Monrovia, 26 Mar. 1928, Paris, n.d.
88 87
473
safeguard the interests of their Levantine protgs, pointing out that Article 11 prohibited any discrimination in Syria or the Lebanon against the nationals of any member-state of the League of Nations,91 and suggested that reciprocal treatment for Lebanese citizens in Liberia might be expected.92 It is clear that the Quai dOrsay, rather than merely affirming the principle of protection, sought to safeguard the commercial position of Lebanese and Syrian citizens abroad and ensure their rights were upheld, if necessary through recourse to lengthy arbitration before the League of Nations. Interwar migration controls in AOF, meanwhile, both steered clear of any measures of exception that might contravene international convention and submitted AOF to metropolitan law. Guys 1910 arrt, seen as failing to correspond to the principles regulating the settlement of foreigners in France and deemed vexatious to passengers, was abrogated in 1921 in an attempt to bring AOF into line with metropolitan practices. Crucially, the decrees of 1921 and 1923, unlike pre-war measures, were intended to regulate the activities of foreign nationals upon the territory of AOF rather than to police its borders. While they forbade foreigners from practicing certain professions without administrative authorization, they failed to impose restrictions upon entry. The 1921 regulations, in stark contrast with those of 1910, demanded nothing more of migrants than a simple declaration of identity to their landlords. While the decree of 28 April 1923 did stipulate that identity cards could be granted only to migrants who had paid a guarantee equivalent to the costs of repatriation, new arrivals were allowed to provide instead a guarantee given by a solvent licensed trader, already established in the colony, a concession that deliberately did away with a significant impediment to migration. In such circumstances, the only recourse available to administrators wishing to channel or stem the inflow of people from the Eastern Mediterranean was to refuse identity cards to migrants already on the soil of the Federation.93 These skeletal controls upon migration were, it is true, supplemented by subsequent decrees in 1925, 1927, and 1932 that required travelers disembarking in AOF to provide proof of identity, any criminal record they might have, and a medical certificate, and a monetary guarantee set in 1927 at 4,800 Francs for Lebanese and Syrian citizens.94 While these measures went some way toward reestablishing the legal status quo ante on paper, they failed in practice to provide effective checks upon migration from the Eastern Mediterranean. Indeed, this may well not have been their purpose. The requirement that
French Mandate, 179. MAE NS/E/SL 413, answer attached to Peytaud, Monrovia, 26 Mar. 1928, Paris, n.d. 93 Desbordes, LImmigration, 63, 65; Journal Officiel de lAfrique Occidentale Franaise (JOAOF) (1921): 67678; and JOAOF (1923): 45859. 94 Desbordes, LImmigration, 6680; JOAOF (1925): 21920; JOAOF (1927): 3001; JOAOF (1932): 297302.
91 92
474
ANDREW KERIM ARSAN
migrants pay a guarantee seems to have acted essentially as a budgetary measure intended, not to bar entry to those unable to pay, but rather to free the administration from the costs of repatriating indigent aliens. Had functionaries regarded this consignment as an exclusionary measure, they would likely have been less willing to accept the guarantees of migrants already established in AOF, or payments by commercial companies, navigation lines,95 and the Mandatory authorities in Beirut96 on behalf of their employees, travelers, and administrative charges. Moreover, officials scrupulously avoided any suggestion of prejudice against migrants. Governor-General Carde went so far as to stress in 1925 that even criminal offences did not disbar new arrivals from being granted residence. The stipulation that passengers present any criminal record for a visa, he made clear, did not grant local authorities the capacity to oppose the disembarkation of convicts. This procedure was no more than a means of gathering information to be used in the enquiry which precedes the issue of a definitive identity card. Under no circumstances could the evidence thus acquired justify a refusal to grant the right to land, which was contingent only upon providing the appropriate documents rather than their content.97 Frustrated by the inefficacy of such local measures, which offered no real means of selection from the hundreds and thousands of migrants who disembarked in AOF each year, Governor-General de Coppet in 1936 suggested the creation of what amounted, in effect, to a system of remote control. Under this scheme, the issue of visas to prospective migrants before their departure would be conditional upon the personal authorization of the governor-general, who would base his decision upon the advice of both the Mandatory authorities and the territorial lieutenant-governors, who were better able to assess situations in their own colonies.98 However, as the head of the Federations Sret Gnrale complained bitterly in an internal memorandum, almost a year later the Department of Political Affairs at the Rue Oudinot had still not responded to this proposal. Also unanswered, he said, was a request the Ministry of Colonies had forwarded to the Quai dOrsay to strengthen the existing regulatory measures. This had been formulated in response to both a sudden hike in the numbers of new migrants over 1936 and 1937 and the mounting tension between colons and Libano-Syriens. He could not but conclude, The local administration can count only upon itself to face down, using the
JOAOF (1925): 634; JOAOF (1926): 773. By Article 3 of the decree of 5 Mar. 1927, which stipulated that the caution could be replaced by a document attesting that the government of the indigent migrants country of origin was prepared to provide the costs of repatriation. JOAOF 1177 (9 Apr. 1927): 301. 97 JOAOF (1925): 634. 98 CARAN AOF/Nouvelle Srie (NS)/21 G 61, GG to Minister of Colonies, a/s immigration libano-syrienne, Dakar, 2 Dec. 1936.
96
95
475
legislation already in place, the dangers associated with the growth of Lebanese and Syrian migration to AOF.99 Lebanese and Syrian migrants, then, could not be selected before their departure from Beirut or Tripoli, nor turned away at the borders of AOF. They could only be subjected to a screening process once already resident in the Federation. While identity documents, which doubled as residence permits, could be refused to new arrivals awaiting permission to remain in AOF, such rejections were unfortunately rare, as the director of the Federations Sret Gnrale conceded in 1937. He castigated local authorities for failing to make use of an administrative tool that enabled them to select immigrants to their territories.100 Furthermore, though the colonial state could, by the letter of the law, withdraw identity documents from foreigners who failed to observe residence requirements or were found in breach of public health regulations, such provisions were rarely, if ever, used to expel Libano-Syriens from AOF. As the Department of Political Affairs took pains to point out in 1936, expulsion orders would only be accepted in cases where migrants had committed criminal offences, since Lebanese and Syrian citizens were not to be treated with the same rigor as other foreigners.101 Indeed, they were entitled, by dint of the Mandate to our protection, which is accorded them in France and the colonies on the same terms as to our own citizens and subjects, in keeping with the directives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.102 This was no more than an extension to the colonies of regulations already implemented in the mtropole in early 1935. These accorded Lebanese and Syrian residents in France the status of citizens of a most favored nation, in reciprocal recognition of the preferential treatment accorded French nationals in Lebanon and Syria. While this measure did not alter existing regulations upon the registration of foreigners and delivery of identity papers, Lebanese and Syrians were to be treated with benevolence in matters of settlement, residence, the exercise of trade, occupations and professions, the purchase, ownership, and occupation of all mobile and immobile goods and, generally, the right to dispose of them, conscription, and state benefits. They were also to remain free of any special taxes aside from residency taxes.103 While the signing of independence treaties with the states of the Levant in 1936 (never, in the event, ratified) put an end to the status of Lebanese and Syrian citizens as formal protgs, they were to continue to
99 CARAN AOF/NS/21 G 142, Rsum relatif la question de limmigration libano-syrienne en AOF, Dakar, 17 Nov. 1937. 100 Ibid. 101 CARAN AOF/NS/21 G 61, DAPA, a/s immigration libano-syrienne, Dakar, 13 Oct. 1936. 102 CARAN AOF/NS/21 G 61, Compte-rendu de la runion du 25 novembre 1937 au sujet de la question de limmigration libano-syrienne en AOF. 103 Modus Vivendi relatif ltablissement des Libanais en France, http://www.doc.diplomatie.gouv.fr/BASIS/pacte/webext/bilat/DDD/19340025.pdf (accessed 25 Jan. 2008).
476
ANDREW KERIM ARSAN
benefit from the same exceptional treatment as nationals of a most favored state.104 Such clemency sometimes extended even to expulsion orders issued for criminal offences or breach of residency requirements.105 Migrants often enlisted the assistance of both Lebanese dignitaries and French administrators in their individual and collective appeals to the Ministry of Colonies and the Government-General of AOF. Recourse to such intercession had its origins in the years before World War I. Already in 1910 the migrants of the commercial center of Kayes had expressed their dissatisfaction with the treatment meted out by the colonial administration in a letter to Sulaiman al-Bustani, the Maronite deputy for Beirut in the Ottoman assembly.106 It is clear that, as Simon Jackson has argued, efforts to draw benefit from the culture of legality in which Mandatory rule was embedded had their origins in the lobbying and jurisdictional politics of the late Ottoman period.107 They became increasingly common in the interwar years, when Eastern Mediterranean migrants in AOF regularly sought and received assistance from Lebanese dignitaries. Of these, Monsignor Fighali, the Maronite vicar patriarchal in Paris, was perhaps the most frequent intercessor, intervening regularly throughout the 1930s on behalf of both Christian and Muslim Lebanese citizens served with expulsion orders. While not always successful in gaining repeals, Fighali seems to have been confident enough in his capacities to continue dispatching entreaties to the Ministry of Colonies appealing for clemency for his compatriots. He did not shy away from ending a letter acknowledging the expulsions, despite his efforts, of three men from Cte dIvoire with a further request for clemency in the case of Ahmad Isa Khudr. Already expelled from AOF, Khudr hoped to be authorized to return to his family, particularly to his pregnant wife, and Fighali called upon Minister of Colonies Marius Moutet to reconsider his case and see whether it would not be possible, with a little kindness, to allow him to return home. The vicar patriarchal assured Moutet, I am certain that this Lebanese national will become, like his compatriots who have already seen their identity cards returned, a most devoted friend to a benevolent and generous France. This was a carefully worded appeal, ably moving between the overlapping lexicons of Christian charity for a man with eight people at his charge and nationalist sentiment; in this delicate game of praise and
104 CARAN AOF/NS/21 G 61 [200 Mi 3039], Compte-rendu de la runion du 25 novembre 1937 au sujet de la question de limmigration libano-syrienne en AOF. 105 These were, as in metropolitan law, distinct offences, the one punished by expulsion, the other by refoulement. See Daniel Gordon, The Back-Door of the Nation-State: Expulsion of Foreigners and Continuity in Twentieth-Century France, Past & Present 186 (2005): 20132. 106 MAE T/SL/NS 114, Bompard to MFA, Therapia, 20 June 1910; MC to MFA, Paris, 19 Oct. 1910; Bompard to MFA, Paris, 31 Dec. 1910. 107 Jackson, Mandatory Development, 398, 402. See Emmanuelle Saada, The Empire of Law: Dignity, Prestige and Domination in the Colonial Situation, French Politics, Culture and Society 20, 2 (2002): 98120.
477
gentle persuasion, Fighali attempted to pull a concession from Moutet by pricking his conscience while simultaneously flattering his patriotic sensibilities.108 Fighali enjoyed some striking successes. In 1936, he obtained the suspension of expulsion orders hanging over Ibrahim Tham, Husain Wihbi, Muhammad Hilal, and Ilias Abu Rizq, whose identity papers had been confiscated for their political activities. He appealed on their behalf as the representative of the Maronite Patriarch to the French government, as a Frenchman, and as Professor of Oriental Languages at the Sorbonne and the Faculty of Letters of the University of Bordeaux. In a pair of letters to the governor-general, Fighali asked him to reverse his decision, maintaining, An act of clemency toward [these men] would be welcomed by their Lebanese compatriots, at a time when they are amicably discussing with France the terms of a treaty of friendship.109 What is more, he explained, he addressed himself to the governorgeneral on the advice of functionaries at the Quai dOrsay, where [he had] brought up this matter the other day, who suggested that he write to you directly, asking you to examine carefully the case of these unfortunate Lebanese, currently Frances protgs, and soon to be its friends and allies. Benevolence towards these men would be most opportune and would coincide with the French governments decision to reward the fidelity, the unshakeable commitment of the Lebanese towards France, their protector and friend for more than ten centuries with independence.110 Clearly, Fighali was prepared to deploy all rhetorical means at his disposal in pursuit of a favorable decision. Capable of humbly presenting himself as an ordinary French citizen, he also hinted at his influence as a Lebanese plenipotentiary who could, his turn of phrase suggested, casually drop by the Quai dOrsay to discuss the position of his compatriots. He also underscored his authority as a religious emissary and accomplished scholar, and stressed the advantages of a favorable decision in terms that conflated immediate political exigency and long commitments. Such wiliness was effective: while Hilal and Abu Rizq had already left the Federation, Governor-General Brvi did postpone the expulsions of Tham and Wihbi, and assured Fighali he was re-examining with the utmost benevolence the situation of these citizens under French Mandate. He also reminded the Monsignor, The withdrawal of a foreigners identity booklet is not in itself an expulsion order, and, in an apparent attempt to gloss over his decision to expel Abu Rizq and Hilal by presenting the possibility of their return, told him that requests for readmission to AOF at a later date might be welcomed.111
108 Aix-en-Provence, Centre des Archives dOutremer, Ministre des Colonies, Fonds Ministriel, Affaires Politiques (hereafter CAOM MC/FM/AP) 1432/1, Fighali to MC, Paris, 31 Dec. 1936. 109 CAOM MC/FM/AP 1432/1, Fighali to GG, Paris, 3 June 1936. 110 CAOM MC/FM/AP 1432/1, Fighali to GG, Paris, 29 June 1936. 111 CAOM MC/FM/AP 1432/1, GG to Fighali, Dakar, 13 July 1936.
478
ANDREW KERIM ARSAN
Cases like these are profoundly revealing in a number of ways. They illuminate the workings of the paternalistic civic order created by the French in Lebanon and Syria within which religious representatives like Fighali were treated as favored interlocutors, entrenching an enduring form of bureaucratic confessionalism, and they reveal the intimate language of friendship, fidelity, and benevolence that infused such exchanges. But they also allow us to trace the reverberations of such policy as far away as AOF, whose administrators found their own capacity to act constrained by the sentimental imperatives of the Mandatory state. Even after the introduction of the 1932 decree intended to centralize and rationalize all migration procedures, these functionaries still could not deal with the cases of Lebanese migrants according to inflexible, Weberian bureaucratic procedures. Instead, they found themselves enmeshed in the webs of empire, forced to navigate a tangled weave of personal commitments and sentimental ties. I have sought here to trace the attempts of administrators across AOF to devise and implement measures of law that might check Eastern Mediterranean migration to the territories under their rule. Such endeavors, as I have shown, were repeatedly stymied by interventions of metropolitan departments of state, and by the entreaties of migrants themselves. This tale of frustration and halfmeasures underscores that no colonial territory was an island unto itself, its administrators safely marooned on the periphery away from the intrusive politicking of the imperial capital, and free to make law as they saw fit. In important areas of sovereignty, such as matters of international law and foreign relations, French possessions remained clearly subordinated to directives issued from Rue Oudinot, and the Ministry of Colonies was itself forced to bow in turn before directives of the Quai dOrsay. This is a telling reminder that we cannot truly speak of a colonial state in the singular, but only of an imperial system, whose constituent parts were administered by a congeries of departments of state, each with its own priorities and imperatives. Furthermore, these relations were marked by stark asymmetries of power between various agencies that sometimes allowed one to protect its own interests at the expense of others around it. This account has also shown ways in which this empire-state retained personal, affective forms and norms of governance even as it dealt in matters of international law that showed little concern for the circumstances of particular individuals. Not only were governors and ministers of state pulled into protracted personal correspondence with migrants and their advocates, but they also had to respond to such entreaties, and frame their own arguments, in emotive registers that bore scarce relation to the abstract language of jurisprudence. Imperial reason of state, then, rested upon the intimate registers of sentimental commitment.

Lebanese Migration To Frech West Africa

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Исходное описание:

Оригинальное название

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Lebanese Migration To Frech West Africa

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Comparative Studies in Society and History 2011;53(3):450478. 0010-4175/11 $15.

ANDREW KERIM ARSAN

ANDREW KERIM ARSAN

ANDREW KERIM ARSAN

ANDREW KERIM ARSAN

ANDREW KERIM ARSAN

ANDREW KERIM ARSAN

ANDREW KERIM ARSAN

ANDREW KERIM ARSAN

ANDREW KERIM ARSAN

ANDREW KERIM ARSAN

ANDREW KERIM ARSAN

ANDREW KERIM ARSAN

ANDREW KERIM ARSAN

ANDREW KERIM ARSAN

Вам также может понравиться