Abstract
What's the Sex of the Stateless? Statelessness in Post-war West-Germany
The stateless person is a central figure of the twentieth century. It developed as a result of the confluence of nationalism, the emergence of new nation states, the dissolution of former empires and the two World Wars. Of all the major causes of statelessness, one had particularly affected women. Even long into the twentieth century – and in international law, until 1957 – a woman's nationality was based on the principle of «derivative citizenship». This meant that her citizenship depended on the person to whom she «belonged», be it her father in her country of origin or her husband of a different nationality. This article focuses on international judicial, diplomatic and humanitarian discussions in the preliminary stages of resolutions such as the 1957 UN Convention on the Nationality of Married Women. The discussions on the supranational level were echoed by the West-German claim of equality of the sexes, which was laid out in national legislation such as the Basic Law. By looking at this example, we can find out how both the nation states as well as women's rights groups acted as players in an international field of diplomatic discourse, and how they employed a human rights language in order to make themselves heard and to convey their claims. While the «right to have a nationality» was part of the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, the question of how to deal with stateless people on an everyday basis of political and social practice within the framework of the nation state still remained unanswered. My interest is to show how women's rights groups and German national legislation discovered and defined statelessness as a humanitarian problem and tried to solve it in the political realm.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.