The relationship between marriage and citizenship was implicit in the practices of most democratic states during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The policy of depriving women who married foreigners of their citizenship was legally codified only with the process of 'nationalisation'. In the particular case of Switzerland, the practice was not codified until 1941, at the height of the movement of peoples unleashed by the Second World War, and it was only fully dismantled in the 1990s. This article analyses the discursive webs linking gender construction, nation state and legal system during the controversies surrounding the marriage rule in Switzerland between 1917 and 1952. It explores the formative role of gender in the process of delineating the practices of inclusion and exclusion and in shaping the internal boundaries within the nation between foreigners and those who belonged: citizens.

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For a long time the history of communist organizations was primarily written from a party or partisan viewpoint, influenced by topical questions and subjects; 1 the interpretation or judgements offered were closely linked to the political stance of the author at the time of writing. Even works of a later date and conforming to serious academic standards often came from authors who had experienced communism at first hand. Many of them had been forced to leave Soviet Russia after the revolution. In contrast, others were close to a Communist Party or belonged to disappointed adherents or dissidents of communism -"renegades", as the communist organizations were wont to label those they had expelled and vilified.2 The usefulness of works of this kind was not necessarily diminished by virtue of

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, communism was embodied in an International that was organised by and centred on Moscow. This was known as the Third International, the Communist International or the Comintern, which existed from 1919 to 1943. Communism also spawned a new internationalism which connected people around causes from Harlem to Moscow, Hamburg to Buenos Aires, Marseille to Durban, London to Shanghai; it gave rise to global moments of protest and struggle, and myriad diverse organisations of many different acronyms. This internationalism proved to be, through its revolutionary, anti-fascist and anti-imperialist scope, both more enduring and more global than the International which had given it life. In what ways did the Comintern serve as a 'start-up' for worldwide projects and struggles which have left their imprint on the contemporary world, in particular outside of Europe? In this article we try to offer some answers to this question. We should note from the beginning that our inquiry would not have been possible without recent innovations in the field. Communism is transnational, but we needed the perspective of transnational history to be able to think about it as such. For a long time works on communism (as on other topics) had been bound by a nationally-minded framework, a mode of analysis which favoured country-by-country studies of national parties and organisations