The War of Governments against their Opposition in Exile

Abstract

The activities of political exiles have long been a source of unease for governments. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, the French Emperor, Napoleon 111, was in constant terror of plots against his life by French exiles. In 1850 the Bonapartist dictatorship established the French Political Police to suppress subversive acts against the regime said to be instigated by political exiles in England. Napoleon himself declared that 'until the [exile] problem was solved, it would never be safe in France "to relax the present system" of authoritarian regime'.' Similarly the Tsarist government feared Russian exile groups in Western Europe and moved to suppress them. From the revolutionary days of Alexander Herzen until Lenin's victorious homecoming in 1917, Tsarist police agents strove to destroy the connection between domestic opponents of the regime and exiled revolutionaries, and used a variety of means to infiltrate and eliminate the Russian emigrt forces.' Operating from outside their respective states and often under the shelter of sympathetic governments, exile groups may have a better opportunity than an internally-based opposition to carry on a forceful campaign against the home regime. As a student of the African National Congress (ANC) observed, in times of total repression of the domestic opposition, the terrain of exile 'can provide protections, security, powerful forms of external support, factors and conditions which facilitate the development and quality of organization unattainable in the precarious circumstances of opposition politics within the homeland'.' Indeed, in some cases, the exiles' campaigns are the only indication of an active opposition to the home regime, an indisputable proof of the falseness of the regime's claim that the nation is unified behind its leadership. Mussohi, for example, was

Governing Diasporas

“…In some other cases, states create incentives for their labor abroad to return, such as New Zealand’s “brain drain” policies (Larner 2007). The same apparent contradictions appear at the political level: some states police and even kill their expatriates abroad (Libya, Russia), others use them as “lobbies” and instruments of foreign policy (from Israel to Mexico or Macedonia) (Shain 1989, 1999). In some cases, the population abroad is considered to be a shameful condition (such as Mexico’s “pochos”), in others a resource (Fitzgerald 2006).…”