Internationalism, Protectionism, Xenophobia: The Second International's Migration Debate (1889–1914)

Abstract

In 1907, the Second International adopted a resolution on migration that rejected restrictions on the free movement of workers. In this article, we contend that, despite this official stance, the issue of migration was a highly controversial one for the international socialist community. We present a multi-level analysis, in which we detail the migration debate as it took place on the platforms of the Second International (roughly between 1903 and 1907) and the way in which this debate played out domestically for the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands and the Socialist Party of America – two parties that openly rooted for restrictions at the international level. We discern three ideal-typical stances on immigration – internationalism, on the one hand, and protectionist nativism and xenophobic nativism, on the other – and argue that it was the incompatibility of the internationalist and nativist positions that caused internal divisions to arise during the debates. Apart from speaking to the classic historiography on the Second International, which deals with the incompatibility of internationalism and nationalism, this article traces the influence of additional racist and culturalist ideologies on the debate and further historicizes it within the broader context of the modern international migration system that was taking shape at the time.

Between 18 and 24 August 1907, left-wing politicians, unionists, intellectuals, and journalists from around the world gathered in Stuttgart to attend the seventh congress of the Second International (Figure 1). On the fifth day of this congress, the international socialist community dealt with a resolution on the immigration and emigration of workers. It was internationalist in nature and declared that the immigration and emigration “of workmen are phenomena as inseparable from the substance of capitalism as unemployment, overproduction and underconsumption of the workingmen”. The congress, therefore, was not to

consider exceptional measures of any kind, economic or political, [as] the means for removing any danger which may arise to the working class from immigration and emigration since such measures are fruitless and reactionary; especially not the restriction of the freedom of migration and the exclusion of foreign nations and races.¹

After some debate, the resolution was accepted by a large majority of the congress.²

Figure 1. Prominent members of the international socialist community portrayed during their stay in Stuttgart to attend the seventh congress of the Second International, held between 18 and 24 August 1907. 1. Manuel Ugarte, 2. Pieter Jelles Troelstra, 3. Édouard Vaillant, 4. Henri van Kol, 5. Henry Hyndman, 6. Emile Vandervelde, 7. Jean Jaurès, 8. Rosa Luxemburg, 9 Paul Singer, 10. Karl Kautsky, 11. Victor Adler, 12. August Bebel, 13. Camille Huysmans, 14. Morris Hillquit.

Photo from Sonderheft betr. der Kongress zu Stuttgart. Mit Bilder. Berlin, s.d. Imprimé, Second International Archives, International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam).

The international socialists stood united on the issue – or, at least, that is how it appeared.³ Below the surface there was much controversy. In the commission that was to formulate the resolution, the question of immigration and emigration was heavily debated. Multiple draft resolutions had been sent to the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) to be discussed in Stuttgart,⁴ and most of the debate evolved around the proposition of Morris Hillquit. Hillquit was the leader of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) and was fiercely criticized for introducing a plan that would allow immigrants to be excluded based on their race and nationality.⁵ While the majority of the commission rejected Hillquit's plans as essentially un-socialist, and claimed that the “freedom of migration”, “libre circulation”, or “Freizügigkeit”⁶ of workers had to be maintained at all cost, support came from other white settler states, Australia and South Africa, and, more interestingly, from sections of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD). The Germans argued that they could not “approve a resolution which rejects any restriction on immigration”.⁷

The central premise of this article is that the issue of migration proved far more controversial to the international socialist community than the “performance of internationalism”⁸ in taking an internationalist stance in Stuttgart suggests. To understand why this was the case, we discern three ideal-typical positions on immigration that surfaced during the migration debate at the Second International: 1) the internationalist position, in which restrictions on free movement were rejected altogether, and particularly restrictions applying to certain races and nationalities; 2) the protectionist position, in which restrictions were supported on the basis of socioeconomic considerations; and finally, 3) the xenophobic position, in which restrictions were supported on the basis of culturalist and racist considerations. We present a multi-level analysis in which we detail not only the migration debate as it took place on the platforms of the Second International (roughly between 1903 and 1907; Figure 1), but also the way in which the debates played out domestically for the SPD and the SPA. By focusing on these two parties that openly rooted for restrictions, we analyse the protectionist and xenophobic positions in more detail. Though, in practice, these were often wedded together, we make a conceptual distinction between both strands of left-wing nativism to study the specific dynamics at work.

Historiography

In an overview of European left-wing strands of nativism since the late 1980s, Lucassen and Lucassen speak of a “left-wing discomfort with immigration”, which, they hypothesize, “represents a longstanding current within Labor that goes back to discussions about class versus ethnic solidarity within the Second International (1889–1916)”.⁹ This tension between class and ethnic solidarity to which the authors refer has been a dominant theme in the classic historiography of the Second International, yet the issue of migration is generally overlooked in this work, or at least overshadowed by other “national questions” that defined the Second International's debates – militarism, imperialism, and colonialism. According to the narrative developed by scholars such as Cole, Haupt, Braunthal, and Joll, the “national questions” tested socialists’ internationalist loyalties and laid bare the irreconcilable differences between the two main factions within the Second International and its affiliated parties: the revolutionaries who stood for a radical internationalist politics based on “class”, and the reformists who engaged in cross-class, “ethnic”, or “national” cooperation for piecemeal reforms.¹⁰

Over time, the working class became increasingly “integrated into the nation”, to reproduce Van der Linden's narrative;¹¹ consequently, socialists found it increasingly difficult to uphold their professed internationalism. Within the socialist movement, “practical” nationalism increasingly dominated over “theoretical” internationalism. This had implications for international cooperation at the level of the Second International, too: parties found it increasingly difficult to overcome their nationalistically inspired differences, and, eventually, this famously resulted in the breakdown of the Second International in August 1914, on the outbreak of World War I.¹² The centrality of the “national questions” in the historiography of the Second International compels us to consider the Second International's migration debate in more detail. Much of the existing scholarship that deals specifically with this debate – an MA thesis by Fuchs, a short article by Weil, and a recent working paper by Poy¹³ – is still fairly descriptive in nature. In this article, we approach the topic with a more rigorous analytical framework.

Logically, one of the starting points is, indeed, to approach the issue of migration through the lens of factionalism and the perceived conflict between “class” and “ethnic” solidarity. In their rudimentary overview, Berger and Smith have suggested a link between party factionalism and the distribution of pro-immigrant and anti-immigrant positions within the Left for this period;¹⁴ and in histories with a national focus, too, hints at factional divisions over migration can be discerned.¹⁵ If we consider the parties central in our case studies: Elsner argues for the SPD that there were segments of the party that took in a position on immigration “which was essentially in accord with proletarian internationalism”, while he denotes a socialist nativist position “supported by opportunists and revisionists”.¹⁶ For the SPA, Leinenweber stresses how on immigration, “[t]he lines of division followed the left-right split of the Party”, with on the right-wing those “on the whole friendly or at least neutral” towards the reformist labour union American Federation of Labor (AFL). Meanwhile, the left wing of the party consisted of people sympathetic towards the radical and internationalist unionism of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).¹⁷

In more recent scholarship, the notion that the internationalism and nationalism propagated by members of the Second International necessarily stood in binary opposition has been challenged.¹⁸ Callahan developed the concept of “inter-nationalism” to denote how, for some on the Left, the “unit of the nation” constituted “the rudimentary category of identification within the context of internationalism”. In this sense, the nation was seen as the building block for any internationalist ideology or identity.¹⁹ Schickl elaborates on these findings when describing the Second International's dealings with “national questions” as a process in which the “particularistic” interests of national socialist movements were balanced out against the “universalistic” interests of internationalist socialism. Nationalistic, “particularistic” desires, such as national armament, nations’ right to self-determination, or colonialization schemes were deemed viable only if they served – or were framed to serve – internationalistic, “universalistic” purposes, such as world peace, anti-imperialism, or the socialist mission civilisatrice.²⁰

Schickl further shows how cultural and ethnic groups’ right to defend “particularistic” interests within the Second International depended on the place these groups took in a perceived cultural hierarchy of “civilized” and “uncivilized” peoples of the world. Socialists within the Second International could, for instance, reject the imperialistic domination over certain nations in the European “metropole” or the “semi-periphery” of Europe, while supporting colonization schemes in the “periphery” based on peoples’ cultural inferiority.²¹ This reasoning also influenced the way in which the Second International dealt with the issue of immigration. In what (to my knowledge) is one the most thorough analyses of the Second International's migration debate, Schickl demonstrates that migration “from the metropole to the periphery” was often legitimized based on the perceived cultural superiority of the migrants in question, while migration “in the opposite direction” was delegitimized by members of the socialist community based on migrants’ cultural and racial inferiority.²²

Schickl deals primarily with the “discursive practices” of the Second International, and he is less concerned with the question of why socialists engaged in these practices in the first place. By studying the Second International's migration debate at the level of ideology, we hope to gain more insights into this. What is clear is that migration was not simply, or at least not merely, a “national question”. Due to the overemphasis on the classical dyad of “internationalism versus nationalism” when studying the Second International, scholars have long been insensitive to other modes of thought and ideologies that do not fit well with these more familiar concepts. We should be aware that the Second International did not operate in isolation, however, and “was not above the racial and cultural stereotypes and practices” of its time, to cite Callahan.²³ Studying additional ideological affinities is essential for fully grasping the way in which socialists dealt with immigration in the period under consideration here.

The historiography of the labour in the “New World” is more advanced in this sense. Scholars such as FitzGerald and Cook-Martín, Zolberg, and Pittenger have noted the influence of racist ideology on left-wing parties and unions, leaving some of them to speak of “white labourism” and “white internationalism” for the period discussed here.²⁴ In combination with eugenicist thought – of which immigration restrictions were the most “significant and consistent policy and legal application”²⁵ – this led to dominant strands of left-wing anti-Asian nativism from the 1850s onwards. There is literature on the European Left, too, linking left-wing nativism to eugenics, especially for the British and Scandinavian contexts. Lucassen, Blomqvist, and Carlson show how “communitarian-organic” types of socialism (to use Lucassen's definition) coupled with a belief in eugenics, influenced how the Left approached and distinguished between immigrants.²⁶ A final body of literature worth mentioning here links left-wing nativism to antisemitism, for instance in France.²⁷

Essential to bear in mind when “freeing” the Second International from isolation is that its existence roughly coincided with a formative phase in the history of the modern international migration system still in place today. At the time, migration policies were becoming “the quintessential expression of the masculine sovereignty” of self-governing nations, as Lake and Reynolds put it.²⁸ Moreover, as McKeown argues, this went hand in hand with the globalization of border practices, in which institutions, techniques, and criteria used to control immigration diffused and were standardized all over the world.²⁹ It was the migration of Asian “coolies” that first started debates on migration restrictions in the “New World” in the second half of the nineteenth century. There, members of the white settler population argued they were justified in protecting their “white men's countries” against non-whites and “coolies” in particular. It led to concrete regulations and laws to exclude certain Asian peoples from their territories.³⁰

European nations often obtained “racial knowledge” and “technologies” through exchanges with settler states, and political elites appropriated this knowledge to serve their own agenda – for instance, to justify colonial enterprises and to battle rising powers in the East.³¹ Meanwhile, the notion of the “yellow peril” – the term coined by the German state to denote the existential dangers East Asians posed to Western civilization – fundamentally changed thinking on migration in the “New” and “Old World” alike. It provided an additional rationale for migration controls, which, according to McKeown, were initially developed to exclude “coolies”, but eventually formed the blueprint for all forms of regulating mobility internationally. Being “free” and “civilized” came to be guiding principles, on the basis of which migrants could or could not be excluded from nations’ territories. Around the turn of the century, the realization that these principles did not apply to Asian migrants alone created a tendency “to replace the vocabulary of race and distinction with legal phraseology that was self-consciously race neutral and ostensibly universal in its application”.³² We study the Second International's migration debate against the backdrop of these broader developments.

Below, we will answer the following research question: Why did internationalism – at least for important sections of the international socialist community – not prevail when the issue of labour migration was debated on the platforms of the Second International, resulting in an embrace of protectionist and xenophobic nativist discourses and support for exclusionary policies? Migration was discussed at the ISB in 1903 and at the congress of the Second International in Amsterdam in 1904. At the congress in Stuttgart (1907), the debate was longer and more controversial. The first half of this article deals with the migration debate as it took place on the international platforms of the Second International. We will focus on the internationalist position and the question of why a majority of the Second International supported free movement in more depth. The second half deals with the SPD and the SPA, as we explain why these parties rallied for restrictions. The source material for all sections consists of the records of the meetings and publications of the Second International, material from several labour unions, and publications in the socialist press.

Debating Immigration in the Second International (1903–1907)

In July 1903, several leaders of parties affiliated to the Second International gathered for an annual meeting at the ISB in Brussels. This meeting marks the beginning of what we have dubbed the Second International's migration debate, which ended with the adoption of the Stuttgart resolution in 1907.³³ During the gathering – and after discussing numerous other affairs – the issue of migration was brought up by the delegation of the Parti Ouvrier Belge (POB). It did so in response to a proposal issued in the French parliament by the socialist Jules Coutant to limit the presence of foreign labour to ten per cent of the total workforce in France. This worried Emile Vandervelde of the POB, who was convinced that this plan was directed mainly at Belgian workers. Though Belgium was a “low wage country”, he stated, and Belgian workers sometimes caused “disastrous competition” for French labourers, socialists were never to approve of such restrictive measures. They “constitute the worst form of protectionism” and tend to “develop between workers belonging to different nations antagonisms which have already led to bloody conflicts”.³⁴

After Vandervelde stated his case, a discussion commenced during which the two major fault lines were displayed, which would also come to define the debates in Amsterdam and Stuttgart. The first was the question of whether restrictions on immigration could be considered at all. Though he did question the plans of his compatriot, the French representative Édouard Vaillant defended Coutant (who was not attending) by insisting that his proposition was a means to counteract the “flood of nationalist proposals” issued in parliament, which, when effectuated, would impose far more extreme limitations on foreign labour.³⁵ In more principled wordings, German delegate Richard Fischer stated that “it is impossible to say principally that the path of legislation cannot be followed for actions against the employment of foreign labourers”. Support for Fischer came from Henry Hyndman of the British Labour Party and Dutch representatives Henri van Kol and Pieter Jelles Troelstra of the Sociaal-Democratische Arbeiderspartij (SDAP).³⁶

Nonetheless, most of the socialist leaders present sided with Vandervelde and proposed a resolution in which it was stated that socialist parties were to condemn measures legally restricting immigration from “neighbouring countries”.³⁷ These last words are of grave importance, however, and bring us to the second line of contention displayed at the ISB, which arose from the question of whether immigrants could be treated differently based on their racial or cultural background. As Hyndman reminded his colleagues during the debate, the issue of migration was “much broader” than the case brought up by Vandervelde suggested: “the introduction of Asian labour into Europe and America raises an economic problem of extreme gravity”.³⁸ While the issue of Belgian labourers in France concerned “countries with roughly the same degree of civilization”, the socialists gathered clearly had more difficulties formulating a conclusive stance on immigrants with a “lower culture”. After acknowledging that it was indeed a difficult issue, it was decided to reserve this question for the next international socialist congress. At Vaillant's request, it was made clear that the resolution which rejected restrictive measures – at least for now – applied to countries “with the same culture” only (hence: “neighbouring” countries).³⁹

By the time the meeting at the ISB was held, the issue of migration had already been put on the agenda of the Amsterdam international socialist congress in August 1904 at the request of the Argentine Socialist Party (ASP). The ASP was worried about “artificial” immigration from Europe generated by the Argentinian and European capitalist classes, which endangered the position of the working class at the receiving end. The ASP presented a report on these issues, which was reprinted and translated in the international socialist press.⁴⁰ The report, which was meant to serve as the basis for the discussions in Amsterdam, called for propaganda “aimed at limiting emigration artificially fomented […] for the benefit of the capitalist class”.⁴¹

Eventually, the issue of migration was discussed only very briefly in Amsterdam. The debate had only just started when it was postponed for another three years at the request of the Scottish socialist James Keir Hardie, who was convinced more preparation was needed. It is worthwhile, however, to consider the two resolutions that had already been presented to the congress. The first was based on the ASP's report. While acknowledging the potential dangers of uncontrolled mass migration, the resolution – in internationalist spirit – rejected “every legal measure” that “excludes” foreign workers from “countries of immigration”. It called for the equal treatment and unionization of foreign workers, and for propaganda to ensure migrants were not lured into migration on false premises.⁴² The resolution of the American, Australian, and Dutch delegations explicitly rejected “every legal measure” to hinder free migration, too. The devil was in the detail, however, as it stated that other provisions could apply to “workingmen of backward races (Chinese, negroes, etc.)” who were “often imported by capitalists in order to keep down the native workingmen”.⁴³

At the congress of the Second International in 1907, the socialist community resumed its debate on migration, and the issue aroused much more attention than it had done three years before. Already in advance of the congress, various articles had been published in the international socialist press, and the ISB received draft resolutions from Austrian, Dutch, French, and American delegations, and from the Jewish Bund.⁴⁴ It was Morris Hillquit's proposition – which had been translated and published in Die Neue Zeit – around which most of the discussions evolved.⁴⁵ The leader of the SPA demanded the “exclusion of workingmen of such races and nations as have as yet not been drawn into the sphere of modern production, and who are incapable of assimilation with the workingmen of the country of their adoption, and of joining the organizations and struggles of their class”. This was “a direct expression of the natural instinct of self-preservation”, the American claimed.⁴⁶

During the debate, Hillquit received support from colleagues from other settler states, who – like Hillquit – framed non-white immigrants as if they were a menace to the working class, arguing they debased wages, broke strikes, and thwarted the overall progress of the labour movement. As South African delegate Mark Lucas stated: “[w]e are no enemies of the Chinese as a race, but as strikebreakers”. He added that his party took “the standpoint of international socialism” where it concerned migration of “workers capable of organization”.⁴⁷ Australian delegate Victor Kroemer argued that “white immigrant workers organize themselves in a short period of time, and do not reduce the standard of living of the Australians”. His party wished to exclude “those workers, of whom it is not expected that they take on the living standard of the whites”.⁴⁸ Hillquit made clear that these were “the Chinese and Japanese, and the yellow race in general”. We do not have a “race prejudice”, he claimed, “yet we must ascertain that they are completely unorganizable”.⁴⁹

Hillquit, Lucas, and Kroemer took in a true minority position in Stuttgart, and even Dutch representative Willem Vliegen – whose party had sided with Hillquit in Amsterdam – rejected their overt racism. A section of the SPD sided with the “New World” nativists. Speaking on behalf of his delegation, Fritz Paeplow stated that German socialism, too, was “confronted with the danger of coolie immigration”, which had started in maritime transport, and which he believed would continue in mining and agriculture.⁵⁰ By implication, Paeplow's position was more radical than that of Hillquit, Lucas, and Kroemer, as his stance was not limited to “coolie” immigration alone. In Amsterdam, in 1904, he had already expounded that Marx never “expected [us] to let underdeveloped workers immigrate, regardless of the circumstances in their own country, to the extent that, for instance, the German construction workers should be allowed to have their own situation deteriorate significantly by the unrestricted immigration of Italian workers”.⁵¹ In Stuttgart, he added: “it is inconceivable, that in countries with a highly developed labour movement, the achievements of decades of political and union organization are undone in one blow due to the mass immigration of totally needless workers”. For Paeplow, this was not merely a problem of “coolie” migration: the “mass influx of Italian and Slavic workers” caused similar problems.⁵²

Internationalism: The Stuttgart Resolution

Before considering the “nativists” of the Second International's migration debate in more detail by concentrating on our case studies of the SPD and the SPA, it is worthwhile considering the internationalist stance of the majority. The internationalists did not fight the nativists’ claims that migration could cause hardships to people in receiving societies, especially when wage dumping and strikebreaking occurred. They did, however, reject immigration restrictions, and especially migration restrictions for certain nationalities and races – these were deemed both “fruitless” and “reactionary”.⁵³ Again, it is worthwhile reflecting on the two questions that were central during the Second International's migration debate: whether restrictions on immigration could be considered at all, and whether immigrants could be treated differently based on their racial or cultural background.

The key to understanding the internationalist position on immigration lies in the very origins of the international socialist project (and the Marxist project in particular) and its ambiguous relation with the increasingly global character of the capitalist mode of production in the nineteenth century. As nations were drawn under the influence of capitalism, the dawn of the new age of capitalist internationalism was looming, along the lines predicted by economists such as Adam Smith.⁵⁴ Whereas for liberals, this capitalist epoch was an end stage, socialists regarded it a necessary phase before the internationalist socialist revolution could take place. As such – and despite the hardships it caused for workers – socialists in the Marxist tradition acknowledged the “progressive forces” of capitalism. The internationalization of the world economy and the creation of an international proletariat were regarded as being of central importance for bringing about the socialist revolution, which was going to be a distinctively international event.⁵⁵ Palen shows how Marxists came to reject protectionism and protectionist measures in the second half of the nineteenth century, as these were “regressive and belonged to the pre- and proto-capitalist era”. Protective tariffs would not help the working class as a whole and only reinforce national orientations.⁵⁶ Considering this, it is not surprising that socialists deemed restrictions on immigration “fruitless and reactionary”, since these were essentially protectionist.

The socialists’ support for “free movement” was limited to migration that was considered “free”, however (as opposed to “unfree”, “unnatural”, or “artificial” migration). The question of what constituted a “free migrant” led to some revealing semantic discussions during the migration debate of the Second International. According to the Amsterdam majority resolution, for instance, a free migrant was “a victim of capitalist domination, who leaves his fatherland to arduously live his life or to secure his freedom”.⁵⁷ More often, the “free migrant” was defined negatively against its “unfree” antipole. The fact that indentured labourers formed an undesirable category remained uncontested, yet sometimes greater denominators were applied. In Amsterdam, the majority stated that unfree labour migrants were those “docile and willing elements, […] lured by immoral capitalists” to undercut native workers, break strikes, and generate conflict between workers. As such, thinking in terms of “unfree” migration allowed for the delegitimization of more immigrants than indentured labourers alone.⁵⁸

The undesirability of “unfree” migration remained largely uncontested during the Second International's migration debate. What generated most internationalist opposition to the nativists was that the latter distinguished between immigrants based on their race and nationality – immigrants of “backward races” were framed as if they were “unfree” and “unorganizable” per definition. In Stuttgart, Julius Hammer of the Socialist Labour Party of the United States of America replied to his rivals at the SPA that “the workingmen of whatever color, creed, or nationality, [after] the moment he steps into the capitalist establishment is a proletarian with the identity of wage-slavery”. Immigration restrictions were “in the interest of the capitalist policy to divide and keep divided the working class as much as possible”.⁵⁹ He argued that “[t]he Japanese and Chinese could be organized very well”.⁶⁰ The Hungarian Josef Diner-Dénes claimed that “[t]hose countries that are today still unorganizable, will not be [unorganizable] tomorrow”.⁶¹ A similar argument was made by Adéodat Compère-Morel of the Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), who stated that “the Chinese and Japanese should be drawn to socialism by means of education and […] organisation”.⁶²

Japanese delegate Kato – as the only representative from Southeastern Asia in Stuttgart – stated that “the Americans have expelled us from California”, based on two arguments: “first, that the Japanese worker would debase the wage and living standards of the native, [and] second, that they deprived them of their employment opportunities”. Kato argued, however, that “not only the Japanese, but also the Italians, Slovaks, Jews, etc. do this”, and for this reason it seemed to him “that the race question plays a role here, [and] that the Americans are guided by the so-called yellow peril”. He finished his statement by arguing that “the founders of socialism, [and] Karl Marx in particular, have not addressed some [countries], but all countries”, after which he received vivid applause from many of his socialist colleagues.⁶³

The fact that many socialists argued against racist restrictions did not imply that their worldview was not racist, or should not, by today's standards, be qualified as such. As the likes of Said, Achcar, and Satgar have concluded, orthodox Marxist thought was, in many ways, deeply influenced by the Eurocentric and Orientalist thinking of the nineteenth century.⁶⁴ Certainly, Marx and Engels rejected the Hegelian idealist perspective on the orient as if it was “essentially” different from the occident, yet there was a distinct “epistemic Eurocentrism” in how they and later Marxists understood the world.⁶⁵ Again, this can best be explained with a reference to the “progressive forces” ascribed to capitalism, for it was believed that the world would – under the influence of capitalism – follow the same “civilizing path” as Europe. However, understanding the world as if all its peoples and nations were on their way to become “civilized” also provided the rationale for hierarchical thinking based on the “progress” peoples and nations had (or had not) already made.⁶⁶

It was the proletariat's “unequal development” that led socialists to believe that migration could, indeed, have (potentially) harmful effects. Or, as Karl Kautsky concluded in his renowned book The Class Struggle: the “modern proletarian is torn loose from the soil”, and “[n]o doubt this world-citizenship is a great hardship for workers in countries where the standard of living is high and the conditions of labor are comparatively good”. In such countries, “immigration will exceed emigration”, and “as a result the laborers with the higher standard of living will be hindered in the class-struggle by the influx of those with a lower standard and less power of resistance”. He continued that “[u]nder certain circumstances this sort of competition […] may lead to a new emphasis on national lines, a new hatred of foreign workers on the part of the native born”. Kautsky was optimistic, however, as this would only be a temporary phenomenon. The receiving proletarians would “come to see that there is only one effective means of removing the hindering influence of backward nations: to do away with the backwardness itself”.⁶⁷

At the time of the Second International's migration debate, one of the most eloquent formulations of this line of reasoning came from the Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer. In an article for Die Neue Zeit, published some time before the Stuttgart congress, Bauer frantically circumvented any racial categorizations when describing migration from developed “industrial” and underdeveloped “agricultural” areas of the world. As a revisionist theoretician, Bauer appreciated the nation as a cultural and psychological entity,⁶⁸ yet he rejected “bourgeois” essentialist and racialist conceptualizations of the nation. In line with this, he was convinced that immigrants could and would, over time, always integrate in their nations of arrival.⁶⁹ While stating that the “cultural distance” of immigrants could indeed ease or complicate processes of integration, Bauer argued in favour of “free movement” – both for migrants from “industrial” and from “agricultural” areas. Regarding the latter category, Bauer emphasized that this type of migration needed to be “free” (instead of artificial, unnatural, etc.), and that this was to be accomplished by “effective social-political protective measures”.⁷⁰

One could argue that Bauer got what he wanted, as the Stuttgart majority resolution reflected most of his analysis and propositions.⁷¹ The resolution acknowledged the “difficulties” that “confront the workingmen of a more advanced stage of capitalist development through the mass immigration of unorganized workingmen accustomed to a lower standard of life and coming from countries of prevalently agricultural and domestic civilization”.⁷² Furthermore, it was recognized that the “emigration of workingmen is often artificially stimulated by railway- and steamship companies, land-speculators and other swindling concerns through false and lying promises to workingmen”. So, while restrictions on immigration – “especially […] the restriction of the freedom of migration and the exclusion of foreign nations and races” – were deemed “fruitless and reactionary”, the congress did urge national branches to control “steamship companies and emigration bureaus” by imposing “legal and administrative measures against them in order to prevent emigration be abused in the interests of such capitalist concerns”.⁷³

In accordance with McKeown's interpretation,⁷⁴ the internationalist majority of the Second International embraced the “universal language” of “free” and “unfree” migration, even in combination with measures to curb immigration of the latter category. While the socialist community argued in favour of “free movement” and revolted against measures that would restrict this, there was a certain idea of what a “free” migrant looked like, and this idea was also used to delegitimize “unfree” immigration. And though the extent to which migrants were “civilized” was officially rejected as a principle to impose immigration restrictions, there was a distinct “epistemic Eurocentrism” to the way in which the socialist community understood international migration altogether.

Even from our reflection on the internationalist stance, the image of a desirable immigrant arises who is both “free” and “civilized”. We will now shift our attention to the nativists of the Second International, who, we argue, shared much of the epistemology of their internationalist colleagues, yet with several fundamental differences that led them to draw different conclusions on the issue of migration, especially in relation to migrants who did not live up to the standards of their “free” and “civilized” desirable counterparts. We distinguish between two strands of socialist nativism: protectionist nativism and xenophobic nativism. In the following sections, we will demonstrate how arguments akin to both strands induced the German SPD and the American SPA to take a stance against free migration at the international platform of the Second International.

SPD: The Exclusionist Temptation

We should start by acknowledging that the position taken by the SPD on the international platforms of the Second International did not represent the position of the whole party. In fact, the leadership of the SPD supported the Stuttgart majority resolution. For technical reasons, Karl Kautsky did not agree with the clause stating that countries should strive to introduce a minimum wage, but he did qualify the resolution as otherwise “excellent”.⁷⁵ At the SPD's national convention in Essen one month after the Stuttgart congress the party's chairmen – Paul Singer and August Bebel – endorsed the resolution too.⁷⁶ Clara Zetkin – though operating on the SPD's left wing – concluded optimistically that by adopting the resolution the congress had upheld its internationalist principles.⁷⁷

Why, then, did the German delegation at the Second International's immigration debate – comprising Fritz Paeplow, Heinrich Hansmann, Paul Müller, and Max Schippel – side with the “New World” nativists? A first explanation lies in the fact that, in their daily life and occupation, the SPD's representatives operated in close proximity to the social democratic Freie Gewerkschaften, or Free Trade Unions (FTU). Furthermore, as labour leaders, these men – though not Schippel necessarily – interacted with grassroots in German regions and sectors with a marked immigrant presence.

In construction work – where Fritz Paeplow's Deutschen Bauarbeiterverband was active – foreigners made up between 7.9 per cent and 10.7 per cent of the total workforce, and almost half of them were Italian.⁷⁸ Perceived mainly as a socioeconomic threat, the Bauarbeiterverband considered the Italians “a plague on the workers of other countries”, as it was stated in the union's periodical Der Grundstein. The three foremost problems with Italians – as they were listed in the journal – were that they accepted lower wages, that they put up with more exploitation, and that they lacked true feelings of solidarity. The union called for the right of German labourers to defend themselves against the competition of the “unorganizable” Italians.⁷⁹

Another sector of the German economy that relied heavily on immigrants was mining. At the time, Poles (and Masurians) made up twenty per cent of the workforce in the mining districts of North-Rhein Westphalia. Formally, these miners were internal migrants who were recruited in the Polish regions of the German Reich.⁸⁰ From the 1870s onwards, their employment in the Ruhr instigated fears of “Polonization”, including anxieties of moral danger, racial mixing, and cultural debasement.⁸¹ None of the (social democratic or Christian) German unions “exerted great efforts to recruit Polish members”, as Murphy states it, and they were unwilling “to make concessions to Polish ethnicity”.⁸² Though the Alter Verband – in which the SPD's Hansmann was a leading figure – was relatively friendly to the immigrant population, it supported anti-Polish legislation in 1899 and refused to back the Polish revolt in Herne in that same year. To avoid suspicion of support for this uprising, the union wrote that the Poles, since they were of an “intellectual lower” stock, were naturally “prone to violence” and “unorganizable”.⁸³ Such acts and expressions of xenophobia were a catalyst for the formation of the Polish radical union Zjednoczenie Zawodowe Polskie (ZZP).⁸⁴

What is striking is, how, in reaction to the Stuttgart congress, the journal of the Alter Verband urged its readership to consider the potential dangers of the “importation of workers from Asia and Africa” to the mines.⁸⁵ Since the late 1890s, the employment of “coolies” had been openly discussed in Germany. Inspired by “Yellow Peril” ideology, opponents of “coolie” migration emphasized the cultural and racial incompatibility of these workers and their threat to the national body.⁸⁶ The SPD, too, opposed “coolie labour” in this period. In a speech before the Reichstag in 1898, Bebel warned about the “storm of indignation that would erupt throughout the German working class” if the state supported the import of Chinese labour. He argued that the “undemanding, industrious, modest Chinese” were a tool of the capitalist class, and that they would not abandon their undemanding lifestyle even if they lived “in the environment of a higher culture” for many years.⁸⁷

Schemes to import Chinese or other Asians to work on German soil never materialized in the period under discussion. The situation was different in navigation. There, shipping companies hired Chinese crews from the 1890s onwards.⁸⁸ On the Left, the strongest opposition to the employment of “coolies” on German ships was voiced by Paul Müller's Seemanns-Verband für Deutschland. The union deployed racist language to describe the “coloured” on German ships,⁸⁹ and in 1907 – two months after the congress in Stuttgart – the union demanded the German government allow the employment of “Chinese, Malayan, Lascars, and negroes” only if they knew the German language and were equated with German sailors in wages and legal rights.⁹⁰ As summarized in its periodical, the union opposed the employment of “coolies” on German ships not only for economic reasons.⁹¹ Particularly striking is the address by Paul Müller in 1908 on the “national lie in the Reichstag or the coloured coolie as an undercutter and rival to the German seamen”.⁹² In a perfect example of the “ethnicization of the national”, to use Conrad's concept,⁹³ Müller called on workers, but also bourgeois parties in shipping, and, finally, the German people as a whole to recognize the threat posed by “coolies” – to workers in maritime transport, and to the German national body in general.⁹⁴ In the Second International, representatives of the SPD used mainly protectionist rhetoric to defend their anti-immigration stance. However, as the sources above demonstrate, protectionist and xenophobic arguments were often mixed together, especially when “coolie migration” was debated.

Despite the alarming statements of some of their (major) unions, the FTU – as an umbrella organization – took a more nuanced stance. In advance of the Stuttgart congress, the general commission of the FTU emphasized how, for the German context, exclusionary measures based on race or nationality were not yet necessary as the “occasional arrival of immigrants of alien races” was not regarded as a threat to “public order” or “cultural achievement” in Germany. Consequently, imposing limits on “free immigration” to Germany was not relevant, especially not based on the “race” or “language” of immigrants. The FTU did emphasize the problems that existed in the settler states, and they did not “deny other countries, in which the mass immigration of backward races overtly leads to problems, the right to take measures”. After all, German socialists could not “know which path we would take if hundreds of thousands of coolies or negroes were imported”.⁹⁵

In line with what was expressed by the SPD's delegations in 1903, 1904, and 1907, exclusionist measures were not out of question for the German social democratic unions – in fact, according to some labour leaders, these were a bare necessity in Germany, too. Now, as Fletcher, Pierson, and Van Ree show, support for economic protectionism was fairly common in pre-war German social democracy, especially in sections of its revisionist right wing.⁹⁶ Particularly the revisionist branch associated with Joseph Bloch and his journal the Sozialistische Monatshefte was marked by anti-liberal discourse and support for protectionist measures.⁹⁷ This wing of the SPD built on the tradition of German “state socialism”, of which Ferdinand Lassalle, Eugen Dühring, and Georg von Vollmar had been the main proponents. In contrast to Marx and Engels's expectation of an international proletarian revolution that would overthrow capitalism, state socialists presumed that “socialism could initially be constructed in a single country”, as Van Ree writes. Due to the “socialist economic system”, this socialist state – preferably Germany – would come to dominate the world market, and as such “out-compete its capitalist rivals”.⁹⁸

After the turn of the century, the “confidence in the ability of the national state to dominate the world market” waned, and the emphasis – such as expressed in the Sozialistische Monatshefte – shifted to “insulating the state from the world market in an enlarged colonial sphere with autarkic ambitions”.⁹⁹ Protectionist measures were no longer deemed redundant. Besides editor Joseph Bloch himself, Max Schippel was one of the frequent contributors to the Sozialistische Monatshefte challenging the “dogmatic opposition of the Social Democrats to any form of protectionism”.¹⁰⁰ This brought him into fierce conflict with Kautsky and Bebel, and eventually cost him his seat in the Reichstag. What defined his public stance was not necessarily his fondness for protectionism, but a willingness to break with free trade orthodoxy. For Schippel, choosing between protectionism and free trade was “a practical question”, to be “decided in each individual case”.¹⁰¹

The issue of migration was approached by Schippel in a similar vein. In advance of the Stuttgart congress, Schippel – who was trained as a social scientist – produced a study on “the foreign worker and the legislation of various countries”.¹⁰² In this study, which was published as an appendix to Die Neue Zeit, Schippel explicitly refrained from giving his own opinions,¹⁰³ yet he reflected more polemically on the issue of migration in the Sozialistische Monatshefte. Schippel was convinced that general rules on immigration were useless, due to the great discrepancies between nations’ experiences with immigration. He defended the American socialists of the SPA, who were, or so he argued, suffering from immigration: “the current influx of people partly endangers the results and achievements of the American advancement up to now”.¹⁰⁴ Just as with free trade, Schippel was willing to reconsider the free movement orthodoxy, though he argued that for the German context restrictions were not (yet) relevant. As such, Schippel's stance was similar to the FTU's, yet we could argue that it was the other way around: the FTU explicitly based their stance on Schippel's writings, and it has even been argued that Schippel actually wrote the unions’ communique.¹⁰⁵

To conclude: the SPD officially endorsed the Stuttgart resolution, yet there were important segments on the right wing of the party that diverged from this line. This position defined the SPD's contributions to the Second International's migration debate in Brussels, Amsterdam, and Stuttgart. The SPD delegates went against the internationalist principle of “free movement” and rejected the notion that protectionist restrictions on migration were principally indefensible. As the analysis above demonstrates, protectionist arguments were often supported by xenophobic arguments to justify exclusion. While for some in the SPD, excluding “Italians” and “Slavics” surely belonged to the realm of possibilities,¹⁰⁶ the spectre of “coolie” immigration aroused opposition even among centrists such as Bebel. While other immigrants might have been “uncivilized” for the time being, “coolies” were regarded as a more “essential” threat. During the migration debate of the Second International, this was a line of reasoning also consistently defended by the SPA, the American counterpart of the SPD.

SPA: Whiteness and the Faith of Socialism

On 20 January 1908, the editor of the Sozialistische Monatshefte, Joseph Bloch, sent a letter to Morris Hillquit in which he stated that “the question of immigration and emigration has been discussed in the Socialist Party in New York in a manner opposed to the resolution of the international congress in Stuttgart”. For Bloch, this was “quite natural”, as the resolution was “too general and too schematic”, and “does not in the least fit in with the American & Australian conditions”. In his letter, Bloch asked Hillquit to write an article in which he would give “an objective account of the reasons why American socialist workers cannot [act on] purely philanthropic considerations and why it is impossible for them to follow the Stuttgart directions”.¹⁰⁷ Hillquit's reply to Bloch was salient:

While I am not in full accord with the Stuttgart resolution in that subject, I also find myself unable to side with the advocates of indiscriminate exclusion of all Asiatic labor from the United States, and since that view seems to be the one prevalent [in the American labour movement], I do not believe that I could properly present the general attitude of American labor and socialism on the subject.¹⁰⁸

This statement is clearly at odds with the position taken by Hillquit in both Amsterdam and Stuttgart. In 1910, he reflected on this turn, stating that he was “taught differently” at the Stuttgart congress: “[a]fter a full debate [and] being overruled practically by every nation in the world, [I] pledged solemnly that I would defend the international position”.¹⁰⁹

In the period under discussion here, immigration was an extremely sensitive issue for the Socialist Party of America. During the “third wave of mass immigration”, the number of people entering the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century sometimes rose to over one million a year. In the period stretching from 1901 until 1910, approximately seventy per cent of all immigrants came from Southern and Eastern Europe. As in Germany, the share of “coolie” immigrants was relatively small: in the first decade of the twentieth century, less than four per cent of all immigrants came from Asia or the Middle East.¹¹⁰ Asian immigrants had constituted only a small minority of the total influx even in the nineteenth century: in the period from 1850 until 1882, between 110,000 and 300,000 Chinese migrated to the United States.¹¹¹

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 limited Chinese immigration further, yet the idea that Asians constituted a biological, moral, and cultural threat to the American people and the American national body prevailed. Asian workers continued to fall victim to nativist and racist campaigns by journalists, writers, playwrights, politicians, and – most important here – the labour movement. Anti-Asian nativism in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America was promoted by a cross-class coalition of the economic Left and cultural Right.¹¹² And though there were economic reasons for labour organizations to oppose immigration, they “focused their rage on a particular racial group rather than all groups with which they were in economic competition”.¹¹³ The Left's opposition was, above all, motivated by evolutionary and racist thought. In the practical realm, this was wedded with eugenicist thinking and led to support for nativist measures.¹¹⁴

While earlier labour organizations had combined their official internationalism with support for the exclusion of Asian labourers, it was Samuel Gomper's (non-socialist) American Federation of Labor – which rose to prominence in the 1890s – that further widened labour's scope and came to advocate the exclusion of other migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.¹¹⁵ In contrast to immigration from Asia, Eastern and Southern European immigration was at its peak around the turn of the twentieth century.¹¹⁶ Similar to Asians before them – and despite the fact that “[n]o variety of anti-European sentiment has ever approached the violent extremes to which anti-Chinese agitation went in the 1870's and 1880's”¹¹⁷ – these immigrants became a victim of xenophobic campaigns. Again, a key role was played by the labour movement. With the “aristocracy of labour” (e.g. skilled workers) as its membership, the AFL, as the most important labour institution of the period, widened and maintained the ethnic rift on the American labour market. By organizing primarily workers born in the United States and immigrants from “old” immigration countries, the AFL neglected the unskilled segments of the labouring class, comprising African-Americans, Asian immigrants, and “new” immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe.¹¹⁸

In terms of membership, leadership, and ideology, strong links existed between the AFL and the SPA. The socialists, too, demonstrated little concern for organizing African-Americans or immigrants from Asia, or Eastern and Southern Europe,¹¹⁹ and it was particularly the right wing of the SPA that was important for representing the interests of the unions on SPA platforms and vice versa. They successfully induced the unions to endorse various social and humanitarian causes, while within the SPA the right-wing faction stood for a type of socialism to be established through piecemeal reforms and cross-class cooperation.¹²⁰ While the right wing of the party consisted of reformist socialists who were part of or sympathetic towards the AFL, the left wing consisted of radicals who came to be associated with the revolutionary syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).¹²¹ The IWW was, in many ways, set up in reaction to the AFL, as demonstrated by its stance on immigration: “[t]he A.F. of L. is fighting against Chinese, Japanese, and the Southern European races calling them ‘undesirable’ class of immigrants; and is agitating for laws to bar them from America. The I.W.W. extends a fraternal hand to every wageworker, no matter what his religion, fatherland, or trade”.¹²² In contrast to the AFL, the IWW committed itself to the organization of unskilled workers and the development of a “new” immigrant base.

Though the issue of migration had been discussed in the SPA before, the Stuttgart congress of the Second International and its migration resolution gave new impetus to the debate. Not long after the congress, right-wing leader Victor Berger expressed his discontent over the migration resolution, claiming that the “intellectuals” in the American delegation had betrayed the American proletariat by permitting “Jap” and “Chinaman” to enter the country. Socialism, he believed, required the United States to be a “white man's country”.¹²³ Some months later, the SPA's National Executive Committee adopted a resolution moved by Berger and Ernest Untermann to reject the resolution, and to preserve the racist position that had been defended by Hillquit at the congress. The National Committee endorsed this position, as far as it concerned workers “coming from Oriental countries or others backward in economic development, where the workers of such countries have shown themselves, as a body, to be unapproachable with the philosophy of Socialism”.¹²⁴

At the national congress of the SPA in 1908, a compromise resolution was proposed, which claimed that the mass importation “of foreign workers with lower standard of living […] may in some instances become as serious to the working class of the nation as an armed invasion would be to the nation itself”, and that therefore the SPA should “resolutely oppose all immigration which is subsidised or stimulated by the capitalist class, and all contract labor immigration, as well as to support all attempts of the workers to raise their standards of living”. The commission that formulated the resolution did not “feel itself competent enough” to deal with the “question of racial differences involved in the agitation for the exclusion of Asiatic immigrants”.¹²⁵ The resolution was adopted and a permanent commission to deal with the race question was voted in.

The commission consisted of Berger and Untermann, and further of right-wing centrists Joseph Wanhope, and John Spargo.¹²⁶ They presented the fruits of their labour at the SPA congress in 1910. The majority, consisting of Berger, Untermann, and Wanhope, agreed “with the conclusions of the International Congress at Stuttgart”, claiming that they were “fully justified in endorsing every demand and position […] on Immigration, with the exception of those passages which refer to specific restriction or to the exclusion of definite races of nations”. In “white internationalist” fashion, this exception would apply “to the mass immigration of Chinese, Japanese, Coreans and Hindus”. Those groups were not – according to the commission majority – excluded “as races per se”, but because “these peoples occupy definite portions of the earth in which they are so far behind […] that they constitute a drawback, an obstacle and menace to the progress of the most aggressive, militant and intelligent elements of our working-class population”.¹²⁷

As Pittenger argues, the “[s]ocialist nativism” of the SPA was much more than an expression of economic concerns over job competition or strikebreaking: “[p]arty intellectuals reframed popular evolutionary racist ideas as crucial elements of a scientific socialist world-view”.¹²⁸ As discussed in detail, the internationalists of the Second International did not reject the notion that there existed a hierarchy of “peoples” or “races”. What most of them did renounce was the view that some peoples were “backward” or “inferior” by definition. This would imply that not the degree to which people had been touched by the force of capitalism, but instead genetics defined how “civilized” they were. In the right wing and centre of the SPA, thinking that “linked cultural with biological ‘inferiority’” was very common however.¹²⁹ For this, use was made of a scientific consensus on “inferior races”, as Pittenger states it: “[m]any non-Caucasian peoples were said to have suffered evolutionary failures or setbacks which now limited their biological and social potentials”. Asians appeared “unassimilable to the evolutionary pattern that […] [socialists] believed must lead through capitalism to socialism”, and this “seamless blending of environment with heredity, of social forms with biological necessities” provided the rationale for Asian exclusion.¹³⁰

There was some opposition to the overt racism within the SPA, especially voiced by the left-wing of the party – or more precisely, the sections close to the IWW. As the only African-American representative present at the SPA's congress of 1907, George W. Woodbey stated he was “in favour of throwing the entire world open to inhabitants of the world”, while claiming that there “are no foreigners, and cannot be unless some person came down from Mars, or Jupiter, or some place”.¹³¹ The most prominent figure in the SPA rejecting nativist policies was the party's presidential candidate (and left-winger) Eugene V. Debs. He called for the “rigid adherence to the fundamental principles of the International proletarian movement”, because if “international, revolutionary Socialism, does not stand staunchly, unflinchingly, and uncompromisingly for the working class and for the exploited and oppressed masses of all lands, then it stands for none and its claim is a false pretense and its profession a delusion and a snare”.¹³²

The internationalists were in the minority within the SPA, and contrary to what was happening in Germany, there were no prominent centrists arguing for free migration. While Morris Hillquit was convinced by the Stuttgart congress that exclusion on the basis of race and nationality was un-socialist, he offered a substitute to the existing majority and minority reports at the SPA's congress of 1910, stating that the party was to favour “[a]ll legislative measures tending to prevent the immigration of strike-breakers and contract laborers, and the mass immigration of workers from foreign countries brought about by the employing classes for the purpose of weakening American labor, and of lowering the standard of life of American workers”. He came up with his own interpretation of the Second International's decisions on migration: “[t]he Stuttgart resolution does not advocate absolutely the free immigration of labor”, he stated:

It discriminates against the strike breaker, and it discriminates against mass importation of labor from any country stimulated by the capitalist class for the purpose of lowering the standard of life of the native labourer. I say to you now that I do not know whether this Asiatic immigration is free or imported. […] [I]f it is [artificial], then we may in full accord with the spirit and letter of the Stuttgart resolution countenance their exclusion, not because they are Chinese, not because they are Japanese, but because they are being imported by the capitalist class […].¹³³

Nowhere in the Stuttgart resolution was it suggested that excluding workers who had been “stimulated” to migrate by the capitalist was permitted.¹³⁴ Hillquit had promised his international colleagues to “loyally follow” the guidelines issued by the Stuttgart congress,¹³⁵ yet his main takeaway clearly had been the rejection of ethnonationalism and racism. His substitute report denounced the principle of ethnic and racial exclusion, yet legitimized exclusion on ostensibly “universal” grounds.

Many of the socialists present realized that Hillquit's resolution was, in fact, more extreme than many of the propositions, since it concerned not only “coolie labour” but in theory now also European workers. Hillquit was criticized for simply putting forward the position of the AFL.¹³⁶ It was stressed time and again during the congresses of the SPA that, in contrast to Asian immigrants, Eastern and Southern Europeans – though still “backward” when they arrived in the United States, and as such also causing problems – could be assimilated into the socialist movement fairly easily for they were of the “same race”.¹³⁷ Despite this, Victor Berger did not refrain from labelling “Slavonians, Italians, Greeks, Russians, and Armenians” as “modern white coolies”.¹³⁸ John Spargo – who sat in the immigration commission of the SPA in 1910 – once wrote to Karl Kautsky that “the real menace to our standards of living is not the Jap but the Slav, the Greek and the Sicillian [sic]”.¹³⁹ After 1910, the SPA no longer principally opposed their exclusion as well.

Conclusion

In the introduction to this article, we stated the following research question: Why did internationalism – at least for important sections of the international socialist community – not prevail when the issue of labour migration was debated on the platforms of the Second International, resulting in an embrace of protectionist and xenophobic nativist discourses and support for exclusionary policies? To answer this question, it is worthwhile reflecting on the two major questions that caused internal divisions when the issue of labour migration was debated between 1903 and 1907. The first was the question of whether restrictions on immigration could be considered at all. In Stuttgart, the majority of the congress committed itself to “free movement” and rejected restrictions on labour migration, or at least restrictions on migration considered “free”. We discussed this internationalist position with reference to the orthodox Marxist adherence to free movement and the notion that migration restrictions, as a form of protectionism, would only reinforce national orientations and not help the working class as a whole.

Voices were raised questioning the tenability of this position – at the congresses most notably by parties from the settler states and the SPD, yet on the more private platform of the ISB also by French, British, and Dutch sections of the Second International. For some, upholding the internationalist stance on immigration clearly proved difficult, especially when the immigrants in question were considered “undeveloped” or “uncivilized”. This brings us to the second question that caused debate in the Second International: could immigrants be treated differently based on their racial or cultural background? Again, the Stuttgart majority took an internationalist position and emphasized explicitly that restrictions based on immigrants’ race or nationality were out of the question. Though thinking in terms of “civilized” and “uncivilized” peoples was part of the worldview of internationalists and nativists alike, the former maintained that how “civilized” people were was primarily defined by the degree to which they had been influenced by capitalism.

Two types of arguments were raised against the internationalist position on migration, and these can help us explain why sections of the Left embraced nativist discourses and supported exclusions. From a protectionist perspective, certain groups of immigrants – whether the expectation was that they could easily be turned into “civilized” proletarians eventually or not at all – were a risk to the socioeconomic position of the native workforce, especially because they were believed to break strikes and dump wages. In welfare-chauvinist fashion, such sentiments were reinforced by the notion that immigrants threatened the very progress and achievements of the national labour movement itself. Based on these arguments, some on the Left jumped to the conclusion that migration controls were needed and that these were consistent with their socialist beliefs.¹⁴⁰

The second nativist perspective central in this article was labelled xenophobic, and in the period under consideration it had clear culturalist and racist (white supremacist) traits. Migrants that did not originate from the “highly developed” economies of Western Europe or the settler states were all too easily labelled “less civilized”, which, in turn, implied that their immigration was likely to cause hardships to native workers with a higher standard of living. As a result, protectionist and xenophobic arguments went hand in hand, as perceptions of immigrants’ socioeconomic threat were to a considerable degree determined by culturalist and racist considerations. Especially immigrants of non-wite races – most notably Asians, generally referred to as “coolies” – were targeted by nativists, as it was believed they were genetically unfit to become “civilized” altogether and as such would continue to undermine the socialist cause.

In the introduction, we discussed three sets of literature on which we are building and to which we seek to contribute with this article. The first was the “classic” literature of the Second International (with notable authors such as Cole, Haupt, Braunthal, and Joll), which dealt primarily with the dichotomy of “nationalist” and “internationalist” ideologies and identities. Was immigration indeed a “national question”, and should we thus understand the Second International's migration debate as part of the broader “discussions about class versus ethnic solidarity”, to cite Lucassen and Lucassen?¹⁴¹ The fact is that the internationalist majority of the Second International did appeal to international class solidarity when defending their position. The fact is also that, within both the SPD and SPA, a clear link can be established between nativist, xenophobic, and racist attitudes, and those sections of the party questioning radical class-based politics.¹⁴²

By further engaging with the literature that centres on the influence of racist, culturalist, and eugenicist thought on the Left, we tried to move beyond the classic dyad of “nationalism” versus “internationalism”.¹⁴³ In our case study of the SPA, we discussed the influence of scientific racism, which prompted some to believe that people of non-white races could never be true proletarians. We also touched upon the influence of “Yellow Peril” ideology, which caused specifically Asian immigration to be problematized, as it was believed it posed an essential threat to Western civilization. This type of racist nativism was not limited to parties from the settler states – it was voiced by sections of European socialist parties too. It is further important to emphasize the existence of non-racist forms of xenophobic nativism. Opposition to Southern and Eastern European immigration within both the SPD and the SPA was motivated not only by protectionist but also by culturalist, xenophobic arguments. Finally, we should note instances of the “ethnicization” and “racialization of the national” that we came across in this article, in which racism and culturalism were brought into a synthesis with nationalism. Figures such as Berger (SPA) and Müller (SPD) connected the faith of the socialist nation to cultural and racial homogeneity.

Considering that both the internationalists and nativists of the Second International adhered to the notion of a cultural hierarchy of peoples, ideational schemes, such as those described above were necessary to induce some socialists to support exclusions. Schickl, who discussed in detail the “hierarchy” of peoples based on cultural development, remains largely insensitive to these additional xenophobic ideological affinities, which determined what consequences socialists connected to their worldview.¹⁴⁴

A similar argument can be made with respect to protectionist nativism. In the period under discussion, working-class resistance to immigration was increasingly emerging from the grassroots level, especially in regions with a great immigrant presence. Arguably, there were “(understandable) economic grievances” related to migration, and some of the criticism by the labour movement can thus be said to be “understandable”.¹⁴⁵ As a result, the internationalist position was increasingly difficult to maintain for labour leaders, yet the way left-wing figures actually reacted to the concerns of their constituents can be understood only by studying their response at the level of ideology. Supporters of free movement did not deny that immigration could cause hardships to people in the receiving countries, yet they – as opposed to socialists who imagined a less important historical role for the international working class – were unwilling to give up their free movement orthodoxy.

To others, the material interests of native workers took precedence over the interests of the working class as a whole. We found little to no proof of an “inter-nationalist”¹⁴⁶ reasoning behind migration controls (e.g. the suggestion that national restrictions on migration would help foster international socialism), and, in fact, many of the nativists studied in this article jumped to their conclusions in a rather opportunistic fashion, especially when “uncivilized” or non-white immigrants were being discussed.

A final literature central in this article deals with the history of the modern international migration system taking shape at the time. As the works of McKeown and Lake and Reynolds show, this was a transnational history, marked by the circulation of ideas and knowledge. In the period 1903 to 1907, the Second International formed the main platform on which socialists from the “Old” and “New World” engaged in such exchanges. We noticed how the nativists within the SPD looked at their American colleagues to define their own stance. Meanwhile, the Stuttgart resolution took a central place in the debates on immigration in the SPA. The party continued to endorse restrictions, yet no longer on explicitly racist grounds. This process of the “universalization” of exclusions – as McKeown describes it – is a clear example of how “the vocabulary of race and distinction” was replaced by a language “ostensibly universal in its application” that could be applied to include more groups than Asians alone.¹⁴⁷

Dynamics such as these shed an interesting light on the contemporary significance of the Second International. The “cultural turn” in studies on the Second International has led some scholars to appreciate the organization as mainly a cultural institution. From this perspective, the Second International's congresses and debates were primarily performative in character.¹⁴⁸ In this article, we demonstrate that the Second International provided a discursive arena in which not only hardened internationalists, yet also more nationally oriented socialists exchanged ideas, and where socialistic ideologies could effectively collide. As such, the Second International had an impact that extended beyond the purely performative realm. The resolution adopted in Stuttgart did, however, conceal the profound tensions simmering under the internationalist surface on the issue of immigration.

This should be taken into account when trying to understand how the Second International's migration debate connects both backward and forward in time. In our sections on the United States, we noted the existence of left-wing nativism in the decades before the period central here, and in the European context, too, there were instances of left-wing nativism in the second half of the nineteenth century.¹⁴⁹ Despite the commitment of the international socialist community to “free movement” at Stuttgart, left-wing nativism has continued to resurface time and again ever since the Second International's migration debate. In the interwar period, the view that protectionist measures against immigration were sometimes both needed and justified to protect the native workforce was no longer a taboo for the European social democratic mainstream.¹⁵⁰ After 1945, social democratic parties were a main driving force behind the principle of “free movement” within the European Economic Community (EEC), yet immigration from outside the EEC remained more controversial.¹⁵¹ It has been argued that it was only in the 1980s that, under the influence of neo-liberalism, “open borders” became a truly left-wing position once again.¹⁵²

Left-wing forms of xenophobic nativism – based either on racist or culturalist grounds – have been a recurrent phenomenon in the past century too. In several countries, the mid-century “communitarian turn” of social democracy was paired with the belief that national societies needed to be ethnically homogenous.¹⁵³ And while after the cultural revolution of the 1960s mainstream social democracy was supportive of principles of non-discrimination and cultural pluriformity, anti-immigrant voices – targeting either post-colonial migrants or “guest workers” – could be heard on the fringes. Over the past decades, left-wing nativists have mainly targeted Islamic groups, either on welfare-chauvinist or cultural-nationalist grounds. As was the case during the migration debate of the Second International, protectionist and xenophobic arguments are still often carelessly wedded together.¹⁵⁴

Lucassen once poignantly stated that the “mechanism of ‘the other’ operated rather as a rule than as an exception in labour history – contrary to what the socialist ideal of internationalism might lead us to believe”.¹⁵⁵ The Stuttgart resolution is sometimes cited as if it represented the communis opinio of the decade,¹⁵⁶ yet the ideological constellations behind the strands of left-wing nativism surfacing at the time are equally important for understanding the way in which the Left has historically approached immigration, both before and after the migration debate of the Second International took place.