How the law defines and protects all those persons who are not designated as combatants or POWs – civilians – forms the focus of Chapter 6. It examines how the law protects civilians generally in armed conflict, and in particular ‘protected persons’ – those who find themselves in the hands of an adverse power as enemy aliens or in situations of belligerent occupation. Chapter 6 examines the rules that Occupying Powers must observe when, in international armed conflicts, they find themselves in temporary possession of territory that belongs to another sovereign State. The phenomenon of long-term occupation is also examined, as is the law regulating the treatment of civilians in non-international armed conflict.

This chapter tracks how the measures on enemy aliens consolidated, evolved and transformed and how the number of enemy aliens grew and changed between 1915 and the beginning of 1917. In this period, policies against enemy aliens became more detailed and regulated new aspects of the enemy aliens’ lives. The chapter follows the processes of convergence and divergence among countries at war. It also deals with the policies adopted and implemented by countries such as Italy, Bulgaria, Romania and Portugal and its colonies that entered the war at a later stage. It also pays attention to the process that transformed enemy aliens into friendly aliens and vice versa. As the war ground on, while anti-alien feelings among the belligerent populations assumed an anti-Semitic and racial character, the warring governments put in place a two-way process that turned some enemy aliens into friendly aliens and citizens and subjects who belonged to specific national or religious minorities into aliens. This double process mainly concerned, directly and indirectly, the multi-ethnic empires at different stages of the war, and varied greatly from government to government.

This chapter continues the exploration of the gap between legal theories on the conduct of war and enemy aliens on the one hand and the practice of states at war on the other. It focuses first of all on the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 that anticipated the mobilization of the nation-in-arms and examines, in particular, the expulsion of "Germans" from Paris and Strasbourg in the summer of 1870, the consequences of the expulsion and the lively debate among international lawyers it sparked. The chapter continues with an analysis of the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–1878, concentrating on the emergence of a humanitarian discourse in order to legitimize intervention. Then it moves east to take into consideration the treatment of enemy aliens and the accompanying discourses on civilization in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. This chapter also delves into the novelties that occurred in the field of international law and international relations with the signing of the Geneva Convention, the foundation of the Institute of International Law in Brussels, the two Conferences at The Hague in 1899 and 1907. The final part of the chapter concentrates on the Balkan conflicts of 1912–1913 and the atrocities against civilians.

This introductory chapter sketches the main argument of the book and the various areas of interest it touches upon: sovereignty, international law and laws of war, the dilemma security versus freedom, the attempt at humanizing the war conduct, the transformation of notions and practices of citizenship, rights, individual and human in particular, humanitarianism, national belonging, war and society. The introduction focuses in particular on whether there were consolidated customary practices and codified rules to deal with aliens of enemy nationality at the moment of the outbreak of the First World War, and if and how that conflict represented a watershed. It then presents the structure of the book.

Chapter 9 deals specifically with the way in which the war affected the notions and practices of citizenship. It does so by switching the attention from enemy aliens to citizens of enemy origins. The chapter concentrates firstly on an analysis and discussion of the naturalization policies adopted by the various belligerent countries during the First World War. It then examines the spread of denaturalization statutes across Europe and the emergence of statelessness, concentrating both on state attitudes and public opinion and on the impact of naturalization and denaturalization policies on people of enemy origin. It also looks past the end of the war at the impact of those policies on interwar developments in inclusion and exclusion. The war played a crucial role in stabilizing differences between citizens and aliens and making them starker. It also imposed markers of identity (nationality, language, religion, ethnicity, “race”) on people, often regardless of their will or choice. In the name of military necessity and national security, authorities were willing to investigate origins and parentage or kinship, religion, language and all the markers that could indicate disloyalty to the nation in arms, thus implementing rigid notions of citizenship/subjecthood.

This chapter opens the second part of the book and is the first of six entirely devoted to the First World War. It concentrates on the early months of the war and examines first of all the spread of the state of emergency throughout Europe and the British Empire. It then, while calculating the number of enemy aliens in the belligerent countries, describes the first measures against enemy aliens adopted by Britain, France, the Russian Empire and Japan on the one hand, and those taken by Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire on the other. It also spells out the diplomatic attempts at protecting enemy aliens, the reactions of the victims of the earliest provisions and the attitudes of the nationalistic public opinion, the spy fever, the spread of fake news and the popular responses to them. By the end of December 1914, each of the early participants in the war had set in motion the mechanism for dealing with enemy aliens. By the same date, the war against them had also become global, ranging from Europe to North America, from Oceania to India or Iran.

This chapter concentrates on the early months of the war, and delving into autobiographical testimonies looks more closely at the suffering and fate of enemy aliens. The chapter then describes the implementation of the policies adopted in the early months and deals with expulsion, forced repatriation and deportation. It then addresses the internment of civilians, which was one of the major novelties that the belligerent countries introduced in the European war. The chapter follows the spread of concentration camps throughout Europe and the British and French Empires, the internment gender and generational dimensions, and the beginning of the humanitarian activities that the mass internment of enemy aliens triggered. The third part of the chapter deals with another crucial novelty that concerned the property rights of the enemy aliens. States at war sequestered and confiscated their assets as part and parcel of the economic war they waged. The internment and sequestration of enemy property led to enormous growth in the apparatuses of the state. And this meant that state involvement in the lives of civilians increased disproportionately.

This chapter focuses firstly on the expansion of internment and confinement between 1915 and the beginning of 1917 in Europe and outside it. It traces the differences among the various belligerents in the treatment of enemy aliens, the living conditions in the camps, and the national, gender and generational composition of the inmates. It also concentrates on the one hand on the popular pressure in support of the wholesale internment of enemy aliens and, on the other, on the broadening of the humanitarian activities pursued by international non-governmental organization such as the International Committee of the Red Cross that actively promoted the exchange of prisoners of war and civilian internees. The second part of the chapter addresses the spread of a nationalistic economic discourse that boosted the intensification of the economic war and the attack on enemy aliens' property with the creation of new state bureaucracies and the beginning of the liquidation of sequestered assets. The chapter shows how the capacity of the state to enforce such policies was continuously put to the test by the effect of the war on politics and by its military evolution.

This chapter opens the first part of the book that presents the background of the First World War. It deals with the emergence of the concept of “enemy alien” in the debate among international lawyers. Starting with the Law of Nations published by Emer de Vattel in 1758, it analyzes and discusses what the foundational texts of international law in the century-and-a-half preceding the First World War said on the rights of foreigners in peacetime and on the conduct toward these same foreigners when they became enemies in wartime. It then compares legal doctrines and practices analyzing the behavior of belligerents towards enemy aliens in a string of interstate wars that occurred between the end of the eighteenth century and 1865, namely the French Revolutionary Wars of 1792–1793, the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States, the Crimean War and the American Civil War. The chapter follows the changes in the attitude toward enemy aliens that mass conscription and the post-French Revolution concept of citizenship and nationality triggered.

This chapter follows the globalization and radicalization of the policies on enemy aliens that occurred in the last two years of the war. In 1917, the conflict became truly global with the entrance of the Americas (the United States, Brazil and Cuba) and Asia (the independent states of China and Siam, and the Philippines as a US dependency). At the same time, Russia and Romania exited the conflict, signing disadvantageous peace agreements with Germany. All the states that joined the war in 1917 drew up policies against enemy aliens, notwithstanding the enormous differences in the numbers of such people within their territories. The chapter analyzes the policies against enemy aliens in the United States, in Brazil, in China and Siam, and compares them with the evolution of the war in Europe where radicalization transformed all foreigners into enemies and also affected neutral countries. The chapter concentrates in particular on a series of new developments that concerned property rights. On the eve of the end of the conflict, property rights were no longer safe in any of the belligerent countries and were actually in pieces in many places.