Abstract
Folded into Jonathon Moses’ book, Emigration and Political Development, is an elegant discussion of emigration from Norway before World War I and its impact on that country’s political trajectory. The author explores the effects of Norwegian emigration—an outpouring of people headed toward the United States, which began in the 1820s and halted only on the eve of The Great War. This emigration started with a trickle of religious dissidents fleeing repression but over time grew to encompass large numbers of rural inhabitants leaving primarily for economic reasons.
Moses argues that the Norwegians’ experience in the United States throughout the nineteenth century, and in particular their encounter with political freedom, helped transform the political culture in Norway and would ultimately lead to the reform of governance structures. He posits, for example, that reports from Norwegian emigrants who settled in the United States about the economic opportunities and the political freedoms they enjoyed hastened the outflow of the poor and landless compatriots. So significant was this movement, argues Moses, that it led to measures taken in the late 1800s to improve the lot of Norway’s tenant farmers, such as the establishment of a fund to help landless peasants purchase a plot, as well as other land reform measures to make more areas available for cultivation. He makes similar claims for the effect of emigration on the rise in industrial wages and the swell of labor mobilization at the close of the nineteenth century. He argues that as large numbers of workers emigrated, Norway’s expanding industry, faced with labor shortages, was forced to pay higher wages to recruit workers, and that the country’s nascent labor movement exploited the pressures these shortages brought to bear on manufacturers with calls for emigration as a form of labor protest. Likewise, Moses maintains that emigration was an important factor in the expansion of suffrage rights in the late 1800s, noting that suffragists invoked emigration as evidence of political dissatisfaction and, as he puts it, deployed the threat of emigration “as a sort of political crowbar” (p. 111). He also sees the influence of emigration, or rather emigrants, in the leftist drive for a parliamentary form of governance in Norway, and later, in the country’s push for independence from Sweden. He alludes to the moral and financial support, especially for rearmament, that emigrants devoted to these two causes.
Moses’ discussion of emigration’s influence on Norway’s political development in the nineteenth century captures the book’s greatest strengths. He uses rich historical data to make his arguments, drawing on sources ranging from letters to political treatises to levels of labor mobilization and proclamations by labor leaders. He ambitiously covers a century of history in one short chapter, and so inevitably the political evolution he sketches is at times impressionistic and its connection to emigration heavily drawn. But Moses is careful to specify caveats throughout, particularly in reference to causality. And his account raises important questions about how high levels of emigration can, over time, transform the political culture of the country of origin.
Unfortunately, Moses’ description of the political impact of Norwegian emigration, nuanced and rich as it is, nevertheless suffers from many of the same flaws that characterize, even define, the rest of the book. These shortcomings stem from the book’s central purpose. The author explains that his project with this monograph is twofold: to show that emigration “can deliver political effects” and to outline a research design “that can reveal those effects” (p. 5). Applying this analysis to a timespan of more than 150 years and over an expanse of more than the same number of countries, as Moses explicitly sets out to do, requires making several gross generalizations about emigration, political development, and economic change. It also demands rubbing out critical historical details, such as shifts in national boundaries and even the emergence of the modern nation-state.
Moses’ discussion of emigration’s impact on Norway displays numerous important slippages of this kind. He reports, for example, that the lion’s share of emigration was of poor tenant farmers, and yet soon after, he asserts the influence of this phenomenon on urban industry and labor relations, resorting to facile explanations about supply and demand to make his case, which are unsupported given the rise in population that Norway saw during this period. Moreover, his narrative conflates historical observations or statements—sometimes as singular as calls to arms by individuals or small groups—with political outcomes; his attention to Martin Tranmæl, activist in the Norwegian Labor Party at the turn of the twentieth century, is an example of this tendency. Perhaps the most jarring slight of hand in Moses’ discussion is the scant mention, and even lighter treatment, of the fact that Norway was not an independent nation in the nineteenth century. It was part of an enforced political union with Sweden, in which Norway oftentimes more closely resembled a protectorate of its more powerful neighbor than an independent political entity with an autonomous political trajectory. Norway only achieved its independence in 1905, by plebiscite to be sure, but backed by armed forces and industry that could, at long last, rival Sweden’s. Just as troubling is that fact that Moses chooses Norway as a focus out of a possible list of countries that he identifies as high-emigration countries, even though they did not exist as modern nation-states or were mired in civil war over the pre-WWI historical period that the author considers; named as options are Yugoslavia, Ireland, Italy, Uruguay, and Argentina.
The trouble with Emigration and Political Development is that its flaws are not accidental. Rather, they are purposefully built into the research design on which the book is based. To test whether emigration affects political development, Moses begins by defining and creating two data series he will use for this purpose. After a discussion of why the nation is the correct level of analysis (“the state is clearly the most relevant and convenient means of operationalizing ‘community’” [p. 41]), Moses introduces the database he constructed, EMIG 1.2, tallying emigration counts from 155 countries over 159 years (1850–2008). When one considers that during the period covered by this database the boundaries of those states were redrawn by wars, colonialism, independence movements, and political unions, and when one adds to the shifting borders the awareness that these are years over which the notion of the state and governance evolved dramatically, the meaning of EMIG 1.2, to say nothing of its validity, is difficult to discern.
Alongside his discussion of the EMIG 1.2 is his explanation of how he chooses indicators for political development, especially over the extended timespan he considers. He begins his discussion with an extended review of the theoretical origins of the UN Development Program’s Human Development Index, first launched in the 1990 Human Development Report published by the UNDP; he discusses Amartya Sen’s and Martha Nussbaum’s work in some detail. He follows this exploration with what appears to be a dismissal of the HDI; he offers the critique that the HDI does not consider political aspects, and thus must be supplemented, if not replaced, with rougher indices of democratization (which may not be coequal with political development). This review ultimately proves confusing to the reader, especially since Moses uses myriad indicators to mark political development throughout his book, adding numerous variables such as income levels, national and per capita, to those indicators he discusses fulsomely at the beginning of his monograph. Moreover, he does so without always providing a clear rationale for his choice.
Moses augments this confusion about variables and categories by offering extended discussions of factors that mediate the relationship between emigration and political development that he earlier dismisses as less helpful or inappropriate. After asserting that subnational effects provide insufficient material to understand the relationship between emigration and political development because they are too parochial and thus difficult to compare across contexts (p. 41), he devotes a chapter to internal migration, focusing on the movement of African Americans from the southern states of the United States to northern industrial areas. Likewise, he offers a chapter on the role of individual emigrants in shaping political trajectories, after earlier dismissing the motives of individual migrants as “insignificant” (p. 40). This exploration of emigration and political development at multiple scales reflects the author’s thoroughness, but it calls into question the conclusions Moses himself advances about the appropriate level at which to consider migration’s effects. It also creates confusion about the author’s central project.
In the midst of these somewhat obfuscating deliberations about scale and the definition of political development, the relationships of causality that the author seems fundamentally concerned with are lost. These relationships are most helpfully and insightfully examined in the more qualitative and historical portions of this book. While these sections can provide no cross-cutting and definitive answers about the causal relationship between emigration and political development, they raise important questions that can usefully be applied at multiple scales and in different contexts. These questions offer unique windows onto the ways that migration may nudge, or perhaps even shove, political processes in any given direction. These windows are helpful, however, only if we acknowledge their limitations; they allow us to see and contemplate only so much.