Migration and Citizenship in the Roman Empire

Migration and integration: No issue is more topical, nothing stirs citizens and governments in Europe in the present times more. It is important to search for solutions, to shape the development of our societies and communities in a thriving way. Although European history at all times has faced migration movements, current events still seem to be quite extraordinary. Nevertheless, Europe was once already the destination for never-ending migrations: from the 3rd to the 6th century A.D., millions of migrants moved from East to the West, from the North to the South. Peoples from various origins attempted to find refuge in the then Roman Empire, and to settle there. The Roman state was not able to cope with this enormous task regarding the integration, and finally disappeared, at least in essential parts, from the stage of history. Generations of researchers have tried to study the downfall and to determine the exact reasons. Surprisingly, nobody has considered the legal aspects, neither the structure of the state, nor the authorities responsible for migration, or those legal measures that were meant to channel migration and encourage integration. Exactly these instruments are the subject of this project, which is meant to answer the question to which extent legal possibilities have been developed, and in what way they have been used effectively, or if perhaps the lack of adequate legal structures and measures, and their misguided use, respectively, have caused Romes downfall. The clarification of ancient legal dimensions will also allow significant conclusions for the current approach, for chances and limits.

Starting with the question regarding the legal framework of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in the West the citizenship could be identified as the crucial legal institution determining the Roman statehood and therefore the Roman constitutional law.The birth of this right strongly connected since the beginning of the Republic around 500 BC to the concept of liberty and its further development have been analysed on the basis of all the legal and literal sources at our disposal. In order to highlight the consequences of the pertinent legislation and the application two sociological terms, inclusion and exclusion, had been adopted. Periods of outstanding generosity regarding the award of the citizenship were followed by periods of seclusio and severe segregation. Legally and historically the project analysed innumerable migrations from the beginning of the Republic until the end of The Empire. The integration of the migrants or their rejection, the conferment of rights, the citizenship, or their expulsion became very often a question regarding the survival of the Roman state itself. The zenith of the integration und thus of the inclusion was reached in the year 212 AD when the emperor Antoninus Caracalla conferred the Roman citizenship with his Constitutio Antoniniana to all free men and women of the Empire. The Roman Empire of the first two centuries of our era was quite close to our modern European Union in many constitutional aspects. People at those times were agitated by the same crucial questions regarding legal and constitutional aspects. The Roman Empire was composed by many political entities which enjoyed considerable political and legal autonomies., whose process of integration step by step into the central state must be defined as an imperishable model. In particular the harmonization of laws must be called noteworthy, harmonization based on the award of Roman citizenship in a gradual manner. The triumph of Roman Law was never the result of political compulsion but depended on the slow but continuous penetration of the Roman law into the different communities and social realities due to its excellency and justice. In this context the problem of a double or even multiple citizenship played a major role as could be shown already in the speeches of Cicero ProBalbo, ProCaecina and Pro Archia. The project could prove that whenever migrations could be accompanied successfully by particular legal measures, above all by the conferment of the Roman citizenship itself, the Roman state must be defined as flourishing. In this sense the inclusion achieved by legal means was an authentic success story. The failure of a successful integration also carried out by legal exclusion in Late Antiquity was after all the death knell of the Empire and lead to its fall.