To paraphrase a famous line from Tolstoy, those loyal to their country are faithful in the same way. They fight in armies, pay their taxes and vote in elections. Among the disloyal, however, each becomes a traitor in his own way.
Take the American and German postwar experiences. The US has not seen a treason prosecution since World War II, and Germany has, arguably, abolished treason in the traditional sense, retaining only a general crime of sedition designed to protect the government from overthrow by anti-democratic forces.
Now focus on the post-communist states, where a new wave of treason trials seems in the offing. The prosecution in the Czech Republic of two 78-year-old men (Milos Jakes, and Jozef Lenart), both veterans of the Soviet invasion of 1968, and the four-year-long trial in Vladivostok of Grigory Pasko, a Russian naval officer, suggests the earliest stages of a cycle where injured states respond to perceptions of betrayal with charges of treason.
Why does treason appear to be dying in some countries and coming alive in others? Some history may help here. As originally defined by parliament in 14th-century England, the Anglo-American version of treason includes a whole range of acts that threatened the Crown. To even think of murdering the King (then quaintly called "compassing") was punishable by death. Counterfeiting and rape of the Queen (contaminating the blood line) were thrown into the statute to assure that the King's currency and his House were safe.
Levying war against the King was a primary charge of treason, but a catch limits the crime's scope. To be a traitor you must first have a duty to be loyal. The French have no such duty toward the English Crown. Only the English do. So, one requirement of treason, virtually everywhere, is that only citizens and permanent residents of a country can commit treason. If you intentionally kill a foreigner, then you are guilty of murder. But as a matter of definition, if you have no duty of loyalty to a foreign country, then you cannot commit treason against it.
The Americans who signed the Declaration of Independence, as British citizens, were all guilty of treason for levying war against King George III. Understandably, when they won independence and escaped prosecution, they trimmed the 14th-century definition of treason. Their anxieties about treason are recorded in the Constitution, which limits the offense to levying war and to a famous phrase originating in the 14th-century statute: "adhering to the enemy, giving them aid and comfort."
Still, language of such breadth could accommodate virtually any action sympathetic to a foreign power, yet Americans are reluctant to invoke their catch-all criminal charge. Witness the debate about whether to prosecute John Walker, the Californian who fought for the Taliban in Afghanistan. He surely adhered to the enemy, giving much more than aid and comfort. Yet Americans seem reluctant to brand him a traitor. Perhaps he will be imprisoned for assisting terrorists, but his betrayal generates little resentment. Secure states tend to forget about treason.
Insecure states are quicker to sense acts of betrayal. The Soviets, with their fragile legitimacy, always feared betrayal. They called their crime izmena rodine, betrayal of the motherland, and they married this high moral language to minor transgressions, such as leaving the country illegally. Anyone who endangered the international security of the Soviet Union was deemed a traitor deserving death.
When a group of dissident Jews conspired in 1970 to hijack an airplane, they were charged with attempted treason. Two of the organizers were sentenced to death. (Worldwide protests induced the Soviets to modify the penalty). When Anatoly Shcharansky allegedly gave sensitive material to an American journalist, he was convicted of treason.
Shcharansky's case helps us understand the recent story of Grigory Pasko, convicted after a four-year trial for allegedly providing information for a Japanese television report on the Russian army dumping nuclear waste at sea. The Russians modified the Communist definition of treason, eliminating the death penalty and changing the name to "governmental treason." But they retained the clause subjecting any Russian to charges of treason for creating risks to the international security of the state. Security, as the Russians understand it, seems to be endangered when foreign journalists write articles that bring Russia's state into disrepute.
The story in the Czech Republic differs. Jakes and Lenart may have sided with the Russian enemy in 1968, but it is not clear what the state gains by beating a dead regime with yet another trial.
Germany's experience with treason is rife with paradox but may point toward the future. If you examine the statute in force today you will be struck by the apparent absence of the citizenship requirement. Anyone -- foreigners as well as Germans -- can commit Hochverrat [high treason] by using force or the threat of force to undermine the Basic Law, the German constitution.
The temptation is to think that postwar Germans, sickened by the nationalism of the Nazi period, eliminated the duty of national allegiance. But things are more complicated than that. Hitler changed the law in 1934 in the megalomaniac belief that the whole world owed him a duty of loyalty. Still, by substituting the Basic Law for the Fuhrer in the postwar amendment of the crime, contemporary Germans have in effect nullified the crime of treason. Even though the label of treason is used, the offense now resembles the American concept of sedition and seeks to prevent a violent overthrow of the government.
From the English King, to the American republic, to the Russian motherland, to the German constitution, the object of required loyalty is constantly changing. Perhaps the German model will win out and we will become duty-bound to revere not a leader but a set of democratic principles. But fears of "enemies within," such as Russia's Pasko, or the French, British, and other European Muslims who fought alongside the Taliban, are also gaining ground. Treason is dead, or it might be just aborning.
George P. Fletcher is Cardozo Professor of Jurisprudence at Columbia University. He is the author of "Our Secret Constitution: How Lincoln Redefined American Democracy."
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past