Keywords

Let us start with two writers working on the Baltic Rim, separated by more than seven centuries and over a thousand kilometers. The first, Adam of Bremen, was a schoolmaster attached to the Hamburg-Bremen episcopal chapter living in the second half of the eleventh century. The second, Immanuel Kant, was a professor of philosophy attached to the University of Königsberg—established in the former capital of the Teutonic Knights’ crusader state—living in the second half of the eighteenth century. The first famously invented the name for the Baltic Sea, deriving it from the Latin word for belt, balteus; the second offered a famous answer to the question: Was ist Aufklärung? In the context of this volume, however, the most salient link between the two men is that they both reflected on the question of hospitality as means of intercultural and interfaith interaction, something that was prompted by their spatially similar but historically very distinct contexts. In the fourth book of his Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae Pontificum from the 1070s, which addressed the geography and proselytizing opportunities as well the customs of the peoples inhabiting the Baltic Rim, Adam passed the following judgment on all dwellers of the North, Hyperboreans in his terminology:

Although all Hyperboreans are noted for their hospitality, our Swedes are so in particular. To deny wayfarers entertainment is to them the basest of all shameful deeds, so much so that there is strife and contention among them over who is worthy to receive a guest. They show him every courtesy for as many days as he wishes to stay, vying with one another to take him to their friends in their several houses. These good traits they have in their customs.1

For Adam, this cultural inclination was a pre-condition to receive priests and, consequently, for converting those people to the Christian faith. Further, thanks to the expansion of the Latin Church to the north-eastern peripheries of Europe through Christianization and thanks to the emerging Hanseatic League, the Baltic coasts were drawn closer to each other. Over 700 years later, in his philosophical sketch Toward Perpetual Peace from 1795, Kant saw the laws and rights of hospitality primarily as a vehicle of trade and exchange. For him, hospitality paired with world citizenship was one of the conditions that would make possible the assurance of permanent international peace in Europe, even if the continent was actually on the brink of the Napoleonic Wars:

Hospitality (a host’s conduct to his guest) means the right of a stranger not to be treated in a hostile manner by another upon his arrival on the other’s territory.… It is not the right of a guest that the stranger has a claim to (which would require a special, charitable contract stipulating that he be made a member of the household for a certain period of time), but rather a right to visit, to which all human beings have a claim, to present oneself to society by virtue of the right of the common possession of the surface of the earth…. The right of hospitality, that is, the right of foreign arrivals, pertains, however, only to conditions of the possibility of attempting interaction with the old inhabitants.2

In the first case, local customs and courtesy were underpinned with emotion (shame); in the second case, worldwide universal laws and natural rights. The culturally particular contrasted with the common and normatively universal. Furthermore, the two authors’ sense of belonging to their respective settled host communities and cities inescapably colored their views of hospitality. Adam’s and Kant’s explicit considerations of the topic, however, seemed to be more aligned with viewpoints of arriving guests and mobile strangers rather than with that of the receiving hosts of static communities.

What Adam and Kant also seem to have agreed upon was that hospitality constituted a threshold phenomenon, one that was negotiated and produced through the interaction between hosts and guests. In this volume, too, the threshold incidents related to hospitality are considered as moments of temporary and spatial as well as material and symbolic “inbetweenness” that informs the meetings of strangers. Such thresholds give reason to halt, and they signal the difficulty of passing; they are neither barriers nor means of smooth transitions. At the same time, as aptly put by Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, thresholds are there to be crossed over.3

This volume, in a transhistorical manner addresses the fundamentally linked positions of hosts and guests, united and torn apart during occasions of hospitality. While both Adam and Kant agreed that a host should offer some form of hospitality, and thus protection, to the approaching stranger, both authors recognized that hosts needed to strike a balance between offering help and protecting their own community. To achieve this, hospitality includes some form of security measures as well as rules and boundaries; if the guests violate either, they overstep the conditions of their welcome. It is thus the paradoxical simultaneity of receiving and rejecting, coupled with securitization practices, that our approach to hospitality addresses. The chapters collected in this volume investigate the dilemmas and limits of hospitality, and what security measures were deployed by hosts and guests alike to come to terms with the uncertainties and risks inherent to their relationship.4

Finally, Adam’s and Kant’s reflections on the role and significance of hospitality emerged, quite symptomatically, in the context of the harbor cities in which the authors lived. In the eleventh century just as much as on the verge of the nineteenth century, the seawaters and harbors were the main way of connecting people in the Baltic Sea region, both opening up intercultural exchange and constituting a potential source and arena of danger and conflict in equal measure. There is, in other words, an important maritime dimension and thalassographic quality to the spatiality of Baltic hospitality as it is considered in this volume.5 Many of the examples of meetings and confrontations between different types of guests and strangers and their hosts studied here took place within earshot of waves hitting the seashore. Our conceptual and empirical focus on hospitality as a threshold cultural phenomenon characterized by constant tension between reception and rejection is therefore matched by our empirical focus on the coastal zones surrounding the Baltic Sea. These regions are historically viewed as thresholds between the habitable and uninhabitable. In both premodern and modern contexts, port cities and coastal areas occupied a symbolic position as the end point of where a lawful social order was actually possible, and beyond which threats both natural and political could arise.6 This predicament dictated the establishment of situational or more permanent customs and rules of rapprochement and provisions of security for both hosts and strangers. This book engages with the practices and discourses of hospitality related to and resolved through provisions of security during confrontations between host communities and arriving strangers. In doing so, it offers insight into the microcosms located at the sea/land intersection and, more generally, into the wider historical legacy of Baltic hospitality.7

Scope, Focus, and Questions

This volume, consisting of fourteen empirical chapters, offers a trans-historical reflection on the conditions, experiences, predicaments, and entanglements of hospitality on the Baltic Rim between the turn of the second millennium and the beginning of the twentieth century. The first date has been chosen as a very imprecise starting point related to the conceptualization of the Baltic Sea as a space of hospitality by Adam of Bremen. To be sure, his Gesta had long been preceded by other travelogues depicting welcoming or inhospitable attitudes and customs of the inhabitants of the Baltic Rim, such as Wulfstan of Hedeby’s from the ninth century or Ibrāhīm ibn Ya’qūb’s from the tenth, and so on.8 However, in keeping with the Europeanization paradigm still dominant in medieval studies, the expansion of the Catholic world-system by means of colonization, conquest, and cultural expansion and their reception on the north-eastern peripheries during the High Middle Ages constitutes a qualitative break. This break justifies beginning our volume roughly around the time of Adam’s conceptualization of the Baltic Sea, which additionally coincided with an explosion of accounts documenting these processes, giving us insight into practices of hospitality in the region.9

The closing period, the long nineteenth century (1789–1914), is justified by the fact that World War I radically changed the rules of the game when it comes to regulating the movement of people and the status of “strangers” through the constitutional and legal straitjackets of modern nation states. These pan-European changes, heralded by the British Aliens Act of 1905, spread all over the Baltic Rim. We draw the line prior to the point when these processes came into full swing during the interwar period, which would eventually lead to the crucial 1951 UN Refugee Convention.10 This does not mean that hospitality as a way of conceptualizing meetings and confrontations between hosts and many types of guest or migrants has disappeared in the twentieth century. Despite the repeated pronouncements about the “end of hospitality,” which have particularly surged in the wake of the 2015 migration and asylum “crisis,”11 it seems that the discourse of hospitality has consistently retained its ever-evolving and adaptive ethical, intellectual, and political vitality to reframe present as well as past views of migration, cultural exchange, and human responsibilities.12 In the Baltic Rim context, the millennium that stretches between c.1000 and 1900 saw questions of hospitality be elevated very slowly onto an increasingly large scale. Practices of hospitality developed from the level of local customs and personal concerns, to the regulation of those obligations in precepts of law and, finally, towards the slowly emerging supralocal structures of responses and state-centered discourses of citizenship and alien status promoted by international laws.13

In a geographical, cultural, and historical sense, the Baltic Rim and the Baltic Sea—the Mediterranean of the North—are considered very broadly here. Our empirical focus is primarily on the coastal regions as spaces for meetings and confrontations, as the ambiguous and precarious nature of the land/sea interface matches similar qualities of host–guest relations, intensifying the questions at hand. Receiving a stranger in this space could be a deliverance, and rejecting a stranger could be an act of obliteration. However, the central significance of seaborne contacts and networks, magnified by the extensive river systems, evidently bled in to the eastern hinterlands of the Baltic coasts, sometimes stretching hundreds and thousands of kilometres inland, yet still visibly shaped by this sea and its sea-centered cultures.14 For this reason, the individual case studies, which cover all coasts of the Baltic Sea, include studies of the practices and spaces of hospitality performed as far east as Staraya Ladoga on the Volkhov River. As pointed out by Kristel Zilmer, “in terms of belonging within a broader network of travel routes that connected Northern Europe with areas to the east and south, the Baltic Sea region can also be shown to form a transit zone or a gateway that provided access to larger territories.”15 These included territories as distant as north-western Russia and Constantinople, we might add. At the other end of the geographical and chronological spectrum, the coastal thresholds studied here include regions as far west as the Belgian and Dutch port cities, whose investigation addresses the fate of emigrants from the Baltic region on their way to the United States in the late nineteenth century. Those investigations point to moments and places that witnessed and participated in the global expansion of the people from the Baltic region, triggered by the processes of mass migration. This volume bears evidence to the fact that the cultural balteus of the Baltic stretched farther than the reach of its seawaters alone.

When it comes to its thematic focus and purpose, this volume studies why, how, and under what circumstances multifarious categories of guests and strangers—migrants, war refugees, prisoners of war, merchants, missionaries, vagrants, vagabonds, etc.—were portrayed as threats to local populations or as objects of their charity. We ask how these images guided the practical—political, administrative, and religious—responses of host communities in the Baltic Sea region, c.1000–1900. Further, we study how hospitality practices discriminated against certain categories of strangers in relation to their creed, ethnicity, national belonging, gender, and political or socioeconomic status. Crucially, this volume works with and elaborates upon a number of conceptual tools for transhistorical comparison of ideas, practices, and spaces of host–guest relations, offering new insights into premodern and modern legacies of (in-)hospitality in the Baltic Sea region by posing the following questions:

  • How was the tension between hospitality and inhospitality resolved in concrete encounters and crises? Under what circumstances did hostility emerge?

  • What representations of strangers did past local host communities create? How did these images guide their practical response towards various categories of strangers?

  • What continuities and changes in approaches to strangers can be identified?

We depart from broad notions and traditions of hospitality borrowed from other disciplines16 and engage with the concepts of host–guest relations as featured in the sources, with these case studies accounting for different historical spaces of hospitality and techniques of securitization vis-à-vis guests and strangers in premodern and modern settings. Our theoretical and methodological premises are deployed in the context of the Baltic Sea region, seen as a multilayered space of intercultural encounter and conflict. The significance and implications of this volume are threefold. First, it provides historical nuance and brings past understandings of hospitality to the often naïve claims about its universal and ethical potential, and about its inherently beneficial character promoted by some disciplines (especially by tourism and hospitality studies).17 Second, by elaborating both the concepts and methods for studying host–guest relations, this volume makes examples from the Baltic region accessible and comparable with other strands in migration studies. Third, the volume’s longitudinal view on hospitality around the Baltic Sea puts the current debates about “migration crises” in this region (and elsewhere) in a much needed historical perspective.

Hospitality: Between Security and Hostility

The central problem hardwired into the phenomenon of hospitality has a relational nature: “hospitality between whom?” Although the standard answer, rather self-evident and circular, identifies the relationship as one between hosts and guests/strangers, in reality, the positions of hosts and guests tend to be merely placeholders, empty subject positions. They need to be filled with concrete examples and considered in their historical context. For instance, what emerges from both Adam of Bremen’s and Kant’s ruminations on hospitality is the question of safety and security, that is, the irreducible risks that inhospitality poses to the stranger: the concrete and foreseeable risks for his priestly readers and prospective missionaries in Adam’s case, and more generalized and abstract risks in Kant’s case. For both authors hospitality was essentially a way of avoiding or disarming the potentiality of hostility between the encountering parties. Accordingly, for the purposes of this volume we elaborate Jacques Derrida’s claim that there is a critical continuum between hospitable and hostile behavior between host communities and arriving guests or strangers, a condition well encapsulated in his neologism hostipitality.18 Host–guest relations, we argue, are transhistorically riddled with ambiguity and irreducible tension between two contradictory responses: receiving and rejecting guests/strangers.19

Because of this inherent ambiguity, we decided to refrain from defining what hospitality is. Instead, by treating this phenomenon as a historically contingent set of customs, institutions, and discourses of host–guest relations—more as an experiential rather than a conceptual problem—we allow for its senses and meanings to emerge from the contexts and sources under study. The investigations are nonetheless guided by certain contested aspects of hospitality: its ethical, commercial, legal, and power/resistance dimensions; its role in identity-formation and its way of functioning as a socio-politically integrative and disintegrative force; and its generosity and limitations.20

Customs, institutions, and discourses of hospitality are investigated in this volume as spatially situated techniques to cope with a double challenge: responding to perceptions of threat on the one hand, and, on the other, providing protection for host communities, but ideally also for arriving strangers and guests. The categories of strangers and guests are considered very broadly here to encompass many forms of human mobility and migration, from medieval merchants and individual missionaries to large groups of war refugees or vagrant entertainers. This type of conceptual expansiveness is not just unavoidable, but necessary and desirable. It is our contention that comparisons of mobility and its relations to hospitality over time and space have been thwarted by a lack of common concepts for addressing issues of refuge and migration.21 Practitioners’ as well as researchers’ understanding of mobility, internal or external, has been commonly reduced to state phenomena and its concerns.22 As such, migration has been defined as a central “domain of insecurity,”23 meaning not only that mobility tends to incite insecurity, but also that in methodologically state-focused migration studies, insecurity is framed as a problem in need of an immediate solution. With their aspiration for a far-reaching grasp over territories and peoples, states are a recent invention. Their territorial control, historically speaking, has operated more as a postulation than a reality.24 During the bulk of the period studied here, states were still in the stage of emergence, and several of the chapters deal with pre-state areas. Other chapters deal with local responses to arriving strangers, which prevailed even in the late nineteenth century with bureaucratic nation states well in place.25 We employ therefore a very broad definition of migration covering transient as well as longitudinal occurrences and forms of mobility having both a short- and long-distance character.26 By focusing on situations in which arriving strangers were identified as having a claim to hospitality, but also as posing a potential security risk, we propose a platform within historical research regarding issues of hospitality across time and space.

To address the tensions between hospitality and hostility, this volume studies situations of hospitality on the Baltic and northern seafront through the lens of securitization. The analytical framework of “securitization” developed within the field of international relations to comprehend the “making” of security issues of various kinds,27 and it has proven potent for historical research.28 Securitization of migration is considered to be “a transversal political technology” used by diverse institutions to foster a sense of public threat and to affirm their role as providers of security.29 The identification of an issue as a security threat carries normative connotations, compelling the community to respond with protective measures. These measures in turn might pose further security threats as securitization discriminates and tends to focus on certain groups rather than others.30 Moreover, as security measures become an integral part of everyday lives, they run the risk of autoimmunization. The security measures taken to ensure the safety of the public may end up endangering those it was meant to protect.31 Gestures of hospitality, too, involve measures to secure the uncertain, sometimes exceptional situation or crisis created by the arrival and (temporary) stay of unknown people. Situations of hospitality and moments of initial confrontation between host communities and arriving strangers provide a suitable setting to study how historical actors framed the arrival of newcomers in practical and discursive terms.32

Combining hospitality—or hostipitality—and securitization perspectives to analyze initial confrontations between host societies and arriving strangers throughout Baltic history is mutually enriching. On the one hand, the security-component of host–guest situations offers tangible substance to the often vague assumption that hospitality, beyond charitable acts, represents a complex and ambiguous set of practices. The chapters in this volume show that providing hospitality was often imbued with measures taken to control and secure an unstable situation, pointing to the tension between viewing traveling people as a threat and conceiving of them as being in need of help. On the other hand, focusing on the initial encounters between host communities and arriving guests opens a micro-perspective on the ways and processes through which issues or events are turned into a security concern. The contributions consider in what ways the characteristics of arriving strangers were taken as decisive grounds for a host community to view the arrivals as a threat—be they Christian missionaries on the early medieval Baltic coasts, Finnish refugees in early modern Stockholm, Russian soldiers in early modern Livonia and Estonia, Italian vagrant musicians in nineteenth-century Sweden, or Eastern European transmigrants in late nineteenth-century Rotterdam and Antwerp. Together, the chapters investigate under what circumstances arriving strangers could be regarded as lucrative or benevolent guests, meriting hospitality and protection, and under what circumstances such hospitality could transform into either hidden or open hostility.

The case studies covering the time span from the Early Middle Ages to the early twentieth century provide substance to the often-made claim that studying history through the lens of security or securitization allows us to bridge the usual divide between the premodern and modern era, thus circumventing the statehood paradigm.33 Although situations of hospitality call for contextualization and analysis of the contingencies of time and space, they are nevertheless appropriate for diachronic comparison. While most collections of historical securitization studies focus on one epoch,34 other transhistorical volumes usually begin with the early modern period and do not include the Middle Ages.35 This book sets out to fill this research gap by offering an chapter selection dealing with practices of hospitality in pre-state, proto-state- and nation state contexts and space formations, which, according to specific conditions and to a varying degree, involved securitization practices.

Hospitality: A Spatial Approach

In addition to “hospitality between whom?”, an equally important question underpinning the phenomenon of hospitality, especially when considered in conjunction with security, is: “hospitality where?” For this volume, the question is addressed by paying equal attention to localizations and spatializations of hospitality.36 Although host–guest relations tend to be primarily shaped by shared or distinct ideals and cultural norms, they are always practiced somewhere, within a concrete spatial context. To understand how initial encounters between hosts and strangers were resolved, we need to study these issues at the local level, paying attention to their spatial components and dynamics and their situated ethics.37

The individual chapters focus on local, initial encounters along the coasts of the Baltic Sea region, which during the period 1000–1914 meets the criteria of constituting a threshold space writ large. We have chosen the term threshold space over other conceptual contestants, such as frontier or borderland, precisely because of its detachment from the control of state entities. Despite the Baltic Rim’s many faces during the period in question—from a mythical space, pagan outpost, Hanseatic market place, interreligious meeting place and combat ground, to a short-lived inland sea of the Swedish empire, and a divider between east and west, north and central Europe—the region’s image was constantly marked by its position as a threshold between the known and unknown, friendly and hostile, habitable and uninhabitable lands.38 The threshold of the land/sea divide in the Baltic region separated and united hosts and strangers, and set them in perpetual contact with each other. The threshold is an inherently ambiguous concept, implying the same tension as present in the concept of hospitality itself: the tension between receiving and rejecting others. It conceals and protects what is within its perimeter, while simultaneously inviting and inciting change.39 The threshold space thus directly corresponds to the position of the stranger, who is relegated to “an ambivalent and unstable place vacillating between friendship and hostility, between outside and inside, … between integration and exclusion.”40 This is a contradictory predicament, well visible in the long history of the Baltic Sea, too.

The dilemma of receiving or rejecting strangers is exacerbated in urban or proto-urban settings, where the influx of strangers is intensified both in range and in scope. As loci of control as well as spaces of continual movement, these settings brought representatives of central, royal, or state power and local power holders and residents together, and subjected them to an influx of strangers, provoking security measures to deal with perceived threats as well as the potential benefits of increased trade and contact opportunities. By focusing on the local and spatial aspects of these security measures, the volume attempts to see beyond the policies and strategies developed by state entities and distant authorities, and instead highlights direct responses in the initial meetings between strangers and hosts.

As local tensions between hostility and hospitality are translated into security issues, they tend to be negotiated and resolved spatially. Such spatial anchoring of host–guest relations, articulated from a point of tension between mobility and settlement, is clearly visible in both Adam of Bremen’s and Immanuel Kant’s texts. To follow social scientist Dan Bulley, “hospitality is the means by which particular spaces are brought into being as ‘homes,’ as embodying an ethos, a way of being: an ethics. Practices of hospitality carve out spaces as mine rather than yours, as places of belonging and non-belonging, and then manage and enforce their internal and external boundaries and behaviours.”41 The aspects of this approach are elaborated further in the first chapter by Wojtek Jezierski, which serves as a conceptual-empirical bridge into the rest of the book.

Spatial negotiations often involve actions to secure and control those spaces where the confrontation between host community and arriving strangers take place. Sari Nauman’s chapter on the reception of refugees in early eighteenth-century Stockholm and Christina Reimann’s on transmigration through late nineteenth-century port cities exemplify this point. Thanks to the volume’s transhistorical outline, studies of hospitality situations in medieval proto-urban contexts allow for a fruitful expansion of the spatial approach to securitization processes, as demonstrated by the contribution on confrontations between arriving missionaries and pagan communities on the Baltic Sea coasts between the late tenth to mid-twelfth centuries. Though often temporary in ambition, these spatial solutions frequently survived the acute emergency that brought them forth. They became normalized, signaling the emergence of a new status quo that confronted the stranger and resident to the same degree.

By dealing with hospitality as a transhistorical phenomenon, this volume adds to existing research that has uncoupled the securitization paradigm from that of the state by focusing on local, (proto-)urban host communities as the initial providers of security in concrete spatial and local settings.42 By turning to specific historical port cities and regions, the chapters localize these measures, and demonstrate how specific responses depended on concrete historical, local, spatial, and cultural conditions. At the same time, the volume points to similarities across space and time, preparing the ground for further investigations on the stimuli and incentives of spatial and temporal transformations.

Hospitality: A Transhistorical Perspective

The volume takes off in the southern coasts of the Baltic Sea. Wojtek Jezierski’s chapter, which focuses on the difficult relations between pagan hosts and Christian guests who sought to fundamentally alter the life of the hosts through evangelization (sometimes paying the highest price for it, death), demonstrates how host–guest relations worked as discourses and practices that shaped intercultural encounters and conflicts. Based on the evidence from missionary historiography and hagiography from the tenth through twelfth centuries, the chapter demonstrates the importance of spatiality in negotiating hospitality and meetings in inimical contexts. These impromptu produced spaces of missionary hospitality were by no means politically or culturally stable. Rather, they built on a continuum between hospitable and hostile conduct between the parties involved, particularly because these encounters often had regime-changing religio-political implications. Producing such spaces and transgressing such boundaries could have lethal consequences, and host communities were often divided in their attitude towards arriving missionaries.

The predominant sense of hospitality’s link to security in premodern contexts, however, seems to be its relation to commercial activities, which comes to the fore in the following cluster of chapters that bridge the medieval and the early modern period. First, Tatjana Jackson examines the host–guest relationship between the rulers of Ladoga, an intermediate stop on the trading route between the Baltic Sea and Novgorod, and Scandinavian traders (Vikings), as envisioned in Icelandic sagas (twelfth to thirteenth centuries). Jackson shows that hospitality and safety measures went hand in hand. Traveling from Ladoga to Novgorod was dangerous due to the wild river passages, evoking one of the basic and physical protective principles of hospitality: the duty of the host to assure safe passage for guests once accepted. The welcome guest merchant was one whom the host should not be afraid of, coming in peace and with unambiguous purposes. Hospitality on such occasions was less of a burden and more an element of mutual economic gain. Rejecting unwelcome trade guests was also easy: one either simply denied foreign merchants assistance in obtaining safe passage through dangerous river systems or refused to grant a trade peace to them altogether.

Tobias Boestad’s chapter also focuses on problems of systemic reciprocity in discussing how the basic principles of commercial hospitality became objects of negotiation and legislation from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. In the majority of Baltic trade contexts, there was little space for high-flying moral considerations of hospitality as universal principles. Instead, political and economic choices and necessities underpinned every specific occasion for welcome or rejection. Trade reciprocity seemed to constitute a basic foundation of hospitality, and it was mostly limited to the basic idea of mutual gain that was measured locally, in relation to economic strength as well as political and administrative capacity. For instance, the obligation to provide merchants with security was important but costly. It led to certain rulers declaring themselves unable to maintain security within their territory, leaving it to the travelers to solve any potential problems on their own.

In the following contribution, Pavel V. Lukin deals with relations between western traders and the local community of Novgorod over the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. He shows that in this crucial node of the long-distance trade network, the host community and the permanent guest community living in its midst depended on each other to such a large degree that this created somewhat involuntary grounds for hospitality and an amplified sense of needing to make everyday practices and relations between the parties work. While previous research, focusing on antagonism within official regulations and chronicles, has often depicted host–guest relations in Novgorod in negative terms, Lukin shows that everyday practices were more flexible and more hospitable, even if they remained ambiguous. These relations were organized through a formal and informal infrastructure and through spaces of hospitality, which developed out of the mutual need for trust within trade relations, as well as the permanent, centuries-long cohabitation of formally separate communities.

Concerns about maintaining social order when negotiating trade hospitality, which often implied that hosts would guarantee their trading guests’ security, continued into the early modern period. Lovisa Olsson uses the wealth of sources from sixteenth-century towns and trade networks to examine the reception of visiting merchants in Lübeck, Stockholm, Reval (Tallinn), and Malmö, demonstrating how host–guest relations in these towns were shaped in accordance with social hierarchies. Trade hospitality was predominantly organized around the relations between well-established equals. Merchant guests, burghers in their home towns, received lodging in the homes of their equals and were provided with security and the right to store wares in private homes and warehouses. Less established traders found their accommodation in rowdy lodgings or even stayed on their ships, thus becoming objects for security measures or targets of crime, rather than being provided security. Their position sat just at the outer edge of the host community in legal, social, and spatial terms.

Dorothée Goetze’s chapter focuses on and develops the spatial aspects of hospitality and its relation to power, viewing hospitality as an expression of changing socio-political order. The case in point is the ritualized hospitality enacted when the town of Riga capitulated to Russian commander Boris Sheremetev in 1710. In the span of two weeks in July of this year, the inhabitants of Riga went from being besieged to occupied to then becoming Russian subjects. This transition was marked through carefully arranged manifestations of hospitality, which reflect the altered hierarchical order in well-chosen places thus making a swift symbolic transformation of the identity of the hosts—the Riga elite—into guests, and of the identity of their imposing guest into the new political host and master. The crucial element of this political makeover was the use of hostages—yet another element in the etymological, institutional, and political sense of hospitality43—who served as tools of surety and security in an unstable and potentially violent situation. Maintaining the host’s responsibility for hospitality was central during the events, which ended with the population of Riga being offered the rights of guests—set within the framework of premodern political hospitality—in their own hometown.

In general, the set of problems informed by the discourses and practices of host–guest relations seemed to shift in the early modern period towards the military and the political, and their contexts of application were suspended between the local and the level of the state. Olof Blomqvist, Sari Nauman, and Sofia Gustavsson point in particular to the different ways in which hospitality continued to structure early modern societies and, vice versa, how social status shaped host–guest relations. Blomqvist examines the reception of prisoners of war in the cities of Uppsala (Sweden) and Aarhus (Denmark) over the years 1700–1721. Both states delegated the responsibility for war prisoners to local communities, which had to accommodate them according to the prisoners’ social standing, meaning that citizens had to receive the enemy in their homes. While this costly, involuntary, and prolonged hospitality created tensions, court records show that they generated surprisingly few major conflicts. Mutual gains, mostly in terms of labor supply, counterweighted the costs of providing hospitality. Social and cultural similarities between hosts and guests simplified matters, nonetheless: the situation for Russian Orthodox prisoners was worse than for Lutheran prisoners.

Nauman analyzes this delegation of hospitality to local communities further by examining the relations between the so-called Refugee Commission of Sweden’s King Charles XII, the local population of Stockholm, and domestic war refugees fleeing to Sweden during the 1710s. The chapter addresses the basic dilemma of hospitality considered at both the local and state levels: namely, that the guest was supposed to eventually move on or abandon his/her temporary status, while fear of lingering strangers led to the negative treatment of refugees. While the king referred to the moral and political obligations of hospitality in his official communications, Nauman stresses how the commission’s mandate pushed to distinguish between desirable and undesirable refugees. As migrants and local communities interrogated such attitudes, the situation quickly escalated into autoimmunization, meaning that security measures taken to ensure the safety of the community ended up endangering it. The Commission began to identify the refugees as a social problem and as a security issue for local communities.

Johannes Ljungberg’s contribution qualifies the predominantly military and political view of hospitality during this period. In mid-eighteenth-century Altona, at that time ruled by the Danish crown, intermittent, accidental policemen of middling status took care of the city’s security. Securing Altona vis-à-vis arriving strangers, these policemen acted in multiple capacities: as private citizens, as economic agents, and as men of law. The strain between these partially exclusive roles led to uneasy negotiations between policemen’s private responsibilities, their community service in public places, and the need to control the domestic spaces of their richer compatriots, from which policemen were normally excluded because of their social standing. The citizen-led securitization of Altona proved untenable in the end; the task was eventually transferred to a professionalized police and decoupled from the issues of hospitality.

In her contribution, Gustafsson examines an unusual case of involuntary hospitality: the forced accommodation of soldiers and officers in the town of Helsinki during the 1750s. Helsinki, with a population of roughly 2000 inhabitants, received as many as 10,000 soldiers, many of whom, according to the Swedish statutes, were to be accommodated in the burghers’ homes, clearly running the risk that the guests would overwhelm the hosts. The task was impossible to meet, but court records show that tensions were fewer than expected. The fact that hospitality was involuntary did not impede the development of benevolent and reciprocal relations in the city. On the contrary, the records show that the situation was beneficial to many burghers, and that local authorities made efforts to provide security, not only to the host community but to the guests as well. The fact that a substantial number of Helsinki inhabitants profited from the situation through beer-brewing businesses simplified matters considerably.

The social and economic development from the late eighteenth century onwards profoundly changed patterns of migration and, accordingly, the character of hospitality and accompanying securitization moves. After the Napoleonic Wars, societies were gradually demilitarized and the accommodation of internal refugees, soldiers, or prisoners of war became a less burning issue. Instead, the increasing proletarization went hand in hand with the growth of poverty in Europe, and the restructuring of the Baltic economies created new demographic movements and mobilities. In the context of formation of nation states, host communities increasingly considered arriving strangers as members of national and ethnic groups. To a larger degree than before, newcomers’ national and ethnic belonging determined whether they were received as guests or rejected as undesirable strangers—and to what extent strangers were conceived of as a threat to the host communities’ security. A pair of contributions, one by Johanna Wassholm and Anna Sundelin, and the other by Leif Runefelt, point to an interesting development of the discourse of hospitality and security related to the growth of a bourgeois or middle-class press. Wassholm and Sundelin examine local communities’ attitudes towards mobile peddlers, a group of growing importance within the context of an increasing consumer market on the European periphery, in this case Finland and Sweden. While many locals appreciated peddlers for the consumer goods they distributed, the press instead turned them into a security issue, painting them as a danger to local communities and the nation as a whole. The press securitized peddlers as threats to morality and household economies, failing to notice the reciprocity between strangers and local communities documented by other sources.

Runefelt’s contribution, which examines the attitudes towards foreign street entertainers in Sweden, goes in a similar direction. The numeric growth of itinerant entertainers around 1850 and their seemingly unproductive—from the point of view of local communities—way of earning their livelihood elicited a strong negative reaction. They came and went, but through the sheer frequency of their visits, vagrant entertainers created a sense of constant presence. They looked more and more like the stranger that stayed rather than one that came and left. This created very little, if any, room for acts of charitable hospitality. The press, again, failed to notice the public appreciation of such performances and, accordingly, any reciprocity in the relationship between entertainers and local communities in Sweden. Instead, the use of exaggerated rhetoric in supralocal media securitized itinerant artists as nuisances of no economic worth.

The last contribution of this volume, by Christina Reimann, looks at the westward expansion of the Baltic Rim. Though the places examined, Antwerp and Rotterdam, are geographically far from the Baltic coasts, they served as intermediate stops for thousands of migrants from the Baltic region on their way to the United States over the period 1880–1914. Reimann examines inherent tensions and contradictions of discourse and practices of hospitality, charting how migrants were securitized through reception, accommodation, (medical) control, and their administrative “processing.” The author goes beyond the oft-used dichotomy between the security measures of authorities and the hospitable practices of aid organizations. All parties involved seemed eager, albeit for very different reasons, to provide security for refugees and to make them leave town as quickly as possible. The harbor and coastal space of hospitality produced there was, again, one of mobility and ambiguous short-term encounters, in keeping with the non-permanent nature of such host–guest relations.

Considered together, these contributions attest to the flexible and variable ways in which historical agents consistently adapted the basic features of hospitality to fit ever-changing circumstances. Some elements did remain stable: all chapters demonstrate the reciprocal and contingent qualities of hospitality acts. Reciprocity considered the obligations and rights placed on hosts and guests alike, urging hosts, at the very least, to recognize their guests and urging guests to pay heed to their hosts’ reluctance. Several of the contributions point out that social equality, mutual economic dependence, or political symmetry between guests and hosts facilitated and smoothed relations between the parties, minimizing the need to securitize the guests. Conversely, reciprocity was undermined when relations between guests and hosts were too unequal. Finally, the contingent character of host–guest relations lay in the fact that they were, on the one hand, guided by past encounters and future expectations of both hosts and guests, and, on the other, they had to be negotiated ad hoc and articulated anew in concrete meetings. This volume captures this duality of Baltic hospitality, one which incorporated both long-lasting experiences and present, immediate urgencies.

As a whole, the volume points to a slow transformation in the nature and types of hospitality on the Baltic Rim. Jezierski shows how missionaries practically negotiated and pried open spaces of hospitality: evangelization contexts created a dangerous balancing act between hospitality and hostility for the involved parties. Christianization notwithstanding, from the turn of the first millennium and until the sixteenth century, the primary context for discourses and practices of hospitality was closely related to processes of establishing networks and trade connections across the Baltic Sea, as shown by Jackson, Boestad, Lukin, and Olsson. In multiple coastal contexts, hosts sought—through economic, social, religious, legal, and securitizing means—to identify and select benefits from potential threats brought about by merchant guests. The following period, from the late sixteenth century onwards, was characterized by wars in the Baltic Sea region. The victors often tended to fashion themselves as hosts and masters in newly conquered regions, as Goetze demonstrates. On the other hand, the common people who felt the consequences of these wars—soldiers, prisoners of war, and refugees in particular—had to adjust their positions as guests and navigate their dual status as insiders and outsiders in the recipient societies, as Blomqvist, Nauman, and Gustafsson illustrate. In the context of the emerging nation states in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the position of outsiders was articulated differently. Wassholm and Sundelin, Runefelt, and Reimann demonstrate the generally hostile attitudes national host communities developed towards peddlers, itinerant entertainers, and refugees in their respective contexts: public officials and dominant social groups would primarily frame them as a threat to the community’s well-being. The ambivalence typical of host–guest relations prevailed on the local level nonetheless.

Transhistorically, the role of local host communities in migration and hospitality contexts remained decisive. They continued to be responsible for offering actual hospitality—often paired with security—and for interacting with strangers on a day-to-day basis. This meant that they often went beyond what was expected of them by laws, customs, rules of conduct, or policies imposed from above. Host communities responded to inherent contingencies and risks involved in host–guest relations by, more or less explicitly, choosing between desirable and undesirable strangers, guests, and migrants. In that manner, they effectively produced their own, situated, practical, and contested ethics and local iterations of Baltic hospitalities, often quite detached from what schoolmasters or philosophers imagined.

Coda: The Legacy of Baltic Hospitality

The line and continuities of Baltic hospitality drawn between Adam of Bremen and Immanuel Kant at the beginning of this introduction did not suddenly end on the cusp of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It continued beyond the chronological scope of this volume, well into the present context in which this book appears and which informs the investigations it gathers and the main problems it posits. It must suffice to mention two additional data points on this long line of Baltic hospitality, which go beyond the chapters of this book.

The first is the 2015 so-called “migration crisis” and its aftermath in many countries around the Baltic Sea, and the way these countries opened, or refused to open, their borders to asylum-seeking migrants coming to Europe from Syria and other affected regions. Strikingly, the political debates and responses on the state as well as European level to this issue were almost universally dissociated from the discourse of hospitality and ethics of host–guest relations. In Scandinavia, and more broadly, in the Baltic Sea region, this wave of migration was seen invariably through the lens of the state: as an economic strain on the welfare-state and/or as a security issue and an assault on the integrity of the nation state. Yet, and contrary to the images of aliens as mere parasites or hostiles, recent studies conducted in the aftermath of this “crisis” have shown that discourses and practices of hospitality were in fact explicitly evoked and employed at the level of civil society and by NGOs—mostly through organizations of religious character, but by no means exclusively so.44 Though often more charitable than rejecting, these hospitalities do reveal the full complexity and contested character of the phenomenon in a migration context that has been exorcized from the ethics of the state.

The second, more recent data point is the 2020 pandemic. The responses to this health crisis arrested mobility in the Baltic region, as well as globally, thus bringing tourism and the hospitality industry to its knees.45 In line with restrictions, the physical conference planned in the run-up for this volume in April 2020 was canceled, as were most other academic ventures, adding to the overall demise of the hospitality business. The radical detachment between the two recent contexts and the contemporary compartmentalization of hospitality as a unilaterally beneficial ethics springing from commodified services calls for a reconsideration of the legacy of hospitality, in both the Baltic region and beyond. By setting these recent predicaments in a longitudinal perspective, it is our hope this book can help imagine another present for hospitality viewed through its multiple pasts.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Adam of Bremen: lib. IV c. 21, 203.

  2. 2.

    Kant (2006 [1795]: 67–109 at 82, emphasis in the original).

  3. 3.

    “Schwellen sind dazu da, überschritten zu werden.” Assman and Assman (1997: 8) and Giesen (2012). See also Simmel (1994 [1909]).

  4. 4.

    Brown (2010), Claviez (2013), and Friese (2010).

  5. 5.

    Miller (2013), Müller (2020), Rüdiger (2017), and Gatrell (2017: 172–175).

  6. 6.

    Schmitt (1950; 1981), and Derrida (2001).

  7. 7.

    Brown (2010), Baker (2013), Giannacopoulos (2013), and Claviez (2013).

  8. 8.

    Foerster (2016), Jezierski (2016), and Melnikova (2012).

  9. 9.

    Blomkvist (2004) and Bartlett (1993); see also Murray (2009) and Mänd and Tamm (2020); Jezierski (2022).

  10. 10.

    Wray (2006), Gatrell (2017: 179–181), Oltmer (2017: 318–322), and Ther (2019: 158–184).

  11. 11.

    Le Blanc and Brugère (2017) and Korstanje (2018); see the special issue E-MIGRINTER (2020).

  12. 12.

    Bendixen and Weller (2020a).

  13. 13.

    Marrus (1985), Sassen (1999), Greefs and Winter (2018), Gustafsson and Sanders (2006), and Ther (2019).

  14. 14.

    Kirby (1990), Gerner et al. (2002), North (2015), Bertell et al. (2019), Jezierski and Hermanson (2016); A Companion to the Hanseatic League (2015), Drost and North (2013), Götz (2014), and Hurd (2010).

  15. 15.

    Zilmer (2006; 2010: 100–101) and Franklin (2021: 4).

  16. 16.

    Liebsch et al. (2016), Montandon (2004), Wodziński (2015), and Hellmuth (1984).

  17. 17.

    Cf. Lashley and Morrison (2001) and Lashley et al. (2007).

  18. 18.

    Derrida (2000), Derrida and Dufourmantelle (2000), and Benveniste (2016: 61–73).

  19. 19.

    Claviez (2013) and Thorpe et al. (2014).

  20. 20.

    Dikeç (2002), Bulley (2016), and Bendixsen and Wyller (2020a: 7–9).

  21. 21.

    Collier and Mahon (1993), Kleist (2017), and Marfleet (2007).

  22. 22.

    Döşemeci (2020: 258–266), Marfleet (2007: 139–143), and Oberprantacher (2016).

  23. 23.

    Huysmans (2006: 2–6), Messer et al. (2012), and Kleist (2017).

  24. 24.

    Krasner (2001: 17–19), Walker (1987: 74; 1991), and Jezierski et al. (2022).

  25. 25.

    For the importance of cities and localities in regulating migration up until the twentieth century, see Greefs and Winter (2018) and Reimann (2020).

  26. 26.

    For a broad definition of migration, see Lucassen and Lucassen (2014) and Messer et al. (2012).

  27. 27.

    The analytical perspective of securitization was developed within constructivist security studies and within the sociology of international relations. See, for the so-called Copenhagen School (CS), Waever (1995) and Buzan et al. (1998). For the so-called Paris school, see Balzacq (2011).

  28. 28.

    The securitization framework has been amply applied and developed for historical purposes by the Research Cluster “Dynamics of Security” at the Universities of Marburg and Gießen. See in particular Conze (2012; 2018: 82–101). For a critique of the concept from its own proponents, see MacDonald (2008) and Balzacq et al. (2016). See also Nauman (2021).

  29. 29.

    Bigo (2002).

  30. 30.

    See, e.g., Buzan et al. (1998).

  31. 31.

    On autoimmunization, see Derrida (2005: 34–35). For examples of discrimination and autoimmunization, see Mavelli (2017) and Burke (2013).

  32. 32.

    Pohl and Wodak (2012).

  33. 33.

    Zwierlein and Graf (2010) and Patzold (2012).

  34. 34.

    Carl et al. (2019) and Kampmann and Niggemann (2013).

  35. 35.

    Kampmann et al. (2017).

  36. 36.

    While “localization” is considered to be a geographic description, “spatialization” refers to the socially constructed character of space. However, the conceptual separation between geographical and social space has fiercely been criticized by Löw (2001) and Friese (2010).

  37. 37.

    Barnett (2005).

  38. 38.

    Gerner et al. (2002: 26–27, 33–123) and Blomkvist (2017).

  39. 39.

    Bawden (2014: 25–28) and Jütte (2015: 11–13).

  40. 40.

    Friese (2004: 71), Dikeç (2002), Donecker (2012), and Franklin (2021: 82–84).

  41. 41.

    Bulley (2016: 4) and Bida (2018: 119–131).

  42. 42.

    Kreide and Langenohl (2019).

  43. 43.

    Morschauser (2003) and Kosto (2012: 55–57).

  44. 44.

    Bendixsen and Wyller (2020a) and Luca and Wilson (2017).

  45. 45.

    Gursoy and Chi (2020).