S862 COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF TRANSNATIONAL LAW [56:S855 him the character of a citizen . . . possessed of certain municipal rights.” 31 Nationality, alone, could not confer citizenship or its associated municipal rights. B. The Challenges of War and Nationality: World War I World War I, in effect, created the original dialogue regarding statelessness. Stateless persons, denationalized or otherwise unrecognized by their State of origin, had undefined status under States’ municipal laws. During the War, this meant that States took liberties in conscripting stateless persons hailing from allied territory. Further, it meant that States took no risks in detaining stateless persons hailing from enemy territory. In the aftermath of the War, crises of statelessness continued; World War I had precipitated the Russian Revolution and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, both of which led to the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of denationalized persons. The wartime abuse of stateless persons, through either arbitrary conscription or detention, proved itself a legal, political, and moral morass. 32 Great Britain, as an example, conscripted stateless Poles and Jews who had previously held Russian nationality but had fled persecution, losing their legal status in the process. 33 Great Britain, entitled by a bilateral treaty 34 to conscript Britain-based Russian nationals, assessed stateless persons’ nationality based on British municipal law, which did not recognize the possibility of statelessness. 35 The British government identified stateless Poles and Jews as Russian nationals. Accordingly, the stateless Poles and Jews fled persecution in Russia, only to find themselves conscripted into the hard-labor battalions of a foreign State. 31. William Griffith, Domicile and Allegiance, or, Civil and Political Status, and Extradition, 15 ASS’N REFORM & CONDITIONAL L. NATIONS R. CONF. 165, 165 (1892) (quoting Lord Chancellor Westbury in Udny v. Udny, L.R. I., Sc. Ap. 457). 32. R.S. Fraser, Nationality and Allegiance, 4 INT’L L. NOTES 12, 13 (1917). 33. 3 JOHN BASSETT MOORE, A DIGEST OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 622 (noting that Russia “forb[ade] the return of her subjects who might choose to abandon her protection and escape from their allegiances”). 34. An Agreement Concluded Between His Majesty’s Government and the Provisional Government of Russia Relative to the Reciprocal Liability to Military Service of British Subjects Resident in Russia and Russian Subjects Resident in Great Britain, July 16, 1917, Rus.-Gr. Brit., art. 3, 1917 Cd. 8588. See also Sharman Kadish, Bolsheviks and British Jews: The Anglo-Jewish Community, Britain and the Russian Revolution, 50 JEWISH SOC. STUDIES 239, 249 (1988). 35. Fraser, supra note 32, at 13. Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2954729