The Exiles And Political Obligations

Exile, especially political exile, is not only a kind of political violence by which dominant regimes use as an instrument to expel political dissidents and deprive their citizenship so that their governance can be maintained, but also a special historical phenomenon: social injustice initiated by exile caused man-made calamities, and these calamities greatly threatened the safety of citizen's lives and properties, their personal dignities and their freedom, therefore, they had to leave their homeland. For political exiles, exile means that they had to face their tragic lots of losing their citizenship. They tried very hard to restore their citizenship in their homeland or to win other countries' citizenship; citizenship became political exiles' central concern, and if they want to regain the meaning of their living, they had to depend on it.The obligation that exiles had for their unjust homeland is not to be allegiance to but to overthrow it if they want to gain their moral legitimacy. For their host country, exiles had better be understood as their plans' spectators who accepted benefits from them, even be regarded as a kind of group who accepted by the host country and received their benefaction when host country took accepting them as their responsibility, therefore, exiles had an obligation to express their thanks to their host country, and this inevitably means that we have to justify the obligations of exiles to their host country.The loyalty that exiles had for their homeland would always affect exiles' obedience to the obligations that they had for their host country, and they always got into a predicament about to whom they should be loyal. Sometimes exiles would choose to "betray" their homeland and to be really loyal to their host country. By reflecting that exile is a typical kind of political evil, and reflecting different kinds of exiles' tragic lots in different times, we felt pity for the huge groups of thousands of homeless and stateless refugees, what caused their losing of their objects of their loyalty is political loyalty itself, namely, the ethnic consolidation and nationalism that took expulsion as their basic characteristic caused human beings' fanatic loyalty and xenophobic feelings. In this respect, the study of the problems of today's exiles/refugees is full of ethical meaning in politics.