This article probes the consequences of basing post-World War I citizenship regimes on the Habsburg imperial network system for the control of mobility, a system known among specialists as Heimatrecht or pertinency. To date most of the historiography has focused on what this meant for national minorities in nationalizing states, with the most important studies thus far looking at the experience of Jews in Austria and Poland. We argue that though the national exclusionary tools of postwar pertinency are of undoubted importance, a larger, social trauma was experienced through post-Habsburg Europe, one that affected far more people and left many facing the consequences of potential statelessness. This article focuses on how postwar pertinency affected the worlds of work, welfare, and expulsion in the immigrant-rich industrial port town of Fiume, Europe's smallest postwar successor state.In November 1918, the Habsburg Monarchy dissolved and about 50 million people found themselves without a state. By early 1919, politicians, lawyers, diplomats, business elites, and activists at the Paris Peace conference were discussing plans for replacing the Habsburg imperial complex with future nation-states. 1 At the heart of these negotiations was a liberal vision of rights-oriented citizenship. No one in Paris wanted Bolshevik councils to serve as the basis for the new states: the dominant dream was to set up parliamentary, capitalist, free-market, secular democracies that would protect individual rights of citizens, hasten prosperity, and forestall ethnic violence. 2 When the first treaties creating the post-Habsburg successor states were signed, they outlined how citizenship in