The Forty Years' Crisis: Refugees in Europe 1919-1959, Birkbeck College, University of London, 14-16 September 2010

Despite the transnational turn in Anglophone historiography, research on Europe's refugee crisis and on the diverse experiences of uprooted people during the period of the two world wars lacks a common historical framework. Aiming to correct this gap, this conference, organized by Jessica Reinisch (Birkbeck) and Matthew Frank (University of Leeds), brought together over thirty scholars to consider the conceptual coherence of a single 'crisis' in Europe, and the methods and challenges of integrating the history of refugees and displaced persons into a broader narrative of the twentieth century. The conference focused on the development of national and international responses to the problem of refugees and on the continuities and discontinuities in humanitarian relief efforts from the First World War through to the mass movement west of Hungarian refugees in 1959.

In his keynote address, Michael R. Marrus (University of Toronto) suggested that refugees represented a distinctly modern phenomenon, with 1919 as a clear breaking-point in international history that therefore provided an orienting theme and temporal boundary for the conference. Only the peculiar combinations of factors in the postwar era, including a more restrictive passport system and new assumptions about the responsibility of the state for the social welfare of its citizens, contributed to the construction of refugees as 'intolerable burdens' on state institutions. The very structure of the modern nation state thus made certain groups vulnerable outsiders, and the concomitant rise of international institutions such as minority rights treaties could not provide an effective response to the exclusivist logic of modern nationalism, which remained a challenge for the present international system. The tension between cautious optimism about the emergence of international relief mechanisms and lament for the succession of refugee crises over the course of the century was a striking feature of the discussion following the lecture and was evident throughout the conference. Discussants identified a note of nostalgia for the stability of the pre-1914 period in the lecture, and questioned whether the rise of supranational institutions like the European Union, omitted from Marrus' analysis, indicated an alternative history of cosmopolitan visions emerging along side the demands for homogenous nation-states.

In 1957, Elfan Reese declared that the twentieth century was the 'century of the homeless man'. Yet, as the first panel on narratives and myths surrounding the refugee crisis revealed, such received interpretations require their own careful historical study. Peter Gatrell (University of Manchester) contextualized the campaign to draw attention to the continuing plight of refugees during World Refugee Year (1960) within the dynamics of both the Cold War and decolonization. For some states, support for World Refugee Year served as an apology for allowing refugees to languish in DP (Displaced Person) camps long after the war. Meanwhile other states like France avoided participation in the campaign due to the entanglements of empire and the continuing creation of refugees during the Algerian War. Reflecting on the gaps in contemporary refugee historiography, Tony Kushner (Southampton University) suggested that the difficulty of transcending national narratives and of confronting traumatic history contributed to the marginalization of refugee history in British historiography. Echoing Peter Gatrell's discussion of the mobilization of refugee history for present political conflict, Antonio Ferrara (University of Naples) discussed the first, and still prominent, studies of European refugees and population movements by Eugene Kulischer and Joseph Schechtmann, both refugees whose lives and careers revealed the bond between biography and scholarship in the early study of the modern refugee phenomenon. Despite a common background, distinct political commitments, including Schechtman's work on behalf of the revisionist Zionist party, informed their differing diagnoses of the world refugee problem. The panel thus highlighted the political and cultural motivations behind early interpretations of the European refugee crisis, as well as the way in which actors involved in publicizing the plight of refugees after the Second World War sought to distinguish the refugee question from other debates over the meaning of human rights. It was acknowledged in discussion, however, that the contemporary prominence of the language of human rights helped to spur interest in reintegrating refugee...