Refugees in Europe, 1919-1959: A Forty Years' Crisis

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This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Refugees in Europe, 1919-1959 offers a new history of Europes mid-20th century as seen through its recurrent refugee crises. By bringing together in one volume recent research on a range of different contexts of groups of refugees and refugee policy, it sheds light on the common assumptions that underpinned the history of refugees throughout the period under review. The essays foreground the period between the end of the First World War, which inaugurated a series of new international structures to deal with displaced populations, and the late 1950s, when Europe's home-grown refugee problems had supposedly been solved and attention shifted from the identification of an exclusively European refugee problem to a global one. Borrowing from E. H. Carrs The Twenty Years Crisis, first published in 1939, the editors of this volume test the idea that the two post-war eras could be represented as a single crisis of a European-dominated international order of nation states in the face of successive refugee crises which were both the direct consequence of that system and a challenge to it. Each of the chapters reflects on the utility and limitations of this notion of a forty years crisis for understanding the development of specific national and international responses to refugees in the mid-20th century. Contributors to the volume also provide alternative readings of the history of an international refugee regime, in which the non-European and colonial world are assigned a central role in the narrative.

Reviews

This collection succeeds because its expert authors and editors elucidate the rich variety and the ubiquity of the refugee experience, without eliding its devastating inhumane aspects. Readers of this journal may read it for the experience of eastern Europe in the twentieth century, yet it has something to teach historians of every continent. * Slavic Review *
The anthology, which in view of the topicality of the topics and its methodological breadth is a profitable read for those who are particularly interested as well as for teaching, thus marks a promising change of perspective. * H-Soz-Kult (Bloomsbury Translation) *
Penned by prominent specialists, these essays offer the most comprehensive account of Europes refugee problem from the end of World War One to the decolonization era. They also provide an invaluable point of comparison with the ongoing asylum and humanitarian crisis affecting the European Union. * Daniel Cohen, Rice University, USA *
Who can assess Europe today without the catastrophic situation of refugees, hundreds of thousands of whom are knocking on its doors In this excellent volume, historians Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch assemble essays that put this inescapable phenomenon into its complicated and yet sometimes repetitious historical context. Using the framework of a forty years crisis framed by the two World Wars, the editors present innovative approaches to Europes refugee past, suggesting new ways of looking one of the great upheavals of our time. * Michael R. Marrus, University of Toronto, Canada *

Author Bio

Matthew Frank is Associate Professor in International History at the University of Leeds, UK. Jessica Reinisch is Reader in Modern European History at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK.