Table Of ContentRefugees in Europe, 1919–1959
iii
Refugees in Europe, 1919–1959
A Forty Years’ Crisis?
Edited by
Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch
Bloomsbury Academic
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Contents
List of Abbreviations vi
Notes on Contributors vii
1 ‘The Story Stays the Same’? Refugees in Europe from the ‘Forty Years’
Crisis’ to the Present Jessica Reinisch and Matthew Frank 1
2 Refugees: The Timeless Problem Zara Steiner 21
3 The Forty Years’ Crisis: Making the Connections Peter Gatrell 33
4 Writing Refugee History – Or Not Tony Kushner 51
5 The Imperial Refugee: Refugees and Refugee-Creation in the Ottoman
Empire and Europe Jared Manasek 67
6 The Forty Years’ Crisis: The Jewish Dimension Mark Levene 85
7 The League of Nations, Refugees and Individual Rights Barbara Metzger 101
8 The Myth of ‘Vacant Places’: Refugees and Group
Resettlement Matthew Frank 121
9 Old Wine in New Bottles? UNRRA and the Mid-Century World of
Refugees Jessica Reinisch 147
10 The United States and the Forty Years’ Crisis Carl J. Bon Tempo 177
11 The Empire Returns: ‘Repatriates’ and ‘Refugees’ from French
Algeria Claire Eldridge 195
12 Colonialism, Sovereignty and the History of the International Refugee
Regime Glen Peterson 213
Bibliography 229
Index 249
List of Abbreviations
AFSC American Friends Service Committee
ANFANOMA Association Nationale des Français d’Afrique du Nord, d’Outre-
Mer et de leurs Amis
ARA American Relief Administration
CRB Committee for Relief in Belgium
DP Displaced Person
FDR Franklin Delano Roosevelt
FLN National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale)
ICEM Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration
ICRC International Committee of the Red Cross
IDP Internally displaced person
IGCR Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees
ILO International Labour Organization
IOM International Organization for Migration
IRO International Refugee Organization
LNHCR League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
MCP Malayan Communist Party
MERRA Middle East Relief and Refugee Administration
OAS Secret Army Organization (Organisation de l’armée secrete)
OFRRO Office of Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation Operations
RIIA Royal Institute of International Affairs
RSC Refugee Settlement Commission
SHAEF Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force
UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
UNRRA United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration
UNRWA United Nations Relief and Works Agency
WCC World Council of Churches
WRB War Refugee Board
WRY World Refugee Year
Notes on Contributors
Carl J. Bon Tempo is Associate Professor of History at the University at Albany, SUNY.
He is the author of Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the
Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2008). His recent essays have appeared in The
Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013),
Immigrants in American History: Arrival, Adaptation, and Integration (ABC-CLIO,
2013), and The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (Oxford University
Press, 2012). He is currently writing a book, Immigration: An American History, with
Hasia Diner for Yale University Press. He earned his PhD in United States history from
the University of Virginia, Virginia, United States, in 2004.
Claire Eldridge is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Leeds.
Her research engages with questions of memory, migration and identity construction
in colonial and postcolonial France. Much of this work has focused on exploring
the commemorative legacies of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62) in
France, particularly in relation to the pied-noir and harki communities. She is also
interested in the relationship between the French military and the European settler
population of colonial Algeria during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She
is the author of From Empire to Exile: History and Memory within the Pied-Noir and
Harki Communities, 1962-2012, published by Manchester University Press in 2016.
Matthew Frank is Associate Professor in International History at the University of
Leeds. He is a graduate of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University
of London and St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He is the author of Expelling
the Germans (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Making Minorities History (Oxford
University Press, 2017) and has published widely on the diplomacy of displacement
in twentieth-century Europe. He is currently co-editor of the journal Contemporary
European History.
Peter Gatrell is Professor of Economic History at the University of Manchester, where
he is co-director of the Centre for the Cultural History of Modern War and affiliated
to the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute. He is the author of a trilogy
of books on refugee history, including A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia
during World War 1 (Indiana University Press, 1999) and The Making of the Modern
Refugee (Oxford University Press, 2013), as well as books on Russian economic and
social history. His edited book on the European refugee crisis during the First World
War, entitled Europe on the Move, will appear in summer 2017. He has directed several
collaborative research projects and is one of the general editors of the encyclopaedia,
‘1914-1918 online’. In 2011 he was elected a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.
He is currently writing a history of Europe since 1945 seen through the lens of
migration, to be published by Penguin Books and Basic Books.
Notes on Contributors ix
Tony Kushner is Professor in the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish
Relations and the History Department at the University of Southampton. His most
recent book is The Battle of Britishness: Migrant Journeys since 1685 (Manchester
University Press, 2012). He is currently working on a study of the construction
of ethnicity in the British armed forces and two books relating to the Holocaust,
entitled Journeys from the Abyss: The Holocaust and Forced Migration and, with Dr
Aimee Bunting, Co-Presents to the Holocaust. He is co-editor of the journal Patterns of
Prejudice and deputy editor of Jewish Culture and History.
Mark Levene is Reader in Comparative History at the University of Southampton. His
writing ranges across genocide, Jewish history and environmental and peace issues,
especially focusing on anthropogenic climate change. His most recent works include
the two-volume The Crisis of Genocide: The European Rimlands, 1912-1953 (Oxford
University Press, 2013), for which he received the biennial Lemkin Award from the
New York-based Institute for the Study of Genocide in 2015.
Jared Manasek is Assistant Professor of History at Pace University in New York, and a
graduate of Columbia University, New York. His work focuses on the history of forced
migration, humanitarianism and international law, as well as the late Habsburg and
Ottoman Empires.
Barbara Metzger is Senior Research Associate at the Centre of International Studies
at the University of Cambridge. Her research has focused on emerging human rights
concepts during the interwar years, transnationalism and the UN human rights
regime. Currently, she is conducting research into the legacies of the Second World
War. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, with a thesis entitled ‘The
League of Nations and Human Rights: From Practice to Theory’ and has published
several articles in the field.
Glen Peterson is Professor of Chinese History at the University of British Columbia.
His current research focuses on refugee movements into and out of China during
the twentieth century, China’s participation in the League of Nations and ILO efforts
to address problems of forced migration, and China’s place in the evolution of the
international refugee regime in post-war Asia. He is the author of numerous books
and articles on these subjects, including The Power of Words: Literacy and Revolution
in South China (UBC Press, 1997), Education, Culture and Identity in Twentieth
Century China, with Ruth Hayhoe and Yongling Lu (Michigan University Press, 2001)
and Overseas Chinese in the People’s Republic of China (Routledge, 2012). A Chinese-
language edition of the last book was published in 2014 and reprinted in 2016 by
the Hong Kong Society for Indonesian Studies and the Yayasan NABIL Foundation,
Jakarta.
Jessica Reinisch is Reader in Modern European History at Birkbeck, University of
London. She has published on the aftermath of the Second World War, particularly
on post-war relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction projects, including those
organized by UNRRA. Her publications include The Perils of Peace: Public Health in
x Notes on Contributors
Occupied Germany (Oxford University Press, 2013, available as a free eBook); The
Disentanglements of Populations: Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in postwar
Europe, 1944-1949 (Palgrave, 2011, edited with Elizabeth White); and Post-War
Reconstruction in Europe: International Perspectives, 1945-1949 (Oxford University
Press, 2011, edited with Mark Mazower and David Feldman). She was awarded a
Wellcome Investigator Award for her project ‘The Reluctant Internationalists’, and is
working on a history of UNRRA. She is the director of the Centre for the Study of
Internationalism at Birkbeck, and co-editor of Contemporary European History.
Zara Steiner did her first BA at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania; a second BA in
history at St. Anne’s College, Oxford; and a PhD at Radcliffe College, Cambridge,
Massachusetts. She has been teaching at New Hall (now Murray Edwards College),
University of Cambridge, as Fellow and Director of Studies in History, for some 30
years. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. Her many publications include The Foreign
Office and Foreign Policy, 1898-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1969); Britain and
the Origins of the First World War (Macmillan, 1977); The Lights that Failed: European
International History 1919-1933 (Oxford University Press, 2005); The Triumph of the
Dark: European International History, 1933-1939 (Oxford University Press, 2011).
