Abstract
While the twentieth century came to be known as the century of the refugee,1 the numbers of stateless persons on the European continent fluctuated during its course. Peaks occurred at key moments, including the end of the First World War, the end of the Second World War and the collapse of communism. This does not mean that people did not flee their states of origin due to ‘a well founded fear of persecution’ (to use the 1951 United Nations definition)2 at other times during the course of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, at the three moments identified above, the numbers of refugees reached peaks due to a combination of factors, including imperial and state collapse. The first of these periods consisted of the First World War and its aftermath, the era in which the refugee and the concept of such a person developed, especially in the early 1920s. The Armenian Genocide of 1915 represents an important point in this process, both because of the sheer numbers of people forced out of their homeland towards Syria and because of the existence of a now large historiography on this subject.3 It is estimated that between 1.5 million and 2 million people fled their homes in southeastern Anatolia towards the Syrian desert, of whom about half died, while others moved westwards.4 But the Armenian Genocide simply represented the most dramatic example of a process occurring throughout Eastern Europe, in particular in the era of the First World War.
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Notes
Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1985).
See, for example: Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford, 2005); Vahakn Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide (Oxford, 1995); Richard G. Hovannissian, ed., The Armenian Genocide: History, Policy, Ethics (London, 1992).
Robert F. Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (London, 1992), pp. 145–6.
Benjamin Lieberman, Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe (Chicago, IL, 2006), pp. 53–79. See also Mark Levene’s essay below.
Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Late Ottoman Genocides: The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and Young Turkish Population and Extermination Policies: Introduction’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 10 (2008), pp. 7–14.
Renée Hirschon, ‘Consequences of the Lausanne Convention: An Overview’, in Renée Hirschon, ed., Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange Between Greece and Turkey (Oxford, 2003), pp. 14–15.
See the discussion in Matthew Frank, Expelling the Germans: British Opinion and Post-1945 Population Transfer in Context (Oxford, 2007), pp. 13–38.
Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia During World War One (Bloomington, IN, 1999).
Norman Stone and Michael Glenny, The Other Russia (London, 1990), p. xv.
John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Attrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (London, 2001); Peter Cahalan, Belgian Refugee Relief in England During the Great War (New York, 1982).
See, for instance, Panikos Panayi, Ethnic Minorities in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Germany: Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Turks and Others (London, 2000), pp. 145–8.
Marrus, Unwanted, pp. 81–96; Claudia Skran, Refugees in Inter-War Europe: The Emergence of a Regime (Oxford, 1995).
As an introduction to these issues see, for instance, Tony Kushner and Katherine Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide: Global, National and Local Perspectives During the Twentieth Century (London, 1999), pp. 126–71.
Simon Segal, Poland in World War Two (London, 1943).
See, for example, Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in the Ukraine (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005).
Omar Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1942–45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare, 2nd edn (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 129–41.
See for example: Martin Conway and José Gotovich, eds, Europe in Exile: European Exile Communities in Britain, 1940–45 (Oxford, 2001).
See, for instance, Detlef Brandes, ‘Die Deutschen in Russland und der Sowjetunion’, in Klaus J. Bade, ed., Deutsche im Ausland — Fremde in Deutschland: Migration in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Munich, 1992), pp. 130–4.
Anne Sheehy, The Crimean Tatars and the Volga Germans: Soviet Treatment of Two National Minorities (London, 1971), pp. 9–12; Brian Glyn Williams, ‘The Hidden Ethnic Cleansing of Muslims in the Soviet Union: The Exile and Repatriation of the Crimean Tatars’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 37 (2002), pp. 323–47.
Timothy Snyder, ‘The Causes of Ukrainian-Polish Ethnic Cleansing 1943’, Past and Present, no. 179 (2003), pp. 197–234.
Eugene Kulischer, Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917–1947 (New York, 1948), p. 305.
See, for example: Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, The German Expellees: Victims in War and Peace (London, 1993); Siegfried Bethlehem, Heimatvertreibung, DDR-Flucht, Gastarbeiterwanderung: Wanderungsströme und Wanderungspolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1982); and Tony Radspieler, The Ethnic German Refugee in Austria (The Hague, 1955).
Panikos Panayi, Outsiders: A History of European Minorities (London, 1999), pp. 125–6.
Ruth Gay, Safe Among the Germans: Liberated Jews After World War Two (London, 2002).
Thomas Lane, Victims of Stalin and Hitler: The Exodus of Poles and Balts to Britain (Basingstoke, 2004).
Jacques Vernant, The Refugee in the Post-War World (London, 1953), p. 225.
Joseph B. Schechtman, ‘Compulsory Transfer of the Turkish Minority from Bulgaria’, Journal of Central European Affairs, vol. 12 (1952), pp. 157–8; Huey Luis Kostanick, The Turkish Resettlement of Bulgarian Turks, 1950–1953 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1957), pp. 106–8.
Gordon Brook-Shepherd, The Storm Birds: Soviet Post-War Defectors (London, 1988).
Hartmut Berghoff, ‘Population Change and Its Repercussions on the Social History of the Federal Republic’, in Klaus Larres and Panikos Panayi, eds, The Federal Republic of Germany Since 1949: Politics, Society and Economy Before and After Unification (London, 1996), p. 40.
Krystyna Iglicka, Poland’s Post-War Dynamic of Migration (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 42–3, 100.
Panikos Panayi, ‘Refugees in Twentieth-Century Britain: A Brief History’, in Vaughan Robinson, ed., The International Refugee Crisis: British and Canadian Responses (London, 1993), pp. 104–5.
Christoph Pallaske, Migration aus Polen in die Bundesrepublik Deutschland in den 1980er und 1990er Jahren: Migrationsverläufe und Eingliedrungsprozesse in sozilageschichtlicher Perspektive (Munster, 2000), covers the range of reasons for Polish migration to Germany.
George Schöpflin and Hugh Poulton, Rumania’s Ethnic Hungarians (London, 1990), pp. 17–19; Rudolf Joó, The Hungarian Minority Situation in Ceauçescu’s Rumania (New York, 1984), pp. 101–8.
Darina Vasileva, ‘Bulgarian Turkish Migration and Return’, International Migration Review, vol. 26 (1992), pp. 342–52; Erhard Franz, ‘The Exodus of Turks from Bulgaria’, Asian and African Studies, vol. 25 (1991), pp. 91–4.
See, for instance: Paul Kolstoe, Russians in the Former Soviet Republics (London, 1995); Neil Melvin, Russians Beyond Russia (London, 1995); and Jeff Chinn and Robert Kaiser, Russians as the New Minority: Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Soviet Successor States (Oxford, 1996).
John F. R. Wright, Suzanne Goldenberg and Richard Schofield, eds, Transcaucasian Boundaries (London, 1996).
United Nations High Commission for Refugees, The State of the World’s Refugees (Oxford, 1995), p. 24.
United Nations High Commission for Refugees, The State of the World’s Refugees (Oxford, 1997), p. 200.
United Nations High Commission for Refugees, The State of the World’s Refugees (1995), p. 12.
Vladimir Grecic, ‘Former Yugoslavia’, in Solon Ardittis, ed., The Politics of East-West Migration (London, 1994), p. 131.
Roy Gutman, A Witness to Genocide: The First Inside Account of the Horrors of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ in Bosnia (Shaftesbury, 1993), p. 107.
Sumantra Bose, Bosnia After Dayton: Nationalist Partition and International Intervention (London, 2002).
Florian Bieber and Zidas Daskalovski, eds, Understanding the War in Kosovo (London, 2003).
World Refugee Survey 1991 (Washington, DC, 1991), p. 73.
Tom Gallagher, ‘Vatra Rumânească and Resurgent Nationalism in Romania’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 15 (1992).
Andrew Geddes, Immigration and European Integration: Towards Fortress Europe (Manchester, 2000).
There is, for instance, a large literature on Jewish and non-Jewish refugees from the Nazis to Britain, focusing upon a range of themes, including their impact. See, for instance: W. E. Mosse et al., eds, Second Chance: Two Centuries of German-Speaking Jews in the United Kingdom (Tübingen, 1991); Gerhard Hirschfeld, ed., Exile in Great Britain: Refugees from Hitler’s Germany (Leamington Spa, 1984); Daniel Snowman, The Hitler Emigres: The Cultural Impact on Britain of Refugees from Nazism (London, 2003); Marian Malet and Anthony Grenville, eds, Changing Countries: The Experience and Achievement of German-Speaking Exiles from Hitler in Britain, 1933 to Today (London, 2002); Peter Alter, ed., Out of the Third Reich: Refugee Historians in Post-War Britain (London, 1998); J. M. Ritchie, German Exiles: British Perspectives (New York, 1997).
See, for example: contributions to Hirschon, Crossing the Aegean; Dimitri Pentzopoulos, The Balkan Exchange of Minorities and Its Impact on Greece (London, 2002); Elisabeth Kontogiorgi, Population Exchange in Greek Macedonia: The Rural Settlement of Refugees 1922–1930 (Oxford, 2006); Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey (London, 2007).
See, for instance: Gustavo Corni, Hitler’s Ghettos (London, 2003); and Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933–45 (London, 1975).
See, for example: Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA, 2004); Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945: A Study in Occupation Politics (London, 1981); and Lower, Nazi Empire-Building.
Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-C entury Europe (London, 2001), p. 2.
Cathie Carmichael, Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans: Nationalism and the Destruction of Tradition (London, 2002).
Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, Ethnic Cleansing (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 1–4.
Lieberman, Terrible Fate. See also Stevan Béla Várdy, T. Hunt Tooley and Otto von Habsburg, eds, Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe (New York, 2003).
Christhard Hoffmann, Werner Bergmann and Helmut Walter Smith, eds, Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History (Ann Arbor, MI, 2002).
See, for instance: Christopher Bennet, Yugoslavia’s Bloody Collapse (London, 1995); and Laura Silber and Alan Little, The Death of Yugoslavia (London: Penguin, 1996).
See Christopher J. Walker, Armenia: The Survival of a Nation (London, 1990), pp. 177–89.
See, for instance, Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford, 1998).
Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, 2nd edn (London, 2000).
Panikos Panayi, ‘Dominant Societies and Minorities in the Two World Wars’, in Panikos Panayi, ed., Minorities in Wartime: National and Racial Groupings in Europe, North America and Australia during the Two World Wars (Oxford, 1993), pp. 18–19.
Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (London, 2008), pp. 78–178.
Jörg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945 (New York, 2006).
See, for instance, Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (London, 2007), pp. 43–390.
See, for instance, Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (London, 2001).
Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1983).
See, for example, Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (London, 1994); Judah, Serbs.
Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Oxford, 2010); Panayi, Outsiders.
Walker Connor, ‘A Nation is a Nation, is a State, is an Ethnic Group is a …’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 1 (1978), p. 382, claimed that in 1971, out of ‘132 entities generally considered to be states’, only 12 or 9.1 per cent ‘can justifiably be described as nation-states’ with a unitary ethnic group.
See, for instance, Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (Cambridge, 2005).
Justin McCarthy, The Ottoman Peoples and the End of Empire (London, 2001), pp. 128–48.
Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 (Princeton, NJ, 1995).
See the analysis of the nationality question in Prussia in William W. Hagen, Germans, Poles and Jews: The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772–1914 (London, 1980).
Ulrich Herbert, ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies (Oxford, 1999).
The classic work on this subject is, Theodor Schieder, ed., Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa, 4 Volumes (Bonn, 1954–1961).
Ulrich Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Labour in Germany under the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1997); Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, Vom Zwangsarbeiter zum heimatlosen Ausländer (Göttingen, 1985).
Bernard Wasserstein, Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews in Europe Since 1945 (London, 1996), pp. 1–36, 85–102.
Pavel Markovic Poljan and Žanna Antonovna Zajonċkovskaja, ‘Ostarbeiter in Deutschland und Daheim: Ergebnisse einer Fragenbogenanalyse’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 41 (1993); Diana Kay and Robert Miles, Refugees or Migrant Workers? European Volunteer Workers in Britain (London, 1992).
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Panayi, P. (2011). Imperial Collapse and the Creation of Refugees in Twentieth-Century Europe. In: Panayi, P., Virdee, P. (eds) Refugees and the End of Empire. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230305700_1
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