TY - JOUR
AU - Hondius,, Dienke
AB - For readers in Europe, refugee and asylum issues have been part of everyday news for at least the last five years. Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch’s edited volume Refugees in Europe, 1919–1959: A Forty Years’ Crisis? was initiated by the organizers of a conference in London in September 2010, which focused on the history of refugees in twentieth-century Europe, with particular reference to the initiatives and work conducted by the United Nations, its precursor organizations, and other international bodies. The fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations’ first “World Refugee Year” (1959–1960) took place in London at the same time. The editors remark that this commemoration’s aim was “to raise funds for the cash-strapped UNHCR and heighten awareness of international efforts in support of refugees” (10). There was, according to Frank and Reinisch, no consistent historiography that placed the many different kinds of refugees, migrants, and uprooted people within a common framework, or situated the often conflicting national and international priorities in the management of the refugee “threat” within their wider historical context; it was mostly episodic or nationally bounded and concerned with a specific group of displaced people or sites of displacement. For example, Michael Marrus’s important work The Unwanted: European Refugees from the First World War through the Cold War (1985) was a study of refugees but focused on Jewish refugees, specifically, in the 1930s and 1940s. It is indeed surprising how little academic historical work on refugees has appeared, given the heavy presence of the topic in media around the world on an almost daily basis. The book aims to shed light on the common assumptions and frameworks that underpin the history of refugees and refugee policy throughout the period from 1919 to 1959, and it does so with a clear eye on very recent and contemporary developments: the recent and in many ways ongoing phenomenon of refugees and migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Eritrea, and Somalia seeking sanctuary in Europe since 2011. Historians have not been very active in the broader field of refugee studies, whereas scholars in international relations, political science, law, sociology, and anthropology have done much more. The editors give a very good overview of existing smaller-scale historical studies in a variety of smaller fields, for example in German, French, and other national state-bound migration histories, in displaced persons histories, and in Cold War studies. And across the book, the authors discuss many of the important events in the 1919–1959 period: the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the appointment of Fridtjof Nansen as head of the first international refugee agency in 1921, the 1933 Refugee Convention, the Evian Conference in 1938, World War II conferences and meetings (such as the Bermuda Conference in 1943), the 1951 Refugee Convention, and World Refugee Year in 1959–1960. Barbara Metzger’s essay on the League of Nations, refugees, and individual rights presents first-class microhistories of these crucial developments; she also focuses on James McDonald’s 1935 letter of resignation following the Nuremberg Laws in Nazi Germany. Equally fascinating essays are Jessica Reinisch’s essay on the history of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), and Tony Kushner’s critical analysis of refugee histories compared with developments in labor history, women’s history, black history, and immigration history; moreover, the authors do not only refer to academic work but also to applications in museums, exhibitions, and educational projects. Mark Levene’s essay on the Jewish dimension of refugee studies across Europe in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries contains a wealth of new information. Claire Eldridge addresses empire and post-empire histories with regard to French Algeria; however, overall the book could have included more cases as well as comparative work on decolonization wars, refugees, and migration histories in other European countries and their former, vanishing, or remnant empires. Glen Peterson’s final essay, “Colonialism, Sovereignty and the History of the International Refugee Regime,” presents a welcome longer-term analysis as well as short overview of relevant topics for further research, including primary sources and a bibliography. For example, his take on the development of thought regarding various regimes of labor, including forced and slave labor, in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as his discussion of the concept of refugees from colonial rule (215–224), deserves to be applied further in connection with other existing postcolonial and decolonizing terminologies of identifications, as well as with the terminologies of diasporic and war-related migration. Organizational archives are listed in the book, and all articles contain original primary archival research. The volume is recommended for use in a variety of coursework. It facilitates further student research, and it could also be used for studies after 1959–1960. Students interested in more recent, current, and ongoing refugee and migration news, not only in Europe but in the U.S., Central America, and many other parts of the world, will find much in this volume to design up-to-date study projects. © The Author 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch, editors. Refugees in Europe, 1919–1959: A Forty Years’ Crisis?
JO - The American Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ahr/rhz296
DA - 2020-10-21
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/matthew-frank-and-jessica-reinisch-editors-refugees-in-europe-1919-zdqqNMO0eT
SP - 1501
EP - 1502
VL - 125
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -