Becoming a Continent of Immigration: Charting Europe's Migration History, 1919–2019

INTRODUCTION

Widespread belief in economic liberalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, combined with the development of safer, faster, and cheaper transportation, paved the way for huge migration to occur. Between 1850 and 1914, 55 million people departed Europe, with the vast majority heading to the Americas during what Hatton and Williamson term “the age of mass migration”.¹ According to McKeown, something similar in scale and duration took place at approximately the same time – albeit enduring for slightly longer – involving Indians and southern Chinese moving to Southeast Asia and people from north-eastern Asia and Russia to North Asia.² However, “the booming of the guns of August 1914 brought to a sudden close the era during which foreigners were relatively free to traverse borders”, according to John Torpey.³ States in Europe and North America, in particular, reintroduced passport controls with vigour during World War I and instead of lifting these bellicose measures at the end of the conflict, they generally reinforced them. The United States led the way in introducing such restrictions. Following on from the imposition of the 1917 Literacy Act came the 1921 and 1924 US Immigration Acts, which limited arrivals by introducing quotas for countries.⁴ The development in much of Europe of the modern welfare state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century simultaneously gave rise to more restrictive immigration policies in Europe, thereby leading to an even greater distinction between citizens and non-citizens.⁵

Even as states’ “expropriation of the legitimate means of movement” gained more traction, people continued to move on a massive scale.⁶ Europe was no different. The three books under review here consider 1) how states in Europe dealt with the admission and regulation of immigration since 1919, and 2) how the criteria for admission and thus the categories of immigrants and refugees changed over time as a result. Matthew Frank (University of Leeds) and Jessica Reinisch's (Birkbeck) edited collection, Refugees in Europe 1919–1959: A Forty Years’ Crisis?, analyses reactions to the new and numerous refugees who emerged after World War I due to the fallout from war, the end of various European empires, and the creation of new nation states. Peter Gatrell's (University of Manchester) The Unsettling of Europe: How Migration Reshaped a Continent examines the post-World War II history of European migration, including colonial and postcolonial migration to Europe and the continent's dependence on migrant labour. David Scott FitzGerald's (University of California, San Diego) Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers provides a comparative analysis of the asylum policies of the US, Canada, Australia, and Europe since the 1980s.

These three books deal with the aftermath of the so-called age of mass migration that followed World War I, when Europeans could no longer emigrate across the Atlantic in such huge numbers. One of the world's leading textbooks for students and scholars on migration, Castles and Miller's The Age of Migration,⁷ posited that a new global age of migration began after 1945 and increased further from the 1980s onwards.⁸ Did this apply to Europe?

This article provides a chronological overview of Europe's migration history since 1919 through the prism of the three studies under review. It pays particular attention to noting how Europe coped with various types of inward movement since 1919 and identifying what effect Europe's reaction had on migration patterns over time. It also dwells on the question of whether Europe entered an age of migration at any stage during this one-hundred-year period and concludes that Europe experienced an “age of refugees” between World War I and the aftermath of World War II and an “age of global immigration” since the late 1940s as Europe transformed from a continent of emigration to a continent of immigration.

EUROPE'S NEW REFUGEES

Unlike the refugee that wandered Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, the refugee in twentieth-century Europe no longer solely represented people such as Marx and Mazzini who had “dared to defy the established powers with the pen, the revolver, or in armed campaigns”.⁹ Instead, they often comprised people escaping newly drawn borders, persecution, the fallout from war, and humanitarian disasters. Refugee movements in interwar Europe “dwarfed all previous ones”, according to Skran, with millions seeking shelter across international borders.¹⁰ Tens of millions became displaced during and after World War II.

Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch's edited volume, Refugees in Europe 1919–1959: A Forty Years’ Crisis?, emanated from a conference that Frank and Reinisch organized at Birkbeck College in London in 2010. The event aimed to bring together “the growing body of research on displacement” by historians to try to create a common framework for understanding mass displacement in twentieth-century Europe.¹¹ They noted that “the last attempt at a grand narrative – Michael Marrus's influential The Unwanted”, dated from the mid-1980s, but its focus “rested primarily with the experience of Jewish refugees in the 1930s and 1940s”.¹² Fittingly, Marrus was a keynote speaker at the extensive conference, which included an exhibition to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the UN's first ever World Refugee Year in 1959/60.¹³ Frank and Reinisch edited a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History in 2014 entitled “Refugees and the Nation-State in Europe, 1919–59” that included papers on post-war Austria, Italy, and France, as well as broader studies in time of Czechoslovak, Swiss, and Swedish refugee policies.¹⁴ In 2017, they published Refugees in Europe, 1919–1959. A Forty Years' Crisis?, which came out in paperback in 2019 and, interestingly for readers, is available to download for free from Bloomsbury Open Access.¹⁵ The book contains twelve chapters, all of which differ from the special journal issue.

At the conference, Marrus agreed that 1919 represented a fitting starting point because of the post-war development of a more restrictive passport regime and a more coherent social welfare system among modern nation states practicing a more exclusivist form of nationalism. This led to refugees being seen increasingly by receiving societies as “intolerable burdens”.¹⁶ Zara Steiner's chapter contends that the date of the modern European refugee crisis could be moved backwards, “possibly to the movement of Jews from Tsarist Russia to western Europe to escape the pogroms of the late nineteenth century […] or to the refugees leaving during the Balkan crises at the very start of the twentieth century. Or we might begin with the flow of Russian refugees after 1917”.¹⁷ Other contributors, such as Jared Manasek, who writes about the Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman empires’ experiences with forced migration in the nineteenth century, Glen Peterson, who challenges the Eurocentricity of refugee history, and Carl Bon Tempo, who writes about the US, also question the validity of the time frame used by the editors for their own case studies. Manasek convincingly argues that “the arbitrary creation of European minorities in the wake of the Great War that Hannah Arendt described was already under way in the last quarter of the nineteenth century”.¹⁸ Yet, the international framework to deal with refugees did not exist then and the social welfare system was in its infancy. Furthermore, refugees in late-nineteenth-century Europe could theoretically have escaped to the United States as US migration restrictions for Europeans remained relaxed compared to post-World War I. As Bon Tempo notes, “if the US maintained its open door in the 1920s […] the US obviously would not have provided the solution to the Continent's refugee problems, but it is likely would have lessened them to a decent degree – and an important life-changing degree for those migrants able to resettle in the US”.¹⁹ International refugee law first developed in Europe after World War I.²⁰ While many states facilitated stranded Russians in the 1920s through their adoption of the Nansen passport, a more restrictionist approach characterized the response to Jewish refugees in the 1930s, as demonstrated most clearly at the 1938 Evian Conference. The horrors of World War II led indirectly to the formation of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, which remains the cornerstone of how most European states define the admission and regulation of those in search of asylum.

I find Frank and Reinisch's timeline valuable when examining Europe. Their argument that the “nature of refugee crises, and national and international responses to them, changed fundamentally in the period between the end of the First World War, which inaugurated a series of new international structures and policies, and the late 1950s when Europe's home-grown refugee problems were supposedly ‘solved’”, is a persuasive one.²¹ I would, however, probably revise both the starting and end points slightly. World War I produced significant displacement, as the editors acknowledge. Most refugees had moved by the late 1940s. Approximately 200,000 did flee Hungary after 1956 and significant numbers of East Germans crossed into West Germany before the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, but numbers remained considerably lower than those produced by World War II and its immediate aftermath.

In many respects, the period from World War I until the late 1940s can be understood as representing Europe's “age of refugees” rather than an “age of migration”. This age of refugees coincided with the collapse of several cosmopolitan European empires. As Arendt explained, “out of the liquidation of the two multi-national states of pre-war Europe, Russia and Austria-Hungary, two victim groups emerged whose sufferings were different from those of all others in the era between the wars […]. The stateless and the minorities, rightly termed ‘cousins-germane’, had no governments to represent and to protect them […].”²² The fallout from the Russian Revolution, the subsequent civil war and famine forced over one million Russian refugees to flee the Soviet Union after 1917. The 1921–22 Greco-Turkish war uprooted 1.5 million Greeks, 400,000 Turks, and 300,000 Armenians. In the 1930s, approximately 400,000 people escaped Nazi Germany and a similar number of Spanish Republicans left Franco's Spain.²³ In addition, approximately one to two million ethnic Poles migrated to Poland; one million ethnic Germans to Germany; 300,000 ethnic Hungarians to Hungary; and the newly formed Balkan states became home to tens of thousands of its ethnic countrymen and women.²⁴ World War II produced even greater volumes of refugees. As Steiner sets out in the book, “[w]e are talking about thirty million people (the number much disputed): ethnic Germans sent out from the Baltic, from Poland and Czechoslovakia; Jews released from the concentration camps; people displaced by the bombings and the destruction of war; and those fleeing from the triumphant Red Army.”²⁵ Thereafter, numbers decreased quite dramatically.

One of the book's main objectives was to move things on from Marrus's seminal work in the 1980s. Did it succeed? Yes and no. The introduction of the forty-year periodization is a welcome framework through which historians working on refugees in Europe between 1919 and 1959 can structure their work and engage with other scholars. Furthermore, they do manage to give a more holistic account of the period that incorporates Jewish refugee history, most notably through the chapters of Tony Kushner and Mark Levene, with other refugee case studies, such as Claire Eldridge's chapter on “repatriates” and “refugees” coming from French Algeria in the late 1950s and early 1960s to France. Nevertheless, some issues remain. Kushner notes that Marrus's “approach was very much from the top down providing a much-needed history of the international refugee institutional regime”.²⁶ The book appears to adopt a similar approach. Metzger's chapter focuses on the relatively successful response of the League of Nations to Russian refugees in the 1920s and its unsuccessful response to Jewish refugees in the 1930s. Reinisch's chapter examines the neglected work of the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) “overseeing, coordinating and organising mass movements, and bringing people ‘home’” during and immediately after the war.²⁷ Gatrell's lively chapter investigates the UN World Refugee Year campaign in 1959–60, which, somewhat incredibly when one thinks of recent debates in Britain, was initiated by a group of socially conscious young British Conservatives who “bemoaned the failure of governments to find a permanent solution to the prolonged suffering of refugees in Europe, the Middle East and the Far East”.²⁸ The campaign targeted three groups: the remaining 132,000 Displaced Persons living inside and outside camps throughout Europe, the approximately 915,000 Palestinian refugees, and the 700,000 Chinese refugees who had fled to British Hong Kong. To their credit, the chapters within the volume do add fascinating details to our knowledge of institutional responses.

Several authors throughout the collection lament the “overwhelming presentism within the field of refugee studies”, which is caused by history being regarded by non-historians as, according to Kushner, “‘nice to know’, but not essential”. Furthermore, historians, especially those looking at Europe, “have made only a scant contribution to the wider field of refugee and forced migration studies that emerged in the 1980s”.²⁹ This volume attempts to fill the notable gap in the historiography this has caused. However, it is made clear that the editors do not want to use history to explain what is going on today since “it is a road full of potholes and diversions” as “every historical precedent has a particular context, without which it becomes ambiguous and inaccurate”. Instead, historians “have to identify both the particular and the ways in which the particular can be transcended”.³⁰

One way they might have done this in the book was to focus more on theories that explain the creation of refugees. Aristide Zolberg wrote in 1983 that refugees were “a by-product of the secular transformation of empires into nation-states”.³¹ Considering the book dealt with the period after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, German, and Tsarist empires, the creation of Czechoslovakia, Finland, Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Yugoslavia and the subsequent invasion by the Nazis and takeover by the Soviets of many of these countries, it would have been fascinating if the authors had been instructed to re-examine, challenge, and develop Zolberg's theory based on their findings. This might have been a way to transcend the particular and would no doubt have intrigued both historians and non-historians alike.

INCORPORATING POST-WWII MIGRATION INTO EUROPE'S HISTORY

Theory does not feature too prominently in Peter Gatrell's new book about Europe's migration history since 1945 either. But he has enough to be concerned with already, as is evident from the 548 pages of rich text and images that the reader is presented with in The Unsettling of Europe: How Migration Shaped a Continent. Gatrell is probably the scholar who has taken up Marrus's mantle as the historian par excellence on refugees and, as mentioned above, is one of the contributors to Frank and Reinisch's volume. He has previously written extensively about Russian refugees, refugees around the time of World War I, and the World Refugee Year (1959/60).³² Most significantly, he published The Making of the Modern Refugee in 2013, which globalized refugee history by including analyses of refugee crises in the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent, East Asia, Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, as well as Europe throughout the twentieth century.³³

Gatrell's most recent monograph goes beyond his previous focus on refugees and analyses Europe's migration history since 1945 more generally. The Unsettling of Europe, according to Gatrell, “reinterprets the big events in postwar Europe and reconnects them with the history of people on the move”. Gatrell contends that “without putting migration and migrants at its heart, the history of Europe since the end of the Second World War is incomplete”.³⁴ Gatrell deliberately uses the term “migration” rather than “immigration” to convey various strands of mobility:

“Immigration” implies that people buy a one-way ticket, whereas “migration” takes account of regular return journeys – the decision not to burn bridges with one's place of birth. “Migration” speaks of interrupted journeys, and travel between different destinations. It acknowledges that migrants may have a stake in more than one place simultaneously.³⁵

Much of Klaus Bade's magnificent Europa in Bewegung (2000) concentrated on the same period as Gatrell's study. Yet, it did not offer the same breadth of analysis. Whereas Bade's Europe “ranges from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean and from the British Isles to east central Europe”,³⁶ Gatrell's background as a historian of Russia enables his Europe to extend as far east as Siberia and includes the successor states of the former Soviet Union. Kazakhstan's Virgin Lands Campaign, for example, is a notable inclusion – a campaign that saw large swathes of ethnic minorities (Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks, Crimeans, Tatars, Poles, and Volga Germans, among others) move east to help develop pasturelands to feed people in the Russian heartland.³⁷ As Gatrell observes: “The Iron Curtain was hugely significant, but it should not obscure similarities in the way that European states behaved or how migrants experienced mobility”.³⁸ Although there has been some excellent recent work on migration in the Soviet Union and beyond, it is nice to see it dealt with alongside research on Western and Southern Europe.³⁹ As elsewhere in Europe, the Soviet Union, too, experienced enormous movement away from the countryside, with approximately 50 million people relocating across the fifteen constituent republics to urban environments between the mid-1950s and early 1970s.⁴⁰ By moving, they sustained the economic growth that much of the Soviet bloc also experienced in tandem with West European states during this period. By the late 1980s, Moscow had become home to an estimated 11.5 million migrant workers.⁴¹ On the eve of the Soviet Union's collapse, 25.3 million ethnic Russians lived outside the Russian republic, with Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Belarus, and the Baltic republics all home to significant Russian populations.⁴²

Gatrell's lengthy tome is divided into five chronological parts spanning roughly fifteen years each. It is extraordinary how much he fits into each part. The first part (1945–1956) captures the fallout of war for those with certain ethnicities and the prominence of the nation state in trying to adapt to the new configuration of their recovering societies caused by planned and unplanned movement into and out of their borders. The integration of the millions of ethnic German expellees – who accounted for seventeen per cent of West Germany's population in 1950 and twenty-four per cent of East Germany's – features prominently. In Part Two (1956–1973), decolonization and the arrival of colonial and postcolonial migrants in Britain, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands plays a central role alongside the arrival of guest workers to West Germany. In Part Three (1973–1989), Gatrell highlights the increasingly hostile environment migrants faced as Western European economies slumped, before shifting his gaze to Southern Europe's transition from countries of emigration to countries of immigration. Part Four (1989–2008) deals with the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, including German reunification, Yugoslav fragmentation, and the increasing prominence of the EU in migration policymaking. Part Five (2008–2019) looks at the fallout from the global financial crisis and the Arab Spring.

Some parts are less nation-state focused and more thematic than others. Part Five, for instance, demonstrates Gatrell's diversity and the book's uniqueness by including chapters entitled “Belief, Bodies, and Behaviour” and “Owning the Past: Migration, Memory, Museum”. The former chapter dwells on migrants’ funeral practices, their faith, and their food. It includes a fascinating discussion about the afterlives of migrants – for example, whether they are buried in their country of origin or where they died. It highlights how religion helped to “negotiate new surroundings” through “spiritual solace” and “material support among faith-based networks”.⁴³ In addition, it underlines the influence of migration on food culture in Europe, from the spread of the döner kebab as street food in Germany in the late 1960s to the increasing prominence of Chinese restaurants.⁴⁴ The latter chapter looks at the memorialization of immigration in Europe. It is striking how few museums are dedicated to migration despite its impact on modern Europe, with the Musée national de l'histoire de l'immigration in Paris and a handful of others standing out. Europe has become home to millions of refugees since the early twentieth century, yet this history is notable by its absence from Europe's museums. The permanent exhibition Fluchtpunkt Friedland (“Vanishing Point Friedland: About the Border Transit Camp, 1945 – Today”) in the small Friedland Museum located twenty kilometres south of Göttingen in central Germany, is a notable exception, but Gatrell notes that “[i]t is difficult to think of anything else in Europe of equivalent importance for the history of forced migration”.⁴⁵

Despite the European Union receiving fewer refugees than Turkey or Middle Eastern countries, Gatrell wryly notes in his last chapter how the Arab Spring “produced a wintry response in Europe” that effaced the refugee experience “in favour of the perspectives of the European Union and its individual member states”.⁴⁶ Gatrell's book, by contrast, makes a concerted and consistent effort to include the voice of the migrants and refugees he describes in a thought-provoking way that serves to connect different migration events and experiences. At the beginning of the book, for instance, he references one woman's testimony about the stench and lack of air onboard the boat that took her across the Mediterranean. This testimony came from an Algerian harki being transported to France in 1962, away from the fallout of the Algerian war of independence, rather than a refugee crossing the Mediterranean more recently, implying that Europe's past resonates in its present.

Many quotes from migrants and refugees stand out for their eloquence and profundity. One young Moluccan man in the Netherlands asked his Dutch counterparts: “I've adapted, I wear western clothes and go to a Dutch school. Did you ever think to adapt to me?” A later quote from Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-born cultural theorist, captured the often-forgotten colonial dimension to much of post-war migration to Europe when he noted that, “[p]eople like me who came to England in the 1950s have been there for centuries […]. I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea”. A Yugoslavian interrogated in the 1950s by an Italian official to determine whether he qualified for refugee status highlighted further misunderstandings between newcomers and hosts: “Your question proves to me that the West understands very little of the nature of the Communist system. If by persecution you mean a term of imprisonment then I must confess that I have not been persecuted. […] I have suffered oppression.”⁴⁷ A Turkish guest worker in West Germany, Fuat Bultan, remarked that he and his compatriots felt “wanted but not welcome”. Reflecting one of the central points that Gatrell tries to make, one Cape Verdean noted that they went to work in Portugal “in order to come back and have a better life here”, demonstrating that “migration was not a one-way street”.⁴⁸ Perhaps the most heart-breaking human story involved one elderly Chinese man, Feng Dai, living in London. After his doctor explained to him that his cancer was no longer treatable, “Mr Dai asks for a pen and writes a single word on a small scrap of paper. He tells the doctor that he will look up the word in his dictionary later at home. The word? ‘Terminal’”.⁴⁹

The book contains a host of cultural references, especially to films – both known, such as Angst Essen Seele Auf (1974) and Dirty Pretty Things (2002), and those more obscure, such as Io sto con la sposa (2014), which documents the film director and his friend's attempt to help five undocumented Syrians, who had landed in Lampedusa, get from Italy to Sweden by faking a wedding (“The police would never check a bride's documents!”).⁵⁰ The addition of two segments containing striking photos covering Europe's migration history adds another appealing dimension to the book.

This is a fantastic book overall and it would make an excellent handbook for a course on Europe's modern migration history. Gatrell touches so many bases and it is a masterful account of a neglected but crucial part of Europe's history. Perhaps more attention could have been devoted to discussing migration policies and the rise of nativist political parties in recent decades. In his defence, Gatrell notes that policies do not tell the whole story and “an accurate account of migration must be leavened with a discussion of the cultural and social life of migrants”.⁵¹ He also clearly wants to challenge the fact that Europe “seems to speak of migration as a curse rather than a blessing”, since “migration cannot be undone, except in the dangerous fantasy world of the far right” and he contends that, “[i]t is far better to confront animosity and division by becoming better informed about how migrants have negotiated the difficulties and opportunities to which they have been exposed”.⁵²

While Gatrell does not dwell on whether Europe entered an age of migration, it is apparent that immigration did become more voluminous and salient after 1945 – particularly its more globalized nature. While immigration from other European countries remained quite stable throughout the twentieth century, the scale of immigration from other continents to Europe soared.⁵³ Certain scholars have taken issue with Castles and Miller's inference that the world entered an age of migration after 1945. Demographers Zlotnik and Abel, for instance, show that the percentage of the global population estimated to have migrated across international borders and remained abroad has been low and relatively constant over time.⁵⁴ The historians Jan and Leo Lucassen pleaded for a more nuanced and qualified approach to the dominant idea that we live in an unprecedented migratory age.⁵⁵ Stating that Europe entered an age of global immigration after 1945 is, I believe, a more nuanced appraisal of Europe's migration history. Between 1900 and 1950, just over 3 million people from beyond Europe immigrated into the continent. From 1950 to 2000, however, almost 25 million immigrants from outside Europe moved to Europe.⁵⁶ They comprised mostly: 1) (post) colonial immigrants from (former) European colonies who arrived between the late 1940s and 1970s to Britain, France, the Netherlands and Portugal;⁵⁷ 2) guest workers from North Africa and Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s to West Germany, Switzerland, the Benelux countries, Austria, Denmark, and Sweden (followed by their families in the 1970s and 1980s);⁵⁸ and 3) people in search of asylum from Asia, the Middle East, and Africa since the 1980s.⁵⁹ Whereas Europe's age of refugees had been caused by the demise of different heterogeneous empires within the continent, Europe's age of global immigration began because of the demise or imminent demise of various European empires located outside the continent, which caused substantial immigration from colonial refugees, colonial repatriates, and economic immigrants. They were joined throughout the 1950s and 1960s by guest workers, required by Europe to maintain its remarkable post-war economic growth – first from Southern Europe but later from Turkey and northern Africa.

How did Europe react to slowly becoming a more cosmopolitan continent? Unwittingly at first. The arrival of (post) colonial migrants “caught European governments largely by surprise”, according to Gatrell. Similarly, when guest workers from Turkey and northern Africa began to permanently settle in the 1970s, “[g]overnments and public opinion took some time to digest the implications”.⁶⁰ Colonial migrants did feature in European society before the twentieth century but never on the scale of what occurred after 1945.⁶¹ Their arrival often took place alongside immigration from other European countries, but their presence dominated discourse in the popular and official imagination as “imperial mentalities remained alive both during and after decolonization as many Europeans proved unwilling or unable to decolonize their minds to adjust to a new era”. This made the divide between the colonial and postcolonial eras “blurry”, according to Buettner, because “[i]deologies of empire still had an influence on European identity politics and polemics around race, minorities, and cultural differences long after 1945”, as notions of whiteness and Europeanness intersected.⁶² This became apparent in various attempts by European states to stem the arrival of more migrants from their old colonies. Britain introduced increasingly restrictive laws targeting potential immigration from its Commonwealth in the 1960s. In 1968, for example, potential immigrants had to demonstrate patrial ties to Britain; a device, according to Gatrell, “to discriminate in favour white Commonwealth citizens”.⁶³ With the trente glorieuses coming towards the end in the early 1970s, the rest of Europe followed by halting guest worker programmes and attempting to stem immigration more generally. This met with mixed success, however, since “migration was not a tap that could be turned on and off at a moment's notice”. Instead, immigrants “increasingly called upon their dependents to join them under organised schemes of family reunification”.⁶⁴

European states stood out by allowing some form of family reunification to eventually take place for guest workers; similar schemes in the United States around the same time, as well as the Gulf States more recently, did not.⁶⁵ Different explanations have been offered to explain European exceptionality or what Hollifield termed the “liberal paradox”, whereby states’ expansionist immigration policies appeared to be at odds with the more restrictionist-inclined desires of their electorates.⁶⁶ Scholars have explained this by pointing to the “liberalness of the liberal state” as embodied by independent judiciaries, the growing influence of supranational bodies and international instruments, and the moral issues civil servants and politicians faced when trying to apply policies.⁶⁷ One side effect of increasing restrictions on immigration more generally from the early 1970s onwards was that an increasing number of people who wanted to come to Europe applied for asylum, as other legal avenues disappeared.

REPULSING REFUGEES AND ASYLUM SEEKERS

The last book under review, David Scott FitzGerald's Refuge beyond Reach, does a brilliant job of discerning the Global North's efforts to create a buttress between it and the Global South in its consideration of the asylum policies of the US, Canada, Australia, and Europe. In contrast to the two above-mentioned volumes, it is the work of a sociologist rather than a historian. Yet, David Scott FitzGerald is clearly familiar with the historian's craft. Along with David Cook-Martín, he is the co-author of Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policies in the Americas and numerous history-related papers.⁶⁸ In Refuge beyond Reach, FitzGerald draws on court cases, state and NGO reports, declassified CIA documents from the 1960s to the early 1980s, various state archival sources, American diplomatic cables from the 2000s released by Wikileaks – to excellent effect – and interviews. He argues that rich democracies have deliberately and systematically shut down most legal paths to safety by complying with the letter of the international refugee regime but evading its spirit through an “architecture of repulsion”.⁶⁹ To capture this architecture, FitzGerald interestingly, and quite effectively in my opinion, draws on “medieval metaphors of cages, domes, buffers, moats, and barbicans to make visible a system of remote control that does much more to keep out refugees than the more obvious border walls”.⁷⁰ “Caging” keeps refugees in their countries of origin or camps abroad; a virtual “dome” – the most crucial way of stopping unwanted migrants – prevents people coming by air through the increasingly sophisticated visa regime enforced by consulates and airlines; states rely on in-between countries to act as “buffers” to keep out the unwanted; states and regions use the sea as a “moat” to police their territories; and anomalous zones at the entrance to states’ territories, such as transit zones in airports, act as “barbicans”.⁷¹

Building on Zolberg's notion of remote control, which refers to the development of an administrative immigration system to regulate admission at the point of embarkation abroad, as well as at the border, FitzGerald first provides a history of how remote control was applied to refugees.⁷² FitzGerald then shifts his attention to what has occurred since the 1980s, when controls intensified. This followed on from the globalization of the refugee definition. Whereas the 1951 Refugee Convention was confined to those fleeing Europe before 1951, the 1967 protocol had removed these geographical and time constraints. The availability of improved and cheaper transport links in an age of mobility for air travel also meant global migration became more accessible.⁷³ In 1984, the UNHCR High Commissioner at the time, Poul Hartling, described those arriving as “jet-age refugees” because of their commercially facilitated entrance.⁷⁴ During the 1980s, asylum applications in Europe, North America, and Australia increased by more than nine-fold.⁷⁵ Of the 1.3 million asylum applications made in Western Europe between 1983 and 1989, 60 per cent originated from outside the continent.⁷⁶ Numbers continued to climb in the 1990s, with the conclusion of the Cold War and the brutal civil war that erupted in Yugoslavia in 1991 sparking considerable movement. Political instability in other European former communist states and intensified violence in Africa and the Middle East added further to the demand for asylum.

The arrival of so many caused various degrees of confusion and anxiety. To check such a development, states began to create the first signs of a recognisable “asylum” system to decide whether to confer these new people with refugee status, as well as all the rights that came with it. While awaiting the outcome of these deliberations, states increasingly termed these people “asylum seekers” rather than “refugees” to represent the doubt that states had over whether these people deserved asylum.⁷⁷ As Gil Loescher surmised, states quickly concluded that the most effective method of reducing the flow of asylum seekers was to prevent them from arriving in the first place.⁷⁸ It is these efforts that FitzGerald concentrates on. He places particular emphasis on states’ attempts to stop boat refugees, who take to the seas to circumvent the restrictive measures they face.⁷⁹

FitzGerald develops the notions of extra-territorialization and hyper-territorialization to highlight how states manipulate territoriality; the former “pushes the control function of borders hundreds or even thousands of kilometres beyond the state's territory” while the latter sees states make “micro-distinctions down to the meter at the borderline” to restrict access to asylum and other rights.⁸⁰ An example of hyper-territorialization that stands out is the US “wet foot, dry foot” policy in place from the mid-1990s to 2017. The US Coastguard repatriated Cubans intercepted at sea but allowed those who made it to US land to remain. In 2006, fifteen Cubans made it to an abandoned bridge in Florida but because the bridge was no longer connected to land, the US Coastguard decided that their feet were still “wet” and returned them to Cuba. A US district judge later ruled that the bridge was “as American as apple pie” and officials had mistakenly removed them.⁸¹

FitzGerald also draws on legal scholar Claire Inder's concept of “hyper-legalism” to good effect throughout. Hyper-legalism allows states to use “the rhetoric of compliance with international law without any constraint on their actions in practice”.⁸² Notable examples cited throughout include the US Coastguard's practice of interdicting boats carrying Haitians in international waters in 1992 before repatriating them and Australia's repeated excision of its territory from its migration zone since 2001. This meant that the US and Australia could claim that they complied with their non-refoulement obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention since these actions took place outside their territory, where such responsibilities were understood not to apply.⁸³

FitzGerald's work allows us to compare Europe with other regions and countries. He highlights the illusion that European policymakers just want to stop “bogus asylum seekers”, by outlining how Europe slaps visa restrictions “on the very countries that are the world's major sources of recognised refugees”.⁸⁴ Unlike, the US, Canada, and Australia, Europe resettles very few refugees from camps around the world. He focuses much of his attention on how the supranational structure of the EU “has shaped remote controls in unique ways”.⁸⁵ In the 1980s and 1990s, EU states’ migration policies underwent significant “Europeanization”, whereby member states and different EU institutions began to increasingly share responsibility for migration and asylum policies. Initially, member states shifted some of their policies up to the European level to escape national constraints and to securitize migration with such initiatives as the development of Schengen in the 1980s and 1990s. As FitzGerald further outlines, “Europeanization circumvented the constraints of national courts on member governments’ ability to prevent family reunification of immigrants and to deport foreigners” – something that caused difficulty for states when dealing with guest workers in the 1970s and 1980s.⁸⁶

FitzGerald tests whether the “escape to Europe” thesis formulated in the late 1990s, which held that member states had used the EU as a policy venue to sidestep national constraints on its asylum policymaking, still applies.⁸⁷ He contends that the EU more recently has “become a significant constrainer and enabler of remote control”.⁸⁸ He notes that the European Parliament and “even the European Commission” have typically taken human rights considerations more seriously in their approach to asylum than member states.⁸⁹ Furthermore, the European Court of Justice (ECJ)⁹⁰ and the European Court of Human Rights attached to the Council of Europe have repeatedly challenged the actions of member states regarding their asylum policies. Nevertheless, it is not necessarily one-way traffic as the EU consists of so many disparate parts. Frontex, an EU agency established in 2004 to control the borders of the Schengen Area, did not have the legal authority to allow interdictions in third countries so it “piggybacked” on to Spain's informal bilateral agreements with various West African countries for its own operations, thereby “invert[ing] the escape to Europe thesis”.⁹¹ More recently, in 2017, the Italian government, with the approval of the EU, tried to restrict the activities of NGOs rescuing migrants at sea at a time when they were involved in over one third of rescues.⁹² It is hard, therefore, to generalize about the activities of this, at times, Janus-faced union.

Pointedly, FitzGerald asks “why did Greece, Italy, or Spain not follow the Australian model […] and ‘excise’ one of their islands, turning Lesbos, Lampedusa, or Cabrera into a barbican camp like Australia's Christmas Island?”⁹³ His answer is that:

The main obstacle is a strong supranational judiciary that monitors strong rights of territorial personhood and has increasingly suggested that state control over individuals outside its territory incurs their obligation to respect the rights of the persons under their control.⁹⁴

Divergent views within the EU and the unwillingness of transit states to comply further explain why Europe has not re-enacted Australian practices (yet). Examples of the supranational judiciaries’ actions cited include the European Court of Human Rights’ decision on how European states can treat foreigners in the “anomalous zones” of airports and the Hirsi Jamaa (2012) case against Italy where the court ruled that states cannot circumvent their jurisdiction under the European Convention of Human Rights by carrying out operations on the high seas.⁹⁵ The potential problem with this relates to whether member states will comply with supranational judiciary's judgements in the future. The European Commission filed an infringement procedure against Hungary in late 2015 for violating EU asylum law during the so-called refugee crisis but “the slow pace of EU complaints suggests that EU law and the ECJ are not robust checks on the barbican strategy of its members” and the European Convention on Human Rights is “vulnerable when the rule of law is systematically being undermined by an increasingly authoritarian government such as Prime Minister Orbán's”.⁹⁶

FitzGerald's book is broad in scope, incisive, and thought-provoking. One minor criticism is that the refugee voice is mostly missing throughout, but his focus is more on how states keep people out than on what effect this has on individuals.

CONCLUSION

Substantial numbers of European migrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century sailed across the Atlantic. This option began to recede after World War I as the United States introduced stricter immigration controls – a practice that many other states began to follow, especially in the 1930s. This meant that Europe no longer had a safety valve for its more vulnerable populations. This coincided with the collapse of the diverse Ottoman, Tsarist, Austro-Hungarian, and German empires, and the subsequent creation of several new states in their place in what I have suggested could be deemed to represent the start of Europe's age of refugees. As outlined in Frank and Reinisch's Refugees in Europe 1919–1959: A Forty Years’ Crisis?, Europe initially coped relatively well but economic and political developments in the 1930s meant that subsequent refugees met with a more hostile reception. After World War II, states in Europe, North America, and Australasia slowly mopped up the remaining Displaced Persons. Germany – East and West – stood out for its sympathetic treatment of the approximately 12 million German expellees who arrived after the war. The 1951 Refugee Convention was meant to signal a new, more humanitarian approach to refugees, although this would not be properly tested until the 1980s, since refugees almost disappeared from Europe after the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Instead, Europe had to deal with other types of immigrants emanating from beyond the continent. Europe had previously provided substantial immigration to the Americas, Australasia, and Eurasia through colonization and permanent settlement.⁹⁷ Yet, immigration to Europe from beyond the continent remained minimal before the 1940s. The (impending) collapse of Europe's empire abroad sparked the beginning of Europe's age of global immigration. Postcolonial immigrants, guest workers, and internal migrants, all covered in detail in Gatrell's The Unsettling of Europe, arrived to contribute to the incredible economic growth that marked West and East Europe's post-war decades.⁹⁸ Since migration is “both the cause and the consequence of increased prosperity”, as Gatrell reminds us, immigration did not stop after the oil price shocks of the 1970s and the subsequent restrictions that emerged.⁹⁹ Instead, immigrants adapted by turning to family reunification and some applied for asylum. Despite the intensification of efforts to prevent those in search of asylum from ever arriving in Europe since the 1980s, efforts to repel refugees from afar have so far met with mixed results. In many ways, David Scott FitzGerald's Refuge beyond Reach's comparative study confirms Europe's transformation into a continent of immigration since it increasingly resembles traditional settler-states and their attitude to certain undesirable immigrants. Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia all need to attract newcomers to prolong their prosperity but seek to control who can enter and under what circumstances. Asylum seekers and refugees are clearly personae non gratae. Nevertheless, Europe's endeavours to stop them from arriving have met with varying effectiveness because of the complicated consequences of the Europeanization of migration and asylum control, as illustrated in 2015 when over one million people successfully sailed across the Mediterranean to apply for asylum in Europe.