The Unsettling of Europe

Allen Lane 576pp £30

The Week Bookshop £24.99 (incl. p&p)

Many people in the UK have a strangely selective memory when it comes to immigration, said Jonathan Portes in The Observer. It is often said, for instance, that Britain has had little history of multicultural diversity, and that Europe, unlike the US, is “not a continent of immigration”. It is to counter such “historical amnesia” that Peter Gatrell has written his timely and ambitious new book, which argues that migration has been “central” to Europe’s development throughout the postwar period. He begins with the now largely forgotten “violent peacetime” of the late 1940s, when millions of ethnic Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe. He then moves to the migrations associated with the end of empire, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Balkans conflict. While Gatrell admits that these movements have been “unsettling”, he says that their overall effect has been hugely beneficial, economically and socially. The Unsettling of Europe is a “nuanced and sympathetic” work, with a “focus on the stories of individual migrants”.

I disagree, said David Goodhart in the London Evening Standard: this is essentially a “work of advocacy”. Its “claim to originality” lies in drawing a link between the upheavals of the immediate postwar period and more familiar subsequent migrations – including the recent refugee crisis. Gatrell’s suggestion is that since Europe has “always been on the move”, we should be relaxed about immigration now. But his analogy “does not bear examination”: while the events of the late 1940s represented a “one-off migration of Europeans”, recent immigration has been mainly from outside the continent, and its “cumulative scale” has been far greater. Much of the time, this book simply “reads like a list of events, interspersed with bouts of indignation”.