New history books reviewed
RICHARD J EVANS welcomes a major study that provides some much-needed historical perspective on the migration dilemmas dividing Europe
In recent years, it’s hardly been possible to open a newspaper or turn on the television news without seeing distressing pictures of tiny, rickety and overcrowded boats attempting to ferry migrants across the Mediterranean, sometimes sinking or capsizing. We are all too familiar with images of bodies washed up on the shore, of huddles of migrant men, women and children cowering in the back of people-smugglers’ lorries, or of crowds of would-be immigrants at border checkpoints or in makeshift and supposedly temporary camps.
This seems, on the face of it, to be a development of the last few years – and yet, as Peter Gatrell reminds us in this major new study, it isn’t really very new at all. In telling the story of migration into Europe and across the continent, from country to country, as well as within the borders of individual states, Gatrell provides a much-needed historical perspective on our current dilemmas. It is one of the great virtues of Gatrell’s book that he pays full attention to eastern Europe – as one might expect, given his previous incarnation as an economic historian of Russia. Too many previous studies of the topic have focused almost exclusively on the west, and Gatrell rightly seeks here to redress the balance. Moreover, unlike other students of the topic, he doesn’t confine himself to political debates and the formulation of policy, but examines the cultural processing of migration in literature and film, and lets the migrants speak for themselves, often
providing graphic and moving testimony of their experiences.
The book begins with the late 1940s, when the resettlement of ‘displaced persons’ – mostly forced labourers recruited by the Nazis during the war, numbering 7 million at their height – faced the United Nations and its various agencies with a variety of challenges, especially when they did not want to return to their original homelands, as was the case with many eastern Europeans repulsed by the blanket of communist dictatorship falling across their countries at the start of
"By 1960, governments across Europe were actively encouraging immigration to provide vital labour
the Cold War. In addition, some 11 million ethnic Germans had either fled eastern Europe or been brutally expelled at the end of the war, and had to be resettled in West Germany – a process described in detail by RM Douglas in his book Orderly and Humane, whose title refers ironically to the Allies’ mandate for the way in which the expulsions were supposed to be carried out.
Gatrell might have provided more detail on the expulsions, but prefers instead to focus on the successful integration of the refugees and expellees into West German society in the course of the 1950s. As in other countries, such huge numbers of immigrants kept wages low and facilitated economic reconstruction after the war. By 1960 or so, governments across Europe were actively encouraging immigration to provide vital labour for what in Germany was termed the ‘economic miracle’. The famous boatload of West Indian immigrants carried to the UK on the HMT Empire Windrush in 1948, along with many others from various parts of the British empire, especially India and Pakistan, were part of this Europe-wide phenomenon. The process was not without its tensions, and racial and cultural clashes occurred in many parts of Europe (the 1958 Notting Hill race riots in London were a particularly notorious example). But on the whole, governments saw the economic advantages of immigration despite such problems. In similar fashion, the Soviet Union fostered economic growth in Central Asia and Siberia in its ‘Virgin Lands’ campaign, in the course of which some 300,000 Russian and Ukrainian citizens headed out to the east to play their part.
On top of this, very substantial numbers of immigrants came to Europe in the wake of decolonisation: hundreds of thousands of colonial administrators and settlers, for example, returned to Portugal from newly independent colonies such as Mozambique, or went back to Italy from Libya and other former colonial possessions. Meanwhile, the fallout from the Algerian war of independence was on an even larger scale as far as France was concerned. All of this came to an end with the global economic downturn that followed the huge oil-price hike engineered by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in 1973. As unemployment rates soared across Europe, governments stopped encouraging immigration, imposing restrictions on it instead, and urging migrants to return home.
But many of them stayed, sparking a debate between advocates of integration and supporters of multiculturalism that has continued right up to the present. Certainly, the cultural impact of immigrants on European societies has been notable in many ways, most obviously in the popularity of foods such as the döner kebab in Germany or chicken korma in the UK. But the economic impact has aroused more hostility, with accusations of immigrants lowering wages, above all after the crisis of 2008. Populist politicians have won mass support in recent years by whipping up fears that millions of refugees, especially from the war-torn Middle East, will supposedly undermine European civilisation. Governments have responded with a mixture of deterrence, detention and deportation, and Gatrell castigates them for their failure to think beyond such negative responses to what too many of them have described as a ‘migration crisis’.
In calling for a more imaginative, less punitive approach, this book reminds us of the benefits migration has brought to European societies since the Second World War, and the considerable encouragement states have given to it from time to time. I have only one quarrel with this otherwise excellent book, and that’s with its starting point in 1945. As Gatrell surely knows, migration to and from Europe, and within it, has a much longer history, and it’s a pity he doesn’t refer to it, if only in a few paragraphs. But this shouldn’t obscure the fact that he has delivered an absorbing and highly readable narrative that ought to be required reading for anyone concerned with modern migration, and not just in Europe either.