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Refugees Then and Now

Introduction to a special issue of Patterns of Prejudice: "Refugees Then and Now: Memory, History and Politics in the Long Twentieth Century"

Patterns of Prejudice ISSN: 0031-322X (Print) 1461-7331 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpop20 Refugees then and now: memory, history and politics in the long twentieth century: an introduction Dan Stone To cite this article: Dan Stone (2018) Refugees then and now: memory, history and politics in the long twentieth century: an introduction, Patterns of Prejudice, 52:2-3, 101-106, DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.2018.1433004 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2018.1433004 Published online: 26 Apr 2018. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rpop20 Patterns of Prejudice, 2018 Vol. 52, Nos. 2–3, 101–106, https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2018.1433004 Refugees then and now: memory, history and politics in the long twentieth century: an introduction Refugee history In a recent survey article, Peter Gatrell argues that ‘refugee history cannot just be about refugees’.1 What does that mean? Historians have long neglected to include refugees in their general national, regional or world histories. There is a large historiography on refugees in specific situations—for example, of Jewish displaced persons after the Holocaust or Hindu and Muslim refugees in the wake of Partition—and a growing body of literature dealing with the creation of refugees through forced removal, especially where this phenomenon slides into ethnic cleansing and the concerns of genocide studies.2 This is also increasingly the case with respect to international organizations, especially with respect to their attempts to coordinate aid to refugees and to codify international law on the rights of refugees.3 Finally, there is now an emerging field of refugee history—focusing on the experience of different groups of refugees over time, their constitution as refugees by persecuting states and movements, their experience of migration (though such studies remain limited),4 and the response of receiving states, including individuals, charities and aid organizations—that increasingly seeks to represent the refugees’ experience rather than simply seeing them as passive objects of 1 2 3 4 Peter Gatrell, ‘Refugees—what’s wrong with history?’, Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 30, no. 2, 2017, 170–89 (178). See, for example, Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak (eds), Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield 2001); Pertti Ahonen, Gustavo Corni, Jerzy Kochanowski, Rainer Schulze, Tamás Stark and Barbara StelzlMarx, People on the Move: Forced Population Movements in Europe in the Second World War and its Aftermath (Oxford: Berg 2008); Richard Bessel and Claudia B. Haake (eds), Removing Peoples: Forced Removal in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009); Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch (eds), Refugees in Europe, 1919–1959: A Forty Years’ Crisis (London: Bloomsbury 2017). For example, Sharif Gemie, Fiona Reid and Laure Humbert, with Louise Ingram, Outcast Europe: Refugees and Relief Workers in an Era of Total War 1936–48 (London: Continuum 2012); Gerard Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (New York: Oxford University Press 2012). See, for example, Gadi Benezer and Roger Zetter, ‘Searching for directions: conceptual and methodological challenges in researching refugee journeys’, Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 28, no. 3, 2014, 297–318; Tony Kushner, Journeys from the Abyss: The Holocaust and Forced Migration from the 1880s to the Present (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2017). Cf. Helen Taylor, ‘Refugees, the state, and the concept of home’, Refugee Survey Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 2, 2013, 130–52. © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 102 Patterns of Prejudice persecution and recipients of rescue.5 Nevertheless, it remains the case that, despite Philip Marfleet’s decade-old call to study history, refugee studies is dominated by sociology, anthropology, political theory and law. In other words, it is very much focused on present-day concerns, especially questions of security and border control, citizenship and statelessness, national identity, the politics of immigration, people trafficking, human rights, international law, the ethics of asylum, and the role of NGOs and international organizations such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in aiding refugees, creating and maintaining camps, and resettling refugees.6 But this is not what Gatrell means, although he also discusses this growing historiography. Indeed, this is his starting point, and the basis of his call for an interdisciplinary, nation-transcending methodology. What he means is that the history of refugees should not be written only as the history of movements of discrete population groups from one place to another, although this is a necessary prerequisite of the approach. In other words, refugee studies needs to take cognizance of the past at the same time as historians need to see the significance of refugees for understanding the past. Gatrell’s call means too that ‘refugee studies’ is not a stable or uncontested discipline, and that the concept of the ‘refugee’ itself has a history. The word can be subjected to the operation of Begriffsgeschichte (history of concepts), showing its shifting meaning over time and place. More importantly, historians need to see how refugees are not just a given phenomenon in certain situations—such as war or famine—but are constituted in the process of unfolding events. Refugees are people who once had homes and stable lives; being labelled a refugee tends to subsume all other identities, especially in the eyes of others, yet this is not how refugees necessarily understand themselves. For some, the label is a burden, for others it is a badge of honour that is worn as a challenge to the wider world or an opportunity to explain, in an ostensibly self-effacing way, the negative effects on one’s identity being a ‘refugee’ 5 6 Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press 1985); Tony Kushner and Katharine Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide: Global, National and Local Perspectives during the Twentieth Century (London: Frank Cass 1999); Tony Kushner, Remembering Refugees: Then and Now (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2006); Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013). For a survey, see Stephen Castles, ‘Immigration and asylum: challenges to European identities and citizenship’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012), 201–19. Philip Marfleet, ‘Refugees and history: why we must address the past’, Refugee Survey Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 3, 2007, 136–48. See also Philip Marfleet, ‘Explorations in a foreign land: states, refugees, and the problem of history’, Refugee Survey Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 2, 2013, 14–34. The mainstream literature in refugee studies is too vast to list here; for a starting point, see Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Gil Loescher, Katy Long and Nando Sigona (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014). DAN STONE 103 carries. Hannah Arendt, for example, wrote in her classic essay of 1943, ‘We Refugees’: ‘If we are saved we feel humiliated, and if we are helped we feel degraded.’7 Part of the problem for historians is understanding that, in writing the history of refugees, they need to be alive to the process of constructing refugees and not simply to take ‘refugee’ as a pre-existing category that simply exists in the world. This is not always easy to do, especially when one focuses on the work of relief agencies, for example, whose documentation focuses on the needs of those they are seeking to help, or government agencies whose brief is to control refugees and, all too often, keep them at bay. Historians are familiar with the methodological problem that, in writing the past, they construct it, and thus, in the case of refugees with all the ethical, social and cultural dilemmas that surround the politics of immigration, asylum and refuge (which are of course not synonymous, though interrelated), they have to be wary of taking as a given the phenomenon whose constitution they are seeking to describe and analyse.8 Beyond the shifting meaning of the term ‘refugee’, what Gatrell is also drawing our attention to is the fact that refugees do not exist in a vacuum, as one might think from the separation of ‘refugee studies’ from history. The processes of becoming a refugee, of migration, of admission to a new country and of trying to build a new life, are all interwoven with the histories of nation-states, international diplomacy and transnational phenomena such as war and its effects and the operation of international organizations. It does not suffice to write the history of particular groups of refugees; one also needs to show how the creation of refugees and their movement has shaped states and their relations with one another, as well as how the movements of refugees over time have changed the nature of the polities that have received them. Without such a history, it is too easy to slip into the platitudes of one’s country’s ‘proud tradition’ of helping refugees or other such trite statements that bowdlerize the complexities, dilemmas and ambiguities of the past. Besides, it is strange that the role of refugees in founding some states and disrupting others has been neglected in mainstream historiography. As Gatrell notes: ‘Historians have been slow to wake up to the crucial insight that emerges from scholarship in the social and political sciences, namely that states make refugees, but that refugees can also make states.’9 It is in this spirit that the essays in this special issue are offered. Whether they deal with the history of international law (Behrman), with the geopolitics 7 8 9 Hannah Arendt, ‘We refugees’ [1943], in Ron H. Feldman (ed.), The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (New York: Grove Press 1978), 55–66 (60). For further discussion along these lines, with specific reference to terms such as ‘refugee’ and ‘statelessness’, see Dan Stone, ‘The memory of the archive: the International Tracing Service and the construction of the past as history’, Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, vol. 31, no. 2, 2017, 69–88; and Dan Stone, ‘Excommunicating the past? Narrativism and rational constructivism in the historiography of the Holocaust’, Rethinking History, vol. 21, no. 4, 2017, 549–66. Gatrell, ‘Refugees’, 175. 104 Patterns of Prejudice of borders and human rights (Bialasiewicz and Maessen, Goalwin), with the experience of migration (Gigliotti, Taylor), with the discourse used to describe refugees (Ahonen, Pavlovich) or with the way in which the memory of the past shapes current-day discussions (Kushner, Stone), each has been written with this implicitly comparative framework in mind. Irrespective of the discipline of the authors (we include lawyers, political scientists, philosophers, cultural geographers and historians), each suggests that only by understanding the past can we make sense of refugee movements today, and vice versa: that by thinking about the present—since all history is contemporary history— we can better understand the history of refugees. Refugees then and now What does it mean to be a refugee? After the Second World War, when Britain was proud to be involved with European and international organizations, an important body was set up called the International Tracing Service (ITS). It still exists today, and most of its remarkable collection of 30 million documents can now be consulted in electronic form at one of seven depositories including, in London, the Wiener Library. Among its holdings are documents from the International Refugee Organization (IRO), the body that administered the ITS for three years from January 1948 to December 1950. In January 1949, a meeting of the IRO and voluntary organizations took place in Geneva. Many people spoke about the mission and practical capabilities of the IRO, including Albert Cohen, from the IRO’s Division of Protection. In his address, he set out what he considered to be the three handicaps under which ‘the refugee who is stateless’ labours: The first lies in the fact that the refugee is an alien in any and every country to which he may go … He does not have that last resort which is always open to the ‘normal alien’—return to his native country. … The second handicap lies in the fact that the refugee is not only an alien wherever he goes, but also he is an unprotected alien. … He has no Government behind him. … and the Bible says, ‘Woe to the man that is alone’. The third handicap lies in the fact that this man who is everywhere an alien, and an unprotected alien, is in the majority of cases an unfortunate, a piece of human flotsam. … He is sometimes the object of the suspicion or contempt which are readily directed at aliens without protection; it is an accepted fact of mass psychology that the behaviour of a national group varies according to whether it has to deal with a ‘normal’ alien, reinforced with the invisible strength of the State whose protection he enjoys, or with the ‘abnormal’ alien, the refugee, powerless and unprotected, who in the last resort is DAN STONE 105 unable to return to his native country—and who for that very reason, and most unjustly, is often treated as a suspect and an undesirable. Cohen concluded from this one simple statement: ‘It is obvious from all this that if there is any human being who needs protection it is the refugee.’10 Seventy years later, it remains obvious still. The value of comparing the treatment of refugee ‘issues’ in the past with the present reveals both how much and how little has changed. Many legal instruments are in place now that were unavailable to people and states before the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951) and, more important, the 1967 protocol to it that extended protection beyond those affected by the Second World War. At the same time, much antirefugee discourse is almost identical with that of more than a century ago, as several of the articles here show. To read the Daily Mail’s anti-alien stance of the early twentieth century is to know how it stands with respect to Syrian refugees today. So too do we know the script of those who want to help: a few years before Arendt published her essay ‘We Refugees’, Norman Angell’s famous book, You and the Refugee, appeared just before the outbreak of the war. In it, Angell argued that many people who were refugees had become so thanks to British policies. Therefore, we certainly cannot slam the door upon some of the very best of the world’s people at the very moment that they perish—perish sometimes as the result either of conditions we may, even unwittingly, have helped to create, or as the direct outcome of behaviour we have asked them to adopt.11 As Tony Kushner shows in his essay in this special issue, both those who are opposed to taking in refugees and those who want to help have made their arguments on the basis of instrumentalized versions of the past, drawing on stock images of terrorists and diseased-ridden Untermenschen, on the one hand, and innocent, winsome children, on the other. It is the hope of the contributors to this special issue that a more nuanced understanding of history will advance our understanding of what Peter Gatrell calls ‘refugeedom’, including the policies and ethical debates that surround the admission and care of refugees as well as what it means actually to be a refugee. The task is urgent, practically speaking. In today’s world, twenty people a minute are displaced. One in every 113 people is either an asylum-seeker, internally displaced or a refugee. There are about 65.6 million displaced people in the world, about the same as the population of the United Kingdom. About 40.8 million people are internally displaced within their own country. Of the 22.5 million refugees displaced outside their country of 10 Albert Cohen, ‘The aims of the International Refugee Organization as regards legal and political protection’, speech at IRO and Voluntary Organizations Conference, Geneva, 18–21 January 1949: Wiener Library, London, ITS Digital Archive, 6.1.1/82509659#1. 11 Norman Angell, You and the Refugee (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1939), 27. 106 Patterns of Prejudice origin, more than half come from three countries: Syria, Afghanistan and South Sudan. Eighty-six per cent of the refugees under UNHCR care are located in low- and middle-income countries close to the countries from which they have fled. Turkey is the country with the largest number of refugees in absolute terms, with 2.9 million refugees; Lebanon, with one refugee for every five citizens of the country, hosts more refugees per head of population than any other country. Some 51 per cent of all refugees, according to the UNHCR, are children, many of them travelling alone.12 Given these statistics, the fact that Europe appeared to struggle to cope with 1.5 million refugees over the last few years seems strange. The fact that it is struggling still, and continues to talk of a ‘refugee crisis’, is even more strange. It is not that the continent cannot afford to help these people. If the term ‘refugee crisis’ has been used less often in 2017–18 than in the preceding two years, it is because European governments have been ‘successful’ at keeping the ‘problem’ at bay, that is to say, stopping refugees from reaching Europe in such large numbers as previously. The people are still there, still refugees whether internally or externally displaced; they are simply out of Europeans’ sight. Nearly a third of all displaced persons are in Africa. Of the world’s 65 million refugees, some 10,000 tenaciously made their way to Calais, where they were stopped from proceeding to the United Kingdom and, until October 2016, set up camp in the ‘Jungle’, a place that should never have been allowed to exist in one of the richest corners of the world (that is to say, Europe as a whole, not Pas-de-Calais specifically). Ten thousand is a 650th of 65,000,000, or 0.015 per cent. These are not people who lack initiative or talent; they have determinedly made their way across dangerous terrain and ugly encounters with people smugglers and border guards in order to fulfil their dream of entering Britain. The United Kingdom, with its ‘proud tradition of helping the oppressed’, has denied them entry. With the exception of a few hundred children hurriedly allowed in as the French were sending in the bulldozers, even children with relatives in the Britain and, under Lord Dubs’s amendment, unaccompanied children were refused entry, leaving them exposed to the dangers of the camp. The contributors are under no illusion that these essays will change the situation. But the work of academics does make its way into wider debates, whether through policy consultation or the media. Given the hysteria over refugees at a time when much of the world seems to want to shrink in on itself and shirk its duties under international law—forgetting too that refugees have been economically and culturally beneficial for ‘host countries’—it seems nevertheless fitting that Patterns of Prejudice should grapple with the meaning of refugees historically, as it has had occasion to do on many occasions before. Dan Stone 12 See ‘Figures at a glance’, 30 June 2017, available on the the UNHCR website at www. unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html (viewed 3 January 2018).