A Europa e os movimentos migratórios pós-Segunda Guerra - Peter Gatrell book; review by Harun Buljina

H-Diplo Review Essay 205 on Gatrell. The Unsettling of Europe: How Migration Reshaped a Continent

by George Fujii

H-Diplo Review Essay 205

20 March 2020

Peter Gatrell:  

The Unsettling of Europe: How Migration Reshaped a Continent

New York:  Basic Books, 2019.  ISBN:  9780465093632 (hardcover, $19.99).

https://hdiplo.org/to/E205
Review Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii

Review by Harun Buljina, Independent Scholar

Migration has formed an omnipresent feature of European politics and public discourse over the past several years, with commentators frequently referencing an unprecedented ‘migrant crisis’ and the challenge it poses to continental institutions. Peter Gatrell’s timely new book, The Unsettling of Europe, explicitly confronts these debates, opening with the all-too familiar image of desperate masses crowding into boats and trying to reach the safety of foreign shores. The episode Gatrell describes, however, belongs not to the contemporary Mediterranean, but to a similarly perilous crossing of the Baltic Sea in 1944. The author argues that far from being an apocalyptic novelty, migration forms a defining feature of the past 70-odd years of European history, with his book reinterpreting this period by centering it on the experience of “people on the move” (3).

In doing so, Gatrell draws on several discernible strands of the scholarly literature. The Unsettling of Europe fits neatly within an ongoing concern with ‘mobility,’ both within and without European historiography, with the author notably opting for the term ‘migration’ over such narrower counterparts as ‘immigration’ so as to emphasize the multiple dimensions and open-ended nature of the phenomenon.^[1] It also builds on an ongoing scholarly interest in the totality of the “postwar” years—epitomized by Tony Judt’s eponymous study—which has grappled with the consequences of Europe’s Cold War division and reunification by considering the two sides of the iron curtain in conjunction.^[2] Above all, however, Gatrell’s book testifies to a renewed methodological emphasis on personal narratives and experiences in public history and similarly-minded academic works.^[3] The result is a rich panoramic account of how migration shaped contemporary Europe, humanizing and bringing nuance to public debate while leaving open a number of further questions.

The Unsettling of Europe is divided into five chronological sections, each of which further consists of four-to-five individual chapters focusing on particular national contexts or, occasionally, themes. Part 1 covers the period 1945-1956, with Gatrell arguing that accounts centered on recovery and reconstruction underplay the tremendous displacement that these processes entailed. Emerging Cold War rivalries thus combined with regional retaliations to further redraw Central and Eastern Europe along ethno-national lines, perhaps most notably in the case of the region’s large German minorities. At the same time, both the eastern and western blocs relied on migrants, whether internal or international, to facilitate their economic development. Part 2 consequently turns to the ‘golden age’ of this development between 1956 and 1973. Coinciding as it did with accelerating decolonization, this period saw growing numbers of collaborators, laborers, and repatriates arriving in metropoles from their former colonies. Gatrell particularly examines the questions that new migrants posed for governments and societies in Britain, France, and Germany, but also in the Communist East, whose economic modernization entailed both tremendous internal migration and growing contacts with migrants and visitors from the broader second and third worlds.

Economic concerns continue to structure the book in part 3, which spans from the 1973 Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil embargo to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Gatrell documents how the former crisis accelerated rightwing backlash against migrants throughout Northwestern Europe, illustrating what political scientist James Hollifield described as the “liberal paradox”: as businesses demanded the free movement of labor, voters balked at sharing welfare benefits.^[4] Alongside these domestic divisions, however, migration from southern European countries such as Greece, Italy, and Portugal also contributed to the continent’s ongoing economic integration. Gatrell is further attuned to the intertwined intellectual development of the concept of multiculturalism and competing demands for assimilation during this same era, but is careful not to let these abstract debates monopolize the discussion, devoting greater attention to the experience of migrants themselves. For many, the reality of likely permanent settlement ran counter to their own initial expectations, opening up gender and generational cleavages that compounded the ‘disintegration’ of pre-migratory social ties. As in the preceding decades then, migration in late Cold War Europe represented a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon, simultaneously tying the continent together and provoking anxieties over civilizational decline, “unsettling” both migrant communities and the larger societies around them.

Part 4 considers the period 1989-2008, during which the collapse of Communism appeared to herald a new Europe of obsolete borders and unprecedented mobility. Gatrell offers a critical reappraisal of these years in light of more recent developments, highlighting growing contradictions within the project of European integration. The break-up of Yugoslavia, for instance, demonstrated once again the link between national self-determination and mass displacement, while the rise of exceptionally mobile ‘Eurostar’ professionals and Western expatriates belied the parallel expansion of human trafficking and brutal exploitation of poorer migrants. Describing the archipelago of camps and detention centers that emerged in the early years of the new century to keep extra-European migrants out, Gatrell sets the stage for the book’s final part 5, which, analogously to part 3, pivots on the economic crisis of the 2008 financial crash. In contrast to the oil embargo of the early 70s, however, here the resulting downturn accompanied enormous political upheavals, most notably the Arab Spring, which sharply increased the numbers of those seeking refuge and stability within the European Union. After offering a pair of more conceptual chapters that consider contestations over migrants’ bodies and efforts at memorialization, Gatrell closes the section with a reflection on the “war on refugees” in Europe today, concluding that the continent seems to have come full circle to the displacement of 1945.

In the conclusion, Gatrell distills the preceding narrative into a handful of overarching points. He reiterates that the history of migration in modern Europe is multi-layered and open-ended, a catalyst for both interstate cooperation and disagreement, the cause as well as consequence of European integration. Situating the current “migrant crisis” within the longer convoluted history that his book described, he takes aim at both popular historical amnesia and such academic formulations as Ivan Krastev’s reference to a newly “barricaded continent.”^[5] While Gatrell is a harsh critic of ‘fortress Europe,’ he warns that notions of an unprecedented hostility to migrants obscure how mobility has always worked in tandem with incarceration, as well as the selective embrace of wealthier migrants in the EU today—a filter rather than a fortress. Conceding that questions of identity are never far from the surface, he proposes re-conceptualizing Europe’s history of migration not through the symbol of an arriving boat, but with that of a bridge: the continent may have been less unsettled without it, but it would have also emerged greatly diminished and impoverished.

Besides historicizing the public debate over migration in Europe today, another central intervention of The Unsettling of Europe is to restore historical agency to migrants themselves. Gatrell thus sees dehumanizing descriptions of migrants as an amorphous mass or of waves of migration as comparable to natural phenomena as reflecting not only contemporary anxieties, but also a consistent failure on the part of commentators and policy makers to take into account their diverse perspectives over the preceding decades. Chapters throughout the book therefore repeatedly highlight how socio-political polemics ignored migrants’ varied backgrounds, motivations, and responses to life in new lands, with debates over “assimilation,” for example, showing little concern for how migrants understood the concept themselves. In an effort to rectify this, Gatrell incorporates a broad range of primary sources, from individual memoirs to a wealth of anthropological studies and works of film and literature. The Unsettling of Europe consequently teems with personal stories of migrants from virtually every locale and period under discussion, perhaps taking its cue from similar trends in European museums, which themselves form a major subject of a chapter toward the end of the book.

Taken on its own terms then, The Unsettling of Europe largely succeeds, providing a cohesive and intimate reinterpretation of European history since the close of the Second World War with migration—and migrant voices—at its center. Certain drawbacks emerge, however, precisely at the boundaries of this spatial and temporal scope. Much of the post-1945 displacement Gatrell describes in Eastern Europe, for instance, has its roots in the longer-term demise of pluralistic dynastic empires and the proliferation of nation-states in their wake. Several chapters thus refer to Bulgarian state pressures on the country’s Turkish minority, but while these unfolded within the geopolitical circumstances of the Cold War, they were also rooted in much older local dynamics surrounding the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, which in turn cast their shadow on the present-day ‘Balkan route.’ Taking 1945 as the starting point also conceals other longer-term structural trends, such as the fact that Europe entered the twentieth century as a net exporter of peoples but closed it with the significant in-migration that Gatrell describes; where the interwar overpopulation of the Balkans made them a formative site for theories of economic development that economists later applied to Africa and Asia, today they register some of the steepest rates of population decline in the world. In effect, while focusing on the post-1945 period highlights the relationship between migration, political economy, and state-building, it also risks obscuring the longer-term changes and continuities that shape regional responses to migration today.

In spatial terms too, the European political framing occasionally sidelines certain global and trans-continental developments that are crucial for making sense of migration in Europe itself. As mentioned, the global economic shocks such as 1973 and 2008 structure the book’s narrative, but the focus is on how they affected the European nation-states that drew in migrants rather than on how their global ramifications spurred migration in the first place. In other words, while The Unsettling of Europe more explicitly situates the ‘pull’ factors behind migration within the historical development of the modern European political economy, the corresponding ‘push’ factors emerge largely from the composite of individual experiences. In fairness, however, Gatrell is clearly attuned to the global factors behind migration into Europe, notably criticizing the parochialism of European debates in which commentators ignore the fact that the bulk of those fleeing Syria have ended up in Lebanon, Turkey, and elsewhere. Moreover, with 24 chapters, 70-odd years, and a geographic range stretching from Portugal to the Urals, one can hardly fault The Unsettling of Europe for a lack of breadth. To the contrary, while the above issues of scope testify to the challenges and trade-offs of fitting global phenomena into a European frame, Gatrell’s study makes an important historical contribution to one of the most far-reaching debates shaping Europe today.

Harun Buljina received his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 2019. Currently based in Cambridge, MA, his research focuses on Muslim intellectual and socio-political networks in the late-Ottoman and modern Balkans.

Notes

[1] Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, “The Mobility Transition Revisited, 1500–1900: What the Case of Europe Can Offer to Global History,” Journal of Global History 4:3 (November 2009): 347-377; Engseng Ho, “Inter-Asian Concepts for Mobile Societies,” The Journal of Asian Studies 76:4 (November 2017): 907-928.

[2] Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005).

[3] Orhan Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2012), 54-57.

[4] James F. Hollifield, “The Emerging Migration State,” International Migration Review 38:3 (2004): 885-912.

[5] Ivan Krastev, After Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 108.

Crescimento populacional: os dados da questao - The Globalist

Global Population Growth: Just The Facts

The Globalist, November 2017

 

Global Population Growth Per Minute

On balance, how many more people did Earth gain every minute of the past year? | By The Globalist.

https://www.theglobalist.com/global-population-growth-per-minute/

Annual Population Growth by Region

How much did different world regions gain in population over the past year? | By The Globalist

 https://www.theglobalist.com/annual-population-growth-by-region/

The Global Gender Balance in 2017

What share of the population of each world region is female? | By The Globalist.

https://www.theglobalist.com/the-global-gender-balance-in-2017/

International Migration and the Global Agenda

What are the causes and effects of global migration?

By Joseph Chamie, June 23, 2008
https://www.theglobalist.com/international-migration-and-the-global-agenda/

Four powerful forces are contributing to the urgency of addressing the international migration issue on the national, regional and international agenda.
The first force is demography. Generally speaking, receiving countries in the North are facing a “birth-rate crisis.” With more deaths than births due to low fertility levels, many receiving countries are experiencing rapid population aging — and facing outright population decline.
In contrast, the populations of sending countries, especially in Asia and Africa, continue to grow rapidly, with most of their populations concentrated in the younger ages.
Economics is the second major force. With aging and shrinking populations, many developed nations are confronting serious labor shortages, financial pressures on government-sponsored pensions and difficulties providing health care for the elderly.
In addition, countries in the Persian Gulf are recruiting large numbers of temporary migrant workers for their expanding economies, fueled largely by their vast oil wealth.
At the same time, millions of men and women in poor developing countries, especially the youth, face poverty and hardships securing employment. And as a result, many are seeking opportunities by migrating — legally or illegally — to wealthier countries, especially in Europe and North America.
Their difficult situations are further compounded by environmental and climate changes impacting their farming, fishing and other important natural resources.
The third major force is culture — a broad set of issues including ethnicity, language, religion, customs and tradition. In contrast to the past, the composition of the immigrants in many instances differs greatly from that of the receiving country.
In Europe following World War II, for example, many immigrants came from the relatively poorer countries of southern Europe.
Many of the immigrants today, however, are not only less educated and lower skilled than the native populations — but are ethnically and culturally different, raising concerns about integration, assimilation and cultural integrity.
Finally, the fourth crucial force is national security. The events of 9-11 in the United States, the bombings in the United Kingdom, Spain, Indonesia and elsewhere, as well as several high profile violent crimes committed by immigrants have heightened security and safety concerns relating to international migrants.
As a result, many countries have tightened their borders, stiffened their policies and instituted new guidelines and procedures, e.g., photos, fingerprints, lengthy detentions and immigration bans, to monitor and deal with those coming from certain countries, especially illegal immigrants.
In addition, civil conflict and societal breakdowns — such as in Somalia, Haiti and the Congo — have resulted in millions of people rushing to escape from the disorder, violence and insecurity.
These four powerful forces are keeping international migration at the top of national, regional and global agenda.
Moreover, given the current economic downturn and growing anti-immigrant sentiments among both developed and developing countries, it seems certain that the issue of how best to manage international migration will become even more contentious, divisive and challenging for governments and international organizations in the years ahead.

A comunidade britanica no mundo: sua construcao cultural - Book review

H-Net
Greetings Paulo Almeida,
New items have been posted in H-Diplo.

Table of Contents

Fairchild on Crosbie and Hampton, 'The Cultural Construction of the British World' [review]

Barry Crosbie, Mark Hampton, eds. The Cultural Construction of the British World. Manchester:    Manchester University Press, 2016. 240 pp. $105.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7190-9789-8.

Reviewed by Sabrina Fairchild (University of Bristol)
Published on H-Diplo (June, 2016)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach

Migration, networks, and culture remain organizing concepts in the history of the British world. The reason is not hard to see: between 1815 and 1914, 22.6 million people emigrated from the British Isles. Sixty percent went to the United States, but at least 13.5 million Britons settled in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. This mass movement affected a transfer of “Britishness” through emotional, commercial, cultural, and political networks that linked the colonies with Britain and with each other. Since the 1990s, historians of empire have labelled this geopolitical system the “British world.” In The Cultural Construction of the British World, Barry Crosbie and Mark Hampton push this concept beyond the Dominions, those areas of mainly white settlement. This edited collection offers fresh insights into the nature and experience of the British world, demonstrating the way it shaped British imperial expansion across the formal empire and areas of informal influence. In doing so, it offers a timely intervention into the study of the cultures of empire.

As Crosbie and Hampton assert in their introduction, this volume fruitfully combines the theoretical frameworks of the British world model with the cultural emphasis of “new imperial history” (p. 1). The former approach emerged in the late 1990s the result of a series of conferences attended by historians of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa who sought to nuance the colony-to-nation thesis of previous nationalist historians.[1] In the years following this has led to vibrant investigations in the role of remittances, journalism, religion, and tourism among others in the making of the British world.[2] A growing consensus on the importance of migration and empires as migration systems has emerged from the literature. What Crosbie and Hampton take from the British world model is the importance of movement; that the travel and careering of “expatriates, settlers and indigenous peoples” shaped the circulation of “people, goods, ideas and capital” across the British world and formed new systems of international exchange (p. 4). This analytical focus also allows them to follow their subjects out of the preexisting, Dominion-based bounds of the British world and across areas as diverse as China, the Ottoman Empire, and Sierra Leone. 

Here, Crosbie and Hampton’s expansion of the British world model gains significant support from “new imperial history.” Beginning in the early 1990s, this re-envisioning of British imperial history sought to emphasize the importance of culture as the driver of imperial expansion and the lens through which historians could see the interconnections of metropole and periphery. According to the advocates of this approach like Antoinette Burton, Catherine Hall, and John Mackenzie, culture traveled alongside the merchants, missionaries, diplomats, and adventurers who populated empire.[3] The movement of British subjects across the globe created new forms of cultural exchange which shaped the nature and trajectory of imperial expansion. Such insights provide the conceptual glue that holds Crosbie and Hampton’s expanded British world together. Wherever Britons went, they argue, they “sought to recreate the institutions familiar to home: clubs, sport, educational systems and, where possible, family structures” (p. 6). This meant that even outside the settler colonies enough cultural uniformities existed to see diverse locations as part of a cultural British world.

The introduction and eleven chapters of the collection work to explicate the cultural British world. Crosbie and Hampton’s introduction outlines the book’s rationale, its arrangement, and its broader implications. The chapters themselves are divided into two sections. The first five chapters bring to the fore the people and ideas that held together the cultural British world. The chapters by Christopher Bayly and Michelle Tusan both argue for paying better attention to British men (and women) on the ground of empire. In both Asia and the Ottoman Empire these foreign merchants, journalists, administrators, or philanthropists pushed forward the reach of British imperial expansion and determined the kind of cultural exchanges that occurred therein. Alongside these the chapters by Philippa Levine, Philip Harling, and Martin J. Wiener illustrate the types of commercial, political, and sartorial ideas that underpinned the “Britishness” of the British world. In each, questions about dress, free trade, and “English rights” provide opportunities to explore the mechanics of cultural exchange and to examine how far these processes strengthened or weakened the British world.

The second six chapters work to decenter the cultural British world by mapping its networks and tracing the ways in which people, goods, and ideas circulated across them. The chapters by Barry Crosbie and Tillman Nechtman argue for a more precise understanding of how these networks were shaped by particular ethnicities and cultural practices. In different ways, Irish military, religious and professional initiatives in India, and the material possessions brought back home by British administrators of India formed specific circuits and understandings of cultural exchange. The chapters by John Carroll, Mark Hampton, and Bronwen Everill then broaden our understanding of the scope of the British cultural world. In their studies of China and Sierra Leone the recurring themes of legitimate commerce, the civilizing mission, and fixing understandings provide evidence of the ideas and practices that drove forward and integrated the British cultural world across the formal and informal empire. Finally, Christopher Hilliard’s chapter on the career of Leavisian literary criticism in New Zealand and India suggests to historians that any expanded model of the British world still needs to engage with the Dominions and their place within this system.

As a whole, the volume provides historians of the British world and imperialism with numerous exciting areas for exploration. Obviously, it reinvigorates the debates around culture and empire. Some chapters do revisit the conventional themes and sources of cultural history. Paintings and engravings of explorations throughout North America and the Pacific provide the basis for Philippa Levine’s discussion of the twinned tropes of the “noble savage” and “naked native” (p. 18). Paintings produced in India also feature in Tillman Nechtman’s chapter as the source of William Hickney’s “feud with the [British] tax collector” and the definition of Britishness (p. 181). Where this volume really pushes forward historians’ understanding of culture in empire, however, are the chapters that expand its remit. In this context, a stand-out contribution is Philip Harling’s chapter on sugar, which uses a commodity as a lens to draw out the competing economic and cultural imperatives of empire. Seeing culture as more than just “sport, film, theatre and the media” (p. 2) therefore forces historians to look across disciplinary bounds and understand the ways in which culture, economics, diplomacy, and politics together drove forward British imperial expansion.

Together these chapters also reinforce the need to be specific about the direction and manner in which culture interconnected the British world. Barry Crosbie’s chapter argues that “Britishness” often conceals the distinctive English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh contributions to imperial expansion. Because of this Crosbie examines Irish initiatives in India to demonstrate how they were differentiated by a distinct Irish understanding and culture of empire. Clearly, the cultural British world, like the broader empire, was not “one big thing.”[4] The volume further argues for specificity in understanding imperial culture through comparative studies. The chapters by Martin Weiner and Christopher Hilliard show that similar ideas had remarkably different careers across the British world. In Weiner’s study the recourse to “English rights” bolstered British dominance in Trinidad, but also supported an indigenous campaign against the repeal of jury trials in India. Similarly, Hilliard’s chapter suggests that Leavisian literary criticism found a stronger following among intellectuals in New Zealand than it did in India. Here, each study demonstrates that instead of being “one big thing” the British world was comprised of multiple, overlapping networks of imperial cultures.

The volume’s strongest contribution is its commitment to localize the cultural British world. Doing so bridges the discussions of culture and networks by zooming in on the encounters and exchanges of specific communities. For example, at the heart of the studies by Christopher Bayly, Michelle Tusan, and John Carroll are discussions of individual initiative and agency. For Bayly the “British people who worked in Asia for significant periods” (p. 39) gained a privileged view of empire that made them effective critics for reform. Likewise for Tusan the men and women on the spot in the Ottoman Empire--consuls, diplomats and philanthropists--brought with them a sense of a humanitarian mission and used their position to influence British policy in the Near East. Carroll’s merchants, diplomats, and professionals in pre-1839 Canton may have been more transient, but they still used their unique vantage point to fix understandings about China with less hostility than previously assumed. For each study, following British subjects abroad supports the argument that British initiatives oversea created an expansive cultural British world beyond the bounds of the Dominions and the formal empire.

As a final comment I would have liked to see the cultural British world placed within a broader comparative framework. Crosbie and Hampton themselves state that this is one of the aims of the volume. Their cultural British world is one “often precarious ‘system’” amid others, engaging equally with “small kingdoms and stateless tribes” and with “such empires as the Qing, the Ottoman and the Mughal,” not to mention the “newly emergent United States of America” (p. 7). Yet, this view of the cultural British world as a competing player on the world stage is not always clear in the chapters that follow. Michelle Tusan’s and John Carroll’s chapters concern the Ottoman Empire and Qing Empire, respectively. But, the emphasis on British actions on the ground, while necessary to explicate the cultural British world, obfuscates the subjectivity of the other imperial powers. Equally, there are multiple references to the United States scattered across these chapters. American consuls and missionaries appear briefly in Tusan’s chapter (p. 85), again as merchants in Carroll’s study (p. 138), and again in Bronwen Everill’s discussion of the settlers to Sierra Leone (p. 198). How this competition among empires for space, resources, and loyalty shaped the cultural British world is a question posed and left unanswered.

Still, there is much here to applaud. Even the question over the global context of the cultural British world is less a criticism than an area of research for future scholars to explore. By expanding the definition of the British world, by tracing culture’s circulation through its networks, and by demonstrating how “culture” itself can be a more encompassing field of study, these collected studies offer up many new ways to think about the histories of the British world and imperial expansion. The volume will no doubt provide a useful addition to the existing scholarship.

Notes

[1]. For the first of these see Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich, eds., British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2003).

[2]. Gary B. Magee and A. S. Thompson, Empire and Globalization: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c.1815-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Simon J. Potter, News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876-1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Charles V. Reed, Royal Tourists, Colonial Subjects and the Making of a British World, 1860-1911 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016); and Hilary M. Carey, God's Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c. 1801-1908 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

[3]. Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880-1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).

[4]. Richard Price, “One Big Thing: Britain, Its Empire, and Their Imperial Culture,” Journal of British Studies 45 (2006): 602-27.

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=46275

Citation: Sabrina Fairchild. Review of Crosbie, Barry; Hampton, Mark, eds., The Cultural Construction of the British World. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. June, 2016.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=46275

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.