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Department of History, Classics and Archaeology

Event Date: 14-16 September 2010,
Birkbeck, University of London

The Forty Years’ Crisis: Refugees in Europe, 1919-1959

Organisers:Dr Jessica Reinisch (Birkbeck), Dr Matthew Frank (Leeds) 
Conference email:fortyyearscrisis@googlemail.com

• Download the conference programme here

When the United Nations launched the first ever ‘World Refugee Year’ in June 1959, it came at the end of a tumultuous half century of military and diplomatic conflict and a succession of refugee crises originating in Europe. The publicity and events surrounding World Refugee Year were designed not just to raise funds for the cash-strapped UN High Commissioner for Refugees and heighten awareness of international efforts in the support of refugees, but also to draw a line under the European refugee problem by resettling the remaining core of wartime displaced still languishing in refugee camps.

Fifty years on, the organisers consider it timely to take stock of the ‘short’ twentieth century of European refugees and refugee policy which World Refugee Year supposedly brought to a close.

Scholarship on some aspects of European migration and migrants has grown enormously in recent years, particularly on the lives and post-1945 experiences of some groups of Displaced Persons. But in spite of growing academic interest in both world wars and post-war periods there is to date still no consistent historiography that places the many different kinds of refugees, migrants and uprooted people within a common framework, or situates the often conflicting national and international priorities in the management of the refugee threat within their wider historical context.

About the Conference

The conference will offer a uniquely comprehensive perspective on European refugees, refugee crises and responses within their international and global context. It aims to bring together the latest research on the development of approaches to the management of refugees in twentieth-century Europe, with particular reference to the initiatives and work conducted by the United Nations, its precursor organizations and other international bodies.

In the European context these refugee crises were always conceived of as a temporary problem with various piecemeal, largely technical and ad hoc solutions. The conference will re-assess the development of national and increasingly international responses to the problem of refugees, and will examine the parameters, consequences and implications of policies, from the First World War until 1959/1960.

The conference is concerned both with the responses to refugee crises and their political and historiographical afterlives. We invite papers on national and international responses to refugees and migrants in Europe, and we welcome proposals on how refugees were defined and categorised, on matching organisational divisions and responsibilities, on policies concerning the reception of refugees, humanitarian relief programmes, and on resettlement and repatriation initiatives. We particularly encourage papers which make national and international comparisons, or examine case studies within a wider European framework. We are also especially interested in the roles and historical assessments of international refugee bodies in the development of refugee policy.

The conference will adopt a pan-European perspective, which locates the European refugees, refugee crises and responses in an international and global context. It will thereby reflect on the role played by the problem of European crises in the new international structures of 1919, and how this had changed by 1959. When, why and how did the focus shift from the identification of an apparently European refugee problem to a global one?

Keynote Speakers:

• Michael Marrus (Toronto), Refugees in Europe: Explaining the Forty Years’ Crisis – (AUDIO HERE)
• Zara Steiner (Murray-Edwards College, Cambridge), The European refugee problem as a ‘forty year crisis’ - (AUDIO HERE)

Royal Holloway University of London Department of History
and The University of Leeds School of History

Event Date: 9 and 10 September 2010 
Royal Asiatic Society 14 Stephenson Way, London NW1

Uditi Sen – The Nation and its Exclusions: The Repatriation of European Refugees from Independent India, 1947-49

The transition from subjects of the British Empire to citizens of India and Pakistan was a long process which held different meanings for different people in South Asia. However, not all who were living in India at her hour of emancipation were entitled to make this transition. During World War II, India had emerged as a safe haven for several thousand Jewish refugees and British subjects evacuated from the Baltic States, Greece and Malta. As the war progressed, they were joined by refugees from Burma, Malaya and Hong Kong. In 1947, India’s independence sounded the death knell for these hastily set up refugee camps. From a refuge for stranded British subjects, India turned into a reluctant host, unwilling to succour ‘foreigners’. The national government was quick to differentiate between Indian citizens and British subjects, and pushed for the latter’s early repatriation. In 1947, there were no legal provisions distinguishing subjects from citizens, in India or in Britain. Despite this, there was a high degree of co-operation between the newly independent Government of India and His Majesty’s Government in removing ‘foreigners’ from Indian soil. By analysing the administrative discourse surrounding the repatriation of European refugees from India between 1947 and 1949, this paper explores the shared meanings of belonging to the nation of India which made such co-operation possible. Secondly, it compares this administrative discourse of belonging with the aspirations and actions of European refugees and evacuees. It attempts to understand why and how far they were complicit in their exclusion from India as outsiders. It also explores how a minority challenged this dominant discourse by staying on. By looking at India’s transition to independence from the perspective of those who were disenfranchised as ‘foreigners’, this paper seeks to throw fresh light on the boundaries of belonging to independent India.

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Uditi Sen, University of Cambridge
Rehabilitation’s Residue: Recasting Refugee Women as ‘Permanent Liabilities’

This paper explores the position of refugee women within the regime of refugee rehabilitation in post-colonial India. In order to rehabilitate or restore to normalcy millions of partition refugees, the independent Indian state was forced to articulate its vision of a normative social order. The anxiety caused by the figure of the widowed or single refugee woman, who had no male guardian to protect and provide for her reveals the inherent gender bias in this state led project of social reconstruction. Identified as ‘unattached’ women, they were considered to be ‘unrehabilitable’. The state stepped forward to fill the shoes of the missing patriarch and guarantee perpetual relief to unattached women and their dependants by classifying them as ‘permanent liabilities’. This paper demonstrates how the apparent benevolence of the state towards ‘unattached’ refugee women masked their exclusion from rehabilitation. However, the essentialisation of women as economic dependants did not go unchallenged. It rankled with the prominent women of Nehruvian India; and as ministers, administrators and social workers who enjoyed the patronage of the Congress they advocated training ‘unattached women’ to achieve economic self-sufficiency. Vocational training for refugee women introduced a contradictory ideal of feminine self-sufficiency within a project geared towards replicating patriarchal social mores. But it failed to address the root cause of the marginalisation of refugee women- the stubborn refusal of the Indian nation-state to give unattached women access to the core benefits of rehabilitation – land (or loans to buy land) and the capital to set up trades or businesses. This paper will conclude with suggesting that the inability of independent Indian to imagine refugee women as autonomous entities anticipated its refusal to grant equal citizenship to women in general.

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