Imperial Collapse and the Creation of Refugees in Twentieth-Century Europe

Abstract

While the twentieth century came to be known as the century of the refugee,1 the numbers of stateless persons on the European continent fluctuated during its course. Peaks occurred at key moments, including the end of the First World War, the end of the Second World War and the collapse of communism. This does not mean that people did not flee their states of origin due to ‘a well founded fear of persecution’ (to use the 1951 United Nations definition)2 at other times during the course of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, at the three moments identified above, the numbers of refugees reached peaks due to a combination of factors, including imperial and state collapse. The first of these periods consisted of the First World War and its aftermath, the era in which the refugee and the concept of such a person developed, especially in the early 1920s. The Armenian Genocide of 1915 represents an important point in this process, both because of the sheer numbers of people forced out of their homeland towards Syria and because of the existence of a now large historiography on this subject.3 It is estimated that between 1.5 million and 2 million people fled their homes in southeastern Anatolia towards the Syrian desert, of whom about half died, while others moved westwards.4 But the Armenian Genocide simply represented the most dramatic example of a process occurring throughout Eastern Europe, in particular in the era of the First World War.