The re-making of a Europe of differences: mobile lives and the globalization of categories in revolutionary and post-imperial times (c.1770–1970)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article discusses the fundamental question of how the differentiation of people on the move or in transit and their categorization changed in revolutionary and post-imperial times. These interacting processes have affected Europe and the negotiation of its internal and external boundaries. Drawing on examples from the rich history of migration and mobility since the late eighteenth century, the article demonstrates how individual research studies can be situated and expanded within a broad temporal and analytical framework which focuses on the historical actors’ struggles over the distinctions and categories imposed upon them by others (e.g. the administration or the family). It explores dynamics arising both from the socio-economic and cultural practices of mobile people (e.g. on localizing or globalizing their concepts of life) and from legal-administrative procedures to distinguish between these people (e.g. through categories). These differentiations interacted and changed especially during two threshold phases, around 1800 and 1945. During these periods, international actors renegotiated the relationship between territory and population by grappling with the distinction between ‘refugees’ and numerous other migrants and claiming a universalist or more particularistic definition over which people were entitled to protection and support. Through this approach, Europe is understood as a lived, administered and negotiated space whose external and internal boundaries are also the result of long, more or less overlapping processes of self- and external evaluation of people located outside their place of origin.