Belgian Refugees Research Articles

The Great War, 1914–18: A Houseful of Belgians

On the outbreak of war in 1914 Tyndale, Bristol was one of the British Baptist churches to offer hospitality to Belgian refugees. Bristol had responded to the government’s appeal to assist in making provision for them. Established in 1869, many of Tyndale’s members were prominent in civic affairs. The Minister, Herbert Morgan, was a pacifist, but his views on the war largely chimed with those of other Baptists. The Bertholet family from Dinant were among those to whom the church gave hospitality. They had experienced the horrors of the German invasion as described in contemporary accounts and by Henri Bertholet himself. The church’s welcome for these Roman Catholic people was in the context of its broad ecumenical attitude.

Refugees and health: lessons from World War 1

The vast territory and huge number of civilians affected by World War 1 caused an unprecedented displacement and forced migration of people in Europe and beyond. 1 Gatrell P Refugees and forced migrants during the First World War. Immigrants Minorities. 2008; 26: 82-110 Crossref Scopus (30) Google Scholar There is little consensus on the actual number displaced, but more than 9 million were internally displaced persons and more than 3 million were refugees. 1 Gatrell P Refugees and forced migrants during the First World War. Immigrants Minorities. 2008; 26: 82-110 Crossref Scopus (30) Google Scholar , 2 De Jastrzebski T The register of Belgian refugees. J R Stat Soc. 1916; 79: 133-158 Crossref Google Scholar , 3 Stibbe M. Captivity, forced labour and forced migration in Europe during the First World War. Abingdon, Oxon, UK; Routledge, 2013. Google Scholar Although not comparable to the conflict in World War 1, today there are more than 51 million people worldwide who have been forcibly displaced; these include internally displaced persons, refugees, and asylum seekers, the largest number since World War 2. 4 United Nations High Commissioner for RefugeesUNHCR Global Trends 2013. http://www.unhcr.org/5399a14f9.html Google Scholar 16·7 million of these people are refugees, 33·3 million are internally displaced persons, and 1·2 million are asylum seekers. More than half of all refugees come from just three countries: Afghanistan, Syria, and Somalia. Lebanon hosts the largest number of refugees in relation to its population, with 178 refugees per 1000 inhabitants; this burden is the highest of any country since 1980. 4 United Nations High Commissioner for RefugeesUNHCR Global Trends 2013. http://www.unhcr.org/5399a14f9.html Google Scholar The changing role of the British state and its citizensA J P Taylor, the British historian, noted that before World War 1, “a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman”.1 After the war, the life of a British citizen would be shaped by the state and its institutions in ways that could never previously have been imagined. Full-Text PDF Disability and socioeconomic inclusion after World War 1Much has been written about the health legacies of World War 1: from early research on the psychological consequences of trauma to advances in prosthetics and plastic surgery, improvements in field medicine and nursing, and the eventual discovery of antibiotics.1–3 World War 1 also left a legacy of disability, with millions of men left permanently impaired. But, as historian Deborah Cohen4 has written, the responses of the German and British Governments to these millions of war disabled were strikingly different and, it might be argued, have left another equally enduring legacy. Full-Text PDF Dysentery in World War 1: Shigella a century onIn 1900, Simon Flexner, while visiting Manila, Philippines, isolated a bacterium from two patients with “red [bloody] diarrhoea” that he thought was the same as Shiga's Shigella dysenteriae. However, in 1902, Martini and Lentz1 showed that this bacterium was a distinct microbe, Bacterium flexneri, renamed by Ewing2 as Shigella flexneri. Full-Text PDF Open Access

Open Secrets: Literature, Education, and Authority from J.-J. Rousseau to J. M. Coetzee by Michael Bell

MLR, I03.4, 2oo8 I095 ner' s 'Portrait of theTranslator as Chameleon', on theother hand, is a patchwork of quotations where the exercise in rhetoric seems toconstitute an end in itself.Included in the section on 'Historical Perspectives', Christophe Declercq's paper on Belgian refugees inBritain during theFirstWorld War is an interesting ifratheroddly placed contribution, dwelling only marginally, as itdoes, on translation, and diverging en tirely from the textual and literary focus of the volume. Apparently more inkeeping with the overall theme of the collection isElena Xeni's examination of theproblems pertaining to the translation of figurative speech. Her report is based on an applied project comparing thedifficultiesencountered by experienced translators and trainees when facedwith translating intoGreek selected passages fromSue Townsend's The Secret Diary ofAdrian Mole, Aged I33/4. Unfortunately, however, the article would have greatly benefited from close editorial attention. This last observation could be applied to the volume as a whole: amore rigorous editing process could have eliminated a number of linguistic problems and evened up thequality of the contributions. As itstands, thecollection lacks homogeneity but stillmanages to offer amix of bright ideas, specialist information, and unexpected curiosities. UNIVERSITY OFWARWICK LOREDANAPOLEZZI Open Secrets: Literature, Education, and Authority fromY.-J.Rousseau toJ. M. Coet zee. By MICHAEL BELL. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2007. vii + 254 pp. ?50. ISBN 978-O-Ig-92080g-8. The 'open secret' in this difficult study,both tentative and assertive, concerns what is imparted in teaching, and what cannot be imparted. The book's arguments foran education which, as humanistic, is aware of the limits of the teachable, and not inter ested in education as something quantifiable, are admirably sharply expressed, and are quietly fearful thatglobal uses ofEnglish and the increase of computer translation 'will completely change thehuman relation to language [. . ] to render impossible an older conception of poetry' (p. 215). Early, admirable chapters examine textswhose theme is education, presented from the point of view of the educator, not the pupil: Rousseau's Emile, Tristram Shandy, Wieland's History ofAgathon-an unfamiliar text interestingly commented on-and two chapters on Goethe, on Wilhelm Meis ter'sApprenticeship and Wilhelm Meister's Journeymanship. The last chapter in this firstpart discusses Nietzsche. While these chapters are good, ifa little inconclusive, each having discussions of theBildungsroman which are sensitive and scholarly, in the second half the tone changes, with chapters on D. H. Lawrence, F R. Leavis, and J. M. Coetzee togetherwith his fictional alter ego, Elizabeth Costello. Michael Bell reads Lawrence as an equivalent, within an English tradition,ofNietzsche, andwould align discussion of Lawrence with suggestions of the importance of Leavis, focusing on his stress on teaching and reading as 'heuristic'. Though there is good reason to welcome a freshattempt at evaluation of Leavis, the discussion here seems slightly disappointing. Seeing Lawrence inNietzschean terms educes a humanist Nietzsche who reads less incisively than he might: itdoes not seem enough to define ressenti ment as 'the desire to take revenge on the past' (p. I47); and itmay be questioned whether Nietzsche on thewill should be read inBell's humanistic terms. Problems about seeing Lawrence as anything like an equivalent toNietzsche may be compared with Lawrence's lack of relation toFreud, which Bell is silent on. Bell would align Leavis with Heidegger. The politics of thisapart, this seems prob lematic: how can Leavis's humanistic concern with the single author who intends meaning (Bell quotes finesections fromLeavis here) be compared with thewriter for Io96 Reviews whom humanism must be set aside, and-in The Origin of the Work of Art-the con cept of the individual imagination? Derrida's pervasive critique ofHeidegger as too interested in defining Being as presence (but Derrida isneglected in this study) sug gests that Heidegger needs tobe read asmore post-humanist thanLeavis orLawrence. If Leavis were to be characterized as Heideggerian, it could be by a reading of his work which found places where Leavis differed fromhimself,making a deconstruc tive reading possible. The point holds with Lawrence: Bell's fine, impassioned pages confirm the 'traditional' Leavis view of Lawrence, rather than attempting to read Lawrence anew, differently from the older I950S and 9g6osarguments. They stake out the familiar ground again. Bell gives insufficient...

Local heroes: Belgian refugees in Britain during the first world war

The Belgians during the First World War represented the largest refugee movement in British history. Despite the size of this influx — at its peak some 250,000 were present in Britain ‐ there has been an almost total absence of reference to them. This article suggests that this neglect is unfortunate both with regard to our understanding of the First World War and the history of refugees during the twentieth century. In particular, this article stresses the importance of local responses and reactions to the refugees and the significance of place in the process of rebuilding lives and identities in Britain.

Réfugiés, prisonniers et sentiment national en milieu rural en 1914-1918. Vers une nouvelle approche de l'Union Sacrée

Populations displaced in the First World War remain largely unkown, though they had a major impact on life in the rear and on the mental representations of the populations who sheltered them. The Sacred Union implied free and spontaneous integration of colonial workers, and repressive rejection of those belonging to enemy nations, wether they be civilians or soldiers. As soon as 1915, the coming back on the forefront of material and manpower concerns entailed a progressive reversal of representations and of local policies : economic actors and simple citizen were all fighting over enemy workforce, whereas French of Belgian refugees became unwelcome, particularly in the countryside. Beyond accusations about their would-be idleness, emerges an actual rejection of difference. If the Sacred Union was never a myth in the rural world, it proved fragile in the long run, thus demonstrating that at the beginning of this century the sense of nationhood was an ideal cut out for a short war.

Belgian Bricks for Fortress Europe: Comment on the New Refugee Law after a Judgment of the Cour d'Arbitrage

The authors examine the modifications of the Belgian refugee law, introduced on 6 May 1993. Those modifications follow the annulment of the so-called double 5% rule by the Court of Arbitration. That rule required that refugees from certain countries submit proof of a well-founded fear of persecution before their request for refugee status could even be considered admissible. That rule comprises two notions, namely, that of the manifestly unfounded claim and the safe country of origin. Annulled because it introduced a discrimination between refugees according to their country of origin, the rule has now been extended to all refugees by the new law. Beyond the question of discrimination, the authors also look at the rule's compatibility with the Geneva Convention, especially given its extensive application. They recall that, according to the logic of the system of the Geneva Convention, without access to the territory of an asylum State, there is no access to the procedure of recognition of the quality of refugee, and therefore no possible protection.

The garden city education of Belgian planners around the First World War

Despite the efforts of the International Garden Cities and Town Planning Association before the First World War, the garden city concept was barely known in Belgium. In 1914, the Association considered the presence of Belgian refugees in Great Britain as the opportunity to take an educational initiative. The International Garden Cities and Town Planning Association decided to organize a Town Planning Conference on the Reconstruction of Belgium, while the Town Planning Institute suggested the education of Belgian experts through a programme of exhibitions and study groups. The Belgium Town Planning Committee, created in London in 1915, was meant to allow architects, engineers, surveyors, lawyers, municipal counsellors and other experts to study the problems of reconstruction and translate them into schemes and preparatory guidelines. The mission of Verwilghen to Great Britain was to prepare the new Belgian statutory order on town planning which was finally influenced by English and French town planning con...

The Register of Belgian Refugees

The Register of Belgian Refugees