European Refugees Research Articles

The Construction of the Mediterranean Refugee Problem from the Italian Digital Press (2013-2015): Emergencies in a Territory of Mobility

The Mediterranean Sea is a historical stage of mobilities and has been a witness to important movements of people and goods since ancient times. In this liquid territory, different social processes of globalization can be observed; yet, in recent years, it has been predominantly depicted as an emergency scene, a crossing platform for those in search of refuge in Europe. This scenario becomes connected to a set of dimensions of securitization and quests for control that redirect the debates about national and European responsibilities regarding maritime territories. In this article, this issue is addressed exploring the construction and development of the social problem of refugees in the Mediterranean, departing from a frame analysis of news items thematically filtered from the digital platforms of two Italian newspapers in 2013-2015. The problem is contextualized in time and content progression, deepening the framing of some critical events, and reframing the Mediterranean as a referent/emergent territory of mobility.

Exile in Mauritius: colonial violence and Indian Ocean archives

On 26 December 1940, 1 580 central European Jewish refugees were imprisoned on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius by the British colonial government after attempting to enter Palestine illegally. Unable to be repatriated to Nazi occupied Europe, and because no other country would grant them safe harbour, the British colonial government used these refugees as a symbolic deterrent against illegal immigration to Palestine by imprisoning them at Beau Bassin prison for the duration of the Second World War. Intersecting with a number of different disciplines and modalities, we examine the Beau Bassin story as a way to reposition histories of WWII from a southern Hemispheric and Indian Ocean perspective. Both ‘traditional’ and ‘ephemeral’ in its make-up, the Beau Bassin prison archive consists of records from the National Archives in London and Mauritius, official colonial records of correspondence, parliamentary debates, records from the South African Jewish Board of Deputies’ special committee on Mauritius 1940–1945, letters, memoirs, literary representations, art works, commemorative museum panels, life writing, interviews, and newspaper articles. In this article, we conceive of archives not simply as accounts of actions or records of what people thought happened, but rather as ‘records of uncertainty and doubt in how people imagined they could and might make the rubrics of rule correspond to a changing imperial world’ (Stoler 2010: 4). Approaching this story from a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective we locate the Beau Bassin story at the entangled apex of a confluence of narratives, from the history of the Indian Ocean region, Mauritian history, the history of the Second World War, to colonial studies, the history of penal colonies, Jewish Studies and the history of Palestine.

Europe's Migration Crisis

There has been a huge increase in the numbers of migrants seeking refuge in Europe. James Hampshire examines the development of a humanitarian and a political crisis within the European Union and assesses the chances of a long-term solution.

The Immigrant Rights Struggle, and the Paradoxes of Radical Activism in Europe

This paper discusses one of the dilemmas inherent in social movement mobilizations: the lack of an aligned frame within a movement. It shows how the existence of a dominant and a subordinate faction (European activists and refugees) with different social and ideological identities within the immigrant rights mobilizations in Berlin led to the emergence of paradoxes, and became counterproductive. This had two consequences: first, a power structure emerged which privileged European activists over the very people they sought to empower. Second, some refugees began to adopt the European activists' framing of the issue as anti-colonial/capitalist, in spite of the fact that it contradicted their primary demands concerning permission to work and reside in Germany.

THE TURKISH SEPHARDIM OF SAN ANTONIO MARKET, BARCELONA, 1900–1945

The article offers an historical anthropological study of a little-known, mostly Turkish-Sephardi population that settled in Barcelona at the beginning of the twentieth century, attracted by the commercial dynamism of the area around the San Antonio Market. The complete disappearance of the community in the early 1940s has made it more difficult to reconstruct its history than is the case with some other Jewish communities in Spain. Through oral history testimonies and the location of several dispersed sources, this article provides new ethnographic and historical information that contributes to recovering the memory of this Jewish community. The study is also an attempt to explain the reasons behind the departure of most of the community's members in the early 1940s, after more than 20 years of settlement and integration in the city of Barcelona. It shows how the new conditions introduced by the Francoist authorities had a direct impact on the ability of community members to make a living. The restrictions forced them first to ask for help from the international organizations which were helping European refugees and ultimately to leave the country.

Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II. By Gao Bei.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. x+185. $74.00

<i>Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II</i>. By Gao Bei.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. x+185. $74.00

Gilberto Bosques y el consulado de México en Marsella (1940-1942). La burocracia en tiempos de guerra

Based on unpublished archive sources, this paper examines in depth the role played by Mexican consul Gilberto Bosques and the Mexican Consulate in Marseille between 1940 and 1942, in relation to the rescue of European (non-Spanish) refugees. The fundamental role played by assistance groups in obtaining visas for refugees is analyzed, as well as the bureaucratic operation of the consulate and the fact that hundreds of visas were not delivered to their recipients, due to the imposition of demands that were impossible to meet. While collective memory sees Bosques as working in a state of exception, the historical sources consulted portray him working in normal conditions of Mexican bureaucracy: a normality that appears detached from the surrounding context of war and persecution.

The Admission of European Refugees from East and South Asia in 1947: Antecedents of Australia’s International Refugee Organization Mass Resettlement Scheme

A retrospective view which conceives of the past primarily as a pre-present tends to focus on the arrival in Australia of 843 displaced persons (DPs) aboard the General Heintzelman in November 1947 as a paradigmatic starting point of mass immigration, refugee resettlement and the end of monoculturalism. Here, I focus on two seemingly inconsequential episodes from 1947 — the admission of Polish refugees from India in August, and the arrival of hundreds of Jewish survivors aboard the Hwa Lien, in January—which could further our understanding of the immigration of International Refugee Organization (IRO)-sponsored DPs, and unsettle genealogies that shore up the present.This article has been peer reviewed.

Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II by Gao Bei (review)

Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II by Gao Bei (review)

Bei Gao. Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II.

Bei Gao. Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II.

Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II. By Gao Bei (New York, Oxford University Press, 2012) 204 pp. $74.00

<i>Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II.</i> By Gao Bei (New York, Oxford University Press, 2012) 204 pp. $74.00

Framing the Margins of Japanese American Life and Politics

Framing the Margins of Japanese American Life and Politics Brian Masaru Hayashi (bio) Greg Robinson . After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. viii + 247 pp. Photographs, notes, and index. $27.95. Doing the history of an ethnic or racial minority group involves the difficult task of using a "lens" that makes the historical experiences of a given racial and ethnic minority relevant to readers. Like many before him, Greg Robinson uses civil rights and racism as his way of understanding and communicating the historical experiences of Japanese Americans to an audience beyond that ethnic community. With civil rights, Robinson is able to link their historical experiences into the larger "story" of the American struggle for civil rights, and with racism, to connect their struggle with other minorities to illustrate the depth of the oppression Japanese Americans faced. All of these are admirable goals, but framing the post-World War II experience of Japanese Americans solely along these lines also creates problems, as his recent book After Camp makes clear. Robinson examines the three decades after Japanese Americans were released from the internment camps and asks "What happened afterwards?" He believes "the mid-century Japanese American experience" to be "a central but unexplored area of American history" that set the course for "mainland Japanese American life." To map out this terrain, Robinson undertook "a series of case studies, in the form of essays," believing they would illuminate "various developments relating to Japanese Americans in the aftermath of their wartime confinement, including resettlement nationwide, the mental and physical readjustment of the former inmates, and their political engagement, most notably in concert with other racialized and ethnic minority groups" (p. 1). His aim, therefore, is not to write a definitive or comprehensive study, but rather to present "a new departure" and something with which to stimulate further study and discussion of the post-World War II Japanese American experience. He writes: "It is my fervent hope that the volume will help move scholars in history, political science, law, ethnic studies, and other fields to [End Page 519] engage the primary material available on postwar Japanese Americans and fill the sizable gaps that exist in the literature" (p. 2). In the first part, Robinson sketches the wider context for the postwar Japanese American resettlement. He finds in "Political Science?" that their resettlement was linked to the Roosevelt Administration's plans to relocate Japanese Americans with the anticipated hundreds of thousands of postwar European refugees. Through an analysis of Project M (M for Migration), Robinson uncovers "eugenicist" thinking and a "political science" that believed mass dispersion was the means to peace, stability, and economic growth and was the common link between the planned resettlement of Japanese Americans and European Jews. This social science approach, Robinson reveals, was present in the thinking of Ales Hrdlicka, Isaiah Bowman, and others. He further shows evidence of support for Roosevelt's approach in "semi-official circles" as expressed by sociologist Forrest LaViolette, champion of the rights of Japanese Americans against their wholesale removal and internment. However, LaViolette's belief that assimilation would result in equality and protection of civil rights caused him to support the Roosevelt Administration's mass dispersal program even though FDR evidently did not have the same idealistic motivation. Robinson then shifts his focus, in "Japantown Born and Reborn," to Japanese American settlers to examine how well the mass dispersion and integration approach actually worked. He finds that the mass dispersal program was not successful for those Japanese Americans who settled in Los Angeles, where they faced greater difficulty in securing housing and employment than those who moved east to Detroit or New York City. But Japanese Americans who settled in Detroit faced difficulties of their own, finding themselves caught between growing racial tensions among Euro Americans and African Americans in the Motor City. In contrast, those who went to New York City, Robinson observes, found a city government equipped with social welfare agencies to assist their settlement and a welcoming atmosphere created by the "cosmopolitan spirit" among its "intellectual-minded and artistic group of Nisei," and this allowed Japanese Americans to achieve "a more rapid and...

Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II. By Gao Bei. pp. 185. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2013.

Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II. By Gao Bei. pp. 185. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2013.

Routing the camp: experiential authority in a politics of irregular migration

Often approached through Giorgio Agamben’s work, the camp-like spaces associated with asylum-seeking and refuge in Europe have been portrayed as sites of abjection to a predatory sovereign logic. In this article, I claim this reading overlooks the forms of authority in play at such sites. Through a theoretical interrogation of a politics of irregular migration and an empirical investigation of No Borders’ practices, I emphasise the ‘experiential’ forms of authority through which subjects are already taking and remaking the meaning of citizenship. Through Jacques Rancière’s philosophy of politics and sense, I argue that the task of discerning productions of experiential authority within new geographies of mobility is a critical political task of our time.

Quaker brotherhood: interracial activism and the American Friends Service Committee, 1917-1950

The Religious Society of Friends and its service organization, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) have long been known for their peace and justice activism. The abolitionist work of Friends during the antebellum era has been well documented, and their contemporary anti-war and anti-racism work is familiar to activists around the world. Quaker Brotherhood is the first extensive study of the AFSC's interracial activism in the first half of the twentieth century, filling a major gap in scholarship on the Quakers' race relations work from the AFSC's founding in 1917 to the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the early 1950s. Allan W. Austin tracks the evolution of key AFSC projects such as the Interracial Section and the American Interracial Peace Committee, which demonstrate the tentativeness of the Friends' activism in the 1920s, as well as efforts in the 1930s to make scholarly ideas and activist work more theologically relevant for Friends. Documenting the AFSC's efforts to help European and Japanese American refugees during World War II, Austin shows that by 1950, Quakers in the AFSC had honed a distinctly Friendly approach to interracial relations that combined scholarly understandings of race with their religious views. In tracing the transformation of one of the most influential social activist groups in the United States over the first half of the twentieth century, Quaker Brotherhood presents Friends in a thoughtful, thorough, and even-handed manner. Austin portrays the history of the AFSC and race--highlighting the organization's boldness in some aspects and its timidity in others--as an ongoing struggle that provides a foundation for understanding how shared agency might function in an imperfect and often racist world. Highlighting the complicated and sometimes controversial connections between Quakers and race during this era, Austin uncovers important aspects of the history of Friends, pacifism, feminism, American religion, immigration, ethnicity, and the early roots of multiculturalism.

Beyond the culture of exclusion: using Critical Race Theory to examine the perceptions of British ‘minority ethnic’ and Eastern European ‘immigrant’ young people in English schools

In England there are minority ethnic students with past family connections to the former British Empire, as well as recent Eastern European students, economic migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. One may wish to ask, do newly emerging racial identities conceptualise race and race relations in similar ways to existing minority ethnic communities? This paper is based on ongoing research examining the perceptions and experiences of British ‘minority ethnic’ and more recently migrated Eastern European ‘immigrant’ youth. Findings from a qualitative study conducted in two Buckinghamshire secondary schools examine everyday experiences, perceptions, practices, and barriers that validate stereotypes of 30 young people (ages 12–16). The primary aims in this paper are: (1) to illustrate some articulations of both inclusion and exclusion within the English educational system, particularly in relation to the recent comparative and temporal dimensions of migration and (2) to demonstrate how critical race theory (CRT), particularly the tenet of white supremacy, can be used to examine multicultural and intercultural descriptors. CRT is applied in this paper as an interdisciplinary approach that draws from new theories of race and society. I argue that diversity in race, migration, and education requires researchers to adopt flexible critical analytical frameworks that can expose transformations of racism.

A Sketch of My Scientific Autobiography

A Sketch of My Scientific Autobiography Robert R. Sokal1 I was born in 1926 in Vienna, Austria. I stem from a very typical bourgeois Jewish family, probably not all that different from non-Jewish middle-class families in Vienna. My father was a paint merchant. He owned a small chain of paint stores and a little manufactory, not big enough to be dignified by the name factory, for producing paint. As to my ancestors—most Jewish people when asked count at least one or two rabbis among their forebearers, just as emigré Russians like to sport a Grand Duke in their families— but I have not heard of a single rabbi among my ancestors. In fact, as far as I know, my paternal ancestors for three generations manufactured and sold paint in various places, mostly in what is now western Ukraine and at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. My maternal grandfather was the headmaster of a secular school for Jewish children in the same region. My own schooling started in Vienna where I went to an institution called a Gymnasium, which is a high school European style, in which I earned solid passing grades, but I was not in any way distinguished academically. Moreover, because this biography emphasizes my scientific development, I cannot recall any specific scientific interests. I did take a course in natural history, learned how to botanize and dissect flowers, and I recall being somewhat intrigued by the diversity of floral structure I uncovered. But I certainly had no special love or particular affinity for nature. In that respect, I am an uncharacteristic member of an ecology and evolution department. Many of our faculty were beetle or moth collectors in their youth, and those who had the good or bad fortune to grow up in a big city often developed that love of nature in a museum of natural history. Although there was and is a very distinguished natural history museum in Vienna, I cannot recall being there more than once during my childhood. I have gone back there as an adult, and have, in fact, worked there, but it had no influence on me then. My parents, like most bourgeois Jewish parents, expected me to become a doctor. And I had not given the matter much thought. I was only 13 when I left Vienna. The city furnished my cultural and intellectual roots, which are undoubtedly still visible—in many ways I still feel very European—but nevertheless, as far as science goes, my origins lie elsewhere. [End Page 489] In 1939 we moved to Shanghai. You may ask why? It is fairly obvious if you know your recent, actually no longer so recent, history. The Germans occupied Austria, or so the Austrians say. Anyway, the Germans came. My father was sent to the infamous Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps, and the only way to get him released was to present evidence that we were planning to leave the country. And the only place you could go without a visa was China. At that, we were very fortunate to be able to do that because it saved us from the Holocaust. So I arrived in Shanghai after an exciting three-week ocean voyage into a completely different culture, a very exotic one, for a 13-year-old Viennese boy. We were part of a community of some 20,000 Central European refugees who arrived in Shanghai between 1937 and 1941. I was put into a school with all the other refugee children. However, this school terminated students at age 14. I was within a year of that age, and the prospects ahead of me were that I would have to become an apprentice to someone like a carpenter or a plumber. That is what most of my friends and classmates were going to do. As anybody who knows me well will testify, I am absolutely hopeless at doing anything with my hands, and therefore I abhorred the thought of earning my living by manual labor. My mother was also very ambitious for me, and she somehow managed to get me into a school, called a public school, which was actually a...

The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict (review)

Reviewed by: The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict Timothy Mason Roberts (bio) The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict. By Andre M. Fleche. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. xiv, 204. $39.95 cloth) Andre M. Fleche shows how Americans and Europeans of the mid-nineteenth century compared the Civil War to preceding wars of liberation and revolutions in Europe, especially the revolutions of 1848. Fleche's work complements previous studies of Americans' reactions to nineteenth-century European revolutions and independence movements, particularly my Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (2009) and Paul Quigley's Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848-1865 (2011). Different from these works, however, The Revolution of 1861 extends the "age of revolution" to encompass America's erstwhile peculiar epic conflict (p. 8). An Atlantic focus, Fleche argues, rids us of parochialism in showing how both Northerners and Southerners, in order to understand their great national crisis, compared themselves to peoples around them. Fleche argues that European struggles for self-determination offered Southerners a contemporary model with which to justify secession and international recognition, and European labor and class conflicts strengthened Southerners' opposition to abolitionism. These same conflicts, however, influenced Northerners to support emancipation, even when they were hostile to black equality. Most important, European failures to achieve liberal democracy through challenges to traditional authority prodded supporters of the Union to redefine American liberalism to account for and justify their wartime expansion of central authority, even through military conquest. The Revolution of 1861 begins with a study of the immigrant politics of St. Louis during the outbreak of the war, showing how [End Page 585] "forty-eighters," European revolutionary refugees, organized and divided over the outbreak of "the American 1848," according to a Republican newspaper editor (p. 44). German-Americans tended towards the Union and antislavery, some hoping that the Civil War could precipitate a world democratic revolution. Meanwhile, Irish-Americans split, perceiving that fighting in America for either North or South might help liberate Ireland—the revolutionaries Thomas Francis Meagher and John Mitchel, escaping banishment in Australia for 1848 conspiracies, fought against each other in the Civil War. Alternating chapters then explore how trans-Atlantic advocates of either northern national unification or southern national independence, called upon ideologies of European nationalism to explain Americans' wartime political objectives and to recruit international support. Of course, sometimes trans-Atlantic analogies did not easily fit American circumstances. Unionists struggled to show that secession jeopardized, rather than maintained, the American revolutionary origins. Instead, they recalled how the American Revolution had launched a global attack on aristocracy; the Union destruction of slavery could embolden ordinary Europeans to renew the assault in the Old World. Moreover, northern victory would ensure the American capacity as a great power to bring free-labor democracy to the world—thus justifying both exceptionalism and imperialism. Meanwhile, champions of southern secession drew inspiration and justification "from a half-century's worth of revolution in Europe" (p. 84). Liberty-seeking Greeks, Belgians, Poles, Hungarians, and Italians all furnished prototypes for Confederates' reminding British policymakers of their general sympathy for continental rebels. On the other hand, Southerners struggled to show their likeness to European peoples who were different ethnically from the empires or majority populations that besieged them. And slavery remained the great chink in Southerners' search for international solidarity. Paradoxically, as Fleche shows, the appeal of the Confederacy to European revolutionaries was contradicted by the insistence of southern ideologues that in its defense of slavery the South was the [End Page 586] global bulwark of property-preserving conservatism, immune from the embrace of dangerous notions of human equality. Given the windup of the narrative in 1865, Fleche perhaps reaches too far in asserting that resituating the Civil War in a global context allows us to see "the disturbing side of the rhetoric of nationalist self-determination" and to see how easily "liberal arguments could justify racial subordination" in the postwar imperial age (p. 9). Perhaps, alternatively, liberal arguments were simply defeated by a conservative, subjugating Atlantic counterrevolution, played out in imperial conquests in Africa...

Spatialising the refugee camp

While the repressive geographies of asylum and refuge in Europe have been the focus of academic attention in recent years, much less work in geography has focused on the refugee camp as a distinctive political space. This paper sets out an analytical strategy for refugee camp space, focusing on the particular case of Palestinian camps in Lebanon. It takes three analytical cuts into the space of the camp: a critical take on Agamben’s ‘space of exception’ that accounts for the complex, multiple and hybrid sovereignties of the camp; an analysis of the camp as an assemblage of people, institutions, organisations, the built environment and the relations between them that produce particular values and practices; and an analysis of the constrained temporality of the camp, its enduring liminality and the particular time‐space from which it draws meaning. This spatial analysis of the camp offers a way of grounding geopolitics, seeing its manifestations and negotiations in the everyday lives and practices of ordinary people. The camp is much more than an anonymous terrain of conflict or a tool of international agencies, and understanding its spatiality is essential for seeing the everyday politics and material practices of refugees.

Propaganda Versus Genocide: The United States War Refugee Board and the Hungarian Holocaust

In 1944 the Second World War had been raging for more than four long years, with the death toll among soldiers and civilians alike climbing. European Jews constituted a special group of the victims, a fact that leaders of the Allied powers failed to acknowledge. In January 1944 a major revision of previous government policy was brought about in the United States with the establishment of the War Refugee Board in Washington, promising an American commitment to the rescue of European war refugees, including Jews. In March of the same year the situation for Jewish inhabitants in Hungary turned dire as German forces occupied the country. For lack of any other instantly applicable way to influence Hungarian developments, leaders of the new American War Refugee Board decided to launch a propaganda campaign to fight the Nazis and their accomplices. This paper will examine the motivations of American policy makers in focusing on political propaganda measures during the first phase of the Hungarian Holocaust (March–July 1944), and it will describe the logic and workings of the campaign as a means to save Hungary’s Jewry in the last full year of the Second World War.