Refugees and the Nation-State in Europe,1919–59

This special issue examines how refugees and refugee crises were defined and managed by European nation-states in the four decades after the end of the First World War. Refugees were iconic of this turbulent period in European history. They have always been, as John Stoessinger, the former refugee turned International Refugee Organization (IRO) official and historian, observed, ‘the barometer of intolerance’. ¹ The timeframe of this special issue includes some of the most dramatic examples of intolerance in modern European history; it spans the aftermaths of two world wars, a series of military and civil conflicts, and struggles over nationalism, race, ideology and economic development. Many millions of Europeans were displaced in the course of resulting waves of ethnic and genocidal conflict. According to Malcolm Proudfoot, who ran the refugee department of General Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) in occupied Germany, some 60 million Europeans were uprooted during and after the Second World War, more than 10 times as many as had been part of the refugee movements accompanying and following the First World War. ² In his recent survey of modern refugees, Peter Gatrell also agrees that ‘the most dramatic period of mass population displacement occurred in the 1940s as a result of war and political upheaval around the world’. ³ By the end of the 1950s a line was supposed to have been drawn under the European refugee problem, as signalled by the United Nations’ first World Refugee Year in 1959–60. While this event did not bring an end to the existence of refugees by any means, to contemporary observers it did seem to form a turning point from the identification of an apparently European refugee problem to a global one. Europe had already by this stage become a place of refuge for non-Europeans; thereafter refugees no longer tended to be European in origin.

Not long into this project we were asked by a friendly provocateur if it were possible for historians to suffer from ‘refugee fatigue’. Considering the ever-growing numbers of articles, books and special journal issues on aspects of refugee and migration history, this was a reasonable question. Indeed, the historiography on migration and displacement has grown immensely in the last decade, as a result of which refugees, in all their variety, have been firmly placed on the map of modern history. It is simply no longer true, as Eugene Kulischer lamented in 1948, that the role of migration in world history has been largely neglected. ⁴ Nonetheless, the emerging canon still has some notable and fundamental blind spots. It is precisely the refugees’ diversity, and the apparent heterogeneity of migration scenarios and administrative and official responses, that scholarship has struggled to encapsulate. For many of us, our understanding of refugee crises remains at best episodic. Synthesis and elucidation has come in the shape of Michael Marrus’ and now Peter Gatrell’s surveys of refugees’ pathways through the twentieth century, but their examples have not been widely followed. ⁵ Even the recent ‘global turn’, which aims to understand migration patterns in a global perspective, is often unsatisfactory in that it leaves the continent of Europe strangely lacking in details, nuances and colours. ⁶ Overall, there is still no consistent historiography that locates the many different kinds of refugees, migrants and uprooted people within a common framework.

While a transnational or global approach to migration has often failed to do justice to regional and national particularities, the opposite problem is perhaps even more debilitating: far too many insights about individual refugee crises and responses remain packed away in national boxes, where they are inaccessible to all but a handful of specialists. Writing within their different national historiographical traditions, scholars have studied many examples of states’ responses to refugee crises as temporary problems with various piecemeal, largely technical and ad hoc solutions. As a result we now know a surprising amount about, for example, the formation of Belgian refugee policy up until the outbreak of the Second World War; ⁷ the responses by countries such as Britain, France and other western European states to the flood of Jewish refugees from Germany after 1933; ⁸ and population politics and resulting internal migrations within the Soviet Union since 1917. ⁹ The literature on individual countries’ experiences of the vast and bloody population upheavals of the Second World War and its aftermath is particularly voluminous. ¹⁰

But although the national containers are clearly brimming with rich scholarship and insights, the nation-state itself, and its international connections, often escapes from view. Those piecemeal national approaches demand greater contextualization, which requires coming to grips with the nature of the states themselves. European states underwent radical transformations in this crucial 40 year period, as becomes visible in the papers of this collection. In the wake of the First World War, new states such as Czechoslovakia and Austria were created out of the rubble of the collapsed European empires. Others, such as France and Italy, were soon to lose their grip on their colonial possessions. Others still, such as Switzerland, attempted to shape the construction of new international arrangements which defined and put limits on state authority, while escaping such control for themselves. The comparatively late experience of national self-determination in the ethnically-mixed territories of the collapsed Ottoman and Habsburg empires resulted in the rise of minorities and the creation of refugees in large stretches of the continent. As the articles testify, refugees were a product of the fluidity and mutability of states’ definitions of who was deemed to be a citizen and who was not, as well as of who was economically and socially desirable (or at least tolerable) and thus eligible for support, and who was not. It was by and within states that discussions about refugees were channelled and organized, and debated at international forums. As a result, states also have to be the most important organizing principle through which historians can attempt to impose conceptual order on the refugee chaos.

Motivated by such observations, the editors of this special issue held a conference on The Forty Years’ Crisis: Refugees in Europe, 1919–59 at Birkbeck College, London in 2010, which brought together scholars from different fields and historiographical traditions, and turned into the largest gathering of historians working on refugees for at least a generation. ¹¹ Our aim was to bring different area specialists and historiographies under the same roof, and together think about refugees as a European, international and global problem. The papers in this issue are one set of results of those conversations and discussions. ¹² They aim to juxtapose different states’ strategies for defining, controlling and administering the threat posed by refugees, and to consider these national responses in an international and comparative context. The papers share a focus on nation-states and their participation – often by lack of choice, and with resulting reservations and caution – in the international refugee regime and its legal definitions and conventions. Together the contributors illuminate refugee policy as a crucial product of states' definitions and re-definitions of nationality and citizenship. In the remainder of this introduction we will sketch out the broad canvas of the European refugee problem in the 40 year period under investigation in this special issue, before going on to highlight a number of overarching themes and comparisons.

‘Too long the refugee problem has been largely regarded as one of international charity’, lamented the celebrated American journalist, Dorothy Thompson, in June 1938. ‘It must be regarded now as a problem of international politics’. ¹³ Writing at the start of the great Jewish refugee crisis that followed Anschluss with Austria in March 1938, before spreading to the rest of Greater Germany and threatening to engulf Eastern Europe when other states also sought to solve their ‘Jewish problem’ through expatriation, Thompson bemoaned not only the niggardly humanitarian response of the western democracies but their disingenuousness in failing to fully acknowledge the actual roots and character of the contemporary refugee problem. When, a month later, representatives of 32 states met, on the initiative of the US President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, at the French lakeside resort of Évian to discuss the unfolding crisis in central Europe, few held out much hope for a gathering – the first of its kind dedicated exclusively to finding an international solution to the refugee problem – where many participants almost seemed to take comfort in being part of a coalition of the unwilling. Hands were wrung sore while delegates outdid one another in pledging to do nothing. ¹⁴ But the failure of the conference highlighted one of the defining features of the refugee problem. While refugees were undoubtedly an international problem, states resisted at every turn efforts to impose obligations on them. This tension between the international dimensions of the refugee problem and the prerogatives of the nation-state is a dominant theme in the six case studies of this special issue.

The gap between national and international practice was never wider than in the 1930s – or more precisely between 1933 and 1943 – ‘a low dishonest decade’ ¹⁵ that is often regarded as the nadir of the refugee. To some extent, the 1930s suffers from comparison with the preceding decade, even if the contrast between the ‘successes’ and optimism of the 1920s and the ‘failures’ and cynicism of the 1930s can be overdrawn. ¹⁶ Starting in 1921 with a commitment to assist over a million Russians rendered stateless after fleeing revolution and civil war, the brand new League of Nations entered the field of refugee work. ¹⁷ The modest achievements of the League, which came at very little financial or political cost to its member states, helped to dispel some of the instinctive distrust felt by states towards this new international refugee work. Although its mandate was limited, the League’s achievements were considerable. Important first steps were taken in defining what constituted a refugee for the purposes of international assistance and protection, and therefore what responsibilities states had towards them. International assistance for refugee settlement in Greece, not discounting the problems it faced and the failure of comparable schemes elsewhere, continued to excite and inspire policymakers long after the League’s work was wound up there in 1930. The challenges of the 1930s, however, in which the political and economic climate was far less propitious, showed the weakness of these new institutions and initiatives. States in the 1930s set out to divest themselves of international commitments, or circumvent them. In this sense, the international refugee regime, as it had developed up to then, met the same fate as the Versailles order within which it had developed, as it was revised, ignored or overturned. ¹⁸

But there was a paradox about the 1930s. Despite the increasing insularity of states, the refugee problem showed just how inter-connected they actually were. Since the refugee policy of one state had a knock-on effect on another unless appropriate defensive measures were put in place, restrictive refugee policies tended to proliferate and converge. The decade saw co-ordination between states to guard against refugees: a negative form of international cooperation based on a sort of competitive restrictionism. But one consequence of the ‘international ping-pong’ that Ludi alludes to in her article on Switzerland was that the refugee problem never went out of play. With repatriation ruled out and traditional sites of asylum and refuge closed to all but a trickle of refugees, other international ‘solutions’ were sought which tended to aim at the expatriation of the problem beyond the frontiers of Europe.

And therein lies a further paradox of the 1930s: the nimbyism of the decade provided the negative stimulus for new ideas, and in some instances concrete schemes, for the resettlement and the scientific management of population, all of which were predicated on a high degree of international coordination and cooperation. Although this did not always occur on an inter-state level or within the existing international structures, it helped to inform debates at a national and international level. The problem with the 1930s, then, was not a shortage of ideas, but of political will – and just as importantly, the political space – to put them into action. The thinking and sentiment, if not the specific schemes, would give rise in the 1940s to a far more positive and integrated approach to managing refugees at an international level. In that sense, the 1930s were the laboratory for the 1940s.

Although quantitatively the problem of displacement in the 1940s was on a much grander and more daunting scale than the 1930s, qualitatively – in terms of the institutions dealing with them – the situation had vastly improved. The period from 1943 to 1946 saw for the first time an aligning of the interests of nation-states and international concerns, or at least a narrowing of the gap between them. To some extent, it was a reflection of the weakness of the nation-state at this point. It was not only in the field of refugees and repatriation of co-nationals that the nation-state required the massive assistance of international agencies – this extended to the reconstruction of nation-states more generally. ¹⁹ But it was also a reflection of the universal nature of the refugee problem. The plight of the refugee had never been enough to mobilize sufficient sympathy among countries that could assist them by exerting diplomatic pressure or by taking them in. Only when it began to involve ‘us’, when the refugee problem became a truly pan-European phenomenon, in which almost no country was left untouched as a site of mass displacement, as in the DP crisis of 1945–6, did a greater willingness to engage more constructively with international efforts emerge. ²⁰ And even then, as the articles show, tensions between commitments to national and international refugees remained.

This qualitative shift in how the refugee problem was handled centred around the year 1943. It was towards the end of this year that the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was created and the decision was taken to establish the War Refugee Board. The founding of UNRRA by 44 countries of the ‘United Nations’ (two years before they formally declared themselves as such), including the Soviet Union, demonstrated that more attention was being paid to grappling with future international responsibilities towards refugees rather than just existing or past ones; and the creation of the War Refugee Board by presidential order in January 1944 showed what a US government was capable of in the refugee field when it set its mind and considerable resources to it. In essence, both amounted to the same thing, and both examples point to a key factor in the post-Second World War era: it was no coincidence that both organizations were founded in Washington. The involvement of the USA was key in three ways. It offered diplomatic support for international solutions, provided financial and logistical assistance, and presented a destination for refugee resettlement. And in the period from 1943 to the winding up of the International Refugee Organization in 1950, US backing helped to cement sustained political, financial and logistical support within the framework of an ‘international response’.

But this level of US commitment to international solutions did not extend into the 1950s, by which time the international context had again changed how the refugee problem was handled. ²¹ The 1950s evince a superficial resemblance to the 1930s: a narrowing of the scope for co-ordinated international action owing to a deterioration in relations between the principal powers of the time, and alongside this increasing restrictions on the free movement of people through the erection of barriers. But there were crucial differences. Economic buoyancy lessened residual hostility to refugees as potential immigrants who themselves could become part of the solution to a labour shortage problem rather than simply being a problem in their own right. As in the 1930s, the international response was also to a great extent defined by the origin of the refugee. If in the 1930s (and 1940s) their geographical origins had made refugees undesirable, in the 1950s it made them highly sought after.

The origins of refugees raises the last of our paradoxes. It was because, not in spite of, deepening East-West divisions that an international refugee regime was able to survive into the 1950s. The two factors which shaped the refugee problem in the 1950s – the Cold War and the 1951 Refugee Convention – were themselves intertwined. The contours of ideological difference between the Soviet Union and the western powers had become politically sharp with the onset of the Cold War and the ‘bolshevization’ of eastern Europe. That displacements which had been primarily ethnic or national in origin now came to be regarded as political-ideological greatly simplified the meaning and significance of refugees. It was in direct relation to this ideological context, and crucially in the absence of the Soviets and their satellites, who boycotted the relevant UN discussions, that the key instruments of international refugee policy were framed and which would determine how the refugee problem was henceforth defined and handled internationally. ²²

Insofar as the refugee problem was always partly about immigration, and partly about ideology, the Hungarian refugee crisis of 1956–7, which was the first ‘test’ of the new (that is, post-1951) international refugee regime, seems almost heaven sent for western governments, as Hungarian ‘freedom fighters’ – who also happened to be predominantly able-bodied young men – sought recognition as refugees. ²³ They fitted the spirit if not the letter of the 1951 conception of the refugee like a glove. States ‘broke [the] old rules of the refugee trade’, as the American writer, John Hersey, put it, and fell over each other in offering refuge. ²⁴ The Hungarian refugee crisis became an international demonstration – in a sort of inverted resemblance to the 1930s – of competitive latitude that did much to expiate the sins of preceding decades and establish the Hungarian case as the normative response to refugee crises, when it was anything but. Of course it helped that the numbers of refugees were much smaller. Nonetheless, the Hungarian refugee crisis provided not only a test of international institutions, but also of states’ adherence to the rules, regulations and ‘spirit’ of the international refugee regime to which they had signed up. That states – or more precisely, western states – appeared to conform enthusiastically to international norms and practices is again in stark contrast to preceding decades. It says as much about the self-serving content of international legislation as about the role that full engagement with international structures in the 1950s played in preserving their self-identity as democratic and open societies, and reconnecting with their own liberal traditions of asylum which had been so rudely disrupted during the ‘forty years’ crisis’.

***

Just over a decade ago, Philipp Ther took issue with the prevalent ‘national framing in historiography’. Pointing to the ‘entangled’ and ‘relational’ character of German, Austrian, Czech and Polish histories, he urged historians to trace the mutual influences between the compared cases and to write the history of their connections. ²⁵ In some ways, Ther’s call closely matches our own concerns in this special issue. Refugees, immigrants, migrants, émigrés, exiles, displaced persons, however they are labelled, are by definition a phenomenon that ‘entangles’ nations. If the ‘national framing’ nonetheless remains central to the following papers, it is because the state itself is under investigation here: how it was made, besieged, and re-made during successive perceived or actual refugee crises; how changing definitions of immigrants and aliens were matched by revisions of citizenship. Ther mocked the ‘proclivity of historians to think like nation-builders’, but the following articles show, we hope, that studying refugees through the eyes of the state awards them a central role in the nation-building projects that were underway in the years between 1919 and 1959. As a result, by looking at refugee crises and attempted solutions we can begin to understand nation-states better and in a more nuanced light.

The differences between the states in this special issue abound. At the end of the First World War, only France and Sweden could present themselves as ‘old nations’: Italy had existed in its modern form only since its unification in the 1860s, two decades after Switzerland was created as a federal state; the new states of Austria and Czechoslovakia, as by-products of the postwar settlement of 1918–19, were only days old. Switzerland and Czechoslovakia were multi-national, multi-lingual states; Sweden, in comparison, was homogenous and mono-ethnic. France, Italy, Austria and Czechoslovakia all experienced dramatic upheavals in the course of the Second World War, in the aftermath of which all of them had to deal (to differing degrees) with the legacies of foreign occupation and collaboration with Nazism. By contrast, non-belligerents with a claim to neutrality, such as Sweden and Switzerland, had escaped most of the turmoil of the mid-century with their democratic structures intact, but as countries of asylum they ‘encountered the world’, as Byström puts it below, and its many problems.

But for all these differences, there are some intriguing similarities, which only emerge fully when the different scenarios are put side by side. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the durability of the nation-state, in spite of repeated fears that it would not survive the onslaught of fascism. Although Austria and Czechoslovakia ceased to exist as states between 1938 and 1945, ²⁶ all six of our case studies ended the period as they began it, as sovereign nation-states and within more or less the same state borders. ²⁷ The same could not be said about some of their neighbours, particularly Poland and Germany. The relative immutability of frontiers hid the radical transformations going on within them, but their persistence nonetheless points to the survival of pillars of the Versailles order throughout the short but transformative period under review.

More importantly, in the 40 years in question all six countries had extensive experience of refugees. Sweden and Switzerland were exclusively ‘refugee-receiving’; but none of the other examples here were exclusively ‘refugee-generating’. Several of the case studies switched roles at some point: Czechoslovakia, as Frankl puts it, became a country to flee from, no longer one to escape to; the reverse was true for Austria. Others, like Italy in the interwar decades, saw both significant emigration and immigration at the same time. So not only are there striking differences that run through the collection, but in their aggregate the articles also point to a series of similarities and continent-wide patterns in the construction of national refugee legislations. These similarities and patterns developed from a basic assumption shared by politicians and policymakers throughout the continent: that refugees were a threat to national order, carriers of contagion, and problems to be solved, even if the solutions themselves could take different forms. What makes the point of comparison even more compelling is that all six states had once had, acquired or aspired to have a liberal tradition of asylum, which played an important part in their self-identity.

All of the authors identify transformative moments in their countries’ 40 year history between 1919 and 1959. They largely converge with the periodization of broader national historiographies, and unsurprisingly bunch in or around the Second World War. For Czechoslovakia, the hinge year was 1938: the moment of the great interruption. But even in the case of Czechoslovakia there were continuities, as in the so-called ‘Greek Action’ in the late 1940s, which harked back to the refugee policies of the 1920s. For Sweden, the Second World War itself brought change, turning this once exporter of population into a destination for refugees. Conversely, the Swiss case reveals hidden discontinuities. What looked like continuously restrictive and discriminatory approaches to incomers, Ludi argues, often disguised the changing reasons for them, as practical calculations and economic considerations converged with existing patterns of prejudice. In Italy, the continuities in refugee policy seem to predominate, in spite of its rapid transition from dictatorship to democracy. As Salvatici shows, the state administrative structures and personnel of the Fascist era remained unchanged and shaped responses to the refugee problem on the ground. Italy, moreover, remained a place of transit throughout this period – a ‘way station’ on the route to resettlement overseas, rather than a site of refuge and destination for permanent settlement. Finally, for Austria, the crucial moment of change is perhaps – fittingly – more conventional: 1945 is the year that the Alpine state emerged from the shadow of Germany and began to successfully reinvent itself as the ‘proto-martyr of Europe’ and a fully paid up member of the international community. But here, too, continuities lurked not far beneath the surface as the public alarm at the influx of Hungarian Jews in 1956 demonstrates.

Within each state, national and local authorities constructed categories of aliens on the basis of certain markers, chiefly ethnicity, race, religion, language or alleged national loyalty. Perceived ethnic or cultural affinities of incoming foreigners were often at the heart of states' immigration policies. One of the most profound reconfigurations occurred in Czechoslovakia, which saw a switch from a political to an ethnic conception of citizenship, as a result of which this one-time haven for refugees became increasingly less welcoming. Or perhaps this shift was not so radical after all: those who look can already see signs of an ethnic classification of incomers in the liberal heyday of interwar Czechoslovakia. In Austria, too, the handling of refugee issues after 1945 followed ethnic lines. As Knight reminds us, ethnic ties were far stronger than political links: a shared anti-communism was not enough to create bonds of empathy between Austrians and those non-German DPs unable or unwilling to return to communized eastern Europe. A similar situation could be seen in Italy where a sharp distinction between so-called ‘national’ and foreign refugees was put into law, resulting in a ‘binary regime’ of refugee care. Nonetheless, Salvatici shows that we cannot deal with ‘national’ and foreign immigrants in isolation; they were mutually defining and invariably part of the same phenomenon. In France, too, debates about immigration legislation were closely linked to ideas about the demographic and cultural make-up of the French people. Even if figures like George Mauco, president of the Consultative Committee, who suggested that racial criteria ought to play a central role in deciding who was allowed entry into France, were ultimately unable to influence the wording of postwar French refugee and asylum policy, they nonetheless tapped into and reflected popular sentiments about ethnicity and citizenship that were hard to erase.

Indeed, debates about the racial, social and economic pillars of immigration were particularly vigorous in those comparatively affluent countries spared from much of the century's bloodshed and destruction. In Switzerland, antisemitism intersected with economic, security and medical concerns and cultural prejudice. Ultimately, immigrants only received assistance if they were seen as similar to the Swiss themselves and therefore as ‘deserving’ refugees. Sweden took a seemingly more progressive path as refugees were gradually integrated into the fabric of the welfare state. In contrast to Switzerland, the Swedish labour market was eventually opened to refugees and refugee families kept intact. Based on a model of social citizenship, the 1954 Aliens Act granted refugees formal equality with Swedish citizens. But even here ethnic hierarchies proved extremely durable. The notion of an ‘ethnic obligation’ to fellow northerners persisted in the form of a ‘Nordic prerogative’ that prioritized the intake of Scandinavian refugees. In fact, the Swedish case is a useful reminder of how relative these ethnic, racial and cultural hierarchies really were. While in countries such as France, refugees from the Baltic States were welcomed as ethnically and culturally superior northern Europeans, in Sweden they were seen as insufficiently ‘Nordic’, no doubt in part as a result of their past as subjects of Swedish imperial rule. At the same time, Jews, particularly those from eastern Europe, and to a lesser extent Russians, Greeks and Armenians, were seen as ‘undesirable’ in all countries under investigation right up to and including the Hungarian crisis of 1956. And, as Knight shows, in Austria a hierarchy even existed among ethnic Germans depending on their geographic origin, class and skills, and perceived cultural affinity. In all cases, ethnic origin was often synonymous with economic and cultural value.

The nation-state that emerges from the following discussions looks different in each case. Externally, that is in terms of its political frontiers, there were perhaps few signs of change. But the states’ composition, competences and ‘reach’ changed significantly. Byström emphasizes the homogeneity of the Swedish state which became the principal actor in refugee affairs after taking over from voluntary bodies during the war. By contrast, in Switzerland, ‘the state’ never seems to have spoken with a single voice and, as Ludi shows, non-state actors were crucial to the formulation of refugee policy, both as agents which put pressure on the state to tighten immigration restrictions, and as advocates speaking up on behalf of the refugees. Frankl presents Czechoslovakia as a nation and a state under construction, which under external and internal pressures went from being a post-Habsburg ‘state of nationalities’ to a ‘national state’. At key moments it lacked an internal political consensus, which shaped responses to refugees such as the politically-active Germans who fled the Third Reich. After 1945, a new kind of consensus was visible in the rigid ethnic categorizations that were applied to safeguard the creation of an ethnically-homogenous Czechoslovak nation-state. Similarly, Austria, like Czechoslovakia, was very much a work-in-progress. As another confection of the post-1919 order founded on the sudden collapse of a multinational empire, Knight reminds us how underdeveloped and uncertain Austrian nationhood was in 1945, when it was keen to give independent statehood another try, but had to balance the twin legacies of having been at the fulcrum of both the Habsburg and Nazi Empires. For these ‘new’ states control of national borders and definitions of citizenship were much more important than refugee policy per se. The categorization of inhabitants into citizens and foreigners was a tool not only for sorting out who was in the country, but also for preventing the return of unwanted elements. After the Second World War, Italy, like Austria, sought to regain its sovereignty and reassert its state prerogatives in the face of occupation and foreign control. But one reminder of the recent past was the alphabet soup of international agencies now active in Italy, on which it was heavily reliant, but from which it also wanted to be released. Sovereignty remained, in the immediate postwar years, an ideal.

The collection will make depressing reading for those hoping to find genuine, idealistic and ideological engagement with international legislation on refugees. There are no internationalist mindsets here, rather a series of national calculations and interests. For ‘ex-enemy’ states like Italy and Austria after the Second World War, adherence to international instruments had a lot to do with diplomatic rehabilitation and re-entry into the family of nations. Indeed, this re-admittance was fundamental to the restoration of their national sovereignty. Italy had early and extensive experience of international concerns; by the late 1940s it was well-versed in the language and practice of dealing with international organizations, and adept at exploiting its ambiguous status as an ex-enemy state. As Salvatici shows, these stratagems had a long history, as the Fascist state had happily cooperated with the refugee machinery of the League insofar as this kept them on the right side of the British and French. Similarly, the Austrian authorities attempted to manipulate a better deal for Austria through bilateral negotiations and dealings with the Allied occupiers. Later, it used its much-publicized ‘generosity’ towards the Hungarian refugees as evidence that the international community was right in placing its faith in a fully sovereign post-State Treaty Austria.

Similarly, France in both the interwar and post-1944 periods engaged with and used international instruments to distinctly national ends. Unlike Italy and Austria, France was less interested in the international refugee regime as a means to restore its international reputation. Although French prestige had taken a sharp knock during the years of defeat, collaboration and foreign occupation, joining the ranks of the ‘Big Four’ in Germany had already helped to heal those wounds. Instead, it saw immediate practical and material benefits in international collaboration. Signing up to the international arrangements in 1945, for example, meant that France could access the services and financial support of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, and refugee repatriation or resettlement could proceed without France itself having to negotiate with individual governments. For Switzerland, declared commitment to international norms was often a pretext for the coordination of immigration restrictions ‘so that no country would run the risk of lagging behind’. In fact, Ludi describes this as a zero-sum game: a state with more generous admissions criteria for refugees would quickly become a much more popular target which was in no state's interest. As a result, by the late 1930s, international cooperation had facilitated the proliferation of increasingly restrictive measures. This ‘homogenisation of European refugee policies’, as Frank Caestecker and Bob Moore have termed it, ²⁸ did not only apply to the refugee-receiving states of western Europe. The Czechoslovak case, moreover, also shows how nation-states jealously guarded their sovereignty even while dutifully performing their international duties. Although the Czechoslovak authorities cooperated with international organizations in the 1920s and for much of the 1930s, they resisted all attempts to impose internationally-mediated definitions of a refugee in order to preserve their freedom of action.

The history of the modern refugee problem is therefore to all intents and purposes the history of Europe in the twentieth century. The collapse of empires, the creation of new states and political upheavals and armed conflicts that preceded, accompanied or followed these developments all generated refugees in substantial numbers, as international frontiers shifted, the boundaries between nation and state were realigned, the internal composition of the nation was reconfigured and political identity of the state recast. As well as generating refugees, these crises also stimulated the building of new international structures and policies to deal with them. The articles in this special issue explore the parallel development of these refugee-generating and institution-building processes during ‘the forty years’ crisis’, ²⁹ and with it one of several paradoxes of the modern refugee problem: with each successive refugee crisis the nation-state became more ‘national’ at the same time as the range and scope of international obligations became more extensive. National and international approaches to the refugee problem, as this issue shows, were closely ‘entangled’.