Europe in Motion: Refugees, Displacement, and the Remaking of National Space, 1939–73

My purpose in this paper is to explore ways of resituating World War II in the longer contexts of Europe’s 20^th century, fiocusing on issues of migrancy, population politics, and refugees. I am interested not only in the gargantuan scale of the population movements – the 23 million Europeans left un-homed by the postwar repatriations, territorial changes, and population transfers – but also in the longer-term histories through which particular populations may have been integrated by their new host societies or not: refugees, camp inmates, and DPs who ended up staying where they were stranded; migrant workers recruited after 1945; POWs and other returnees; repatriated populations; German, Italian, Polish, and Ukrainian expellees; and orphaned and evacuated children. These postwar circumstances clearly possessed their exceptional quality, for which a range of coercive state practices, whether deployed by the reconstituted national governments or the inter-Allied occupying regimes, became decisive. But the wider administrative and relief arrangements deployed by those authorities, including their use of charitable, semi-official, and voluntary organizations, drawing on a range of professional expertise, also delivers fruitful grounds for comparison. Four longer contexts will also shape my discussion: (a) European empire (overseas and landward), extending back into the later 19^th century; (b) transnational genealogies for European integration; (c) the contemporary politics of migrancy and migration; (d) deeper histories of state-making and national unification. I will also balance the claims of two often countervailing perspectives: the deep structural continuities and longer-term patterns suggested by the longer histories of mobility, uprootedness, and instabilities of populations and their management; and the big eventfulness of the immediate conjuncture of 1945 and the ending of the war.