Session Abstract

Forced migration was a key tool and frequent by-product of nineteenth and twentieth century European violence. Refugees permanently altered Europe's social, cultural and political geography. This was especially true in Central and Eastern Europe, where new nation states emerged from the multi-national Habsburg Empire at the end of World War One, and which bore the worst consequences of death, exile and internal displacement from Nazi policies only to end up as a fault line in the Cold War. The Central and East European experience with refugees was foundational, and forced migration was inherent to the process of state-creation and political alignment. At the same time, the Central European experience was in many ways definitional for the modern category of the refugee. Some of the most persistent questions facing refugees and their helpers today can be seen, fully formed, from early on. Weak states and alienating claims to legitimate rule, external demands of protection and the extent of state sovereignty, national identity and statelessness, refugees' intimate stories of violence and exile—these were the experiences that resulted in interwar and post-war attempts to construct an international refugee regime. This regime, arguably, extrapolated the demands and expectations of nineteenth and twentieth century Central Europe to the globe.  

This panel, which spans the period between 1878 and 1948, explores European efforts to develop the means to care for, manage, and control refugee populations. The panelists look at how states and official bodies responded to a wide range of refugee needs and wants while trying to maintain or build political authority and limit refugees' influence on settled populations. The papers examine turning-points in the region's history, and indicate ways in which refugee policies pointed to other aspirations and reflected specific visions of the future. In "Refugee Return and Resettlement in Habsburg-occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1878-1879," Jared Manasek looks at the imperial view, and asks in what ways the occupation of the Ottoman provinces enabled the return of refugees already on Habsburg soil, and to what extent this return might have furthered Habsburg efforts to expand its claims as a legitimate imperial power in the face of growing territorial nationalist movements in the Balkans. Rebekah Klein-Pejšová's paper, "Beyond the 'Infamous Concentration Camps of the Old Monarchy': Refugee Policy from Wartime Austria-Hungary to Interwar Czechoslovakia," turns to the end of the First World War, comparing refugee policy in wartime Hungary/Austria-Hungary with policy in Czechoslovakia immediately after the war, as the new state sought to distance itself from its imperial predecessor. And Jessica Reinisch examines the international refugee regimes in "Old Wine in New Bottles? Refugees, Relief and Reconstruction in 1945," which looks at the activities of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, asking whether and how international refugee care and relief changed during wartime and what the emerging vision of an international refugee regime would look like.