European Others and Others in Europe? Entangled Migration Histories of the Postwar Era
By Professor Elizabeth Buettner, Professor of Modern History at the Universiteit van Amsterdam
Does the history of cross-border migration unite or divide Europeans? If we consider the post-1945 era, mobility across state lines has been an important shared aspect of Europe’s past and present. In countries embarking on reconstruction and economic recovery in the wake of wartime upheaval and destruction, the migration experience characterized not only the millions of refugees and other displaced persons who moved from East to West or within Central Europe. It brought labour into North-Western Europe — some of it professional, but most of it skilled and unskilled manual and service-sector labour — which played a fundamental role during what became an era of full employment and gradually a time still renowned for being France’s trente glorieuses (‘thirty glorious years’), West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), or other national equivalents. Far more often than has been popularly acknowledged, postwar booms were fuelled by millions of foreign workers from Southern and Eastern Europe and Turkey. Some who left home to live and work where there were far better economic (and often political) opportunities stayed permanently; other migrants were temporary (perhaps labelled as ‘guest workers’) or cyclical, coming and going until they ultimately made decisions in favour of one place or another.
At the same time Europe was being reinvented in the aftermath of war, however, so too were Western Europe’s global empires. After 1945, imperial powers initially struggled to hold on to most (if not all) of their overseas possessions but faced an uphill struggle. Not only did American and Soviet priorities during the Cold War limit their options: so too did demands from colonised populations for a change to the imperial status quo that led to many different forms of anti-colonial nationalist movements, some peaceful, others militant. Tactics to preserve what they could of their empires explain the emergence of new European governing practices and efforts to repress dissent as well as attempts to bind colonies and metropoles together more tightly. In hindsight, of course, the postwar era is rightly remembered as a time when losing empires — decolonization — ultimately reshaped Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean as well as Europe itself. But along the way, European colonisers experimented with alternative constructions of imperial states and peoples that stressed connectedness and shared attributes.
Thus, the era from the late 1940s to the early 1960s gave the Netherlands a new constitutional framework in its 1954 Statuut (Charter), which made the Netherlands, Suriname, and the Netherlands Antilles equal partners with full internal self-government and a common nationality within a tripartite Dutch Kingdom. France’s empire became the French Union in 1946, when the metropole and its overseas possessions became a single entity and ‘colonies’ were renamed ‘overseas departments and territories’ or — like Algeria — juridically remained départements of France itself. Correspondingly, French Union residents received full French citizenship, regardless of skin colour. So did Africans and mestiços from Portugal’s surviving empire. Having renamed their colonies ‘overseas provinces’ in 1951 to defend the notion that Portugal was a pluricontinental nation — one spanning the seas — rather than a coloniser, it became a multiracial nation as well 10 years later as it extended Portuguese citizenship to those across its far-flung domains, irrespective of ethnicity or birthplace. Britain too had its equivalent of this as it struggled to maintain what it could of its empire. The 1948 British Nationality Act aimed to strengthen British relations with its colonies and ex-colonies within the Commonwealth by formalizing migration and settlement rights for all subjects. Colonial and Commonwealth subjects were British citizens by law, and could freely travel to, live and work in the metropole — at least until racism in society and politics led to a series of restriction acts starting (but by no means ending) in 1962. Portugal, France, and the Netherlands also reworked many of these inclusive mid-century policies once it was clear that times had changed and that decolonization was irreversible.
While they lasted, however, these end-of-empire restylings and citizenship policies turned declining and ultimately former imperial metropoles into the multicultural, postcolonial European nations they remain today. This is something that a number of Western European nations now share, and which distinguishes them from Eastern Europe. Millions of people, many of whom are now the second or third generation, have Algerian, Moroccan, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Jamaican, Cape Verdian, Angolan, Surinamese, and Indonesian origins — to name but a few — and have long been in Europe to stay, having often arrived as citizens.
Postwar/postcolonial Europe was thus demographically, culturally and economically remade via multiple migration waves from former overseas empires, as well as from Turkey and other European countries. European foreigners as well as ethnic minorities of extra-European origins all experienced discrimination of various kinds, whether on the grounds of nationality, their precarious socio-economic position, or ideas about racial and cultural distinctions that rendered peoples of many backgrounds allegedly suspect or inferior. Racism and discrimination might have been predicated upon colour difference or cultural difference, or often some combination of these, and it is highly significant that European foreigners fared better in both respects. Widespread notions that other Europeans, however different, were culturally and ethnically ‘closer’ to the native population and thus better able to assimilate were common. Whether we look at Britain, France, or other countries, it is relatively easy to find glowing statements about the potential of European foreign migrants (and especially their children) to integrate within the national community, even from commentators who were determined to criticise other forms of migration as a ‘problem’ and national danger. Or perhaps especially from these corners: praising Europeans’ successful or potentially painless assimilation often appears to be have been pretext for condemning other groups as less desirable by comparison and justifying their exclusion and marginalisation.
Time and again, Western Europe’s postcolonial nations often expressed preferences for white European ‘others’ — even if they arrived illegally, and not speaking the language — to ethnic minorities who often possessed citizenship rights and might well have had common cultural attributes that came from growing up in a colonial society. Shared citizenship and nationality could mean little in terms of political or societal acceptance as racism and the rejection of cultural difference (particularly if it concerned religious, especially Islamic, cultural difference) won out over xenophobia. Inclinations favouring Europeans over racialised non-Europeans were at times rendered explicit, but silence surrounding their presence and impact was even more apparent precisely because they were considered relatively unthreatening — literally unremarkable.
Spoken or unspoken preferences for Europeans over other newcomers can be seen — or not seen — in the history of European Volunteer Workers in late 1940s Britain, who never received anywhere near the negative attention accorded to ‘coloured’ colonial and Commonwealth arrivals; in France, where Portuguese workers were nearly as numerous as Algerians but generated nowhere near the same public hostility; in Belgium and the Netherlands, where labour migrants from Southern Europe never attracted anywhere near the same levels of opprobrium as either Dutch Surinamese or ‘guest workers’ from Turkey and Morocco; or later in Portugal, where communities from the former empire in Cape Verde, Angola, and elsewhere suffered racist exclusion from employers who seemed to prefer Eastern Europeans after the late 1980s. Germany’s ‘economic miracle’, meanwhile, involved labour input from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Yugoslavia, all of them far less developed lower-wage economies, but by the 1980s this postwar history of ‘guest workers’ from across the Mediterranean basin which had been intensely multinational in character had been racialised, with Turks the exclusive focus of attention. Across Western Europe, migrants and their descendants from the South of Europe were either welcomed or rendered invisible (because uncontentious), while those from the Global South were ‘problems’ to be either excluded at the border or intensely monitored and worried about from within.
Two main factors help account for this: European integration and the relentless spread of Islamophobia. As scholars are now addressing more thoroughly, Europe’s integration and the disintegration of European overseas empires are crucial dimensions of postwar history that were intensely interconnected processes, not phenomena to be studied in isolation. This is certainly the case with respect to Europe’s multiple histories of migration. Starting with the Treaty of Rome and the emergence of the EEC in 1957, freedom of movement (of capital, goods, services and people) became increasingly fundamental to the ideology and aspirations of Europe’s common market that ultimately became the European Union. EU citizenship extended from these core principles, coming into effect in 1993. These developments facilitated legal labour migration within a growing EEC/EU as more nations in Southern Europe joined in the 1980s — a time when anti-black racism continued and Western paranoia about Islam grew exponentially. Border-hopping or permanently resident Europeans of other nationalities became ever less problematic, while minorities of non-European origin faced ongoing and often increasing stigmatisation, regardless of their citizenship, birthplace and official right to belong.
But the new millennium brought new challenges. One came from enhanced anxieties about Europe’s Muslim minorities with the series of Islamist terrorist attacks on Western targets during and after 2001. The other involved movements within Europe that took on new dimensions as 12 new member states, most in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, entered the EU in 2004 and 2007. But like postcolonial arrivals, however, Eastern Europeans now provoked extremely xenophobic populist responses. Common citizenship and labour rights and that of freedom of movement, and in this instance perceptions of relative cultural and ethnic proximity, have not protected Eastern Europeans from xenophobia and discrimination in recent years, just as was so often the case with late colonial and postcolonial migrants.
A deeper historical awareness of how targets of hostility and anxiety can shift is crucial, not least in times like ours when fears vacillate between focusing on Muslims and border-crossing Europeans (some of whom of course are also Muslim). Indeed, debates about today’s migration ‘crisis’ reflect both of these at the same time, helping to account for some of their stridency. Not only are non-Europeans refugees ‘invading’ Europe from without, but once inside the EU their ability to travel elsewhere within its confines has created panic not only in Mediterranean points of arrival but in Northern, Western, Central, and Eastern Europe as well. If EU citizens can take advantage of open borders in an integrated Europe, so too can those who have entered, largely unwanted, from outside the continent. Within this tangled realm of migration anxieties, internal and external EU dimensions become inseparable.
We saw this in the first half of 2016 in the ‘Brexit’ debate as Britain headed closer to its referendum about whether to remain in or leave the EU. Migration was obviously central to this, as the EU is both the source of fellow EU migrants as well as non-EU refugees, who happen to be largely Muslim and highly mobile. This was blatantly apparent in the scare tactics deployed by the ‘leave’ campaign as they circulated visions of Britain within an EU that might one day include Turkey and additional Balkan countries, and hence of a Britain unable to exclude millions more EU nationals. In the words of Vote Leave, by 2030 the EU would encompass ‘a visa-free zone from the English Channel to the borders of Syria’*.
Seeking to exclude or otherwise marginalise other Europeans now appears to have become a defining feature of British national identity. While we can detect instances of xenophobia directed at European foreigners (typically Eastern and South-Eastern) in other countries, Britain’s current negative fixation and ‘othering’ of Europeans appears more extreme, and most certainly a departure from its own history before the EU’s enlargement starting in 2004. But mixed together with this are ongoing antagonisms vis-à-vis groups of non-European and often postcolonial origins. The ‘Brexit’ vote has revealed the toxic consequences of xenophobia against white EU citizens for the UK’s long-settled postcolonial minorities as Britain’s black and Asian communities reported a spike in racist behaviour following the 23 June referendum. Xenophobia directed at the EU cannot be cordoned off from racism targeting co-nationals or more recent refugees; European ‘Others’ and ‘Others’ in Europe have entangled postwar pasts and most certainly entangled presents.
Download the full European Union and Disunion report.
*Jennifer Rankin, ‘Will staying in EU really lead to an influx equal to Scottish population?’, Guardian, 20 May 2016.
PROFESSOR ELIZABETH BUETTNER has been Professor of Modern History at the Universiteit van Amsterdam since 2014. Her research centres on British imperial, social and cultural history since the late 19th century, along with other European nations’ histories of late colonialism, decolonisation, and their domestic ramifications. Her recent book entitled Europe After Empire: Decolonization, Society and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2016) examines British, French, Dutch, Belgian and Portuguese histories of coming to terms with the end of empires after the Second World War, focusing on the domestic impact of decolonisation, postcolonial migration, the emergence of contemporary multicultural societies and selective memories of empire.
