REFUGEES.

Global conflicts, including the Cold War, and the collapse of empires and civil wars were the major impetus for the involuntary displacement of people in the twentieth century. The focus herein is on the key moments of crisis that led to the displacement of civilians in Europe, the role played by states in prompting flight or establishing the terms of resettlement, and the efforts that were made to manage crises and to relieve the conditions in which refugees found themselves.

WORLD WAR I

It was during World War I that the word refugees first became a familiar term in European public life. Following the German invasion of Belgium on 4 August 1914, tens of thousands of Belgian civilians crossed the English Channel to find refuge in the United Kingdom. Their arrival prompted a flurry of private charitable activity, including the War Refugees Committee launched by Flora Lugard (1852–1929), former colonial correspondent for the Times of London. By the time the war ended, in November 1918, 140,000 Belgian refugees were registered in the United Kingdom. Other refugees fled to the Netherlands where they were housed first in government-built camps and later on in cheap bungalows capable of being dismantled and quickly reassembled elsewhere. Camp life emphasized health, hygiene, and hard work making toys and household goods.

British officials acknowledged an obligation toward refugees, whose plight reflected the Allies' inability to stem the enemy onslaught that exposed the devout Catholic inhabitants of Belgium to "pagan" Germany. But in their anxiety about "undesirable aliens," government officials kept close track of the refugee population. Belgians complained, to no avail, about the Aliens Restriction Act (5 August 1914), which required them to notify the police of any journey they made of more than five miles and confined them to specific areas of the country. Plans were drawn up to resettle the refugees in Chile and in South Africa, but the Belgian authorities rebuffed these proposals on the grounds that refugees should contribute to national reconstruction. Most returned to Belgium by 1919. The relief effort was informed by a mixture of condescension and genuine concern for human suffering. The novelist Edith Wharton (1862–1937) wrote a short story titled "The Refugees" lampooning the rush by comfortable British families to adopt a refugee as a social adornment.

The Austrian invasions of Serbia in 1914 and 1915 produced a catastrophic displacement of soldiers and civilians, amounting to one-third of the prewar total. Half a million refugees made their way across the mountains into Albania. Many ended up in Corfu, Corsica, and Tunisia; perhaps 200,000 died en route. Other Serb refugees were incarcerated in Austrian camps and treated as forced labor. The Society of Friends (American and British Quakers) along with the American Red Cross lent their support to the relief of the refugees. The Serbian Relief Fund, created by the historian Robert Seton-Watson (1879–1951), brought some refugee children to the United Kingdom.

Events elsewhere also generated large numbers of refugees. In Austria-Hungary Jewish civilians, fearful of tsarist troops, fled from the empire's eastern territories of Galicia and Bukovina to the relative safety of Vienna where they came under the care of middle-class Jews. In the Ottoman Empire, Armenians were targeted by the Young Turks as "disloyal" and "subversive" elements. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were disarmed, arrested, and sent east. Many were simply killed. A minority escaped to safety, either to Syria or to the Russian controlled Transcaucasus. By the beginning of 1916 more than 100,000 ex-Ottoman Armenians sought refuge in Erivan (now Yerevan), then a small town. Philanthropic efforts mobilized Armenian society in the Russian Empire, where relief agencies supplied food and medicine, looked after orphans, and provided basic schooling.

The Russian Empire itself was another site of population displacement. Civilians fled to the interior to escape the German and Austrian invasion. The Russian high command deported German, Jewish, Polish, and other subjects of the tsar. By the beginning of 1917 there were six million refugees and forced migrants, roughly equivalent to 5 percent of the total population. The war generated extensive voluntary as well as governmental intervention. Municipal authorities, diocesan committees, and private charities established schools and orphanages. Peasant communities and rural cooperatives harnessed their established mechanisms of self-help to the task of assisting the newcomers. Overall the war brought about an impressive relief effort. Humanitarian initiatives provided evidence of a newly emerging professional ethos in late imperial Russia, giving social workers, doctors, psychiatrists, statisticians, and lawyers practice in scrutinizing and managing the tsar's subjects.

Crucially, because resources were thinly stretched, the tsarist state also devolved some of the responsibility for refugee relief onto newly formed "national committees" (Polish, Jewish, Latvian, and Armenian—although not Russian or Ukrainian). These committees mobilized "national" opinion at home and abroad. Within an emerging patriotic intelligentsia, this aspect of refugeedom inspired a sense of calamity that gave rise to a vision of national solidarity. Deliberate action was needed, as one Latvian activist put it, to ensure that Latvians avoid "the lot of the Jews, to be scattered across the entire globe." Polish activists spoke of "preserving the refugee on behalf of the motherland." These patriotic elites engaged in a new national politics, instructing the refugee population in their rights and responsibilities.

World War I was thus significant in various senses. It created or legitimated a broad range of relief agencies and professional expertise. It trained patriotic leaders in the practice of government. The political scientist Hannah Arendt (1906–1971) famously suggested that the successor nation-states in eastern Europe were associated with a refugee-generating process. This is only part of the story. By giving patriotic elites direct access to a nascent national community and training them in the art of government, refugeedom played a more fundamental role, helping to crystallize the new nation-state.

THE LEGACY OF WORLD WAR I

The Russian Revolution unleashed a bitter civil war between those who supported and those who opposed the Bolsheviks. Having failed to overthrow the new regime, anti-Bolshevik elements fled Russia. Most never returned, settling instead in "temporary" refugee camps in Turkey, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Greece. By 1922 more than 27 percent of the total Russian refugee population had settled in Germany; some estimates put their number in Berlin alone at 360,000. A further 20 percent settled in Poland, 16 percent in the Balkan states, and 10 percent in France. Around 17 percent settled in the Far East, where conditions remained deplorable throughout the 1920s and 1930s, with the remaining 10 percent scattered elsewhere. Welfare organizations such as Zemgor (the Union of Towns and Cities, formed in 1915) provided basic material support. A handful returned to Soviet Russia under an amnesty issued in September 1920.

What of those displaced earlier within the former Russian Empire? Many non-Russians were motivated to return by a desire to participate in the reconstruction of their newly independent "homeland." Between 1918 and 1924 around 130,000 people were repatriated to Latvia, and a further 215,000 to Lithuania. By 1925 the total number of Polish citizens who had been repatriated from the Soviet Union stood at 1.3 million. They endured appalling conditions; typhus was a major health hazard. Relief workers, such as the British Quaker Ruth Fry (1878–1962), encouraged these returnees to get back on their feet by lending seed, timber, and petty credit. Matters were not helped by the tendency of Polish, Latvian, and Lithuanian officials to portray the returnees as potential subversives. Border guards barred or delayed the return of nonnational refugees. Jews, in particular, suffered discrimination.

One legacy of the war was thus the promotion of a sense of exclusion that had pernicious consequences as new nation-states emerged from the wreckage of multinational empires. This was often accompanied by downward social mobility, as with Hungarian refugees who, under the terms of the Treaty of Trianon (4 June 1920), found themselves a beleaguered minority in newly independent Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Having forfeited the privileged position they enjoyed as landed gentry in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, they fled to a truncated Hungarian state, forming the backbone of a reactionary and revanchist politics.

MANUFACTURING REFUGEES: THE GREEK-TURKISH POPULATION EXCHANGE

Another legacy of war was the exchange of population between Greece and Turkey as provided in the Lausanne Convention (30 January 1923) and endorsed by the Treaty of Lausanne (24 July 1923), whose purpose was "to bring to a final close the state of war which has existed in the East since 1914." The treaty followed the defeat of the Greek army in Anatolia and the sacking of Smyrna in the autumn of 1922, following which 900,000 Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox faith fled for Greece. Their hope of a speedy return at the end of hostilities was quickly dashed. Under the Lausanne Convention, 350,000 Muslims were uprooted from Greece and moved to Turkey. Some estimates suggest that up to half a million displaced persons remained unaccounted for following this exchange. The League of Nations established a Refugee Settlement Commission in Greece, but resources were badly stretched and most refugees lived in makeshift barracks.

The Mikrasiates (Asia Minor refugees) prided themselves on being more cosmopolitan and devout than their new neighbors. Local Greeks were portrayed as unsophisticated "shepherds"; they in turn poked fun at refugees as "stupid" and "baptized in yogurt." But the newcomers made a significant contribution to the Greek economy by developing new industries such as carpet weaving and tobacco production. (They also introduced the bouzouki, a stringed instrument, and rebetika, a type of urban folk music, to mainland Greece.) Politically the poorer refugees initially supported the Liberal Party led by Eleutherios Venizelos (1864–1936) but subsequently switched allegiance to the Greek Communist Party, which, until it was banned in 1936, campaigned on behalf of "workers, peasants and refugees." Meanwhile the displaced Muslim refugees fared little better in Turkish society.

THE INTERNATIONAL REFUGEE REGIME AND EUROPE'S REFUGEES

The international refugee regime has its origins in the aftermath of World War I. In August 1921 the League of Nations created a High Commission for Refugees (HCR), led by the renowned Norwegian Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930). This was an initiative to support Russian and Armenian refugees. Many members of the league originally hoped that the refugee problem would be solved by repatriation. These hopes were soon dashed. Nansen supplied refugees with identity documents in order that they not be returned involuntarily to Soviet Russia. By 1923 thirty-nine governments recognized the right of holders of the "Nansen passport" to cross international boundaries, provided that they did not thereby adopt another nationality.

The League of Nations had no funds of its own to spend on the relief and resettlement of refugees; its agencies played a supporting and coordinating role instead, relying where possible on financial assistance from national governments and voluntary bodies. Armenian refugees settled in France, encouraged by the authorities who wished to address the shortage of labor following World War I. Many were housed in refugee camps such as Camp Oddo in Marseille, where they remained until 1927. Nansen wanted to settle others in South America, a destination later favored by the U.S. delegates to the Evian Conference on Refugees in July 1938.

In accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1938, the Nansen International Office for Refugees spoke of the "material benefits" that the prize would bring to the refugees under its care. It went on to "rejoice above all in the moral effect that the Nobel Committee's decision cannot fail to exert on world opinion by emphasizing the enormous importance of the refugee problem." The following years brought little evidence of such "moral effect" and multiplied the "refugee problem" many times over.

THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR AND THE RISE OF NAZISM

The Spanish civil war (1936–1939) produced massive internal and external displacement. As early as June 1936 some sixty thousand refugees entered France; by October 1937 five times that number had settled there, in the relatively friendly environment created by Léon Blum's Popular Front government. The mood did not last. Following General Francisco Franco's march on Barcelona, which fell to Nationalist forces in January 1939, an estimated 300,000 refugees gathered at the French border. Border officials turned them back. Conditions in the French refugee camps were rudimentary and refugees faced much local hostility, but they stayed put. Following the international recognition granted the Franco regime after World War II, they abandoned hope of returning to Spain.

Others ended up in the United Kingdom, having been sponsored by local fundraising groups and the Trades Union Congress. Some assistance was orchestrated by Katharine, Duchess of Atholl (1874–1960), known as the "Red Duchess," who achieved brief notoriety. The Basque Children's Committee subsequently published a journal that enabled refugees to keep in touch and to publish their memoirs; significantly, it was titled Amistad. Meanwhile the French arranged for around five thousand Spanish refugee orphans to be resettled in the Soviet Union. (Adult refugees were often deported to the gulag.)

In response to the growing numbers of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and Poland, the French government contemplated settling them in Madagascar, thereby avoiding the need to locate them in Palestine. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee supported this proposal, but it foundered because of colonial opposition. In a familiar refrain, the French government accused German refugees of being "spies and subversives" and accordingly imposed tough restrictions on entry.

In 1938 (the year of Kristallnacht) the situation worsened dramatically in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Italy. Édouard Daladier (1884–1970), restored to power as French prime minister in April 1938 and resolutely opposed to the Popular Front, hurriedly introduced a decree on French residence, distinguishing the "new" from the "old" (i.e., Russian and Armenian) refugees and affirming that France had reached a "saturation point." Other distinctions were also drawn, notably between the "authentic" political refugees and the "undesirable" economic migrant, although this wholly arbitrary dividing line did not stop some politicians from advocating the import of cheap refugee labor.

The Geneva Convention on Refugees (4 July 1936 and 10 February 1938) provided relief to refugees from Nazi Germany. A key advocate was the British lawyer Norman Bentwich (1883–1971). The HCR, however, had no mandate to address the needs of refugees from Nazi-occupied Austria and elsewhere in Europe. The U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt convened the Evian Conference to attempt to resolve their plight, but it achieved little. French ministers reiterated their concerns that an "influx" of refugees would undermine domestic security. British delegates refused to allow any discussion of Palestine as a potential destination. The desperate refugees already in France found it increasingly difficult to secure even temporary residence permits.

WORLD WAR II AND ITS AFTERMATH

Population displacement in World War II, including compulsory deportation, was eerily reminiscent of World War I. The chief theater of displacement was Europe. One million Poles and Polish Jews left western Poland following the German invasion. From 1939 to 1941 Ukrainians fled westward to Germany from Soviet-occupied western Ukraine. The Soviet premier Joseph Stalin deported German settlers from the Volga region in 1941. Poles were expelled from Ukraine by nationalist forces in 1942. There were numerous involuntary movements of population elsewhere. Existing refugee groups were exposed to great risk. In France, for example, interned Spanish civil war refugees were exposed to the German onslaught in 1940.

As the tide of war turned, the retreat of the German army from the territories it occupied since 1938 was accompanied by a mass flight of five million ethnic Germans, who feared reprisals from partisans and the Soviet Red Army. Others were expelled "spontaneously" by local communities in Poland and Czechoslovakia. The Potsdam Conference (17 July–2 August 1945) sanctioned these "transfers." By mid-1947 the Allies counted 10.5 million ethnic German refugees in the occupation zones. The settled population regarded these Vertriebene (exiles) with alarm, believing that they threatened the health and integrity of the German Volk. Meanwhile dedicated Landsmannschaften (homeland societies) gave the expellees a degree of collective identity and political leverage. The additional burden that they placed on resources was subsequently alleviated by the West German "economic miracle," which provided them with greater security without extinguishing hopes of a return to their former homes in Eastern Europe.

In May 1944, 200,000 Crimean Tatars, irrespective of occupation and Communist Party membership, were summarily transported to Uzbekistan on grounds of collective ethnic disloyalty. Little is known of the lives they lived or of the ways in which they may have sought to maintain a sense of collective identity. The Stalinist state also inflicted enormous harm on the so-called kulak-bandit population of the Baltic states and western Belorussia during the postwar collectivization drive. Between 1948 and 1952 farming households were forcibly transferred from the Baltic states to the Urals and Siberia. The impact of these deportations too remains virtually uncharted territory.

At the end of the war displaced persons (DP) camps sprang up throughout liberated Germany, Austria, and Italy, initially under the auspices of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and then the International Refugee Organization, which was responsible for resettling refugees. Over five hundred such camps were still in existence in 1948, housing 800,000 refugees. The DP camp was by definition a place of incarceration, but it nevertheless provided an opportunity for a degree of self-administration. Camp authorities sponsored cooperative businesses, educational ventures, music and theater companies, and scout troops. DP camps also became a training ground for future political activists. Officials repatriated reluctant Ukrainian and other refugees to the Soviet Union. Relief workers spoke up for DPs who wished to move to North America and Australia, formulating their appeals with a "human interest" angle rather than concentrating on legal formulas. Around 400,000 DPs traveled to the United States under the Displaced Persons Act (25 June 1948).

Inevitably the schemes for resettling the DPs tended to favor the young and able-bodied workers. Under the European Voluntary Worker (EVW) program, the British government dispatched officials to the DP camps to identify "quality" workers, in order to satisfy the demand for labor in key occupations such as textiles and agriculture. Other EVWs were assigned to jobs in hospitals and sanatoria. The elderly or sick became known as the "hard core," stranded in the camps until they died or were rescued by charitable government officials. Thus the program to resettle refugees was governed primarily by economic considerations, not by the wish to save Baltic, Polish, or Ukrainian DPs from Soviet retribution.

Other episodes of displacement are less well known. The Italian-Yugoslav peace treaty in 1947 required defeated Italy to renounce Istria. Some 300,000 profughi (refugees), fearing retribution by Yugoslav partisans, left Istria between 1947 and 1954, settling first in refugee camps and then in shelters built by the Italian government in Trieste, itself a contested city. (Some camps survived until the 1960s.) Styling themselves esuli (exiles) rather than refugees, they recounted these momentous events in terms of "national" suffering, martyrdom, and (more recently) "ethnic cleansing," thereby sustaining contemporary irredentist claims and demands for compensation. Thus population displacement continues to reverberate in political and social life.

The aftermath of World War II witnessed the creation of a new international refugee regime in which the focus shifted from the group (as with Russian refugees) to the individual. Signatories to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees acknowledged as a general principle that refugees could claim protection if they were subject as individuals to a "well-founded fear of persecution, on grounds of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion." Crucially, the convention applied only to refugees who had been displaced by events prior to 1 January 1951, and signatories could confine their obligations to refugees from events occurring in Europe alone. It also enshrined the principle that refugees could not be returned to the country that persecuted them. The convention came into force on 22 April 1954, by which time the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had been in existence for three years. Given its limited budget, the UNHCR could do little more than resettle small numbers of displaced persons in conjunction with voluntary agencies.

THE COLD WAR AND EUROPE'S REFUGEES

Echoes of World War II—as a consequence of the Sovietization of Eastern Europe—can be detected in the displacement that followed the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet domination. Hungarian refugees were embraced by the UNHCR, notwithstanding the 1951 convention, on the grounds that their "persecution" could be directly attributed to the postwar turmoil and the Sovietization of Eastern Europe. In the space of a few months around 200,000 Hungarian refugees, mostly from Budapest, crossed the border into Austria and Yugoslavia. Western governments addressed the refugee crisis at once, lest displaced Hungarians contribute to the "destabilization" of Austria, which had only recently said farewell to Soviet occupation forces. Hungarian refugees were welcomed in the United States, Canada, and Britain on the grounds that they were the living embodiment of communist persecution. They offered firsthand accounts of life behind the Iron Curtain to Western social scientists and intelligence agencies. Other Hungarian dissidents were simply deported to Soviet prison camps.

The UNHCR became the main agency responsible for assisting Hungarian refugees. Various nongovernmental organizations and private agencies also intervened, including the Red Cross. The situation in Hungary was important for other reasons. It was the first occasion in which a refugee crisis reached a wider public audience through television coverage.

CRUCIBLES OF DISPLACEMENT

In 1974 Turks and Greeks once again experienced population displacement, this time as a consequence of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, which took place against the background of deteriorating relations between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Displaced Greek villagers resented being labeled refugees, a term that implied that they would not soon return to their homes. In response to refugee activists, the Cyprus government set aside houses abandoned by Turkish Cypriots or made affordable housing available to the refugees, and the UNHCR provided emergency funding to assist with resettlement programs. Women played the key role in maintaining refugee households. Some refugees demonstrated resourcefulness in establishing new businesses that traded on their status: hence, "Refugee Kebabs" and "Refugee Taxis."

Twenty years later, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe contributed to civil war in the rapidly fracturing state of Yugoslavia. In Bosnia and Herzegovina around 2.5 million people were displaced in the early 1990s, representing more than half the total prewar population. Most of them were Bosnian Muslims. Some 1.3 million were internally displaced, with the remainder split more or less equally between adjacent regions such as Croatia and Western Europe (especially Germany and Austria), where they had faced considerable obstacles to entry. Private initiatives, prompted in part by the constant media attention to the conflict, enabled many refugees to seek asylum in the West or at least to deal with unsympathetic government officials. In Bosnia itself relief operations were coordinated by the UNHCR, but its officials ultimately lacked the wherewithal to prevent attacks on Muslim enclaves in the so-called safe havens. One result was the massacre of Bosnian Muslim refugees in Srebrenica. Following the Dayton Accords (December 1995), the process of repatriation commenced. According to the United Nations, more than a million people displaced by the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s returned home from elsewhere in former Yugoslavia or from abroad. Half went back to areas where they remained ethnically in a minority. Their return posed enormous problems in restoring infrastructure, education, and health care; rebuilding homes; and simply finding jobs. Others remained in Western Europe (where they frequently faced an uncertain future) or traveled farther afield.

Intervention by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the conflict in Kosovo during 1999 contributed to the murder or deportation of tens of thousands of Kosovar Albanians, who were trapped by the closure of the border with Macedonia. NATO's program of "military-humanitarian cooperation," designed to move people to a place of safety, ultimately created pockets of ethnically homogeneous populations. When Kosovar Albanians returned to their homes, they faced enormous difficulties in rebuilding their lives. Albanian militias wreaked revenge upon the Serb population of Kosovo by expelling them in turn.

The collapse of the Soviet Union prompted ethnic Russians to leave their homes in Central Asia where they had settled, in some cases for two or three generations. Many Russian families left what is termed the "near abroad" either under duress or because of fears of future disadvantage or violence. They have since become an important subgroup in post-Soviet society, whose relentless economic decline has put a great strain on the provision of dedicated welfare programs. Russia's displaced persons (most of whom reject the designation "refugee," unless they encounter direct persecution or violence) live in poor accommodations and have experienced downward social mobility, alleviated somewhat by various self-help strategies. The outbreak of conflicts, whether between newly independent states (such as Armenia and Azerbaijan) or within the Russian Federation (in particular, Chechnya), produced further displacement and hardship. Contemporary opinion makes much of earlier episodes of forced migration, an issue discussed in the final section.

CONTEMPORARY REPERCUSSIONS AND THE "REVENGE OF THE PAST"

The memory of displacement survives in cultural practices and in political activity. Anthropologists trace the persistence of a refugee identity among Greeks who were displaced from Anatolia in 1923 and who settled in Piraeus. Well into the 1970s their descendants readily referred to one another as prosfiges (refugees), affirming a sense of separate identity from "the locals" and underpinning claims for compensation from the Greek government. Italian exiles in Trieste continue to depict Istria and the surrounding region as a "pure" Italian land appropriated by Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, the formation of "collective memory" is invariably contentious and uneven. For some individuals, displacement and resettlement evoke more positive memories rather than corresponding to a sense of trauma.

Many of the displacements of population associated with World War II and its aftermath—the Stalinist deportations of national minorities and "class enemies," the expulsion of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia, the displacement of ethnic Italians from the Julian March—continued to reverberate in the later twentieth century and beyond. With the liberalization and final collapse of Soviet communism, deported nationalities such as the Crimean Tatars made their way back from Central Asia to the "homeland" they had been forced to abandon. Second- and third-generation activists have asserted their right to be heard and compensated.

CONCLUSIONS

Discussions of refugees typically center around two categories. The first category is that of the refugees, whose experience has often been depicted in terms of loss and victimization. While these characterizations correspond to aspects of reality, they by no means encompass the entirety of experience. Younger Italians from Istria spoke of the refugee camp as a place offering adventure and even liberation. For others, such as some refugees from the Spanish civil war, the camp was a springboard to avenging past suffering by conducting acts of terror. This is neither to romanticize the refugee experience nor to exaggerate its transformative potential, but it does suggest that the experience was not one-dimensional or uniform.

The second category is that of the relief workers, typically belonging to nongovernmental organizations and with careers to make and budgets to manage. Many of the descriptions of refugee life that have become public have been generated not by refugees but by professional or semiprofessional relief workers who are normally bound by the conventions of the sponsoring agency. Relief workers and relief agencies have not simply responded to disasters, as represented in the modern mass media. They are actors in their own right, usually speaking on behalf of refugees rather than bringing them into the conversation.

Another conclusion is that the history of Europe's refugee population during the twentieth century was related to broader political changes. These include the replacement of multinational polities by nation-states as well as other changes of regime associated with revolutionary upheavals and civil conflict. The Bolshevik Revolution transformed the terms of the debate for generations to come, enabling unsympathetic states to label refugees as potential communist subversives, as happened in central Europe during the 1920s and France in the later 1930s. Hungarian refugees from communism served as ideological fodder during the Cold War. More broadly, Europe witnessed ruthless state practices, targeting populations for exclusion or excision. In the early twenty-first century such practices have called forth international action and thus eroded state sovereignty. Humanitarian intervention has undoubtedly saved the lives of many refugees, but whether or not this seismic political shift has improved the longer-term prospects of displaced persons is less certain.

See alsoEthnic Cleansing; Immigration and Internal Migration.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ballinger, Pamela. History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans. Princeton, N.J., 2002. Anthropological study of the Istrian peninsula in past and present.

Baron, Nick, and Peter Gatrell, eds. Homelands: War, Population, and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia, 1918–1924. London, 2004.

Cahalan, Peter. Belgian Refugee Relief in England during the Great War. New York, 1982. Now somewhat outdated, but the only full study available.

Caron, Vicki. Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933–1942. Stanford, Calif., 1999. Comprehensive account of policy and public opinion.

Gatrell, Peter. A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I. Bloomington, Ind., 1999.

Hirschon, Renée. Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus. Oxford, U.K., 1989. Sensitively traces the legacy of the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange, based on fieldwork conducted in 1972.

Holborn, Louise W. Refugees, a Problem of Our Time: The Work of the United Nations High Commissioner forRefugees, 1951–1972. 2 vols. Metuchen, N.J., 1975. Massive study of the UNHCR during its first quarter century.

Kulischer, Eugene M. Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917–1947. New York, 1948. Brilliant and pioneering study based on reading in a dozen languages.

Kushner, Tony, and Katharine Knox. Refugees in an Age of Genocide: Global, National, and Local Perspectives during the Twentieth Century. London, 1999. Informative study that focuses on the United Kingdom, using oral testimony where appropriate.

Loizos, Peter. The Heart Grown Bitter: A Chronicle of Cypriot War Refugees. Cambridge, U.K., 1981. Sensitive and personal account by a social anthropologist.

Marrus, Michael R. The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century. New York, 1985. 2nd ed. Philadelphia, 2002. Standard modern overview and a useful starting point for further research.

Pilkington, Hilary. Migration, Displacement, and Identity in Post-Soviet Russia. London, 1998.

Proudfoot, Malcolm. European Refugees, 1939–1952: A Study of Forced Population Movements. Evanston, Ill., 1956.

Simpson, John Hope. The Refugee Problem: Report of a Survey. London, 1939. Classic in-depth study of the interwar period.

Skran, Claudena M. Refugees in Inter-war Europe: The Emergence of a Regime. Oxford, U.K., 1995. Sober account based on the League of Nations archives.

Wyman, Mark. DPs: Europe's Displaced Persons, 1945–1951. Ithaca, N.Y., 1998.

Peter Gatrell