Ebbs and tides of people always and everywhere

A book review: The Unsettling of Europe by Peter Gatrell review by David Aaronovitch. Data rich.

The Unsettling of Europe is a definitive book in which Peter Gatrell, a historian of population movement at the University of Manchester, proves that “what we used to have” is a chimerical idea. As is the often repeated notion that today’s migration levels — immigration and emigration (although the second is rarely mentioned) — are “unprecedented”.

He begins in the wake of the last war, when vast numbers of people were on the move in Europe. About 2.7 million Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia, another six million from Poland. By 1950, 17 per cent of the population of West Germany were refugees or expellees, a figure rising to 27 per cent in Lower Saxony.

Meanwhile, 430,000 Karelians went from the Soviet Union to Finland, 300,000 Italians from Yugoslavia to Italy, 250,000 Turks from Bulgaria to Turkey, 150,000 Ukrainians from Poland to Ukraine, Hungarians from Czechoslovakia, Germans from Romania, and so on. There was scarcely a border from the Pyrenees to the Urals that was not crossed by multitudes. A few were the 87,000 displaced Jews taken in by Britain in an act of generosity that was later used to justify British reluctance to share other refugee crises.

These were people who had never lived in the country in which they found themselves. Yet somehow provision was made: between 1945 and 1960 one tenth of all taxes in West Germany went to help ethnic German expellees. Not that everyone was delighted. There were local resentments, a pogrom or two, much prejudice, and after the Iron Curtain fell even instances of West Germans betraying to the Stasi the defection plans of Easterners, on the basis that they would “otherwise take jobs that rightfully belonged to West Germans”.

Decolonisation and politics led to other mass migrations. In 1956 210,000 Hungarians left their country after the Soviet invasion, almost all of them going to Austria. Britain took 25,000. In 1972 the 60,000 Asians living in Uganda were expelled by the regime of Idi Amin. Britain, despite being the former colonial power, agreed to take in only half. For a while some Ugandan Asians ended up in Kensington Barracks, which was run in such a way that one refugee later described it as his “first experience of what it would be like to live in a totalitarian society”.

Next came the Vietnamese boat people. Again Britain took very few, and then only after civil servants, urged on by Margaret Thatcher, had looked at resettling them on the Solomon Islands or the Falklands. That would have given the Argies a shock.

My childhood was spent in South America, Africa, and Europe. I lived as a third-culture child among these movements of people. I knew Dutch who returned from Indonesia, French from Vietnam and Algeria, Germans from Poland, as well as all those inbound into England from the Caribbean and East Africa and elsewhere.

I had a pretty good read on the population movements from World War I but Gatrell's numbers show that World War II was comparable.

He answers a longstanding question I have had about immigration permanence. As an example, in the heyday of Italian migration America in the 1880s-1920s, perhaps 35% or more ended up removing back to Italy. Sometimes we get too focused on the inbound numbers, we ignore the outbound.

In this particular instance, all through my youth, I have been aware of the concerns and issues arising from Turkish Gastarbeiters. The numbers were large compared to the host nation. And yet, in travels in Germany, the Turkish presence has never seemed proportionate to the numbers. And no wonder.

Between 1955 and 1973, 14 million guest workers arrived in Germany, with 11 million eventually returning home.

That makes sense. 3 million on a country of circa 80 million is much less noticeable versus 11 million on 80 million.

Seems like an interesting book. Once I have cleared some stacks in my library, I will look for this one.