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Refugees – what’s wrong with history?

Introduction

The play on words in the title of this article points to the fact that although a handful of historians have contributed greatly to our understanding of mass population displacement, much more remains to be done not only in terms of specialist studies but in relation to history generally. The title also implies that many social scientists working in refugee studies are yet to be convinced of the benefits of thinking historically. One way of bridging the divide, it is suggested, is by deploying the concept of ‘refugeedom’, seen here as a matrix involving administrative practices, legal norms, social relations, and refugees’ experiences, and how these have been represented in cultural terms. History is needed in order to understand and contextualise this matrix. Given the focus of this special issue, this article also highlights some less familiar conceptual questions around refugees and refugee protection. A final section briefly outlines how refugees themselves engage with history.

Given the scale of this task it is perhaps advisable to begin more modestly and obliquely by asking what future historians will write about forced migration in and around the Mediterranean during 2015-2016. In the spring and early summer of 2015, Europe’s media devoted considerable space to reports of the efforts by thousands of migrants to reach a place of relative safety by negotiating the hazardous passage across the Mediterranean from ports in Libya and elsewhere to Lampedusa and Sicily. In the autumn and winter of 2015 these reports were supplanted by news bulletins describing the perilous journeys that migrants, mainly but not exclusively from Syria, attempted to negotiate from Turkey to Greek islands. The spotlight regularly fell on those who perished in the attempt.

How might these events be analysed in years to come? One answer to this question is that social historians can enquire into the aspirations of migrants and the families they left behind. Social historians may draw on the personal testimony of survivors in order to understand their motives and experiences. Whether this will be written up as a history of ordeal and pure loss or adventure and opportunity remains to be seen. Political historians will certainly examine the factors explaining the miserable response of EU states to the plight of migrants and its implications for the refugee regime in the new millennium. Cultural historians might seek to engage with representations of ‘Mare Nostrum’, the name given to Italy’s original search and rescue mission, and its replacement by the more restricted programme ‘Joint Operation Triton’, named after the Greek God, messenger of the sea. Maybe the passage of time will enable future historians to make something of the fact that far more people drowned in the Mediterranean in the course of 2014 than lost their lives on 9/11, and what this says about responses to ‘crisis’.1

Perhaps historians will locate current calamities in a broader history of encounters and enterprise in the Mediterranean, the ‘great sea’ to which David Abulafia has drawn attention in a book that puts human agency at the centre of the historical narrative (Abulafia, 2011; compare Horden and Purcell, 2000). They might acknowledge the insight of cultural theorist Iain Chambers who notes the historical connections and multiple cross-currents that made the Mediterranean ‘always part of an extensive elsewhere’, not just a ‘Latin lake’ (Chambers, 2008: 39, 146). They might connect migrants’ journeys from North Africa to the history of Italy’s colonisation of Libya and Abyssinia and its subsequent decolonisation (Ballinger, 2007; Arnone, 2008). In any event, historians now understand that the Mediterranean has been not a single sea but rather a series of multiple sites of commercial exchange and intellectual ferment in which merchants, sailors, workers, and political fugitives from different backgrounds became embroiled (Clancy-Smith, 2011; Isabella and Zanou, eds, 2016). The current focus on the Mediterranean as a place of danger (to migrants) and a source of ‘threat’ (to EU states) may in due course be placed in this kind of broader temporal and conceptual framework.

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These examples illustrate the kind of perspective that historians might bring to current events. Of course, it is conceivable that historians will pay little or no attention to this Mediterranean moment, deeming the migration of asylum-seekers and refugees to be merely episodic or surface noise rather than a fundamental component of conflict in the modern world. But part of the purpose of this article is an attempt to suggest why such pessimism is misplaced, and how an emerging history of displacement across space and time has begun to address the aspirations, actions and trajectories of refugees. A history ‘from below’ must also be accompanied by a history of the political dynamics and the cultural representation of mobility and migration. In thinking about this bigger picture historians can contribute to overcoming the ‘academic partition’ between different disciplines that has hindered the exchange of ideas between historians and other scholars (Rahman and Schendel, 2003: 554).

Thinking through Oceans

The events of 2015-2016 point not only to the need to understand the causes of mass displacement in and around the Mediterranean, and the policies pursued by European governments, but also invite us to look beyond the boundedness of the modern nation-state. One can call this ‘thinking through oceans’. This perspective offers a means of interrogating the meanings attached to population displacement and thinking about cultural and social linkages across time and space.

Historians could, for example, connect Mediterranean crossings to islands that play a part in the history of twentieth-century displacement, such as Stromboli, location of the classic film Stromboli (dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1950) which tells the story of a young woman, played by Ingrid Bergman, who at the end of the Second World War ends up in a Displaced Persons camp in Italy where she is befriended by and then marries an Italian prisoner of war who takes her back to his fishing village on Stromboli. Rossellini’s film is conceived as a powerful psychological portrait of the disillusionment and torment inflicted by a different kind of confinement in which the active volcano is both a symbolic and a real presence. A more familiar example is Cyprus, whose significance for refugee history derives not only from the mass displacement that was associated with the war of 1974 (Loizos, 1981; Bryant, 2004), but also from the fact that it housed British-administered camps for Jewish Holocaust survivors and refugees who were trying to get to Palestine. This history can be written as one of determination on the part of Jews to find a secure place in which to live, but also as a study in external intervention, including by American psychiatrists who sought to determine the mental health and ‘qualifications’ of Eastern European Jews, prior to their admission to Palestine/Israel or the USA (Zalashik and Davidovitch, 2006). Here, displacement opened up contentious questions about ‘race’, gender, citizenship and state formation; and ‘islands of history’ (Sahlins, 1985) in the middle of a vast sea were the location for attempting to resolve them.

One powerful way of thinking through oceans emerges in Sunil Amrith’s recent book, Crossing the Bay of Bengal, which demonstrates the active participation of migrants and refugees in seizing economic opportunities, overcoming constraints, and contributing at the same time to shaping societies and states in the entire region (Amrith, 2013). Other studies have shown how contemporaries, including refugees, reflected on the meanings of displacement. For instance, although the history of the Atlantic is inextricably bound up with slavery, its particular significance for the historian of refugee movements emerges in the journeys made by Spanish Civil War refugees who fled to Mexico and Argentina in the late 1930s and spoke of ‘carrying Spain in their arms’. Conscious of the significance of the Atlantic Ocean for the history of early-modern Spain, these modern exiles turned the voyage into an intense affirmation of their determination to regroup rather than succumb to permanent defeat, and in due course to reclaim Spain for a progressive purpose (Rickett, 2014).

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Even more striking in this ‘oceanic vein’ is a landmark study by anthropologist Lynda Mannik that draws upon the surviving photographic record of 350 Estonian refugees who fled to Canada in 1948. In contrast to those who attempt the much shorter journey across the Mediterranean and place themselves in the hands of people whom they barely know, these refugees formed an incorporated company to pay for the refitting of an old minesweeper, the SS Walnut, to transport them from Sweden to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where they were held for a month in a detention centre before being granted asylum. The Canadian media at the time construed this group as ‘docile, northern, and white’, and as victims of communism arriving in ‘little Viking boats’. Politicians subsequently incorporated the experience of Estonian refugees into a narrative of Canadian humanitarianism and multiculturalism, conveniently omitting the history of refugees who faced a more hostile reception in Canada, including Jewish refugees on the St Louis, which was turned back in 1939, and Tamil refugees in 1986. Multiple historical connections and meanings were thus disclosed. One is the association made by Estonian refugees with other episodes of displacement, as in ‘We were the first boat people’. Another connection is with the discourse of generosity that rests upon a selective appropriation of history, and even with the idea of porous borders, as in the reference to ‘Viking boats’. Mannik demonstrates how Estonian refugees were quite capable of holding a negative opinion of subsequent refugees whom they deemed to be ‘economic migrants’, whereas they were ‘political’ refugees – even though this was not in fact an accurate depiction of their own status, since they had the option of remaining in Sweden. The idea of describing themselves or being described as ‘boat people’ was contested. Some elderly Estonians and their children rejected the analogy: ‘I think [said one] of the Vietnamese who came, and we were not like that’. Their Atlantic passage conveyed ideas of a heroic expedition, but it also carried an unfortunate association with those who in their opinion had a less genuine claim to asylum (Mannik, 2013: 55, 153-157).2

I mention these books partly because of the maritime association that was triggered by media reports of the cross-currents of migration in the Mediterranean but also because they point a way forward for historians who seek to put refugees closer to the centre of modern history. They demonstrate the multiple meanings associated with displacement and the need to contextualise attempts to define ‘who (and what) is a refugee?’ They allude to the need to locate refugee crises in a broader historical framework, the absence of which emerges in another major talking point in 2015, namely the crisis in the Andaman Sea, when thousands of Rohingya refugees took to fishing vessels in a high-risk attempt to escape persecution in Myanmar and Bangladesh and to reach a place of safety in Malaysia and Indonesia. The lengthy debate to which this crisis gave rise overlooked the long history of Rohingya settlement, first in Bangladesh, and later on in Pakistan as well as in Thailand and Malaysia. The Thai-based smuggling networks that attracted so much international attention originated in the 1990s, when the first Rohingya refugees to be admitted to Malaysia faced innumerable difficulties including being labelled as ‘illegal immigrants’. Their precarious situation and lack of protection therefore stretches back at least two decades (Wong and Suan, 2012). Again, a historical perspective sheds important light on what appears to be a ‘contemporary crisis’.

Thinking through oceans is also a good way of acknowledging but also problematizing the nation state as the fundamental point of reference in historical accounts of mass displacement (Marfleet, 2007; Marfleet, 2013). I say ‘acknowledge’ rather than refuse the nation state, because of the ways in which powerful states perceive of themselves as island bulwarks whose ‘protection’ is deemed to trump that of today’s boat people – Australia and the UK being obvious cases. ‘Problematize’, because oceans (as in the work of Amrith and Mannik) direct our attention to diasporic networks and connections that transcend national frontiers and that are formed and re-formed by virtue of arduous physical labour as well as fresh feats of imagination (Hoerder, 2002; Mannik, ed. 2016; Lachenicht, this issue). Diasporic affiliations draw our attention to the means whereby refugees can engage in what might be thought of as self-protection, a point to which I return later.

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Lastly, oceans have been represented not only as a real (and metaphorical) site of danger but also of deliverance. Here, too, the political context of humanitarian relief and rescue operations is inescapable. To take an example from the height of the Cold War, a campaign launched in 1971 by the International Refugee Committee characterised the departure of refugees from China and Cuba as a ‘flight to freedom’. Newspaper publicity reproduced photographs of ‘a thousand Cubans leaving their fear-ridden country every week by makeshift rafts’ alongside ‘hundreds [of Chinese], risking their lives to swim from Red China to Hong Kong’. A personal appeal by IRC founder Leo Cherne described how they are ‘spending up to ten hours in the water, usually at night, demonstrating extraordinary ingenuity, courage and determination. What do they find when they arrive? A poverty-filled metropolis, but also the IRC’.3 This formulation and others like it invite a broad view of the components of refugee history, incorporating the politicised messages and expressions of oceanic humanitarianism.

In sum, oceans might appear ‘boundless’ and a way of thinking beyond the nation-state, but recent events and research by historians have shown how they are also policed and politicised. In cultural-historical terms, oceans are invested with meanings of adventure and opportunity, as well as constraint and risk. Refugees have themselves contributed to and contested such meanings over time.

Historians and Refugees: ‘Making up People’

Such dramatic moments, so costly in terms of human life, often fail to show up on the radar of historians. It is striking how little attention is given to refugees in general histories of the modern world, Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent being a notable exception (Mazower, 1998). Tony Judt, for example, began his deservedly much-admired magnum opus with a discussion of the post-1945 refugee crisis, but omitted to examine the displacement associated with the Hungarian revolution, conflicts in Cyprus and Yugoslavia, and the collapse of the Soviet Union (Judt, 2005). Where refugees do make an appearance in the pages of history books, there is still a tendency to portray them as miserable flotsam and jetsam – another watery metaphor – as inescapable ‘victims’ of war or revolution, not as agents of change. Historians have been slow to wake up to the crucial insight that emerges from scholarship in the social and political sciences, namely that states make refugees, but that refugees can also make states (Soguk, 1999). This alone is a sufficiently compelling reason to put refugees into the historiographic mainstream.

To be sure, there is a history of ‘refugee history’. It stretches back at least as far as two eminent Russian-Jewish scholars, Eugene Kulischer and Joseph Schechtman. Kulischer wrote an informative account of population movements in early twentieth-century Europe, but it is not well known even to specialists (Kulischer, 1948). Schechtman brought his knowledge of European history to bear on contemporary population movements in South Asia and the Middle East, with a series of books in the late 1940s through the early 1960s that advocated what he termed ‘permanent constructive solutions rather than palliative measures’, organised population transfer being one possible ‘solution’. Schechtman nailed his colours to the mast by arguing that resettlement and integration rather than repatriation offered the best way forward. (He was particularly dismissive of Palestinian claims to a right of return.) His contribution is interesting on two counts: first, because he argued that history ought not to weigh heavily on the mind of refugees, in other words, refugees should transcend the past in order to concentrate on the future; and, secondly, because of his willingness to provide a global and comparative perspective to population displacement – a way of joining the dots (Schechtman, 1946; Schechtman, 1949; Schechtman, 1963; Ferrara, 2011). I discuss this below.

So there was a kind of momentum to refugee history around the middle years of the century – to the aforementioned works we should add the fundamental study by Sir John Hope Simpson and colleagues (Simpson, 1939). But it then ran out of steam. Apart from the

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informative overview by Michael Marrus on the refugee crisis in twentieth-century Europe (Marrus, 1985), most of what stood for refugee history in the second half of the twentieth century derived as a kind of by-product from the literature in refugee studies, itself heavily geared towards policy issues. Aristide Zolberg’s classic co-authored book, Escape from Violence, showed how refugees were associated with some of the transformational moments in modern history, but historians took little notice of it (Zolberg, Suhrke and Aguayo, 1989). Another path-breaking study, notable for the fact that it was a kind of history from below rather than a study of refugee regimes and policy, was Renée Hirschon’s ethnography of first, second and third generation refugees from Asia Minor. Hirschon pointed not just to the legacy of Lausanne but to the ways in which refugees made a meaningful life in the growing port city of Piraeus. It had the potential to speak directly to social and cultural history, but her book is better known to anthropologists than to historians (Hirschon, 1989; Hirschon, ed., 2003).

Historians’ problem with refugees is perplexing. One likely explanation, noted by others, is a fixation with the nation state, although it is nevertheless odd that historians have not done more to establish the connections between refugees and the great upheavals of war, revolution, decolonisation and state formation in the twentieth century. Nor, as Phil Orchard and Jared Manasek note (this issue), have historians devoted much time to the social life of refugees before 1900, although there are exceptions (Burgess, 2008; Lachenicht, 2010; Shaw, 2015). Conceivably, such neglect reflects the assumption that any refugee crisis is a temporary blip, and that things ‘return to normal’ after a brief if painful interlude, although this too is puzzling, given what is known about the enduring presence and legacies of refugee populations in the Middle East, South-East Asia, and other parts of the world. Another possible explanation is that historians assume that many refugees had no wish or few opportunities to advertise their status and left few traces behind in the historical record. Yet, as the Palestinian Nakba and other events demonstrate, the rich resources that are available have not been well exploited by historians (Gatrell, 2013; compare Chatty, 2010).

All the same, it is misleading to dwell too long on the fact that historians have neglected refugees. Specialists have turned refugee history into a growing and dynamic field (Elie, 2014). Whereas hitherto, pioneering scholars such as Marrus, Tony Kushner and Katharine Knox, Frank Caestecker and others paid close attention to the impact of government policies on refugees, the focus of attention has lately begun to broaden (Kushner and Knox, 1999; Caestecker, 2000). To take one important example, although the centenary of the First World War has not so far been the occasion to devote attention to pan-European population displacement immediately before, during and after the war, at least one collaborative research project is currently underway. This will enable comparisons to be made between different wartime experiences and between governmental and non-governmental practices that developed in the midst of an entirely unexpected crisis, with immense political repercussions in terms of destabilising powerful continental empires and exposing fault-lines in the state (Gatrell and Zhvanko, forthcoming). Another example is the history of Europe’s Displaced Persons after 1945, which has recently become a growth area following the pioneering work of Wolfgang Jacobmeyer and Mark Wyman (Jacobmeyer, 1985; Wyman, 1998). New work locates their experiences of DPs in the history of post-war central Europe and in the history of international migration and the growth of inter-governmental organisations (Holian, 2011; Cohen, 2012; Holian and Cohen, 2012; Defrance, Denis and Maspero, 2015). Historians of humanitarianism have also contributed studies of refugee assistance (Irwin, 2013; Cabanes, 2014). This dynamic research points to a sea-change in the historiography of twentieth-century refugee crises and the refugee regime (Frank and Reinisch, 2016).

So is there a case for ‘refugee history’, and what is it? Can refugee history be taken seriously in much the same way as historians began decades ago to address the history of the working class, women, and slave populations? It’s tempting to suggest that a closer

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focus on refugees will enlarge the scope of historiography, and that this would in itself be a positive development. However, getting to grips with marginal and dispossessed social groups is not just a matter of rescuing them from what E.P. Thompson famously described as ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ (Thompson, 1963). Something more than a history ‘from below’ is required. This is a partly question of engaging with the complicated business of what Ian Hacking, taking his cue from Nietzsche, calls ‘making up people’ (Hacking, 2006; Zetter, 2007).

This point can be illustrated by reference to work that connects the experiences of refugees to broader questions in political, cultural and social history, and that specifically analyses the processes by which and the contexts in which the category of ‘refugee’ was fashioned. Janet Chen’s book on China under Japanese occupation and the aftermath of war shows how officials in Shanghai wrestled with the issue of definition: who was a ‘genuine refugee’ and who belonged to the category of ‘beggar’? Who had a valid claim on government support and who was a sponger? The stakes were considerable, not only for millions of Chinese displaced by the Japanese military invasion and prolonged occupation, but also for the occupation regime that found itself caught up in a crisis of its own making (Chen, 2012: 128). Another important body of work has been authored by Ilana Feldman, who has written about the ‘difficult distinctions’ in Gaza in the aftermath of the Nakba, between those Palestinians who were recognised by UNRWA as refugees and those who, as ‘locals’, fell outside the programmes of organised relief. Particularly helpful is her engagement with the process of categorisation – how, historically, violent conflict has been just the starting point of the process of making the modern refugee – and how this was connected to the history of an entire society (Feldman, 2007). Another way of putting this is to say that refugee history cannot just be about refugees. Granted, as Laura Madokoro puts it in her subtle and genuinely transnational account of the changing contours of Chinese migration in the second half of the twentieth century, historians need to ‘think of refugees as people in motion rather than as subjects constructed in relation to the states that alternately refuse or receive them’ (Madokoro, 2012: 10; see also Madokoro, 2015). The history of refugees is bound up with a broader set of relations and practices which I have elsewhere characterised as refugeedom, being my translation of the Russian word bezhenstvo that gained currency during the First World War. In that specific context, it directed attention to the emergence of a new social category that didn’t correspond to existing categories of status or class in the death throes of the Russian Empire. It was simultaneously a description of millions of people who had been wrenched from their familiar moorings by 1915-1916 (and who were initially divided into ‘forced migrants’ or ‘deportees’, on the one hand, and ‘genuine refugees’ on the other), and also an expression of the treatment – sometimes hostile, often demeaning, certainly hesitant – that was meted out by government officials and by host communities among which refugees settled. The term resonated because it neatly encapsulated the uncertainties and anxieties of Russian society and because it expressed the critiques being mounted against the Tsarist state. In short, issues of definition and practices of assistance were heavily politicised (Gatrell, 1999).

Refugeedom is a capacious and also an insistent term: it carried connotations of a new status and also a distinctive domain or sphere of practice in relation to a specific category of humanity. Granted, it is a rather awkward word in the English language, although it finds echoes elsewhere. The justification for adopting it is that it does a good job in getting us to think about multiple relationships between refugees and relief workers, those relationships that Ilana Feldman calls the ‘humanitarian circuit’ (Feldman, 2010).4 In addition, as the original Russian usage did, it incorporates the changing manifestations of a ‘refugee regime’, taken to mean the principles, rules and practices adopted by government officials and others in order to manage refugees, and the protection gaps in the system (Skran, 1995; Caron, 1999; Haddad, 2008; Long, 2013). I would argue that refugeedom allows us to go even

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further, by acknowledging the world that refugees made, not just the world that has been made for them. It thus extends to categorical practices, legal frameworks, bureaucratic instruments and humanitarian relief work, whilst enabling us to relate refugees’ experiences, conduct and responses to those prevailing institutions and norms.

Calling for a history of refugeedom is to argue for an approach that incorporates a social and cultural history of refugees within shifting systems of power. This must be done in a way that does not see power flowing in one direction. Refugeedom can be conceived as a system that governs but does not necessarily bind refugees in an inescapable vice. Particularly helpful are Aihwa Ong’s remarks in relation to Cambodian refugees who aligned their behaviour in order to maximise their suitability as candidates for admission to the USA: ‘in official and public domains refugees become subjects of norms, rules, and systems, but they also modify practices and agendas while nimbly deflecting control and interjecting critique’ (Ong, 2003: xvii). The history of this agility is something that bears scrutiny in its own right. In the rewarding formulation of Denise Riley, ‘the members of an exhorted mass – whether of a race, a class, a nation, a bodily state, a sexual persuasion – are always apt to break out of its corrals to re-align themselves elsewhere’. This calls for the historian to identify the moments and uncover the causes of such an escape from reification – what Riley calls ‘the extraordinary weight of characterisation’ (Riley, 1988: 16, 111). Under what conditions did refugees break free of the designation they were assigned, and perhaps espoused? How might refugeedom be a state of being in the world, a form of self-realisation, a badge of honour rather than a mark of shame? More research by historians on these questions is badly needed.

Refugee (Self)-Protection in History

The previous sections advocate an approach that contextualises the history of refugees and their categorisation. In this section I want to suggest something similar for the history of refugee protection. The politics and rhetoric of ‘protection’ still await a comprehensive Begriffsgeschichte, a history of concepts. Space precludes an attempt to trace its genealogy, which would require a consideration of its multiple meanings, for example in feudal societies and in terms of diplomatic practice (as in the notion of ‘protectorate’) (Conze, 1984).5

Contributions from a social science perspective have done much to explicate the doctrine of refugee protection. The focus of attention has largely been on international norms and institutions, particularly but not exclusively on twentieth-century practice (Loescher, 2001; Haddad, 2008; Goodwin-Gill, 2008). Historians have rightly been at pains to demonstrate the failures of protection, particularly under the inter-war refugee regime (Skran, 1995; Long, 2013). Yet we should not ignore dissonant voices that articulated a liberal and cosmopolitan vision of protection against the backdrop of illiberal policies in the later 1920s and 1930s. French historian Dzovinar Kévonian offers an exemplary archive-based account of the elaboration of international legal doctrine in respect of refugees at this juncture, tracing the contribution to international law made by a number of outstanding theorists including Andre Mandelstam. Mandelstam regarded the individual as the object of international law; he was the leading figure behind the declaration of the international rights of man adopted in 1929 by the Institut de droit international, and he regularly questioned the primacy of state sovereignty (Kévonian, 2004: 253-259; Kévonian, 2013). For scholars such as Mandelstam, international law provided little in the way of protection for refugees.

However, this was neither orthodox opinion nor practical politics. In his classic study on ‘the refugee problem’, Simpson dismissed as ‘sentimental’ the expression ‘right of asylum’, on the grounds that ‘no such right exists in law. It is a contradiction in terms. Asylum is a privilege conferred by the state. It is not a condition inherent in the individual’ (Simpson, 1939: 230-231). An official in the UK Home Office restated the case forcefully after the Second World War, referring to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which ‘states that everyone has the right to leave any country including his own and return to it, and that

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everyone has the right to seek and enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution’. Nevertheless:

The Declaration stops short of according to every individual a right to migrate to whatever particular country he chooses … While it would be possible to build up an argument for a natural right of every man to move where he wishes, it would equally be possible to build up an argument for the natural right of any community of men to decide for themselves whom they will admit to residence within their community. Just as the right of an individual to move freely about the country does not entitle him to trespass on other people’s property, the right to move about the world could well be regarded as subject to the same limitation.6

Much ink has been spilt on detailing the history of protection, including the ways in which domestic ‘security’ took priority over the protection of refugees. This doctrine can be traced back to the First World War and its immediate aftermath. During the First World War, governments and armies used force to displace entire populations in order to ‘secure’ the state against internal ‘enemies’ as well as external foes. In other words, the discourse of ‘protection’ operated to generate mass population displacement for a range of prophylactic purposes (Gatrell, 1999; Üngör, 2011). Another kind of ‘protection’ manifested itself during the 1930s, when professional bodies in Britain opposed the admission of Jewish doctors and others from Nazi Germany. It is a thread that runs through subsequent refugee crises, as with fears about the potential ‘infiltration’ of political extremists among DPs after 1945 and Hungarian refugees in 1956. The governments of India and Nepal likewise expressed anxiety about Chinese spies and ‘infiltrators’ accompanying refugees from Tibet (Beaglehole, 2013: 47-53; Haddad, 2008: 89-95, 212).

Nor does this exhaust the possibilities of rethinking protection. What about ‘temporary’ protection? Refugee camps are designed at least in principle to provide refugees with temporary protection from persecution and harm, but that they also serve to protect host societies from refugees (Hyndman, 2000). The history of the First World War and its aftermath again offers an instructive point of departure. Research in progress by Martina Hermann demonstrates that the Habsburg refugee camp in Gmünd, Lower Austria, isolated Ruthenian (the Ukrainian-speaking population of Galicia) and other refugees from the surrounding population, in order to prevent the spread of infectious disease but also to discourage refugees from spreading news of military misfortune. Gmünd became a site not only of incarceration but also of expert intervention by health professionals, who conducted experiments on the camp’s inmates. As well as ‘protecting’ refugees, the camp became a means of influencing their behaviour (Hermann, personal communication). In a similar vein, the American Red Cross created a refugee colony in 1918 for 2,000 Italian refugees outside Pisa which was designed to be a showcase of a ‘modern American city’, with the emphasis on light and clean air to promote hygiene (Irwin, 2013: 134). Elsewhere, when the war ended, refugees who returned from Bolshevik Russia to the new states of Poland, Lithuania and Latvia were kept in isolation partly in order to check their health status but also to interrogate them as to their political opinions. Thus the war unleashed efforts to protect the ‘local’ population as much as it did to protect refugees (Baron and Gatrell, 2004).

A final observation on protection is that the post-1945 refugee camp in Europe became a site of what might be termed self-protection. Decisions were made by the camp’s residents, in conformity with the doctrine of promoting independence and self-reliance as the basis of re-integration in democratic society. As the historian of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration put it:

Decisions of this sort were of the greatest importance in persuading the residents that they were receiving fair treatment [and] that they were human beings treated like other human beings ... In the long run, by practice and persuasion, but not by order and command … human beings were rehabilitated (Woodbridge, 1950, II: 525, 532).

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The voluminous literature on refugee camps in the contemporary world rightly points to the constraints imposed on refugees and the ironies of temporary protection. At the same time, the historical record discloses refugees’ capacity to challenge constraints and to develop strategies for self-protection. We are already beginning to see the results of historical research that draws upon the insights of social-scientific refugee studies to paint a more nuanced portrait of social, economic, political and cultural life in refugee camps in their political and administrative context (Chatterji, 2007; McLaren, 2010; Lipman, 2014; compare Harrell-Bond, 1986; Kibreab, 1993). Joining the Dots: Refugee History, or Refugees and their History?

The emerging body of work on refugees, refugee regimes and practices of protection nevertheless carries a risk of piling up a series of regionally differentiated and disconnected crises and responses (Frank and Reinisch, 2014: 479). Instead, we might ask how and in what terms refugees and non-refugees made connections between one crisis and another, in other words to think about the social and cultural history of displacement. I am less concerned here with the references that refugees sometimes made to biblical stories of flight (as they did in Russia in 1915-1916) or (as they did in France in 1940) to ‘the barbarian invasions of the fourth century’ and the Napoleonic Wars (Diamond, 2007; Judt, 2005: 23). Nor is there space to examine the use – or abuse – of history by government officials in Britain, Canada, Australia and other countries who proclaim their ‘proud tradition of welcome’, invariably a smokescreen or overt justification for imposing tough restrictions on those seeking asylum (Kushner, 2006; Beaglehole, 2013; Neumann, 2015).

Refugees have in fact often done better than historians in joining the dots. One thinks of the demand of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers for a sympathetic hearing from Israeli government officials, on the grounds that ‘not so long ago [you] were refugees as well’ (Ramm and Yacobi, 2012: 160, quoting Anthony Dadod). The politics of comparison emerged in the invitation extended by an Indian government official to a European audience to ‘imagine what would have happened if instead of a few hundred thousand people who fled from Europe to Britain during the dark days between 1934 and 1939, the number of refugees had included the whole population of Norway or Denmark’. He went on to add that then ‘we can get some idea of the problem which faced this country in 1947’, which – he was keen to emphasise – meant ‘a transfusion of new blood; the whole body of the country has benefited from it’. Likewise, the historian Sir Jadunath Sarkar told an audience of East Bengal refugees in 1948 that they were welcome in India, because they could help revive the local economy. He referred to the positive contribution made by Huguenots in Britain and Puritan settlers in North America. He urged West Bengalis in turn to ‘graft this rich racial branch upon its old decaying trunk and rise to a new era of prosperity and power’. But Sarkar did not leave matters there. In a striking analogy with recent events he also praised new Jewish settlers in Palestine who would, in his words, provide ‘a spark of light in the midst of the mess of Muslim misgovernment and stagnation. We must [he went on] make our West Bengal what Palestine under Jewish rule will be, a light in the darkness of medieval ignorance and theocratic bigotry’ (Gatrell, 2013: 177; Chakrabarti, 1999: 23-24).

History matters profoundly to refugees, in at least two senses. The first is that it influences, although it may not determine, the routes taken by refugees at times of crisis. Refugees from the Spanish Civil War followed the tracks made by earlier generations of labour migrants who moved to France to pick grapes and harvest sugar beet or who had migrated to Argentina. Refugees who fled from North to South Vietnam in the mid-1950s repeated journeys made by family members in the past. Refugees from the bitter civil war in Mozambique sought sanctuary in Malawi to which they were affiliated by virtue of peacetime migration during the 1950s. Bosnian Muslim women who were attacked by Serb militias during the war over the carcass of Yugoslavia found refuge in Slovenia, because their menfolk traditionally looked for temporary work in Ljubljana and other Slovenian towns and

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cities. The trajectories of displaced people rarely had a random character but were instead associated with historic ties, journeys and diasporic formations, literally a kind of ‘path dependency’ (Gatrell, 2013: 288; compare BenEzer and Zetter, 2015). The second element in a refugee-centred history is about memory and forgetting (Danforth and Van Boeschoten, 2011; Lacroix and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2013). Refugees have frequently invested in commemorative work, not least by emphasising the importance of the temporal rupture associated with displacement. But it is also important not to overlook what is excised from historical accounts. Refugees have been known to airbrush from history their former neighbours who turned upon them at the moment of displacement, making past sociability irrelevant to the new historical narrative and replacing it with ideas of ‘ancient’ enmity. These ‘mythico-histories’ can contribute to stoking conflict (Malkki, 1995). Following the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, the Armenian genocide, and the Greek-Turkish population exchange in 1923, the past neighbourliness of Christian and Muslim villagers in the Balkans and Anatolia was rewritten as a history of mutual disdain (Üngör, 2011). To take another example, Hindu refugees who arrived from Pakistan in Delhi in September 1947 and who moved into Muslim houses in the city refused to acknowledge its Muslim past; the same is true of Muslims who wrote the multicultural elements of Lahore out of history, and thereby constructed a historical account in which ethnic and religious violence became ‘predictable’ (Pandey, 2001). The displaced might think of themselves as a spectral ‘presence’ (as in the memorial books of Armenians, Jews and Palestinians), but they have turned former neighbours into ghosts as well. This is about rewriting the past for present purposes, a politics of negation and oblivion. Historians need to be wary of falling into the same trap. Concluding Reflections

What, then, should history and historians have to say about, and to, refugees? As this article has argued, answers to this question lead in several directions. The short answer is that history can provide perspective and corrective. Perspective, because a refusal to confront the historical record suggests an unwillingness to understand both the root causes of mass population displacement and the discursive registers in which responses to crises are articulated, or even to account for fundamental decisions by refugees as to the routes they might follow in moving to a place of relative safety. Corrective, in the sense that history exposes misconceptions. This enables statist claims about ‘traditions of hospitality’ or assertions about the increasing scale and ‘complexity’ of refugee crises, to be subjected to closer scrutiny.7

There is also a conversation to be had between historians and refugees themselves. The past is a resource for refugees seeking to locate themselves not just spatially but also temporally. Put simply, refugees have been adept at making historical connections and comparisons. Sometimes this has problematic consequences for other groups in society, such as when rival claims about suffering and restitution are advanced. It would strike entirely the wrong note to say that history is for that reason too important to be left to refugees; rather, historians can contribute to these debates.

To write the history of refugees is to engage critically with a category of concern which has to be problematized and historicised, to understand how refugees have, in Ian Hacking’s words, become ‘moving targets’ (Hacking, 2006). This calls for something more akin to a total history that integrates ‘history from below’ with other domains, including the history of geopolitics, law, and humanitarian assistance. Such an approach acknowledges but does not privilege the exercise of external power over refugees.

The greatest challenge of all, however, is for historians to write displacement into the larger processes of historical change. As this article has demonstrated, and as a growing body of specialist work attests, many key elements are already in place, in terms of understanding

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the oscillating relationships between wars, decolonisation, state formation and state collapse. These fundamental processes have been closely bound up with mass population displacement. At the same time, we require a broader analytical framework and a more generous understanding of how displacement has been managed and how it has been represented in cultural terms. This article favours the term ‘refugeedom’, which should not be thought of as a rigid construct, let alone a de-historicised ‘condition’, but instead as a shifting matrix of relations and practices to which refugees themselves have contributed.

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1 UNHCR estimates that 3,500 refugees lost their lives in this way in 2014. See http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/search?page=search&docid=54dc8dc59&query=mediterranean [accessed 25 February 2015]. This compares with 2,996 killed in the Twin Towers and the planes that crashed into them on 9/11, along with those killed in the attack on the Pentagon and on United Airlines flight 93. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks#Casualties [accessed 25 February 2015]. 2 For a powerful account by one of the ‘boat people’ who reached Pulau Bidong in Malaysia see Vu, 2007. 3 National Review, 13 July 1971, and ‘China Refugee Appeal’, in Papers of Leo Cherne, Box 35 Hong Kong, 1960-74, Boston University, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. 4 The term also appears in Summerfield (2000) without explanation or definition. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh speaks of ‘overlapping refugeedoms’ but does not elaborate. 5 A fuller conceptual history would also need to take account of such issues as economic policy (as in ‘protectionism’ versus free trade) and the protection of the environment and of ‘heritage’. 6 J.R. Ross, Home Office, 29 September 1959, Christian Aid Archives, SOAS, University of London. 7 In relation to the latter argument, according to the World Health Organisation, ‘political turbulence in many regions of the world has increased the number of displaced people fleeing complex emergencies and disasters’. The implication that previous ‘emergencies’ were more modest in scope and more straightforward to address is at odds with what is known for example about the aftermath of the two world wars in Europe and the consequences of Japan’s invasion and occupation of China between 1937 and 1945. http://www.who.int/environmental_health_emergencies/displaced_people/en/ [accessed 3 July 2015].