The Unsettling of Europe
How Migration Reshaped a Continent
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
An acclaimed historian examines postwar migration's fundamental role in shaping modern Europe
Migration is perhaps the most pressing issue of our time, and it has completely decentered European politics in recent years. But as we consider the current refugee crisis, acclaimed historian Peter Gatrell reminds us that the history of Europe has always been one of people on the move.
The end of World War II left Europe in a state of confusion with many Europeans virtually stateless. Later, as former colonial states gained national independence, colonists and their supporters migrated to often-unwelcoming metropoles. The collapse of communism in 1989 marked another fundamental turning point.
Gatrell places migration at the center of post-war European history, and the aspirations of migrants themselves at the center of the story of migration. This is an urgent history that will reshape our understanding of modern Europe.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Far from a disruptor of equilibrium, mass migration has been a constant, constructive, but bitterly controversial aspect of postwar Europe, according to this sweeping historical study. University of Manchester economic historian Gatrell (The Making of the Modern Refugee) surveys 75 years of population upheavals, including the forced expulsions of millions of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe following WWII; the return of colonists from the British, French, and Portuguese empires in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s; the movements of people from eastern and southern Europe into western and northern Europe after the fall of communism and the expansion of the European Union; and the contemporary appeals for acceptance of refugees and economic migrants from the Middle East and Africa. Gatrell probes the conflicted politics of migration: governments and businesses eagerly recruit migrant workers, he writes, only to cold-shoulder them during economic downturns, and native-born citizens sometimes welcome but often attack migrants because of cultural and racial xenophobia stoked by right-wing nationalist parties. Gatrell's detailed but lucid and accessible treatment balances close analysis of shifting policies with vivid, sympathetic sketches of migrants negotiating perilous border crossings and struggling to fit in. The result is a persuasive challenge to conventional wisdom that shows migration in Europe is nothing new.
