Refugees and Citizens.

Over the past few decades, the refugee policies of Western states during the interwar period have been thoroughly examined, focusing on the restrictive actions of closed borders. Yet refugees are not only a ‘Western’ subject nor only a ‘Western’ discussion. This workshop focuses on refugees and refugee policies in the new nation states created in Eastern, South Eastern and Central Europe and beyond as a result of the First World War. It will examine how the often increasingly nationalist and authoritarian regimes became places of asylum, even if only temporary ones. In the new nation states, refugee policies were formulated against the background of new and contested rules of citizenship, freshly drawn borders, minority policies and transfers. Their creation, as well as territorial revisions, contributed to the problem of statelessness. Often, the idealised concept of ‘the citizen’ was used as an argument against those refugees and migrants deemed unsuitable for national citizenship.

Until now, refugee policies as well as legislation, discourses and debates, in most of these states, has remained understudied and rarely placed in a wider transnational context. Therefore, existing comparative research needs to be extended by examining refugees in these regions in the context of the broader population, migration and citizenship policies and discourses on legislation. Starting with the mass exodus during the First World War, through to the forced migrations after the Paris Peace Treaties, the population exchanges/expulsions in South-Eastern Europe and the politics of political asylum up to the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, this area remains an essential topic for scholarship.

Programme

Abstract & CVs