Refugees have existed throughout recorded history. Some exoduses have been economic- fleeing drought, famine, floods, etc.- others have been military, political, religious or ethnic in character.
Where immigration is opposed for economic reasons, or where there is xenophobia or fear of demographic replacement, the influx of refugees may be viewed with alarm. However, advanced capitalist countries, in the post-War years, generally assimilated refugees and, often, found them to be a source of endogenous economic growth.
In a paper titled- The Refugee Political in the Age of Imperial Crisis, Decolonization, and ColdWar, 1930s–1950s-
Milinda Banerjee1 and Kerstin von Lingen write
The three decades spanning the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s witnessed the birth of the modern global state system, characterized by a protracted and tortuous transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states. The demise of Nazi, British, and Japanese empires emancipated millions of people across the world.
Unless they ended up under a Communist dictatorship.
However, as old empires dissolved, new post-imperial states
like the Soviet Union?
continued older colonial-origin forms of ethno-religious discrimination and rulingclass dominance, or invented novel hierarchies.
Not to mention Gulags & man-made famines & repeated purges whose one great virtue is that they thinned out the herd of 'Old Bolsheviks'.
Hence, this epoch was marked by catastrophic outbursts of racial violence, sectarian war, and genocide.
Such things had happened in previous centuries.
If majoritarian nation-states were the privileged offspring of this transformation, then refugees were the unwanted issue.
Unless the refugee could get to a nation where his people were the majority. Orderly exchanges of population were possible. In some places this lead to a economic growth spurt and permanently higher material standards of living.
The national citizen and the refugee were co-created.
Some national citizens became refugees till they got to a safe harbour where they became national citizens.
Against their forced displacement and subalternization,
a King might become a refugee. He didn't become 'subaltern'.
refugees re-politicized their selves.
Some did. Most didn't.
We define this as ‘the refugee political’:
which is like the 'diaspora political' or, more simply, fucking immigrants banging on about shite the rest of us don't give a fart about.
refugees constructing themselves as political beings
there was no need to. Everybody has some political status in every country.
and building wide-ranging alliances – with churches, politicians, and entrepreneurs; with peasants, industrial workers, and feminists.
not to mention rent-boys, stamp-collectors & the neighbour's cat.
They became ‘subaltern internationalists’, linking the Dachen Islands to the United States, and maritime Southeast Asia to India; connecting central European Jews to Australian women, or impoverished Indians to Soviet and Chinese communists.
All this was wholly inconsequential. Jewish refugees streaming into Israel were consequential but no other refugee group has achieved anything of note.
They created new forms of ‘refugee polis’ – political communities which were simultaneously local and daringly transnational.
Immigration can indeed change demographics. There are 'sanctuary cities' in the US which may be able to prevent forcible deportation of people who crossed the border. The problem is that such immigrants may be socially conservative and end up supporting parties the authors of this paper dislike.
What do they like? My guess is some sort of anarcho-interntionalism.
They question 'traditional narratives which took for granted the transition from a world largely dominated by empires to a world largely dominated by nation-states'. Sadly, there is little point doing so. When multi-ethnic Empires break up, what eventually emerges is Nation-States- for example, the Roman Empire, over time, turned into 'National' Crowns (of Enland, France, Bohemia, etc.).
After 1917, it was obvious that the age of multi-ethnic Empires was over. China & Portugal had already become Republics. Soon, there was no Tzar or Kaiser or Hapsburg or Caliph. Ireland, Egypt and Afghanistan became independent in 1922. India and Ceylon were launched on the path to Democratic self-government. Meanwhile, plenty of refugees were flooding out of the Soviet Union- if they got the chance.
for many Asian and African political actors too, nation-state hegemony was not the most desired outcome of decolonization.
There were some crazy Commies. Stalin killed a good few of them. The more sensible ones either returned to their countries to gain advancement in the bureaucracy or else fucked off to some 'safe space' on a Liberal Arts Campus.
Since at least the first decades of the twentieth century, anti-state anarchism had been a central pillar of anti-colonial Indian politics.
Fuck off! There was only nationalism and, later on, some Commie bollocks but the Soviet Union didn't want too many of that type of twat.
From China and Malaya to the Arab world and France, anti-colonial activists often put their faith in socialist/communist internationalism, pan-Islamism, or feminist internationalism as more emancipatory alternatives to elite nationalism.
Very true. Many eco-feminists devoted themselves to sitting on the faces of the subaltern.
Black radical solidarities connected political actors across the Atlantic.
They were useless. Du Bois ending up a Ghanaian citizen was fucking hilarious.
The interwar years had been, in many ways, a golden age for such internationalisms,
Because Whitey still ran much of Africa and South Asia. Thus, loquacious darkies could jaw away to their heart's content. Sadly, it turned out, their countries' real problems began after Whitey fucked off. I suppose plenty of Whites had enjoyed a similar golden period at the time of the First and Second International. By the time the Third International began, in 1919, Europeans had bigger problems as their native lands had turned to shit. Jews, in particular, were soon to regret the balmy days when Imperial cousins ruled half the world
assembling actors across large stretches of Afro-Asia in shared anti-colonial rebellion. The eventual transfer of political and military power from colonial ruling classes to Afro-Asian elites, and the resultant consolidation of postcolonial nation-states, rendered almost impossible the translation of these internationalist solidarities into actual forms of polity.
No. The foreign ministiries of the new countries created various fora of a wholly useless sort. India began to regret its Third Worldism when, during the Indo-Chinese war, Nkrumah demanded that the Brits help the Chinese, not the Indians! Nasser, however, stood by India. Sukarno did not. In 1965, he supported Pakistan.
Internationalist solidarity was often subsumed and co-opted into solidarities between nation-states – the Non-Aligned Movement offering a case in point.
It was utterly useless. A colleague of my father- later patronised by Rajiv Gandhi- devoted his career to building alliances to battle Apartheid. Then the Americans did a deal with the Soviets. The Cubans left. The transition to majority rule was arranged without any input from African or Asian states.
The authors take inspiration from 'a celebrated essay, ‘The formation of new states as a refugee-generating process’ (1983), by the political scientist Aristide R. Zolberg (1931–2013). The author argues: ‘Following Arendt,
who was utterly ignorant
but with the modifications indicated, it can be suggested that massive refugee flows are most prominently a concomitant of the secular transformation of a world of empires and of small self-sufficient communities or tribes into a world of national states.’
This is clearly false. The Tzar's pogroms had driven 2 million Jews out of his realms between 1880-1914. Subsequent wars and changes of borders did create millions of refugees but this had nothing to do with any type of 'secular transformation'. Also, we know of no 'small self-sufficient communities or tribes who turned themselves into 'nation states'. The closest example would be the creation of Saudi Arabia, but it didn't create a lot of refugees.
The demise of the Nazi, British, and Japanese empires had undoubtedly emancipatory implications for millions of people across the world.
No. The demise of the Nazi and Japanese empires was good because both were fucking horrible. The British Empire was more good than bad and longer British rule correlated with higher growth in the Fifties and Sixties. Compare Hong Kong to Bombay or Calcutta.
But the same cannot necessarily be said for the ensuing triumph of nation-states such as China,
which turned into a Republic before the Great War
India, Pakistan, and Israel.
The refugees were better off by reason of getting away from murderous neighbours.
Like their imperial ancestors, these post-imperial states, too, were characterized by elite dominance.
If you dominate, you have elite traits. Why is it that post-imperial states were not taken over by abject cowards who spent their days getting horrifically sodomised by all and sundry?
To consolidate and legitimate their authority, ruling elites championed various forms of ethnic/religious identity, manufacturing majorities and minorities.
They forced men to have penises and women to have vaginas. That was very mean of them.
we endeavour... to rethink the 1930s–1950s not from the perspective of the citizen, as is traditionally done, but from that of the refugee.
This is easily done. A lot of very important scientists, statesmen, intellectuals and artists were refugees during this period. They directly altered the economic, military and political outcomes. Indeed, after the War, many of the new rulers had been refugees in the previous decades.
Paying homage to the lord– bondsman (Herr–Knecht) dialectic outlined by the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831),
it is irrelevant. The refugee is like a runaway slave. There is no 'life-death' struggle. If the refugee joins forces with some rival power and kills and replaces the Lord, there is no fucking dialectic.
we aim to write this global history from the perspective of the Knecht, here the refugee, rather than from the standpoint of the majoritarian citizens who were victors in the wars of decolonization.
Why bother? Plenty of guys who found themselves on the wrong side of a border, went elsewhere and wrote long books about their plight.
BTW, there weren't many 'wars of decolonization' in the British Empire.
That is our special issue’s most significant contribution. Taking a cue from Hegel, and especially from the interpretation of his work offered by the Russian émigré French philosopher Alexandre Kojève (1902–68), we shall suggest that the refugees, from their vantage point of subalternity,
The poorer refugees may have been so. They got jobs or started businesses. Some assimilated and rose by merit. Their kids rose yet further. I suppose a few ended up studying worthless shite. Still, Zohran Mamdani- who did 'African Studies'- doesn't seem to have done too badly. A Mayor of NYC is bound to get very very rich. Immigrants may want to pretend to be refugees while true refugees may want to assimilate so completely that nobody recalls they were once weak and persectuted. Can an immigrant politics of unassuagable Grievance hold power outside one or two decaying or corrupt inner cities? I hope the answer is no.
