If one photograph has captured the magnitude and sadness of the 2015 refugee crisis, it is the boy on the beach: three-year-old Alan Kurdi, found drowned and washed up near the Turkish town of Bodrum after the overcrowded boat carrying him and his mother and brother across the Mediterranean was overcome by waves. They were just three of more than a million migrants who fled war-torn and destabilized parts of the Middle East and Africa in 2015, trying desperately to find refuge in Europe. Many commentators now call this “one of the greatest humanitarian crises the globe has ever known.” This month, historian Theodora Dragostinova explores the causes and pathways of today’s refugee crisis and reminds us that displacement and migration have long defined European history.

Refugees and minorities dominate contemporary international politics and the western humanitarian imagination bringing Hollywood stars to the most devastated parts of the Global South. And yet during the twentieth century, the global south was Europe itself. The collapse of the great multi-ethnic empires, the two World Wars, and finally the end of the Cold War created an unprecedented number of minorities and refugees. Millions of Germans, Greeks, Jews, Russians, and no less Muslims, came to constitute a major humanitarian and political issue for states, international organizations and private humanitarian associations alike. This course draws from the insights of history, minority and refugee studies, and international relations and uses a variety of sources (from parliamentary reports to refugee testimonies, and from films to literature), to examine this phenomenon. Bringing Europe’s ‘periphery’ (the Balkans and East Central Europe), into a closer conversation with each other, it explores state policies and local responses in order to highlight the importance of the minorities and refugees in the shaping of societies, states, and interstate relations in Europe’s twentieth century and no less our contemporary humanitarian sensibilities.

This paper is published in PerConcordiam: Journal of European Security and Defense Issues, Vol. 7, Issue 1, 2016, pp. 10-17 (The whole journal is uploaded). A large-scale migration and refugee crisis is unfolding in Europe. During the course of 2015, more than 1 million people arrived aboard overflowing and often unseaworthy vessels crossing the Mediterranean Sea to European Union member countries Italy and Greece. Almost 3,800 people died in the attempt. Most of the new arrivals have headed farther north into the EU, with Germany expecting to receive 1 million asylum applications in 2015. Global displacement stands at over 60 million people, the highest number since World War II. Many have drawn on this statistic to suggest that the population movement into the EU is unprecedented in scope and manageability. The numbers are indeed high and the EU’s response — poorly coordinated and piecemeal, driven in part by fear and hostility, in part by sympathy and generosity — has made it less manageable than it needs be. The chaotic nature of the influx has led many to feel that Europe is overwhelmed. The challenges are indeed great, but it is worth noting that the continent has dealt with larger flows, even in recent history: Twenty years ago, 3 million people were displaced at the end of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, the vast majority of them having fled within Europe. Europe’s long history of migration and displacement shows that mass population movements are catalysts for change — sometimes for the worse, leading to conflict and violence, and sometimes for the better, with the newcomers contributing to the prosperity and strength of host communities. If Europe’s migration and displacement history offers a lesson for today, it would be that sympathetic and pragmatic approaches to admitting and integrating refugees usually pay off in the longer term, while xenophobic and fear-driven attempts at “stopping the flow” through harsh security measures increase the risk of conflict and instability. This article is not meant to provide a historical blueprint for how to respond to today’s crisis — that would be impossible. But by taking a historical view, we can add nuance and perspective to today’s challenges, encouraging a less panicked and more measured response.

Executive Summary: - Faced with reports of current numbers of migrants coming to Europe, many have searched for historical comparisons. - These comparisons are often stripped of their context, and are as a result counter-productive or misleading. - Both the Kindertransport of 1938 and Hungarian refugee crisis of 1956 have been misleadingly cited as precedents to be emulated by policy-makers today. - Rather than drawing a straight line between two superficially similar events, we should pay more attention to the context of refugee crises, and ask what is distinctive about them. - Reference to history can nonetheless point to some long-term continuities in responses to refugees, such as: - Refugees are by definition an international problem, but states have always resisted any obligations imposed on them by outside actors. International organisations have a poor record of making states admit refugees they don’t want to take in. - Voluntary humanitarian work with refugees was and is often a dire necessity, but has always proved inadequate in material terms. - In spite of states’ persistent resistance to international solutions, the current crisis is unlikely to be successfully managed with anything other than a European-wide, even world-wide, programme of agreed responsibilities and the provision of generous resources.

This volume was written in the aftermath of the so-called refugee crisis which tested the ability of the European states, governments and residents to receive and grant protection to people fleeing war and conflicts. The absence of a comprehensive and coordinated response on the level of the European Union, unilateral and self-centred responses of its individual Member States to the challenges posed by mass migration, and the rise of xenophobic and racist sentiments within populations as well as in political programmes all revealed the level of solidarity and hospitality problems that both the European Union and its Member States have in coping with migration challenges. Through these developments, it became clear how fragile the Schengen Area, the Common European Asylum System and even the sole concept of asylum are. The unwillingness of certain EU Member States to agree with the solidarity-based quota system or to implement this system raised fundamental questions of why some of them even aspired to the European Union membership—was it only for the money? Was it for better and worse, or was it really just for the better, i.e. for the benefits deriving from the EU membership?