How Europe didn’t learn from its last ‘refugee crisis’
This is a guest post by Sharif Gemie, a writer and academic
One of the saddest things about the recent ‘refugee crisis’ is that we have seen it all before. The mistakes, the prejudices, the outright cruelty, the failure to provide adequate and appropriate resources, and the tendency to xenophobia have all been experienced in different forms in previous epochs.
The last great period of forced migration was in the years before and after the Second World War. While all estimates of numbers involved are provisional and uncertain, the scale of those movements is unmistakable. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), about a million people left Spain: most of them returned within a few years, if not a few months. At the start of the Second World War, three and a half million people were evacuated within the UK, and then between September 1939 and May 1940, three million evacuees were moved within France.
The German invasion of France in May 1940 set off a massive population movement: between ten and twelve million people, mainly French, but including people from Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg moved southwards and westwards within France, fleeing the advance of German blitzkrieg. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, between 16 and 17 million Russians were evacuated. This was a chaotic movement: soon these evacuees were referred to as ‘refugees’. Finally, in 1947, during the decolonization of India and the creation of Pakistan, about 15 million people travelled between the two new countries. These last two movements — the evacuations with the Soviet Union and the journeys between India and Pakistan — probably count as the largest movements of people in history.
The scale of these movements was recognised by contemporary observers, and their thoughts and reactions brought about an importance change in aid agencies. Previous agencies had been largely voluntary, often religious in inspiration, and usually seen as temporary expedients to meet unexpected emergencies. During the Second World War, a new tone was set: aid agencies were professionalised, secularized, and given some form of permanent existence. The wartime Allies attempted to plan for social disruption at the end of the war: the first organisation created by the UN was UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which was established in July 1943.
Compared to these enormous historical movements, the current ‘refugee crisis’ looks relatively small. This raises some simple questions: why hasn’t more been learnt? Why are the same mistakes repeated in each crisis?
I will discuss the repeating characteristics of these crises by considering one particular incident from 1939: the flight of approximately half a million Spanish Republicans from Barcelona across the Pyrenees into France in the last days of January 1939 and the first day of February 1939. They fled as Franco’s forces advanced on the city: this was not the last act in that bloody, highly politicized civil war (republican Madrid held out until April 1939), but the fall of Barcelona, almost without a fight, was a clear sign that the Republic was collapsing.
The Spanish conflict had fascinated and worried French people since its beginning. There were a variety of interpretations: the French right generally supported Franco, seeing him as a Catholic gentleman who was bringing order to a disorderly and socially radical Republic. Middle-of-the-road French political groups generally felt some sympathy for the new Spanish Republic (created in 1931), but were worried by signs of social radicalism. Finally, French left-wing groups were torn between different interpretations: was the Spanish Civil War the start of a social revolution? Anarchist groups were briefly in control of Barcelona and the surrounding districts of Catalonia and Aragon in the summer of 1936. Some French leftists urged caution: the immediate priority had to be to defeat Franco and fascism; social revolution would have to wait.
All these viewpoints reflected in a series of brilliant reports concerning Spain: we tend to remember George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (first published in 1938), but Orwell was merely one of a flood of journalists and writers who visited Republican Spain, including André Malraux, Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn.
By 1939, French people had certainly received much information about the Spanish conflict, but often they remained confused. For example: Catholics felt a spontaneous sympathy for the apparently pro-church policies of Franco, but were then appalled to hear of the ferocity of his forces as they advanced into the Basque Country, reputedly the most Catholic area of Spain. French Catholics could therefore work with agencies to receive and accommodate Basque refugees. One point is clear: in all the streams of hostile and supportive reporting on the Spanish Civil War, the consensus of opinion was that the Republic was not about to collapse in January 1939. Most observers expected that there would be long battle to take Barcelona.
Refugees started to leave Barcelona in the last days of January 1939. Most tried to sort out their own means of transport, but one of the last actions of the various political groups active in the city was to arrange transport. Some started in trucks, some found cars, but ultimately all walked northwards. The easiest route would have been along the coastline, but this was open to attack from sea and air, which meant that the bulk of the approximately half a million refugees headed across the mountains of the Pyrenees in mid-winter.
Nearly all went through agonizing decisions concerning what to take with them. One reads of journalists deciding to take portable typewriters, young women thinking of taking their trousseau, seamstresses carrying their sewing machines, shepherds herding their sheep along the routes. These points reveal a certain attitude: the refugees expected to carry on their lives and their trades when they reached France. Most political groups in Barcelona destroyed the records of their membership and their activities: these could have put members in danger if they were found by the Francoists.
In general, the refugees had a positive attitude to France: the neighbouring country was seen as a stable, Republican democracy, a society that Spaniards should be trying to emulate. Significantly, a number of Spanish political groups took their names from French organisations.
The journey was dangerous. People on the roads were attacked by German planes supporting Franco’s forces. Supplies of food quickly ran out. The Pyrenees were extremely cold: this was mid-winter. Refugees had to make dreadful decisions about their possessions: the roads, and then the mountain tracks were littered with the cases they left behind.
Furthermore, there was a political and psychological dimension to their journey, which became apparent when they passed through towns and villages of people who were staying. Their journey was creating two rival ideals of what constituted Spain. Those who stayed considered that they could live under Franco, those who left considered that they represented the best qualities of Spain, which could not survive under a dictatorship.
Many must have died on this journey: no one has been able to calculate how many.
There are two principal images of their reception in France. Let us consider the French interpretation first.
The refugees quickly became headline news in all the main French papers. The extraordinary sight of these thousands emerging from the snow-capped Pyrenees to descend into what were normally tiny farming villages and tourist resorts gripped the imagination. French journalists stressed the range and the energy of those who organised their reception: they highlighted the role of the police forces, going above and beyond the call of duty, of soldiers at the frontier, and of voluntary, charitable groups, often Catholic in character. One basic theme emerges within much of their reporting: the Spaniards looked terrible: cold, hungry, dishevelled, desperate, even suspicious. In contrast, the French helpers often seemed — to the journalists — to exemplify the best characteristics of France. They were benevolent, humanitarian, hard-working and orderly. This stark contrast between the orderly French organisations and the disorderly refugees is repeated again and again.
There were some suspicions about the Spanish refugees: ideas about contagion circulated, whether a political contagion from far left-wing militants (feared by the right-wing press) or from diseases that the refugees might be carrying. These fears justified the screening of refugees, and the isolation of young men from the others.
The second major interpretation of the reception is that recorded by the Spanish refugees. The contrast they offer to the French reports is astonishing, but very clear. Nearly every Spanish refugee complains about the inefficiency and even the cruelty of the French organisations. They report having to wait for hours, even days for food, and on the absence of any medical facilities. There are even stories of Spaniards sneaking back over border, southwards, to find cattle or sheep to slaughter for food. The Spaniards report having to construct their own shelters in freezing mountainous lands. (This also gave rise to one of the stories that circulated: French journalists reported Spanish acts of vandalism when they tore branches off trees to use as firewood.) Finally, the Spanish were extremely sensitive to the scorn and suspicion with which the French forces treated them: they had hoped for a welcome from a fellow Republic.
These differences can be summed up in a sub-theme which runs through the French reporting: that of the ungrateful Spaniard, who only complained when given a hot drink or food, or who made ridiculous demands about the type of shelter they wanted.
The similarities between the crisis of 1939 and the current ‘refugee crisis’ are, I think, obvious. We find the same search in news reports for the ‘good news’ story: Italian TV has run a number of programmes praising the work of Italian navy units operating in the Mediterranean. Of course, this is difficult work, and those units do deserve commendation. But these programmes seem to work as a substitute for reporting the real experience of the migrants themselves. The deadly dangers surrounding the migrants are minimized, or — worse still — offered as evidence of the migrants’ irrationality in travelling. And in the current reporting there is constantly the bland, re-assuring theme that ‘we’ are offering ‘them’ the best of possible receptions.
All historical information from: Sharif Gemie, Fiona Reid and Laure Humbert, with Louise Ingram, Outcast Europe: Refugees and Relief Workers in an Era of Total War, 1936–48 (London: Continuum, 2012)
