This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Refugees in Europe, 1919-1959 offers a new history of Europe's mid-20th century as seen through its recurrent refugee crises. By bringing together in one volume recent research on a range of different contexts of groups of refugees and refugee policy, it sheds light on the common assumptions that underpinned the history of refugees throughout the period under review. The essays foreground the period between the end of the First World War, which inaugurated a series of new international structures to deal with displaced populations, and the late 1950s, when Europe's home-grown refugee problems had supposedly been 'solved' and attention shifted from the identification of an exclusively European refugee problem to a global one. Borrowing from E. H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis, first published in 1939, the editors of this volume test the idea that the two post-war eras could be represented as a single crisis of a European-dominated international order of nation states in the face of successive refugee crises which were both the direct consequence of that system and a challenge to it. Each of the chapters reflects on the utility and limitations of this notion of a 'forty years' crisis' for understanding the development of specific national and international responses to refugees in the mid-20th century. Contributors to the volume also provide alternative readings of the history of an international refugee regime, in which the non-European and colonial world are assigned a central role in the narrative.

Representing a crucial intervention in the history of internationalism, transnationalism and global history, this edited collection examines a variety of international movements, organisations and projects developed in Europe or by Europeans over the course of the 20th century. Reacting against the old Eurocentricism, much of the scholarship in the field has refocussed attention on other parts of the globe. This volume attempts to rethink the role played by ideas, people and organisations originating or located in Europe, including some of their consequential global impact. The chapters cover aspects of internationalism such as the importance of language, communication and infrastructures of internationalism; ways of grappling with the history of internationalism as a lived experience; and the roles of European actors in the formulation of different and often competing models of internationalism. It demonstrates that the success and failure of international programmes were dependent on participants' ability to communicate across linguistic but also political, cultural and economic borders. By bringing together commonly disconnected strands of European history and 'history from below', this volume rebalances and significantly advances the field, and promotes a deeper understanding of internationalism in its many historical guises. The volume is conceived as a way of thinking about internationalism that is relevant not just to scholars of Europe, but to international and global history more generally.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. At the end of the war in 1945 Germany was a country with no government, little functioning infrastructure, millions of refugees and homeless people, and huge foreign armies living largely off the land. Large parts of the country were covered in rubble with no clean drinking water, electricity, or gas. Hospitals overflowed with patients but were short of beds, medicines, and medical personnel. In these conditions the potential for epidemics and public health disasters was severe. In The Perils of Peace Jessica Reinisch considers how the four occupiers - Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States - attempted to keep their own troops and the ex-enemy population alive. While the war was still being fought, German public health was a secondary consideration for them: an unaffordable and undeserved luxury. But once fighting ceased and the occupation began, it rapidly turned into an urgent priority. Public health was then recognized as an indispensable component of creating order, keeping the population governable, and facilitating the reconstruction of German society. But they faced a number of problems in the process. Which Germans could be trusted to work with the occupiers and how were they to be identified? Who could be tolerated because of a lack of alternatives? How, if at all, could former Nazis be reformed and reintegrated into German society? What was the purpose of the occupation in the first place? This is the first carefully researched comparison of the four occupation zones which looks at the occupation through the prism of public health, an essential service fundamentally shaped by political and economic criteria, and which in turn was to determine the success or failure of the occupation.

Representing a crucial intervention in the history of internationalism, transnationalism and global history, this edited collection examines a variety of international movements, organisations and projects developed in Europe or by Europeans over the course of the 20th century. Reacting against the old Eurocentricism, much of the scholarship in the field has refocussed attention on other parts of the globe. This volume attempts to rethink the role played by ideas, people and organisations originating or located in Europe, including some of their consequential global impact. The chapters cover aspects of internationalism such as the importance of language, communication and infrastructures of internationalism; ways of grappling with the history of internationalism as a lived experience; and the roles of European actors in the formulation of different and often competing models of internationalism. It demonstrates that the success and failure of international programmes were dependent on participants' ability to communicate across linguistic but also political, cultural and economic borders. By bringing together commonly disconnected strands of European history and 'history from below', this volume rebalances and significantly advances the field, and promotes a deeper understanding of internationalism in its many historical guises. The volume is conceived as a way of thinking about internationalism that is relevant not just to scholars of Europe, but to international and global history more generally.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. This volume offers a new history of Europe's mid-20th century as seen through the lens of its recurrent refugee crises. Borrowing from and adapting E. H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis, the editors of this volume conceive of the two post-war eras as a single 'forty years' crisis', which enables them not only to explore the continuities and disjunctures across the period but also to challenge established historiographical certainties and master narratives. As the essays in this volume show, the story of the 'forty years' crisis' can be told in very different ways: as one of upheaval, disintegration and suffering, or as one of newly emerging national and international solutions and possibilities; as a 'top-down' history of nations, institutions and policies, or as a 'bottom-up' history of refugees, relief workers and refugee advocates; by assessing the historical developments themselves or their historiographical afterlives. This volume is unique in that it brings these different perspectives together and provides a coherent intellectual framework within which they can be made sense of. Refugees in Twentieth-Century Europe represents the first comprehensive treatment of refugees in Europe of this breadth and depth for over a generation. It will provide an indispensable research guide for students of migration, nationalism and international diplomacy in 20th-century Europe, and an up-to-date overview of current research for specialists. As such it will make a major contribution to European and international history.