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What is a refugee? That question is not answered in the same way today as it was seven years ago, at least not for the perception that millions of Europeans have of what that word means and represents. Seven years ago, in 2015, Europe was experiencing one of the biggest refugee crises in its recent history, but it was doing so from a distance and a certain fear and rejection of some people who, according to the discourse of part of the European political spectrum, were invading the continent.
On the contrary, since February 24 of this year, more than 6.5 million people have fled from Ukraine, 5 times the number of Syrians and Afghans -mostly- who tried to reach Europe in 2015, at a much faster rate. vertiginous.
However, this massive flight has not generated the same reaction in a society that is even more polarized than it was then, quite the opposite. The signs of solidarity have been unanimous, the massive reception and the word invasion has not made an appearance in the public debate. The difference? A “very important” one: that the Ukrainian refugees are not “those we are used to seeing suffer on television, but blondes with blue eyes”, as stated by a Spaniard evacuated from Ukraine in reference to the children who had remained in the border with Poland.
The historical experience of the last seven years shows that, beyond its legal meaning and its academic conceptualization, what the word ‘refugee’ represents for European society as a whole varies according to nationality, race or religion, that is, the geographical and cultural distance between those who define others as refugees and those who are reduced to that condition. Philipp Ther’s book, ‘Foreigners. Refugees in Europe since 1492’ (translated by Antonio Escobar Tortosa), addresses this complex political, social and cultural construction, as well as the experience of the different escapes and flows of refugees that have occurred on the European continent since the beginning of the Modern Age and the policies put in place to address this phenomenon. Through a long-term inter-epoch approach, the Austrian historian, Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna, proposes a topological structure. Instead of following a chronological order, Ther is committed to dissecting the history of refugees in Europe through their main reasons for fleeing: religious, linked to radical nationalism and ethnic cleansing, and political. In fact, that simple choice already yields some relevant conclusions. First of all, that history is not simple and linear, but complex and made up of a whole series of interrelated dimensions. In other words, refugees do not flee exclusively for religious, ethno-nationalist or political reasons, but in many cases they do so for the sum of some or all of them, something that fits better into the structure the book adopts by going through the same experiences of flight from different thematic perspectives And, second, that it is important to differentiate between refuge and other forms of migration, such as economic migration, with coercion and violence as a distinctive element.
The persecution and expulsion of Jews, Huguenots or Muslims; the huge relocations and forced displacements of ethnic and national minorities in the two and post world wars, but also in the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia; or flight for political reasons, from revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries who had to seek refuge throughout the 19th century to those forced to flee from authoritarian and fascist dictatorships –as in the case of the Spanish Civil War– or from communism during the Cold War. This extensive casuistry, often running in parallel, makes up the historical experience of refuge in Europe, a past that those so concerned with constructing essentialist visions of history seem to conveniently forget. And it is that if we can get something clear from the reading of Extranjeros it is precisely that, the recurrent nature, even cyclical in its geographical deployment, of the phenomenon of refuge, and how that has shaped not only the national, social and cultural identity of Europe , but also the response that Europeans have gradually given to this phenomenon. A response obviously conditioned by the religious, the national and the political –the same reasons for refuge–, but which have still made Europe one of the most relevant reception spaces on the globe, particularly in terms of legislation, tools and policies. it means.
However, as Ther also warns, this kind of minimum common solidarity seems to be increasingly threatened. The problems arising from the integration of refugees and migrants in certain countries such as France, Sweden or the United Kingdom have ended up simplifying and radicalizing the perception of these people, reducing to a cultural and religious issue what is a much more complex that has, for example, deep economic roots that are generally undervalued. Here, again, the long-range vision offered by ‘Foreigners’ allows us to place things in a context that goes beyond the short-termism and dogmatism that feed many of the discourses and policies of the European extreme right today. As the Austrian historian points out, Europe has faced much larger waves of refugees than even that of 2015, and the countries that host refugees almost always benefit from this process, both through the absorption of skilled workers and through the creating greater cultural diversity and social tolerance.
Thus, rather than answering the question of what a refugee is, what Philipp Ther proposes to us in ‘Foreigners’ is that we go beyond that fixed point, which is usually the center of all public debate and historical narrative. In other words, once the reasons for the flight and the great flows that have characterized the history of refuge in Europe since 1492 have been identified, we also approach the after, that is, the reception, adaptation and integration in societies receivers. In short, that we should not reduce people who flee to their status as fugitives, since this should only be a stage in an existence that has roots, but also has a horizon and a future to which we aspire. The sixteen individual portraits of Philipp Ther refugees (include photo caption) with which the author truffles his work undoubtedly contribute to this, reminding us that behind supra-individual and dehumanizing terms such as “invaders” there are only people who, like last resort, they have been forced to flee their homes. Beyond recounting a nuclear part of the history of Europe, perhaps this is one of the most important contributions of ‘Foreigners. Refugees in Europe since 1492’.
book sheet
Title: Foreign. Refugees in Europe since 1492
Author: Philipp Ther
Editorial: Presses of the University of Zaragoza
Year of edition: 2022
Available at: Presses of the University of Zaragoza
Available in: Unebook
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