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ABSTRACT
At the height of the refugee crisis in Europe in autumn 2015, two public intellectuals, Jan T. Gross and G. M. Tamás, a Polish-American historian and a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, respectively, published articles arguing that Eastern Europe’s failure to respond in a humanitarian way to the refugee movements were reminders that the region was still trapped in its past. Specifically, they claimed that the memory of the Second World War, in which large numbers of people either sympathized with (Poland) or collaborated in (Hungary) the murder of the Jews, had not been worked through and remained a motivating force for dealing with ‘outsiders’. Stone's article analyses those by Gross and Tamás, and suggests that, although there is much to recommend them, they do not go far enough. The draconian response to the refugee crisis by no means characterizes only Eastern Europeans but has been a Europe-wide phenomenon. Stone suggests that it is important to recognize the revision of the post-war settlement that has been in train for several decades if one is to understand the way in which most European states have responded to the latest movement of people to Europe.
Notes
1 Walter Rothschild, ‘Refugees and normality’, AJR Journal, vol. 15, no. 10, 2015, 5.
2 Quoted in Sam Jones, ‘Refugee rhetoric echoes 1938 summit before Holocaust, UN official warns’, Global Development, 14 October 2015, available on the Guardian website at www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/oct/14/refugee-rhetoric-echoes-1938-summit-before-holocaust-un-official-warns (viewed 12 March 2018).
3 ‘UK must emulate Kindertransport to aid refugee crisis, says Lord Sacks’, Guardian, 4 September 2015.
4 Quoted in Dominic Casciani, ‘Kindertransport veterans urge Calais children help’, BBC News (online), 20 May 2016, available at www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-36332557 (viewed 12 March 2018).
5 See Dan Stone, ‘A bitter road: refugees past and present’ (blog), 15 December 2016, available on the Refugee History website at http://refugeehistory.org/blog/2016/12/15/a-bitter-road (viewed 12 March 2018).
6 G. M. Tamás, ‘On post-fascism: the degradation of universal citizenship’, Boston Review (blog), 1 June 2000, available at http://bostonreview.net/world/g-m-tam%C3%A1s-post-fascism; see also Andrew Ryder, ‘Socialism and freedom: an interview with G. M. Tamás' (blog), Jacobin (online), 12 May 2015, available at www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/tamas-fascism-socialism-east-europe-hungary/ (both websites viewed 12 March 2018).
7 See Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Finding meaning in memory: a methodological critique of collective memory studies’, History and Theory, vol. 41, no. 2, 2002, 179–97; and Aleida Assmann, ‘The transformative power of memory’, in Małgorzata Pakier and Joanna Wawrzyniak (eds), Memory and Change in Europe: Eastern Perspectives (New York: Berghahn Books 2016), 23–37.
8 See Paul Connerton, How Modernity Forgets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009). See also my article, ‘Beyond the Mnemosyne Institute: the future of memory after the age of commemoration’, in Dan Stone, The Holocaust, Fascism and Memory: Essays in the History of Ideas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2013), ch. 12.
9 Joanna Beata Michlic, ‘The path of bringing the dark past to light: memory of the Holocaust in postcommunist Europe’, in Małgorzata Pakier and Joanna Wawrzyniak (eds), Memory and Change in Europe: Eastern Perspectives (New York: Berghahn Books 2016), 115–30. On the Holocaust as ‘memory icon’, see, for example, Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser and Piotr Sztompka, Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press 2004); Amos Goldberg and Haim Hazan (eds), Marking Evil: Holocaust Memory in the Global Age (New York: Berghahn Books 2016); Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson (eds), The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory between and beyond Borders (Berlin: De Gruyter 2014).
10 Jan T. Gross, ‘Eastern Europe’s crisis of shame’, Project Syndicate (online), 13 September 2015, available at www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/eastern-europe-refugee-crisis-xenophobia-by-jan-gross-2015-09 (viewed 2017).
11 Email from Jan Gross to the author, 3 November 2016.
12 For a discussion, see Patricia Owens, ‘Reclaiming “bare life”? Against Agamben on refugees’, International Relations, vol. 23, no. 4, 2009, 567–82; and Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2011), ch. 4.
13 Norman Angell, You and the Refugee (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1939), 27.
14 G. M. Tamás, ‘The meaning of the refugee crisis’, openDemocracy, 21 September 2015, available at www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/g-m-tam%C3%A1s/meaning-of-refugee-crisis (viewed 12 March 2018).
15 This image of the Brezhnev years is only partially justified. See the essays in Edwin Bacon and Mike Sandle (eds), Brezhnev Reconsidered (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2002).
16 For a similar, more detailed analysis of the transition from Communist elite to robber barons, see Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001). For further analysis of some of the themes raised here, see Dan Stone, ‘Responding to “order without life”? Living under Communism’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012), 163–81.
17 Naomi Conrad, ‘Comentariu: Retorica premierului bavarez Seehofer’, Deutsche Welle Online, 10 October 2015, available at www.dw.com/ro/comentariu-retorica-premierului-bavarez-seehofer/a-18774249 (viewed 12 March 2018). For good analyses of responses to the refugee crisis in Germany, see Seth M. Holmes and Heide Castañeda, ‘Representing the “European refugee crisis” in Germany and beyond: deservingness and difference, life and death’, American Ethnologist, vol. 43, no. 1, 2016, 1–13; and Anita Bunyan, ‘Cosmopolitan Europeans? Jewish public intellectuals in Germany and Austria and the idea of “Europe”’, European Review of History/Revue Européenne d’Histoire, vol. 23, no. 5–6, 2016, 931–46.
18 For some of the crucial arguments about the sociology of immigration and asylum, see Jonathan Seglow, ‘Arguments for naturalisation’, Political Studies, vol. 57, no. 4, 2009, 788–804; Christian Joppke, Immigration and the Nation State: The United States, Germany, and Great Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1999); Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1992); Danièle Joly (ed.), Haven or Hell? Asylum Policies and Refugees in Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 1996); Stephen Castles, Hein De Haas and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, rev. edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2013); and Stephen Castles, ‘Immigration and asylum: challenges to European identities and citizenship’, in Stone (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History, 201–19.
19 Christian Davies, ‘Poland is “on road to autocracy”, says constitutional court president’, Guardian (online), 18 December 2016, available at www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/18/poland-is-on-road-to-autocracy-says-high-court-president (viewed 12 March 2018).
20 Bernt Riegert, ‘Comentariu: Europa în stare de urgenţă’, Deutsche Welle Online, 9 October 2015, available at www.dw.com/ro/comentariu-europa-%C3%AEn-stare-de-urgen%C8%9B%C4%83/a-18771766 (viewed 12 March 2018).
21 Daniel Trilling, ‘What to do with the people who make it across?’, London Review of Books, vol. 37, no. 19, 8 October 2015, 10–12.
22 Dan Stone, Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014).
23 Alan Moorehead, Eclipse (London: Hamish Hamilton 1945), 229.
24 See my discussion in Dan Stone, Concentration Camps: A Short History (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017).
25 Boris Pahor, Necropolis (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press 2010), 83.
26 Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2004).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Dan Stone
Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of numerous books and articles including: Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press 2010); Responses to Nazism in Britain 1933–1939: Before War and Holocaust, 2nd edn (Palgrave Macmillan 2012); Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe since 1945 (Oxford University Press 2014); The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (Yale 2015); and Concentration Camps: A Short History (Oxford University Press 2017). He is currently engaged on a Leverhulme Trust-funded project on the International Tracing Service. Email: [email protected]