Past in the present: migration and the uses of history in the contemporary era

ABSTRACT

This Introduction addresses questions of migration, history, and memory in the context of recent changes in public discourses on immigrant integration in Europe, focusing on how history is used to make claims about the inclusion of some and the exclusion of others. We highlight how these debates are often framed in a nostalgic tone that sustains categorizations and classifications of the population in terms of ‘natives’, who are allegedly historically rooted, and non-natives, lacking historical roots. To shed light on this process, we put forward the notion of historical repertoires to refer to ways that views of history are used to evaluate and justify the present. We lay out three possible components of these repertoires, showing their utility in analysing the debates discussed in the six European case studies in this issue (Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, and Greece). We also consider some parallels with the United States in how the history of immigration is remembered and used in public debates and political discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• nativism
• historical repertoires
• Europe

This issue addresses questions of migration, history, and memory in the context of profound changes in the axes of inclusion and exclusion in contemporary European societies. The articles in this special issue are about how history is used as a resource to make claims that justify the inclusion of some and the exclusion of others. As Margaret Macmillan put it, ‘history can help us to be wise, but much depends on how history is used’ (2008, 153). We seek to understand why and how history is used in public debates, policies and social movements concerned with migration and ethnicity, and with what consequences.

In emphasising the uses of history our questions are not focused on how historians produce historiographies of migration, including on migrant integration and integration policies, or whether various narratives about the past are ‘true’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ when read against historians’ analyses of the past. Our key concern is a different one: to broaden our understanding of why and how ideas and memories about the past play a significant role in present-day discussions of and reactions to migration. We see this perspective as relevant to social scientists studying immigration, race, and ethnicity – social scientists in our account referring to sociologists and political scientists as well as demographers and anthropologists – and as both different from and complementary to the work of historians.

We begin the introduction by providing some background, discussing how and why history has mattered in migration research, with a consideration of the role of history in scholarship on migration in contemporary American and European societies. We show that studies contrasting periods of migration – now and then – run the risk of not taking historical facts seriously and sometimes even creating or relying on versions of a mythical past. There is, however, another trend closer to the focus of this special issue that we also consider: studies concerned with how the past is remembered, a theme taken up in memory studies.

In discussing the importance of memories of the past in contemporary public and political debates about migration and integration in Europe, we highlight how these debates are often framed in a nostalgic tone that sustains categorizations and classifications of the population in terms of ‘natives’, who are allegedly historically rooted, and non-natives, lacking historical roots. To shed light on this process, we put forward the notion of historical repertoires to refer to ways that views of history are used to evaluate and justify the present. We lay out three possible components of these repertoires, showing their utility in analysing the debates discussed in the six European case studies in this issue, on Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, and Greece.

Although the articles in this issue are focused on Europe, in this introduction we draw at several points on a comparison with the U.S. Despite many differences from European societies, the U.S. case reveals some striking similarities in how the history of immigration is remembered, used, and misused in public debates and political discourse on both sides of the Atlantic.

Why and how history has mattered in research on contemporary migration

History has played a major role in research on immigration. In the U.S., scholarship on immigration has long been concerned with the past since immigration is an ever-present, and central, feature of American history. ‘Once I thought to write the history of the immigrants in America’, the historian Oscar Handlin (1951) began his classic book The Uprooted. ‘Then I discovered that immigrants were American history’. American historians of immigration have provided a vast trove of rich, detailed accounts of the experiences of newcomers in earlier periods that explore a wide range of topics. They also have their own association, founded in 1965 as an immigration history society and since 1998 called the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.

For a long time, the focus in American immigration history was on European immigrants, who overwhelmingly dominated the flows to the United States before 1965. As late as the 1990s, a survey showed that six out of ten U.S. immigration historians focused their research on European groups (Rumbaut 2001). By now, however, many more are concerned with Latin American, Asian, Caribbean and African arrivals, and many themselves have origins in these parts of the world. A new generation of immigration historians, as George Sanchez puts it, has begun ‘to tell a whole story of immigration to the United States that excludes no one while taking into account the diversity of conditions that brought newcomers to the United States as well as the varieties of factors that influenced their adaptation’ (Sanchez 2000, 57).

In contrast to the work of most historians of immigration, nearly all social scientists who study immigration in the United States focus on the contemporary period. To the extent that sociologists consider the pre-1965 years, it is typically as a backdrop to the present or as just a brief mention, generally to emphasise how different today’s immigration is from the past. As Nancy Green has observed, while historians are more inclined to emphasise parallels between today’s migration patterns and those in earlier periods, sociologists are more likely to emphasise newness (cited in Foner 2005, 3). This newness can be exaggerated, however. In their initial enthusiasm to introduce new concepts as describing new phenomena – migrant transnationalism, for example, and segmented assimilation among the second generation – some social scientists, even if unintentionally, have misrepresented the past or left out relevant aspects of it, leading, in reaction, to attempts in the social science literature to specify just what is singular today and what are longstanding themes (e.g. Foner, 2000; Morawska 2001 on transnationalism; Perlmann and Waldinger 1997 on segmented assimilation).

In fact, a (small) number of social scientists have put history front-and-centre in their analyses, systematically analysing the migrant experience in the United States in explicit comparisons between then and now that typically involve early twentieth century (then) and post-1965 (now) immigrants and their children. While sensitive to distinctive features in the contemporary period, the comparisons have also emphasised parallel developments and the operation of similar processes in both eras – with regard, for example, to assimilation (Alba and Nee 2003), trajectories of the second generation (e.g. Perlmann and Waldinger 1997), and the nature and impact of racial exclusion (Alba 2009; Foner, 2000; Foner and Fredrickson 2004). Aristide Zolberg’s A Nation by Design (2006) is noteworthy in that immigration policy is at the centre of the analysis of American political development, shown to be a tool of nation building since colonial times.

In the European literature, history has played an important role in the work of migration scholars concerned with the contemporary era, for instance in social historian Leo Lucassen's (2005) comparison of pre – and post-World War II immigrants in Europe that emphasises similarities in patterns of exclusion as well as integration. His work, among others, makes clear that invidious comparisons between ‘old’ and ‘new’ immigrants are nothing new, dating back to the turn of the twentieth century at least, a time when the new immigrants then stigmatised were, for example, Italians in France, Poles in Germany, and Russian Jews in Britain.

Over the last three decades and until now, the nexus between past and present in public and political, as well as scholarly, discourse in Europe has particularly focused on Muslim immigration, with regard to concerns about the future of multiculturalism in Western European immigration countries (Joppke 2009; Koopmans et al. 2005). Questions about a crisis of ‘multiculturalism’ at the beginning of the twenty-first century often involved comparisons between periods, suggesting that a difference between ‘old’ (good) and ‘new’ (bad) migrants was central to the understanding of the so-called crisis.

In general, social science comparisons between periods of immigration and immigrant integration run the risk of using a misremembered past or overlooking important aspects of earlier eras. Myths or at least partial truths about the past have sometimes substituted for what historians have shown about the immigration past. These myths may hide not-so-rosy realities of the incorporation of previous waves of migrants. Setbacks and struggles of immigrants and their children of the past may be glossed over or ignored, giving the impression that the difficulties of today’s newcomers and second generation are unique and more severe compared to the alleged successes of those in earlier waves (Foner 2019). Comparative analyses by social scientists should be based on empirical work by historians.

Whether in American or European migration and ethnic studies, there is another risk when social scientists start to compare categories of immigrants over time: that the categories used in a given time to describe immigrants will be misunderstood as ahistorical entities so that, for instance, early twenty-first century racial and ethnic categories may be assumed to have had the same meaning in the past. Historians of immigration have shown that southern and eastern European immigrants’ ‘whiteness’ in the U.S. a century ago – when they were seen as racially inferior whites – was not the same as it was for people with origins in northern and western Europe (see, for example, Foner 2005, 2019; Fox and Guglielmo 2012; Jacobson 1998). The same is true for Italian and Polish migrants in early twentieth century France, whose ‘whiteness’ was less obvious at that time than it is for these groups today.

When facing distorted narratives about the past, students of contemporary migration, race and ethnicity are normally equipped with critical methodologies and concepts they can borrow from the work of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and demographers. Against the mythical past, the scholarship of historians helps to rectify misrepresentations of the past, unveil collective amnesia, and explain the logics behind the construction of collective memories. Moreover, there is a growing interest and sensitivity in the social sciences to understanding how contemporary cultural categories have been historically constructed and social patterns shaped by historically rooted institutions and arrangements (e.g. Alba and Foner 2015). This ability to be sensitive to history is one important criteria against which the scholarship on current immigration and multiculturalism can be evaluated. In other words, it is an integral part of sociology and political science.

Why then re-open the discussion about history and migration, including migration research? Indeed, there would be no reason if questions about the role of history in contemporary migration studies were only epistemological and methodological ones, limited to how scholars conduct their research. The relationship between history and migration is, however, much broader than this, and involves another dimension – the public use of the past in contemporary debates on migration – which needs to be considered.

Memory, nostalgia and nativism

Memory studies have shown how much the past constitutes a battlefield for claims made by diverse actors, including politicians, journalists, social activists, migrants and refugees and, we should add, scholars. In the U.S., scholars have explored various aspects of memories of immigration such as the emergence and impact of a collective identity as a nation of immigrants, late-twentieth-century idealizations of earlier immigration, and the development of a cultural pluralist ethos in the mid-twentieth century in the wake of the incorporation of early twentieth century immigrants and their children (e.g. Alba and Nee 2003; Bodnar 1995; Diner 2000; Foner, 2000, 2005; Higham [1975] 1984). In Europe, immigration scholars have written about an ignorance or even denial of memory of an immigrant past. Writing on late twentieth-century France, French historian Gérard Noiriel (1996) called this ‘a collective amnesia’ regarding the role played by immigration in earlier times and a tendency to view mass immigration as something new (on the rising interest in the historiography of immigration in France see Green 2007). Collective memory is not only about remembering or misrepresenting the past. It can be also about forgetting the past altogether.

An important reason to re-examine the interplay between history, memory, and migration has to do with social and political developments in which recent political movements and aspiring leaders have utilised memories of the past to mobilise support. The case of European societies is especially relevant in this regard. With the rise of new nativist discourses at the core of migration politics in most European immigration societies, (mis)representations of the past are systematically sustained by a nostalgic perspective on a past before post-World War II immigration. Nativist narratives – nativist understood here as an intense opposition to an internal minority that is seen as a threat to the nation due to its ‘foreignness’ (Kešić and Duyvendak 2019) – are also mirrored in slogans emphasising that the past should be re-enacted and revived. But not any past: in Europe it is particularly the recent past before the arrival of postwar immigrants from the Global South who are often considered the cause of alleged declines.

The result in European societies is what may be called a nostalgic mood based on a temporal classification of the population. A hierarchy is assumed by many political parties, and not only on the far-right, between ‘natives’ and ‘newcomers’. The emphasis in Europe on temporal differences among citizens, combined with the idea that the past was ‘better’, makes it very hard for new, ‘foreign’ citizens to become full-fledged citizens. The nostalgic mood effectively excludes them from the national body since, added to the temporal differentiation between groups, today’s nativism includes the theme of ‘cultural threat’ by immigrants and their descendants.

Combining temporality and cultural antagonisms, nativism in contemporary Europe revolves around the ‘fear of loss of identity as a result of being ‘overrun’ by culturally alien foreigners’ (Betz 2017, 177). Indeed, perceptions of immigration and multiculturalism have profoundly changed in most European immigration societies over the past two decades. What seemed, at first, to be resistance to progressive forms of immigrant incorporation and new ‘post-national’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ conceptions of citizenship (Soysal 1994; Bauböck 1994; Castles and Davidson 2005) has shifted to a common, and blunt, questioning of the values of political liberalism itself, and of the very possibility that new immigrants or other minorities can become full members of society. The right to full membership is claimed for (and by) those who consider themselves as ‘native’ to the soil, with ‘newcomers’ considered by a large segment of the population to be a threat to the nation-state. This rapid rise of nativism as the dominant public and political discourse about immigration (Balkenhol, Mepschen, and Duyvendak 2016; Betz 2017; Guia 2016; Mudde 2017) has dramatically shifted debates about citizenship. Citizenship has increasingly been framed as an issue of cultural norms rather than of civic, political and social rights and duties (Duyvendak 2011; Duyvendak, Geschiere, and Tonkens 2016; Bertossi 2016).

A comparative perspective: historical repertoires and migration

Historians have related the past to the present in numerous ways. Nancy Foner (2006) distinguishes two approaches she labels ‘then-to-now’ and ‘then-and-now’. The former is an over-time perspective that emphasises how the past, and change over time, help to account for the present. In the latter approach, historical episodes and social and cultural patterns in the past are compared to the present in the search for similarities and differences, but not necessarily to explain the present by what happened in the past.

From the ‘then-to-now’ approach, she shows that present and past relate in the history of immigration in New York City through a specific dynamic, namely in ‘the way migrant inflows in one period, in a dialectical process, change the very social, political, and cultural context that greets – and affects the experiences and incorporation of – the next wave’ (Foner 2014, 30). Institutions created to deal with earlier waves of immigration continue to function in the integration of new waves of immigrants, while New York City’s public culture and ethos, heavily influenced by earlier Italian and Jewish immigrants, continue to contribute to the city’s openness to newcomers. At the same time, Foner shows that a specific interpretation of the past plays a role in shaping the legitimacy of the immigrant-friendly public culture: leaders in the municipality as well as numerous immigrant organisations frequently draw on the notion of New York as the city of immigration par excellence, a view that celebrates the city's multicultural history and the ongoing contributions of immigrants to its prosperity and cosmopolitan ambiance.

Foner’s discussion hints at how a public culture that values immigration mobilises positive collective memories of it, relating ‘then to now’. However, by doing so, it may distort the actual history of immigration to New York (and the U.S.), which also has been characterised by strong barriers to inclusion and stark inequalities (Higham [1955] 2011). Nevertheless, as Foner indicates, interpretations of the past are pertinent for those favouring immigration and optimistic about the possibility of integration (Duyvendak 2014). In general, and whether pro- or anti-immigrant, historical arguments in contemporary public debates about migrants and their children often mobilise the past and selectively remember what did, or did not, happen to buttress their positions.

While Foner’s discussion has addressed the U.S., we deal in this volume with Western, Eastern and Southern European contexts: Britain, Germany, Greece, France, Hungary, and the Netherlands. In each of these six countries, the question of the uses of the past is linked to a reframing of citizenship as an institution of belonging and social closure (Brubaker 1992). The culturalization of citizenship found today in Europe often leads to an emphasis in public discourse on ‘historical continuity’ that distinguishes between insiders and outsiders, coming from elsewhere. This idea of historical continuity is elaborated in various ways in the six countries but often with one element in common: the assumption that the nation has a historical ‘core’, paradoxically rendering the ‘historical’ into an ahistorical category. In other words, ‘we’, the Dutch, for example, the French, or the Germans have always been like this, which not only essentializes what Dutchness, francité, or Germanness is about, but also effectively blocks the blurring of the borders between ‘natives’ and ‘newcomers’. History and the immigration past thus play a role in drawing today’s boundaries between members and non-members of the six European countries. In this way, the past is used as justification for new narratives of inclusion and exclusion.

This argument or approach frames this special issue. Of relevance for this approach is a recent stream of works in contemporary sociology interested in the study of ‘repertoires of evaluation and justification’, what Michèle Lamont and Laurent Thévenot define as ‘elementary grammars that can be available across situations and that pre-exist individuals, although they are transformed and made salient by individuals’ (Lamont and Thévenot 2000, 5). From a cross-national comparative perspective, a focus on these ‘elementary grammars’ bids us to pay attention to how they organise the past-present relationship in collective narratives about migrants and minority groups and to empirically document the impact of these grammars on the definition of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in different national contexts.

In borrowing the concept of ‘repertoire’ from Lamont and Thévenot, we use the phrase historical repertoires to refer to elementary grammars about how the past is framed in present public debates about immigration, although this use differs from what Lamont calls ‘historical or cultural national repertoires’, which she characterises as a few central historical (read historically durable) themes defining the traditional national values and ideologies of a society (Lamont 1992, 136). We use historical repertoires more specifically, to refer to ways that ‘history’ is used to evaluate and justify the present.

To put it another way, we are not looking at how values and ideologies become fixed or sedimented in a society over time. If historical repertoires are understood as deeply-embedded and relatively stable, as Lamont suggests, they tend to be seen as ‘thick’ and rather unchangeable elements in how societies define membership and social hierarchies. In our conceptualisation here, historical repertoires are the framing processes in which past events are woven into overall coherent and meaningful narratives. Historical repertoires are oriented and applied to the present situation, even though these repertoires may not correspond to the ‘actual past’. There is much at stake here since historical repertoires have moral and cultural implications as they can be used to legitimize societal membership.

Whether and how historical repertoires emerge and contribute to transforming the axes of inclusion and exclusion in societies, particularly under the influence of new nativist discourses, is a theme of major concern in this issue. In addressing what we call the uses of the past, we distinguish historians’ understandings and analysis of the past based on systematic research from ‘memory’, conceptualised as mobilizations of different groups who make claims about the past based on, and often in the name of, their particular position in a society (see, for example Perron, 2021, and Dessewffy and Nagy 2021).

A central question for sociologists of immigration is thus to analyse how the uses of the past affect social and cultural hierarchies in contemporary immigration societies. Two additional points are relevant to this type of analysis. One is that it does not aim to assess the accuracy of narratives about the past used in contemporary debates about immigration, judging some as ‘real history’ and others as merely (mistaken) ‘memory’. The aim, instead, is to turn the focus to the types of categorizations, evaluations and justifications incorporated into narratives about the past that become part of debates about belonging, what we call historical repertoires. At the same time, in public arguments about the past, historical ‘facts’ and evidence presented in historians’ accounts can have an effect on the repertoires mobilised by others in immigration debates. A key issue, we believe, for studies of history, memory, and migration is not the question of ‘what is the past’ but ‘whose past is it?’ that is, who belongs and who does not.

Second, just which individuals and groups use the past in particular ways is highly variable depending on, among other things, the configuration of interests and subject of controversy at a certain time. For example, an immigration past can take on new meanings when political leaders seek to justify major decisions, as illustrated by Catherine Perron’s analysis of the reframing of the German ‘Flight and Expulsion’ memory after Angela Merkel’s decision to open the country’s borders to migrants in 2015 (2021). Historians can have a role, too. In Dutch debates about a mandatory historical canon for secondary schools, they were sensitive to the potential political use of such a canon, although the version they developed had problems in that it highly politicised a notion of ‘decent Dutchness’ that could be used for exclusionary purposes (Kešić and Duyvendak 2016; see also Duyvendak, 2021).

Such debates can contribute, in their own way, to the framing of the past, so that it becomes a cognitive, moral, and cultural support for claims about who does or does not belong. In drawing on, and reshaping, historical repertoires, debates about migration, integration, and national identity can help to promote a nostalgic and romanticised mood about the past that is often found in European discussions of these topics. The comparative perspective in this special issue allows us to begin to identify the repertoires at play in national debates and discussions and in country-specific culturalized notions of national citizenship. Despite specifics that are unique to each of the six countries, there are some overarching similarities in how the past is mobilised. We can identify at least three broad schemas that capture elements and emphases in public discourses on nostalgia and national identity (on the notion of schema, see Bowen et al. 2014). On the ground, there are cross-national differences in the relative weight given to each of these three schemas; they also may occur in different combinations, depending on the national context. Each national historical repertoire is, in fact, the result of the way the three are combined.

Schema 1. ‘Perpetual grace’: a linear, positive reading of a country’s past and present

In this schema what is emphasised is the innate ‘grace’ of a particular group compared to others. The widespread public discourse on and in Amsterdam about Dutchness provides a clear illustration of this type of narrative, in which the ‘perpetual grace’ of the Dutch is embodied in their alleged continuous tolerance. In innumerable speeches, mayors and aldermen in the Dutch capital of Amsterdam emphasise that the city has been a refuge for dissidents, particularly religious dissidents, from its earliest days. It does not matter whether the suggestion of a causal relationship between the seventeenth century and today’s liberal city empirically makes any sense (which it barely does). Another example is how laïcité (French secularism) has become a central element of the definition of the French political tradition of immigrant integration, even if this notion has been applied to immigrants and their children (and mainly Muslims) only since the late 1990s and early 2000s (see Bertossi, 2021). The narrative of ‘perpetual grace’ invokes a continuity between a distant past and the present by excluding periods that do not easily fit into this picture.

Schema 2. ‘Accomplished progress’: increasingly doing better

Whereas the perpetual grace narrative depicts national history positively through the invocation of harmonious trans-historical continuity, the second schema does so through representing the nation’s past in terms of discontinuity. In contrast to the first schema that denies conflict within and differences between periods of national history, the schema of ‘accomplished progress’ is predicated on acknowledging the nation’s historical struggles. It views them, however, not only as a central part of the nation’s past, but involves a rather self-congratulatory image, involving triumphs over adversity and conflict.

This can be illustrated by the emphasis in Dutch integration debates on the Dutch peoples’ capacity throughout the centuries to overcome problems and to continually move in the right moral direction. A similar schema applies in French debates about the superiority of the French ideology of republican integration, which is seen as surviving even in the darkest periods of French history (think of Vichy, for example). Despite these crises, France is defined in terms of a persistent and underlying French republican universalism. More than other schemas, this one regards national history as a discontinuous process with conflicts but stresses a trans-historical essence that finds its full realisation in the present. Without idealising the past, the schema of accomplished progress depicts a positive historical process culminating in the ideal state of completion in the present or near future.

Schema 3. ‘Rebirth now or never’: the promise of the past for the future

In this schema, the national past is pushed to the point of glorified superiority. This national superiority is perceived, not as a product of historical development, but as a trans-historical essence of a static past. If the narrative of accomplished progress depicts the present as the pinnacle of cultural progress, the schema of ‘rebirth’ diagnoses the present as the nadir up to the point of near death. The future appears in two guises in this narrative. In one, the future is seen as an apocalypse, echoing Spencerian notions of inter-ethnic competition and decadent degeneration. Both in Western and Eastern European countries, an emerging public discourse blames two entities (leftist liberal elites and Muslims) for destroying national culture and by extension Western civilisation. In a second version, the future is presented as a realisable utopia, when the past’s superiority will rise again and an idyllic purity of native homogeneity will be reinstalled.

The articles in this issue show variations in the importance of each of the three schemas, and related historical repertoires, in the six different European countries, indicating some of the factors making one schema more salient than others in specific national contexts and circumstances.

A European comparison

The six European countries represented in this issue exhibit a wide range of differences in their history of migration and immigrant integration. Some are former colonial powers and have long been immigration countries (Britain, France, and the Netherlands); one is a recent immigration country (Greece), although it was at the forefront of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe in 2015. In Hungary in that year, during the intensely politicised issue of refugees in the EU, the Orban government played a central role in mobilising nativist sentiment in the EU in general and among the four central European Visegrad countries in particular. Germany offers another important case, standing out for its 2015 decision to open its borders to some one million migrants. Taken together, the articles on the six countries allow us to see the enormous variation in how historical repertoires frame the articulation between past and present in public debates about immigration, race, and ethnicity.

The authors of the articles were not invited to apply a single a priori analytical framework to their national case. As a group, we met several times in order to critically analyse how and to what extent the past constitutes a resource for present public discourses on immigration. Our initial research interest was related to the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe, asking whether active (positive) memories of past migration made a substantial difference in how new migrants and refugees were welcomed in Europe in the post-2015 period. However, we soon realised that the relationship between positive memory and positive perceptions of immigration is much more complex. Our question progressively broadened, leading to a discussion of the interplay between memory, history, and migration politics. A conclusion that emerged from our comparative project was that a positive memory of past migrations did not necessarily guarantee a progressive approach to contemporary migration when, for instance, earlier ‘good’ migrants were contrasted with the ‘bad’ ones of today. Still, in some instances, the active remembering of former episodes of immigration contributed to a progressive remembering that countered existing nativist narratives about a country’s identity and supported a more inclusive notion of societal membership.

Germany provides the most striking example of this dynamic. In contradiction to the usual tropes of not being ‘a country of immigration’ and having a traditional ‘ethno-cultural’ and anti-immigrant conception of citizenship (Brubaker 1992), Catherine Perron shows in her article that events in 2015 contributed to a dramatic reframing of the national narrative about immigration, putting it in more inclusive terms. The Flight and Expulsion narrative concerning the expulsion of millions of Germans from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe after the second World War had long been upheld as one of the founding identity narratives to define Germanness. In 2015 it was reconfigured into an inclusive frame regarding immigrants and asylees in the aftermath of the arrival of about one million, mostly Middle Eastern, migrants. One aspect of this reframing of Flight and Expulsion was the re-historicization of the earlier period when Germans were themselves refugees at the end of World War II. In contrast to the rather rosy memory of harmonious inclusion of these German refugees, the 2015 reframing of Flight and Expulsion now took into account the difficulties they experienced on arrival in Germany. Angela Merkel's famous ‘Wir schaffen dass!’ (We can do it) can be understood as an activation of what we called earlier the schema of ‘accomplished progress’, that is, a schema predicated on acknowledging the nation’s historical struggles.

Tibor Desseffwy and Szofia Nagy, in contrast, emphasise how Hungary’s refugee past of 1956, when many Hungarians fled after the failed revolution, could have been mobilised in 2015, but instead was totally absent in public debates at that time, paving the way for a de-historicized perception of the refugee question. They also show how political leaders during the 2015 refugee crisis relied on existing – and, particularly in the case of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, highly negative – narratives of migrants and refugees to close the door on them. The Hungarian case thus sheds light on the uses of deep-rooted schemas, discussed by the authors from the perspective of social memory. They argue that these deep-rooted schemas, available in many Eastern European countries, help to explain their national state responses to the 2015 events. Against these stable narratives, the ambiguous meanings attached to migrants have been manipulated by the Hungarian government and especially Orban. This was made possible by three features: the autocratic transformation of the structure of the Hungarian political sphere; Orban’s ability to switch the use of history on and off according to his short-term political objectives; and a number of deeply rooted narratives that could be mobilised in order to ground a nostalgic longing about Hungary’s past as a nation. A combination of schemas has come into play that emphasise the ‘perpetual grace’ of long-established Hungarians (what Desseffwy and Nagy call ‘the last battalion’) as well as the nation’s continuous ‘accomplished progress’.

Jan Willem Duyvendak in his article analyses the various uses of history within contemporary Dutch public debates on national identity and immigration. These different ways of dealing with the past are telling in and of themselves, but Duyvendak also points to what the various uses of the past have in common: most Dutch politicians, he argues, just like Orban, are influenced by nativist ideas. This nativist layer makes national belonging extremely exclusionary. The nativist discourse not only frames Muslim immigrants as foreign to Dutch culture but also as unassimilable, rendering the gulf between immigrants and natives by definition unbridgeable. Since they don’t have the same history, they can’t share the same future. The enormous attention to the past, as exemplified by the endless public debates about the national historical canon, illustrates the selective process of remembering and forgetting, in which the ‘native history’ prevails. Duyvendak shows that the three schemas distinguished above are evident in four historical repertoires, including a repertoire he calls ‘secular emergence’. In this repertoire, subscribed to by both far-right wing and centrist parties, Dutch national identity (defined by liberal values embodied first and foremost in progressive sexual and gender relations) is a secular identity that is historically and selectively linked to the nation’s Christian past. This repertoire is informed by the ‘now or never rebirth’ schema insofar as it is nurtured by blaming the so-called ‘multicultural’ Dutch policies of the recent past for their supposed failure to achieve the integration of Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands.

Britain is a good illustration of how the past is a matter of a ‘national forgetting’ and ‘silencing’ process, through the construction of more or less selective elements of the official canon. In their article, Sundeep Lidher, Malachi McIntosh and Claire Alexander address recent disputes about Britain’s migration past, including debates about the ‘Windrush generation’ (Caribbean migrants who arrived between 1948 and 1970) and the historical canon taught in schools (2021). They show the extent to which these debates are part of a process of classification and categorisation which draws a boundary between those who are worthy of remembrance and those who are not. History and memory are battlefields where conceptions of race and ethnicity are produced and reinforced. In the British context, the three schemas presented above are mobilised in these battles. The schema of ‘perpetual grace’ is related to the British postcolonial melancholia after the end of the British Empire as described by Paul Gilroy (2004). The schema of ‘accomplished progress’ is related to what the authors identify as ‘exclusionary and monochrome versions of cultural citizenship’, which in turn raises the question of the relevance of migration history for non-migrants and White Britons. Eventually, the third schema of ‘rebirth now or never’ became predominant in the debates about Brexit.

In his article, Christophe Bertossi focuses on France, discussing the possibility of going beyond the history/memory dichotomy in order to look in a more direct manner at how uses of the past contribute to cultural and moral boundary-making in immigration societies. He shows that, in the post-war period, the framing of immigration as an issue having to do with the French republican tradition is a recent invention dating from the late 1980s and early 1990s. It is only when migration and migrant integration became a public issue in these years that the French political tradition of republicanism was activated as the framework for discussing the presence of immigrants in France – thus illustrating the operation of historical repertoires. Beyond the stress on the republican tradition and its universalistic conception, the historical repertoires mobilised in France drew heavily on culturalized categories, centred on the association of many migrants and their offspring with Islam. Bertossi analyses a dispute about France’s colonial legacy that occurred in 2004 and 2005, which combined in one debate (a) new claims by postcolonial minority groups about their belonging to France, (b) the memory of former colonists who left Algeria in 1962 after its independence about the ‘positive’ legacy of French colonialism, and (c) the actions of historians to defend their discipline’s autonomy in the face of the government’s political uses of the past. In this dispute, the ‘perpetual grace’ schema about the French republican tradition was directly connected to the ‘rebirth’ schema through the problematic concept of communautarisme (ethnic migrant communalism), which was eventually defined through political debates as the ultimate counterpoint to the French political model.

In their contribution, Markus Balkenhol and Yannick Coenders focus on new claims by postcolonial migrants, in this case in the Netherlands. While the history of slavery was remembered by people of African descent in the Netherlands throughout the twentieth century, the scale of remembrance has changed over the past three decades with colonialism and slavery emerging as highly contested fields of public memory. Since the early 1990s, Black grassroots organisations in the Netherlands have successfully used the nation’s history of slavery to articulate claims to citizenship and memory, asserting that ‘we are here because you were there’. Based on their rights as subjects of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, they rejected second-class citizenship to demand recognition as full citizens with unrestricted access to all areas of social life including employment, housing and education, areas in which Black Dutch have often experienced racial exclusion. Balkenhol and Coenders show, complementary to Duyvendak’s article on the Netherlands, how Black activists of the past have been remembered in various ways. Despite many differences among these activists, they had and have one thing in common: their fight against a Dutch identity defined in White, nativist terms.

Finally, Giorgio Kritikos investigates the extent to which the Greek historiography of the 1920 population exchanges between Turkey and Greece contributed to downplaying this Asia Minor refugee past as a lieu de mémoire for Greece’s national identity. Among the most striking elements of the role historians played in the politics of collective memory is their portrayal of these Asia Minor refugees as a coherent and homogenous group, neglecting or ignoring diversity among them and the problems they faced in terms of social, cultural, and economic integration after arrival in Greece. This characterisation of the refugees, as sharing the homogenous and cultural religious traits of the Greek nation, had the effect of supporting the development of positive views of their national belonging and national identity. Kritikos (2021) argues that the lack of a ‘history from below’ of the 1920 population exchanges and the Asia Minor refugees has played a key role in explaining why the widely accepted historical narrative of this past was not used or mobilised in 2015.

Taken together, the articles reveal important differences in the way the past is dealt with in actual public debates, but they share one common feature: the debates in all six European countries are coloured by the highly selective mobilisation of historical repertoires, in which some episodes of the past are glorified while others are actively forgotten. This aspect of forgetting turns out to be at least as important as what is actually remembered, and therefore deserves our full attention.

Although this issue examines the role of history in a broad range of European societies, the United States often lurks in the background, implicitly as a very different case. Certainly, as we indicated earlier, there are transatlantic differences in how the history of immigration is remembered and, even more important, how the immigrant past has shaped the receiving context for contemporary immigrants. At the same time, the analysis of the connections between history, memory, and migration in this issue reveals U.S.-Europe parallels that are important to bear in mind, and are thus a fitting way to conclude.

If the actual immigrant past has helped make the United States a different context than European societies for contemporary immigrants and their children, a focus on memories of immigration points to some remarkable U.S.-Europe similarities in terms of the processes involved. Several of the articles on European societies show how the past can be forgotten or mis-remembered in public debates about or reactions to contemporary migrants, and this is also true in the United States, where popular memories of days gone by are often more myth than reality (Foner 2000, 2013). To be sure, these memories of immigrants in the past are strongly held and emotional for many established Americans, focusing as they frequently do on their own grandparents and great-grandparents who came from Europe at the turn of the twentieth century.

But whether memories of immigrants are about those who came a hundred years ago or further back, they are inevitably selective and often distorting. Earlier Ellis Island era immigrants are often remembered as folk heroes of a sort who worked hard, strove to become assimilated, pulled themselves up by their own Herculean efforts, had strong values, and, in the case of Russian Jews, were ‘a people of the book’ (Foner, 2000). Against an image of these mythical heroes and heroines, it is difficult, indeed virtually impossible, for contemporary immigrants to measure up. In this sense, the myths have exclusionary elements in that they foster a view that the incorporation difficulties of today’s immigrants and their children are unique.

Americans often like to extol their country as having a long history as a haven for immigrants seeking freedom and a better way of life. Yet, there is considerable historical amnesia among the general public about the sharp nativist political responses to European immigrants in the past. In fact, whenever the United States has experienced sustained large-scale immigration, an anti-foreigner reaction against newcomers has ensued based on perceptions of economic, cultural, political, and racial threats, a topic on which historians have provided a host of detailed accounts. Indeed, Erika Lee's recent book, America for Americans, argues that the United States is not just a nation of immigrants, but a nation of xenophobia, in which fear and hostility toward immigrants, and their demonisation as racial and religious others, have been an integral part of American history (Lee 2019; see also, for example, Higham [1955] 2011; Kraut 2016). Even the phrase ‘nation of immigrants’, which is closely tied to the American myth of national origin, only became commonly and popularly used to celebrate the United States in the 1960s (Gabaccia 2010).

An important contribution of this issue is to demonstrate how history is marshalled for current political purposes with regard to immigration and this, too, is a process found in the United States. The contemporary U.S. case underscores how the past can be utilised for different political ends depending on the political actors and goals involved – in some instances in support of immigrants’ interests, in others against them. On one side today, Democratic Party political figures tend to celebrate the diversity that immigrants brought in the past and bring in the present and their positive contributions to American society. On the other side, Republicans today have engaged in white identity politics, capitalising on the threats many whites feel are posed by growing ethnic and racial diversity in the context of mass immigration.

None has exploited the fears of a loss of white privilege more than Donald Trump, whose appeals have been aimed, in particular, at working-class whites who believe that nonwhite, often immigrant, groups are receiving preferential government treatment and getting ahead while they are being left behind (Hochschild 2016). The view of history perpetrated by Trump is encapsulated in his 2016 campaign slogan: ‘Make America Great Again’, which reflects a desire, among other things, to return to a whiter America of the past. Trump’s version of history in the service of anti-immigrant politics would find few supporters in heavily Democratic, blue, cities, and New York is one of the bluest of all. This points to another dynamic that the U.S. case highlights: regional or urban differences in how political figures use history. In New York City, with its long history of continuous immigration and where in 2008 nearly half of voting age citizens were immigrants and their second-generation children, Democratic and Republican mayors alike often emphasise their immigrant roots and immigrants’ contributions in the past as well as the present (Foner 2014; Mollenkopf 2014).

That nativism has returned with a vengeance in both the United States and in the EU begs for a full analysis that goes beyond this special issue’s ambitions. What to think of nativism as a new context for understanding the place of migration and migrants in contemporary Western societies is a question for social scientists doing research in the present – and for historians in the future. What the articles in this issue empirically demonstrate is both more modest and more ambitious: how ideas about and memories of the past can function as a powerful driver of inclusion and exclusion in European immigration societies, sometimes allowing for more inclusion (see Perron (2021) on Germany, and Balkenhol & Coenders (2021) on Dutch black activism in this issue) but, more often than not, intensifying barriers to full-fledged membership along culturalized lines.

Acknowledgements

This issue is the outcome of three seminars held respectively at the Institute for Advanced Study in Paris (on June 30, 2016), the Central European University in Budapest (on November 14, 2016), and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies – NIAS (on July 9–10, 2018). The editors thank these institutions for their support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).