ABSTRACT

Traditional overviews of migration in Europe in the modern era are based on the so-called mobility transition. This still influential interpretation claims that until “modernization”— meaning roughly the Industrial Revolution and the accompanying massive population growth and urbanization-European societies were largely static and levels of migration therefore low. Only through the modernization process did people become uprooted and in large numbers leave the countryside to flock to the city, not only within Europe, but also overseas. This explains the disproportionate attention in many studies on migration of the 50-60 million Europeans who went to the Americas and Oceania. Only after World War II, so the conventional view goes, did migration to Europe become significant. [High levels of immigration occurred through the decolonization of Western European countries like the UK (from South Asia and the Caribbean), France (Africa, South East Asia, and the Caribbean), Belgium (Congo), Portugal (Mozambique and Angola) and the Netherlands (Indonesia and Surinam).] Another large immigration consisted of guest workers and their families from Northern Africa and Turkey and finally the number of asylum seekers from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East increased significantly from the 1980s onwards. This standard history, however, is highly selective as it largely ignores intra-European

migrations and important internal flows within countries. Furthermore it is not very consistent as it strongly favors emigration to the Americas over people who left Europe to Siberia, Central Asia and the Middle East, and furthermore it ignores circular and return migrations. Finally it is completely silent about unfree migrations from, to, and inside Europe. In this chapter we use a different perspective that builds on the vast new historiography of the last decades which started with the pioneering work in the 1980s of historians like Klaus J. Bade, Gérard Noiriel, Dirk Hoerder, Nancy L. Green, Leslie Moch, and others. Moreover, we follow the recent theoretical approach of Patrick Manning, who developed a cross-community approach to migration. In contrast to people whomove within their “home community,”whosemembers share the same language and culture, the migration of people who join or invade another community is fundamentally different and often leads to social and cultural change. As people from different communities in isolation have developed different ideas, technologies, and artifacts, cross-community migration

easily leads to innovation and change. Whereas Manning defines community in linguistic terms we also include social and cultural parameters. For the long nineteenth century, ending with World War I this means that we not only focus on people who leave (emigration) or enter (immigration) Europe, but also include internal migrants who move to cities, because they entered a different socio-cultural world. Because nation states become much more homogeneous in the course of the nineteenth century and cultural differences between the countryside and the city within nation states became less significant, we decided for this chapter to exclude internal migrants in the “age of extremes” that started with World War I. From that time onwards we concentrate on rural-urban moves of an international and later on intercontinental nature, for example Italians from the Sicilian countryside and Moroccans from the Rif mountains to Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam. Furthermore we discuss seasonal migrants who moved between more traditional and highly

commercialized regions, sometimes across national boundaries, but not necessarily so. Third, we will pay serious attention to the migration of soldiers (and sailors) who moved over national boundaries, a category that is often overlooked. These moves may often have been temporarily, but the cross-community experience did influence both the migrants as well as the societies they entered, in the case of soldiers either as combatants or as occupiers/peace keepers. One can think of intra-European wars, but also the migration of millions of soldiers within the many empires, including Russia and the Ottoman empire, who left for Asia and Africa. But also of Americans, Australians, Canadians, and colonial soldiers from all continents who fought during World War I and World War II, and part of whom functioned as occupying forces, like Americans in postwar Germany and Russians in Eastern Europe. Finally our cross-community approach also includes colonization migrations, which we define as people who settled in different ecological settings in rural areas, often in different countries. In the modern era this form of cross-community migration was rather small and largely limited to Eastern and southeastern Europe.