Yorkshire Philosophical Society

Event Information

The making of the modern refugee
Holocaust Memorial LectureProfessor Peter Gatrell, Department of Economic History, University of Manchester

The answer to the question ‘Who or what makes the modern refugee’? may seem to be self-evident. Flight from an oppressive political regime or from unremitting warfare has a long history, and today’s broadsheets are filled with reports of disasters both man-made and ‘natural’ that make it difficult for citizens who are unaffected by these calamities to avoid reflecting on the circumstances that give rise to the mass displacement of their fellow human beings. In this lecture I provide a twentieth-century perspective on the origins of refugee crises in different parts of the world and to show how they were linked to the collapse of empires, the emergence of the modern nation-state and the growth of totalising ideologies that persecuted ‘enemies within’. I shall also suggest, however, that other forces have been at work in fashioning the modern refugee into a recognisable ‘problem’ and a category of ‘victim’, and that this tendency – which we can observe in the media, in humanitarian and legal doctrine, and among refugees themselves – carries its own troubling implications.

Report
by Ken Hutson

This talk painted a very bleak picture of historical and modern attitudes to and treatment of refugees. Many countries, including Britain, found reasons to disperse Jews escaping from Germany before WW2 to far-flung destinations. Refugees are not just the victims of conflict but are often the deliberate creation of the State. Plans for refugees usually have a blithe disregard for their own wishes. Those of a particular nationality are quite often shunned by fellow nationals already established in a country of refuge.

The modern idea of refugee camps may appear to provide protection but more often than not they are set up as a means of control. In summary Professor Gatrell said “the categorisation of refugees may be designed to afford protection and assistance, but the process also deprives them of agency, disallows their resourcefulness, demands their acquiescence and ideally looks for an expression of gratitude that will validate our intervention”.