Expellees and ethno-national categorizations in Europe, 1943-1948
Table of contents
Project description
The research project, funded by the Academy of Finland (2021-2025), questions fundamental aspects of Europe’s post-World War II settlement and its long-term legacies, with important implications for the present. Our primary objective is to re-examine the ethno-national categorization of particular groups of European forced migrants during the crucial -- but under-investigated -- transitional period between late 1943 and 1948, which we label 'the postwar moment'. In particular, we aim to challenge the widespread tendency of both the research literature and more popular narratives to portray the millions of refugees who were expelled across emerging inter-state borders as national minorities -- a category of refugees whom we call expellees -- as having consisted of distinct ethno-national groups that were transferred to their 'home states' and then integrated as co-ethnic migrants into homogeneous national communities.
We analyse the dynamics of the ethno-national categorization of expellees in four different locations across continental Europe. In each case,two sets of imperatives collided. Powerful homogenizing forces, primarily from above, aimed to impose exclusive ethno-national labels on the incoming expellees, with the objective of building homogeneous nation states. Meanwhile, many expellees lacked exclusive national allegiances, having arrived from multi-ethnic borderlands in which regional or other identities often trumped national allegiances. The result was prolonged tension and conflict on the ground in the emerging post-1945 polities, as the authorities and the population, both newly arrived expellees and more established residents, engaged in complex processes of redefining and renegotiating the boundaries of the postwar national community.
Our secondary objective is to stress that these matters are not merely historical. By critiquing overly streamlined accounts of the dynamics of postwar Europe’s forced migrations, we make an empirically grounded contribution to wider social science critiques of ethnic ‘groupism’ and challenge myths of national homogeneity and singularity, which have stymied efforts to deal constructively with subsequent waves of cross-border migration and fuelled populist right-wing rhetoric, down to the present. We tackle these tasks with an interdisciplinary research team that draws on comparative and transnational methods, uses a very extensive primary source base and employs an interactionist approach, foregrounding frequently neglected, experiential grassroots perspectives.
