Migration flows in 20th century Europe

and their impact on school life

80th European Teachers’ Seminar

Donaueschingen, 15-19 June 1998

Report

by

Danielle Leclercq

Council of the Cultural Co-operation

In-Service Training Programme for Teachers

Strasbourg, 1999
The Council of Europe was founded in 1949 to achieve greater unity between European
parliamentary democracies. It is the oldest of the European political institutions and has forty
member States,* including the fifteen members of the European Union. It is the widest
intergovernmental and interparliamentary grouping in Europe, and has its headquarters in the
French city of Strasbourg.

Only questions related to national defence are excluded from the Council of Europe's work,
and the Organisation has activities in the following areas: democracy, human rights and
fundamental freedoms; media and communication; social and economic affairs; education,
culture, heritage and sport; youth; health; environment and regional planning; local democracy
and legal co-operation.

The European Cultural Convention was opened for signature in 1954. This international
treaty is open to European countries that are not members of the Council of Europe, and it
enables them to take part in the Organisation's programmes on education, culture, sport and
youth. So far, forty-seven states have acceded to the European Cultural Convention: the
Council of Europe's forty member states plus Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia-
Herzegovina, Georgia, the Holy See and Monaco.

The Council for Cultural Co-operation (the CDCC) is responsible for the Council of Europe's
work on education, culture and sport. Four specialised committees - the Education
Committee, the Higher Education and Research Committee, the Culture Committee and the
Cultural Heritage Committee - help the CDCC to carry out its tasks under the European
Cultural Convention. There is also a close working relationship between the CDCC and the
regular conferences of specialised European ministers responsible for education, for culture
and for the cultural heritage.

The CDCC's programmes are an integral part of the Council of Europe's work and, like the
programmes in other sectors, they contribute to the Organisation's three overriding policy
objectives for the 1990s:

- the protection, reinforcement and promotion of human rights and fundamental

freedoms and pluralist democracy;

- the promotion of an awareness of European identity;

- the search for common responses to the great challenges facing European society.

The CDCC's education programme covers school, higher and adult education, as well as
educational research. At present, there are projects on: education for democratic values;
history; modern languages; school links and exchanges; the reform of secondary education;
access to higher education; the reform of legislation on higher education in Central and
Eastern Europe; academic mobility, and educational documentation and research.

*
Albania, Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia,
Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania,
Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russian Federation,
San Marino, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the former Yugoslav Republic
of Macedonia, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom.

2
 DECS/EDU/INSET/DONAU (98) 2

COUNCIL OF THE CULTURAL CO-OPERATION

In-Service Training Programme for Teachers

80th European Teachers’ Seminar

"Migration flows in 20th century Europe

and their impact on school life"

Donaueschingen (Germany), 15-19 June 1998

Report

by

Ms Danielle LECLERCQ

3
The opinions expressed in this work are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect
the official policy of the Council for Cultural Co-operation of the Council of Europe nor that of
the Secretariat.

All correspondence concerning this report or the reproduction or translation of all or part of
the document should be addressed to the Director of Education, Culture and Sport of the
Council of Europe (F-67075 STRASBOURG Cedex)

4
Contents

I. Introduction................................................................................................................... 7

II. The Council of Europe project on the teaching of history............................................ 7

III. Migration in the history of Europe................................................................................. 8

A conceptual framework of migration ........................................................................... 8

Long-term migration: permanence and change ......................................................... 13
The migration of the Jews in the 19th and 20th century............................................. 19
The Gypsies ............................................................................................................... 20

IV. From a multicultural to an intercultural society ........................................................... 22

V. Methodology............................................................................................................... 23

VI. Workshops ................................................................................................................. 25

VII. Recommendations ..................................................................................................... 28

VIII. Conclusions................................................................................................................ 28

Appendix I .............................................................................................................................. 30

Appendix II ............................................................................................................................. 32

Appendix III ............................................................................................................................ 78

5
6
I. Introduction
The 80th Donaueschingen seminar, on migration flows in Europe, was organised by the
Council of Europe under its In-service Teacher Training Programme. It was attended by
thirty-two teachers from Belarus, Belgium, Cyprus, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy,
Moldova, Portugal, Slovak Republic and Spain. All had already taught history, geography or
social sciences in secondary schools and some were head teachers or teachers’ instructors.

This seminar likewise formed part of the Council of Europe project "Learning and teaching
about the history of Europe in the 20th century”.

Aims

Current developments in Europe are opening up new prospects for the education of young
people, particularly with regard to the teaching of 20th century history throughout the
continent. Young people must be given an opportunity to acquire greater self-knowledge and
a better understanding of other Europeans, so as to mould a freer, fairer, more tolerant
society for tomorrow’s Europe, by highlighting the beneficial influences that various
countries, religions and ideas exerted on one another during the historical development of
Europe.

Although migration in the 20th century was a traumatic experience for many people, it
nevertheless helped to fashion and enrich society as we now know it. Europe today is the
product of this migration and we suggested that participants should cast a critical, historical
look at its duration, course and consequences. In addition, much thought was given to the
methods to be used when broaching these topics and dealing with multicultural classes.

Methodology

In order to provide both information and training at this seminar, we alternated lectures (so
as to review the current stock of knowledge about migration and offer a conceptual
framework) with workshops at which participants could react, test their grasp of the subject,
swap experience and consider the most appropriate teaching practices.

This report will present the findings in a logical rather than a chronological order. The
working groups all adopted the same approach, which means that their conclusions can be
grouped together under a single heading.

II. The Council of Europe project on the teaching of history

Ms Carole Reich, a CDCC administrator, opened the discussion by describing the project
"Learning and teaching about the history of Europe in the 20th century". This new project,

7
which was launched in May 1997, is due to last three or four years. It has several aims1
(defined by the Education Committee) which are to help young people:

• understand the forces, movements and events which have shaped 20th century history;

• understand the historical roots and the context of the challenges facing Europe today;

• reflect on the kind of Europe in which they wish to live tomorrow;

• develop critical skills and reflexes, such as the ability to see another person’s point of
view, recognise differences, detect errors and prejudices and not to be swayed by
biased information.

In order to achieve these goals, teachers are to be helped by placing teaching resources at
their disposal, offering them examples of innovative teaching practices and improving their
command of new information technologies, and so forth.

During the project four teaching packs are to be produced on the following subjects:

• human rights and pluralist democracy in Europe;

• women in Europe in the 20th century;
• population movements in Europe in the 20th century;
• nationalism in Europe in the 20th century.

This 80th seminar therefore fitted into this background. The intention was to supply
information about the extent and features of migration within Europe and to think about the
impact of immigrant children on a class and about the teaching practices entailed by their
presence.

III. Migration in the history of Europe

1. A conceptual framework of migration

The purpose of the opening address given by Danielle Leclercq, Course Director, was to
outline the subject and offer teachers a conceptual framework. From the outset, she made it
clear that Europe was basically an area of migration, its whole history being punctuated by
the tremendous intermixing of peoples, sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly, either
violently or peacefully.

Nevertheless, migration after the Middle Ages developed some particular features in
response to the formation of increasingly powerful states and the emergence of nationalism.

Moreover, this phenomenon took on unprecedented dimensions in the 19th century with the
advent of steam ships and railways which permitted mass transportation over great
distances in much less time. Thus Europe became an area of emigration (especially

1. See Document CC-ED/HIST (96) 14, where the project is described in greater length.

8
towards America). But this was also the era when internal migration (the flight from the land)
and temporary migration reached their height. Migration in the 20th century was marked by:

• a waning in transoceanic emigration after the first world war;

• huge migratory movements directly or indirectly triggered by two global conflicts (more
than 20 million displaced persons);

• the continued drift from the land to towns in the old countries of Europe, a trend which
spread throughout most of the world;

• the influx, in the more economically advanced countries, after the second world war, of a
largely unskilled labour force recruited in the developing countries.

The reversal of the migratory current in post-war Europe

In the years immediately after the end of the second world war emigration picked up again in
Europe, although it did not reach anything like its pre-1914 pitch. Many refugees settled
overseas. But the most salient feature of the post-war period was certainly a big surge in
immigration; Europe, which had seen a strong wave of emigration during the 19th and at the
beginning of the 20th century, became an area where immigration outstripped emigration to
such an extent that it was possible to speak of a reversal of the migratory current, at least in
the west. As from the sixties, or thereabouts, economic prosperity, industrial development
and more jobs necessitated the importing of a large additional labour force into the most
highly industrialised countries.

European countries are now taking in immigrants from regions where, for a long time, they
ruled or had colonies. But migratory traditions mean that political contexts and situations are
as many and various as states. Immigration, which was initially seen as something
temporary, is gradually becoming permanent and final.

How do things stand today, nine years after the fall of the Berlin Wall? The central European
countries’ fears that their most dynamic citizens would take flight have proved groundless.
On the other hand, ethnic groups have migrated: Germans (from Poland, Romania, etc), as
well as Jews and Armenians (reunification of the diasporas). This trend is gradually
weakening.

The low birth rate and the need for workers (both skilled and unskilled) in the manufacturing
industries and services has led to continued immigration to western Europe. Other states
further south - Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece - have in turn become host countries.
Similarly, the number of asylum-seekers and political refugees is growing steadily, especially
in Sweden, Switzerland, Germany and Belgium.

The most crucial problems in western Europe are the numerous illegal immigrants and the
rising tide of xenophobia in the local population and/or among long-established immigrants.

Immigration has deeply marked our societies politically, socially and culturally, yet
immigrants are numerically in the minority: out of 380 million west Europeans, only
approximately 20 million, or 5% to 6%, are foreigners, but the situation varies from one
country to another (8.9% in Belgium, 15% in Switzerland and 27% in the Grand Duchy of
Luxembourg).

It must be noted that while emigration has fallen, it has not ceased. Fifteen million people
have emigrated from the EEC.

9
Migration in so many words

The literal meaning of the word "migration" is movement from one place to another (like the
seasonal migration of birds, a very useful comparison for teaching purposes). Usually, but
not always, it refers to movements of groups which do not intend to return.

It is necessary to qualify this definition straight away. Many

migrants who left in the hope of improving their financial situation
then of returning to their native country have never done so; others
who left with the idea of settling somewhere else for good, have
had to abandon their plan. It is often circumstances which decide
whether temporary migration becomes permanent or not.
Generally, migration is classified according to the criteria of cause,
length and destination.

(We're going to begin this history lesson with a bit of biology.

Are you for or against migration?)

Causes

Migration has many different causes depending on time and place. A distinction may be
drawn between repulsive causes, such as famine, poverty, unemployment or political,
religious or racial persecution, which prompt human beings to leave their native country, and
attractive causes which lure a person to another country. Examples of this would be the
desire to conquer and pillage (as in the conquest of America in the 16th century), or, more
frequently, the search for new land to cultivate (in the 19th century up until about 1880, the
vast majority of European emigrants were farmers). Sometimes the discovery of hitherto
unknown sources of wealth exerted such a pull that a rush ensued, as happened in the 19th
century when gold was found in North America and Australia.

More commonly, differences in living standards linked to disparities in natural resources, the
level of technology, population density or demographic growth rates set in motion a process
similar to that of communicating vessels, where richer countries suck in migrants from
countries where the living standard is lower.

Admittedly, in reality, the distinction between attractive and repulsive causes is often
artificial. Of course, these causes may act separately but, in general, migration is the result
of several factors, some of them repulsive, others attractive, acting in combination.

Looking at the topic from another angle, a distinction may also be drawn between:

• spontaneous migration, that is resulting from a spontaneous decision of the migrant, and

• migration caused by outside intervention. This is sometimes also called organised

migration. In some cases, organised migration was forced migration: the slave trade which
flourished above all in the 18th century is a famous example of this. The same is true of
penal migration, like the deportation to Siberia of Russians convicted of political offences or
common law crimes, of the transfer to North America and then Australia of British convicts,
or the sending of French convicts to New Caledonia or Guiana. The large-scale population

10
movements sparked off in the 20th century by armed conflicts or agreements between
governments are the most recent example.

Other migration stems not from the use of force, but from resorting to persuasion. A good
example of this was the population movements engineered in the 17th and 18th centuries by
German, Austrian or Russian sovereigns who, in their wish to populate or repopulate their
territory, tried to outbid one another with promises of land and exemption from taxes and
military service in order to entice nationals of other states to live within their borders.

Then in the 19th and 20th centuries, powerful advertising in various forms by rail and
shipping companies, immigration agencies and governments themselves substantially
contributed to the populating of new countries like the United States, Canada, the Argentine
Republic and Brazil.

Some European governments, such as the British Government, apprehensive about the
prospect of a horde of unemployed paupers in their country, repeatedly adopted measures
to encourage their nationals to emigrate by giving them cash grants and free passage.
Conversely, the scarcity of manpower which started to make itself felt at the beginning of the
20th century, especially after the 1914-1918 war, in some sectors of the French economy
led to the founding of associations to bring in workers (farmers, miners and metalworkers) to
fill the gaps.

Lastly, official colonisation, as exemplified by the history of the different colonial empires,
must also be classed as organised migration.

Duration

Migration can be permanent or temporary. We speak of permanent migration when migrants

leave their country with the intention of settling somewhere else for good. Migration is
temporary when migrants return to their point of departure after a stay abroad for a fairly
long, but nevertheless limited, period of time (we also speak of circular migration or
commuting). It is true that this distinction is often awkward (see above).

In fact, provided that a period of sufficient length is considered, the best way to arrive at an
approximate calculation of permanent migration is to adopt the demographer's method, that
is to say to compute net migration or the migratory balance, that is the balance of arrivals
and departures.

There are several types of temporary migration, which may be classified according to length:
daily and weekly migration (the person works a long way from home and returns only at the
weekend), as well as seasonal and working-life migration (when the migrant works in
another country for the whole of their working life but returns to their native country on
retirement).

Destination

A distinction is made between internal migration, that is to say within the borders of a state
(emigration of country-dwellers to towns, commuting for work or recreation) and external
migration, which presupposes the crossing of at least one border. External migration must
not be confused with colonisation. The latter implies not only migration, but taking
possession of a territory with a view to its exploitation, whereas in the case of true migration,
migrants become the subjects of the host country’s government.

11
The crossing of a border (be it political, administrative, cultural or linguistic) introduces a
new element, since the migrant’s status changes, they come under a different jurisdiction
and, if migration becomes permanent, they join a new community. What counts is the
crossing of a political border, or even more so the existence of "metafrontiers", or veritable
barriers (like the iron curtain) which are far less permeable to migration than borders
between countries in the same bloc. Metafrontiers also create a special kind of migrant -
refugees.

Mobility and migration are not merely a spatial phenomenon; they are first and foremost a
social phenomenon. The physical distance upward or downward mobility, which is closely
related to displacement.

Consequences of migration

For the host country it means a large number of immigrants that constitute an additional
trained labour force, whose arrival promotes economic expansion. It also encourages the
creation of new activities or, conversely, helps to maintain traditional activities which, without
it, would lack the requisite manpower, and in which the nationals of the host country refuse
to engage.

When adult immigrants are unaccompanied, they send their families who have stayed at
home some of their wages; these immigrants’ remittances are capital outflows. These
workers, who often cannot afford to be demanding, tend to depress wages by increasing the
supply of labour.

In the country of emigration the number of workers falls, entailing a drop in production and
the sums of money which migrant workers send their families sometimes constitute
substantial inflows of foreign currency. Another consequence is that migrant workers’ eating
habits create new commercial outlets for some products.

Demographic consequences

As most migrant workers are young men, emigration alters the composition of the population
of the country of departure and the host country as far as age and sex are concerned. In the
former, the result can be an ageing of the population and a decline in the birth rate. The aim
of the policy of family reunification practised by some host countries is to boost the birth rate,
which is falling alarmingly in some places.

Political consequences

Emigration often makes for political stability by reducing unemployment or underemployment

in the country of departure and by getting rid of masses of potentially rebellious poor people
and opponents of the government (in the case of political refugees).

Moreover, once they have settled, these migrant workers can exert a political and cultural
influence in the host countries. That is why some governments try to retain some influence
over their expatriates. This was the practice of the Italian fascist government which sent out
officials responsible for keeping in contact with and assisting Italians abroad. It also sent
them priests and published newspapers in Italian.

Furthermore, temporary migration can have a political impact on electoral behaviour, for
example. Migrants who have been in contact with new ideas, adopt and spread these ideas
on their return or in letters to their families.

12
Clearly, therefore, the causes, duration, various forms and consequences of migration are
an essential factor in the development of human societies and have a lasting influence on
them.

2. Long-term migration: permanence and change1

"History is the study of the roots of the problems of our time" (F. Braudel). In order to gain a
thorough understanding of migration in Europe in the 20th century, we have to go back
several centuries. The economic changes we have been experiencing since the mid-
seventies and the collapse of the communist bloc have aroused renewed interest in the
historiography of this phenomenon and given rise to much heart-searching.

Historians are no longer content with quantifying flows. They devise typologies, identify
"systems" and attempt to construct models. They look at migratory movements in a very
long-term context and above all strive to understand migration routes, networks, strategies
and the personality of migrants.

We have already said that migration is primarily a social phenomenon. That is why historians
attach great importance to the personality of migrants, to their strategies, routes, success or
failure, to the networks within which and through which they move, to socio-economic and
cultural patterns at the points of departure, transit and arrival. All these factors, which are
constantly modified by the migrants themselves, highlight the complexity of migration.

In modern-day Europe, historians have identified four types of migration which are also
broadly valid for the 19th century:

• local migration that is migration to any part of the country, but usually over short
distances;

• circular migration and commuting which bring migrants back to their place of origin after a
period away. Seasonal and temporary migration come under this heading, which is more
akin to a form of mobility than to genuine migration;

• chain migration when migrants who have arrived at their destination encourage other
compatriots to join them and, possibly, move on;

• career migration.

We would add colonial migration and forced migration to these four types.

There is no doubt that there has been intense mobility in modern Europe and that, far from
playing a marginal role, it has been an integral part of both the self-regulating demographic
mechanism and, more widely, of the social and economic organisation of town and village
communities, since migration is essential to an economy which needs seasonal and
temporary mobility in order to function. Temporary workers make it possible to meet short
bursts of demand for manpower on farms and urban building sites or in industries subject to
seasonal fluctuations (like the metallurgical or mining industries). For example, the
agricultural sector and industry in the towns of the Po plain, central Italy and above all Rome
used to employ thousands of seasonal workers from the Alps, Apennines and Abruzzi. Every
year, these migrant workers crossed several state borders and passed through city gates

1. This presentation given by Danielle Leclercq was based on a text prepared by René Leboutte, a
historian at the European Institute in Florence, who was unable to participate in the seminar.

13
without any formalities, other than possibly a health certificate proving that they did not come
from an area infected by an epidemic.

While this mobility was not affected by state borders, it was confined to large geopolitical
blocs based on religion: the Catholic states, the Reformed states or the Ottoman Empire. On
the other hand, movement between these blocs was so strictly controlled that it came under
the heading of either business travel or adventure.

Seasonal and temporary mobility is not migration, but a means of escaping it, although at
the same time it maps out a route for it and prepares the ground for chain migration.
Seasonal migrant workers create an environment combining two places ("home" which they
leave with the intention of returning and their temporary domicile) and juggle the
opportunities and challenges of both. Itineracy has no point unless it is part of a strategy to
improve one’s position in society in one’s country of birth, whereas true migration is pointless
unless it is part of a strategy to achieve higher social status at the place of destination

Recent research confirms that in pre-industrial Europe, economic mobility was inherent in
the economy, society and families. It was a normal, structural element of old societies,
whereas stability was a privilege of the better-off. This mobility was based on solidarity
between individuals and families, which followed well-defined paths and resulted in the
formation of networks. It was clearly motivated by a desire not only to survive, but also to go
up in society.

Historians and political scientists now agree that there were three main eras of migration
between the end of the Middle Ages and the period immediately after the second world war.
It looks as if a fourth began after the Berlin Wall disappeared. These three epochs all have
one thing in common: the role of those in power (princes, national governments or the
European Union) in determining the conditions for migration.

The population policy of the ancien régime (15th-18th centuries)

At least in western Europe, a country’s population was regarded as an economic and military
resource of prime importance. During the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, the idea expressed
by the Frenchman Jean BODIN that "there is no wealth, nor strength, but it be that of men"
was constantly echoed not only by thinkers, but also by rulers.

Monarchs and municipalities took joint steps to encourage immigration so as to secure a

skilled labour force and dissuade subjects who were an asset to the country from emigrating.
This subtle exercise operated by means of privileges. In order to discourage potential
emigrants, the local ruler or town council awarded them privileges such as exemption from
taxes, corvées, military service, etc At the same time, they enticed foreigners with capital or
know-how by giving them the same privileges.

These rulers and town councils simultaneously attempted to rid themselves of paupers and
vagrants. The colonies frequently served as a dumping ground for these undesirables.
Monarchs above all did not hesitate to use religion as a pretext for expelling and persecuting
subjects regarded as dangerous dissidents, even if they contributed to the country’s
economy through their work and capital. Everybody knows about the waves of expulsion of
the Jews since the Middle Ages right up until our times. The forced emigration of the French
Huguenots and Protestants from the Spanish Netherlands, German Catholic principalities
and Italian states led to the appearance of "refuges" , towns like Geneva and kingdoms like
England, which took in these fugitives. These refuges gave rise to a particular social type,
the refugee, in the meaning this term still has today.

14
A prominent feature of migration in the ancien régime was obviously the great importance of
seasonal and temporary migration, which was part of households’ survival strategy and local
economic organisation. There is no question of expanding on this subject here. Nonetheless,
it must be stressed that this migration was highly organised and institutionalised. It was an
old tradition, but one which could be incorporated easily into a capitalist economy.

The age of revolutions (1790-1914)

The independence of the United States, then of the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies
(Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Brazil and Mexico) brought about a
reorganisation of the international economy. To meet a burgeoning demand for workers,
these countries opened their borders just as Europe was undergoing a demographic
transition. A legally tolerated and economically encouraged mass emigration of Europeans
was made possible by the industrial revolution and, in particular, by steam ships.

On the European continent, the Congress of Vienna set in train the formation of a huge
number of new states, but it did not put an end to movement, the only remaining metafrontier
being that which separated it from the Ottoman Empire. Admittedly, measures to maintain
law and order - passports, worker’s record books, compulsory registration with the local
authorities - controlled mobility but did not hamper it. Up until the end of the last century,
countries felt little need to adopt legislation on migration. Apart from frontier-zone workers,
the number of foreigners in most European countries was small in the 19h century. Provided
they could make a living and did not disturb the peace by political activities or strike calls,
these foreigners came into little contact with the police. Everything changed after the first
world war, when the industrialised countries were faced with a huge influx of workers:
residence permits, work permits or hawker’s licences became obligatory.

Industrialisation had two effects on geographical mobility: it intensified it and concentrated it

in a small number of development centres. Migration between neighbouring areas did,
however, prevail until well into the 1880s.

The rural population grew throughout Europe; moreover the number of inhabitants in villages
peaked between 1850 and 1880, depending on the region. In some regions (Ireland,
Flanders, the Netherlands, Westphalia, the Scottish Highlands, Silesia, etc) this relative
overpopulation led to widespread poverty which triggered an "emigration of the destitute".
During the 18th and at the beginning of the 19th century, these surplus farm labourers
fuelled the rapid development of rural industries in regions, which, without them, could not
have supported such a large population. Furthermore, the springing up of industry in the
countryside helped to curb the temporary subsistence migration, which had previously
occurred.

In the first half of the 19th century, the decline of rural industry accelerated impoverishment.
This change in fortune created a mass agricultural proletariat for whom mobility was a
necessity.

The agricultural depression in the last quarter of the 19th century was the result of a long
process where disease (potato blight, which decimated Ireland and Flanders between 1845
and 1850, pébrine which hit northern Italy and phylloxera which destroyed the French and
Italian vineyards) coincided with radical changes (dividing up of cultivated plots,
disappearance of commons, dispossession of impoverished smallholders and the
proletarianisation of proto-industrial workers). To crown it all, competition from American
agricultural products and the mechanisation of agriculture hastened the proletarianisation of
agricultural labourers and smallholders.

15
It is therefore necessary to start with the rural world, its organisation, strategies and changes
in order to understand how the mass migrations in the second half of the last century came
about.

Similarly, the spread of cheap means of transport and regional economic imbalances sped
up mobility over medium and short distances as from the last two decades of the
19th century. The arrival of the first groups of foreign workers in the French, Walloon and
German industrial areas (Italians, Poles, Kabyles, etc) was a consequence of the great
economic depression between 1873 and 1890. Immigration to industrial areas then seemed
like a means of avoiding migration overseas.

The mass migrations to North America constituted a landmark in the 19th century. They
clearly sprang from this context of industrialisation, a revolution in transport, crisis in the rural
world and the 1870-90 economic depression.

The striking new feature was that never had so many people emigrated at the same time.
Migration became a lucrative business. Recruitment agencies and rail and shipping
companies sometimes engaged in real swindles. Technical innovations in transport made it
possible to travel at a relatively reasonable cost and a return to the home country
conceivable. As from the last quarter of the last century, the reduction in the cost of transport
and the rapidity of steamers gave rise to temporary migration of labour between the
European and American continents which formed a global labour market: the Atlantic world
system. Most of the migrants between 1870 and 1914 were young workers who returned to
their country of birth after a few years. These return journeys accounted for 25% of
migrations in the 1870s and 45% in the 1890s.

Despite these new features, emigration overseas was an old strategy. Family networks and
links with acquaintances remained essential as a means of passing on information,
arranging departures and meeting people on arrival. These migrations worked on the
principle of chain migration and in some cases, the landing place was only one stage in
further internal migration. When Scandinavians migrated to Canada and the United States,
personal relationships between the inhabitants at the place of departure and emigrants
sometimes explained why one Swedish or Norwegian village was a source of migrants, while
others produced none. Italian emigration functioned in the same way. A culture of migration
therefore emerged at local level.

Industrialisation was also accompanied by a new wave of urbanisation. In the old days,
towns depended on continuous immigration for population growth. In the 19th century, not
only did existing towns expand with unprecedented speed, but the construction of factories
and workers’ housing estates turned modest little towns into industrial conurbations. The
birth of industrial areas, a major factor in European urban history, would have been
unthinkable without powerful currents of internal migration. The splendour of capitals and
large cities has always proved attractive.

The 20th century and the break precipitated by the first world war

The first world war put an abrupt end to a period of great mobility in an area of relatively free
movement within the Atlantic world system. The United States and Canada, the main
countries of destination, shut their doors to European emigrants.

In Europe, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian and Ottoman Empires
had three effects on migratory flows.

16
First, a new metafrontier appeared separating western Europe from the Soviet Union. In an
inward-looking Europe, the rise of National Socialism and fascist régimes was reflected in
policies to prevent nationals from migrating and to expel "undesirables" – Jews, of course,
but also political opponents and ethnic minorities.

Then a Europe shrunk to a few democratic countries was confronted no longer with
individual migration as it had been in the 19th century, but with the mass migration of
political refugees fleeing the Bolshevik revolution, fascist dictatorships and the aftermath of
the Spanish civil war.

The third consequence of the geopolitical upheaval caused by the first world war was the
forced displacement of whole populations, which reached its climax at the end of the second
world war.

For example, the fall of the Ottoman Empire led to a backward surge of Muslims from the
Balkan countries, the Crimea and the Caucasus to Turkey and, at the same time, the
expulsion of the Christian minorities from Turkey (2 million Greeks emigrated from the
country as from 1912) and the flight of the Armenians. By 1927 only 65 000 Armenians and
120 000 Greeks were still living in Turkish territory compared with 2.3 million and 2.1 million
respectively in 1870.

As far as refugees were concerned, two new factors characterised the period between the
wars. First, their numbers swelled considerably, so that their reception had to be organised
on a quite different scale from that in the 19th century. Secondly, the founding of the League
of Nations was followed by the definition of an international refugee status and the
formulation of an international policy with regard to them.

While more is beginning to be known about the fate of the victims of the Nazi policy of
extermination, so far no one has investigated the impact of these forced migrations back to
the places of origin. Europe suffered not only a considerable demographic loss, but also
economic and cultural damage, the extent of which has yet to be assessed. For example,
the annihilation of the Jews, Gypsies and many other ethnic minorities caused irreversible
damage to the linguistic culture of Europe.

The fall of the Third Reich gave birth to fresh hopes of a free world, a Europe without
borders or a metafrontier which could be crossed only be prisoners or deportees. The end of
Hitler’s dreams kindled hope of an area open to free movement. It also ended German
territorial expansion to the east and prompted the return migration of Germans who had
settled in the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania or Yugoslavia, an
immigration which in 1957 was put at 12.5 million people to the Federal Republic and
4.3 million to the Democratic Republic.

Stalinism and the cold war strengthened the metafrontier splitting Europe in two and, above
all, it established a Soviet world system where forced migration took place on a scale we are
only just beginning to realise.

When this metafrontier finally crumbled, what could prove to be a revolution in migration
patterns took place. This completely unexpected event created a whole new situation,
where international migration is regulated solely by the immigration policy of potential host
countries.

17
For about the last ten years, the break-up of the Soviet bloc has been having a triple effect.

The first is that of return migrations; that of Russians from non-Russian republics, which
began back in the 1960s, is continuing amidst predictable tensions. Since 1990, the return
migration of Russians has been coupled with complex flows of refugees comprising peoples
who served to colonise the lands to the east (Ukrainians, Belarussians, Tatars, Armenians,
Jews and Meskhetian Turks) and/or were deported (Germans, Crimean Tatars, Koreans,
etc).

The second is the emigration of Jews to Israel, but also to Germany and the arrival in
Germany of ethnic Germans, or Aussiedler, whose presence in the former territories of the
Russian Empire goes back to the 18th century.

The third is the reappearance of a constantly swelling tide of East-West commuters. Strictly
speaking, they are not migrants, but a new type of cheap, mobile labour with which this part
of Europe was familiar between 1870 and 1914. In the last century, the eastern fringes of the
Kingdom of Prussia were the scene of flows of workers from East Prussia, the Polish part of
the Russian Empire (Congress Poland) and the area of Poland which was under the rule of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Galicia). Most of them were seasonal workers, employed in
their thousands not only by the owners of farms, but also by industrialists in the Ruhrgebiet.
Today’s temporary migrants are merely rediscovering an old channel of mobility. Like their
ancestors, they are not seeking to emigrate, but to improve their standard of living in Poland,
the Czech Republic or elsewhere.

Contrary to apocalyptic speculation about a flood of migrants, we are witnessing a return to

a former state of affairs.

Migration policy in 20th century Europe

International migration is now controlled solely by the immigration policies of potential host
countries. In actual fact, such control is not as new as one might think. It is the legacy of the
policy of recruiting temporary foreign labour that was pursued in the late 19th century.

As from the 1880s, the German Empire took steps to control and regulate the influx of Polish
workers. These measures even resulted in an upsurge of anti-Polish xenophobia at the time
of the Kulturkampf (1885). At the beginning of the 1890s the German Empire finally opted
for a policy which was to be copied with success in other countries: workers with a work
contract and a residence permit (Legitimationskarte) were allowed in for a limited period of
time. This policy, which gave rise to the term Gastarbeiter, achieved the government’s aim of
controlling migratory flows, met the demand for farm labourers and provided industrialists
with a flexible reserve of labour.

At the end of the 19th century in Prussia and immediately after the first world war in Belgium
and France, a pattern first emerged which is still being repeated today in the case of
temporary migrants from eastern Europe. In order to offset manpower shortages in some
sectors of production, especially mining and metallurgical engineering, employers recruited
foreign labour, with the agreement of the government, which laid down the rules (residence
and work permit), on the understanding that this immigration could only be temporary. When
a recession arose, the entry of foreign workers was strictly controlled and those who were
already there were repatriated. For example, the 1926-27 crisis caused the suspension of
Polish immigration to France for several months. It then began again with renewed vigour
and continued until 1931. As from 1934, the French Government embarked on a policy of
mass repatriation, although the coal companies were opposed to it, because Poles made up
most of their pit staff. Urged on by public opinion, the government adopted legal and

18
administrative measures to limit, prevent or ban the recruitment or employment of foreigners.
These measures were strictly applied during a recession, but soon forgotten when an
economic revival required a new intake of workers.

In the blunt words of a Belgian industrialist in 1925, "The labour force must bow to economic
laws. [...] Foreigners are prepared to take jobs Belgians do not want to do. The Belgian
working chap is not keen on moving. When work is scarce, it is easier to get rid of
foreigners. In a slump there is no demand for workers."

Migratory flows were therefore used to regulate the labour market,

as the chairman of the Belgian Federation of Coal Mining
Associations explained in 1939. "During a boom, the workforce is
lured away from us by a flourishing industry capable of paying high
wages, just at the very time coal consumption is growing. The
reverse happens in a recession: how can we contend with these
formidable drawbacks without the existence of a regulating
reservoir supplementing, in variable proportions, the hard core of
Belgian workers? We can only find this regulating reservoir in
foreign manpower."

The industrialised countries of western Europe have drawn on increasingly distant reservoirs
of manpower: Italy, Spain, Portugal, North Africa and Turkey.

The economic metamorphosis which started in 1974 slowed this trend, but did not halt it, for
the very reason that such a workforce offers the advantage of flexibility. It fuels a contractual
labour market as well as that of the underground economy. For example, the employment of
migrants who commute from eastern Europe to Germany is at present "one of the rare
means enabling building firms to compete with one another. At a time when the cost of
supplying materials is the same for all undertakings, costs can be reduced and tenders won
only by varying the salaries paid to employees."

During the period between the wars Europe went from being an exporter to an importer of
migrants, first from regions on its fringes then, after the second world war, from countries
further afield. Migrants for economic reasons were joined by refugees. A multiplicity of
national policies on migration have been adopted, yet the formation of the European Union
makes harmonisation necessary.

3. The migration of the Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries,

Mr Jean-Philippe Schreiber1 painted a general picture of Jewish migration in Europe in the

19th and 20th centuries.

It must be remembered that although the French Revolution emancipated the Jews, they
were, however, discriminated against in other states until well into the 19th century. For
example, young men were conscripted into the Russian army for 25 years (1821), or they
were forcibly settled in towns in Russia (expulsion from the shtetl, or traditional villages).

The Jewish population in Europe grew very considerably and was gradually emancipated in
the course of the 19th century. These factors led them to emigrate first to the towns
(especially the capitals) then to America. This was particularly true of German Jews as from
1848 and those from eastern Europe as from 1880 (a consequence of the pogroms). Some
who came from the Austro-Hungarian Empire (the poorest and most old-fashioned) ended

1. Mr Jean-Philippe Schreiber is a lecturer at the Free University of Brussels.

19
up in the Atlantic ports (Antwerp, Rotterdam, London and Hamburg), where they founded
Jewish quarters in which they retained their traditional way of life and orthodox religious
practices. n fact, this was a reversal of the migratory current, in that Jews were emigrating
from east to west and no longer from west to east or from south to north, as in previous
centuries.

This population growth levelled off in the 20th century, while the Jewish diaspora spread
right across the world. Emigration to the United States fell (owing to quotas), as did that to
Palestine (in consequence of the White Paper). Nevertheless, more than half the Jews in
Europe migrated during the period between the wars. After 1945, the shock of the Shoah
caused a second huge wave of migration to the United States, but above all to Palestine and
soon after that to Israel. Most migrants came from Germany, Poland, Romania and, in the
seventies, from the Soviet Union.

The Jews are one of the most migrant peoples in the world. Moreover, their migrations are
not circular; few Jews return to their place of departure.

It is interesting to study the cultural shock ensuing from this transplantation, the contacts
between Jewish traditions and host societies and the way in which these traditions have
adapted. The Jews have adjusted to the modern world:

• by engaging in trades carried out by few other people;

• by adapting their religion and design (the architecture of synagogues is similar to that of
local churches);

• by becoming secularised;

• by altering some organisational aspects (establishment of the office of chief rabbi and
consistories, in response to the fact that Judaism has been recognised as a religion).

This adaptation deserves closer study, because it might help us to understand the obstacles
to integration in our societies faced by new immigrants.

4. The Gypsies

The Gypsies, one of the last nomadic peoples of Europe, have always been persecuted and
yet little is known about them. Ms Marie-Christine Hubert1 tried to make us better
acquainted with them. The full text of her statement, briefly summarised below, is to be
found in the appendix.

The Gypsies, who originated in India, set out on their first big migration in the 15th century,
when they appeared in Europe under various names (Zigeuner, Romani, Bohemians,
Manouches, Jenisch, etc). These local nicknames meant nothing to the Gypsies, who called
themselves Rom and who spoke Romani (with many dialectal variants). Today, it is
extremely difficult to distinguish between the different groups ("anyone who is conscious of
being a Gypsy is one"). 95% of Gypsies are now more or less settled, even if they
sometimes go on fairly long journeys from time to time. The main difficulty encountered by
historians who wish to study their past is that theirs is still largely an oral culture.

1. Marie-Christine Hubert has written a doctoral thesis about the situation of the Gypsies during the
second world war. She is a member of the Research Group on the European History of the Gypsies
set up by the Gypsy Research Centre in Paris.

20
They have been victimised ever since the 16th century: exclusion (banishment and
branding), authoritarian, violent incarceration or forcible assimilation (especially in the
second half of the 20th century).

A second big wave of migration began in the second half of the 19th century. The Romanian
Gypsies, who had been enslaved until then, were liberated. They dispersed in all directions,
but mainly towards western Europe, with other groups of Gypsies following in their wake.

Their visibility, more than their numbers, attracted attention to them. The authorities tried to
take a census of them and compile files on them. For example, a French Act of 1912
compelled them to hold a police record book. That act had tragic consequences during the
second world war: Gypsies were made subject to compulsory residence orders as from
April 1940 and interned from October 1940 until 1946.

They were the scapegoats of the Third Reich: registered, interned, deported to Auschwitz
(where they were locked up in a camp within the camp) then gassed in August 1944.
Between 250,000 and 300,000 of them were killed.

Repression continued after 1945. They were again the victims of forced settlement in the
communist régimes and relegated to the fringes of society everywhere.

Today they still have the highest death and morbidity rates among Europeans and suffer
more during economic recessions.

A third big wave of migration took place between 1960 and 1980 from eastern Europe. Many
Gypsies from the former Yugoslavia came to work in France and Italy, like other immigrant
workers. As a consequence of the conflicts in the Balkans, many Roma from Romania,
Macedonia, Kosovo and Bosnia applied for political asylum in western Europe. Almost all
countries took steps to prevent them from settling or to turn them back.

They still migrate seasonally to western Europe (to pick fruit) and a number from eastern
Europe try to come to the west (notably to Germany, Italy and Austria) to escape poverty
and discrimination. In the former communist countries they usually have the status of a
national minority.

In fact, their culture is still rejected and they are forced to eke out a precarious existence.
Their children generally drop out of school: only 30 to 40% of Gypsy children attend school
even on a very irregular basis. School for them constitutes a threat, the symbol of their
acculturation. While all Gypsies today are the citizens of the states where they live, they
prefer a nomadic life.

For several years, their cause has been championed by the Council of Europe. The latter’s
mediation will perhaps enable them to enter a decisive phase of their history and take
charge of their destiny.

IV. From a multicultural to an intercultural society

In order to give added substance to the discussion of the impact of immigration on life at
school, we invited Mr Alberto Gabbiadini, an Italian immigrant in Belgium, to tell us about his
experiences first as a pupil and then as an adult immigrant. For many years, Mr Gabbiadini
has been thinking about the conditions for securing optimum integration into the host society
and about the role schools play in this field1.

1. See Appendix II for the full text.

21
Having outlined the economic role of immigrant workers in the host country (as additional
unskilled labour) and their demographic role (that of raising the birth rate), Mr Gabbiadini
noted that this policy was both a success and a failure, in that young immigrants no longer
wished to do unskilled jobs. "We needed workers and we got human beings".

Then he described the following behavioural changes wrought by immigration:

• the first generation, who intended to go home when they retired, end up staying in the
host country to enable their children to enjoy higher social standing;

• there are more and more mixed marriages (and their offspring are the product of two
cultures);

• the structure of immigrant families ultimately resembles that of local families (and new
immigrants have to be brought in);

• ethnic communities diversify;

• growing human mobility (tourism) leads to a cultural break.

We already live in a multicultural society. "Interbreeding will be the pattern of the future"
(J. Senghor). Moreover, closer integration within the European Union is based on this fact
(for example all member states’ languages are recognised). The question is "What type of
society and what teaching methods are needed to cope with this situation?"

While multiculturalism is a social fact, interculturalism is a social choice. It is based on the

assumption that each culture enriches and invigorates others and that no culture is an
island. This means that we must transcend prejudice and an élitist view of culture. This new
method of organising society must be predicated on exchange, reciprocity, solidarity and the
recognition of values, ways of life and symbols (like Andalusia between the 7th and
12th centuries, when the Christian, Jewish and Muslim cultures co-existed).

What is wanted is a real blueprint for teaching: all classes must become intercultural, this will
require a collective effort in schools. Moreover, teachers must not be left with the sole
responsibility for this blueprint; all the other people involved in education must be given an
opportunity to contribute. This plan must enable each pupil to become independent and
recover their self-esteem. Clearly any school which adopted this programme would be in the
vanguard, it would be a trail-blazer and a focus of social evaluation.

Interculturalism is Belgium’s answer to integration problems. Unlike the view taken in Britain
(immigrants form an ethnic minority who must be protected) or in France (integration must
operate through the absorption of secular, republican values), the Belgians have devised a
more subtle approach to the integration of immigrants1. It is based on assimilation when this
is necessary for the sake of law and order (respect of the law), respect of certain inviolable
values (women’s rights) and for the remainder, respect for cultural diversity as a source of
reciprocal enrichment. This likewise presupposes that citizenship is not necessarily related
to nationality.

1. In the report of the Royal Commission on Immigration Policy, especially in volume I, Integration, a
long-term policy, pp. 40 et seq.

22
We also heard a statement from Mrs Cécile Sacre1, a Belgian woman married to an
Algerian, who had lived with their three children in an Algerian village where she was the
only European. She told us about her experiences as an immigrant wife, who did not feel
that she belonged and who found it hard to adapt and come to terms with her loss of identity.
She also described her problems as a mother - how to be consistent when bringing up
children with two cultural backgrounds?

In Algeria, the children did not feel that they were freaks just because they were different (no
racism) but their return to Belgium (after the events of 1990) was somewhat problematical.
How to admit to one’s identity when others look down on it? How to summon up courage to
say that one is Arab and a Muslim, when this culture is despised and rejected? How to
respect a father whose standing in Belgian society is low because he is an immigrant?

All these questions and many others (the role of Islam in daily life, etc) shed light on the
conflicts experienced by some pupils.

V. Methodology
How to teach 20th century history and how to deal with controversial topics

In order to launch the discussion, Danielle Leclercq began with a practical activity designed
to make the participants reflect on the links between the contents of history lessons, the
values that teachers try to impart and the methods used in the classroom.

Groups each comprising four participants were invited to complete the phrase "history is ...".
The replies were displayed and then classified under three headings (contents, values,
methods). While the first two categories contained a fair number of answers, few participants
had mentioned methods specific to the teaching of history. After a debate, we concluded that
if we wanted to build a democratic society, we would have to adopt suitable, non-
transmissive methods.

A second activity enabled us to take our discussion a step further: each group was asked to
construct a timeline, on which each member would enter the two most important historical
events since 1960. When we compared the groups’ timelines, we were struck by the fact
that each individual’s own experience influences their historical ruminations. The same is
obviously true of our pupils. If we want to achieve our goal, we must therefore start off with
the same questions as pupils are actually asking, in order to encourage them to build up
knowledge on their own.

2. Mrs Sacre works in Belgium for the Equal Opportunities Centre, a public body set up in response to
the above-mentioned report. The purpose of the centre is to promote equal opportunities and combat
racism by analyses (prevention) and practical activities.

23
Methods will depend on our aims; if we want to educate critical, responsible citizens capable
of being committed, active members of society, we must form rather than inform In a
changing world, where the volume of knowledge is expanding at an ever-increasing speed
and a plethora of means of obtaining information are within everyone’s reach, the aim is less
to inform than to teach children how to learn and develop a critical mind and step by step to
increase the pupil’s independence as far as possible.

"History is the study of the roots of the problems of our time" (F. Braudel). Pupils should not
memorise past events, but learn through discovery and arrive at their own interpretation.

The history lesson therefore implies more than the mere learning of contents. Through the
methods described in the appendix, it sets out to develop a critical mind which ceaselessly:

• questions the types of sources and their worth;

• compares various sources;
• attempts to distinguish between true and false;
• avoids anachronisms, value judgements using only the present as a reference point and
extrapolations based on fragments of information or isolated cases.

It must help the pupil to see the way history has evolved, perceive that some abiding
questions have always been asked in cultures near and far (in terms of both time and space)
and gain an awareness of humanity’s multifaceted heritage and also of our own heritage. It
must enable schoolchildren to understand complex situations and make completely
independent choices.

History does not recreate the past, it reinvents it1. A history lesson cannot be a recital of a
series of past events, but must consist of the study of the past reconstructed by historians.
Just working through it chronologically is unlikely to make pupils aware of that fact. It is,
however, essential that they realise that history, like the other sciences, implies questioning,
that it can study successive events simultaneously and that it goes back in time by
constantly switching from the past to the present and from the present to the past.

How? This presupposes a history room equipped with a library, a collection of slides and a
video library (and, in the near future, Internet access).

Personally (but many of us practise this method) I prefer to tackle the subject by studying
particular themes, for example:

• authoritarian régimes in the interwar period;

• colonisation, decolonisation, neo-colonialism;
• world conflicts;
• international organisations;
• economic crises;
• major population movements, etc.

Pupils can thus work in groups on different examples, summarise their findings, compare
them (resemblance, divergence, etc) and together explore the subject matter further.

This method has the advantage of not being confined by "borders", but of showing that there
are common trends and patterns, as well as specific regional features and of highlighting
interaction and the complexity of the phenomena being studied.

1. ιστωρια = enquiry, research, investigation.

24
It likewise permits the gradual putting together of concepts, without which there can be no
intellectual knowledge.

As I have already mentioned on several occasions, this methodology is based on the idea
that knowledge is a construction.

First of all, it is therefore necessary to ask pupils for their mental pictures. (These are often
numerous and surprising.) School has long ceased to be the only means of obtaining
information and this stage is indispensable if we want to avoid building a house on sand.

Then research activities must be organised. The children must be taught to question and
compare all the various forms of documentation made available to them (texts, maps,
diagrams, collections of illustrations, films and so forth).

In view of current developments in information technology, we must attach very great

importance to the language and criticism of still images and moving pictures - this being
essential if children are to be educated in use of the media.

We should make it quite clear that this material does not constitute a set of examples
serving to illustrate the subject matter of the lesson, or a teaching aid. It is the foundation of
and driving force behind the lesson and must be selected in the light of its pertinence as
traces of the past, which the pupil must learn to decipher, question and compare.

This methodological approach necessitates the frequent preparation (with the teacher’s
assistance) of synchronic and diachronic partial syntheses. All the topics chosen start with
an examination of the present, the purpose of this strategy being to stimulate research and
give it some meaning.

Nevertheless, teachers are divided on one point: can the study of recent history (that of the
last ten years, for example) be regarded as a scientific discipline? Given that available
sources are bound to be fragmentary1 we are tempted to reply in the negative. There is
therefore no question of "doing recent history", but of elucidating it through a better
understanding of the past.

Newsflashes, newspapers, news on radio and television, reports, enquiries, polls, the citizen
of a democracy is carried along by a daily flood of information they can no longer grasp. The
gap between the volume of news that the advanced technologies can amplify at top speed
and genuine understanding of this information has probably never been so wide. Our role as
history teachers is to instruct our pupils how to analyse this information, so as to enable
them to measure up fully to their future responsibilities and commitments to themselves and
to society, whose destiny will be in their hands.

VI. Workshops
Throughout the seminar, participants were divided into four working groups in which they
were able to react, swap experiences, compare the present situation in their respective
countries and reflect on the teaching methods to be devised. These discussions proved to
be very fruitful and we summarise them below2. The questionnaires given to the groups to
assist their discussion are appended.

1. Under current regulations, archives are not opened for thirty years or even longer.
2. The full text of the findings of the four groups may be consulted in the appendix.

25
Workshop No. 1: what does immigration mean?

On the basis of a questionnaire in the form of a table, the participants were asked to
consider what immigration meant for the immigrant and for the host country.

Immigrants usually improved their economic situation and that of their family by ensuring that
their children received schooling and had access to modern medical facilities. This
vocational and social mobility generally took place over two generations. The economic
mutations which had begun in the seventies in western European countries and in the
nineties in the former communist states were making things much more difficult for new
immigrants.

Migration severed social links and entailed a break with the solidarity of the family circle and
village community. Immigrants took little part in civic life, since generally they were not
enfranchised (save for nationals of the European Union, who could vote in local elections).
This did not prevent them from playing a part in trade unions or local associations.

Very often, their idea of the family was called into question: the traditional extended family
was replaced by a western-style nuclear family, which adopted behaviour similar to that of
the host country (the fertility rate fell, family solidarity gradually dwindled and polygamy
became less frequent). Fathers lost their points of reference and traditional role.

Women’s influence was decisive in this process. In the second generation, girls with a better
level of education challenged their traditional role and that sometimes led to acute tension
within families.

The integration of migrants depended greatly on their origin and the closeness of their
system of philosophical, political and religious values to that of the host country. A shared
culture (religion, for example) facilitated adjustment. At all events, language, religion and
culture in the broad sense were part of the migrant’s identity and they felt torn between the
need to integrate and the fear of losing their roots and contact with their origins. The
difficulties of mastering a second language could be due to a psychological block.

Although second or third generation immigrants had solved some of these problems
(acquisition of the host country’s language, common youth culture, etc), their traditions still
pulled in one direction and the education they received at school in another and their identity
problems persisted (for example, young beurs did not feel really Algerian or truly French).

All the groups agreed that immigration enriched a country economically and culturally.

Workshop No. 2: the presence of immigrant pupils in classes

The participants gave some thought to the difficulties immigrants’ children encountered at
school: mastering the language of the host country, conflict between cultures, etc Generally
speaking these pupils’ failure at school was due to the same causes as that of local children
from the same social group. They stressed the importance of making parents understand the
usefulness of school and of securing their participation in their children’s education.

Teachers’ difficulties lay in dealing with mixed classes and, above all, in their lack of training
in this respect.

26
All concluded that the presence of immigrant children in a class was a source of enrichment,
because it was an opportunity to find out about other ways of life, rediscover one’s own
culture and learn open-mindedness and tolerance. Like sport and music, school was a great
integrator. Moreover, a multicultural class was good training for life in society.

Workshop No. 3: the space devoted to this subject in textbooks

Having analysed and compared the textbooks of their respective countries, the participants
noted that, on the whole, migration was studied little and at a late stage (after the age of 14),
although the position varied according to the number of foreigners in each country. The
population movements considered were often confined to those which concerned the
particular country and were looked at from a national angle. No attention was generally paid
to the immigrant as an individual. Little was done to make pupils reflect on the causes and
consequences.

In fact, the presentation of migration was meant to be objective (analysis of facts and
statistics, etc). The teachers commented that no subject was neutral and that it was
therefore important to supply pupils with many different, contradictory types of material
enabling them to compare various items of information and standpoints.

The general conclusion was that a more detailed analysis was needed and ought to cover,
among other things, the terms used and the photographs (and captions) chosen.

Workshop No.4: integration and interculturalism

Although migrants, especially schoolchildren, clearly wished to become integrated, the

repercussions of the current employment crisis sometimes tempted them to withdraw into
their native community. This temptation was particularly strong when a large number of
immigrants were concentrated in certain neighbourhoods (ghettos).

Having thought about terminology (integration or assimilation), the members of the working
group were of the opinion that in a society which was supposed to be democratic and based
on mutual respect, integration was the only desirable option, as it enabled immigrants to find
their place in the host country while preserving their identity. Nevertheless it was an ideal
which had yet to be achieved and which required a great deal of effort from all sides.
Assimilation as practised in many states no longer worked. It presupposed a rejection of
other cultures and gave rise to tension and identity crises.

The introduction of genuine intercultural education therefore seemed to be a matter of

urgency. This kind of education was non-existent in most countries. It had yet to be devised
and teachers found that they were woefully unprepared (no initial training). It called for a
complete rethinking of the whole school system and the entire educational community would
have to be made aware of this project.

Social differences meant that some parents still had too little contact with schools. Perhaps
local associations, when they existed, could act as a go-between between schools and
parents. The development of extracurricular activities also seemed a good method.

27
VII. Recommendations
It is recommended that the authorities:

• give more prominence to population movements in curricula and textbooks;

• make curricula more flexible so as to enable teachers to adapt them and deal with some
topics in greater depth depending on the school audience;

• prepare future teachers more for intercultural education;

• reduce class sizes to allow teachers to develop more specialised methods and pay
greater attention to pupils’ difficulties and cultural differences;

• set up special language courses (in the host country’s language) for arrivals.

It is recommended that teachers:

• see to it that the whole educational community becomes interested in the issue of
immigration and that it becomes a school project;

• build up genuine intercultural exchanges;

• broach notions of citizenship, public spiritedness, rights and duties and respect for other
people within this framework;

• ensure that pupils give more thought to this subject, especially its causes and
consequences;

• introduce this topic as early as possible, from primary school onwards.

It is recommended that the Council of Europe

• continue the discussion and analysis of this subject;

• pursue the analysis of curricula and textbooks;

• promote exchanges of information and experience between teachers.

VIII. Conclusions
At the end of the seminar, Danielle Leclercq noted that while it was plain to everyone that
population movements had long been an essential feature of European history, it was still
difficult to tackle the subject in the classroom. Little was known about the subject at
European level and it was hardly mentioned, or dealt with superficially in textbooks. The
Council of Europe’s initiative therefore filled a gap and teachers would certainly appreciate
the publication of a teaching pack on this theme.

We also noted that immigration was a mirror of our societies and that the way it was handled
reflected their values. As was so often the case, teachers had a central role to play in solving

28
the problem, or rather meeting the challenge, as it was up to them to educate future citizens
who, in turn, would mould tomorrow’s society.

This society was already mutlicultural (we no longer had any choice). But harmonious co-
existence presupposed more than merely noting this fact; what was needed was the will to
look beyond this co-existence in order to build a new society resting on mutual recognition
and respect.

What teaching methods could one (should one) introduce to contribute to the building of this
new society? Methods which took into account the way in which each culture could enrich
others.

There were still many obstacles to the introduction of intercultural education: teachers had
been poorly prepared for it, or not prepared at all. They would have to be inventive and
innovative. It could not be left to the responsibility of a single teacher, however willing they
were; it had to be a project involving the whole school and supported within it and outside it.
Schools would have to be opened up to parents, fears and prejudices overcome, cultural
and social gulfs bridged and a new attitude adopted (we can all learn from each other).

There were still many unanswered questions, although all the paths pointed in one direction
and the first steps had been taken. It was up to each of us to give the matter closer thought
in order to arrive at true intercultural education and to try to train others in it.

In conclusion, Danielle Leclercq thanked the participants for their enthusiasm, their thorough
preparatory research and the fruitful discussions in the workshops. This work would provide
added material for the teaching pack being planned.

Ms Carole Reich announced on behalf of the Council of Europe that a seminar on the same
subject would be held at the Academy of Dillingen (Germany in 1999. Networks would be set
up to discuss the space devoted to foreigners in textbooks and the economic, social
demographic and cultural consequences of migration. A teaching pack would also be put
together comprising an overall picture of migration and case studies, an analysis of its
impact on life at school and reflection on methods.

29
Appendix I
Discussions carried out in the workshops

Workshop No. 1: what does immigration mean?

For the individual For the host country

From an economic point of view

From the social point of view

From the point of view of the structure

of the family

From the philosophical point of view

(religion, ideas, politics)

From the point of view of language

From the cultural point of view

Workshop No. 2: presence of immigrant pupils in the class

1.What difficulties are encountered by the teacher and by the pupil?

2.What contribution does this presence make to the class?

Workshop No. 3: migration in textbooks

1. How much space is devoted to this subject in textbooks?

2.What are the terms used?

30
3.From what angle is it approached?

-that of the host country?

-that of the immigrant?
-both?

4.Is the text neutral or does it adopt a standpoint?

(in which case, is it negative or positive?)

Workshop No.4: immigration in the 20th century

From the situations you have met as a teacher, compare the experiences of immigrants in
each of your countries.

Please specify:

• nationality
• social status
• sex
• migration routes and circumstances
• whether migration is voluntary or forced
• the present situation

Workshop No. 5: integration and interculturalism

1. Integration or assimilation?

-what is the position in your country?

-what do you think about it?

2. How to provide intercultural education?

-in our lessons?

-in our schools?

31
Appendix II

Contributions to the seminar

Long-term migration: permanence and change

by René Leboutte

Introduction

In the last fifteen years or so the historiography of migration patterns has undergone a
thorough and radical overhaul in the wake of the economic upheaval brought on by the oil
crisis in the mid-1970s and the collapse of the communist bloc.

Historians no longer simply quantify migration flows. They devise typologies, identify
"systems" and attempt to construct "models" (part I). They look at migration trends in a very
long-term perspective (part II) and endeavour above all to understand migration routes,
networks and strategies and the personalities of the migrants (part III).

It is important from the outset not to confuse "migration" with "mobility": migration is a
particular form of mobility, involving "a set of displacements which has the effect of
transferring the residence of the people concerned from a certain place of origin [...] to a
certain place of destination". This is no trivial distinction, for mobility is a means of avoiding
the wrench of migration while paving the way for it. The "seasonal migrations" so numerous
under the Old Regime as well as in the modern day are in fact examples more often than not
of "seasonal mobility", which actually make it possible for the population groups concerned
to avoid migration. Mobility was and is a means of taking advantage of employment
opportunities and salaries better than those to be had at one's place of origin without actually
having to change one's place of residence.

I. Four levels of analysis

In the abundant literature on migration, four levels of analysis need to be clearly

distinguished:

1. the descriptive level, where migration flows are generally broken down according to a
typology on the basis of three criteria: distance (short-, medium- or long-distance
migration), geography (country-to-city, from one state to another, etc) and duration
(round-trip migration of a seasonal or temporary type; long-term or permanent
migration).

2. The second level concerns "migration systems". A migration system is "the particular
combination of population flow types between country of origin and country of arrival,
with rules or laws governing these flows and bodies responsible for applying them".
The "system" is therefore a space shaped not only by the places of departure and
arrival but also by a whole series of rules and factors such as "the pull/push effect, ie
the power of repulsion and attraction exerted respectively by the migrant's points of
departure and arrival and the distance between them.

3. The third level concerns "migration models", the purpose of which is not to describe
migration patterns but to explain them.

32
4. Finally, there are some general theories which attempt to include and explain
migration patterns in a much broader socio-economic context, such as the world-
system theory. Note that these theories are developed to account not only for
migration patterns but for global social trends - the development of capitalism, for
example, in the case of the world-system theory.

These four levels of analysis are clearly complementary rather than contradictory. And
historians are faced with the task of sorting, classifying, explaining and modelling the
profusion of past migrations, so they have plenty of work still to do.

II. Typologies

Typologies which seek to distinguish between internal and international migration, or

between medium- and long-distance migration, etc. are necessary but insufficient, for in
international migration the distance covered is less important than the crossing of borders,
which entails a change of jurisdiction and, in the case of long-term migration, a change of
political community.

Migration can take place within the same "ecosystem" (within the same rural region, or within
the same town or city) or between ecosystems (from the country to the city, from the
mountains to the plains, from one city or state to another). Where migration takes place from
one ecosystem to another, the likely crossing of a boundary (be it political, administrative,
cultural or linguistic) can of course introduce a new dimension, as it may involve a change of
status for the migrant.

Either within an ecosystem or between two ecosystems, migration may be circular (or round-
trip), ie the migrants return to their place of origin after migrating temporarily, or non-circular,
ie one-way (a term more appropriate in our opinion than "permanent" migration).

What matters above all is the crossing of a border or boundary, and even more so the
existence of "metafrontiers", veritable barriers, like the "Iron Curtain", which are much more
impermeable to migration than the numerous borders between states in the same bloc.
"Metafrontiers" also give rise to a special kind of migration: refugees.

Mobility and migration are not merely a spatial phenomenon, of course. They are above all a
social phenomenon. Again, the physical distance travelled is less decisive than the social
distance, the upward or downward mobility which is closely related to displacement. Which
is why historians attach so much importance to the personalities of migrants, to their
strategies, the routes they take, their successes and failures, the networks within and by
means of which they move, and the socio-economic and cultural structures at their points of
departure, transit and arrival. These numerous and ever-changing factors - modified more
often than not by the migrants themselves - highlight the complexity of migration
phenomena.

III. Migration patterns

Historians have brought to light four types of migration pattern in the Europe of the modern
era which are also largely valid for the 19th century.

1. "local" migration, ie migration to any part of the country, but usually over short
distances;

2. "circular" migration and "commuting", which brings migrants back to their place of
origin after a period away. Seasonal and temporary migration falls into this pattern,
which is more akin to a form of mobility than to true migration;

33
3. "chain" migration, where migrants who reach their destination attract other
compatriots in their wake, before possibly moving further on;

4. "career" migration.

Two further patterns are: "colonial" migration and "forced" migration.

It cannot now be doubted that there has been intense mobility in modern Europe, and that
far from being a marginal phenomenon, it has been an integral part of the self-regulating
demographic mechanism and, more broadly, of the social and economic organisation of
village and, of course, urban communities. Indeed, migration is essential to an economy
which needs temporary seasonal mobility in order to function properly.

Be it on the farm, on urban building sites or in industries subject to seasonal variations (like
iron and steel or mining), temporary labour helps to cope with sudden increases in
manpower needs. The farming economy and urban industries of the Po valley, central Italy
and above all Rome used thousands of seasonal workers from the region of the Alps, the
Abruzzi and the Apennines. Each year these "migrant workers" crossed several state
borders and passed through city gates with no other formalities than perhaps a clean bill of
health certifying that they did not come from somewhere suffering an epidemic.

While this mobility disregarded state borders, it did remain confined within the main
geopolitical blocs shaped largely on the basis of religious faith: the Catholic states, the
Protestant states and the Ottoman Empire. Movement between the blocs, on the other hand,
was strictly controlled, limited largely to business travel or adventure. The blocs were
separated by "metafrontiers", grey zones, "marches" that had constantly to be consolidated
by military colonisation of the border regions. One example was the metafrontier between
the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire: in the Banat region, which was wrested from
the Turks in 1718, Vienna encouraged 1,333 households of debt-bound farmers from the
Duchy of Luxembourg to settle round what is now the Romanian city of Timisoara.

Seasonal and temporary mobility is not migration but, on the contrary, a way of avoiding it
while at the same time mapping out a route for it and paving the way for chain migration.
Seasonal migrants create an environment combining two places (the home they leave with
the intention of coming back, and their temporary destination), juggling with the opportunities
and the challenges of both. This itinerant lifestyle makes sense only in terms of a strategy of
upward social movement in one's country of birth, whereas true migration makes sense only
in terms of a strategy of upward social movement at the place of destination.

Recent research confirms that in pre-industrial Europe economic mobility was part of the
way in which economic, social and family life was organised. It was a perfectly normal
structural element of former societies, whereas stability was a privilege reserved for the well-
to-do. This mobility was organised around family solidarity and solidarity between people,
forming networks and following well-marked paths. It was evidently a survival strategy, but
also a quest for social betterment.

34
IV. Migration in a long-term perspective

The high mobility observed by historians in pre-industrial societies obliges us to reconsider

the long-standing belief that the migration movements of the 19th century were something
extraordinary. They were certainly exceptional in terms of the number of people involved, be
it in internal, intra-European or trans-oceanic migration. But until the eve of the First World
War old trends and new intertwined, as is confirmed by the adaptation of seasonal migration
flows to the industrial era.

The chronological breakdown of the history of migration remains a subject wide open to
debate. Historians and political scientists currently agree that there were three major eras of
migration between the end of the Middle Ages and the end of the Second World War.

These three eras share one factor in common - especially international migration flows, but
also, to a lesser extent, internal migration movements - and that is the role played in
migration patterns by "the powers that be" - whether princes, state governments or
supranational authorities such as the European Community.

A. Population policy under the Old Regime (15th-18th centuries1)

At least in western Europe, a country's population was considered as an economic and

military resource of prime importance. Niccolo Machiavelli, for example, saw a large
population as the source of a strong army on which the power of the ruler rested. However,
realising that population levels were affected by the agricultural resources available,
Machiavelli used emigration to the colonies as an essential safety valve.

In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries the idea put forward by French thinker Jean BODIN that
"there is no wealth and no strength but that of men" was constantly echoed, not only by
philosophers but also by the governing classes.

Princes and city authorities used their joint influence to encourage immigration for the skilled
labour it brought and to dissuade those subjects who created the country's wealth from
emigrating. This subtle exercise operated with the aid of privileges. To deter people from
leaving, monarchs or city officials granted them privileges, such as tax relief or exemption
from certain tasks and obligations. And similar privileges were used to attract wealthy
foreigners or people with useful skills.

It was privileges like these, for example, that lured Walloon metalworkers to Sweden and
Spain at the dawn of the 17th century, and textile workers from Eupen to settle in Gdansk.
Because of such privileges, these ethnic minorities were able to keep their religions, their
languages and the material trappings of their cultures for a long time; reluctant to merge with
the host society, they isolated themselves through endogamy. Their privileges also gave
them an opportunity to improve their social status.

All over western Europe, highly skilled master-craftsmen rose to the lower rungs of the
nobility: glassblowers from Altare and Murano did so in France and the Netherlands, as did
Walloon ironsmiths in the Basque Country, where the Spanish King raised them to the rank
of hidalgo.

It was a selective process, however, since these same princes and officials did their best to
get rid of paupers and vagrants. The colonies often served as dumping grounds for these
undesirables, who became outcasts. Above all, the princes had no qualms about using

1. Aristide Zolberg calls the period from the 15th to the late 18th century the age of "absolutism and
mercantilism".

35
religion as a pretext for banishing and persecuting subjects they regarded as dangerous
dissidents, even if they contributed by their work and their wealth to the country's economy.

As everyone knows, for example, successive waves of Jews have been run out of their
homes since the Middle Ages. The forced emigration of the French Huguenots and
Protestants from the Spanish Netherlands, the Catholic principalities of Germany and the
Italian states led to the appearance of "refuges", cities like Geneva and kingdoms like
England, which took these fugitives in. And these refuges gave rise to a particular social
type, the "refugee" as we understand it today.

It was also in this context of mercantile economic policy and "confessionalisation" that the
migration movements linked to European expansion and colonialism should be seen. The
exploitation of colonial territories also brought a resurgence of the slave trade, organised by
Europeans in need of strong arms to work their plantations and mine precious metals. Few
Europeans went to the colonies to work, and when they did it was generally for fixed periods,
on temporary contracts. The "permanent settlers" often consisted of dissident religious
groups who were unwelcome at home, like the Quakers and Catholics in 17th century
England.

Under the Old Regime mobility depended on the legal and religious status of subjects living
in a particular area: legislation limiting free movement (poor laws, passports); the principle of
cujus regio, ejus religio, sanctioned by the Peace of Augsburg in 1555; the survival or
reinforcement of serfdom in various forms; customs in respect of land ownership and the
devolution of property; family structures; religious allegiance; privileges.

One prominent feature of migration under the Old Regime was of course the considerable
magnitude of the seasonal and temporary migrations that were part of people's survival
strategy and of how local economies worked. I shall not enlarge on this here, but it is
important to realise just how organised and institutionalised this migration was. Although
ancient and traditional, it still had its place in a capitalist economy, as demonstrated by Jan
Lucassen in respect of the North Sea System, which concerned thousands of seasonal
workers from Westphalia, the Hollandsgänger, who travelled to Holland in the 17th and 18th
centuries.

B. The age of revolutions

The second period identified by Aristide Zolberg is "the long 19th century"
(1790-1914), characterised by political revolutions, the emergence of nation-states, and a
first wave of decolonisation, but also by the industrial revolution and demographic transition.

1. A more open world

The United States Declaration of Independence in 1776 had a considerable historical impact
on international migration. The constitution of new independent states (Argentina, Chile,
Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Brazil, Mexico all achieved independence between 1816 and
1822), where people of European descent lived, triggered an economic reshuffle which
created a growing need for labour, slave labour of course, but also (and increasingly with the
growing opposition to slavery) European workers. These young states adopted legislation
that remained liberal for a long time, just when the European countries, under pressure from
population growth, were abandoning all forms of emigration restrictions. Transatlantic
migration, which had previously attracted very few Europeans, developed apace. As a result,
a new system was born: the Atlantic world system.

Legally tolerated and economically encouraged, emigration became materially possible

thanks to the industrial revolution.

36
On the European continent the abolition of what remained of serfdom in the West by the
French Revolution and its ramifications cast off the last chains that bound would-be
emigrants. Subjects of princes became citizens of states, which set limits and rules on their
freedom of movement.

Although the wars of Revolution and Empire disrupted the old "migration systems", they did
not do away with them altogether. Furthermore, fear of conscription and the increasing
number of objectors contributed to the flow of migrants in times of war. True, the Congress
of Vienna traced out a new political geography of Europe and triggered the emergence of a
whole series of new nations, but basically the geopolitical blocs remained the same, or
rather extended further eastwards, so that Europe formed a vast area within which people
could move about, the only metafrontier being that separating it from the Ottoman Empire.

In Europe certain police formalities - passports, workers' record books, compulsory

population registration - kept this mobility under control, but without actually hindering it. Not
until the end of the last century did states really feel the need to introduce legislation to
regulate migration. With the exception of workers in border regions, the number of foreigners
in most European countries was still small in the 19th century. As long as they were able to
provide for themselves and did not cause trouble by their political activities or by stirring up
labour disputes, they were largely left alone. All that was to change, however, after the First
World War, when the industrialised countries had to cope with a massive influx of workers:
residence permits, work permits and street traders' licences all became compulsory.

2. Industrialisation, urbanisation and the transformation of the countryside

Industrialisation had two effects on geographical mobility: it intensified it and concentrated it

in a small number of development centres. Until the 1880s, however, the migration
movements induced by industrial development scarcely differed from those observed in the
18th century. Both in Britain and on the continent, most migration was over short distances.

There was population growth all over rural Europe: in many regions village populations
reached an all-time high between 1850 and 1880. In some regions (Ireland, Flanders, the
Netherlands, Westphalia, the Scottish Highlands, Silesia, etc.) this population surge brought
widespread poverty, causing people to escape indigence by emigrating. In the 18th and
early 19th centuries the rural labour surplus fuelled the growth of rural industries (proto-
industrialisation) in regions which could not have sustained such large populations without
them. Examples can be seen in the upland areas of the cantons of Zurich and Glarus, in
several regions of England, Wales and Ireland, in Flanders and in many parts of France and
Germany. This growth of industrial activity in the countryside also helped to curb the old
temporary subsistence migration trend. The early proto-industrial boom in the Liège-Verviers
region gave villagers in the Lower-Meuse area a reason to stay rather than emigrate, in spite
of the havoc wrought by war in the 17th century.

In the first half of the 19th century, however, the decline of rural industry soon brought
considerable poverty in its wake. In the 1840s came the collapse of the rural flax industry in
Flanders, Silesia, Saxony and elsewhere, under the relentless onslaught of competition from
machine-made English linen imported in large quantities. Industrialisation, of course, was
not alien to the slump in rural industry, as witnessed in the regions of Cambrai-Saint-Quentin
and Liège. The introduction of machinery into the textile industry in Verviers around 1800
deprived the region's cottage industry workers, especially women, of their livelihood, causing
a tidal wave of migration towards Verviers which caught the city authorities quite
unprepared.

37
The countrysides of the North-East exemplified the changes in the labour market following
the development of the industrial basin. Farm labourers headed for the mines, while owners
of small farms remained. To stay in business they resorted to new agricultural machinery,
extensive grazing and intensive farming on their best land. All over Europe the domestic
staff who used to live with landed farming families were gradually replaced in the 18th
century by salaried staff on short-term contracts. This change left a mass of proletarianised
farm labourers who had to keep on the move in order to survive.

The rural depression of the last quarter of the 19th century was the result of a long process
of decline in which disasters (potato blight, which decimated Ireland and Flanders in 1845-
1850; silkworm disease, which struck northern Italy, and phylloxera, which destroyed the
vineyards of France and Italy) combined with sweeping changes (fragmentation of farmland,
the disappearance of common land, dispossession of the poorest smallholders and
proletarianisation of proto-industrial labourers). And to cap it all, competition from imported
American farm produce and the mechanisation of agriculture hastened the proletarianisation
of farm labourers and smallholders.

In order, therefore, to understand the mass migration movements of the second half of the
19th century, one must first look at the rural world, its organisation, its strategies and the
changes it underwent. And even that does not explain everything. The Franco-Belgian
Ardennes and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, for example, were equally badly hit by the
agricultural slumps of the 1840s and the 1870s-1890s, but the French and Belgians did not
emigrate whereas people left Luxembourg en masse for the United States, Brazil,
Guatemala or Argentina. So the discouraging effect of the economic depression was not the
only factor, although nobody really knows why the people of the Ardennes clung so
steadfastly to their thankless soil.

It was also during the last two decades of the 19th century that the development of cheap
transport, and economic imbalances between regions, began to fuel medium- and long-
distance mobility. The arrival of the first groups of foreign workers (from Italy, Poland and
North Africa) in the French, Walloon and German industrial basins was a consequence of
the great economic depression of 1873-1890. In order to regain their competitiveness and
profitability, coal mines and steel plants, glass and textile factories and also the farming
sector turned on an increasingly massive scale to machines requiring less and less skill to
operate. Mechanisation thus favoured the recruitment of foreign labour, often of rural origin.
Migrating towards the industrial basins thus became an alternative to emigrating overseas.

Naturally, in drawing manpower from the countryside industrialisation upset the rural way of
life. In Belgium, for example, the introduction of railway season tickets for workers was to
have far-reaching effects. On the economic level it restored the balance between wages in
farming and industry: wages in industry fell because of the influx of workers, while farm
wages, which were traditionally lower, rose. The season tickets also helped to spread new
ideas, particularly socialist propaganda, as the third-class compartments which the workers
occupied every day were ideal places to read newspapers and chat. When the first elections
with universal suffrage were held in 1893, socialist MPs were elected in previous
conservative fiefdoms, which were still wrongly considered to be agricultural constituencies
when in fact their population was made up of working-class commuters.

The great economic depression was at the origin of a veritable industrial colonisation of
Russia by Belgian, French, British and German businessmen in search of new markets. In
the last quarter of the 19th century Ukraine was a great melting pot of different population
groups. At the beginning of the 19th century the migration pattern was still the one inherited
from the colonial era of the 17th and 18th centuries: as the Tsar's empire gradually extended
its power to the south, a migration movement developed from the densely populated regions
of central Russia towards the parts of Ukraine on the right bank of the Dnieper. In the latter

38
half of the 19th century, with the abolition of serfdom (in 1861), the flow of immigrants into
this emerging basin intensified. Immigrants from nearby regions were joined by long-
distance migrants from places as far afield as the northern Caucasus, Belorussia and the
industrial region of central Russia.

Ukraine thus became a multi-ethnic melting pot. At Uzovka in 1907 there were no less than
34 ethnic groups! Two factors were instrumental in this. Firstly, the urge to emigrate is
influenced by economic and social conditions in the region of destination. Barbara Anderson
has shown that migrants from regions with a high level of literacy and non-agricultural skills
tend to head for regions and towns undergoing modernisation, whereas those from regions
with high illiteracy where traditional agriculture prevails tend to head for areas with new land
to farm. Secondly, the urge to emigrate is fuelled by a shortage of arable land or jobs in
industry at home.

Mass migration towards North America was the major trend of the 19th century. It was set, of
course, in this context of industrialisation and the revolution in transport, but also of the rural
slump and the economic depression of the 1870s-1890s.

Never before had so many emigrants been on the move at the same time. That was plain to
see. Migration became a lucrative business, sometimes an out-and-out racket, for
recruitment agencies and railway and maritime transport companies. Technological progress
in the transport sector made transport more affordable, and people could dream of returning
home one day. From the last quarter of the 19th century, therefore, thanks to the lower cost
of transport and the speed of steamships, there was a pattern of temporary labour migration
in which the European and American continents formed a global labour market: the Atlantic
world system. Most migrants in the period 1870 to 1914 were young workers who returned
home after a few years abroad. These returnees accounted for 25% of all migration around
1870 and 45% in the 1890s.

In spite of these new features, overseas emigration continued to follow a long-established

strategy. Networks of families and acquaintances remained an essential part of the picture,
for they were sources of information, as well as organising departures and greeting new
arrivals. It was the chain migration principle, and in some cases the arrival point was merely
a stepping stone towards a more distant destination in the country of arrival. In the case of
Scandinavian migration to Canada and the United States, for example, the strong personal
ties between the people back home in the place of departure and those who emigrated
explain why certain Swedish or Norwegian villages produced emigrants while others
produced none. Italian emigration followed the same pattern. A "culture of migration" thus
emerged at the local level.

Industrialisation also went hand in hand with a new wave of urban development. Under the
Old Regime towns and cities relied on a constant flow of immigrants to ensure population
growth. The 19th century saw not only the unprecedented growth of existing towns and cities
but also urban development "from the bottom up", turning largish villages into industrial
towns. The birth of the industrial basins, a landmark in the urban history of Europe, would
have been unthinkable without strong internal migration flows. The splendour of capital cities
and metropolises, on the other hand, has always exerted a strong power of attraction.

39
3. Demographic change

The first phase of demographic change, marked by falling mortality while fertility remained
high, brought about rapid population growth in Europe in the 19th century. The result was a
relative over-population of the countryside and strong urban growth. From the turn of the
century, however, emigration from the countryside slowed down and the industrial basins
had all the manpower they needed.

Rural exodus was a limited phenomenon, the countryside often serving as a reservoir of
manpower for rapidly expanding towns and industrial basins. Furthermore, steps were taken
to staunch the flow of emigrants from rural areas. The introduction in the 1870s of cheap rail
and tram season tickets for workers helped to foster temporary mobility (commuting) and to
keep people in their villages. "The army of workers is on the move", commented Ernest
Mahaim in 1910, but it was not an army of emigrants.

C. The 20th century

1. A change of pattern with the "new Thirty-Years War"

The First World War put an abrupt end to a period of great mobility within the Atlantic world
system in which movement was relatively free.

The main countries of destination - the United States and Canada - shut their doors to
European emigrants.

In Europe itself the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian and Ottoman
empires had a three-pronged effect on migration flows.

First of all, a new metafrontier appeared, separating Western Europe from the USSR. In a
Europe withdrawn into itself, the rise of national-socialism and the fascist regimes was
reflected in policies to prevent nationals from emigrating and expel "undesirable" elements -
Jews, of course, but also political dissidents and ethnic minorities.

Secondly, after the individual migration of the 19th century, Europe, reduced to a few
democratic countries, discovered the mass migration of political refugees fleeing the
Bolshevik revolution, then the fascist dictatorships and the aftermath of the Spanish civil war.

The third consequence of the geopolitical upheaval caused by the First World War was the
forced displacement of whole populations, which reached its climax at the end of the Second
World War.

For example, the fall of the Ottoman Empire caused the Muslim populations settled in the
Balkan countries, the Crimea and the Caucasus to move back to Turkey, while at the same
time the Christian minorities were expelled from Turkey (from 1912 onwards, two million
Greeks emigrated from Turkey) and the Armenians likewise fled. In 1870 Turkey was home
to 2.3 million Armenians and 2.1 million Greeks; by 1927 there were, respectively, only
65,000 and 120,000 left.

Two new features characterised the refugee situation between the wars:

- their number swelled considerably, so that the problem facing the receiving countries
took on a quite different dimension as compared with the 19th century;

40
- secondly, the founding of the League of Nations was followed by the introduction of
an international status for refugees and an international policy on refugees, neither of
which had previously existed.

While we are beginning to find out more about the fate of the victims of the Nazi
extermination policy, nobody has yet looked into the consequences of these forced
migrations back to the places of origin. Europe suffered not only a great demographic loss,
but also economic and cultural damage the extent of which is still not clear.

On a purely linguistic level, for example, the annihilation of Jews, Gypsies and numerous
other ethnic minorities did irreparable damage to Europe's culture: "Nomads of language, the
vanished polyglots matched the profile of the ideal European"
(Claude Hagège).

The fall of the Third Reich kindled fresh hope in a free new world, in a Europe without
borders, without a metafrontier which only prisoners and deportees could cross. The end of
Hitler's dreams created hope of a space open to freedom of movement. It also put a stop to
Germany's territorial expansion to the east, causing a reverse migration flow of Germans
who had settled in the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia,
a total immigration figure estimated in 1957 at 12.5 million in Federal Germany and 4.3
million in the German Democratic Republic.

Stalinism and the Cold War strengthened the metafrontier splitting Europe in two, and above
all created a Soviet world system where forced migration occurred on a scale we are only
just beginning to realise.

When this metafrontier finally crumbled, what could prove to be a revolution in migration
patterns took place. As Aristide Zolberg noted in 1989: "The sudden collapse of Soviet and
East European communism has swept away in an instant almost all the barriers that
previously confined hundreds of millions of people to their countries of origin. This
completely unexpected turn of events has created a totally new situation where international
migration patterns are regulated solely by the immigration policies of potential receiving
countries". "International movements, he wrote recently, are now regulated solely by the
potential states of destination."

In the past decade the break-up of the Soviet bloc has given rise to three migration
phenomena.

The first concerns return migration. The return of Russian populations who had settled in
non-Russian republics began back in the 1960s and is continuing amid predictable tensions.
Since 1990 return migration by Russians has combined with complex flows of refugees,
people who were sent to settle the eastern territories (Ukrainians, Belorussians, Tatars,
Armenians, Jews, Meskhetian Turks) and/or were deported (Germans, Tatars of Crimea,
Koreans, etc).

The second phenomenon is the emigration of Jews to Israel, but also to Germany, and the
arrival in Germany of ethnic Germans, the Aussiedler, whose presence in the territories of
the old Russian Empire dates back to the 18th century.

.Thirdly, there is the reappearance of a constantly swelling tide of East-West "commuters".

Strictly speaking, however, this is not migration but a new form of mobility of cheap labour, a
familiar phenomenon in this part of Europe between 1870 and 1914.

The eastern boundaries of the Kingdom of Prussia were the scene in the last century of
labour flows from eastern Prussia, the Polish part of the Russian Empire (Congress Poland)

41
and the area of Poland under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Galicia). These
people were mostly seasonal workers, employed in their thousands, not only by farmers but
also by the industries of the Ruhr. The temporary migrants of today are merely
"rediscovering" an older mobility route. Like their forebears, they are not seeking to emigrate
but merely to improve their standard of living in Poland, the Czech Republic or elsewhere.
Contrary to the apocalyptic visions of a tidal wave of immigrants, what we are seeing is a
return to a former situation.

2. Migration policy in Europe

Nowadays, international migration is controlled solely by the immigration policies of the

potential receiving countries. In actual fact this form of control is not as new as one might
think. It is a legacy of the policy of recruiting temporary foreign labour that was pursued in
the late 19th century.

In the 1880s the German Empire took steps to control and regulate the influx of Polish
workers; this even resulted in a surge of anti-Polish feeling at the time of the Kulturkampf
(1885). In the early 1890s the German Empire finally opted for a policy that was to be copied
with success in other countries: the admission, for a limited period, of workers issued with
work contracts and residence permits (Legitimationskarte). This policy, which gave rise to
the term Gastarbeiter, was the state's way of controlling migration flows while catering for
the demand for a flexible supply of labour in agriculture and industry.

It was at the end of the 19th century in Prussia, and immediately after the First World War in
Belgium and France, that a scenario unfolded for the first time which is still in place today for
the temporary migrants from eastern Europe. In order to offset manpower shortages in
certain production sectors, especially mining and the steel industry, management recruits
foreign labour, by agreement with the state, which lays down the rules (residence and work
permit). It is understood that this immigration can only be temporary. In the event of a
recession, the entry of foreign labour is tightly controlled and arrangements are made to
repatriate those already in the country. The slump of 1926-27, for example, brought Polish
immigration to France to a standstill for several months; it then picked up again with
renewed vigour and continued until 1931. Starting in 1934, the French Government
embarked upon a policy of mass repatriation, in spite of protests from the coal mining
industry, where Poles made up the bulk of the underground workforce. Under pressure from
public opinion, the government introduced legislation and administrative measures to limit,
prevent or prohibit the recruitment or employment of foreigners. These measures were
applied strictly in times of crisis, but soon forgotten when an economic revival created the
need for a fresh supply of workers.

As a Belgian businessman put it rather bluntly in 1925: "Labour must bow to the laws of
economics [...]. Foreigners are willing to work in places where Belgians refuse to go.
Belgian workers do not like to move. When there is a shortage of work, foreign workers are
easier to lay off. There is no demand for workers in a recession".

Migration flows were therefore used to regulate the labour market, as the director of the
Belgian Federation of Coal Mining Associations explained in 1939. In periods of intense
industrial activity our workers leave us for thriving industries that can afford to pay them
higher wages, at the very time when the demand for coal is on the increase. The opposite
happens in times of crisis. How can we possibly cope with these formidable drawbacks
without a reservoir to draw from to varying degrees in order to supplement the hard core of
Belgian manpower? The only such reservoir we have is foreign manpower.".

The industrialised countries of western Europe have drawn manpower from reservoirs
further and further afield: Italy, Spain, Portugal, North Africa, Turkey.

42
The economic change that began in 1974 slowed down this trend without actually stopping it
altogether, precisely because such a workforce has the advantage of flexibility. It fuels a
contractual labour market and also that of an underground economy. Nowadays employing
"commuter migrants" from eastern Europe, for example, is "one of the rare means by which
construction firms in Germany can compete with one another: as all firms pay approximately
the same prices for their building materials, the only way to reduce costs and therefore win
contracts is to pay lower wages".

In the period between the wars Europe changed from a net exporter to a net importer of
migrants, initially from neighbouring countries and then, after the Second World War, from
further and further afield. Economic migrants were joined by refugees. Nations have
developed a variety of policies on migration, but the building of the European Union now
makes harmonisation necessary.

43
Overview of Jewish population movements in Europe in the 19th and
20th centuries

By Professor Jean-Philippe Schreiber, research fellow at the National Foundation for

Scientific Research and Associate Professor at the Jewish Studies Institute, Brussels Free
University

1. The process of migration and demographic change

Ever since the expulsion from central and western Europe during the Middle Ages, Jewish
communities had found refuge in eastern Europe, where they had developed a distinct and
extremely rich culture. However, from the middle of the 17th century the aftermath of the
Russo-Swedish war, massacres by the Ukrainian Cossacks and the effects of the
Shabbetaian heresy caused the migratory currents once and for all to reverse and flow from
East to West.

From that period, therefore, western and central Europe once again became a hub of Jewish
society, whose political and cultural development was accompanied by a slow change in
attitudes towards the Jewish people, followed by a gradual transformation in their status.

In the years leading up to 1880, when certain sectors of eastern European Jewry began in
far greater numbers to emigrate to western Europe and, in particular, to North and South
America, there were two successive migratory waves: the first was a movement from East to
West within the borders of the European empires; the second was international and
transatlantic. Owing to the openness of the borders, the two movements in fact overlapped.

The Russian Jewish population, which was to become the largest in Europe for more than a
century, had been born of the successive Polish partitions in the late 18th century. In
breaking the biggest concentration of European Jews into three separate parts, the partitions
destroyed the fabric of national identity and arrested the development of the greater part of
eastern European Jewry for several decades.

This majority now found itself under an Empire where Jews had been unknown since the
15th century. In 1804, Russia issued a discriminatory decree restricting Jewish residence to
a very extensive “Pale of Settlement”. Since this edict frequently resulted in eviction from
their villages, many Russian Jews became urbanised from an early date, a trend which was
to be accelerated by upheaval in the rural economy and by the Polish risings of 1830 and
1863.

Trends

1. Throughout the 19th century, population movements occurred within the borders of
those countries where Jews were predominantly resident. Jews in the eastern states of the
German Empire migrated to central Prussia (as Berlin developed) and then southwards (to
Bavaria) and westwards. This movement gave them an increasingly German identity.

In Russia, Jews left the densely populated regions of the Pale (Byelorussia and Lithuania)
for the least populated areas (Ukraine).

In Austria-Hungary, they left Bohemia-Moravia, then Galicia (an Austrian possession since
the Polish partitions), for Vienna (which was growing rapidly, having been closed to the Jews
prior to the 19th century) and Hungary.

Finally, in France, the wave of emigration led from Alsace-Lorraine (which had a similar role
as a Jewish settlement area to that of Prussian Poland) to Paris in particular.

44
2. As transport networks improved and new legal and economic opportunities arose, the
next stage was that of international population movements. Much of the Bavarian Jewish
community emigrated to Great Britain and, above all, to the United States. Smaller numbers
from other regions of Germany (in particular the Rhineland) journeyed to the Netherlands,
Belgium and the United States.

There was also a constant flow away from the former Polish territories. Aggravated by
economic crisis, grain shortages and political upheaval, this movement swelled Jewish
communities in western Europe and North America. It cannot, however, be compared with
the post-1880 exodus.

3. Although it is impossible to determine the exact size of the Jewish population world-
wide at this time, it is certain that the high rate of world population growth during the
19th century was considerably greater, and began at an earlier date, among the Jewish
community. This was the result inter alia of a lower mortality rate than in the rest of the
population. In particular it was due to a lower infant mortality rate and to a rarer incidence of
certain diseases. In addition, the Jewish community was migrating towards increasingly
developed regions where the overall mortality rate was sinking.

Furthermore, Jewish marriage trends were changing comparatively slowly, so that their
impact on the birth rate only began to be felt in the second half of the century. There was
consequently a long period when low mortality was combined with a high birth rate and the
Jewish population grew more swiftly than usual. This explains, among other things, why
emigration did not prevent the Jewish population from growing in eastern Europe.

In this way, world Jewry grew from 4.75 million in 1850 to 13.5 million in 1914. In the second
half of the 19th century, it reached an annual growth rate of 1.6%, considerably higher than
the world’s population as a whole (0.6% to 0.7%) and even higher than the population of
Europe and North America (1.1%).

At the end of the 19th century, however, there was a gradual decline in the growth rate of
immigrant Jewish communities. The causes included the following:

a. There was a rise in the age at which people married and the proportion of unmarried
individuals (indeed, there was a tendency in the 19th century for emigrants to be single
people). The increase in geographic mobility had a negative effect on the birth rate; this was
due in particular, in the case of family migrations, to the fact that the family often arrived at a
later date than the husband.

b. Exogamous (or mixed) marriages were becoming more common. This followed the
pre-reform period when certain marriages were banned as a result both of the weight of
tradition within Jewish society and of general prohibitions in national law.

c. Jewish communities were adapting to the patterns of industrialised society, especially

as regards controls on population growth. In fact, demographic change was more extreme
among Jews than in the rest of the population: the Jewish birth rate, initially higher than that
of non-Jews, eventually became far lower.

d. Immigrants from regions where modernisation was already well advanced had a
lower birth rate.

e. Society was becoming more secular. The falling birth rate corresponded to a decline
in religious practice.

45
f. Some Jews were converting or abandoning the faith.

g. From the point of view of social psychology, behavioural patterns were becoming
increasingly alien to the norms of traditional Jewish society. In pre-reform society, a high
birth rate was connected, among other things, with a collective will for survival which
subsequently lost its importance.

4. From the beginning of the 19th century, the demographic patterns of Jewish society
were affected by the gradual transformation of Jews’ civil and political status, by their
secularisation, by changes to their communities’ socio-economic structure and by their high
degree of domestic and international mobility. There was an important, and occasionally
overwhelming, movement of Jews to geographical regions and social strata which were
undergoing extreme modernisation and development.

5. The trend towards urbanisation among western Jews in the 19th century has perhaps
been over-generalised. This is doubtless because the figures immediately available have
only been clarified by recent, more intensive research.

In the case of Jews from south-western Germany, for example, many sectors of the
population remained scattered in rural areas and formed part of the local economy, where
they served chiefly as intermediaries in modernising the rural infrastructure. The same
pattern emerges from studies on Jewish livestock traders and pedlars in the 19th-century
rural society of the Rhineland, Lorraine, Alsace and Switzerland.

Nonetheless, the birth rate and low mortality rate of western Jews clearly indicate that they
became urbanised at an early stage. By the end of the century this trend had developed into
a preference for national capitals. For example, the Jewish population in Paris grew from
2,700 in 1808 to 20,000 in 1866. In Warsaw, the growth of the Jewish community was even
more marked: it expanded from 7,500 in 1799 (12% of the total population) to 220,000 in
1897 (32%). The Jewish population of Vienna and Budapest had remained negligible until
1850 but rose to 200,000 in each city by the outbreak of the first world war. Even in North
Africa, Jews were leaving their traditional rural homes at this time to populate the coastal
towns.

6. However, some writers have cautioned against drawing too many conclusions from
the demographic behaviour of Jewish populations during the modernising period. They warn
that changes were influenced by different regional patterns of modernisation, by economic
tendencies and by the contrasting degree to which Ashkenazi and Sephardi Judaism were
open to adaptation and cultural integration.

2. Population movements in the 19th century

Germany

It is well known that Germany was a country of emigration rather than one of immigration
right until the end of the century. Most of the 225,000 Jewish immigrants to the USA
between 1815 and 1880 came from the regions which after 1871 were to become the
German Empire. It was largely owing to immigrants from Germany that the American Jewish
population grew from 40,000 to 150,000 in the fifteen years between 1845 and 1860.

There had already been a strong wave of emigration from Germany in the 1820s by reason
of the anti-Semitic climate prevailing after the 1818-19 riots. This atmosphere, combined
with the attractiveness of the rapid economic development, the low cost of living and the

46
freedoms available to them in other countries, persuaded many Jews to make their way
abroad.

Besides the political situation and the anti-Semitism, other factors in the wave of German
Jewish emigration were industrialisation and agrarian reform. From 1830 to 1845, the
German Jews – most of whom belonged to the rural lower middle classes – were badly
affected when an increase in their numbers was not accompanied by a corresponding
improvement in their economic circumstances.

In addition, economic liberalisation and the abolition of local taxes threatened the existence
of a number of small traders whose livelihood was in the rural community. Many of them
moved to the cities or emigrated so as to avoid joining the working classes. Naturally,
specifically anti-Semitic discrimination was also instrumental, particularly in the departure of
young single Jews – both because of the difficulties associated with getting married and
setting up home in the districts of their birth, and because of their heavy tax burden.

This trend was especially marked in Bavaria, which was the source of the largest groups of
émigrés. Throughout the 19th century, a large percentage of immigrants from Germany
were young single people, and males in particular.

The German Jewish population was already extremely mobile, having either migrated
westwards from East Prussia (eg Königsberg), Poznan and Silesia (Breslau), or moved in
large numbers to the towns – this in spite of the bar on Jewish access to certain towns and
bans on large Jewish-run businesses.

The wanderings of these émigrés frequently comprised one or more stages inside Germany,
one in western Europe and Great Britain, and then one or more in North America. However,
a distinction must be made between the various German states. Jews from Bavaria,
Württemberg and the Rhineland were different in many ways from the Prussian Jews, who
were native to the former Polish territories.

Whilst Jewish emigration began as part of the general wave of emigration from Germany, it
gathered strength after 1848. In the mid-19th century, a number of European countries had
not yet emancipated their Jewish populations, and many Jews in these countries combined
reformist religious tendencies with ideals of political change.

The events of 1848 consequently raised many hopes, and the failure of their dreams of
progress led many Jews to emigrate to the United States or western Europe. In several
central European countries, the conservative backlash to the failed revolutions of 1848
meant a widespread delay of many years – lasting until 1874 – before Jews were awarded
equal rights.

Jewish emigration from Germany lasted until the end of the century, although it probably
became less significant after unification. This was partly because it went unnoticed at a time
of immigration from eastern Europe, and partly because the liberalising trends introduced in
the train of the Empire gave the Jewish people fewer reasons to leave.

France

The flow of Jewish emigration from France, too, continued throughout the 19th century,
reaching its high point immediately after the war of 1870. Bloody anti-Jewish riots had
already swept Alsace early in the 1830 revolution and again in 1832, taking the Jewish
practice of usury as a pretext. 1848 saw more violence, when the region’s latent anti-Jewish
feeling, which was held both by the population as a whole and by the clergy and local
authorities, came to a head.

47
These demonstrations, exacerbated by the Alsatian Jews’ extreme poverty, grain shortages
and the occasional actual famine, were enough to drive the Jews permanently from the
region. They had begun to settle in Lorraine and Paris from the beginning of the century.
They later settled in other regions of France as well as in Algeria, the United States and (to a
lesser degree) Belgium, where they continued, generally speaking, to work as peddlers.

When, later on, Alsace-Lorraine was annexed to the German Empire, many more Jewish
families decided to leave. Because political circumstances in France and Germany were not
conducive to their remaining, they crossed to the United States in large numbers.

Eastern Europe

Economic crises, grain shortages and political events had the effect of inflating the constant
flow of emigrants from the former Polish territories which swelled the Jewish communities in
western Europe and North America during the first two-thirds of the century. Numbers were
not comparable, however, with what they were to become after 1880.

A second migratory wave in fact began in the 1870s. It was dictated in particular by the
Lithuanian famine, the 1869 cholera epidemic in what is now Poland and other regions of
Europe, and the 1871 pogrom incited by the Greek minority in Odessa. This wave only
really reached its peak in the 1880s, and hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants
streamed to the West between that period and the eve of the first world war. They came
mostly from Russia and Austria-Hungary, but also from the slowly disintegrating Ottoman
Empire. Although some headed for western Europe, the majority settled in North America
(the United States and Canada) and South America (Argentina).

Jewish immigration grew to extraordinary proportions from 1881 in particular, when there
was a massive influx from eastern Europe.

Initially, these migrants came predominantly from Russia – more accurately, they originated
in the Pale, where more than 90% of all Russian Jews were then compelled to live. By 1900
they numbered more than five million, or half the total Jewish population world-wide.

Those arriving in Belgium, for example, were mostly from the following regions of the Tsarist
Pale: Russian Poland (primarily Warsaw, but also Lodz, Lublin and Radom), Lithuania
(Kovno), Vilno (Vilno), Grodno (Bialystok) and Ukraine (Kherson and Odessa). Jews there
had made up 36% of the total urban population, a figure which rises to 50% if the regions of
Russian Poland are excluded.

In addition to imposing military service obligations on Jews from 1827 (whereby Jewish
children were recruited for a period of 25 years, a practice that more or less ensured their
conversion) and abolishing the community’s traditional structures in 1844, the Russian rulers
used the “Temporary Laws” of 1882 effectively to discourage Jews from integrating into
Russian society and to bring about their emigration.

48
The ensuing period of discrimination was punctuated by expulsions from Moscow in 1891
and, above all, by pogroms. These took place in 1881-82 in Russia and Ukraine after the
assassination of Alexander II, in 1903 (eg at Kishinev and Gomel), in 1905 (for example
Zhitomir) and in 1906 (for exampleOdessa and Bialystok).

Jews in the historically Russian part of the Pale had themselves already been uprooted or
were descended from immigrants, since their settlement in Russia had been forced upon
them by the extreme poverty they had suffered in their masses in rural Poland during the
partitions and the Russian state’s colonisation programme beginning in the early
19th century.

Urbanisation, which came early to Russia, was given an additional boost by rural economic
upheaval and the Polish risings in the 1830s and 1860s.

The Pale and the discriminatory laws were like a straitjacket for many Jews, limiting their
social and geographic mobility. They sought in the West what they could not find in eastern
Europe, where discrimination put restrictions on their business activities and industrial
regions were mostly out of bounds. There was of course a welcome for Russian Jewish
revolutionaries in certain countries, but the main causes of Jewish emigration were anti-
Semitic violence and poverty.

There was a final wave of migration in the 1890s. It originated in the Austro-Hungarian
Empire and grew inexorably until the first world war. It included the poorest and most
traditional Jewish immigrant groups. This was especially true of those coming from Galicia.

Bohemian and Moravian Jews had in fact been among those migrating westwards ever
since the beginning of the century. They were heavily urbanised and had often been
affected by the reform, and generally more closely resembled migrants from Germany. After
1890, however, most Jewish immigrants came from Galicia (Austro-Hungarian since the
Polish partitions) and from Bukovina – the two regions of the Empire where they were most
numerous. A certain number, too, originated in Hungary.

Emigration from these regions, which were very poor and religiously still tenaciously
orthodox, came hard on the heels of that of the Russian Jews. It was caused by anti-Semitic
demonstrations, which could turn violent, and by the need to find a remedy for runaway
population growth. In Galicia, for example, the Jewish population doubled between 1857
and 1910.

But it was above all the economic boycotts suffered by the Jews and their exclusion from the
agricultural marketplace after 1893, that propelled them into poverty and encouraged them
to leave in their thousands.

From 1899 onwards – the year in which American statistics first included the category of
Hebrew – the numbers of Jewish immigrants into the United States alone were as follows.
They reveal the huge extent of the exodus.

Table: Jewish immigrants into the United States (1899-1914).

(Source: Encyclopaedia Judaica, supplements, Vol. XVI, Jerusalem, 1971, col. 1521.)

1899: 37,415
1900: 60,764
1901: 58,098
1902: 57,688
1903: 76,203
1904: 106,236

49
1905: 129,910
1906: 153,748
1907: 149,182
1908: 103,387
1909: 57,551
1910: 84,260
1911: 91,223
1912: 80,595
1913: 101,330
1914: 138,051

3. Jewish population movements after 1914

For 600 years, a low growth rate and historical adversity had combined to keep the Jewish
population world-wide at virtually the same level. Between 1100 and 1700, it had grown
from one million to 1.1 million; in the same time frame the overall world population had
doubled. Subsequently, however, the rate of increase was nothing short of spectacular: 2.5
million in 1800, 10.6 million in 1900, 16.5 million in 1939 and, in spite of the tragedy of the
Shoah, an estimated 13 million in the year 2000.

The extraordinary growth in world Jewry throughout the 19th century and until the Shoah
was closely linked to the phenomenon of emigration. Central and western Europe were
home to 500,000 Jews in 1825 but nearly 1,500,000 in 1900. During the same period in the
United States, the population grew from 10,000 to almost 1,200,000. Finally, despite the
depleting effect of emigration to the West, the Jewish population in eastern Europe
(including the Balkans) nearly trebled in the same 75 years, from 2.7 million to 7.3 million
people.

Between 1800 and 1930, a total of 4 million Jews arrived in the West from the empires of
central and eastern Europe. The Jewish community in the United States expanded from
275,000 in 1875 to 3 million in 1914. Moreover, Jews were by then to be found all over the
world.

However, the Jewish migratory trend lost momentum in the inter-war years. American-
imposed quotas (limiting Jewish immigration to a few thousand per year), followed by the
restrictive White Books policy in British-mandated Palestine, made these safe havens off-
limits at a time when the European threat was gathering strength. Just as the United States
had taken in 80% to 90% of European Jewish émigrés before 1914, between the wars
Palestine welcomed nearly one-third of their number. At the same time, the proportion of
immigrants going to other countries (especially Canada, Latin America and South Africa)
was growing considerably.

In 1939 there were just over 16 million Jews world-wide. 4.6 million were in the United
States and Canada, 420,000 in South America, 520,000 in North Africa, 150,000 in South
Africa, 450,000 in Palestine, 350,000 in Asia, 1.2 million in western Europe, 5.3 million in
eastern Europe and 3 million in the USSR. In the previous century and a half, 7.5 million
Jews had learned to call a new continent home.

50
The final decades of the shtetl

Despite the prevailing anti-Jewish climate in many parts of the region, the inter-war years
were a golden period for Jewish life in eastern Europe, where a trilingual culture (Yiddish,
Hebrew and the local language) was developing within the traditional local community or
shtetl.

When Poland regained its sovereignty after the first world war, it took its place – not without
the help of the Russian Revolution – as the focus of Jewish society in eastern Europe.
There were 3 million Jews in Poland, making it the second largest Jewish population centre
in the world. Poland was incontestably the spiritual centre of Ashkenazi Judaism, most of
whose adherents had not followed the West in adopting local patterns of behaviour. Newly
sovereign Poland was marked by a strong nationalistic movement which set out to promote
Polish ethnicity at the expense of all minorities. This meant in particular at the expense of
the Jews, who were a more obvious target than the largely peasant Slav community.

The Jewish community – whom the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer has described so well –
amounted none the less to more than 10% of the population in the early 1920s,
concentrated mostly in the least developed regions of the country – eastern Galicia,
Lithuania and Volhynia. But it was an essentially urban community in a mainly rural country
(one-third of the population of Warsaw was Jewish in 1921), and the Jews formed an
economically distinct minority whose faith, language and customs were entirely different from
those of the majority.

This is what led the Polish Government to press for the departure of the Jews, who, in
contrast with other national minorities, were frequently in competition with ethnic Poles. The
government set about its purpose by colonising regions with a small Polish population, and
by introducing clearly anti-Jewish economic and social policies. Jews were, for instance,
severely under-represented in the civil service, education and nationalised industry, and
were debarred from the traditional channels of secondary and higher education by means of
a numerus clausus quota system.

The Jewish community was penalised by high levels of taxation in the cities and by being
obliged to close their stores on two consecutive days – the shabbat and Sunday, which was
made a compulsory day of rest. Many businesses were ruined as a result. Finally,
government support for peasant co-operatives was obviously intended to strike at the Jewish
middle class. Combined with the effects of anti-Semitism, which was deep-rooted in Polish
society, these measures forced thousands of Jews to emigrate. The main exodus occurred
after the 1925 economic crisis, when Polish Jews were the majority in the fourth aliyah or
wave of immigration to Palestine.

The rise of the Jewish community in the New World

After 1880, as we have seen, the so-called “German” period of American Jewry gave way to
the “Russian” period. The Jewish community in the United States grew from 275,000 in
1875 to 3 million in 1914 and reached more than 4 million in 1939. During this time, one-
third of eastern European Jews left the region of their birth. Ninety per cent of them headed
for the United States, which thus conclusively became the largest world focus of Jewry, just
as Palestine was increasingly becoming the spiritual centre of Judaism. It was, however, in
the United States that the development of Jewish life was unsurpassed, whether in the
cultural field, in its social and religious diversity or in the role played by many Jews in
developing brand new sectors of business.

51
The European Jewish community also established itself in other New World countries. The
Jewish population of Canada grew from 15,000 to 150,000 between 1901 and 1931. In
Argentina, Jewish immigration was encouraged and made possible by the Jewish
Colonisation Association, which helped to set up agricultural settlements and assimilate
thousands of Jewish refugees from eastern Europe and the gradually disintegrating Ottoman
Empire (Turkey, the Balkans and Syria). In 1920 there were some 150,000 Jews in Latin
America, most of them in Argentina.

Jewish Palestine

Ever since 1850, Jewish farming villages had been established and new districts had
appeared in the lethargic Ottoman towns of Palestine. Settlement took place in lamentable
sanitary conditions: young Russian pioneers had to confront marshlands, malaria and
marauders. Those who followed set up socialist agricultural communities (32 kibbutzim and
moshavim between 1902 and 1914) and laid the foundations – including unions, co-
operatives and mutual insurance companies – of a society deeply infused with the ideology
of the European labour movement. It would remain predominantly socialist, both politically
and in the way it operated, from the time of the British mandate until the end of the 1970s.

In 1909, Jewish immigrants built a brand new city, Tel Aviv, on the dunes outside Jaffa.
With 40,000 inhabitants in 1931 and 135,000 in 1939, Tel Aviv was to become the economic
and political centre of the country. Between 1881 and 1939, the Jewish population of
Palestine would grow from 24,000 to 450,000, foreshadowing the extraordinary growth of
this hub of Jewish settlement in the time after Israel’s independence.

The aftermath of the first world war

Jewish life in Europe was greatly disrupted by the war, given that many Jewish homes were
located on the front lines (eg in Galicia) and hundreds of thousands of Jews were recruited
in the opposing armies.

In Russian-occupied territory, where the Jews were suspected of enemy collaboration, the
army deported 600,000 of them to the vicinity of the front. This act led to human tragedy,
economic catastrophe and famine, and its consequences would still be felt when the war
had long since ended.

After the war, Jews on both sides would have to pay the price of the fighting. In Germany
they were identified with the republican regime installed by the victorious powers, a situation
which would serve as a catalyst for the subsequent campaigns against them and their
migration to western Europe. In eastern Europe, where they were held responsible for the
war’s role in bringing a Bolshevik regime to power in Russia, 100,000 Jews died during the
anti-Bolshevik campaigns unleashed by Ukrainian, Polish and White Russian nationalists
during the 1918-1921 civil war.

The break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire

Whereas before the war it had included Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia, Transylvania,
Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, the Empire was reduced after the cessation of hostilities to
Austria alone. From then on, the Jewish communities in the newly independent states would
be organised in different ways and face separate futures.

52
For example, Hungary, the largest country to achieve independence through the Empire’s
dissolution, had a post-war Jewish population of nearly 500,000. More than 200,000 of
these were in Budapest, where 40 years earlier there had been no more than 50,000 Jews.

The fate of these Jewish communities was inextricably bound up with the destinies of the
newly independent central European states, and this in turn was to be of some importance
during the second world war. Whatever the case, in all of these countries, whether or not
they were won over by anti-Semitic feeling during the inter-war period, part of the Jewish
community would take flight for the West – once such a move became possible.

The break-up of the Ottoman Empire

Since the Congress of Berlin (1878) following the Russo-Turkish War, Serbia, Romania and
Bulgaria had all achieved independence. The most important Jewish community was that of
Romania, which already had 250,000 members at the turn of the century and grew
considerably when Greater Romania was formed directly after the war. The 750,000 Jews
living in the country in 1930 were concentrated in the north-east (Bessarabia and Moldavia).
In contempt of the agreement reached at the Congress of Berlin, the authorities refused to
emancipate the Jews, and anti-Semitism remained an important part of the political scene.

A second event was Thessaloniki’s reversion to Greece after the first Balkan war in 1912-
1913. It became a crucial border outpost for the Mediterranean Jewish world, a city which
was 50% Jewish and lay where East met West. The Jewish community in Greece, including
the annexed territories, chief of which was Thessaloniki, immediately after the first world war
amounted to 100,000 people.

Exodus from the Third Reich

As already seen, the post-1918 emigration of European Jews cannot be compared with what
emigration had been before the war, since many countries had now partially or completely
closed their borders to immigrants. Despite these restrictions, which were still in force while
the nazis were taking power in the country, the 1930s saw the start of a new wave of
emigration from Germany.

In the years after 1933, tens of thousands of Jews successfully fled Germany. Latin
America alone took in 100,000 Jewish refugees, and certain Latin American countries, such
as the Dominican Republic, were the only states openly to welcome them. During the 1930s
Great Britain accepted 90,000 mostly Jewish refugees, mainly from Germany and Austria,
but also from Czechoslovakia, Poland and Italy. They swelled the ranks of a community
whose post-war population would come to slightly more than 400,000. Between 1933 and
1941, 150,000 Jews took advantage of the United States’ preferential quota for German
émigrés to reach that country. The reverse was true for Canada, whose closed-door policy
meant that only 5,000 refugees from the Third Reich could take shelter there from the nazis.

Many refugees from Germany would consequently be unable to leave Europe before 1940,
and were thus caught in the same trap as their brothers and sisters in other parts of Europe.
One half of the Jewish community in Europe – one-third of world Jewry - would perish under
the nazi jackboots.

53
4. After the Shoah

The historical details of the Jewish genocide under nazi occupation are too well known for
them to be dealt with here. The demographic impact of the slaughter should however be
noted. There were more than 5 million victims from the following national communities in
particular: 3 million Polish Jews (from an original population of 3.25 million), 1.2 million
Soviet Jews (from 2.8 million), 350,000 Romanian Jews (from 800,000) and 300,000
Hungarian Jews (from 400,000).

Furthermore, the war meant that the distribution of European Jews was now entirely
different. A certain number returned from the displaced persons’ camps to their countries of
origin, while others emigrated (to Palestine in particular, where, since Great Britain was
strictly limiting immigration, there were 70,000 illegal immigrants). President Truman’s 1948
Displaced Persons Act gave 200,000 Jews the right to settle in the United States; it was
followed in 1953 by the Refugee Relief Act.

The Jewish community in the Americas thus grew to nearly 6 million in the post-war period
(87% of them in the United States). Whereas previously it had accounted for one third of
world Jewry, it was now fully one half of a population reduced in consequence of the Shoah.
The six-million mark has possibly been exceeded today as a result of immigration from
Israel. This is estimated, despite the low natural growth rate of the Israeli population, to
have amounted to 300,000 people in 1993.

The creation of the State of Israel

Ever since 1948, the most important receiving country for Jewish immigrants has been the
Jewish people’s national home, now a sovereign state. Between 1948 and 1990 Israel
welcomed 2 million immigrants; since 1990 more than 600,000 Jews from the former Soviet
Union have arrived in the country.

The State of Israel has been populated in a number of migratory waves. These have
decisively altered the distribution of European Jews, although less so than in the case of
Asian and North African Jews, thanks partly to the independence gained by former colonies
in North Africa.

As regards the countries of Europe, 1949-52 was the chief period of Jewish emigration to
Israel from Bulgaria (44,000) and Yugoslavia (8,000). In 1956, 20,000 Jews fled Hungary, a
number of them for Israel. None the less, 80,000 Jews remain in Hungary today. Romanian
Jews emigrated in several waves. The main wave (100,000 people) left between 1950 and
1952, and a total of 200,000 Romanian Jews arrived in Israel (and 80,000 in other countries)
between 1948 and 1960.

In addition, part of the surviving Jewish community in Poland arrived in Palestine in the anti-
Semitic days of 1946. At the same time, 150,000 returned home from the regions occupied
by the Soviet Union. 30,000 more left when Jewish organisations were dissolved in 1949,
and 70,000 between 1956 and 1959 at the time of Gomulka's liberal policy on emigration.
The anaemic Jewish population in Poland was hit by a final exodus during the anti-Jewish
crusade of 1968.

The strongest current of emigration to Israel came from countries in the Near and Middle
East. In one fell swoop, Operation “Magic Carpet” brought 50,000 Jews to Israel from
Yemen in 1949-50; Operation “Ezra and Nehemiah” transferred 120,000 Iraqi Jews in 1950-
51; 40,000 Libyan Jews emigrated en masse to Israel and Italy in 1953-54;
230,000 Moroccan and 130,000 Tunisian Jews emigrated to France and Israel in 1954 and
1955; 66,000 Jews were expelled from Egypt in 1956; Jews of Algeria emigrated at

54
independence (135,000 went to France, whose Jewish community was revitalised by their
arrival, during the summer of 1962 alone, and 15,000 went to Israel); finally, 25,000 Iranian
Jews settled in Israel after Khomeini came to power.

Let us conclude with the emigration of 30,000 Ethiopian Jews in 1984 and 1991 (in two
operations resembling the Yemeni and Iraqi transfers of 1949-51) and that of the
500-strong Albanian Jewish community in 1991. And, lastly, Soviet Jewry has been the
subject of one of the largest population movements in the post-war era. 300,000 people had
already left the USSR between 1968 and 1989 (nearly 200,000 of them for Israel); a further
600,000 plus followed after 1990. In so doing, they gave fresh meaning and energy to the
Jewish state’s role as the national home of world Jewry.

55
Gypsy migrations in Europe

by Marie-Christine Hubert

This statement was originally entitled “Gypsy migrations in Europe and their repercussions
on school life”. Since I am no expert on schooling for Gypsy groups, and since the many
ramifications of this theme make it a major subject on its own, I have decided to deal
exclusively with the first part, namely “Gypsy migrations in Europe”. However, at the end of
my talk I will go into the reality of schooling for Gypsy children in Europe and the relevant
schemes initiated by the Council of Europe.

I will not attempt to cover the whole Gypsy migration phenomenon in its entirety. As we all
know, Gypsies are the last European nomads, people who are unaffected by regional,
national or even continental boundaries. Nevertheless, contrary to certain idées reçues,
most Gypsies travel back and forth within a limited geographical area, and in France, for
instance, they often confine themselves to one or two departments. Only in certain very
special circumstances do we witness any large-scale migrations. The history of Gypsies in
Europe has been marked by three major trans-European migrations, which in fact constitute
the three main stages in the arrival of the Gypsy population in Europe. Even though the first
major migration took place in the 15th century and might therefore seem irrelevant to this
seminar, I have nevertheless decided to describe it, albeit briefly. The arrival of the first
Gypsies in Europe sparked almost immediate hostility from the native populations, especially
their leaders. This hostility took the form of widespread persecution and has informed all
relations between European States and Gypsies ever since. This is why, after five centuries
of Gypsy presence in Europe, we still find the same negative reactions as during the first two
migrations. The second continent-wide Gypsy migration took place in the second half of the
19th century when the Romanian Gypsies, who had been slaves for several centuries, were
emancipated and began to emigrate in all directions. The third migration started in
Yugoslavia in the 1960s and is still continuing.

Before getting to the heart of the matter, we should try to become better acquainted with this
multifaceted people, about which our sedentary societies still know very little.

The most common word in Europe for Gypsies is some variant of the French “Tsigane”. This
term comes from the Greek “atsingani” or “athingani”, referring to a sect in Asia Minor. It
became “cingani” in Eastern Europe, “zingari” in Italy and “Zigeuner” in Germany. It is
unclear why this name clung to them, even if the presence of Gypsies in Constantinople in
1150 is clearly attested.

In Western Europe they were at first called “Egyptians” because they claimed to be
conducting a pilgrimage to atone for the sin of apostasy after the Saracen invasion of a
region known as “Little Egypt” in the southern Peloponnese. This resulted in the word
“Gypsy” in England and “Gitanos” in Spain.

The French word “Bohémien” came from the letters of protection granted at the same period
to the caravan leaders, who were known as “Dukes or Counts of Little Egypt”, by local
princes, actually the kings of Hungary and princes of Bohemia and Poland.

The extremely pejorative names “Romani” or “Romanichel” only emerged in the 19th century,
and are probably corruptions of “Romani Tchave”, which means “Gypsy lads” in Romany.

56
The common French words “Bohémiens” and “Romanichels” are like the word “Tsigane” in
that they mean nothing to the people to whom they are applied. The words related to
“Tsigane” are extremely pejorative in Eastern Europe as they refer to the period when they
were reduced to slavery in Romania. The same applies to Germany since the second world
war. This is why the word “Rom” is used in these countries in preference to “Tsigane”.

Although there is no doubt that Romany is related to Hindi, the Gypsies have no collective
memory of a homeland in India. The reference to the sub-continent is a recent intellectual
construct. On the other hand, Gypsies often distinguish between different families by
referring to the region where they resided longest, and in fact these categories coincide with
the distribution of the dialectal variants of Romany. Gypsies differentiate between the
following groups:

Roma arriving from Central and Eastern Europe from the 13th century onwards. Many of
them appended distinguishing features to their names relating to regions, religion or
sometimes obsolete occupations: the “Kalderash”, “Lovara” and “Tchurara” Gypsies used to
be cauldron-makers, horse dealers and sieve-makers.

The “Sinti” have been in Western Europe since the 15th century. In France they call
themselves “Manouches”.

The “Gitanos” became sedentary very early on and are an integral part of the Iberian and
Southern French area. They too have been settled there since the late Middle Ages.

Travellers of Indian origin sometimes encountered local travellers who had developed an
identity, social organisation and dialect setting them apart from the surrounding populations:
the Tinkers emerged in Ireland in the 12th century, the “Quinquis” in Spain in the 14th century
and the “Yenishes” in Germany in the 17th century. A distinction is commonly drawn
between Gypsies of Indian origin and local travellers, even if there is no real consensus on
this distinction.

These different groups referred to as Gypsies have widely varying customs. However, they
do have a number of common features: their language, Romany, even though this language
is made up of different dialects peculiar to each group1, and their irresistible wanderlust,
even if 95% of Gypsies have now become more or less sedentary. Lastly, their cultural is an
oral one, which explains the difficulties historians face in tracing their history. They are very
different from the usual ethnic groups in that they have no specific religion and no country
with which to identify or claim affiliation. People have been trying to define “Gypsy” since
time immemorial, in vain. They are defined not by what they have in common but rather by
what sets them apart from others, the “natives”, the “locals”, “settled people”, “landlords”,
“Gachos”. At the end of the day, a Gypsy is someone who considers himself as a Gypsy.

Gypsy history is still dotted with grey areas. The heated debate on their origins among
scientists in the 19th century is as topical as ever. The hypothesis that is most commonly
accepted because confirmed by linguistics is that Gypsies originated in north-western India2.
In the early centuries AD this region was coveted by several small kingdoms aspiring to
southward expansion, and was finally conquered by Persia in the 3rd century AD. According
to Donald Kenrick, who has written several books on Gypsies, between 250 and 650 AD
various tribes emigrated to Persia either of their own free will or under coercion, where they

1. These dialects have a common basis, Romany, enriched with vocabulary from the countries where
the Gypsies have lived or are living.
2.. Donald Kenrick, “Les Tsiganes de l’Inde à la Méditerranée”, Gypsy Research Centre, CRDP Midi-
Pyrénées, 1994, p. 63.

57
lived on the fringes of society. They apparently retained their Hindu religion until they came
into contact with Christianity and Islam. The Arab conquest of Persia drove some Gypsy
groups to resume progress north- and westwards, around the year 750 AD. Nevertheless, it
is unlikely that there was any mass exodus: the tribes seem to have emigrated in small
groups over many years.

There is no real certainty about Gypsy history prior to their arrival in Western Europe in the
15th century. The ethnologist Alain Reyniers considers this as the first major Gypsy
migration. They appeared in Germany in 1407, France in 1419, the Netherlands in 1420,
Italy in 1422 and Spain in 1425. They reached the British Isles, the Nordic countries and
Russia at the beginning of the 16th century. Gypsies arrived in Africa and the Americas
primarily after deportations in the 17th century by the Spanish and Portuguese, and then by
the British and French authorities.

When groups of Gypsies arrived in a given area they usually moved on fairly quickly, and
there were major population movements throughout Europe until the early 16th century.
Different groups merged, rather clounding the issue. Then the movements slowed down and
travelling decreased in scope. Nonetheless, it would appear that some groups reduced or
discontinued migration very early on, inter alia for economic reasons, in both the towns and
the countryside.

Persecution of Gypsies began in the 16th century. Jean-Pierre Liégeois, sociologist and
Director of the Gypsy Research Centre, says that three different policies were implemented:
exclusion, reclusion and inclusion. “Bursting in upon societies which the State was
attempting to organise and control, these nomads “without hearth or home” soon promoted
suspicion, fear and rejection in local communities rooted in areas with close and closed
horizons. Despite their small numbers, they became a matter of concern to peasants and
princes, churches and guilds. In response to the general demand, stringent measures were
taken to expel incoming groups of Gypsies, and this initially sporadic rejection quickly
became an affair of state, with Royal declarations and edicts collectively condemning
Gypsies and banishing them on pain of corporal punishment. Such overall rejection of
Gypsies usually began shortly after the arrival of the first families. The local populations had
no means of defining these new arrivals. Confused by their unclassifiable dress, language,
lifestyle and dealings, , sedentary society very quickly constructed a sinister, repugnant
image of Gypsies, inspiring and later justifying action against them. This image combined
sorcery, banditry and propagation of diseases, and a gullible and easily frightened
community soon came to see Gypsies as eternally damned.”

The policy of exclusion (banishment, various prohibitions and punishments such as branding
and hanging) had a dreadful impact on the Gypsies themselves but was only mildly effective
for the State. This is why the policy of exclusion gradually turned into a policy of “reclusion”,
which was synonymous with the authoritarian and violent integration of Gypsies into the
surrounding community. From the late 15th century onwards Spain implemented such a
policy, requiring Gypsies to find a trade and a master and prohibiting them from travelling in
groups. In 1783 King Charles III ordered them to “settle, abandon the garb, tongue and
customs of the so-called Gypsies on pain of branding, and for the more refractory,
execution”. The policy of inclusion, which was to come into its own in the second half of the
20th century, consisted in considering Gypsies as outcasts or misfits posing social or
psychological problems and endeavouring to assimilate them.

All these policies ended in failure because Gypsies have an extraordinary ability to adapt to
all situations and have continued to do so for centuries without ever losing their identify.

Persecution was not the only factor that drove Gypsies on to the roads in search of friendlier
climes. They have also invariably been among the first to suffer in unsettled periods, when

58
they are often used as scapegoats and are at severe risk, and during economic crises, when
they are particularly vulnerable. The migrations also result from trading practices which
necessitate door-to-door sales techniques and from the social obligation to reunite families
which are scattered over wide areas but have a sense of belonging to the same group.

Despite all this, the second major Gypsy migration did not take place until the 19th century.

This east-west migration began in the 1850s and ended just before the first world war. The
shift took place in several successive waves thanks to the abolition of slavery in the
Romanian principalities of Moldavia and Valachia, after five centuries of Gypsy servitude.
The Gypsies had been Crown property in these two principalities since the 14th century. The
princes could use them as they wished, often giving them away to monasteries and noble
families.

This situation remained unchanged until the 1848 Romanian Revolution, when a host of
students came back from the West fervently supporting the liberal ideas circulated by the
anti-slavery movement. They were joined by enlightened nobles such as Alexander Ghika
and the Golescu brothers. The 1848 Revolution in Valachia officially proclaimed the
abolition of slavery. However, when the Danubian principalities were jointly occupied by
Russia and Turkey, slavery was reintroduced. On 22 December 1855 the Romanian
nationalist Gregory Ghika finally pushed through the Emancipation Act in Moldavia, and
Valachia followed suit shortly afterwards.

In the Danubian provinces, Gypsies retained their personal servitude status until 1865.
Once they had regained their freedom the Gypsies headed westwards, pulling the Hungarian
and Bosnian Roma along in their wake. Around the same time, in 1850 and then again in
1971, the “Manouches” and “Yenishes” left Alsace-Lorraine to spread throughout France.
Simultaneously, groups of Sinti set out from Piedmont for France and Belgium. In the first
quarter of the 19th century families already settled in Sweden, Austria, Finland and
elsewhere established lines in France. Alongside these shifts, the socio-economic context
drove many sedentary groups on to the roads, which increased the number of travellers.
This second migration ended just before the first world war with the westward migration of
the Kalderash from Romania via Russia.

This large-scale immigration, even if we do not know its exact size, had almost immediate
effects on Gypsies living in western Europe. However, it was their high profile rather than
their large numbers that drew the public authorities’ attention to them. Gypsies seemed
ubiquitous because of their itinerancy, and the sedentary population imagined them
everywhere. In France, the arrival of these Gypsies as completely unknown quantities was
particularly noticeable in the countryside, where they alarmed the public authorities. The
main effect of the migration was the publication of the Law of 16 July 1912 on hawkers and
the movement of nomads. Gypsies, henceforth referred to by the French Government as
nomads, were required to carry an anthropometrical record card containing the holder’s civil
status particulars, especially his or her physical characteristics and fingerprints, measures
which had previously only been used for criminal files. Furthermore, they had to have this
record card stamped every time they moved. This Law was aimed not only at identifying all
itinerants, particularly Gypsies, but also at reducing nomadism through coercive measures.
The existence of these files on nomads had tragic results during the second world war. In
April 1940 the legilsation permitted the French authorities to subject Gypsies to compulsory
residence orders in April 1940, and in October 1940 the Germans began interning them in
camps. However, I should point out that, paradoxically, it was thanks to this legislation that
many French Gypsies escaped deportation, which was synonymous with extermination.
France was not the only country to adopt measures against Gypsies. Between 1898 and
1907 such countries as Switzerland, Belgium and Bavaria took steps to expel them from
their territory. In Germany Gypsies attracted attention not only from the authorities but also

59
from racial theorists, who at the time were debating the influence of race on social
phenomena and consequently the existence of various different races. Gypsies were
naturally included in this debate, especially since linguists, anthropologists and folklorists
were discussing whether or not this group belonged to the Indo-European race. Between
1850 and 1930 these specialists effected “a sort of shameful incorporation (of Gypsies) into
Aryanism, but were careful to make a separate category of ideally pure Gypsies, even
though the latter were untraceable in the huge mass of half-castes camping on the edges of
the cities”1. The scientists were not alone in dealing with the Gypsy question. From the
1860s onwards the law enforcement agencies systematically denounced the “Gypsy
scourge”, as it was called in Germany. They advocated draconian measures to monitor and
control the movements of a population suspected of sedition because of its itinerant habits.
Much more was at stake than the traditional desire to control Gypsy nomadism. Right from
the inception of the Reich Gypsies were regarded as both nomads and foreigners.

“The public authorities used them to impose the idea of national unity and to legitimate the
need for a centralised police force, which the State saw as one of the most important
instruments of its authority. Where Gypsies were concerned, unlike the case of anti-
Semitism, society was not the primary force behind discrimination and exclusion but the
State itself: it played a decisive role by continually drafting special legislation and using the
exclusion of Gypsies as a means of achieving its own unity”.2

Gypsies thus found themselves at the centre of a debate that did not in fact concern them,
namely the construction and affirmation of a German nation-state. The new empire was
made up of 25 states and a whole series of national minorities requiring unification.
Stigmatisation of Jews and Gypsies contributed to such unification by uniting the German
people against them. The fight against the “Gypsy scourge” helped the Reich to unite in
political and policing terms. A few years later the Gypsy people were deprived of their Aryan
status, which helped affirm the German national identity.

Having been systematically recorded on registers and files since the beginning of the
century, German Gypsies, whether nomadic or sedentary, became the Nazis’ second
favourite target after the Jews. As soon as Hitler came to power all nomads were packed
into Gypsy camps, and sedentary Gypsies, who were regarded as anti-social elements, were
interned in concentration camps. This persecution culminated in December 1942, when
Heinrich Himmler ordered the deportation of all Gypsies from Germany, and in 1943 all
Gypsies from the occupied territories, to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. Unlike
the Jews, Gypsies were not selected on arrival but rounded up into “Zigeunerlager” or
“Familienlager”, where they died of hunger, disease or the medical pseudo-experimentation
of Doctor Mengele. Some 19 000 Gypsies were deported to Auschwitz in 1943 and 2 200
before summer 1944. It is now estimated that between 250 000 and 300 000 Gypsies were
murdered throughout Europe during the second world war.

However, these tragic events had not the least effect on the centuries-old social tendency to
segregate Gypsies in society. In western Europe they were increasingly banned from
camping, and the eastern communist regimes denounced them as parasites, long wavering
between a policy of assimilation by forced settlement under the guise of “social integration”
and a policy of ethnic segregation. Of course, Gypsy poverty was to gradually disappear as
the group integrated into the socialist production system, and so the new leaders
concentrated particularly on them. Romanian Gypsies were among the first to work in the

1. Henriette ASSEO: “Contrepoint: La question tsigane dans les camps allemands”, Annales ESC,
May-June 1993, No. 3, p. 570.

2. Herbert HEUSS, op. cit., p. 22.

60
collective farms. In Bulgaria special schools were provided for them, and their leaders were
represented in Parliament and at all levels of economic life.

Conversely, Gypsy culture was negated, and nomadism universally prohibited. In the Soviet
Union, 1956 legislation outlawed nomadism and required local authorities to provide
employment for itinerant Gypsies. From 1958 onwards violent methods were used to
forcibly settle Gypsies in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. Nomadism was prohibited in
Romania in 1962, even though twenty years on 30% of Gypsies still have a nomadic
lifestyle. Nevertheless, social emancipation did not prevent ethnic marginalisation. Many
villagers pointed the finger at Gypsies who continued with crafts or trades traditionally
associated with nomads, even if they had lived locally for decades. Many Gypsies were
employed in unskilled, low-prestige occupations. Owing to forced settlement in specially
assigned areas, locals came to regard Gypsies as an alien group that could never be
integrated. They were therefore the first to suffer in times of economic recession. To be
perceived as a Gypsy was often to be suspected of anti-social behaviour, and in practical
terms to be excluded from the labour market.

Broadly speaking, for all the government efforts to integrate Gypsies, very few of them ever
became social achievers. The Gypsy population suffered several levels of marginalisation:
high fertility rate, high mortality rate, an age structure with 50% more young than old people,
and serious health problems owing to lack of hygiene, malnutrition and a lifestyle exposed to
wind and weather. Gypsies were increasingly concentrated in the lesser-developed regions.
Alain Reyniers speaks of “the failure of an integration policy which overlooked the
importance of prejudice in inter-ethnic relations and on the labour market and rejected the
significance of culture”1.

The third wave of Gypsy migration came in three stages from the communist-bloc countries.
From 1945 to 1960 the phenomenon was marginal. Gypsy migrations were prompted by
border changes after the second world war. Slovenian Roma from Istria chose to remain in
Italy when the Venezia Giulia region was made over to Yugoslavia in 1945. Muslim Roma
fled the civil war in Greece and settled in Bulgaria. From 1946 onwards in Czechoslovakia,
Gypsies migrated from agricultural Slovakia to the industrial areas of Bohemia as part of the
resettlement of territory previously occupied by the Sudeten Germans.

The more intensive second phase began in 1960 and ended in 1980. It mainly concerned
Yugoslav Gypsies migrating in their thousands to Austria, Germany, Italy and France for
economic reasons. The migration was initially illegal, but in 1965 the Yugoslav State began
regulating it by relaxing passport legislation and allowing certain specially authorised
Yugoslav workers to be recruited abroad. From 1970 onwards Yugoslav citizens could
travel around western countries with an ordinary three-month tourist visa.

Gypsies left the poorer regions of Serbia, Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina to become
immigrant workers. Some left the country with employment contracts in their pockets, while
others did not. As in the case of most economic emigrants from Yugoslavia, the aim was not
to leave the country for good but to earn enough money in the west to keep their families in
Yugoslavia. This meant that most of the Gypsies emigrating were young men hoping to
secure temporary paid employment or a more traditional occupation in music or tinkering.
However, as new financial needs emerged the men were forced to return to the west. This
time they were accompanied by their spouses and planned to work longer in the host
country, leaving their children at home to be looked after by their grandparents.
Nevertheless, more often than not the families were eventually reunited in the host
countries. Gypsy women began to engage in freelance work alongside their husbands’ paid

1. “Etudes Tsiganes”, p. 84.

61
employment. Such families gradually merged into the fairly well-integrated immigrant
population.

In the late 1970s Bosnian Roma, who were also known as “XoraXane” (Turks or Muslims)
arrived in France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium, often via Italy. As illegal
immigrants, these Gypsies begged for a living and became involved in petty crime. They
frequently returned to their country of origin, with which they never lost contact.

The third immigration phase began in the early 1980s, intensified with the collapse of the
communist regimes and is still under way. It involves an increasing number of asylum-
seekers who come primarily from Yugoslavia, Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. More
recently, there has been an upsurge in more overtly economic emigrations to Turkey and
around south-eastern Europe in general.

Broadly speaking, the economic and social problems facing Gypsies in central and eastern
Europe worsened in the 1980s. The resurgence of nationalism and the economic crisis that
accompanied the changes of regime in eastern Europe gave free rein to accumulated
resentments and tensions and severely affected the weaker members of society.

In 1987 thousands of Roma began migrating from Macedonia to Germany, where they
hoped for a better standard of living in terms of housing, education, status and employment.
Pending the final decision on their fate they were authorised to work and granted a minimum
allowance. They were very soon joined by Gypsies from the other Yugoslav republics to
form a group of 10 000 individuals hoping for a better life. However, since they had no
papers or visas, few qualifications and little evidence of any real infringement of their political
rights, they were very soon threatened with expulsion. Some Länder, such as North Rhine-
Westphalia, funded their return and reintegration in their home countries. Some Gypsy
leaders reacted by arguing that owing to their nomadic culture the Roma had no real
“homeland” apart from Europe, and that they had a collective right to settle wherever they
felt the urge1.

In 1990 the emigration of Macedonian Roma was reactivated by the economic crisis. They
were accompanied by Roma from Kosovo, who were bearing the brunt of the fighting
between the Serbs and Albanians. The war in Bosnia also drove many Gypsies on to the
road. Some 30 000 Gypsies from Bosnia as well as Serbia carrying passports with tourist
visas reportedly sought refuge in Austria within the space of one year. In Western Europe
these refugees in search of a host country embark on a “European tour with disillusionment
awaiting them at each new stage in the journey”.

In the early 1990s they were joined by Czech, Hungarian and Polish Gypsies. At the same
time the Gypsy populations of all the east European countries headed west in search of
improved living conditions.

In autumn 1989 the advent of democracy and the resultant relaxation of border controls in
Bulgaria triggered Gypsy emigration to Germany, Benelux and Scandinavia. A small
number of Kalderash Roma “took advantage of family links with Yugoslav Roma from the
same ethnic group to move to the west”2. In fact, most of these Bulgarian Gypsies were
stopped at the German border and accommodated in camps in Poland or Czechoslovakia
(where they did not need visas). Those that did reach Germany engaged in informal trading
activities. Once their application for asylum was dismissed they returned to Bulgaria with

1.
Alain REYNIERS, “Migrations Tsiganes contemporaines”, “Hommes et Migrations”, Paris, No. 1205,
January-February 1997, p. 20.

1. p. 22.

62
sufficient resources to subsist. Other Gypsies are now effecting seasonal migrations to work
on the black market, usually in the Greek, Cypriot and Turkish building industries.

Furthermore, 50 000 of the total population of 80 000 Polish Gypsies have allegedly
managed to enter Germany, Scandinavia and the United States of America.

Romanian Gypsies began emigrating to France in 1981 and 1982, resuming in 1987, but it
was after the collapse of the Ceauescu regime in 1989 that this new migration wave came
to the fore, particularly in the media. Gypsy migrants accompanied a whole host of
Romanian refugees, many of them ethnic Germans or Hungarians, heading for western
Europe. A few thousand Gypsies settled in the outskirts of the major towns and cities in
Germany and France. In Nanterre in the suburbs of Paris a huge makeshift camp
accommodated between 800 and 1 000 individuals until it was dismantled in 1995. All these
Gypsies were seeking political asylum. Germany and France reacted by issuing expulsion
orders and arranging for them to be repatriated in Romania. Some of them came back some
time later or else continued their peregrinations to Spain or Portugal. Hungary, which was
where Gypsies were expelled from Germany and Czechoslovakia, also took steps to monitor
and expel such immigrants in October 1990. Austria introduced a visa requirement for
tourists from Romania and Turkey, and has expelled 7 000 asylum-seekers after rejecting
their applications. Poland, which is a major transit country for Romanians attempting to
enter Germany, has reintroduced the visa requirement and made it compulsory to change
ten dollars into Polish currency every day. Between 1989 and 1991 Germany took in an
estimated 21 000 Romanian Gypsies. On 24 September 1992 the German and Romanian
Ministers of the Interior signed an agreement providing for the general “return to each of the
signatory countries of any of their nationals whose right of asylum has been dismissed by
the co-signatory country, even where there is doubt about their nationality”1. Between
November 1992 and 1996 over 3 500 Romanians were officially expelled. This figure is
contested by anti-racist associations, which claim that three times as many individuals, the
great majority of them Gypsies, have in fact been expelled from Germany. More and more
clandestine immigrants are being turned back at borders, though this does not discourage
unsuccessful asylum-seekers from applying to other countries. Most Gypsies from east
European countries claim that their living conditions have deteriorated since the collapse of
the communist regimes. Despite their large numbers (almost 3 million), the Roma are in a
very insecure position in Romania. The social and human rights of many of theses Gypsies
are reportedly systematically flouted. Ultra-nationalist political movements aided by a
section of the media are fanning the flames of anti-Gypsy agitation. There is indeed
discrimination, but there is no overt political persecution, which is why applications for
asylum submitted by Gypsies are usually rejected.

Gypsies from the Czech Republic have recently been migrating to western Europe and even
further afield. Most of them are sedentary and suffer constant discrimination not only in
seeking employment and accommodation but also in gaining admittance to certain public
places. According to the authorities, some twenty individuals, mostly of Roma origin, have
been killed as a result of racial hatred, though the NGOs claim that the figure is closer to 30.
In summer 1997, after a television report on the wonderful life awaiting Gypsy immigrants in
Australia, hundreds of families sold up and left. Others headed for the United Kingdom,
where they were turned back and were stranded for months in Calais. They eventually
returned home.

In addition to this east-west migration, some Gypsies have begun migrating from the east to
the south-east. Many Romanian Gypsies settle in Bulgaria or develop some kind of

2. p. 25.

63
commercial relations with Turkey. Others apparently find seasonal work in northern Greece.
Albanian Gypsies have also developed some trade links with Turkey.

The westward drift of all these Gypsies took place against the background of mass migration
by minority ethnic groups to States such as Germany and Hungary that provided them with
protection. There were three main incentives for Gypsies to leave their places of origin:
escaping ethnic discrimination against themselves or their families, making money with the
intention of returning home, and escaping total pauperisation without any intention of
returning.

It is estimated that between 200 000 and 280 000 Gypsies have migrated east-west since
the 1960s. Most of them have settled in the countries bordering on the former eastern bloc
(some 170 000 in Germany, Austria and Italy). While this is a very sizeable migration, it
must be seen in the context of a broader migration of inhabitants of the former communist
countries. Since the political and economic situation in these countries is still far from
stabilised, we can assume that this migratory flow will continue for the foreseeable future.

The main consequence of this latest Gypsy migration wave has been to remind Europeans,
particularly in the west, that these people exist, and that they exist in very insecure
conditions in virtually every European country.

Following these three major Gypsy migration waves, which in fact constituted the three
major stages in the settlement of the Gypsy people in Europe, they have obtained different
statuses in different European States. In 1985 Gypsies were granted national minority
status in Bosnia, and Macedonia followed suit seven years later. With the collapse of the
communist regimes, other Gypsy communities also acquired national minority status, namely
in Slovakia, Romania and Hungary. This status has given Gypsies access to the Council of
Europe, an organisation that is determined to defend their political, economic, social and, for
the first time, cultural rights.

For centuries the policies implemented with regard to Gypsies and Travellers negated their
culture and their very existence as individuals and as a group. These policies were
conducted in many different forms (from exclusion to assimilation) and under terrible
conditions. All Gypsy communities are profoundly marked by difficult existential conditions.
Throughout Europe, the various forms of rejection still dominate relations between Gypsies
and their immediate environment: housing problems, ill health, expulsion of nomads and
exclusion from public places. Tension quickly turns to conflict, especially in periods of
economic difficulties and unemployment. The result is harsh treatment and constant
insecurity for the Gypsy community. The picture in terms of educational policy is the same
as for overall policies, which means that intercultural education will involve developing a
general intercultural policy.

Whatever the status of Gypsies in the different European countries, all the educational
policies adopted so far have failed. A survey conducted in the mid-1980s by the Gypsy
Research Centre at the request of the European Commission revealed that only 30% to 40%
of Gypsy children attended school with any degree of regularity, that over half never
attended and that a very low percentage reached, let alone completed, secondary school.
Adult illiteracy often exceeded 50%, soaring to 80% or virtually 100% in some places.
Gypsies had always been suspicious of schools because they symbolised acculturation, but
nowadays, with their serious identity crisis, they have realised that schools are their only
hope if they want to preserve their Gypsy identity.

Since the late 1980s the problems of schooling for Gypsies have been discussed at the
European level, and particularly in the Council of Europe. In 1984 the European Parliament
adopted two resolutions drawing attention to the difficult living conditions facing Gypsy

64
communities. The first was the Resolution of 16 March 1984 on the education of children
with parents of no fixed abode, in which the Parliament invited the European Commission to
co-operate with member States and devise measures to ensure that such children receive
suitable education. The second was the Resolution of 24 May 1984 on the situation of
Gypsies in the European Community, in which the Parliament recommended that the
governments of member States co-ordinate their approaches and urged the Commission to
develop subsidised programmes on Community loans with a view to improving the situation
of Gypsies without destroying their cultural values. On 22 May 1989 the Council and the
Ministers of Education adopted a Resolution on the schooling of Gypsy and traveller
children, setting out a series of actions that might enable member States to improve
schooling conditions for Gypsy children and asking the Commission to ensure the necessary
stimulation, co-ordination, documentation and evaluation. From 1990 onwards, especially in
1991, a series of activities was developed: pilot projects (Gypsy school ombudsmen, remote
teaching, educational material, secondary education, transition from school to working life,
etc), publications, databases, work in the history and language fields and a newsletter. This
new approach to schooling for Gypsies is still in its infancy. In his work “Minorité et scolarité:
le parcours tsigane” published in 1997, Jean-Pierre Liégeois, Director of the Gypsy
Research Centre, pointed out that despite the extensive action taken and the new
awareness of the problem, the disastrous picture mentioned above unfortunately still
applied.

We might conclude by saying that Gypsies have just reached a decisive phase in their long
history. For the first time, thanks to the mediation of the Council of Europe, they have an
opportunity to participate in constructing their own future. This is a vital issue, because their
very survival is at stake.

65
From multiculturalism to interculturalism: the impact on schools

by Alberto Gabbiadini

“You can tear a man away from his country but you cannot
tear that country from a man’s heart” Dos Passos)

“It’s one thing to live in Africa but another to live outside Africa
and have Africa living in your soul” (Henri Lopez, Deputy Director for Africa at Unesco)

Marcel Mauss defined any social phenomenon by which it was possible to gauge how
society as a whole functioned as a “total social phenomenon”.

In its present forms, immigration can be regarded as a mirror of society which, though it
sometimes magnifies and distorts reality, reflects the social, cultural and political function
and characteristics of society as a forum for the social interaction of individuals and their
integration into the society where they are hoping to find a place.

1. The role of immigration

In the 1950s and 1960s immigration was intended primarily as an economic regulator
providing extra unskilled labour.

It was regarded as a temporary economic solution enabling industry – particularly the coal
industry – to expand and meet post-war energy needs.

To cater for the immigrants’ presence, changes were made to some aspects of social
provision such as the social security system and family benefits.

Subsequently, growing needs, economic and social changes and a steep fall in the birth rate
made immigration a structural necessity.

Alfred Sauvy’s report throws some light on these matters. The report, commissioned by the
Government to pinpoint Wallonia’s economic weaknesses, highlighted two major
deficiencies: the first was the ageing coal industry, the second the ageing population. It
recommended a radical economic reorganisation, the closure of the coal pits and the
reunion of immigrant workers with their wives and children.

Since then immigration has become a structural response to the country’s problems,
stabilising families. What was at first a temporary solution has become permanent and now
forms an integral part of the social fabric.

Since then, entire sectors of the economy have been occupied by immigrant workers: the
steel and metal industries, the textile industry, the construction sector, quarrying, services
and the entire tertiary sector.

Thanks to their school education, some immigrants hold important posts in the private sector
(banking, insurance, self-employed work, the professions, etc.) while waiting to be given
wider access to posts in the public services.

With the modernisation of equipment, company reorganisation and the emergence of new
technologies, an increasingly highly-skilled workforce is now required. And second and
subsequent generation immigrants are preparing to meet the challenge.

66
2. Changes in behaviour

Alongside these economic changes, there has been a change in behaviour and mentalities.

a) Immigrants themselves not only stay but put down roots in the host country: evidence
of this is the presence of children from immigrant families in primary schools, in lower
vocational and technical schools and, increasingly, in upper secondary schools and
at university.

Political events and the economic situation in certain countries, the demand for
improved living standards and the education of children have drastically modified
historical, individual and group fundamentals.

For example, the increase in mixed marriages is now a decisive factor for social and
cultural change.

In addition, ageing is reproducing the same age structure as in the population in

general.

b) Immigrant communities have become more diversified.

The first immigrants were from the Ardennes and from Flanders, then came
Russians, Poles and Italians.

After the war, there was a massive influx of Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese. The
1970s saw the arrival of the Moroccans and Turks, and in recent years there have
been refugees: Vietnamese, Latin Americans, Ghanaians, Pakistanis, Iranians,
Africans, Bosnians, Kurds and Kosovans.

The presence of culturally, socially and religiously distinct ethnic groups in the same
country is now a growing phenomenon.

Different national or even regional affiliations and their accompanying cultural,

religious and sometimes political tensions enhance and bring to the fore new social
and cultural phenomena, for example:

- the problem of Islam and fundamentalism;

- dictatorships, etc.;

- smells which prompt aversion (Arab cooking …);

- customs: Ramadan and the slaughtering of sheep; in cemeteries, a sacred

area for Muslims.

c) The economic crisis and its consequences in the form of unemployment, crime,
violence, factory closures, globalisation, business relocation, and the State budget
deficit, have created problems for all institutions (e.g. municipalities, schools,
associations for continuing education, etc.) and given rise to racism, social
deprivation and marginalisation.

It has led to a deterioration of social relations in the major urban agglomerations

which do not have enough social and educational infrastructure: youth centres,

67
 meeting places, sports clubs, adventure playgrounds (e.g. riots involving young
people in the suburbs).

It is tempting to look for scapegoats. They can be found easily in the most fragile,
disadvantaged and vulnerable social groups (young immigrants).

d) Other factors are:

- increasing human mobility contributing to social and cultural change: travel is

educating young people and cultural exchanges and gatherings of young
people from different countries are reducing distances and bringing people
closer together.

- the influence of the mass media with their potential for the widespread
dissemination of information, messages and forms of social behaviour (e.g. the
invasion of American culture via television series, etc.)

- technological advances in communications: television, telephone, mobile

telephones (GSM), the Internet, aeroplanes, high-speed trains, etc.

- tourism as an economic factor, but also as a disturbance of people’s way of life,

local customs and culture.

MacDonalds and Coca Cola are everywhere. Even in Kinshasa there is a Swiss
restaurant serving fondue and raclette.

Tourism is a double-edged sword: it can be conducive to relaxation, recreation,

personal development, fulfilment of individual potential through exchange,
thought, discovery, creativity, the opening of hearts and minds, etc. or it can
lead to the destruction of ancestral customs and traditions by introducing “our”
modernity and our so-called values.

- the emergence of cultural trends among young people from immigrant families:
theatre, film, music, song, fashion, painting, folk traditions, etc. and street
culture (e.g. rap, tag, pop, etc.).

- in schools, the arrival of pupils from an immigrant background causes problems

in the education system, particularly as regards the relationship between
different types of behaviour (involving pupils, teachers, psychologists, heads,
etc.) Changing one component upsets the balance in the system, as the
behaviour of each member of the school is closely tied up with that of all the
others. In this case, the pupils reveal the poor functioning of the system but are
not the source of all the difficulties.

e) Mixed marriages

The steady rise in the number of mixed marriages (nearly 10% per year) is definitely
becoming an ever more decisive social factor, especially because of the children
born afterwards.

As immigration has been halted – except for refugees – the problem of interbreeding
has become more important than problems caused by immigration itself. Young
people were born in the country, educated in it (sometimes badly) and have not
discovered their identity. They (may) even have three identities – the identity of their
family, the identity instilled in them by school and their personal identity which is the

68
 product of their own experience. The future lies in interbreeding, as Léopold Sédar
Senghor once said.

3. Cursory observations

These somewhat cursory observations show that:

a. in our midst there are “foreign” people, or people who can be regarded as such
because they have different ethnic characteristics, who live, work and make plans for
the future: there is only one race, and that is the human race, but there are different
ethnic groups.

b. this situation is set to last and it will develop still further to make our society a multi-
coloured society which we can also describe as plural, multicultural or polycultural.
European integration is founded on multiculturalism. (cf. L’Europe multiraciale,
Document Observateur no.4, Jan./Feb 1989).

c. the situation is or is becoming a problem. The presence of immigrants is becoming a

subject of debate, dispute or even confrontation (e.g. at local elections, in the French
presidential elections, in the publications of Pierre-André Targuieff such as his 1988
book La force du préjugé (The Power of Prejudice) in which he rejects the right to be
different, and of Emmanuel Todd who argues in his 1995 essay Le destin des
immigrés (The fate of immigrants) that acquiescence in Republican values is the only
possible future for immigration.

There is therefore a pressing need to get away from the picture of immigration
painted in newspapers and to make it the subject of an in-depth appraisal with no
taboos or prejudices.

d. if politicians fail to act, there is a risk that the situation will develop in an unwelcome
direction.

Action must be specifically geared to overcoming the failings of current policies and
to seeking the attainment of objectives focusing on values such as harmonious
coexistence, peace accompanied by respect for people’s identities, freedom and
solidarity between different social groups.

Otherwise, we run the risk of reinventing South Africa’s apartheid or separate

development system and of recreating the ghettos (we all know what happened to
the ghettos of Warsaw, former Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Israel, Palestine and all
other attempts at ethnic cleansing).

For anyone with an educational role, there follows a fundamental question:

What type of society and what kind of education can cater properly for such
complexity?

4. Interculturalism, a choice of society

Certain words reflect certain social and cultural options and shape the solutions proposed to
cater for and organise the presence of existing cultural communities (formerly referred to as
immigrant communities).

These words are adaptation, assimilation, incorporation and integration. Adopting or

rejecting one word or the other is tantamount to announcing the ideological, practical or

69
theoretical preconceptions we have regarding the presence of minority ethnic groups. It
reflects a vision of society and in particular the value and the meaning attached to the
relationships that may be established between different communities.

e.g. the theories extolled by the right and the extreme-right during the French presidential
election campaign: the hegemony of the culture of the French identity, national preference,
national identity.

The new racism of the extreme-right according to which the cultures of non-European
communities are incomplete and pollute our European culture. The supposed inequality of
races and cultural differences are highlighted in order to reinforce the argument that
immigrants cannot be assimilated.

Whether we like it or not, the interplay of different cultures has become a part of history
which assumes that claims to hegemony and cultural superiority are transcended.

All cultures have their own characteristics and as such they are worthy of respect because
they serve as vehicles for values which have enabled various social groups to plan and
organise society and the social context, forms of action and interaction, social attitudes and
the words that express them, knowledge and the means of transmitting it, beliefs and their
symbols and the rules and standards which govern life in society.

Multiculturalism, meaning the diversity of cultures, shows itself to be a potential opportunity

for enrichment:

- when prejudice, the elitist management of culture, racism and xenophobia are
overcome;

- and when the desire and the will exist to work seriously towards coexistence and
intercultural dialogue.

a. A choice of society

This choice consists in managing multiculturalism and moving towards

interculturalism as an idea of conviviality and interaction between coexisting social
groups.

Therefore, taking as its basis the cultural pluralism which already exists in society (a
pluralism which is confined to the juxtaposition of cultures and entails only the
highlighting of the values of ethnic groups), it establishes a new cultural synthesis, a
new pattern of social organisation.

b. Interculturalism is an option

Interculturalism is not a science in itself but a project which requires an in-depth

analysis of the situation with the support of anthropology, psychology, educational
theory, economics, history, politics and environmental sciences.

Interculturalism rejects the syncretism or melting-pot approach which results in

confusion of different cultural models with the consequence that individual identities
are lost.

c. It is a dynamic view of the social context as a whole which stems from the fact that
contemporary society is constantly changing and tends to draw different cultural
worlds closer together in time and in space.

70
 It is an ongoing quest for ideas

This new cultural synthesis presupposes that original approaches will be devised on
the basis of different cultures and be grafted onto the base culture to strengthen and
renew it.

Hence, priority is given to communication, interaction, discussion, contact and

creative exchange while respecting differences and individual identities.

This implies two basic prerequisites:

- an objective prerequisite, namely the recognition of equal rights for everyone,

social rights, occupational rights, cultural rights and political rights.

- a subjective prerequisite reflected in a deliberate desire to find solutions which

are harmonious, balanced, respectful and enriching for everyone, and cover the
entire social and cultural context, for example housing, health, schools, customs,
the neighbourhood environment, religion, media, meeting places, information,
the question of the veil, and burials.

It is the desire to live together and consult one another and negotiate on all
aspects of everyday life.

e.g. – In April in New Caledonia, the white New Caledonians and the Kanaks,
who had always been in conflict, finally began to show a willingness to run their
country together.

- 12th-century Cordoba was an outstanding focus of the cultural history of

humankind, the climax of four centuries of coexistence between the Muslim,
Jewish and Christian cultures in what is now Andalusia. It embodied a cultural
universalism in a spirit of tolerance which allowed great intellects to flourish -
poets, mystics, thinkers, geographers, doctors and philosophers (think of
Maimonides and Averroës) - at the great Mosque of Cordoba and the Alhambra
Palace in Granada.

Since 1989, following the report of the Office of the Commissioner for Immigration
Policy, Belgium has opted for a multicultural approach (see L’intégration, une politique
de longue haleine [Immigration, a long-term policy], Volume 1, Repères et premières
propositions [Background and initial proposals], p.39-40).

On the other hand, the French Community has opted for an intercultural approach in
its education plan.

5. Interculturalism as an educational approach

In the field of the education and development of young people, interculturalism can be
defined:

- firstly, by what it is not, that is racism, xenophobia, discrimination, ethnocentrism,

exclusion and the ghetto.

- secondly, as an approach which treats schools as the ideal forum for multicultural
experience, in which the awareness of one’s identity can be expressed and a common

71
 effort for change and a means of linking up, exchanging with and relating to others can
be organised.

It is conducive to democratisation, equality of opportunities and optimum integration

into social and economic life in a society which is constantly changing and evolving. It
is a derivative of project-based education methods.

Mr Leurin, who was formerly a policy officer at the Ministry of Education, defines the
intercultural educational approach as:

a. an educational method in which schools cease to be highly protected cocoons, are

thrust into the outside world and work in partnership with people other than just
teachers;

b. an educational method in which all teachers and, more generally speaking, all those
involved in the pupils’ education including parents are on their guard against
prejudices and strive to teach their children nothing which can be linked to a one-sided
view and nothing which has not been tested (e.g. with a mother-tongue language
teacher).

c. a cross-disciplinary educational approach. School emerges from its monocultural world

to become the vehicle for interculturalism in both its educational approach and its
administrative structure.

d. an educational approach intended to prepare pupils to use situations of intercultural

contact to their best advantage.

The intercultural approach is aimed at all children and is not just limited to teaching
pupils from immigrant families their mother tongue and culture.

The aim is not so much to teach and to learn about a culture but to teach all the
children to understand cultures, both their own and that of others, to take a positive
and critical approach to them in order to discern all their values, distinguish between
them and mere historical deviations, propose several different approaches and learn
about various interpretations.

e. Intercultural education should develop in children:

- freedom of speech and expression;

- a strengthening and enlivening of their cultural identity;
- the opportunity to devise a plan for the future in a country where they feel they
are most able to achieve their personal ambitions;
- the ability to seek ways of achieving these aims with a view to cultural
enrichment through the exchanges this search engenders;
- increased knowledge;
- the ability to put their points of view in context by comparing them with, and
asking questions about, the points of view and opinions of pupils from other
cultures;
- the means of building up self-esteem and confidence about life (thereby avoiding
negative aggression).

f. Intercultural education presupposes certain fundamental rules such as:

1. avoiding cultural relativism: everything should be regarded as culture (fashion,

cooking, folklore, even intercultural marches);

72
 Everything is cultural and everything must be preserved, but a distinction has
to be made between cultural values and customs which have diverted culture
into patterns of behaviour which hinder personal fulfilment (e.g. the status of
women within families, the role of children, etc.).

2. understanding, improving and presenting a positive image of one’s own

culture without falling into a form of ethnocentrism combined with a refusal to
learn more about other people’s cultures.

People should not believe in their own superiority.

3. unifying without merging, distinguishing without segregating.

The historical and everyday context in which we live is full of the most diverse
cultures which have everything to gain from getting to know about one
another.

We must:

- be receptive to fundamental values;

- respect what is distinctive;

- make a clear distinction between what is and what is not acceptable in

order to ensure healthy coexistence.

6. The goals and methodology of schools

The four following ingredients are essential for intercultural education to succeed:

a. Children should be “given the floor”, be active participants, because they are the
living vehicles for the various cultures, even though these may appear to have been
forgotten or buried in the collective sub-conscious of the community.

The aim is to bring fundamental values to the fore in pupils’ everyday lives by
enabling them to express them, understand them, evaluate them and even criticise
them.

b. The subjects on the syllabus should be tackled from various cultural angles using a
pluralist approach.

This is where the presence of mother-tongue and mother-culture teachers becomes

all-important: as an integral part of the teaching staff, they must be able to help in
drawing up syllabuses and to take part in their implementation and evaluation.

c. Schools should practise education through discovery and active methods. This is
what is commonly referred to as the project method.

Being actively involved in gaining their own knowledge and helping their fellow pupils
to acquire theirs stimulate children and enable them to learn to co-exist without
prejudices and benefit from one another’s differences.

This multidisciplinary approach involves everyone, whether Belgian or not, in training

in sociability.

73
d. Families should be involved in the educational process because families sometimes
resist change and shut out intrusions which upset traditional behaviour and customs.

If families are involved, parents are better informed and therefore less reticent and
even more co-operative because they see that their culture is valued and taken
account of by the school.

As a result, children have less trouble in asserting their cultural identity and
establishing new means of communication, contact and exchange.

7. The presence of mother-tongue and mother-culture teachers

a. The value of bilingualism: which mother tongue should be used?

Thérèse MANGOT, a policy officer with the French-speaking Community, wrote in the
Agenda Culturel of September 1986: “with regard to languages, this approach means that
the language you use is the one spoken in the country where you live, but that it must be
possible to preserve, convey and share the flavour of the mother tongue, for example the
flavour of a pun, a swearword, a witticism, an expression of love, a proverb …”.

- Reducing a language which has a history and a literary past, a language which has
been the vehicle of a culture and ensures the cohesion of a social group, to what is
“flavoursome” about it seems to demean both the language and the people who
speak it, to treat it as an eccentricity which only ethnologists could be interested in.

A language is more than a combination of syntax, grammatical rules and verbal

structures …

- Language is the ability to express a thought, a lifetime’s experience, the history of an

individual or a group.

It is a means of devising and developing a life plan.

- It is one of the best ways of communicating, establishing relationships, exchanging

and creating, in company with those who share the same objectives, a history, a
culture, a common political approach.

- And, where one’s mother tongue is concerned, it is a way of uncovering, expressing

and drawing out of oneself what lies in one’s deep sub-conscious, and thus of putting
forward values rooted in experience, values which form the framework of community
life and weave the cultural identity.

The opposite approach leads to gradual impoverishment: people become unable to

understand themselves and express themselves; they allow a part of themselves to be
buried which will never be understood because it has never been expressed.

This sometimes results in a dual personality, in a refusal by people to accept the way they
are, in family break-ups and schizophrenia as described by Emmanuel Todd (who argued
that immigrants who claim to have two cultures are schizophrenic).

Learning their mother tongue and mother culture helps people to discover themselves, to
identify the reasons for their behaviour and ways of changing it, to adapt and develop their
ways of thinking while avoiding isolating nationalism and needless apology.

74
It promotes awareness of one’s intrinsic values and encourages a synthesis between the
mother culture and the culture of the country of residence to the point that it creates a new,
richer and more open way of living which is more respectful of others’ customs.

As well as helping to preserve identities, it helps people to integrate if they return to their
country of origin.

As André Chamson of the Académie française once said: “in my opinion bilingualism is a
prerequisite for all humanism”.

In April 1989 when he was the Minister responsible for the French-speaking communities,
Alain Decaux said that “Anyone who loses his language loses his soul”. If this is true for
French, it is also true for all other well-structured languages.

b. The culture of immigrant communities

We should begin by agreeing on what we mean by “culture”, and a “cultivated person”. In

common parlance what is meant is somebody who has studied, who speaks well and knows
about literature, art, theatre, politics and science. By this definition, culture belongs solely to
an elite.

However, we may also see culture as a way of thinking, living and using one’s skills, a way
of being, loving, reacting to and apprehending individual and group experiences and of
coping with day-to-day problems, in short a set of rules which help us to understand and
make ourselves understood.

Immigrants’ cultures of origin or mother cultures therefore differ according to traditions,

regions and religions, and it is this that forms the soul of their community.

And, as with everyone, we have to look back to the original, fundamental inspirations and
separate them from historic deviations which have lost their raison d’être as change and
development have occurred; the concept of the family, the role of women, the education of
children, religious rites, stereotyped behaviour, etc.

For immigrants, there is concomitance between the reality of the past (customs of everyday
life, expression, organisation, language and religion) and the present (the loss of roots,
social and economic dependence, the tendency for groups to become inward-looking and
isolated, the desire for freedom of expression, for equality and for respect for their dignity
and their rights, etc.)

For young people from an immigrant background the identity crisis is even deeper. Feeling
that they are “neither Belgian, nor Italian, nor Spanish, nor Moroccan …” and having no
roots, they have an acute sense of helplessness.

The question is whether schools can help them to discover themselves and become both
Belgian and Italian, Spanish or Moroccan.

c.The role of mother-tongue and mother-culture teachers

The role of such teachers in the intercultural education approach is more than essential, it is
crucial.

They must form an integral part of the teaching team and be able to take part in all the
committees set up in the school, so as to represent the immigrant pupils’ viewpoints,
sensibilities and social and cultural situations.

75
In addition they should help the teacher or teachers concerned to draw up the syllabuses not
only for history, geography and discovery activities but also for languages, literature and
even mathematics.

They are more than just representatives or helpers for pupils with learning difficulties, though
at times they may serve as cultural mediators between the school and the child and between
the school and the family.

This presupposes prior consultation, a mutual capacity to work together while respecting
cultural specifics and characteristics.

This requires recognition of the teacher’s professionalism and a desire to involve him or her
in the work of preparing, drawing up and implementing syllabuses.

As a part of the teaching team and acting on its behalf, these teachers are both witnesses
and mediators.

8. Outstanding questions

a. What is the role of schools in society? Should they play an avant-garde role, acting
as forerunners, forums for life, solidarity, creativity, social criticism, and laboratories
for a new form of citizenship, or should they aim at finding a lowest common
denominator of distinctive characteristics, burying diversity in a cultural monolithism,
and imposing the dominant culture?

Memories of May ’68 should remind us that schools are places for acquiring
knowledge, know-how and life skills.

b. Should bilingualism be encouraged from the outset (from nursery school on) or
should children first acquire a sound knowledge of their mother tongue or the
language usually used in the school?

c. Should preference be given to teachers from pupils’ countries of origin or should use
be made of young people from immigrant backgrounds with the necessary vocational
qualifications?

One example is the American Magnet Schools which combine three basic principles:
suitable buildings, high quality teaching materials and superbly motivated teachers.

d. What basic training is necessary to cater for the intercultural approach to education:
initial training, in-service training, etc.?

What role should intellectuals from an immigrant background play?

e. Is “building the Europe of 1998” merely an empty phrase or is it a challenge which

schools can take up in order to play the role they have been assigned in society? In
February 1996, Professor Baeck (of the Catholic University of Louvain) said that
Europe would have to be a cultural Europe to be any kind of Europe at all.

For a long time now, financial and economic decision-makers have been preparing to
meet the challenge of the single currency and the single market.

76
But where does this leave the political, social, cultural and educational side of things?
What about school syllabuses and their harmonisation? and what about the
equivalence of academic qualifications?

However, just because our leaders are not reacting does not mean that the rank and
file should stand by and do nothing.

To create a genuine, caring, social Europe, the initiative has to come from those who
are the most directly concerned and who will be its prime beneficiaries, namely the
citizens of Europe.

77
Appendix III – List of participants

Staatliche Akademie für Lehrerfortbildung

Ms Bärbel BAUER
Villingerstrasse 33
D – 78166 DONAUESCHINGEN

Council of Europe
Directorate of Education, Culture and Sport
Section of Educational Policies and European Dimension
F-67075 STRASBOURG CEDEX

Dr Carole REICH, Administratrator

Ms Consuelo HOLTZER, Administrative assistant
Ms Anita DYSERINCK, Assistant

Director and General Rapporteur

Ms Danielle LECLERCQ
9, Rue de Dolembreux
B - 4130 ESNEUX

Lecturers

Mr Alberto GABBIADINI
Directeur de l'ENAIP (Ente National Acli Istruzione Professionale)
Quai Saint-Léonard, 44
B – 4000 LIEGE

Ms Marie-Christine HUBERT
Centre de Recherches Tsiganes
(Université René Descartes)
Rue des Saint Pères
F-75005 PARIS

Mr René LEBOUTTE
Institut Universitaire européen
Département Histoire et Civilisation
Villa Schifanoia
Via Boccaccio 121
I - 50133 FIRENZE

Ms Cécile SACRE
Centre pour l'Egalité des Chances
B-4000 LIEGE

78
Mr Jean-Philippe SCHREIBER
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Avenue Roosevelt, 17
CP 108
B-1050 BRUXELLES

Participants

Belarus

Mr Victor SALOUCHTCHEV
Chkolraïa, 2
PAPERNIA, région de Minsk

Belgium
Ms Maria BLANCO
Rue de Nieuwenhove 37
B - 1180 BRUXELLES
Cyprus
Mr Christodoulos CHRISTODOULOU
55, Rue Elelfteria
Chloraka
PAPHOS
CHYPRE
Mr Paul DAPOLAS
1, Thessalonikis
7101 ARADHIPPOU
Larnaca
CHYPRE

France

Ms Frédérique AICARDI
48, Rue des Amidonniers
F - 31000 TOULOUSE

Mr Jean-Charles BOMATI
La Beulinais
F - 35490 GAHARD

Ms Bénédicte BUCHET
14, Chemin linières
F - 31200 TOULOUSE

79
Ms Florence MAUREL-VERRIEN
14, Bd d'Alembert
F - 78180 MONTIGNY-LE-BRETONNEUX

Mr Guy PONCET
11, Rue J. Du Bellay
F - 03700 BELLERIVE S/ ALLIER

Ms Nicole TIREAU
F- 82100 LAFITTE

Germany

Mr Otto-Michael BLUME
Bachstr. 153
D - 40217 DÜSSELDORF

Mr Martin BURGHARDT
An der Schlenke 13
D - 59494 SOEST

Ms Claudia DITTRICH
Dieffenbachstr. 18
D - 10967 BERLIN

Mr Klaus STURM
Meisenweg 25
D - 86391 STADTBERGEN

Ms Angelina WEBER
Langehegge 143
D - 45770 MARL

Ms Rosemarie WIEGEL
Grünewaldstr. 25
D –30177 HANNOVER

Baden-Württemberg

Ms Ursel CLEMENS
Rosenstr. 22
D - 72116 MÖSSINGEN

Ms Brigitte EBERT-SCHMOLL
Haupt-und Realschule
D – 76473 IFFEZHEIM

Ms Carmen GRASS
Reichenberger Weg 4
D – 74177 BAD FRIEDRICHSHALL

80
Ms Gundula KIRN
Bergstr. 17
D-78606 SEIT – OBERLACHT

Ms Marie-Louise MAIER
Reiserstr. 10
D – 88512 MENGEN

Mr Siegfried PÖTSCHKE
Irenicusstr. 22
D - 76275 ETTLINGEN

Hungary

Ms Gabriella KAKUSZINE KISS

Attila u. 4
H - 6722 SZEGED

Ms Terez BALOGH
Munkacsy u. 25.II.I
H - 7621 PECS

Italy

Mr Rinaldo MERLONE
Via Torino, n. 1
I - 10040 PIOBESI TORINESE

Moldova

Ms Violeta COJOCARU
C/o Ms Victoria ISAC
National Liaison Officer
Ministère de l'Enseignement, de la Jeunesse et du Sport
1 Piata Marii Adunari Nationale
KISHINEV – 2033

Portugal

Ms Maria F. D'ASSA CASTEL-BRANCO

R. Actriz Palmira Bastos
N° 13, 6°, Dto
P - 1900 LISBOA

Ms Maria I. T. LOURO
Rua de Vale Verde N° 17
Fanqueiro
P - 2670 LOURES

81
Ms Maria A. L. MATOS
Rua Terros dos Voles 24-2° Esq.
P - 2700 AMADOZO

Spain

Mr Francisco J. PASCUAL PEREZ

C/ Collarada B N° 6
E - 50620 CASETAS
Zaragoza

Slovak Republic

Ms Sona ORFANUSOVA
Podhaj 74
SK - 974 00 BANSKA BYSTRICA

Mr Pavel KHUN
Blagoevova 10
SK - 85104 BRATISLAVA

82