New Approaches to Displacement, Citizenship, and Statelessness in Twentieth-Century East Central Europe and the Balkans

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Displacement was a defining experience of the twentieth century, particularly in East Central Europe and the Balkans, where wars and shifting borders repeatedly uprooted populations. Indeed, every major development in the region–from the collapse of empires in World War I to the Cold War—was accompanied by migrations, both forced and voluntary. As part of these processes, states sought to define national belonging and citizenship status, establish ideological, as well as physical, boundaries, and navigate broader questions of statelessness in the international system. Progressing chronologically and drawing on both micro- and macro-historical approaches, the papers on this panel offer new perspectives on how state actors shaped and were shaped by issues of displacement at critical moments in the twentieth century. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky explores the immigration of Balkan Muslim refugees to interwar Turkey, focusing on the reasons for their displacement from Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia and on how the Turkish government categorized desirable immigrants during that era. Kathryn Ciancia charts how the Polish government-in-exile’s legally innovative maritime courts sought to control physical movement, conscription, and citizenship status across the globe in ways that bolstered wartime claims to non-territorial sovereignty. Finally, Cristina Florea traces the movement of Cold War refugees and Holocaust survivors through postwar Vienna, as East-Central Europe was being remade into an ethnically homogeneous region. Taken together, the papers showcase the most recent approaches to the study of displacement and lay out the methodological questions that this topic poses.

Sub Unit

• History: 1900-1945

Chair

• Dominique K Reill, U of Miami

Papers

• Muslim or Turkish?: Immigration from the Balkans in Early Republican Turkey - Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, UC Santa Barbara

• Policing People, Not Places: Polish Maritime Courts, Non-Territorial Sovereignty, and the Global Second World War - Kathryn Ciancia, U of Wisconsin-Madison

• Cold War Vienna and the Great Disentanglement of Central and Eastern Europe - Cristina Florea, Cornell U

Discussant

• Theodora Dragostinova, Ohio State U