The History of the European Migration Regime

Germany's Strategic Hegemony

Emmanuel Comte

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780367348724
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351670005
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

After the Second World War, the international migration regime in Europe took a course different from the global migration regime and the migration regimes in other regions of the world. Cumbersome and arbitrary administrative practices prevailed in the late 1940s in most parts of Europe. The gradual implementation of regulations for the free movement of people within the European Community, European citizenship, and the internal and external dimensions of the Schengen agreements profoundly transformed the European migration regime. These instruments produced a regional regime in Europe with an unparalleled degree of intraregional openness and an unparalleled degree of closure towards migrants from outside Europe. This book relies on national and international archives to explain how German strategies during the Cold War shaped the openness of that original regime. This migration regime helped Germany to create a stable international order in Western Europe after the war, conducive to German Reunification and supported German economic expansion. The book embraces the whole period of development of this regime, from 1947 through 1992. It deals with all types of migrants between and towards European countries: unskilled labourers, skilled professionals, self-employed workers, and migrant workers' family members, examining both their access to economic activity and their social and political rights.

1
An Unstable Regime, 1947–1954

After the massive population displacements at the end of the Second World War, international relations over migration questions in Western Europe returned to normal around 1947. The migration regime then prevailing in Western Europe was largely a legacy of the interwar period and remained, overall, in place until 1954. In this chapter, I shall examine how this regime was subject to a series of tensions. I will show how the Allies in Europe tried to transform it but failed, before going on to discuss how, in the context of the Cold War, the United States intervened to resolve the most serious migratory tensions in Western Europe. In the first half of the 1950s, the Western European migration regime was then dual, with a movement for a more open regime concerning only certain countries. I will end the chapter with an account of the first steps taken by the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) to champion an open migration regime in Western Europe.

Disturbing tensions

Around 1947, disturbing tensions wracked Western Europe’s migration regime. A bureaucratic management of migratory movements created costs and pressures, even for countries of immigration. In addition, this regime, which the victorious powers in Western Europe had tried to mould to their own ends, clashed with German and Italian revisionism.

A bureaucratic migration regime

Migration flows within Europe had regularly increased over the previous century. The number of Italians in France had increased from 63,000 in 1851 to 419,000 in 1911.¹ In the decade leading up to the First World War, between 300,000 and 600,000 Polish seasonal workers were travelling each year to Germany and France for work.² The number of Dutch workers in Prussia reached a peak of 118,390 in 1912.³

After the First World War, immigration states developed a bureaucratic framework to manage international migration, in order to protect wage and employment levels for national workers. In Germany in the 1920s, firms had to register their workforce needs with local labour offices, and the Reich administration centralised such information. Foreign workers had to apply for new work permits each time they changed jobs, and employers had to apply for new permits to employ them. The labour administration granted permits according to the situation of the labour market. Residence permits could be valid for all or just a part of German territory and, in the latter case, had to be renewed for all changes of residence. These measures remained in force after the war.⁴ In France, Articles 6 and 7 of the ruling of 2 November 1945 on the entry and residence of foreigners stipulated the need for a residency permit after three months, and a work permit issued by the Ministry of Labour to exercise any professional activity.⁵ In the sectors that the ministry classified as having labour surplus, authorities had to check that an unemployed French worker could not be assigned to the company that had applied for the permit, before issuing a permit to a foreigner.⁶

After the Second World War, states also organised workforce recruitment during peacetime. In France, the ruling of 2 November 1945 set up the National Office of Immigration:

The operations to recruit [labour] for France and the introduction in France of workers from overseas territories and foreigners … are the exclusive competence of the National Office of Immigration set up by the Ministry of Labour. No individual or group other than this office can engage in such operations.⁷

Yet, such a monopoly led to recruitment centres being overloaded and unable to respond to the labour needs of companies.⁸

Other bureaucratic procedures limited migration flows. After the Second World War, France drew up a list of countries whose nationals were entitled to take out a licence to run a coffee bar (débit de boissons). The list excluded former enemy countries or countries that had ‘collaborated in the policies of the Axis [powers] voluntarily or otherwise’: in other words, Germany, Austria, and Italy, but also Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary.⁹ Belgium insisted on a compulsory ‘moral standards certificate [as well as a] medical certificate certifying [that the foreigner] does not suffer from any contagious or transmittable illness.’¹⁰ Belgium also deferred immigration of the worker’s family. A wife was not eligible for a work permit if her husband had a job and if the couple only had a small number of dependent children.¹¹ As regards remittances sent by workers to their families in the country of origin, in France all remittance operations were handled by the Exchange Office, which dealt with them according to the balance of payments and the availability of foreign currency.¹²

Rare bilateral agreements with emigration states mitigated arbitrary decisions by immigration states. The Franco-Italian Treaty of 15 April 1904 had recognised rights to Italian migrants in France. Through this concession, France had tried to get Italy to impose greater social security obligations on its employers, and in this way to limit Italian competition for French industry.¹³ Between 1919 and 1932 France had also signed bilateral agreements to facilitate migration with the new countries of Central Europe. In offering migratory opportunities to the workforce of such countries, France had tried to stabilise them socially and politically, as a way to achieve greater stability for Europe and greater safety for France. France signed agreements with Poland in 1919, 1920, and 1925; with Czechoslovakia in 1920 and 1928; and after the crisis of 1929 with Austria, Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia.¹⁴ With the Cold War, Central European countries became separated from the European migration regime, and only the agreements between Western European countries remained active.

Immigration states’ bureaucratic regulation of migration movements was thus the characteristic feature of the migration regime prevailing in Western Europe around 1947. Immigration states’ actions were leading to recurring tensions with emigration states.

German concerns

After the war the winners were able to draw on the pool of German labour with no concern for the needs of economic recovery in Germany. During the Moscow Conference in April 1947, French Minister of Foreign Affairs Georges Bidault declared himself in favour of German emigration. Under the agreements with the U.S. government, on 29 September 1947, and the British government, on 25 October 1947, France obtained the right to recruit 25,000 German workers in the American and British occupied zones.¹⁵ Germany no longer had a central state, but the administrative authorities in the Länder were still standing and were alarmed by French recruitment of German labour, while German recovery required a large workforce. The number of jobs in the American and British occupied zones went from fewer than 9 million in mid-1946 to more than 11.5 million in the first three months of 1949. The unemployment rate was stable. German authorities therefore opposed the emigration of their productive forces.¹⁶ The representatives of the eight Länder in the American and British occupied zones created, from their first congress in March 1947, a permanent secretariat for emigration issues, charged with combating ‘the emigration fever.’¹⁷ During its congress of 8–9 September 1947 in Lübeck, the committee representing the government of the eight Länder in the American and British occupied zones regarded French recruitment harmful for the German economy.¹⁸ In Austria, too, local authorities were hostile to French recruitment.¹⁹

German Länder favoured the emigration only of the non-working population. And yet occupation powers restricted precisely this sort of emigration. Indeed, these powers had a monopoly on issuing exit visas and only granted them rarely when this emigration was not part of regulated recruitment. In February 1948, the congress of the Länder in the American occupied zone requested that the U.S. government extend potential exit visas to the non-working population. Länder authorities also requested that German immigrants from the East (Volksdeutsche), who were not yet well integrated into the German economy, be a priority when filling immigration quotas for Germans to the United States. The Truman administration, keen to help West German recovery, accepted these demands. These U.S. concessions had no equivalent in the policies of France and Britain. Contrary to German concerns, the British and French governments asked U.S. authorities to extend exit rights in the American zone to German men joining their families in Britain or France.²⁰ The British government wanted the emigration of German workers to be liberalised.²¹

When forced to accept the emigration of people of working age, the West German authorities preferred newcomers, not yet well integrated into the West German economy. French policy was the exact opposite. In early 1948, in the context of the Cold War and after the French strikes of November-December 1947, French Minister of the Interior Jules Moch considered it vital to prevent the immigration of Communist agents to France from the Soviet occupied zone of Germany. In March 1948, the Ministry of the Interior ordered the Security Force for the control of the foreign workforce recruited in Germany and Austria to block the entry of all Germans without long-term domicile in one of the three Western zones.²² This went directly against the interests of the West German Länder. The level and composition of German emigration were thus a source of tension between France and Britain on the one hand and West German authorities on the other.

Last but not least, the status that immigration states granted to German nationals once in their territories alarmed the West German authorities. After a certain number of years of residence, most immigrants were usually free to live anywhere in the host country. Yet Germany’s neighbours prevented the settlement of Germans in the provinces bordering on Germany and which the latter had formerly occupied. During the Congress of Europe in The Hague on 8 May 1948, the Danish delegate to the economic commission, shipping magnate Arnold Peter Møller, objected to the wording of the congress’ final resolution, which planned to ‘promote labour mobility as much as possible,’ fearing German immigration in Northern Schleswig.²³ Furthermore, in France, an order of the Minister of the Interior on 18 March 1946 made the settlement of foreigners in the départements of Alsace (Haut-Rhin and Bas-Rhin) and Moselle subject to prior authorisation by the Prefect, as a way to prevent German immigration.²⁴ In vain, the Department for Mines within the French Ministry of Industrial Production tried to oppose these measures by stressing in August 1947 the risk of a labour shortage in the Lorraine coalfields.²⁵ For the German authorities, this discrimination prevented the settlement of German nationals in the nearest zones, from where they would have been likely to return to Germany to fill the job vacancies to be expected in the near future or to repopulate Eastern territories after an equally expected German reunification.

Given the nature of the German emigration that the international regime in Europe favoured and the discrimination against Germans in neighbouring Western countries, the West German authorities favoured a deep revision of this regime.

Italian revisionism

The Italian government also favoured revising the regime. Italy had experienced a demographic explosion in the previous century and a half, and the Italian population had shot up from 18 million in the early nineteenth century to over 47 million after the Second World War. The share of the population living in poverty had been exacerbated by the forced drop in emigration under Fascism,²⁶ and then by the postwar return of Italian settlers from former colonies. Moreover, labour demand in Italy had dropped due to the destruction caused by warfare and economic disruption in the wake of the war. The number of unemployed, which had already reached 1.32 million in 1946, rose to over 1.74 million in 1948.²⁷ The Italian government worked to broaden emigration opportunities in Europe, and a department dealing exclusively with emigration was set up under the aegis of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In March 1949, the workforce surplus in Italy was estimated at 4 million.²⁸

As the historian Federico Romero emphasised, there was a consensus among Italian party leaders on the need for emigration:

Within the Constituent Assembly, the opinion of the political majority, not only of centre parties, industrialists and a large body of economists, but also of several representatives of the left, was that it would not be possible to reabsorb unemployment without constant emigration.²⁹

In May 1948 the Liberal Party deputy in the Italian Constituent Assembly, Quinto Quintieri, explained to the econ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 An unstable regime, 1947–1954
• 2 A new regime taking shape, 1955–1964
• 3 A shrinking dynamic, 1965–1973
• 4 A protectionist status quo, 1973–1984
• 5 A selective and regionalist regime, 1984–1992
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Sources
• Bibliography
• Index