This post was automatically translated from the German original at
NGHM liest | Klaus J. Bade: Europa in Bewegung (2000).
Is migration the exception or the rule of European history? Klaus J. Bade’s Europa in Bewegung, the third title on the NGHM reading list, comes from the field of migration history and theory and answers this question with a comprehensive synthesis that renders migration movements from the late eighteenth century to the present as a structural feature of European modernity — not as a disruption, but as the norm.
When the book appeared in 2000 with C.H. Beck, Bade was Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Osnabrück and the founder of the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS), established there in 1991. Scholarship and critical policy engagement went hand in hand for him: the historian who wrote the history of European migration had already shaped the West German immigration debate before Europa in Bewegung, through the Manifest der 60: Deutschland und die Einwanderung [Manifesto of the 60: Germany and Immigration], which he initiated in 1993, and through the Rat für Migration [Council for Migration], which he founded in 1998. Eberhard Seidel accordingly recommended the volume in the taz as “accompanying reading” for the Social Democrat–Green federal government’s work on new immigration legislation. Europa in Bewegung appeared in the international series “Making Europe,” edited by Jacques Le Goff and published simultaneously by C.H. Beck, Basil Blackwell, Crítica, Laterza, and Le Seuil — a framework that programmatically underscored the book’s European ambition.
The central thesis: migration belongs to the conditio humana. The Homo migrans, as Bade’s conceptual framework has it, is as old as Homo sapiens. Migration is to be understood soberly as a necessary response to economic, social, and cultural change — not as an anomaly to be regulated or prevented.
From this premise, the book unfolds a chronologically structured account: labor migration and itinerant trade in the transition from agrarian to industrial society; transnational and transcontinental migrations, including the mass exodus to the “New World” and colonial migration; flight, expulsion, and forced labor in the two World Wars; migration policy during the Cold War, from Displaced Persons through “guest workers” to asylum migration; and finally Europe as a continent of immigration at the end of the twentieth century, with questions of “Fortress Europe,” cultural diversity, and illegal immigration. Throughout, Bade combines attention to the everyday realities of migration with analysis of state attempts at regulation. The central historical argument rests on a contrast: the relatively unimpeded proletarian mass migrations of the nineteenth century on the one hand, and the politically regulated migration movements of the twentieth century on the other. In Bade’s reading, Europe transformed itself from a continent of emigration into one of immigration. Policy consistently lagged behind this transformation.
The reception was broad and predominantly positive. Dieter Oberndörfer described it as a “standard work.” Rolf W. Brednich, in a review on H-Soz-Kult, called Bade “the most significant German-language migration historian” and the book a “transnational migration topography.” Steve Hochstadt reviewed it in the American Historical Review, Ludger Pries in the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, and Karine Rance in the Revue de l’IFHA. The book was translated into Italian (Laterza, 2001) and French (Seuil, 2002). Criticism was not absent, however. Leo Lucassen, writing in the International Review of Social History, argued that for the period after 1914 Bade relied too heavily on familiar material and lacked systematic longitudinal analyses of central thematic areas; a more thematic approach would have yielded still more. Brednich noted that the prose style was at times too complex for a book aimed at a broad readership. Jürgen Schmidt criticized the account for not pausing to look at the individual fates behind the “migratory existences”: individual migration biographies were almost entirely absent.
In one of the rare personal passages, Bade describes the migratory fate of a peasant family from the Vogelsberg region who moved to Essen and Paris. A footnote reveals that the account draws on family history sources in the author’s possession. The structural historian who otherwise consistently foregoes individual fates made the sole exception for his own family.
What the book contributes to the reading list lies less in its individual findings than in the shift of perspective it enacts. With it, Bade presented the first epoch-spanning German-language synthesis of European migration history; internationally, only Leslie Page Moch with Moving Europeans (1992) had undertaken a comparable effort, though one limited to Western Europe since 1650. Bade established the framework within which migration could be analyzed as a pan-European structural phenomenon rather than as a national special problem. Those who have taken seriously Carr’s insight from the first entry in this series — that historians do not collect facts but select them — will find in Bade an application of considerable consequence: the decision to frame migration as the norm rather than as a crisis phenomenon changes not only the account itself, but also which sources count as relevant and which questions are asked at all. Later in this series, Mark Wyman’s DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–51 will address a specific segment of those postwar migrations that in Bade are embedded within the broader arc of European migration history.
Students at Osnabrück will find Bade’s Europa in Bewegung in the B Bibliothek Alte Münze under the shelfmark LLN 5031-064 (OPAC).
Klaus J. Bade (1944–), Europa in Bewegung. Migration vom späten 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, Munich: C.H. Beck, 2000.
This post is part of the series NGHM liest [NGHM Reads], in which the 65 titles of the NGHM reading list are introduced. The list can be explored as a knowledge graph.