Backwards and forwards

The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World. By Tara Zahra. W.W. Norton; 392 pages; $28.95 and £18.99.

EASTERN Europe is in the midst of a migration panic. Milos Zeman, the Czech Republich’s president, has called the influx of refugees to the continent an “organised invasion”; Jaroslaw Kaczynski, chairman of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, warns that they may be carrying “very dangerous diseases”. But anxieties about migration in the region are nothing new. In 1890 a lawyer in Galicia described it as “one of the most important, burning problems of the day”. Yet as Tara Zahra recounts in “The Great Departure”, a perceptive history of migration and eastern Europe, until very recently that problem was not immigration but emigration.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, emigration was considered a “fever”, that could empty villages. For most, the destination was America: 300,000 made the journey from Austria-Hungary in 1907, the highest number to arrive from one country in a single year. The story of their arrival there has been told many times; Ms Zahra, of the University of Chicago, describes the impact that leaving had on their homelands and the debates it provoked. The departure of so many men of working age, for example, created new opportunities: in one Hungarian town women reportedly took over most of the positions in local government. But it alarmed local elites. Polish nobles were deprived of cheap agricultural labour, Austrian and Hungarian military officials of conscripts.

The authorities quickly found a convenient scapegoat. They fined and arrested Austria-Hungary’s travel agents, accusing them of duping gullible peasants into leaving the country. This was part of a wider propaganda battle, in which newspapers ran lurid items about violence and exploitation in America. After the first world war, scare stories no longer sufficed. Populations had been devastated, first by the fighting and then by the Spanish flu. The region’s new nation-states quickly deemed emigration an existential threat. In 1920 Poland introduced stricter passport controls; Czechoslovakia sought to lure back expatriates to boost the national stock.

Emigration did have its uses for some, though. Politicians realised they could exploit migration policy to remove unwanted minorities. Despite the passport restrictions, in Poland Jews were encouraged to emigrate. By the mid-1930s many politicians in the region were in favour of mass Jewish emigration. Seeking a solution to what was widely referred to as the “Jewish problem”, Western officials fruitlessly considered places—Madagascar, British Guyana—where eastern European Jews could be resettled. As Ms Zahra points out, these efforts blurred the lines between “rescue and removal…emigration and expulsion”, while doing little to save Jews from the horrors that awaited them. Even before the Holocaust, removing Jews from eastern Europe had become politically acceptable.

For the author the Iron Curtain was the “culmination” of eastern Europe’s struggle against emigration. Communist regimes had long warned of the misery that awaited emigrants to the West; now, however, the political stakes were far higher. Embarrassed by defections to the West, eastern-European governments sought to woo back other émigrés, offering them financial incentives even as they denounced the greed of capitalist societies. But still they were willing to let certain citizens leave. Dissidents and unwelcome minorities could be sold to West Germany or Israel in exchange for substantial ransoms: in the 1970s, Nicolae Ceausescu said that Romania’s best export commodities were “Jews, Germans and oil”.

Eastern Europeans now enjoy the freedom of movement that so many longed for under communism. The expansion of the EU in 2004 gave Poles, Hungarians and Czechs, among others, the right to live anywhere in the union, stimulating the biggest wave of east-west migration in a century. Migration today is never one-way. Some people spend just a couple of years in the West before returning. Others never leave at all. Now that east Europeans can move as they please, for many true freedom is the “freedom to stay home”.