Introduction

In the 1990s, an interesting and heated discussion emerged among migration scholars in the United States on the question, if and to what extent the ‘new’ post 1965 immigrants to the US would experience integration and assimilation processes similar to those experienced by the equally massive immigration wave from Southern and Eastern Europe between 1880-1914. Thus far, this debate has had virtually no resonance in the European context. One reason for this may be that many scholars remain prisoners of their national histories. This limitation has led them to foster assumptions concerning the ethnic homogeneity of populations within European nation-states. Furthermore, the insight that emerged in the early 1980s among social and economic historians, that geographical mobility was a structural element of European history, did not change the dominant view that migration was a sign of crisis, caused by political (war, repression) or economic distress (overpopulation, famine). This belief was strengthened by the understanding of the modernisation process in the 19th century as a fundamental break with the past. Large-scale industrialisation and urbanisation, which caused millions to move from the countryside to cities, and the simultaneous massive emigration from Europe to the New World fitted well into this interpretation.

These factors help account for historians’ repeated neglect of the scale and impact of immigration on European societies from the Middle Ages onwards. One consequence of this neglect has been that mainstream historians and social scientists have neither acknowledged nor taken into account the fact that most Western European countries have experienced important migrations from the Early Modern period onwards, including the ‘classical’ American decades of mass immigration, 1880-1914, and the inter-war years. In other words, contrary to the assumptions of many scholars and commentators who stress the unprecedented character of recent developments, the European past does present many cases that lend themselves to a comparison with immigrations in post-war Western Europe.

This has become apparent since the late 1980s when an increasing number of studies began focussing on immigration to Western European countries in the 19th and 20th centuries. Notwithstanding this advance in scholarship, its results and implications have not yet influenced the reading of either national or European histories.