The re-making of a Europe of differences: Mobile lives and the globalization of categories in revolutionary and post-imperial times

This article discusses the fundamental question of how the differentiation of people on the move or in transit and their categorization changed in revolutionary and post-imperial times. These interacting processes have affected Europe and the negotiation of its internal and external boundaries in different ways. During both periods around 1800 and around 1945, international actors renegotiated the relationship between territory and population. Grappling with the distinction between ‘refugees’ and numerous other migrants, they claimed a universalist or more particularistic definition over which people were entitled to protection and support. Through this approach, Europe is understood as a lived, administered and negotiated space whose external and internal boundaries are also the result of long, more or less overlapping processes of self- and external evaluation of people located outside their place of origin.

Anne Friedrichs (2024): The re-making of a Europe of differences: Mobile lives and the globalization of categories in revolutionary and post-imperial times (c.1770–1970), in: European Review of History: Revue Européenne d’histoire, 32 (1), S. 20–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2024.2385347