Lingelbach, Jochen

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Comparativ (E-Journal)

Rezensionen | Reviews | 259in the post-war period. The value of the book lies in these rightful criticisms and the call for an interdisciplinary debate on socioeconomic change in the 1970s and thereafter. Notes:1 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/13/putins-war-on-ukraine-part-of-crusade-against-liberal-democracy-says-scholz (accessed 11 May 2023).2 See, e.g., N. Ferguson (ed.), The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective, Cambridge, MA 2010. Outside the USA and UK, the 1970s were not necessarily perceived as crisis driven, and also within the USA and UK, the view differs depending on the social group that one looks at.Pamela Ballinger: The World  Refugees Made: Decolonization and the Foundation of Postwar Italy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020, 305 pp.Reviewed byJochen Lingelbach, BayreuthFrom 1943 to 1947, the Italian city of Syracuse was a well-known departure point for “small-boat operators smuggling migrants” to Libya (p. 114). The illegal migrants were Italian settlers clandestine-ly returning to the former Italian colony they had left during the war. The British military government ruling Libya at that time was unwilling to let them return and eventually deported most of them back to Italy. This small anecdote may illustrate the complex history of forced migration at the end of World War II, mainly from the lost empire to Italy. Apart from Italians from the colonies in Libya, Eritrea, Ethio-pia, and Somalia, large groups of Italians came from former Italian-ruled territories ceded to Albania, Yugoslavia, and Greece (the Dodecanese islands). These transfers were not fast and direct “return” move-ments home but long and complex migra-tions of people who did not all regard Italy as “home”. Pamela Ballinger succeeds in bringing all this together and embedding it in the post-war history of refugees and decolonization in a rich and dense mono-graph.Bringing the often separated movements of Italian migrants into one frame, Ball-inger’s argument addresses, firstly, Italian historiography: post-war Italy was made by the post-war refugee situation and the long and complicated decolonization (p. 18). Italian decolonization was not abrupt and uneventful but rather a complex, en-tangled, uneven, and ongoing process. De-colonization is a crucial aspect in post-war Italy for issues of citizenship, the position of foreign refugees, and even the built en-vironment (p. 20). Ballinger’s innovation is to bring all the Italian “national refugees” into one narrative, including those from the adjacent territories ceded to Yugoslavia and Albania as well as the returning colo-nists from Lybia and “Italian East Africa”. While not claiming their sameness, she convincingly shows that the different refu-gees “rubbed elbows” (p. 212) in the same institutions and struggled for support and recognition. As in national historiography, lasting hierarchies developed between the different groups.The second contribution of Ballinger’s book is towards the history of post-war international refugees: “Italy served as a 260 | Rezensionen | Reviewscrucial laboratory in which categorizations differentiating international refugees from national refugees were worked out in prac-tice” (p. 3). While international refugees became the concern of intergovernmen-tal organizations like the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the International Refugee Organization (IRO), and subsequently the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Italian “na-tional refugees” (the book’s focus) became the concern of the consolidating post-war state. The exclusion of national refugees from the United Nations (UN) institu-tions went together with the exclusion of non-Italian displaced persons (DPs) and refugees from the Italian nation-state. This process reminds us of Aristide Zolberg’s (1983) classic observation that refugee generation is a by-product of the transfor-mation of empires into nation-states.The book starts, in chapter 1, with Italy’s imperial past and shows how entwined Italian colonialism was with broader emi-gration policies. Colonization was a way to channel Italian emigration to territories under Italian rule, thus solving the prob-lem of “overpopulation” while keeping the migrants in the service of the motherland. After the fascist party came to power in 1922, the Italian empire gradually ex-panded. Subsequently, emigration to plac-es like Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Albania, and the Dodecanese islands was a means to establish a new type of “fascist empire” signified by the ideal of the Italian agri-cultural settler. Chapter 2 then tackles the beginnings of the Italian return from the empire, starting with the evacuation of ci-vilians from Libya in 1940. Italian officials and humanitarian organizations brought Italians from the colonies to the metropole throughout the war.While the first two chapters form the prel-ude, chapter 3 focuses on the time from the war’s end to the 1947 Treaty of Paris, which restored Italian sovereignty and sealed the loss of territory (with a few ex-ceptions). Ballinger situates this period in the broader literature on international co-operation and national reconstruction in Europe after the war. Following Jessica Rei-nisch’s work on UNRRA, she argues that the nascent UN organizations were less an expression of international governance and more a safeguard of national sover-eignty. Ballinger understands the post-war UN institutions as projects of “intergov-ernmentalism” that were only overseeing national governments rather than attempts at internationalist rule (p. 80). In the post-war era, UN missions visited the former Italian colonies of Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia to assess the situation and local opinion. Eventually, Somalia came under Italian rule again in 1950, albeit limited by a UN mandate and with a fixed end date of 1960 (p. 129). In the chapter, Ballinger also introduces the intriguing term “nest-ing refugeeism” (p. 132) to describe the hi-erarchies between different refugee groups and their treatment by the Italian state. More elaboration would have been good as it captures a critical process observable elsewhere, too: different refugee groups are treated differently depending on oth-er identity aspects. A reference to Milica Bakić-Hayden’s “nesting orientalism” – to which, I assume, the aforementioned term refers – is unfortunately missing.Chapter 4 focuses on Italian citizenship after the Treaty of Paris. Ballinger shows that the boundaries between Italian citi-Rezensionen | Reviews | 261zens and others were not as clear-cut as assumed. Instead, confusion and negotia-tions about the categorization of individu-als abound, and decisions were sometimes left to the discretion of individual officers. The complexities of differentiated citi-zenship dated back to the fascist empire, which not only distinguished (Italian) citi-zens from (colonial) subjects but also had a complex system where Libyans, Albani-ans, inhabitants of the Aegean islands, and descendants of Italo-African relationships had differing and changing in-between statuses. The IRO’s post-war label of “un-determined nationality” (p. 162) for some people from the formerly Italian-ruled ter-ritories, then Greek or Yugoslav, illustrates this point nicely. Partly, residence and lan-guage proficiency were used as criteria, but Ballinger shows that vague concepts such as the “language of the heart” (p. 152) just covered underlying ethnonational assump-tions. Italian bureaucrats tried to keep out Slavs from Yugoslavia even when they op-posed the new regime and were fluent in Italian.In chapter 5, Ballinger follows the national refugees into Italy and examines how they were housed and fed and symbolically in-corporated into the post-war nation. They were not only reminders of the fascist em-pire but became themselves critical agents in reconstructing the nation. Some of the refugees lived literally on the ruins of fas-cism and continued into fascist settlement projects. Therewith, the refugees often finished processes of internal colonization started by the fascist regime (p. 204).Ballinger masters an impressive range of archival material from diverse national and international organizations and di-aspora archives as well as additional oral history interviews in former refugee set-tlements in Italy. The only sources – and thus perspectives – missing are those from the former African colonies. While the ad-ministrative view dominates, the refugee narratives make the book a lively read. The in-between cases that were difficult for the administration are especially fascinating. The complex history of the Italian repatri-ates shows that the simple idea of a “return home” was not the case. Some of the “Ital-ians” had never lived in Italy before but were born into Italian diaspora commu-nities. Specifically in the territories ceded to Yugoslavia, the “repatriation” was part of a more extensive process of ethnic “un-mixing” in Europe’s post-war reordering. Ballinger’s fascinating study invites com-parisons with other contexts as well. For example, the extension of the imperial hi-erarchization into Italy – where southern-ers and Slavs were regarded as inferior – reminds us of the situation in East Central Europe. Both regions are peripheral parts of the core, and their inhabitants are seen as white only in relation to their eastern or southern neighbours. Italy’s “Southern Question” (that is to say, the orientaliza-tion of the country’s south) thereby shows many parallels with Poland’s “ideologies of Eastness” (Zarycki), where the country’s east is seen as inferior and more oriental. The post-war “un-mixing” of populations is another parallel worth exploring in a comparison. German history is another case showing many fascinating parallels. Apart from the apparent reckoning with the fascist past, Italy’s post-war movement to regain control over its “lost” colonies has many commonalities with the colonial revisionist movement in interwar Germa-ny. In addition, the history of Germany’s 262 | Rezensionen | Reviewspost-war “national refugees” (the expellees from the east) mirrors the Italian situa-tion. Another entanglement with German history is the massive labour migration of Italians to Germany in the 1950s and 1960s (the so-called guest workers [Gast-arbeiter]). Ballinger hints at the economic boom in Italy at the same time, implicitly arguing that Italy could have been more open to immigration (p. 207). I am just puzzled why this massive outflow of la-bour migrants – mainly from the poorer south – occurred at the same time. Ethiopia is another essential actor through-out the book but could be dealt with more comprehensively. As an internationally recognized nation-state and member of the League of Nations and during the Paris Peace Conference, Ethiopia often ap-peared to be an antagonist against the Ital-ians. Ballinger shows, however, the limited power Ethiopia could wield there. Ethio-pian plans to persecute Italian perpetrators of war crimes eventually failed (p. 123). Moreover, only after the Ethiopian protest over UNRRA’s support for Italy did Ethio-pia receive some limited assistance from the organization.These suggestions for comparisons do not present criticism of Ballinger’s book but rather attest to its quality and importance beyond the Italian context. It is an essen-tial contribution for years to come and rests on a solid empirical foundation. Ball-inger’s book will be of interest not only to historians of the Italian post-war era but to historians of refugees, international or-ganizations, and decolonization in many places.Alexander E. Davis / Vineet Thakur /Peter Vale: The Imperial Discipline: Race and the Founding of  International Relations, London: Pluto Press, 2020, 197 pp.Reviewed byTomoko Akami, MelbourneA conversion of IR, history, and area stud-ies is occurring at least among some. In the discipline of IR, this is a part of a broader response to the criticism of the nature of the disciplinary knowledge as being Eu-rocentric, colonial, masculine, and racist (summarized in pp. 7–10). More IR schol-ars are turning to history to explore a new framework and/or to scrutinize the gene-alogies of the discipline to understand how it was shaped and search for its alternative paths. Historians and scholars of area studies need to be engaged in this devel-opment in IR because how we understand the world order influences how we see in-terconnected “histories” and “areas” and because IR’s disciplinary histories should reflect accumulated and new scholarship in history and area studies.The Imperial Discipline: Race and the Founding of International Relations is a re-cent contribution to such critical historical works in IR. While various genealogies of the disci-pline of IR have already been identified, this book, written by Alexander E. Davis, Vineet Thakur, and Peter Vale, sees the or-ganization, the Round Table (since 1909), as the significant institutional and intellec-

Pamela Ballinger: The World Refugees Made: Decolonization and the Foundation of Postwar Italy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020, 305 pp.

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Pamela Ballinger: The World Refugees Made: Decolonization and the Foundation of Postwar Italy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020, 305 pp.

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