Suchergebnisse

Italy abolished the 'geographical limitation' permitted by the 1951 Refugee Convention only in 1990. Thereafter, it could award refugee status to people in flight from countries outside Europe. Why did Italy come so very late to this resolution? To answer this question, this article intercuts analysis on various different fronts: the strategies of successive national governments; the actual presence on Italian soil of people needing asylum, and the response of local communities; and Italy's location in the international setting. It demonstrates that until the end of the 1970s the Italian authorities continued to see the refugee issue as principally a problem for its internal policy. Italy remained disconnected from the global turn in policy on refugees, which many historians have placed in the period that spans the late 1950s and early 1960s. In their view, state institutions, voluntary agencies, and the international public experienced profound changes at this time in their perception of refugees, starting to see them as a problem at the global level rather than just affecting Europe. For Italy, however, this was not the case, and we therefore need to question the actual impact of the global turn delineated by the studies.

In the years of postwar reconstruction the experience of refugees in Italy was rapidly eclipsed, both in public discourse and in the growing number of studies on war and liberation. The need for resurrection and the desire to dissociate itself, both from Fascism and from the role it played in the Second World War, led Italian society to drive uncomfortable memories into the shadows. This forgetting of the recent past in turn engendered the misleading interpretation that the end of the war represented a watershed, and this misleading interpretation has extensively affected Italian historiography for several decades. At the end of the 1980s, some of the most relevant and controversial issues surrounding the war and postwar years started to be investigated (such as the Resistance as civil war, the deportations of Jews and the Allied bombings during the Second World War), while the history of refugees has been addressed only very recently and almost exclusively in relation to the revision of the eastern Italian–Yugoslav border. Research about Displaced Persons (DPs) still lags behind.

Résumé Les constructions socio-culturelles du genre féminin et la figure du réfugié interagissent et se renforcent : l'un et l'autre sont considérés comme des sujets non-politiques, n'ayant besoin que d'aide et de protection. L'une des premières opérations de réinstallation à grande échelle, au sortir de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, voit le gouvernement britannique se charger de milliers de réfugiées originaires des pays baltes, recrutées comme personnel de service pour ses sanatoriums et sélectionnées à partir de critères restrictifs fondés sur l'âge, la nationalité et le renoncement aux liens familiaux. Cette expérience peut être considérée comme un chapitre important de l'histoire des personnes déplacées à la suite de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Elle donne à voir une Europe occidentale qui se consacre à la reconstruction de démocraties nationales et reçoit alors des réfugiés sans reconnaître ni leur histoire ni leurs droits. Ce type d'intégration les repousse en même temps vers des marges sociales, que définissent leurs emplois, leurs caractéristiques ethniques et leur genre.