The Bolshevik Revolution upended more than the old Tsarist order: entire populations fled violence and political change after 1917, plunging the European continent into a prolonged population displacement crisis that lasted at least forty years, or so argue the contributors to Refugees in Europe 1919–1959: A Forty Years’ Crisis?. Editors Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch have compiled twelve articles addressing Europe's long refugee crisis in a volume that lays out the evolving emergence of international legal and relief systems, which sometimes helped and often exacerbated the distress of millions of stateless Europeans and global migrants.

Defining a genuine refugee emerges quickly as a frustration for historians as well as policy makers as emphasized by Tony Kushner and Zara Steiner, who remind readers that policy makers arrived at an acceptable definition only in 1951 (22). Nation-states in the early twentieth century mainly subscribed to definitions of refugees and practices to process them based on race and nationality, rather than political criteria for persecution. Carl Bon Tempo's work is illuminating on this issue. He ties the history of US refugee and asylum policies inextricably with US immigration policy. Strong continuities emerge across the twentieth century between US conservatives’ efforts to impose racially based filters on immigration as well as refugee relief, establishing a preference for white Europeans. Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt's policy to champion open immigration as a reward for his growing political base of first-generation Americans did not deviate from this ethnic definition (178). Both US parties embraced racial classifications of refugees/immigrants, but for differing reasons. These historians concur that, although after World War II the international refugee regime began to emphasize refugees’ political, anti-communist qualifications, race still prevailed as a dominant identifier determining a refugee's eligibility for processing in the vast systems of global and national asylum bureaucracies (205).

Thus, Refugees in Europe 1919–1959: Forty Years’ Crisis? is really an examination of refugee relief policies of both individual nation-states and international organizations. This is both the volume's central strength and its central weakness, as a noteworthy history of institutions emerges. Jan Manasek stretches the chronological framework of asylum regimes back to Belgium in 1831. Responding to the crisis in the multi-ethnic Russian, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires, Manasek situates the origins of refugees’ ethnic status as a basis for asylum qualification before the twentieth century. However, laws to manage refugees first appeared in the aftermath of World War I. Barbara Metzger shows how collaboration between the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the League of Nations created new paths of advocacy for refugees and obligations of League member nations to absorb refugee quotas. She highlights the actions of a few key individuals, especially Fridtjof Nansen, the first High Commissioner for Refugees. The League of Nations, however, thwarted crisis resolution by focusing on “technical solutions”—equipping refugees with papers, feeding them, and finding host nations to accept them for resettlement. Metzger describes the League's failure to intervene into member states’ policies of racial exclusion. Unfortunately, Metzger's study ignores the detailed work on the subject by Greg Burgess, which importantly documents how James McDonald, High Commissioner for Refugees from Germany, continued to pressure Secretary General Joseph Avenol to “relax the conditions on their [German Jews'] emigration” (The League of Nations and the Refugees from Nazi Germany: James G. McDonald and Hitler's Victims, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, 55).

Much scholarship has already shown how the United States tried to avoid receiving large quotas of European Jews. However, Matthew Frank's study of the Roosevelt administration's “M” project offers new details about the US government's efforts to locate “vacant places” (122) for the transfer and resettlement of European Jews. Carl Bon Tempo suggests that this racial-based thinking, embedded in the US relief policy, came from 1920s anti-immigration, Anglo-Protestant politicians such as Fred Purnell of the US House of Representatives. Purnell stoked the fear of white Protestants with invasion threats: “There is little or no similarity between the clear-thinking, self-governing stocks that sired the American people and this stream of irresponsible and broken wreckage that is pouring into the lifeblood of America the social and political diseases of the Old World” (178).

Roosevelt's perpetuation of a racialized, ethnic-based classification of refugees was not exclusively his administration's endeavor. The Jewish aid organizations, including Hebrew Immigrant Colonialisation EMIGRDIRECT (coalition composed of three groups, Hebrew Immigrant Aid and Sheltering Society, Jewish Colonialisation Association, and EMIGDIRECT) and The Jewish Colonization Association, also helped resettle European Jews in vacant places in Angola, Colombia, and Tanganyika based on ethnic identity. They did not resettle non-Jewish German socialists and French communists, also victims of Nazism. These groups pressured the United States and the High Commission for Refugees to increase funding to these ethnic resettlement projects (The League of Nations and the Refugees from Nazi Germany, 105–106). Ultimately, these mass relocation schemes failed. As Frank points out: “It was as immigrants in crowded places, therefore, not as pioneer settlers in empty lands, that a ‘durable solution’ was found for refugees during Europe's forty years’ crisis” (136).

Unfortunately, the volume skirts around the views, and thus suggests that the hardships and experiences of host or welcoming communities and their constituents are illegitimate or racist, hence downplaying the real economic and cultural challenges that accompany the short-term impact of refugee absorption. Jessica Reinisch's treatment of the transition of authority over refugees from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) to the International Refugee Organization (IRO) in Allied-occupied postwar Germany does, however, highlight some legitimate administrative and material problems accompanying refugee relocation. Describing the origins and day-to-day operations of the UNRRA makes a new contribution to refugee studies. Reinisch's story of US general John H. Hilldring, who chaffed against the work of the relief agencies, casts light on the military perspective. Hilldring complained to political superiors, “The Army is not a welfare organization” (162). Mission conflict sat at the core of the tensions among relief workers, military personnel, refugees, and state-builders. US military personnel often viewed refugees not as victims but as the perpetrators of Nazi violence and German militarism, whom the United States was charged to bring to justice not to house and provide for.

Clair Eldridge's study of the Algerian repatriation crisis in France in 1961–1962 best excavates the diverse identities of refugees within a mass migration, using refugee narratives that reveal the multiple shades of gray that shadow refugee self-identification and state classification. Eldridge also alludes to the complex, near violent interaction between Algerian repatriates and French communist party sympathizers in Marseilles, who had long opposed the imperialist, pieds-noirs supported cause of French Algeria.

The large majorities of twentieth-century refugees have been women and children, bereft of citizenship rights, but tainted with the political baggage of their husbands, fathers, and brothers. Gender is one of the foundational constructs of refugees’ reality. In this volume, gender is almost completely absent. In part, the volume's focus on institutions and institutional actors accounts for this huge omission. Few women led the policy initiatives detailed in the book, although the voices of a handful of aid workers are preserved. In addition, in attempting to globalize and internationalize its scope, this volume subordinated many of the national histories of political conflict that fueled refugee migrations. Within those national histories and postwar testimonies of the Holocaust, for example, the voices of women refugees and women relief workers offer important understandings about the links between displacement, sexual abuse, prolonged victimization, and female refugee recruitment into illegal activities—all topics absent from this volume. Yet despite some of its crucial omissions, Refugees in Europe 1919–1959: A Forty Years’ Crisis? does make important contributions to a conversation about human displacement that seems as important now as ever before.