This special issue of Contemporary European History is devoted to the impact of the two world wars on civilian population displacement in Europe. Each contributor has brought fresh material to bear on specific instances of involuntary migration that are either unfamiliar or poorly understood. The contributors seek to establish the origins of population displacement and the assistance provided by governments, non-government organisations and individuals and, where possible, also to reflect on the ways in which displacement was understood both at the time and subsequently.

In the wake of the German invasion of Belgium and France in August 1914, four million persons went into exile. While such a displacement of population testified to a dramatic change in the character of war in western Europe, historiography and collective memory alike have so far concurred in marginalising the experience of refugees during the First World War. This article examines their unprecedented encounter with host communities in France and Great Britain. It demonstrates that the refugees' plight reveals the strengths as well as the tensions inherent in the process of social mobilisation that was inseparable from the First World War.

This article deals with the forms of assistance given to refugees in Italy during the First World War. The entire subject has been neglected because of the dominant myth of a victorious nation. The Italian situation was peculiar because of the high level of migration and the multi-ethnic origin of people in the border areas. By pinpointing the pattern of relocation in Italy during the war this article seeks to explain the policies pursued by the state and by aid agencies, the rationale behind that aid and the continuities and discontinuities in the assistance given to the refugees. Significant political, juridical and social issues evolved around the image of the refugee, including the protection that the state owed to its citizens.

After the destruction of the Polish state by the invading Nazi and Soviet armies in the autumn of 1939, about 30,000 Polish nationals fled to eastern Lithuania. This article examines the relationship between population displacement and ethnic rivalry in Lithuania at the onset of the Second World War. As ‘war victims’ in need of help and protection, over time these Polish refugees became increasingly ‘ethnicised’, socially differentiated and isolated from Lithuanian society, and vilified as a potential political threat. Furthermore, the official decision to create a legal category of so-called ‘newcomers’ deprived those Poles who had settled in Vilnius between the wars of citizenship and residence rights in Lithuania. This policy inflated the number of ‘refugees’ to more than 100,000. Various other official measures, such as the creation of camps, forced labour schemes, deportations and repatriations, show how the government manipulated the refugee crisis for its own political purposes.

During the First World War the survival of hundreds of thousands of Latvian refugees, dispersed across the Russian Empire, overlapped with issues of identity. Latvians in Siberia and the Far East created a refugee organisation complete with military, diplomatic and cultural programmes for themselves and their homeland. The key players attempted to recreate the same organisational trajectories and outcomes during the Second World War, under very different geopolitical conditions. This article presents new archival research and suggests new interpretations of the dynamic nature of political organisation, refugee experience and identity in Latvia through the first half of the twentieth century.

In the wake of the German invasion of June 1941, sixteen and a half million Soviet citizens were evacuated to the country's interior. Unlike the archetypal European refugee, the Soviet evacuee was displaced but not stateless. This article, based on previously unexamined sources from archives in Russia and Uzbekistan, examines the status of the displaced in a state in which rights were grounded in territory and the lack of fixed residence could have dire implications. More specifically, it focuses on the way in which the evacuee was conceived in relation to the ‘refugee’ and the ‘deportee’.

During the twentieth century Armenia and Poland alike were sites of widespread population displacement, which brought into sharp focus arguments about national ‘survival’ advanced by patriotic leaders who found in refugees the embodiment of recurrent national suffering. Population displacement also attracted external support from sympathetic foreigners and from the Armenian and Polish diaspora, who regarded it as an affront to civilisation. Among Armenians a groundswell of support for repatriation gathered momentum after both world wars, because Soviet ‘protection’ offered the most realistic chance for national survival. In contrast many Poles opted not to return to Poland after 1945, regarding the communist takeover as a betrayal of Poland's struggle for independence.

According to theories of evolution, species evolve according to survival imperatives generated by their physical environments. Traits are selected and rejected based on their adaptability to the structures of the physical world in which these species live. Biological differences mirror differences in climate; the acutely developed senses of many species have adapted either for capturing prey or eluding predators, and so forth. So too in economic systems do we observe changes in human behaviour modes and policies that suggest adaptation. With respect to money, scholars continue to look for the most important adaptation mechanisms to explain the evolution of international monetary relations. What was once the preserve of strictly economic analysis has now become open ground for a wider array of social scientific analyses. In only a few short decades the study of monetary relations has developed into a more fully multi- and interdisciplinary enterprise. The four books reviewed here represent some of the latest attempts at constructing a broader social scientific explanation of monetary history. These valuable works complement one another in filling gaps in the literature on a complex and more diverse adaptation of monetary relations. Above all they stand as impressive political economies of monetary relations. Moure and Kettell concentrate on specific cases of monetary policy transformation in the interwar period, while Flandreau et al. and Obstfeld and Taylor cover a broader evolutionary timeline. The value of the contributions lies in several factors.

All four of these books are interesting additions to the corpus of historical research into European integration. Parr and Poggiolini's books are precise, document-based accounts of the trials and tribulations surrounding Britain's accession to the European Economic Community (EEC); Ludlow's book, which is based on an imposing quantity of archive research in six countries, is the most important work in English to date on the evolution of the European Community (EC) in the period that elapsed between Charles de Gaulle's veto of British entry and the Hague summit of December 1969, when the member states’ leaders ‘brought to an end a seven year struggle over its purpose, mode of operation and membership’ (p. 198). Gillingham's book reads like a 300-page op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, and is largely concerned with current events rather than history, but that does not mean that it has nothing of relevance for historians, as I hope to show at the end of this review.