Paper short abstract:

Today’s unequal treatment of Black and white refugees in Europe is mirrored by the privileged treatment of European war refugees in the British colonies in Africa. This paper focuses on the forgotten history of privileged refugees and the influence of race on the unequal treatment of refugees.

Paper long abstract:

Since Russia’s attack on Ukraine forced millions to flee, Poland has become a generous host to some 1.4 million of them. At the same time, the right-wing government is building a massive border wall to keep out non-Ukrainian refugees. Black students fleeing from Ukraine and being denied entry at the border while white Ukrainians were welcomed exposed this unequal treatment of refugees. It makes plain obvious that race, and not only the “well-founded fear of being persecuted” (UNHCR 1951), does play a role in the actual treatment of refugees – in Central and Eastern Europe as elsewhere in the Global North. “Refugeeness” is not only unsettling the order of nation-states (Malkki 1995), but it is also internally hierarchized along lines of race, class, gender, nationality and religion.

In this paper, I argue that this inequality has a long history and functions vice versa too. When thousands of Europeans fled to Africa during the Second World War (mainly from Poland, Greece, and Yugoslavia) the hosting British colonial states treated them preferably. Based on extensive research in European, African and UN archives it becomes apparent that constructions of race were relational and context-specific. Due to the refugees’ whiteness and their status as co-belligerents, they lived in well-supplied refugee camps scattered throughout the British Empire and beyond (Lingelbach 2020; 2022). And while British settlers and administrators regarded the Eastern Europeans’ whiteness with suspicion they still included them in white society, especially in opposition to the Black majority population. Acknowledging this long-standing inequality should serve as a starting point for a future vision where refugees are treated equally no matter where they come from.