Contenu du sommaire : Réfugié(e)s

This article compares refugee policies created in Western European states during the long twentieth century. It compares transformations in the international regulations and the internal politics of several states, particularly Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Switzerland. The text underlines the challenges of building European refugee policies, and analyzes the forms they have taken in relationship to the national traditions of various European states. The article shows how, from the mid-nineteenth century on, national histories of refugee policies differ profoundly from, and even contradict, one another. This fact sheds new light on contemporary issues relating to the implementation of the ideals of the Geneva Convention.

The lives of political women outcasts under the French Second Empire have not attracted much historical attention. This article explores three types of female outcasts who challenge the traditional stereotype of a unchanging «eternal feminine» given over to domesticity. The first figure is the wife who « stays behind » the male political exile. She is not passive inasmuch as she assumes, at least in part, the responsibilities of her husband as well as the shame attached to his name. The second type is the woman who follows her husband into exile. She also plays an active role inasmuch as she helps to build and maintain family relations and political connections. If we look beyond the cliché of the wife who sacrifices her comfort and happiness for the sake of her husband, we find that these women had a variety of professional experiences and very ably adjusted to foreign circumstances. The last figure is the single woman outcast, who either is expelled from France or leaves by her own free will. In the case of such women outcasts as Jenny d'Héricourt and Jeanne Deroin, the exile experience transformed their militant behavior and the nature of their political activism.

Mixed marriages between French citizens and German or Austrian women fleeing the Hitlerian regime were not numerous. Nevertheless, they aroused much attention from the French authorities. As the threat of war arose in Europe, the naturalization of alien women through marriage was increasingly viewed with suspicion. After 1938, French citizenship could be denied to alien women who married Frenchmen. For the French administration, the « Germanness » of the female refugees from the Third Reich made of them « anti-mothers » who could never create a French foyer or bear French children, and who might, in the worst case scenario, act as spies who used their husbands to furnish military information. The articulation of this double category of gender and nationality is crucial to understanding the issues raised by the German exile in France from 1933 to 1945.

Because of the socio-cultural construction of gender, the figure of the female refugee is considered to be a non-political subject, needing neither aid nor protection. In one of the first large-scale attempts at resettlement, which took place at the end of the Second World War, the English government assumed responsibility for thousands of women refugees from the Baltic countries. These women were recruited as service personnel for sanatoriums; they were selected according age, nationality and the willingness to renounce family ties. This experience can be considered an important chapter in the history of displaced persons at the end of the Second World War. It reveals a Western Europe dedicated to the reconstruction of national democracies, and willing to receive refugees (but without recognizing either their history or their rights). This type of integration pushed immigrant women towards the social margins, where they were defined by their work, their ethnicity and their gender.

Immigrant Cambodians in France since 1975 have been political refugees fleeing civil war and the Khmer Rouge. Although male domination in this culture has remained relatively stable, it was not reinforced in France because men and women arrived at the same time. The familial model was undermined by events experienced by the immigrants in Cambodia as well as styles of life in France. Studies concerning Cambodian women reveal that conditions of exile transformed the sexual order in an accelerated fashion, generating ruptures in the gender identities of both men and women. However, the result of such ruptures was more complex than a simple emancipation of women from traditional models. This study also reveals that Cambodian women adopted different strategies of adaptation to their new environment, both at the familial and the community levels.

The violent conflicts which have taken place in the Horn of Africa since the 1980s have led to an increased number of Darfour immigrants in Egypt, especially in Cairo. While these immigrants wait to be granted the status of refugee by the local bureau of the UNHCR, they have had to struggle on their own to survive and reorganize their lives. Profound gender differences in the immigrants' experiences have resulted from the cultural norms of the host society as well as the economic structures of the Egyptian city.