Tara Zahra.The Great Departure:Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the central event in the political history of Europe in the twentieth century was the unmaking of great empires and the making of successor national states.From the Hohenzollern German Empire to the former Yugoslavia, almost all great multinational states of the continent rose and eventually fell in the aftermath of the Great War, the Second World War, and the Cold War.Among all spectacular imperial collapses and sometimes even their rebuilding and re-collapse, the once-for-all fall of the Habsburg Empire in 1918, a relatively lightweight among strong European states, appear not especially significant.But as historians have recently began to recognize, the political culture of the Habsburg Empire in its last years and the successor states had exercised a disproportionally large influence on the making of modern Europe and the world.Among the important questions discussed in recent literature are the territorial disputes of new nation states, Holly Case, (Palo Alto:Stanford University Press, 2009).the cultivation of science and domestic life, Deborah Coen, (Chicago:Chicago University Press, 2007).politics and ideology of liberalism, Jonathan Kwan, -(New York:Palgrave McMillan, 2013).and the making of multinational empire. John Deak, (Palo Alto:Stanford University Press, 2015).

Zahra's

Great Departure

would fit into this expanding list of key works on the Habsburg Empire and its successor states.Focused on Czechoslovakia and Poland, Zahra's book depicts the waves of migration and resettlement of Eastern Europeans to the United States, France and various countries in Eastern Europe during a long span of political transformations from late-nineteenth century to the post-Cold War decades.Zahra is apparently not interested in a systematic and much less an exhaustive study of this large and complex process.Instead, she offers in her small book a series of richly contextualized snapshots on shifting dynamics of migration, intimate experience of migrants and the management of population and refugees in the home states.Drawing on a wide range of source ranging from state archives, contemporary polemical literature to private correspondences, the narrative is especially revealing on the dynamics between the efforts of home states to manage migration and the flow and ebb of migration, from the Habsburg's trial of travel agency, Tara Zahra, (New York:W.W.Norton and Company, 2016), 35-50.curtailment of migration in the 1930s in the light of social reforms,the solutions to wartime Jewish Questionand the ransom system of migration which amounted to “selling” the citizens in Cold War,all shared by the Eastern European in question.As Zahra convincingly demonstrates, the pattern of Eastern European migration was largely determined by the state, while setting the agenda for the state.This is, if anything, a sober rebuttal of the triumphantist “making of the free world” in both the West and the East.It is instructive to compare this book with another major work on modern migration from Europe, James Belich's

Replenishing the Earth

. James Belich, - (Oxford and New York:Oxford University Press, 2009).In contrast to Belich's wide-ranging treatment of settlement colonialism of the British empire and its successor states which took place with no design or intervention of the state, Zahra tackles head-on the “state effect” as seen in different kinds of migrants across a century of geopolitical and political transformations in Central and Eastern Europe.Belich's migrants were typically visionary settlers who populated newly discovered lands and transformed the landscape from wilderness to industrial towns, while Zahra's were marginalized and sometimes displaced persons whose moves were uncertain, reversible and even involuntary.Unlike self-motivated colonial pioneers, they were often economic or political refugees and victims of capitalist exploitations and the relentless powers of the modernizing nation-states.If measured by the size and scale of the project, Zahra's is not comparable with Belich's.But it is nevertheless an equally, if not a more important book, since the Eastern European experience, rather than the English-speaking peoples, defines the norm of contemporary migration in a world of nation states, since Poland and Czechoslovakia were among the first fullyfledged nation states without a territorial empire or overseas colonies.

A few points raised in this book has far-reaching relevance to students of migration and world history.First, the question of the agency.In this book, we see more than once that the same set of historical experiences of migration give rise to very different and even opposite individual responses, such as the responses to the freedom but perils of American as a destination and the experience of deprivations in the post-War forced resettlement of Germans.We can say such difference is common sense, but they feature rarely in the structuralist approach, including Belich's rather “structural” treatment.Although Zahra makes no special effort to explain the difference (which is almost an impossible task), the mere recognition of individual agency in the production of migrant experience is a notable contribution.Second, the book tells us that at certain point of time, alignments of historical forces would give rise to “problems” and “solutions” shared by very different factors.One of the best examples is the strange convergence on the Jewish Question and the Madagascar solution across many different factors.The Nazis had also flirted with this solution of shipping all Central and Eastern European Jews to the Madagascar Island until they failed to capture enough British merchant ships by winning the Battle of Britain. Peter Longerich, (Oxford and New York:Oxford University Press, 2010),160-64.Third, there is a period when all European states—including these new states without any colonies—were eagerly seeking to acquire colony as alternative to migration.The interwar Poland was a case in point. Tara Zahra, , 126-27.How can we conceptualize colonialism as a method of statecraft shared even by old imperial states and new nation states alike? What is the conceptual boundary between state-led migration and colonialization at the pre-war Europe? These are important questions for historians who work on migration in different regions of the world.

Zahra's work as a political history of migration and especially refugees also challenges the conventional ways we conceptualize refugee and political migrations in history.Political migrations or refugees are usually studied in the framework of political history, such as larger political and geopolitical shifts, geographical loci like cosmopolitan centers, and a single cataclysmic event like the Russian Revolution.One of the novel themes that this book sketches out is how migration experience shaped migrants as political subjects and then in turn shaped the home country.It reminds us that Poles, Czechs and other Eastern Europeans became aware of their national identities in the United States and then brought their new-found identities back to their homeland, as the American origin of the iconic work on Polish society,

The Polish Peasant

, and Masaryk's plan to “make America in Czechoslovakia” clearly demonstrate.For scholars on the history of modern East Asia and especially modern China, this backward linkage is perhaps among the most significant historical dynamics of migration.Sun Yat-sen once remarked:“Overseas Chinese are the mother of Chinese Revolution.” Indeed, overseas Chinese community, who first recognized themselves as Chinese in the United States, Dutch East Indies and British Malaya, supplied the breeding ground for the nationalist revolution that brought down the Manchu rule in 1912. YAN Qinghuang, (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1979).In the past, historians of migration often ask:how shall we rethink the larger forces behind people who move in-between different political systems and eventually transform the destiny countries? Following the lead of Zahra's work, we should perhaps reshuffle the old question to the following one:how did migration transform the home country, either through their return to home country or the state's response to the fact that most of them would not return?

While this book is about the Habsburg Empire and its successor states, Zahra could have paid more attention to the elephant in the room, namely, the “Russian Question” to offer a more comparative view of the “great departure.” Indeed, the word “Russian” only appears eight times in the whole book.This is not likely to be a negligence on behalf of the author.After all, the European part of the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union would constitute the lion's share of the Eastern Europe and perhaps have supplied the largest contingent of migrants across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.But the Russian case was ultimately different from the Habsburg.On one hand, the way the Romanov's collapse might be compared to the Habsburg in certain ways, but the way the empire was remade in the guise of Soviet Union and atrophied again into the Russian Federation was another story altogether.The Russian and Soviet experiences also included a Eurasian dimension and significant internal migration from the Western to the Eastern half, under its own political dynamics rather than transnational forces.Most importantly, the collapse of the Russian and the Soviet Empires simply never yielded so neatly to national states like the Habsburg, which set the international standard for nation-making via the League of Nation as we reach the age of the United Nations.Thus, it is perhaps wise to keep Russian and Soviet Union as a separate analytical unit when it comes to a history of migration for Eastern Europe.But on the other hand, it is indeed possible to weave a more coherent narrative by treating the Russians and the Soviet Union in an intermittent way when they came into the picture.The way Zahra treats the Russian and Soviet factors—as merely a major foreign power exerting influence on the Czechoslovakian and Polish states—could be supplemented by some general descriptions of the Russian Jews and White Russians who constituted major migrant groups in turn-of-the-century United States and then France in the 1920s and 1930s.

Another debatable point in the narrative concerns treatment of underlying dynamics of migration throughout the period the book covers.Zahra is interested in the question of nationalism and nation building as a global process.But equally important in the making of migrants and migration is the evolution of global capitalism and the formation of world economy, which in many ways set the condition for migration and nation building in the industrial age.While Zahra is keenly aware of the Great Depression as a watershed event in the history of Eastern European migration, Tara Zahra, , 134-36.she provides few clues to the unravelling of global economy and its aftermaths in the nation building projects in East Europe through plummeting trade, unemployment, and state transformation.The relationship between the Great Depression, migration pattern, and state transformations in mid-twentieth-century is a theme that remains to be clarified in future studies of migration in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.Another minor problem regards the notion of migration.While migration is conventionally defined as transnational, it sometimes makes sense to consider not only this transnational definition but also a more broadly-defined notion of resettlement within the country, which might take on a new significance during a global economic crisis when the state might acquire powers to uproot and move its population around.This kind of domestic migration, including urban-rural migration and state-led resettlements, is largely absent in Zahra's work.But is it possible to think about the creation of “free world” in terms of ruralurban migration? Only a serious study that considers both domestic and transnational migration could answer.

These quibbles apart, Zahra's work is still a masterpiece of history that offers insights into not only the history of migration but also the making of nation states and international norms in Eastern Europe and the modern world.