Expulsion, emotion and refugee children: forced European migration and refugee pedagogy (1912-1947)

Abstract

This article explores how capturing the emotional dimensions of state formation may help to explain the arc of forced migration, and an emerging refugee pedagogy, in Europe between 1912 and 1947. In doing so it turns away from the troubling «passions» that dominate the historical literature of this period, from the anger and hatred, manufactured, communicated and learnt, which culminated in persecution, population transfer, mass killing, and genocide. Instead, its focus is on the more positively evaluated «affections», the compassion, empathy and love, which motivated aid for vulnerable populations and, arguably at least, lay behind the attempt to establish international laws that protected all human being from the murderous power of states. Those affections also arguably motivated attempts to protect and rescue children by evacuating them from conflict zones, even when that meant separating them from parents and crossing national boundaries, and it may have stimulated a distinctive form of refugee pedagogy in which emotions, and working through them, were a distinctive presence.

Key words: History of emotions, history of childhood, refugees, war.