MIGRATIONHow Mass Migration Remade Postwar Europe
Volha Charnysh’s new book examines refugees and state-building in Germany and Poland after World War II, as new residents spurred economic and civic growth.
Migrants have become a flashpoint in global politics. But new research by an MIT political scientist, focused on West Germany and Poland after World War II, shows that in the long term, those countries developed stronger states, more prosperous economies, and more entrepreneurship after receiving a large influx of immigrants.
Those findings come from a close examination, at the local level over many decades, of the communities receiving migrants as millions of people relocated westward when Europe’s postwar borders were redrawn.
“I found that places experiencing large-scale displacement [immigration] wound up accumulating state capacity, versus places that did not,” says Volha Charnysh, the Ford Career Development Associate Professor in MIT’s Department of Political Science.
Charnysh’s new book, “Uprooted: How Post-WWII Population Transfers Remade Europe,” published by Cambridge University Press, challenges the notion that migrants have a negative impact on receiving communities.
The time frame of the analysis is important. Much discussion about refugees involves the short-term strains they place on institutions or the backlash they provoke in local communities. Charnysh’s research does reveal tensions in the postwar communities that received large numbers of refugees. But her work, distinctively, also quantifies long-run outcomes, producing a different overall picture.
As Charnysh writes in the book, “Counterintuitively, mass displacement ended up strengthening the state and improving economic performance in the long run.”
Extracting Data from History
World War II wrought a colossal amount of death, destruction, and suffering, including the Holocaust, the genocide of about 6 million European Jews. The ensuing peace settlement among the Allied Powers led to large-scale population transfers. Poland saw its borders moved about 125 miles west; it was granted formerly German territory while ceding eastern territory to the Soviet Union. Its new region became 80 percent filled by new migrants, including Poles displaced from the east and voluntary migrants from other parts of the country and from abroad. West Germany received an influx of 12.5 million Germans displaced from Poland and other parts of Europe.
To study the impact of these population transfers, Charnysh used historical records to create four original quantitative datasets at the municipal and county level, while also examining archival documents, memoirs, and newspapers to better understand the texture of the time. The assignment of refugees to specific communities within Poland and West Germany amounted to a kind of historical natural experiment, allowing her to compare how the size and regional composition of the migrant population affected otherwise similar areas.
