Past Event

DATE: Thursday, June 13th 2024

TIME: 2:00-3:00PM

LOCATION: Richcraft Hall 3302

Registration is required for this event. Please register using the form below.

The Institute of European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies will host the talk “Precarious Privileges: Polish Refugees between Poland, Austria and Canada in the long 1980s” with Daniel Jerke. Daniel Jerke is a doctoral student at the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna where he is working under the supervision of Jannis Panagiotidis.

Event description:

In the 1980s, millions of people left Poland of whom at least 1.3 million never returned. They used a variety of different legal titles, migration strategies and social practices in order to emigrate from Poland and establish themselves abroad. Among the countries most affected by that migration movement were Austria and Canada. In Austria, roughly 50,000 asylum claims were submitted by Polish citizens in the 1980s, however, most of them intended to migrate further to countries overseas. One of those countries admitting Poles from Austria was Canada. In total, more than 100,000 Poles arrived in Canada, most of them labelled refugees.

Already back then, claims were made that Western countries favoured refugees from the Soviet bloc over refugees and migrants from other parts of the world. Yet in my talk I want to demonstrate that Poles leaving their home country were indeed “precariously privileged”: On the one hand, they enjoyed a high acceptance among Western politicians and were privileged in legal terms, but that made them, on the other hand, highly dependent on the state and its institutions. When Western governments gradually changed their policy in the second half of the 1980s that one-sided dependence turned into a huge disadvantage. Furthermore, Polish refugees often suffered from downward social mobility and were partly rejected by wider society.

In fact, the very label ‘refugee’ was already a crucial element of their “precariously privileged” status. This talk discusses the negotiations over the transnational mobility of Polish citizens in the 1980s in order to answer the following questions. Who was was taken by whom for a refugee and for what reason? Who participated in these negotiations? Which goals did the various actors pursue and which means did they use to achieve them? And last, but not least how did the Poles themselves perceive their own situation and tried to influence it? In order to answer these questions, the talk combines the use of written records produced by state institutions, private organisations, the refugees themselves as well as contemporary media reports and academic publications.