International “Migration Management” in the early Cold War: The Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (original) (raw)
This collective volume examines the emergence of the policies, practices and discourses underlying the notion of international “migration management” by tracing the establishment and the activities of the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM) in the early Cold War era. The ICEM was renamed the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in 1989, after having been gradually transformed into one of the main “migration management” bodies in the world. The studies comprising the volume explore the historical processes and the ideological premises that led to a comparatively high degree of intergovernmental cooperation and to a coordinated approach to the regulation of European population outflows in the period following the Second World War, and investigate how migration regulation was conceived in the past and how it was actually implemented. They focus on the initial years of the ICEM’s history, mainly the 1950s, during which the organization galvanized its constitution, its strategies and policies, and arranged for the resettlement of almost one million Europeans in overseas countries. They analyze the specificity of the processes leading to the establishment of international organizations in the immediate postwar period—highly dependent on the salience of nation-states, yet partly inspired by and requesting transnational political, social and cultural agency and knowledge.
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