scholarly journals ‘If We Were Untrammelled by Precedent…’: Pursuing Gradual Reform in Child Migration, 1954–1961

Author(s):  
Gordon Lynch

AbstractThis chapter examines how British child migration policy became caught up in the political sensitivities of post-war assisted migration. By 1950, officials in the Commonwealth Relations Office were becoming increasingly doubtful about the strategic and economic value of assisted migration, but also concerned about adverse political reaction in Australia to any scaling back of this work. An agreement was reached between the Commonwealth Relations and Home Office in 1954 to continue child migration on the basis of encouraging gradual reform of standards in Australia. In 1956, a UK Government Fact-Finding Mission in 1956 recommended more urgent controls over child migration, but this was rejected by an inter-departmental review in view of these wider political sensitivities. Despite introducing more limited monitoring, British policy-makers struggled to reconcile their knowledge of failings in some Australian institutions with the political challenge of trying to address these in the absence of co-operation from the Australian Government.

2020 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 798-826
Author(s):  
GORDON LYNCH

Between 1947 and 1965, 408 British children were sent to Australia under the auspices of the Church of England Advisory Council of Empire Settlement and its successor bodies. Situating this work in wider policy contexts, this article examines how the council involved itself in this work with support from some senior clergy and laity despite being poorly resourced to do so. Noting the council's failure to maintain standards expected of this work by the Home Office and child-care professionals, the article considers factors underlying this which both reflected wider tensions over child migration in the post-war period as well as those specific to the council.


Author(s):  
Gordon Lynch

AbstractThis chapter examines the development of UK child migration to Australia in the inter-war period. Following the opening of Kingsley Fairbridge’s experimental farm school for child migrants at Pinjarra in 1913, the 1920s and 1930s saw a gradual increase in the number of voluntary societies involved in this work and of residential institutions in Australia receiving child migrants. The growth of these programmes in the wider context of the UK Government’s assisted migration policies is discussed. During the 1930s, the global financial depression weakened governmental support for assisted migration, and greater caution emerged within the UK Government about the value of some planned migration schemes. Nevertheless, by 1939, child migration to Australia was seen by UK policy-makers as a small but important part of the attempt to strengthen ties with Britain’s Dominions and to make more efficient use of their collective human and material resources.


Author(s):  
Gordon Lynch

AbstractThis concluding chapter explores why it was that post-war child migration to Australia was allowed to resume and continue by the UK Government despite known failings in these schemes. It is argued that one factor was the sheer administrative complexity of a multi-agency programme operating over different national jurisdictions and large distances which made control and oversight of conditions for British child migrants harder to achieve. Despite concerns that the post-war welfare state would be a powerful, centralised mechanism, the history of these programmes demonstrates British policy-makers’ sense of the limits of their powers—limits arising from lack of resource, the perceived need to avoid unproductive conflict with powerful stakeholders, the wish to respect boundaries of departmental policy remits and assumptions about the value of following policy precedents. The chapter concludes by considering how fine-grained analyses of such policy failures can contribute to public debates about suitable redress.


Balcanica ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 157-169
Author(s):  
Dragan Bakic

The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, officially named Yugoslavia after 1929, came into being on the ruins of the Habsburg Empire in 1918 after the immense war efforts and sacrifices endured by Serbia. The experience of anti-Habsburg struggle both before and after 1914 and the memory of some of the most difficult moments in the Great War left a deep imprint on the minds of policy-makers in Belgrade. As they believed that many dangers faced in the war were likely to be revived in the future, the impact of these experiences was instrumental to their post-war foreign policy and military planning. This paper looks at the specific ways in which the legacy of the Great War affected and shaped the (planned) responses of the Yugoslav government to certain crises and challenges posed to Yugoslavia and the newly-established order in the region. These concern the reaction to the two attempts of Habsburg restoration in Hungary in 1921, the importance of the Greek port of Salonica (Thessaloniki) for Yugoslavia?s strategic and defence requirements, and military planning within the framework of the Little Entente (the defensive alliance between Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Romania) in the early 1930s. In addition, it is ar?gued here that the legacy of Serbo-Croat differences during the war relating to the manner of their unification was apparent in the political struggle between Serbs and Croats during the two decades of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia?s existence.


1984 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 451-470 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Wilks

THE TERM ‘INDUSTRIAL ADAPTATION’ HAS RECENTLY EMERGED as a rallying call in the vocabulary of economic policy-makers in national governments and international organizations. At the same time the political consequences of the adaptation process, such as the reorientation of whole areas of government activity towards industrial priorities, or the escalation of unemployment, have redefined the agenda of economic policy for students of politics. This article, based on a comparison of the systems of industrial adaptation that have operated successfully in West Germany over the post-war period and, far less successfully, in Britain, focuses on the subsidy issue in the two countries and points to the hypocrisy of official economic doctrines and programmes. Insofar as governments must concern themselves with economic activity, issues such as subsidy must be evaluated not in pejorative, polemical fashion but in terms of their goals and of policy frameworks within which they can be controlled.


Author(s):  
Gordon Lynch

AbstractThis chapter examines the policy context and administrative systems associated with the resumption of assisted child migration from the United Kingdom to Australia in 1947. During the Second World War, the Australian Commonwealth Government came to see child migration as an increasingly important element in its wider plans for post-war population growth. Whilst initially developing a plan to receive up to 50,000 ‘war orphans’ shortly after the war in new government-run cottage homes, the Commonwealth Government subsequently abandoned this, partly for financial reasons. A more cost-effective strategy of working with voluntary societies, and their residential institutions, was adopted instead. Monitoring systems of these initial migration parties by the UK Government were weak. Whilst the Home Office began to formulate policies about appropriate standards of care for child migrants overseas, this work was hampered by tensions between the Home Office and the Commonwealth Relations Office about the extent to control over organisations in Australia was possible.


Author(s):  
Gordon Lynch

AbstractThis chapter examines the wider policy context and administrative systems for child migration to Australia in the period 1948-1954. With stronger concerns about child migration being expressed by some professional and voluntary organisations in Britain, in 1949 the Home Office began a process of drafting regulations for the emigration of children from the care of voluntary societies. The chapter examines how the process of developing these regulations was delayed through a complex bureaucratic process, with a final draft of the regulations not completed until 1954. Concerns about the legal limitations of these regulations and their effective power in safeguarding child migrants once overseas contributed to a subsequent decision in the Home Office not to introduce them. This decision was also informed by an independent review of child migration to Australia by John Moss, published in 1953, which offered a broadly positive view of this work. The chapter considers why Moss—a former member of the Curtis Committee—took this view, and how broad policy standards such as the Curtis report were, in practice, interpreted and implemented in different ways.


2006 ◽  
pp. 54-75
Author(s):  
Klaus Peter Friedrich

Facing the decisive struggle between Nazism and Soviet communism for dominance in Europe, in 1942/43 Polish communists sojourning in the USSR espoused anti-German concepts of the political right. Their aim was an ethnic Polish ‘national communism’. Meanwhile, the Polish Workers’ Party in the occupied country advocated a maximum intensification of civilian resistance and partisan struggle. In this context, commentaries on the Nazi judeocide were an important element in their endeavors to influence the prevailing mood in the country: The underground communist press often pointed to the fate of the murdered Jews as a warning in order to make it clear to the Polish population where a deficient lack of resistance could lead. However, an agreed, unconditional Polish and Jewish armed resistance did not come about. At the same time, the communist press constantly expanded its demagogic confrontation with Polish “reactionaries” and accused them of shared responsibility for the Nazi murder of the Jews, while the Polish government (in London) was attacked for its failure. This antagonism was intensified in the fierce dispute between the Polish and Soviet governments after the rift which followed revelations about the Katyn massacre. Now the communist propaganda image of the enemy came to the fore in respect to the government and its representatives in occupied Poland. It viewed the government-in-exile as being allied with the “reactionaries,” indifferent to the murder of the Jews, and thus acting ultimately on behalf of Nazi German policy. The communists denounced the real and supposed antisemitism of their adversaries more and more bluntly. In view of their political isolation, they coupled them together, in an undifferentiated manner, extending from the right-wing radical ONR to the social democrats and the other parties represented in the underground parliament loyal to the London based Polish government. Thereby communist propaganda tried to discredit their opponents and to justify the need for a new start in a post-war Poland whose fate should be shaped by the revolutionary left. They were thus paving the way for the ultimate communist takeover


Author(s):  
Simon Morgan Wortham

This chapter evaluates the question of the ‘complex’ in a range of scientific, political and psychoanalytic contexts, asking not only where lines of connection and demarcation occur among specific distributions of meaning, value, theory and practice; but also probing the psychoanalytic corpus, notably Freud’s writings on the notion of a ‘complex’, in order to reframe various implications of the idea that this term tends to resist its own utilisation as both an object and form of analysis. This section establishes connections between three sets of theoretical questions: the common practice of describing modernity and its wake in terms of a drive towards increasing complexity; the meaning and cultural legacy of phrases such as ‘military-industrial complex’ and sundry derivations in the political sphere; and the intricacies and ambiguities subtending the term ‘complex’ within psychoanalytic theory. As a concept that Freud both utilised and repudiated, the provocative power of the term ‘complex’ is linked to the way it thwarts various attempts at systemization (providing nonetheless an apparatus of sorts through which contemporary science, Slavoj Žižek, Noam Chomsky, Freud, Eisenhower, and post-war politics can be articulated to one another).


Author(s):  
Timur Gimadeev

The article deals with the history of celebrating the Liberation Day in Czechoslovakia organised by the state. Various aspects of the history of the holiday have been considered with the extensive use of audiovisual documents (materials from Czechoslovak newsreels and TV archives), which allowed for a detailed analysis of the propaganda representation of the holiday. As a result, it has been possible to identify the main stages of the historical evolution of the celebrations of Liberation Day, to discover the close interdependence between these stages and the country’s political development. The establishment of the holiday itself — its concept and the military parade as the main ritual — took place in the first post-war years, simultaneously with the consolidation of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Later, until the end of the 1960s, the celebrations gradually evolved along the political regime, acquiring new ritual forms (ceremonial meetings, and “guards of memory”). In 1968, at the same time as there was an attempt to rethink the entire socialist regime and the historical experience connected with it, an attempt was made to reconstruct Liberation Day. However, political “normalisation” led to the normalisation of the celebration itself, which played an important role in legitimising the Soviet presence in the country. At this stage, the role of ceremonial meetings and “guards of memory” increased, while inventions released in time for 9 May appeared and “May TV” was specially produced. The fall of the Communist regime in 1989 led to the fall of the concept of Liberation Day on 9 May, resulting in changes of the title, date and paradigm of the holiday, which became Victory Day and has been since celebrated on 8 May.


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