This article examines two recent refugee crises in Calais: the debate around the Sangatte refugee camp, which was resolved in 2002, and the ongoing problems in Calais, which have been escalating since autumn 2014. It asks: why are these events repeating? What, if anything, has changed between 2002 and now? It points to a number of new developments since 2002, such as growing numbers of migrants worldwide, and a changing European political and legal landscape. But it also argues that a number of the same factors that led to the Sangatte crisis are still shaping events and responses in Calais today. They concern the persistent shortcomings of European states’ immigration controls, the failures to reach Europe‐wide and international agreements on migration, and the inadequacies of international bodies such as the UNHCR and the 1951 Refugee Convention which it upholds.

This article evaluates UNRRA as one of the first international agencies established during the war to manage the transition from war to peace and to provide liberated countries with essential relief. It argues that this organization was a forum for debates on questions not only of internationalism, but also of the future of the nation-state, national reconstruction, national sovereignty, patriotism and citizens' relationships to their states. Moreover, the article explores this chapter of international history at the national level, by asking how the problem of Polish reconstruction after 1945 was framed, discussed and understood by UNRRA's diplomats and relief workers in Poland and in the DP camps. Problems of Polish sovereignty and reconstruction were interpreted differently in different sections of UNRRA, as a pragmatic interpretation of civic usefulness and patriotic responsibilities coexisted with an ethnological understanding of Polish cultural traditions, shared land and ancestry. But even as these different interpretations came into conflict, both models continued to be grounded in a world view which saw nation-states as unavoidable constituents of the international order, and international organizations as having to bind nations together without abolishing them.

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In 2005 Contemporary European History published a special issue on transnationalism, edited by Patricia Clavin and Jens-Wilhelm Wessels. The articles presented six examples of ‘transnational’ connections between Europeans from different countries, focusing primarily on contacts in the political and economic realms, and documenting a multitude of ties and links between Europeans at all levels from the end of the First World War to the early 1960s.

The four chapters in the second part contrast day-to-day public health work in the four occupation zones. They begin by examining the products of the war-time plans, before going on to show how, in the course of the post-war years, the occupiers’ initial assumptions and plans unravelled. Together, they show that health was at the heart of central questions about German reconstruction, renewal and reform, and involved a series of compromises and confrontations. This chapter identifies a number of consequences of an early British diagnosis of a national German, Nazified mentality for the conduct of public health work and the collaboration between German and British health workers