458 MAREN MÖHRING
War II. Referred to as the Gastarbeiter system, these treaties led to strong
entanglements between the European countries that were on the send-
ing or receiving ends of these migration patterns.^62 After 1945, Eastern
Europe formed its own separate migration regime. Here, too, some of
the COMECON states who had been facing labor shortages since the late
1950s tried to attract foreign workers. In contrast to the West, however,
they sought to recruit labor resources exclusively from other Eastern Eu-
ropean countries or non-European countries run by governments that
were either socialist or leaning in this direction.
By the early 1950s, West German job market experts had already begun
to predict a labor shortage in certain sectors. As a result, the West German
government tightened its emigration policies and began to set things in
motion to recruit foreign workers. In 1955, it signed its fi rst bilateral treaty
with Italy, and this agreement was supposed to set a precedent for later
labor recruitment agreements.^63 Accordingly, treaties were signed with
Spain and Greece in 1960 and then Portugal in 1964. The recruitment
agreement signed with Turkey in 1961 was the fi rst treaty with a state
whose territory was not mostly on the European continent. This treaty
diff ered from the others insofar as the recruitment period was supposed
to be limited to two years, and families were not permitted to follow. Al-
though it was not mentioned in the actual agreement, but only in the cor-
respondence surrounding it, this treaty was not supposed to encourage
other non-European countries to try to send workers to the FRG.^64 West
Germany did sign a treaty with Morocco in 1963 and Tunisia in 1965, but
both of these agreements excluded the families of recruits from following.
There were, therefore, fi rst-class and second-class recruitment treaties.^65
Despite the fact that almost a third of these labor migrants were women,
the image of the Gastarbeiter that prevailed among the public was that of
a male labor migrant.^66 In the fi rst few years of recruitment, the term
Gastarbeiter had quickly come to replace the term Fremdarbeiter (foreign
worker, but very much in the sense of “alien worker”) that was still in
use despite the fact that it had become tainted by its association with
the Nazis’ forced labor programs. At the time, however, objections were
already being raised about the term Gastarbeiter. The trade unions, for
example, preferred “foreign employees.” Initially, by referring to this la-
bor migration as Gastarbeit (guest work), the West German recruitment
policies stressed the fact that these workers were supposed to come to
the FRG only for a short time, and they were expected to return home
when they were no longer needed. Once the Berlin Wall had gone up,
stopping the fl ow of immigration from the GDR, eff orts were made to
recruit more foreign labor migrants. At the beginning of the 1970s, this
migration regime, which rested on bilateral treaties, was put to an end,