The Social and Economic Structure of Contemporary Europe599monarchical armies, but most emigrants left for greater
economic opportunities. Millions of Europeans lived in
such poverty in 1900 that flight to the Americas, Aus-
tralia, or the scattered corners of European empires was
preferable to hunger at home. World War I nearly
stopped European emigration, and in the 1920s many
states (led by the United States) adopted much stricter
policies on accepting immigrants. Although emigration
increased during some crises—especially Germans dur-
ing the 1930s and many nations in the decade follow-
ing World War II—by the end of the century, Europe’s
migration pattern had completely reversed the pattern
of 1900. Millions of non-Europeans sought to immi-
grate to Europe because economic opportunity was
much greater there.
Much of the late twentieth-century immigration
into Europe has its origins in the history of European
colonial empires and in the age of decolonization that
followed World War II. The end of empire forced im-
perialist governments to reintegrate European-born
colonists and their descendants; the Franco-Algerian
War of 1954–62, for example, led more than one mil-
lion pieds noirs(French colonists in Algeria) to return to
France in the 1960s. In many cases, the indigenous
population of European colonies had the legal right to
migrate to the imperial state or had legal preference in
normal immigration. For example, after the Dutch East
Indies won their independence as Indonesia in 1949,
the Netherlands absorbed 300,000 immigrants from
their former colony. The independence of the maghreb
(the Arabic term for north Africa—Morocco, Algeria,
and Tunisia) from France resulted in an influx of mil-
lions of north Africans starting in the late 1960s and
peaking in the 1980s. Until strict—and often racially
motivated—immigration controls were adopted by
Britain in mid-1962, hundreds of thousands of south
Asians (chiefly from India and Pakistan) and blacks
from the West Indies migrated to Britain (see table
30.3). These migrations of non-Europeans into
Europe reversed long-standing patterns of population
movement; in the case of Britain, for example, the
largest group of immigrants had remained Irish through
the 1960s.
France provides a dramatic illustration of this trans-
formation of European population. By 1982 immigrants
formed nearly 7 percent of the population of France;
counting the families of immigrant workers, France was
more than 8 percent immigrant. At the start of the
twentieth century, less than 3 percent of the populationThe data reflect the total metropolitan region.
1991
population 1991 population density
City (in millions) per square mile
Moscow 10. 427,562
London 9.8 10,429
Paris 8.7 20,185
Essen 7.5 10,585
Milan 4.7 13,806
St. Petersburg 4.7 33,614
Madrid 4.5 68,385
Barcelona 4.2 48,584
Manchester 3.8 11,287
Athens 3.5 30,237
Rome 3.0 43,949
Berlin 3.0 11,026
Naples 3.0 48,032
Kiev 2.8 45,095
Lisbon 2. 4n.a.
Vienna 2.3 n.a.
Budapest 2.3 16,691
Source: All 1991 data from U.S. Department of Commerce calculations,
reprinted in The World Almanac and Book of Facts 1993(Mahwah, N.J.:
World Almanac Books, 1992), p. 818.
n.a. Not available.TABLE 30.2The Growth of European Cities, 1900–91Annual net commonwealth immigration
West Pakistan and
Year Indies India Bangladesh
1960 49,700 5,900 2,500
1961 66,300 23,750 25,100
1962 35,041 22,100 24,943
January–June 31,800 19,050 25,080
July–December 3,241 3,050 137
1972 1,176 3,634 3,515
Source: Adapted from data in David Butler and Anne Sloman, eds.,
British Political Facts, 1900–1975,4th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1975),
p. 268.TABLE 30.3Commonwealth Immigration into Britain