euro-Mediterranean Migration futures 39
a long history of emigration, immigration and forced migration. The gradual
contraction of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of new states from
the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries led to the wide-scale
displacement of Armenians, Greeks, Muslim Albanians, Bosnians, Pomaks,
Tatars and Turks from the Balkans (Kirişci 2003). In the events around
the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923), over 1 million Greeks left
Turkey and almost half a million Muslims and Turks moved from Greece
to Turkey. Between the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 and
the early 1960s, Turkey was predominantly an immigration country. The
government of the Turkish Republic established an immigration programme
encouraging Muslims and Turks from the Balkans to settle in Turkey, as part
and parcel of the Turkish nation-building exercise (Avcı & Kirişci 2006).
1.3.2 The Turkish and Moroccan guest-worker boom (1961-1972)
The 1960s were characterised by a huge increase in labour migration to
North-West Europe from Morocco and Turkey, which would develop into
two main source countries of labour and family immigrants from outside
the EU in the decades to follow. Rapid post-war economic growth in North-
West Europe had created a demand for unskilled labour in sectors such as
industry, mining, housing construction and agriculture from the 1950s. This
triggered an increasing emigration of ‘guest workers’ from poorer countries
around the Mediterranean. Until the early 1960s, most were recruited in
Southern European countries.
When this migration stagnated, attention shifted towards Southern
Mediterranean countries. The agreement which the Turkish and West
German governments signed in 1961 for the recruitment of ‘guest workers’
would trigger an unprecedented migration from Turkey to West Germany.
Similar agreements were signed with the governments of Austria, Belgium,
the Netherlands, France and Sweden (Avcı & Kirişci 2006). The Moroccan
government also signed agreements on the recruitment of workers with
the governments of West Germany (1963), France (1963), Belgium (1964)
and the Netherlands (1969). This was the onset of a spatial diversif ication
of Moroccan migration to Europe, which used to be exclusively directed
towards France, although the latter would remain the dominant destina-
tion until the 1990s. Migration from Morocco and Turkey peaked in the
early 1970s (Avcı & Kirişci 2006; de Haas 2007a). The inf luence of formal
recruitment by specialised agencies was only important in the initial years
of labour migration and in setting the stage for subsequent chain migration.
Already, in the 1960s, spontaneous settlement and informal recruitment