ABSTRACT
After the massive population displacements at the end of the Second World War, international relations over migration questions in Western Europe returned to normal around 1947. The migration regime then prevailing in Western Europe was largely a legacy of the interwar period and remained, overall, in place until 1954. In this chapter, I shall examine how this regime was subject to a series of tensions. I will show how the Allies in Europe tried to transform it but failed, before going on to discuss how, in the context of the Cold War, the United States intervened to resolve the most serious migratory tensions in Western Europe. In the first half of the 1950s, the Western European migration regime was then dual, with a movement for a more open regime concerning only certain countries. I will end the chapter with an account of the first steps taken by the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) to champion an open migration regime in Western Europe.
