| dc.description.abstract | This thesis aims to study the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) post-war migration effort, from 1946-1951. It does this by studying the Permanent Migration Committee sessions and the 1951 Naples Migration Conference, where a proposal for an extended ILO migration administration was tabled, and ultimately buried. The proposal entailed the ILO organising migration movements based on a ‘rational’ view of the surplus and lack of labour in different countries, to combat the ‘manpower problem’ that the world was facing. The administration was to be financed by the ILO’s member states, and both the emigration and immigration countries were to be subjected to several provisions which aimed to protect the migrants but also prevent further difficulties after the migrant had arrived. The ILO’s proposal does today seem like an unrealistic endeavour that was doomed to fail. This reading does however lack the context of the situation the world found itself in after the war. The financial, social, and political problems which emerged because of the 1929 stock market crash, and the two World Wars, had created the idea of the need to ‘rationalise’ labour, in effect getting the most out of a global workforce. The post-war reconstruction efforts and the believed destabilising effects of unemployment, made the world-society desperate to find an encompassing solution. The ILO was also an organisation that experienced a major shift in its areas of operation after the Second World War, and the attempted ILO migration effort had the possibility of being a part of this shift. The question was whether or not the ILO was to be restricted to the traditional instruments it worked through – being the passing of Conventions and Recommendations – in their migration effort, or if it were able to increase its own agency and impede the national sovereignty of its member states. | eng |