“Upper limits”, “repatriation” and the European “crisis regulation”: German refugee policy has created its own bureaucratic language over the years. In any case, “pushbacks” sound significantly less rough and brutal than the actual police practice at the EU’s external borders, and the nice word “anchor centers” also transforms monitored collection camps into a place of “welcoming culture”. The battle over terms is part of the asylum policy disputes that are currently taking place not only in Germany and which are about much more than individual regulations between European states. In essence, the new “Crisis Ordinance” means consent to making asylum procedures possible at the European external border under detention conditions in the future. What Europe wants to be as a “community of values” in the future will be negotiated on the backs of those seeking protection, and that doesn’t bode well at the moment.
The Geneva Convention was initially not intended for the future
In the meantime, we continue to hear voices questioning one of the key documents of refugee policy – the “Geneva Refugee Convention” of 1951, which is considered the heart of a global refugee policy and which stipulates that refugees may not be deported to a country in which they are Life is not safe because of their ethnic origin, their religion or their political beliefs. The Geneva Refugee Convention codified both the rights and responsibilities of asylum seekers. It did not create a right to asylum, but rather it regulated the right to asylum – a crucial difference, the design and interpretation of which was the subject of intensive debate between the states as early as the early 1950s and in the face of the mass atrocities of the Second World War.
Jakob Schönhagen’s important, widely researched and pleasantly sober book is about how dealing with refugees became a separate field of international politics. The work begins at the end of the Second World War and ends in the mid-1970s, when central instruments of global refugee policy had been established that still have an impact today. Why, is the initial question, was the idea able to prevail after 1945 that it was the task of the international community to help refugees and to build efficient structures and organizations such as the UNHCR to do this? This sounds like a straightforward story of humanitarian aid, from the darkness of war into the light of global human rights policy.
In 1950, no one thought of mass exodus from the Global South
But the Freiburg historian Schönhagen makes it clear from the start that the development of an international refugee policy cannot be explained so easily and was accompanied by adversities, setbacks and different economic conditions and evades a simple narrative of progress. The Geneva Refugee Convention itself was anything but uncontroversial: there was debate about the scope of a right to refuge, about the social and political rights of refugees in their host countries and also about what constitutes a refugee and which groups the convention should apply to. The signatories of the treaty had made sure that the rights of the states ultimately took precedence over the individual rights of the refugees. The convention did not provide for UN sanctions.
In general, it was less focused on the future. Rather, it was aimed at the past and was initially created to resolve the very immediate follow-up problems of the mass violence of the Second World War. It was only with the “New York Protocol” adopted in 1967 that the convention acquired its defining character today, because the scope was now expanded in time and space and adapted to the changing new refugee movements worldwide. Schönhagen vividly shows how much the “Cold War” and especially the experiences of decolonization since the 1960s have changed the perspectives and priorities of international refugee policy. The rich industrialized countries did not yet expect that they would be able to reach the massive refugee movements in Asia and Africa themselves. It was this moment of relatively small global refugee movements that helped establish an international aid architecture with the UNHCR.
Geostrategy always dominated, the welcoming culture rarely did
The benevolent unity began to change in the 1970s when escape routes expanded. Now the consequences of the old European colonial rule were once again evident in the instability of the young African and Asian states. In view of the growing problems, the resources for global refugee aid have again become more limited, scope has been narrowed and the admission procedures in the rich industrialized countries have become more difficult. According to the sobering conclusion, one group hardly played a role in the various conflicts over resources and aid: the refugees themselves. Often these were more geostrategic considerations, dealing with communism or the consequences of the destructive colonial policy for which the Western powers themselves were responsible. It was paradoxical: the gradual implementation of new, globalized norms of refugee protection actually represented a historical turning point, and at the same time their universalization led to massive countermovements and various attempts at new restrictions – a development that extends to the immediate present.
The presentation develops its particular power precisely where, as in the example of the Bangladesh War of 1971, it connects the international history of humanitarianism with regional conflicts and does not stop at negotiations in New York or Geneva. In the first eight weeks of the conflict alone, India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi reported, around 3.5 million Bengalis fled to India to escape the Pakistani military – and there was no end in sight. Within a very short time the number rose to around 9.6 million. The partition of “British India” and the associated territorial, social and religious conflicts and their consequences shaped the region.
The UNHCR played an important role
Violence and displacement were also a bitter legacy of European colonial rule. It becomes clear how long-term experiences of local refugee assistance by the (Indira) Gandhi government were combined with the struggle for international support. Inspired by the UNHCR and other refugee organizations, the regional refugee crisis gave rise to a global support campaign that mobilized approximately $183 billion in goods and money by January 1972. India was by no means just a recipient of aid, as Schönhagen shows, but rather an independent actor that provided considerable financial and logistical resources and contributed support.
This perspective is also important for the present because it places the often narrow national debate about flight and its causes in a global historical context. After all, around 90 percent of all global refugees in the 2010s ended up not between Flensburg and Garmisch, but in the countries of the Global South. A book that broadens our perspective and evades overly smooth narratives: this is what we would also like to read for those who like to complain about refugees at the dentist.
Dietmar Süß teaches modern and contemporary history at the University of Augsburg.