The Post-war Refugee Problem and Its Repercussions for 2015

Abstract

Since its outbreak in 2015, the so-called ‘Syrian’ refugee crisis has been routinely dubbed by the media the worst instance of mass displacement in Europe since the end of World War II. Although violence in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s had already brought back scenes of war refugees to the continent, this comparison is not devoid of merits. The scale of population movements following the collapse of the Third Reich in May 1945 was certainly far superior to the approximately one million refugees who in 2015 reached southern Europe or the Balkans while on their way to Germany or other host countries. Furthermore, a large proportion of post-war refugees comprised millions of ethnic German expellees who had been forcibly evicted from East-Central Europe and who were not merely fleeing war—in this case the eastward advance of the Red Army. Rapidly, however, the so-called ‘last million’ of unrepatriable displaced persons (DPs) languishing in camps in occupied Germany and Austria formed the bulk of Europe’s displacement crisis, a number that is equivalent to the one million Syrians, Afghans, Eritreans and Iraqis who crossed the Mediterranean in recent years. The ‘DPs’, wrote Hannah Arendt in 1949, exemplified the ‘emergence of an entirely new category of human beings [...] who do not possess citizenship.’ Seven decades later, the ‘migrants’ of today once again put on display the spectacle of statelessness in the heart of Europe. A key difference between these two moments, however, is that between 1945 and the early 1950s ‘Europe on the move’ remained an intra-continental phenomenon. Regrouped in the former territory of the Third Reich, Jewish survivors and anti-communist Poles, Ukrainians and Balts indeed all originated from Eastern Europe. The victims of Hitler and Stalin predominantly emigrated to Palestine/Israel, the United States, Canada or Australia. However, despite their resettlement out of the continent, the administration of the DPs between 1945 and 1951 paved the way for the Europeanization of the international refugee regime. When the Conference of Plenipotentiaries representing 26 nations adopted the UN Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees on July 25, 1951, human rights law acknowledged the exemplarity of the European case. Although the convention attached the universal concept of ‘fear of persecution’ to the granting of political asylum, it nonetheless bound the condition of acquiring the status of asylum seeker to Europe’s geography and history. The definition of refugees as victims of