Refugees as a ‘World Order’ Concern: (Western) Europe and the Middle East since the 1980s

Abstract

‘Refugees welcome!’ In September 2015, pictures of crowds of asylum-seekers arriving at Munich’s central railway station were broadcasted around the world. The message that this image conveyed suggested an open-minded Germany, awakening memories of the autumn of 1989 when thousands of people from the German Democratic Republic flooded into the West. This time, however, the migrants were largely displaced people fleeing Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. They had trekked through the so-called ‘Balkan Route’ to the Hungarian border and, for humanitarian reasons, the West German government had agreed to take them in. However, the influx of refugees grew rapidly, and the initial warm reception shown in Munich and other German cities soon gave way to anxious debate and controversy. Was the German and European asylum system being overwhelmed? Were there sufficient strategies in place to integrate these newcomers? Comparisons were made both with the problem of integrating displaced persons following the end of World War II and with the rise in the number of asylum-seekers in the early 1990s. Yet one crucial aspect has so far been neglected: a critical-historical look at the entanglements of global, transnational and regional developments in the 1970s and the 1980s. The way Europe deals with refugees and humanitarianism today cannot be properly analysed without an understanding of these years. Since the mid-1970s, most regional and global refugee movements came from the countries of the ‘Global South’. These states were experiencing wars of independence and mass expulsions of peoples in the wake of decolonisation, in proxy wars in the Cold War confrontation or in Central American civil wars. Above all, after the war in Vietnam, it was the exodus of hundreds of