Refugee crises · 1990
How did refugee responses in Europe and Indochina differ?
The seminar question: “Compare and contrast the responses of states and international organisations to displacement in Europe between 1945 and 1960 and in Indochina between 1975 and 1990.”
After 1945 the victors moved borders and peoples in Europe, uprooting 12 to 14 million Germans and millions of Poles, Ukrainians, Finns and Italians. After 1975 Indochina’s new communist regimes targeted old enemies, social classes and the Hoa, and over three million fled. In both, the end of a war began the displacement.
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The causes of displacement were alike in mechanism and different in kind. In both regions victorious powers acted on plans for the societies they now controlled, and those plans decided who had to leave. In Europe the plan was territorial and national: Poland was moved west, Germany was cut back, and states removed minorities to make borders and nations match, a project Nazi Germany had begun with its own expulsions and the Allies endorsed at Potsdam, their conference of 1945. In Indochina, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, the plan was social and revolutionary: re-education camps, collectivised trade and the emptying of cities targeted classes and political enemies, and the break with China turned the Hoa, Vietnam’s ethnic Chinese, into a suspect minority. Ethnicity ran through both, as the expulsion of Germans and the departures of the Hoa show, and so did the Cold War, the rivalry of the American-led West and the Soviet bloc, which turned people fleeing communism into evidence for the West. The European case moved far more people, and in both the dead of the journey can be counted only as contested ranges.
The short answer
- Victors with plans. In both regions the end of a war handed power to victors with programmes for remaking the land and its people: the Allies’ new map of central Europe in 1945, and the communist parties’ revolutions in Indochina in 1975. Those programmes, more than the destruction of war, decided who had to leave and when. The lesson for Paper 1 is to look at the political aims of victors when explaining displacement after conflict.
- Ethnicity as a target. Both crises turned on ethnic categories applied to whole groups. Germans in Poland and Czechoslovakia were expelled as Germans, whatever they had done, and the Hoa of Vietnam were suspected as Chinese after the break with Beijing. Ethnic targeting multiplied the numbers in both places, because it swept up people who had no personal connection to the war or the old regime.
- The Cold War frame. The Cold War made people fleeing communism welcome in the West. From 1947 in Europe and throughout the Indochinese crisis, Western states treated them as proof of their own system. That motive helps explain both the Convention’s definition, built around persecution by a state, and the generous resettlement quotas of 1956 and 1979. It also explains why generosity faded once the political value of the refugees declined in the late 1980s.
- Who signed the rules. European states wrote the 1951 Convention and bound themselves to it, while the first-asylum states of Southeast Asia, except the Philippines from 1981, never joined. Where states had accepted legal duties, protection could be argued in law; where they had not, it had to be bought with resettlement places and money. The difference explains much of the contrast between Austria in 1956 and Malaysia in 1979.
THE TURNING POINT
Warsaw, 14 November 1990. The German–Polish Border Treaty is the hinge of the epilogue because it formally closed the European story at the moment the Indochinese one was reaching its own settlement. United Germany accepted the Oder–Neisse line as final, ending forty-five years in which expellee politics had kept the border open in law, and the people moved in 1945 became, beyond doubt, citizens of the places where they had settled. In the same years the plan of action was screening the last boat people in Hong Kong and Malaysia. Both crises ended when states agreed where people belonged, and in both the agreement came long after the people had moved.
What it changed
A global refugee regime. The institutions born in Europe’s crisis, UNHCR and the 1951 Convention with its 1967 Protocol, now operate worldwide, and the Indochinese experience gave them their modern tools of large-scale resettlement, orderly departure and individual screening. Both crises are therefore present in every refugee operation since, from the Balkans in the 1990s to Syria and Ukraine in the 2010s and 2020s.
Resettlement and return as competing solutions. Europe after 1947 rejected forced return and relied on integration and resettlement; Indochina after 1989 combined resettlement with monitored return. UNHCR’s three “durable solutions”, return home, integration where refugees first arrive and resettlement in a third country, took shape through both experiences, and choosing among them remains the central decision in every refugee crisis.
Memory and reconciliation. Commemoration of the expulsions has shaped German relations with Poland and the Czech Republic since 1990, and memory of the boat exodus has shaped Vietnamese communities abroad and their relations with Hanoi. In both cases reconciliation has meant naming one’s own losses alongside the wrongs done by one’s own side, a balance that remains difficult.
Echoes at sea. The dilemmas of 1979 returned in the twenty-first century. In May 2015 thousands of Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants were stranded on boats in the Andaman Sea as Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia turned them away, until Malaysia and Indonesia agreed to give temporary shelter. The episode repeated the dilemmas of June 1979, first asylum without shared responsibility, and showed that the lessons of the Indochinese crisis had to be learned again.
The full answer, argued
The similarities are real: in both cases first asylum came from a neighbouring or occupying state, resettlement in distant countries removed the pressure, UNHCR coordinated burden-sharing, and Cold War politics shaped who was welcomed. The contrasts, however, run deeper than these shared tools. Europe’s largest displaced group, the German expellees, was absorbed by its own nation-state, so integration did most of the work, while Indochina’s refugees depended on foreign states. Europe built the legal regime and recognised Hungarians as a group in 1956, while Southeast Asia stayed outside the Convention and ended with individual screening and return. Forced return was abandoned in Europe after 1947 and revived in Hong Kong in 1989. A strong conclusion is that the international system grew more legal but less generous between the two cases, because the definition of the refugee became more precise just as states began to use it to say who did not qualify. The broader insight is that protection depends chiefly on whether the receiving states see the refugees as people they want to keep.
An interesting fact
The same UN agency was honoured for both crises in this atlas. UNHCR received the Nobel Peace Prize for 1954, chiefly for its work with Europe’s post-war refugees, and again in 1981, when the Indochinese exodus dominated its work. Only the International Committee of the Red Cross has won the prize more often, three times. Fridtjof Nansen, the League of Nations’ first High Commissioner for Refugees, had won it in 1922, so the prize has followed refugee protection from the aftermath of the First World War to the end of the Cold War.
This is the study layer of Europe and Indochina refugee crises, chapter 12 of Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990; the full index of the atlas is here.
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