Was the Refugee Convention humane or a Cold War tool?

The short answer

• The last million would not go home. Relief had to become resettlement because the last million would not go home. By 1947 the DPs still in camps were mostly people who refused return to communist states, and Western governments had stopped forcing them. A population that could neither stay in a ruined Germany nor go home needed a third country, so the relief agency of 1945 gave way to a resettlement agency. The change of purpose was the IRO’s whole reason for existence.
• Labour shortages overseas. Post-war Australia, under the slogan “populate or perish”, Canada, Britain and Latin American states needed workers for mines, farms, forests, railways and textile mills. Displaced persons were young, available and anti-communist, and could be bound to contracts. Self-interest turned the receiving states into eager recruiters, which is why resettlement moved a million people so quickly and why selection favoured the fit and skilled.
• The Cold War. The communist takeover in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, the Berlin blockade and the founding of two German states in 1949 made people fleeing the East politically valuable to the West. The Soviet bloc boycotted the IRO and called its clients traitors. In this climate a refugee became, in Western eyes, someone fleeing persecution by a state, a definition that the Convention then wrote down.
• Displacement was not ending. New crises in Palestine, India, Korea and China showed by 1950 that displacement was a recurring feature of the post-war world. A temporary agency could not keep closing and reopening, so the UN created a High Commissioner and a treaty that defined rights. The founders still hoped the problem would end soon, which is why UNHCR received a three-year mandate and the Convention a cut-off date.

What it changed

A definition that travelled. The Convention’s definition of a refugee, persecution for one of five reasons, became the global standard after the 1967 Protocol removed its limits. The United States adopted it in the Refugee Act of 1980, partly in response to the Indochinese crisis, and the screening of boat people after 1988 applied the same test to decide who could stay. That adoption tied the largest country of resettlement to a definition Europe had written for itself.

The first-asylum gap. The Convention bound states that signed it, and none of the states of first asylum in Southeast Asia except, from 1981, the Philippines ever did. When boats reached Malaysia, Thailand or Indonesia, the rule against return was therefore a moral argument backed by diplomacy and money. Without a treaty to bind them, those states could decide for themselves when they had reached their limit, as they did in June 1979.

Germans integrated at home. Excluded from the international regime, the German expellees became the responsibility of the two German states. West Germany answered with housing, jobs and the Equalisation of Burdens law of 1952, East Germany with land reform and official silence. Chapter 6 compares the results, which make Germany a case of integration by citizenship. The contrast with the stateless DPs shows how much a passport decided a displaced person’s fate.

UNHCR’s first emergency. The agency expected to close in 1953 was given new mandates and found its role in 1956, when about 200,000 Hungarians fled across the border. Its quick recognition of them as Convention refugees, even though the revolution happened after 1951, showed how the time limit could be stretched when states wanted to help. Flexibility in favour of people fleeing communism would become a habit of the agency’s Western donors.