At a time when the refugee issue is a hot topic, a collective work offers a history of the asylum administration, its actors and its practices. The first milestone in a European history of asylum in XXe century.
The Life of Ideas: How States in XXe century do they differentiate between refugees and immigrants?
AA and DK: One of the central questions of our book is the emergence and legal implementation of this distinction in XXe century. From the 1920s onwards, this was carried out on an international level, to resolve the question of the personal status of exiled stateless persons, defined by the criterion of the loss of protection of their State of origin. The idea was not so much to distinguish them from immigrants as to allow them to become migrants who could, with an identity and travel certificate (the “Nansen passport”), emigrate to States other than the countries of first asylum. The certificate replaced the missing or impossible to obtain national passport.
The Second World War opened a new period in the construction of this difference between refugees and immigrants. The criterion of persecution and the reasons for it (race, nationality, religion, political opinions, membership of a social group) then appeared, while the texts attributed a status opening up rights or methods of care. Some of these developments were integrated into the Geneva Convention adopted in July 1951.
La Vie des idées: What do we call the “refugee crisis” in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s?
AA and DK: The period from the First to the end of the Second World War was marked by forced displacements and exiles on an unprecedented scale. The intensity of the conflicts, the expansion of the nation-state model and the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were the general causes, to which must be added the Lausanne Convention of January 1923, which admitted the principle of the forced exchange of Greek and Turkish populations. Between 1921 and 1923, we also witnessed the first manifestations of a global and forced loss of nationality, which concerned Russians fleeing the Bolshevik regime and Armenians who had survived the genocide, excluded from the new Kemalist Turkey.
The post-war period saw the generalisation of the passport and visa system, making it necessary to find a solution to issue documents to all these exiles. The rise of fascist regimes and the Nazi regime’s policy of anti-Jewish persecution led, with the Anschluss in 1938, to a reception crisis that could be explained by the economic depression, but also by the general climate of xenophobia and the fear of a new war. At the end of the Spanish Civil War, in February 1939, 500,000 people crossed the border with France, an exodus of unprecedented proportions.
Finally, at the end of the Second World War, the displaced persons camps held 7 million people, many of whom would eventually become refugees, since returning to their home countries would be a risk to their lives and freedom. The extension of Soviet domination and the advent of the people’s democracies in Eastern Europe brought new flows of refugees from 1945 and for several decades.
La Vie des idées: How and by whom were the refugees protected?
AA and DK: From the 1920s onwards, refugees were protected by an international legal status recognised by States, including France, which created specialised administrations responsible for issuing documents permitting residence and civil life, as well as assistance. This general pattern is fairly well-known, but we have sought to reveal the complexity of this protection when we look at it closely and focus on the actors and practices.
First of all, refugees are not only objects of this story, but also actors, often at the forefront, within networks that bring together lawyers, diplomats and community executives, at the international, national and local levels. Then, the first institutions set up in France to exercise this protection are consular offices that must combine the action of international organizations with that of an administrative structure in which entry into the territory is an essential sovereign issue. The creation of theOFPRA in 1952 seemed to operate a nationalization of asylum, but it nonetheless remained a hybrid organization, in particular due to the continuity of the actors and practices.
Finally, the practical arrangements for legal protection are evolving in a more pragmatic way than one might think, through a succession of specific responses. Diversity and solutions ad hoc prevailed in the late 1930s and tended to continue. The transition from collective eligibility to individual eligibility, with the development of interview techniques and the study of requests for protection, took place gradually in the aftermath of the Second World War. It is important to emphasize the differentiated treatment between groups, which can lead to the claim that there is not one refugee status, but several.
La Vie des Idées: What comparisons can we make with today?
AA and DK: Since the 1920s, refugee protection has been a European and international issue, particularly due to the restrictions put in place by the United States, and then, after 1947-1948, due to the bipolarization of the continent. The same is true today, despite the difficulties and divisions within the European Union.
It can also be seen that the reception of refugees generates and reveals political and social divisions and the forms of mobilization of the actors. The policy pursued is the result of a balance of power and compromise between the different configurations (fraternity, indifference, otherness) and the projections of which the refugees are the representatives (war, misery) or the scapegoats (protection of employment).
Another constant is the central place of expertise on the situation of countries of origin. It simply changes form: initially based on the refugees themselves, it is now the work of specialized services. However, the geopolitical and historical context constructs a strong diachrony: the international status of refugee was born in a context of nationalism excluding groups on the basis of race, ethnicity or class, and it then developed in that of reparation and the fight against the totalitarian regimes that clashed during the Second World War, then during the Cold War.
The historicity of the processes of categorization and the logics of protection contribute to taking note of new contexts. This is the case with persecutions carried out by multiple and non-state actors (mafias, armed groups), threats due to long civil wars in weakened states, and the emergence of radical Islamism in the world. Legal developments also reveal new grounds for protection, called “societal”, which are gender and sexual orientation.
As for displacements linked to environmental crises, the question of categorization has been debated for several years. The multi-causality of migratory phenomena remains an element of the long term, beyond the ever-renewed attempts at categorical distinction.