What Do We Owe to Refugees?

David Owen

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781509539741, 9781509539734
• eBook ISBN: 9781509539758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Who are refugees? Who, if anyone, is responsible for protecting them? What forms should this protection take? In a world of people fleeing from civil wars, state failure, and environmental disasters, these are ethically and politically pressing questions.

In this book, David Owen reveals how the contemporary politics of refuge is structured by two rival historical pictures of refugees. In reconstructing this history, he advocates an understanding of refugeehood that moves us beyond our current impasse by distinguishing between what is owed to refugees in general and what is owed to different types of refugee. He provides an account of refugee protection and the forms of international cooperation required to implement it that is responsive to the claims of both refugees and states.

At a time when refugee protection is once again prominent on the international agenda, this book offers a guide to understanding the challenges this topic raises and shows why addressing it matters for all of us.

1
Picturing Refugees

Forced Displacement and the Making of the Modern Refugee Regime

Practices of asylum, sanctuary and refuge have a long history; but their distinctive political form in our contemporary world is shaped by the emergence, and eventual global spread, of an international order of sovereign territorial states. Refugees are, as Haddad puts it, the practically unavoidable result ‘of erecting boundaries, attempting to assign all individuals to a territory within such boundaries, and then failing to ensure universal representation and protection’.¹ The focus in this chapter is on the emergence and development of the modern refugee regime, that is, on sketching the lines of descent that coalesce in the two pivotal institutions that make up this regime – the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1950 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) – and the development of this regime in the changing contexts of post-war global politics. In short, this chapter aims to show how we arrived at the contemporary refugee regime and how this path has led to the grip that the two contrasting pictures of refugees, humanitarian and political, have on our ethical imaginations.

Lines of Descent: Persecution, Humanitarianism and Multilateralism

On 22 October 1685 Louis XIV issued the Edict of Fontainebleau. This proclamation, which followed a series of earlier repressive measures directed at the Reformed Protestant (Calvinist) population in France, revoked the 1598 Edict of Nantes, through which Henri IV had granted religious liberty to those nicknamed ‘Huguenots’ by their enemies. The new edict forbade Reformed Protestant religious services and required the exile of pastors who would not recant their faith, but at the same time denied the laity the right to leave France. Louis had compelling reasons to forbid the emigration of the Huguenots, who comprised a highly skilled portion of the French workforce. Despite the denial of sovereign permission to leave France, an estimated 200,000 Huguenots fled to Protestant states such as Denmark, England, Holland and Prussia.

The French policy was not only a threat to its Huguenot population; it also posed a challenge to the norms that marked out the minimal conditions of peaceful coexistence in a religiously fractured Europe and that, after years of violent conflict across the continent, had been affirmed in the Peace of Westphalia (1648). Central to these conditions of peaceful coexistence were the extension to the Reformed Protestant Church of the provisions of the Peace of Augsburg (1555) for religious toleration and the reaffirmation of religious minorities’ right to emigrate on confessional grounds. Louis XIV’s simultaneous denial of even limited religious toleration to the Reformed Protestant Church and of the right to leave France to its faithful thus provided a test of the commitment of an emerging European international society organised around the norm of state sovereignty to the standards of legitimate state conduct that the Peace of Westphalia had endorsed. It presented the Protestant states of Europe with a dilemma: ‘[H]ow could they accommodate the Huguenots in a way that would express their concerns over Louis XIV’s actions but still avoid conflict with France?’² What was needed was a way of affirming the normative conditions of peaceful coexistence by condemning French policy as illegitimate that, at the same time, avoided direct conflict with France and reasserted the norm of state sovereignty as the basis of the European political order. This was achieved by creating a distinct category of migrants: ‘ones who, because they could no longer count on the protection of their own state, should be allowed to leave that state and receive protection elsewhere’.³ It is thus that the word ‘refugee’ enters the English language, from the French word réfugié, which was used specifically to describe those Huguenots who fled France. The political picture of the refugee has its modern roots here.

This response to persons fleeing religious persecution was extended within broadly European-based international society to those who faced political persecution in the context of persons fleeing the American and French Revolutions, before it was further adapted and refined in nineteenth-century debates about asylum and non-extradition.⁴ These two revolutions made new normative resources central to European-based international society – namely the rights of man and popular sovereignty – and these shaped political understandings of the limits on legitimate state conduct towards its citizens in ways that were important to the concept of refugees and to the norm of asylum; but they also introduced a sharpening of the legal distinction between citizens and aliens and its social realisation as a contrast between nationals and foreigners that would become increasingly politically salient at the century’s end. The French Revolution also produced what became the archetypical nineteenth-century refugee figure: the political revolutionary. Given the open immigration regime of European-based international society in this period, the norm of granting asylum was less a matter of admission to a state than a matter of protection from return to a persecuting state that sought to extradite the political fugitive. Part of the significance of this development was that, whereas granting asylum to religious refugees was typically grounded in confessional solidarity, this did not apply to asylum granted to political exiles, whose transnational political activity could also be a source of diplomatic tension between states; yet the practice that emerged in the nineteenth century identified the admission and protection of refugees, political or otherwise, as norms that should be respected even where there were prudential reasons not to do so.⁵ Within European-based international society, Orchard argues:

States in the nineteenth century held a consistent view of refugees as people fleeing political and religious persecution who should be allowed to leave their own states, who should be offered protection in domestic law, and who should not be returned…. Although accepting refugees remained the purview of individual states, clear notions of correct behaviour towards refugees shaped the interactions of states with international society, founded in the basic rules established by the fundamental institutions of territoriality, international law, and popular sovereignty.⁶

This informal regime established the basic shape of norms that would be central to the modern refugee regime, but its lack of resilience became clear as the numbers of refugees fleeing persecution grew rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and states became increasingly reluctant to admit them.

The norm of protection for persons liable to religious or political persecution by their own state is the source of the political picture of refugees; and the development of this norm is the first of the three lines of descent that will come together to compose the grounds of the modern refugee regime. The second line is rooted in the development of humanitarian organisations in the nineteenth century – most famously, the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in 1863 – and in the large-scale population displacements, including ‘voluntary’ population exchanges, that accompanied regional instability in the Balkans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the ICRC was focused on the suffering of soldiers in warfare, national and international humanitarian relief efforts were mobilised on behalf of these populations that identified them as refugees. Thus, for example, displaced Muslims who fled to Turkey were housed, in part, in new settlements with names such as Muhacirköy (‘Refugee’s Village’), while bodies such as the International Committee for the Relief of Turkish Refugees were founded to mobilise humanitarian aid.⁷ These developments prefigured the larger population displacements that would occur during and after the First World War and the expansion of organised humanitarianism in terms of both numbers of organisations and scope of the aid that established bodies such as the ICRC and its national committees undertook. With this war, civilians became a central focus of international humanitarianism – and ‘refugee’ as a term ‘became part of the common currency of politics and public opinion’.⁸ Its use encompassed not only persons fleeing persecution but, more generally, populations in flight from generalised conditions of violence that posed a serious threat to their safety and well-being. The emergence of the humanitarian picture can be located here. At the same time, to be identified as a ‘refugee’ in this expanded sense and hence to gain humanitarian assistance meant not only to be subject to a process of bureaucratic assessment but to be represented in ways that had social costs:

To be labelled a refugee had demeaning consequences, stripping away attributes of social distinction and class to leave oneself [sic] exposed to a sense of pure deprivation. The consequences of this silencing are eerily familiar to the modern reader. A Belgian refugee spoke from the heart when he summed up his feeling: ‘One was always a refugee – that’s the name one was given, a sort of nickname (sobriquet). One was left with nothing, ruined, and that’s how people carried on talking about “the refugee”. We weren’t real people anymore.’⁹

In contrast to the earlier picturing of religious and political refugees as persons ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Prologue: A Tale of Two Ship
• Introduction
• 1 Picturing Refugees
• 2 Who Are Refugees?
• 3 Responsibility for Refugees
• 4 Predicaments of Protection
• References
• End User License Agreement