The Condition of Exile: The New World Order, the German Asylum Debate of 1992–93, and the Intellectual Origins of the “Refugee Crisis” in Europe

Since the so-called “refugee crisis” of 2015, the term “exile” has reappeared as central in the study of European-Jewish history. Long-associated with studies of Jewish diaspora and identity, “exile” has become a lens through which to view fundamental aspects of modern European history: national and minority identities, “the rights of man”, and “belonging”. The concept retains this role today. Above all, it has recently been taken to highlight the persistent difficulties of what Hannah Arendt called “the right to have rights”.

This paper asks how “exile” came to be so closely connected to contemporary studies of human rights. When did historically particular experiences come to be attributed this universal meaning? How should we understand the moral and political significance of this widespread association today?

To answer these questions, the paper foregrounds the transformations of European international order and specifically Central European border regimes in 1989-90. I examine how these transformations precipitated a turn to the subject of migration among German and Jewish-American critical theorists. After 1989, older questions about “exile” began to give historical meaning to the relationship between migration and human rights. New waves of migration in Central Europe stimulated interest in the ability of newly strengthened institutions of international order, the EU and the UN, to manage migration and difference in a way that would go beyond past failure. But simultaneously, in Germany itself, new migrations precipitated the restriction of asylum rights stipulated in paragraph 16a of the 1949 Grundgesezt. Where “human rights” ideals appeared consensual as never before after 1989, scholars were aware that they existed alongside the persisting, renewed, claims of nation-state sovereignty. As this tension continues to define theoretical and popular understanding perspectives on migration, the paper draws a picture of the early 1990s as an important moment of origin for our own times.