Expellee or Refugee? Contesting the UN Refugee Convention from Cold War Europe

The 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees defined the refugee in international law as an individual displaced outside their country of nationality, while limiting the category to victims of conflicts within Europe before 1951. These geographic and chronological bounds were removed only sixteen years later. Scholars have traced the advocacy of Asian and African states for the expansion of international refugee law during the 1960s. My presentation, however, will show how some of the earliest challenges to the UN's restrictive definition of the refugee emerged from within Europe itself.

The end of the Second World War saw the mass forced migration of so-called “national” refugees, including German-speakers from East-Central Europe and Italian-speakers from the Istrian Peninsula. Because such migrants arrived in the countries of their putative nationality, they did not qualify as refugees under the UN convention. Yet lobbying organizations on behalf of these groups challenged the postwar consensus dividing “national” from “international” refugees. This presentation focuses on one such organization, the Association for the Study of the World Refugee Problem (AWR). Established in Rome in 1950, this body comprised several hundred social scientists and legal experts largely from ex-fascist countries. I examine key conferences and publications of the AWR, as well as its lobbying efforts at the UNHCR and Council of Europe, to argue that postwar critiques of the UN Refugee Convention were often fueled by nationalist and revanchist politics. By claiming refugee status for the groups it represented, the AWR sought to legitimize demands for a right of return as well as revisions of postwar European borders. At the same time, the AWR established contacts with representatives of non-European countries facing refugee influxes, including India, Israel, Pakistan, and Vietnam, laying the groundwork for the broad-based challenges to the Refugee Convention of the 1960s.