Evolvement of the international regime of refugee protection Essay Example for Free

Evolvement of the international regime of refugee protection Essay Many people today are inclined to distinguish refugees as a relatively new phenomenon that mostly occurs in countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and in rapidly disintegrating countries in the Balkans and the ex Soviet Union. Certainly during the past few decades the majority refugees have fled violent conflicts or persecution in the developing countries; but mass refugee movements are neither new nor exceptional to the Third World (Gil Loescher, ed., 1992). They have been a political as well as a humanitarian issue for as long as mankind has lived in structured groups where intolerance and domination have existed. The difference is that, before this century, refugees were regarded as assets somewhat than liabilities; countries granted refuge to people of geo-political, religious, or ideological views similar to their own; and rulers viewed organize over large populations, along with natural resources and terrain itself, as an index of power and national greatness (Michael Marrus, 1985). As most refugees of earlier eras found it probable to gain safe haven outside their country of origin, this has not been the case for numerous refugees in the twentieth century. After both world wars, Europe practiced refugee flows similar to those taking place in the Third World today. Like most modern refugee movements, people left their homes for varied and multifarious reasons, including the severe economic distraction and starvation that accompanied the violence and interference of war and the upheaval of political and social revolution that followed the disintegration of multiethnic empires and the creation of new nation-states. The majority of these people were members of unwanted minority groups, political escapees, or the victims of warfare, communalism, and haphazard violence. Fundamentally, the refugee problems of the period from 1921 to 1951 were political ones, as they are today. The international reactions to mass expulsions, compulsory transfers of population, mass exits, and capricious denial of return were often weak and contradictory. In circumstances related to those that exist in parts of the Third World and Eastern Europe today, mass incursions threatened the security of European states, particularly when numerous refugee crises became protracted affairs that surpassed the competences of humanitarian agencies and individual states to resolve. Organized international efforts for refugees began in 1921, while the League of Nations appointed the first High Commissioner for Refugees. Over the next twenty years, the scope and functions of supporting programs gradually expanded, as efforts were made to regularize the status and control of stateless and denationalized people. Throughout World War II and after it, two expensive and politically contentious refugee organizations the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency and the International Refugee Organization, each with a fundamentally different mandate further developed the international organizational framework. Since 1951, an international refugee regime composed of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and a network of other international agencies, national governments, and voluntary or nongovernmental organizations has developed a reaction strategy that permits some refugees to remain in their countries of first asylum, facilitate others to be resettled in third countries, and arranges for still others to be send back to their countries of origin. Though unevenly applied, international laws that delegate refugees as a unique class of human rights victims who must be accorded special protection as well as benefits have been signed, ratified, and in force for numerous decades. yearly, billions of dollars are raised and spent on refugees. Historians have argued that refugees are a definitely contemporary problem and that international concern for refugees is a twentieth-century fact (Malcom Proudfoot, 1957). Though refugees have been a trait of international society for a long time, before this century there was no global protection for refugees as we know it at present; for the most part, they were left to fend for themselves without any official support. Citizens enjoyed the security of their sovereigns or national governments, but once they broke with their home countries and became refugees, they were completely bereft of protection except as other states or private institutions or individuals might choose to provide it. Asylum was a gift of the crown, the church, and municipalities; and renegade individuals and groups could be expecting no response to claims of asylum or protection premised on human or political right. Refugees have been present in all era. Refugees from religious maltreatment propagated throughout Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Aristide Zolberg, Astri Suhrke , and Sergio Aguayo, 1989). Protestants, Catholics, and Jews were expelled by several regimes and admitted by others according to their beliefs, ideologies, and economic inevitability. By the late seventeenth century, with the attainment of a high degree of religious homogeneity in most parts of Europe, the age of religious harassment gave way to an age of political disruption and revolution, during which individuals were persecuted for their political opinions and their opposition to new radical regimes. New waves of refugees were prompted by these revolutionary conflicts. The nineteenth century produced many comparatively small refugee flows, mostly from other revolutionary and nationalist movements in Poland, Germany, France, and Russia. Europeans who feared persecution could move to one of the numerous immigrant countries in the New World still eager for an improved labor force and for settlers to fill empty territories. There they could merge with other migrant groups and neither regards them nor is labeled as refugees. therefore, before the twentieth century, there were no groups of homeless Europeans cast adrift in a world that rejected them. The refugee is significant precisely because the refugee is an exception; the refugee is outside of some overarching framework. Whereas to celebrate the incomparable position of the refugee beyond violent state constraints, lawyers and practitioners seek to put the refugee inside several type of regime to avoid the violence of the inter. For the lawyers and practitioners, refugees are exceptions, it is decisive to repeat, in the sense that there is no observable entity to protect them. Whereas, the legal refugee regime seeks to protect citizens who have fallen outside the borders of customary state responsibility. As Goodwin-Gill notes: Refugee law †¦ remains an incomplete legal regime of protection; wrongly covering what ought to be a situation of exception. It goes some means to alleviate the plight of those affected by breaches of human rights standards or by the disintegrate of an existing social order in the wake of insurgency, civil strife, or aggression; but it is incomplete so far as refugees and asylum seekers might still be denied even temporary refuge or temporary protection, safe return to their homes, or compensation. They are denied, that is, by states which are not gratifying their obligations. Goodwin-Gill assumes that if all states were satisfying all their obligations there would be no exceptions and hence no refugees. International lawyers and practitioners presume that the internal basis of the state system is non-violent and that violent eruptions are exceptions and hence cause exceptions called refugees. In Dillons terms, international lawyers try to find resolutions to the problem of the inter within the nation-state. Citizens are protected first by their governments as the primary obligation of states is to protect their citizens. Further, governments are organized by various treaties and organisations managing those treaties to make sure that states fulfill their legal obligations to their citizens. These organizations themselves do not protect citizens; they try to guarantee that states do. Refugees are exceptions simply in so far as either their citizenship is in question that is why statelessness is so significant and the determination of citizenship crucial or the accountable government is no longer capable of, or unwilling to offer, proper protection. The role of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) or the International Organization for Migration (IOM) is not to create new state compulsions in the normal function of states, but rather to see that states function in such a way that citizens will be secluded. As Arthur Helton has clearly stated: UNHCRs protection responsibility, which is commended to it by the international community, makes it distinctive among traditional organizations †¦ In a fundamental sense, protection means to secure the satisfaction of basic human rights and to meet primary humanitarian needs. In this sense, the protection of refugees is an conservatory of human rights protection taken in very specific and incomparable situations. The protection function is normal: it is the situation in which the function should operate that is extraordinary. Basic human rights have not changed. The postulation is that if all states respected their compulsions to their citizens in terms of human rights there would be no refugees or refugee flows, which are caused by violations, by exceptions to the rules of appropriate state behavior. Thus, norms dealing with refugees are expansions of the normal obligations of states in unusual situations: they are not extraordinary rules. International politics today displays behavior patterns which imitate the operation of competing ordering principles, including governance by communal self-regulation. Regime analysis attempts to make the point that international relations cannot be reduced to a state of anarchy in the sense that the allowance of goods among states (and their societies) results from the junction of their competitive self-help strategies which they pursue as relative-gains seekers ( Grieco 1990). Certainly, there can be no doubt that for parts of the world the pragmatist assessment of international relations as being in a state of anarchism still seems valid. The Cold War strategies of the United States and the USSR until the eighties or the conflict processes in the Middle East, especially between Israel and its neighbors, but also among Arab states themselves as confirmed by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, are telling evidence of this observation. However, it would be an embellishment if it were suggested that international politics could be said to be nothing but the sum total of individual or communal self-help strategies by which states seek to attain relative gains (or to avoid or minimize relative losses). This realist evaluation turns a blind eye on a wide variety of interaction patterns which cannot be reduced to competitive self-help strategies. The image of competitive international politics formed by anarchy among sovereign states is most sturdily challenged by the observation of instances of hierarchically ordered supranational policy-making (including implementation). Take the following two examples. The Security Council of the United Nations consented collective sanctions against Iraq after its incursion of Kuwait and established monitoring and supervisory machinery; additionally, after Iraqs defeat the Security Council ordered the destruction of weapons, installations, etc. inside Iraq and had it carried out under its overall guidance. In this sense, the Security Council acted like a governmental body of an initial world minimal state. A less spectacular case is the European Community, where hierarchical, supranational policy-making is quite common in numerous policy sectors. In the field of agricultural policy, for example, policies are most often initiated in Brussels, while national governments are so strongly ensnared in the joint decision trap ( Scharpf 1985) that they have no choice but to seek to manipulate the Community policies there is no longer any way out option. However, neither anarchy-induced competitive global politics nor hierarchically ordered international policy-making fatigues the reality of politics among nations. An escalating part of international political interactions and processes has become the object of international collective self-regulation, i.e. the voluntary partaking by states and other international actors in collective action to accomplish joint gains or to avoid joint losses in conflictual or challenging social situations. Examples of this kind of cooperative self-regulation on the global level include the GATT based international trade regime, the nuclear non-proliferation regime, or the establishment for the protection of the stratospheric ozone layer. However, international regimes are simply one manifestation, perhaps the most prominent, of collective self-regulation by states (and other international actors): it also contains contractual arrangements short of a regime as well as formal international organizations which ease collaboration short of generating compelling obligations, e.g. by the production and diffusion of information. To put it in a different way: the growth of institutions governing international political life has been reasonably remarkable. Taking the best-documented separation of international institutions international governmental organizations (IGOs) the count stands at about 300. It goes almost without saying that this number involves a wide variety of this species of international institution. If one looks at another subset, international treaties formally registered with the United Nations, the number of cases is in the thousands. Even though research on international regimes has engendered a wealth of theoretical and empirical studies, it is as yet hard to assess the quantity and quality of international regime formation that has in fact taken place in the last few decades. There is no source for identifying existing international regimes comparable to the sources just cited for international organizations and international treaties. All kinds of organizations with the rationale of defending or promoting functionally defined interests in the international monarchy are in principle able to implement relatively established forms of co-operation in the pursuit of their interests. If international non-governmental organizations interacting in an issue area agree upon principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures in order to normalize their interactions, one can speak of global regimes. To be sure, this constituent of international order is still underdeveloped and under-researched. As one might, for instance, refer to the post-war arrangement of the seven big oil companies the first oil regime according to Frank (1985) , it remains uncertain whether cartels ought to be considered regimes. In short, while transnational regimes represent a subdivision of international order that may become more important in the near future, it is at present a minor component which nevertheless deserves more comprehensive st udy. Regime analysis acknowledges that its field of inquest does not cover the whole realm of todays international relations, even if we take into account both international and transnational regimes. It is restricted, on the one hand, by those competitive interaction patterns which are described by the pragmatist or neo-realist approaches in International Relations. On the other hand, regime analysis should give way to integration theory if, and to the extent that, supportive interaction patterns move into a transformational mode leading to the formation of a new layer of political authority beyond the nation state. Recognizing the practice of tolerant competition among states as well as the phenomenon of supranationalism, regime investigation seeks to avoid being tied down by the either/ or debate in International Relations between anarchists and govern mentalists. Complex international governance might be an proper label for this peculiarity of modern international relations, in which different kinds of partial orders, varying in local scope and function, coexist. As James Rosenau (1992: 13-14) has put it: Global order is conceived here to be a distinct set of arrangements even though these are not causally associated into a single coherent array of patterns. The organic whole that comprises the present or future global order is organic only in the sagacity that its diverse actors are all claimants upon the earthbound resources and all of them should cope with the same environmental conditions, noxious and polluted as these can be. It is very doubtful that one kind of social order will dominate international relations in the near future and thus will reintroduce a state of affairs which can be described as organic or harmonized. The coexistence of different partial orders each considered legitimate in its sphere might turn out to be a enduring feature of international politics. However, we suggest that the nonhierarchical normative institutions for dealing with conflicts or problematical social situations will gain in importance over time, whereas national governments as such will lose. The resulting institutional complexity will enhance the demand for cognitive capabilities of individuals and will put stress on democratic principles. Responses to this kind of pressure comprise an important field of inquiry for the social sciences in the future. Summing up non-hierarchical international institutions of the international and the international kind play, empirically as well as normatively, an significant role in international politics. They are required in order to meet the increasing demand for international governance and they normally govern issue areas. With the existence and the rise of those institutions international relations are ever more characterized by a complex blend of diverse kinds of social order. Moreover, the formula governance without government might stand for a more enviable vision for a shrinking world than its major alternative: hierarchical norm- and rule-setting (and enforcement) on the international level. Thus, it appears worth while ongoing research on the conditions and consequences of shared self-regulation and consolidating a research programme permitting for a cumulating of knowledge. References: †¢ Aristide Zolberg, Astri Suhrke , and Sergio Aguayo, Escape from Violence: Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). †¢ Arthur Helton, Editorial, 6 International Journal of Refugee Law, 1994, pp. 1 and 2 †¢ Dillon, Michael, The Asylum Seeker and the Stranger: An Other Politics, Hospitality and Justice (paper presented at the International Studies Association Conference, Chicago, 1995) †¢ Dillon, Michael, The Scandal of the Refugee: Some Reflections on the â€Å"Inter† of International Relations and Continental Thought (private paper, copy with the author) †¢ Frank L. P. ( 1985), The First Oil Regime, World Politics, 37: 568-98. †¢ Gil Loescher, ed., Refugees and the Asylum Dilemma in the Vest (University Park, Penn.: Penn State University Press, 1992), pp. 8-35. †¢ Goodwin-Gill, Guy, The Refugee in International Law (2nd edn, Clarendon Press Oxford, 1996) †¢ Grieco J. M. ( 1990), Cooperation Among Nations: Europe, America, and NonTariff Barriers to Trade ( Ithaca, NY). †¢ Malcom Proudfoot, European Refugees, 1930-1952: A Study in Forced Population Movement ( London: Faber Faber, 1957) †¢ Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). †¢ Rosenau J. N. ( 1992), Governance, Order, and Change in World Politics, in Rosenau and Czempiel ( 1992), 1-29. †¢ Scharpf F. W. ( 1985), Die Politikverflechtungs-Falle: Europà ¤ische Integration und deutscher Fà ¶deralismus im Vergleich, Politische Vierteljahresschrift, 26: 323-56.