Professor Hathaway is right. The international refugee system is broken and needs to be fixed. But he is naïve to believe that a pre-determined, global burden-sharing scheme based on the 1951 Refugee Convention can be set up to solve the world’s refugee problems.
Firstly, global solidarity is in short supply. Earlier this year I was in Austria, a country which had received without a whimper 180,000 refugees from Hungary in 1956 and 160,000 refugees from Czechoslovakia in 1969. In February it introduced a maximum limit on asylum seekers entering the country at 37,000 a year. When I asked my Austrian interlocutors why this “differentiated response”, they listed concerns about security and cultural integration—and historic fears about Muslims going back to the Ottoman era! Irrational emotions have no place in Hathaway’s reasoned model but they weigh heavily on democratic leaders looking towards winning the next election.
Experience shows that burden-sharing arrangements work best when they are tailor made, time limited and specific, and not global and general. Secondly, experience shows that burden-sharing arrangements work best when they are tailor made, time limited and specific, and not global and general as Professor Hathaway suggests. An early example is the 1951 Convention itself. It was born as a limited response to Europe’s refugee problems in the aftermath of World War II and the onset of the Cold War. It was highly successful in ensuring asylum, resettlement and naturalization in western countries for refugees fleeing communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Solidarity was strengthened by common ideological and geopolitical interests as well as ethnic and religious affinity between the refugees and their hosts. The 1951 Convention was less successful when it went global.
