Refugees in International Relations by Loescher Gil Betts Alexander

Author:Loescher, Gil, Betts, Alexander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2011-07-15T16:00:00+00:00

CHANGING THE QUESTION

The partialist vs. impartialist debate is about what we in the liberal democracies should do when strangers arrive at our national points of entry demanding admission. This situation is indeed common, and poses serious moral questions about our obligations towards our fellow citizens as opposed to those towards these strangers; unfortunately it is difficult to see how these questions can be answered in a satisfactory way within the terms under which they are usually posed, even though theorists may actually agree on what would constitute good practice when confronted with specific cases. This theoretical aporia is one good reason for changing those terms; another, and better, reason is that to see refugee problems in this light is to miss what, from a global perspective, has to be seen as the real problem of refugees, which manifests itself in giant camps in the Great Lakes region of Africa, or in Pakistan, rather than at Heathrow or the Pas de Calais. But what alternative terms are available?

An easy—I will suggest ultimately too easy—answer here would focus on the reasons why people become refugees in the first place, to approach the problem from the supply side, as it were. A sensible working assumption is that no one actually wants to be a refugee (which is why although it makes some sense not to distinguish between ‘political’ and ‘economic’ refugees, it certainly is necessary to distinguish between refugees as a whole, and ‘travellers’ of one kind or another, that is, those who take to the road as a lifestyle choice rather than from necessity); this is a status that is forced on people either by grinding poverty or by intolerable oppression, or, sadly quite often, both at once. Sometimes, of course, the oppressors themselves will actually wish to create refugees in the name of ethnic cleansing, or to get rid of political opponents, but the individuals concerned do not desire this status. In an ideal world, where there were no oppressive regimes, and where all the citizens of every country were able to sustain themselves materially, there would be no refugees—it might still be the case that some people would wish, for one reason or another, to change their domicile, and this might present some practical problems, but there would be no refugee issue as such; and, in a world where no one is forced to leave their home, a general right of hospitality would not pose onerous duties on host populations. This is, I think, the context in which Kant’s Third Definitive Article of a Perpetual Peace—that ‘Cosmopolitan Right shall be limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality’—should be read (Reiss 1970: 106). This is a Definitive Article (as opposed to the six Preliminary Articles) and the assumption is that a Federation of Free States has been established; in such a world there would be no need to make a general provision to provide sanctuary for citizens of such free states.

From this perspective, the task of establishing an ethical approach to the

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