VIDEO
Collectivism vs. Individual Rights – G. Edward Griffin
Individuals versus Nation-States
The Second World War seriously challenged the idea that the normal place for citizens is within the territory of their state. The rough estimate of seven to eleven million DPs found by the Western Allies in the course of their push to Berlin was a vivid illustration of this new possibility.
Postwar Germany, one historian observed, unexpectedly became the “unlikely host to hundreds of thousands of its former victims,” including Jews, concentration camps inmates, and forced laborers, mostly regrouped in the American and British occupation zones. 19
The nation-state order, however, was promptly reasserted: Most DPs voluntarily returned home in the summer and fall of 1945. For Soviet nationals, unfortunate “pawns of Yalta,” return was compulsory. 20 Under UNRRA, an agency curbed to allied military control, the overall policy was to repatriate all (non-Jewish) DPs to their country of origin as a means to swiftly eliminate the disrupting effects of the Second World War. Repatriation was supposed to be voluntary, but because of Grand Alliance considerations, Soviet nationals (most of them liberated POWs) were initially targeted for forcible return “home,” where they more often than not faced execution, deportation, or retribution. 21
The recognition of the individual’s rights against the omnipotence of the state –one of the key human rights principles of the postwar era – was therefore blatantly violated by Western powers despite the multiple references to human rights contained in the Charter of the United Nations adopted at the San Francisco Conference in June 1945. At the end of the Second World War, Allied repatriation policies still reflected the enduring supremacy of state sovereignty in the emerging postwar order.
However, the policy of forcible return eventually subsided with the rise of Cold War tensions. In February 1946, a UN resolution stipulated that DPs who expressed “valid objections” to returning to Soviet bloc countries should not be compelled to do so: Repatriation was from then on a free offer to all DPs. Even if claimed by their countries of origin -for punishment and/or reconstruction purposes – DPs found in the network of UNRRA camps in Germany a protective environment.
The pace of voluntary repatriation dramatically dwindled in 1946, when it became clear that most of the remaining DPs refused to go home. As one of the first historians of DPs pointed out, it then “dawned upon Allied authorities that repatriation would no longer be acceptable for this group.” 22 In December 1946, the International Refugee Organization (IRO) was created by the United Nations (without the support of the Soviet bloc) to find resettlement solutions for the DPs. Free from military control, the IRO was a modern-type agency imbued with internationalist spirit. In Germany, the IRO became in charge of nearly a million refugees composed of Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, and nationals of the Baltic States who refused or were simply unable to return “home.” Many factors accounted for this refusal: for Jewish Holocaust survivors, the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Poland and a desire to “divorce Europe”; for Baltic and Ukrainian DPs, the fear of Soviet retribution and strong nationalism; for Poles, anti-communism as well as straightforward economic motives; and for all, the continuation of a century-old East–West migration trend.
Placed under the Western guardianship of the IRO after 1947, the “last million” of the DPs experienced the advent of a new and more balanced relationship between individuals and states: With repatriation no longer an option, the DPs were indeed free to opt (if accepted by a host country) for citizenship elsewhere, Israel or the New World in most cases. As such, they became the first group to concretely and simultaneously realize a possibility inscribed in Article 15 of the UN Declaration: “No one shall be denied the right to change his nationality.”
The recognition of the right to secede from a state (“the right to leave a country” in the Declaration) reflected the increasing Western awareness of the repressive nature of Soviet communism and of the desire of Holocaust survivors to leave Europe behind. But if postwar European refugees became subjects of international law, it is also because of a groundbreaking shift in internationalist politics: the collapse of minority rights into individual rights, one of the main staples of the “human rights revolution.”
A predominant view in the scholarship of human rights history is that this shift occurred in the early 1940s, when Great Powers politicians and” visionaries” alike seized upon the war to devise a different future by shying away from the League of Nation’s failed system of minority protection. 23
Alongside philosophical idealism and a desire to demarcate the West from totalitarian tyranny, political pragmatism loomed large behind the wartime acceptance to let the interwar minority treaties die an unlamented death. Some wartime proponents of individual human rights, such as the Czech leader Eduard Beneš, were at the same time planning the eviction of ethnic minorities (in this case, ethnic German) after the defeat of Nazism. “Behind the smokescreen of the rights of the individuals,” caustically writes Mark Mazower, “the corpse of the League’s minorities policy could be safely buried.” 24
It is significant, however, that former political refugees stood among the most idealistic supporters of individual rights. To be sure, not all refugee lawyers, scholars, or activists were enthusiastic about the individualization of human rights. Raphael Lemkin’s intense preoccupation with genocide (which the Polish refugee lawyer framed as the murder of a group, not of a mere aggregate of individuals) was very much at odds, politically and culturally, with the individualist overtones of postwar human rights discourse. 25 But although Lemkin, the solitary crusader, sought to salvage part of the heritage of interwar minority protection in his plans for a Genocide Convention, others celebrated the Kantian promises of postwar individual rights. In exile in New Zealand during the war, the Austrian-born philosopher Karl Popper envisioned an “open society” in which “human individuals and not states or nations must be the ultimate concern not only of international organization, but of all politics, international as well as national and parochial.” 26
For the lesser known jurist Eduard Reut-Nicolossi, who fled Italian fascism in the 1930s, what broke down after the Second World War was no less than “Hegel’s apotheosis, the State is God on earth.” 27 The distinguished international lawyer Hersch Lauterpacht, the drafter of an influential “International Bill of the Rights of Man” in 1945, triumphantly hailed the dawn of a new era. “The individual,” Lauterpacht declared in 1950, “has now acquired a status and a stature which have transformed him from an object of international compassion into a subject of international right. The time is now ripe for assessing the significance of these changes … in the functioning of international society.” 28
One of these most immediate changes pertained to the governance of forced displacement in occupied Germany: The turn to individual rights concretely meant the abandonment of the League of Nation’s collective recognition of refugees in favor of individual eligibility. The first international charter on the protection of refugees, the 1933 Geneva Convention, defined refugees according to the principle of national and ethnic origin: “any person who does not enjoy the protection of the Government of the USSR or the Turkish Republic.”
White Russians and Armenians, the largest refugee groups of the post–World War I era, were the main clients of the Nansen humanitarian system. Under the auspices of the League of Nations (and in the interwar context of minority rights), it was theoretically enough to be a member of a designated group of displaced and stateless persons in order to have access to asylum protection (“Nansen passports”) and certain basic rights guaranteed by international convention. 29
After 1945, and especially so under the IRO (1947–1952), DPs were screened on an individual basis: The hundreds of personal files left in the IRO archives amply document the fascinating hearings and interviews conducted by “eligibility officers” in the DP camps. 30 Only Holocaust survivors deemed ideal types of victims until communist dissidents supplanted them as the Cold War unfolded, entirely bypassed the individual screening process. 31 It has been recently proposed that “ideas of Germany as modernity’s consummate ‘rogue state’ have deeply colored twentieth-century views of international justice.” 32
Less noticed, however, is the role played by occupied Germany as a field of experimentation in the individualization of international law. The Nuremberg Trial and the subsequent war crimes trials (1945-1949), with their emphasis of individual accountability over raison d’état (and their search for individual guilt amid the trumpeting of German “collective guilt”), were one aspect of this process. Human rights legacies of Nuremberg, convincingly argues Elizabeth Borgwardt, “included legitimating the idea of individual responsibility against crimes against international law.” 33 The administration of refugees in occupied Germany illustrates another aspect of this individualization process: More than any other groups in the 1940s, the DPs epitomized the transition from collective to individual human rights.
Mirroring the individual turn of the “human rights revolution,” the abandonment of the League’s policy of group acceptance in favor of individual selection was also triggered by more political motivations. “Who is a genuine, bona fide refugee?” asked lengthy IRO “eligibility guidelines” designed to help screeners identify authentic victims among the masses of DPs. Being a Pole, a Ukrainian, or a citizen of one of the Baltic states was not technically enough to receive DP status. What mattered for the IRO and even more so today was the production by refugees of a persuasive narrative of political persecution, decipherable according to contextual human rights standards. In the postwar years, “anti-fascism” and later “anti-communism” was the political norms that came to define political refugees in the eyes of the West. 34
The careful evaluation of individual refugee tales (a radical novelty in asylum policies) stemmed from both an inclusive and exclusive idea of rights. As persecuted people (or risking persecution if returned to their home country), the DPs were for all intents and purposes protected as refugees even if most of them were not technically “stateless” (many still carried identification documents from their country of origin). The primacy of persecution over statelessness as a key identifier of modern refugees had already been asserted by internationalist advocates in the 1930s: “[O]ther features of the existence of the refugee, such as the absence of national status, may be incidental but are not essential to his quality as refugee.” 35
This legal position was translated into a rigorous eligibility system after 1945. In the DP camps, the veracity of persecution claims was thoroughly reviewed by military officers and international civil servants trained to identify, among other potential intruders, former “collaborators,” “Quislings,” and “auxiliaries” of the Nazi order. As such, the shift from collective to individual rights – so crucial for the shaping of contemporary political asylum – also reflected the broader context of denazification and retribution across the European continent.
19. Atina Grossmann, “Victims, Villains, and Survivors: Gendered Perceptions and Self-Perceptions of Jewish Displaced Persons in Occupied Post-War Germany,” Journal of the History of Sexuality , 11 (2002), 291–318.
20. Mark R. Elliott, Pawns of Yalta. Soviet Refugees and America’s Role in Their Repatriation (Urbana, Ill., 1982).
21. Pavel Polian, Deportiert nach Hause. Sowjetische Kriegsgefangene im “Dritten Reich” und ihre Repatriierung (Munich, 2001).
22. Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, “The Displaced Persons Problem: Repatriation and Resettlement,” in Johannes-Dieter Steinert and Inge Weber-Newth (eds.), European Immigrants in Britain 1933–1950 (Munich, 2003), 137–149.
23. Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others. The Great Powers, the Jews and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 357–358.
24. Mazower, “The Strange Triumph of Human Rights,” 389.
25. John Cooper, Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention (New York, 2008).
26. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton, 1950), 576.
27. Reut-Nicolussi, “Displaced Persons and International Law,” 65.
28. Lauterpacht, International Law and Human Rights , 4. 29 Claudena Skran, Refugees in Interwar Europe: The Emergence of a Regime (New York, 1995).
30. G. Daniel Cohen, “Naissance d’une nation: les personnes déplacées de l’après-guerre 1945–1951,” Genèses , 38 (2000), 56–78.
32. Paul Betts, “Germany, International Justice, and the Twentieth Century,” History and Memory , 17 (2005), 45–86.
33. Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World. America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 242.
34. Kim Solomon, Refugees in the Cold War: Towards a New International Refugee Regime in the Early Postwar Era (Lund, Sweden, 1991).
35. Sir John Hope Simpson, The Refugee Problem: Report of a Survey , (London, 1939), 4.
