Frontier Justice: The Global Refugee Crisis and What to Do about It Paperback - 2013

Excerpt

In March of 1933, German politicians voted to grant their new chancellor, Adolf Hitler, the power to govern with impunity. Members of the Nazi party physically attacked parliamentarians before the vote to influence its outcome, but this terror campaign, it soon turned out, was nothing next to what would follow. It was suddenly normal for critics of the government to be beaten in the street. The most outspoken anti-Nazi activists became the first victims of the newly established concentration camp system, at the same time as anti-Semitic decrees expelled Jews from the civil service and other positions. In response to the wave of persecution, thousands of people began to flee the country. Among them were a young Jewish woman and her mother, who, shortly after the initial anti-Jewish laws were passed, left their home in Berlin for the last time.
 
The frightened women made their way south to the Erzgebirge mountain range, which marked Germany’s frontier with Czechoslovakia. Neither one had a passport or visa. They were familiar, however, with a German exile group in Prague, which had set up a network of safe houses for escaping Jews and leftists. Armed with this knowledge, the two Berliners went to the mountain town of Carlsbad, where they sought out a kindhearted family who could provide them with a simple yet invaluable means of avoiding the border patrol: the house they lived in had its front door in Germany and its back door in Czechoslovakia. The two fugitives were taken in by their benefactors while it was light out, offered dinner, and released into the night. When their feet touched Czech soil, two things happened. They became refugees. And they set in motion a major episode in the history of human rights.
 
The escaping Jews were Hannah Arendt, then twenty-six, and her mother, Martha Beerwald. Why was their flight from fascism so remarkable? The answer has to do with Hannah Arendt’s later transformation into one of the great political thinkers of the twentieth century. Arendt’s philosophy was influenced by her experience as a refugee. So perhaps the best place to start in understanding Hannah Arendt, and seeing what we can learn from her about human rights, is by retracing the steps of her journey. As we will see, it is a journey that has much in common with that of refugees even today.
 
Arendt did not stay long in Czechoslovakia. After sending her mother to the relative safety of East Prussia (from where she would again flee the Nazis five years later), Arendt continued on to Switzerland and then to France, where she was reunited with her husband. Günther Stern, a communist and friend of the famous playwright Bertolt Brecht, had fled Germany several months in advance of his wife and mother-in-law. He was prompted to do so after Brecht had an address book confiscated by the Gestapo, which Stern feared would shortly result in the arrest of everyone whose name it contained. Now, in Paris, he and his wife were part of a wave of twenty-five thousand German refugees, 85 percent of them Jewish, who had poured into France, a greater number than that received by any other country.
 
Arendt’s exile in Paris was not a happy time. Even before they became refugees, she and her husband had many differences. When it came to politics, for example, she never shared his commitment to communism. (Before the Nazis came to power, in fact, she was barely interest in politics at all, and always dated her political awakening to the rise of Hitler.) Now Arendt and her husband had little to unite them save the hardscrabble urgencies of refugee existence. When Stern left Paris for New York in 1936, his marriage to Arendt had long been over in all but name. Things were hardly better for Arendt on a political level. The arrival of the German refugees, even though they represented a minuscule portion of France’s population, was regarded in France as a major crisis. To be sure, there were people who spoke out on the refugees’ behalf. They included not only French Jews but Socialists, liberals, left-wing Catholics and a few stray conservatives. But throughout the 1930s, these partisans of “hospitality,” to use the term they most frequently invoked, had to engage in a fierce political battle with conservative and centre-left politicians, rank-and-file union members (union leaders tended to be pro-refugee) and business groups, all of whom filled the air with cries of “France for the French!” and denounced the Jews as economic parasites and “undesirables.”
 
France’s refugee crisis came to a head at the end of the decade. By this point Arendt’s personal situation had improved somewhat: she was employed by a French Jewish charity and had managed to have her mother join her from Prussia. There was even a new man in her life, another German (albeit non-Jewish) refugee named Heinrich Blücher. But after Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938, which sent another wave of desperate Jews into France, the political situation of every refugee in Paris deteriorated. France introduced repressive laws making admission much more difficult. Jews who were already present were barred from holding certain jobs or were sent back to Germany. Others were turned away at the border. A mood of despair spread through the Jewish community, and many refugees chose suicide. After a Polish Jew living in Paris shot a German embassy official, the Nazis responded with Kristallnacht—the night of broken glass— burning and looting Jewish homes, shops and synagogues across Germany. Anti-refugee voices in France were already alleging a Jewish conspiracy to drag France into a needless war with Germany; Kristallnacht, perversely, was taken as evidence for this view and resulted in calls for harsh reprisals against refugees. Paris’s Jews lived in terror of what would happen next.
 
The answer came in the fall of 1939. Hostilities between France and Germany had now formally begun (albeit in the form of the phony war, before the bombs began to fall), and France ordered that all German men with suspicious political backgrounds be interned. It didn’t matter that Heinrich Blücher and thousands of others had fled Germany precisely because they were Communists, and so would be the last people on earth to engage in pro-Nazi activities. Blücher was sent to a labour camp in a small French village, sleeping with two dozen other men in a barn that left them exposed to the constant cold rain, where he soon became ill.
 
Through desperate lobbying, Arendt managed to secure Blücher’s release (a friend of hers tracked down the widow of a police prefect who agreed to serve as his guarantor). When Blücher returned to Paris he and Arendt married. But instead of a honeymoon, they had to contend with a new internment order—one that now included most German women. Four months after their wedding, Arendt and her husband reported to separate sports stadiums in Paris. Arendt was made to sleep on the stone bleachers of the Winter Velodrome alongside other Jewish women branded “enemy aliens.” Every time a plane passed overhead they feared it was a German bomber come to end their lives. Finally, after a week, Arendt and the other female refugees were taken to a camp near Gurs, a town in southwest France. Constant rains had turned the camp into a muddy swamp. Although inmates were not forced to work, the residents kept themselves busy emptying the latrines and engaging in other chores to stave off depression.
 
During her internment, with the war situation growing worse, and not knowing whether she would ever see her husband again, Arendt was overcome with thoughts of killing herself. It was something many other camp residents considered. At one point, there was talk among the refugees of committing suicide en masse, as a form of protest against the way they had been treated by the French government. But the inmates soon decided that this would only please their captors. As Arendt later wrote, “When some of us suggested that we had been shipped there pour crever [to be snuffed out] in any case, the general mood turned suddenly into a violent courage of life.”
 
Several weeks after Arendt’s arrival in Gurs, German troops invaded Paris. All communications broke down and the camp descended into chaos. Many women decided to stay, afraid to leave the one place their husbands would at least know to look for them. When Gurs later came under the jurisdiction of the collaborationist Vichy government, most of these inmates were handed over to the Nazis for extermination. Arendt was lucky: she had somewhere she could go. The same Paris friend who had secured Heinrich Blücher’s release, a wealthy German exile, was renting a house near the southern French town of Montauban. Arendt could reach it by travelling on foot and hitchhiking. Montauban was in total confusion when Arendt arrived. Many homes had been left empty in the panic of war, and the mayor had chosen to express his opposition to the new Vichy government in northern France by turning empty buildings over to former internees. As a result, thousands of refugees were streaming into Montauban from all across France. They slept on empty floors, dragging in every mattress they could find, creating conditions almost as crowded and cramped as in the camps they had just escaped.
 
It was against this backdrop that Hannah Arendt had one of the happiest experiences of her life. One day she found herself on the main avenue of Montauban. There, amid piles of mattresses, furniture and garbage, she saw her husband walking down the street. Blücher’s camp had been evacuated when the Nazis took Paris, and he had joined the great migration of people—travelling on bicycles, in the backs of trucks, on foot with everything they could carry—streaming into unoccupied southern France. Surrounded by crowds of refugees scavenging for scraps of food and tobacco, others seeking word of missing loved ones, Arendt and Blücher fell into a deep embrace. There would be other hurdles still to come. They would have to go to horrendous lengths to obtain visas. They would only narrowly avoid arrest. But from that moment forward, Hannah Arendt redoubled her “violent courage of life.” Travelling with her husband, and followed shortly by her mother, she reached the safety of the United States in 1941.

What can we learn by looking back at Hannah Arendt’s experience today? Luck clearly played a major role in her eventual escape to safety, such as her chance meeting with her husband in southern France. Arendt and Blücher were also fortunate to marry when they did. Shortly after their ceremony, wartime conditions made obtaining a French marriage licence next to impossible. The special emergency visas Arendt and Blücher eventually obtained were given only to single people or to couples who could produce a licence. Unmarried couples had to choose which of them would stay behind and hope for some other opportunity of escape. Yet although these and other details were specific to Arendt’s case, she is not the only person fleeing persecution whose survival has been due to chance. Many refugees continue to make it to safety after just barely catching the right flight or running from their homes at the last possible minute. In this and other ways, Arendt’s experience calls to mind the situation of people still seeking asylum today.
 
Arendt took flight from an anti-Semitic campaign that eventually became the worst genocide of all time. This made her a quintessentially modern refugee. Not because every refugee is necessarily fleeing genocide, but because before the Armenian genocide of 1915, refugees of this kind did not exist. Today we have been taught by events in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda not to be surprised when genocide or its cousin, ethnic cleansing, drive yet another group of refugees across yet another border. But even today, crises of this kind are exacerbated by the inability of outsiders to reckon with evil. When refugees from genocide come forward to recount their experiences, they are often initially met with skepticism. Arendt herself was one of the first people to point out the inverse relationship between persecution and believability. “The very immensity of the crimes,” she wrote, “guarantees that the murderers who proclaim their innocence with all manner of lies will be more readily believed than the victims who tell the truth.”
 
If a refugee is often running from events that are literally incredible, the challenges he faces in escaping can be, by contrast, all too banal. Recall that when Arendt and her mother left Germany, they had no travel documents. This wasn’t because they were absent-minded, or left in a hurry. It was because they faced the same dilemma anyone does who flees persecution by her own government. If the authorities are out to kill you, they are unlikely to process your passport application. (Even travelling to a foreign consulate to obtain a visa can sometimes be impossible: governments have been known to kill dissidents who make public a desire to flee abroad.) Today, legitimate asylumseekers who cross borders by land often still arrive without papers. And with the rise of the jet age, when air travel without identification is next to impossible, it has also become common for genuine refugees to reach the safety of the West by travelling on fake passports.
 
Then there is the question of why Arendt and her family did not seek asylum in Switzerland or some other nearby country, but continued on to France. Beginning in 1933 and for several years afterwards, Switzerland did admit refugees, but always on the understanding that, as with Arendt, they were merely passing through and would not seek asylum in Switzerland itself. As time wore on, however, and the situation of German Jews worsened, Swiss officials became increasingly concerned that Switzerland not be, in the words of a Swiss police official, “saturated with Jews.” So in 1938 the Swiss government sealed its borders and, when thousands of desperate refugees arrived, forcibly returned them to the Nazis.
 
In the context of the 1930s, Switzerland’s policies were unremarkable. We do not like to think about it now, but during the Great Depression anti-Semitism was not confined to Nazi Germany. All Western countries eventually closed their doors to Jewish refugees. This was the main reason so many at first fled to France. As the historian Vicki Caron notes, geographic proximity to Germany and other factors certainly played a role in France’s refugee influx. “Most important, however, was the fact that France had not yet implemented immigration restrictions, in sharp contrast to Great Britain or the United States.”
 
If we can be grateful that Western states are no longer in the grip of an anti-Semitic conspiracy, the situation of France in 1933 nonetheless illustrates an enduring aspect of refugee politics, namely that the number of asylum-seekers a country receives is influenced by the policies of other refugee-receiving states. Many commentators on refugee issues, not to mention government policy-makers, have a tendency to focus on their own country in isolation. This can cause them to overlook the full range of factors that do and do not bring asylum-seekers to their shores. There have been situations, for example, where one country has deliberately made its asylum program less welcoming in the hope of attracting fewer refugee claimants, only to see the number of applications go up instead—because neighbouring countries have simultaneously made their own policies even harsher. Rather than solve any problems, the result is a race to the bottom that puts the needs of refugees at risk.
 
Finally, the refugee debate that took place in France can teach us something. On the one side there were those such as the French police officer who wrote in 1933 that German Jews “will soon constitute groups of discontented and violent exiles: veritable ghettos from the moral point of view, as well as the point of view of hygiene!” Today we recoil from the prejudice in this remark, and read with relief the words of those who spoke out for refugees. A typical representative was the minister of the French government who told the chamber of deputies that it was “an honour for our nation to remain loyal to the generous tradition of hospitality on which it has always prided itself.” And yet, as fundamentally opposed as these viewpoints were, they also had something in common.
 


From the Hardcover edition.

Media reviews

“Andy Lamey tackles this timely and critical debate with an intellect and a passion that are formidable. Frontier Justice could, quiet possibly, have a lasting effect on policy in Canada and elsewhere.”
—The Globe and Mail

"Compulsively readable, at times heartbreaking and super-smart."
—Jeet Heer, literary journalist
 
"A book that pulses with intellectual curiosity and energy . . . a calm, lucid voice in a a debate often sidetracked by terrorist panic and hypocrisy about human rights."
—The Chronicle Herald (Halifax)
 
"Despite its grounding in political theory and legal history, this is not a political-science textbook. Lamey introduces the reader to real refugees, offering portraits, for example, of Haitians detained at Guantanamo Bay before and during the Clinton administration. There are even sections where the book becomes a page-turner."
—The Ottawa Citizen
 
"Frontier Justice provides what the debate over asylum and refugee claims so desperately needs: fresh thinking and historical perspective. Here is a wonderful writer tackling a subject, and a debate, as big as his talent."
—Paul Wells, Maclean's columnist
 
 “[A] superb and immensely readable work …”
—Doug Saunders, Literary Review of Canada
 
"Andy Lamey has produced a persuasive argument for changes to refugee systems around the world."
—The Winnipeg Free Press


From the Hardcover edition.