Refuge and Belonging: Transformations of Refugee Protection in the Federal Republic of Germany

• Applicant: Dr. J. Olaf Kleist
• Subject Area: Political Science ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2013 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 234828459

Germany is one of the main countries of asylum and host to the largest population of refugees in the industrial world. While little discussed even in current immigration debates, the Federal Republic has always welcomed forced migrants on various grounds. It has been refuge to displaced ethnic-Germans, to political asylum seekers, to resettled refugees from around the globe and to forced migrants who escaped war or other situations of despair. However, access to protection has always been highly selective. Rationales upon which refuge in the Federal Republic of Germany has been granted have been politically contested and altered from civic-political to cultural-national models and back. This research project examines the history of refuge in the Federal Republic of Germany and the transformation of political debates about refugees. It is pioneering in its topic and its applied concepts, drawing on theories of political belonging and memory, shedding new light not only on the history and theory of refuge but on the receiving country's political culture.The project is premised on a concept of refuge as an extension of sovereign belonging to non-nationals. The merit of protection is granted on the basis of politically contested notions of belonging to the federal republic's political body in either civic or cultural terms. Thus, in this project political debates at six pivotal moments of refugee protection in Germany's post-war history are closely examined, some for the first time: the institutionalisation of political asylum in the Basic Law 1949; the intake of Czechoslovakian asylum seekers in 1968-69; the turn from civic to cultural perceptions in the resettlement of Indo-Chinese refugees 1975-82; the asylum law reform 1992-93 and its preceding debate about national belonging; the reception of forced migrants from Kosovo 1999-2000; and the return to civic notions in the establishment of a European Refugee System 2003 and onwards. Print media, parliamentary debates and discussions in the federal government's cabinet are subject to analysis. Methodologically, political statements about refuge illuminate a historical trajectory of belonging that links forced migrants to the German polity. In order to draw out notions of belonging in those political arguments about refugees and refuge, particular attention is given to the use of memories and how relationships between German belonging and those seeking protection are constructed therein.The findings of this project will be published in articles and as a monograph, presenting the first comprehensive history of refuge in the Federal Republic of Germany. As the research will be conducted at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford it will be set at and in the context of the forefront of global Forced Migration Studies and contribute not only to a new perception of German political culture and its immigration past but to a novel approach to the international study of refuge and asylum.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Host: Dr. Matthew Gibney