Crisis of Constraint: The Federal Republic of Germany's Current Refugee Imbroglio

Abstract

THE WEST GERMAN STATE HAS FACED TWO DAUNTING challenges brought about by the movement of refugees into its territory since the end of the Second World War. The first occurred immediately after the end of the war and involved the resettlement of ten million refugees of German nationality expelled from East European countries and 3.5 million evacuees from Soviet-controlled East Germany. It was a challenge that was met with dramatic success. With the help of a number of governmental programmes, and a rapidly expanding economy, these refugees were fully integrated into West German society in the two decades after 1945. Indeed, by the end of the 1960s, the success of this massive resettlement attempt, along with the country's uniquely broad constitutional article which recognized a right of asylum for all political refugees, had rendered the Federal Republic, in spite of its catastrophic past, something of a model for all states in the handling of refugees