The “Human Rights Revolution” at Work

Abstract

“When this ghastly war ends,” gloomily predicted Franklin D. Roosevelt in October 1939, “there may be not one million but ten million or twenty million men, women and children belonging to many races … who will enter into the wide picture – the problem of the human refugee.” Six and a half years later, Eleanor Roosevelt confirmed the forecast of her then deceased husband. “A new type of political refugee is appearing,” she wrote in February 1946, “people who have been against the present governments and if they stay at home or go home will probably be killed.” To be sure, these statements could have adequately described earlier instances of forced displacement, none the least the refugee exodus from the Reich of the late 1930s. But although continental Europe had been awash with stateless and exiled people from the end of the First World War to the advent of Nazism, the presidential couple envisioned “the problem of the human refugee” as an impending postwar crisis more than the continuation of an older phenomenon. Two decades of isolationism and restrictive immigration quotas may have blinded American eyes to the magnitude of European displacement prior to 1939. The prospect of renewed American engagement with the world, however, revived strong interest for “Europe on the move.” Observing this phenomenon at both ends of the conflict, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were undoubtedly right: the scale of the European refugee problem at the end of the Second World War went beyond anything seen before. Writing on the eve of Victory in Europe, Hannah Arendt similarly reflected upon the impending refugee crisis. “It would be a good thing,” she observed in April 1945, “if it were generally admitted that the end of the war in Europe will not automatically return thirty to forty million exiles to their homes.” And then the former refugee from Nazi Germany divulged one of the greatest challenges the authorities would face:“[A] very large proportion,” she warned, “will regard repatriation as deportation and will insist on retaining their statelessness.” Arendt had evidently in mind the yet unquantified Jewish survivors of the Final Solution but also referred to other types of anti-Soviet Eastern European displaced persons (DPs). Altogether, she presciently pointed out, “the largest group of potentially stateless people is to be found in Germany itself.” Contrary to the military and humanitarian focus on population management, Arendt believed that the “DP problem” was first and foremost political in nature. From 1946 to the end of the decade, the vocal and conspicuous “last million” of Europe’s DPs – a multinational group of Jewish and non-Jewish asylum seekers unwilling or unable to go home – amply corroborated her predictions.