The Refugee in International Society: Between Sovereigns (review)

Few historians will need reminding of the role that refugees have played in many of the most important events of the Cold War. But serious studies of the historical development of refugee politics have been notably lacking. In recent years the field of forced migration has been dominated by policy analysis and, in particular, by debates on the linkages between refugees, security, and underdevelopment. Emma Haddad's impressive study is therefore particularly welcome. Her concern is to situate the phenomenon of the refugee within the historical evolution of the system or society of sovereign states. Adopting a broadly English School approach, her core argument is that "refugees are not the consequence of a breakdown in the system of separate states, rather they are an inevitable if unanticipated part of international society. As long as there are political borders constructing separate states and creating clear definitions of insiders and outsiders, there will be refugees" (p. 7). Refugees are created when the link between state, citizen and territory is broken: "The (modern) refugee is only fully intelligible within the context of a pluralist system of states in which individual political communities fail to guarantee the content of substantive sovereignty" (p. 63).

Haddad writes from an impressively broad perspective. She first highlights the shortcomings of the existing literature across a number of disciplines. She then considers the perennial problems of definition and categorization. She uses a critical constructivist perspective to underscore the mixture of the descriptive and normative in all definitions of refugees and reminds us of the political and historically contingent character of the process by which the category of "refugee" has been constructed; for example, the Eurocentric origins of the modern idea of the refugee. She deploys a similar perspective to explore the nature of the links between refugees and different historical understandings of security. Three chapters cover the historical development of refugee politics: from roughly 1648 to 1914; during the interwar period; and through the Cold War years. Chapter 7 takes European Union refugee policy as an example of the contending forces acting on Western governments: on the one hand, the pluralist imperative to act in accordance with hard state interest and national security; on the other hand, the liberal soldarist concern with human rights and humanitarianism. The final chapter applies her analysis to post-Cold War situation and makes a series of useful suggestions for the way ahead.

Haddad's argument is coherently organized and generally well-researched (the legal dimensions could perhaps have been treated with greater sophistication).Most importantly, she is successful in arguing that the "problem of the refugee" cannot be understood except in relation to the historically contingent ways in which political life and forms of political community have been imagined and practiced. Haddad criticizes the English School for too often assuming a static and uniform view of international society and correctly notes that concepts such as sovereignty and the state are ambiguous and dynamic. At the same time, her own view is sometimes a little teleological—for example, in her claim that "[t]he French Revolution of 1789 finished what Westphalia had started" (p. 53) or in talking about the modern notions of nationality and citizenship as "the natural extension of what was set in motion in 1648 and 1789" (p. 58). One might want to give greater prominence to state strength and state weakness as crucial variables in the story: to the gradual growth in the ability of states to control their borders and their populations, as well as to the evident importance of state weakness in many of today's most pressing refugee crises. One might, too, give greater weight to the transformation in the role of the state and in notions of political community that help explain why population movement becomes such a very different political problem in the second half of the twentieth century—compared to, say, the mass movements of peoples and refugees that occurred in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The changing nature of political community...