Eras Journal - Burgess, G: Abstract
Abstract of Burgess, G. Into the Protecting Arms: The League of Nations and the Extension of International Assistance to Unprotected Persons in the Middle East and Europe, 1926 - 1928.
The Interwar Arrangements
relating to refugees, made under the auspices of the League of Nations,
introduced into international law a definite legal status for refugees
and certain stateless persons. However, the Arrangements initially
pertained only to refugees who had left Russia after the Bolshevik
Revolution and Armenians from Turkey. The League resisted attempts
to expand the Arrangements to extend the same legal status to other
groups of refugees. Some historians have identified this as a failure
of the international system for refugee protection. The failure of
the League to arrive at a general definition of refugees, it has
been argued, prevented it from finding a lasting solution to the
refugee dilemma confronting interwar Europe.
These conclusions are based on a narrow interpretation of the
motives and principles behind the League's recognition of the
legal status of refugees. They also overlook the question put before
the League in 1927 that the refugee Arrangements be extended to other
refugees. This paper reconsiders the League's decision to reject
the proposition to extend the Arrangements to refugees in general,
and instead to reassert its view that they should pertain only to
specifically designated national groups. This shows that the motives
and principles of the League's refugee work were less to do with
the system of refugee protection it introduced than it was to help
ideological and former wartime allies dislocated in the post-war
settlement.