From Geneva to Schengen

Shaping Immigration and Refugee Protection in Western Europe, 1951-1994

In Kooperation mit der Universität Gent

Leitung: Michael Mayer / Frank Caestecker

Sekretariat: Antonia Kreitner, Tel.: 08158 / 256-58

The 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention is a water­shed in migration “management” by providing refugees a privileged access to the territory of states willing to protect them. The Convention was never just a static legal text. It was a living instrument, constantly reinterpreted throughout time. This workshop looks at high-level diplomacy, but also focusses on the ground level of implementation, examining how Western European states actually put the Convention into practice during its first four decades. We explore the friction between international obligations and the domestic realities of immigration control, labor migration, decoloniza­tion, and the shifting economic tides from the Trente Glorieuses to the post-industrial 1980s. Our analysis centers on how individual governments defined who “counted” as a refugee and how they built the administrative machinery to determine status, grant rights, or enforce exclusions. By tracing these national trajectories up to the decisive 1994 turning point – the threshold of the Schengen era – we reassess how forty years of diverse state practice fundamentally shaped the asylum landscape in Europe.