Christopher Szabla – Cornell University

Colonialism, Technocracy, and International Law in the Struggle for Global Migration Governance

The ongoing worldwide refugee and migration crisis begs serious questions about the international law of migration’s adequacy and effectiveness. Legal regimes to protect migrants, broadly defined, have appeared inadequate, unrecognized, or unapplied, while systems to manage migration’s flow and direction have broken down – where they exist. My research traces the origins of these failures to efforts during the interwar and post-Second World War periods to construct more comprehensive regimes of both refugee and migrant rights and distribution under and alongside the League of Nations, International Labour Organization, United Nations, and forerunners of the International Organization for Migration, and places the global rise of technocratic global governance and the transition from European empires to decolonization and postwar prosperity at the heart of its understanding of these systems’ rise and fall.

My findings indicate that accounts of this failure focusing on differences between “countries of immigration” and “countries of emigration” overstate them; both categories of state had common interests in decreasing European “overcrowding” and, with it, instability in this period – as well as in populating and “developing” settler colonial frontiers with European migrants. Instead, the chief obstacle to comprehensive migration governance, particularly in the interwar period, appears to have consisted of differences between states over the size and precise powers of the regime and their overconfidence in technocratic expertise to design a system that could overcome those disagreements.

Contrary to accounts that focus on the role of Cold War politics in postwar migration governance, furthermore, treaties and institutions that survived the breakdown of states’ earlier efforts became ineffective because they could not survive the diminution of the impetus for creating them: the emigration of Europeans to the global periphery. As migration toward Europe and within the Global South increased instead, treaties focusing on migrant labor rights went unratified and refugee and migration agencies shifted from a focus on overall human movement to emergency relief alone.

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