Development Finance: A Series of Proposals

Observations

1. The standard account of “responsibility-sharing” tends to trace the concept to paragraph 4 of the Refugee Convention’s Preamble, or to derive it from post-1951 historical precedents like the Hungarian crisis response and the CPA. But to limit the range of relevant precedents to events that originated during or after 1951 is to excise from the record the largest, most successful, and most progressive example of financial [and physical] responsibility-sharing in refugee and development history: the Marshall Plan [plus mass resettlement].

2. The Convention provided no concrete responsibility-sharing mechanism because it did not aspire to. At the outset, it aimed merely to stipulate one component – responsibility for the “residual caseload” – of this larger sharing regime. It was the last component, historically, and in some ways the least significant one as well. By 1951, third states had already undertaken years of mass resettlement, while the Marshall Plan – which supplied asylum states like Germany with levels of funding no host state or responsibility-sharing scheme has ever seen since – was in full swing.

3. Situating the Convention within this broader context helps resolve some of its mysteries. The silence on solutions (beyond naturalization) and on financial burden-sharing begins to make sense – both were already occurring. As for the temporal and geographic limitations: mass resettlement was ending and the Marshall Plan would last only a few more years; asylum responsibilities were to be similarly circumscribed. All three elements of this CRR triumvirate were restricted to Europe(ans).