ABSTRACT
As a phenomenon, refugee protection is as old as the history of mankind. Its legal codification, however, is a product of this century and evolved in the context of the general move towards international cooperation after the Second World War. This chapter turns to its normative conceptualisation as it has evolved in international and domestic legislation in France and Germany since 1945. After a discussion of the main normative foundations of the post-World War II international refugee regime, it present the French and the German refugee regimes before Europeanisation. The chapter sets out with the normative roots of the national refugee regimes and recapitulate the major policy developments in both countries up to the late 1980s. It discusses these normative foundations of the German post-World War II refugee regime by a recapitulation of the main policy developments up till the late 1980s, when the constitutional asylum right came increasingly under strain.
