Reluctant Saviors: British Policy on Basque Child Refugees, 1937-1939
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2015
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Haverford College. Department of History
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Bi-College users only
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Abstract
Civil war was raging in Spain and parents there were desperate to find safe havens for their children. Officials urged other countries to take in the children. France, Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland, the former Soviet Union and other nations responded. Britain was a hold out, but eventually agreed to provide refuge to nearly 4,000 children from the Basque region. My thesis assesses the British response and treatment of these children. I focus on Britain’s motives—humanitarian? political?— and examine and analyze the role child rights (or the lack thereof) played in its relief effort. Britain saved the children, but it was a reluctant savior and its mission a black mark that would expose other flaws in the nation’s allegedly spotless humanitarian record. Despite existing international doctrines establishing the unique status of refugees and children and their need for special protections, the British ignored the children’s rights and personage, instead identifying them according to political, humanitarian and national tenets. I conclude that Britain’s Conservative political climate, isolationist foreign policy and anti-foreign (and anti-Spain, in particular) attitude conspired to encourage the nation to neglect the Basque children’s child rights. This episode raises important questions about child rights and how children should be treated during war. It is also a critical commentary on twentieth century European history and evidence that Western Europe placed the protection of the nation state and its sovereignty above the protection of human rights. Although the British treatment of the Basque child refugees was subpar at best, it would take another 20-plus years (after the mistreatment of children and child refugees during World War II, the Greek Civil War and later conflicts) for Britain and the rest of Europe to officially recognize the need for global reform of child rights. It was then (1959) that the United Nations finally amended and adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, truly recognizing that children are individuals who deserve and are entitled to inalienable human rights.