464 MAREN MÖHRING
policy was clearly driven by its foreign policy interests: on the one hand,
in keeping with international solidarity, it supported foreign Communist
parties and their members; on the other hand, emigrants from the so-
called young nation-states, which was the term used to refer to former
colonies that had recently become independent, were taken in by the
GDR.^96 For example, refugees from the Greek civil war, and Spanish Com-
munists who had been expelled from France, came to the GDR in 1949
and 1950, respectively. Among those who were admitted to the GDR
because of their participation in national liberation struggles were indi-
vidual functionaries of the Algerian FLN, the Palestinian PLO, the South
African ANC, and the Namibian SWAPO.^97
The people who fl ed the Eastern Bloc for the West were considered to
be the “real” political refugees in West Germany for the most part.^98 They
were guaranteed the right to stay in West Germany during the Cold War,
even if no grounds for asylum existed.^99 In general, the refugees who fl ed
to West Germany in the wake of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 and the
Prague Spring in 1968/69 were welcomed with open arms, not only by
the responsible authorities, but also the population at large. Likewise,
refugees from Tibet, once it had been annexed to China, were also admit-
ted without trouble to West Germany, and a great number of them were
also accepted by Switzerland, France, and Sweden. Without a doubt, the
“axiomatic Cold War confi guration” determined the course of refugee
and asylum policy.^100 This did not begin to change until the 1980s, when
West Germany adopted an increasingly defensive approach toward refu-
gees from Eastern Europe. For example, the approximately 250 thousand
Poles who fl ed to the West after martial law was declared in Poland in
December 1981 were no longer treated automatically as political refu-
gees.^101 The legitimation that had been provided to justify the admission
of refugees up to this point began to erode quickly. The willingness to
accept asylum-seekers from the so-called Third World had already been
very limited in decades prior, not just in the FRG, but across all of Europe.
Specifi c political events around the globe, such as the military coup
against Allende’s socialist government in Chile in 1973, prompted East
and West Germany to take on political refugees from the country af-
fected.^102 The GDR almost immediately permitted about two thousand
members and followers of Chile’s left-wing Unidad Popular to enter the
country. It then used this gesture to tout its international solidarity and
reaffi rm its moral legitimation.^103 In West Germany, on the other hand,
a heated debate broke out between the social-liberal government and
the Christian Union parties over whether or not this group of Chileans
should be granted asylum.^104 Despite the Christian Democrats’ worries
about Communist infi ltration, the government decided in favor of admit-