(Page 11 of 16) - "Burden-Sharing": The International Politics of Refugee Protection authored by Thielemann, Eiko.

aspects of the political cost of a country's contributions to international collective goods
should also be taken into considerations. He writes: 'When we deal with security policy
decisions that are the result of both national and international political processes,
comparative advantage must incorporate a notion of the political forces that constrain the
choices available to decision-makers in their domestic situations' (1993: 36).

Boyer suggests that political comparative advantage is determined by a country's
domestic political environment, with no two polities supporting an identical mix of
policies. In any political system whether democratic or authoritarian, he agues, national
policy-makers are constrained by the preferences of their constituents. To remain in
power, policy-markers will have to take such preference into account. For example, in a
country where public attitudes are strongly opposed to its army's intervention abroad but
where there is general support for refugee protection in general, granting refuge to
displaced persons (i.e. re-active rather than pro-active refugee protection measures) might
be a policy-maker’s policy of choice. Take the example of post-war Germany. Given its
historical legacy, for much of the post-war period, the German public insisted on a policy
of non-intervention by the German security forces, which constitutionally prohibited 'out
of area' operations by the German army (which, in terms of troop size, was larger than
both the French and British armed forces). The resulting policy choices, became most
obvious during the time of the Bosnian conflict in the early 1990s, when Germany chose
not toe participate in NATO-led military action against the Bosnian Serbs. Instead it
provided refuge to very large numbers of Bosnian asylum seekers (more than 420.000 in
1992 alone). One can expect constraints on policy-makers, like the ones just illustrated in
the German case, to change over time. However, given the nature of the political process
in most liberal democracies, these changes tend to be gradual.

Boyer writes: 'As a

country's political sentiments and economic priorities shift, so will be its specific
contributions' (Boyer 1993: 42).

Both the economic and political sources of comparative advantage therefore provide
incentives for specialization and trade in contributions to international collective goods.
In the refugee context this means that some nations will devote large amounts of
resources to 'pro-active' refugee protection efforts (e.g. through peace-keeping/making)
while being less active in the realm of re-active refugee protection measures. Other
countries can be expected to find the economic and political costs of sending their troops
abroad prohibitive but might be prepared to contribute to regional stability by
accommodating refugees within their borders.

This alternative trade model has two important implications for a discussion of public
good provision and burden-sharing. First, the model suggest that trading might be able to
offset some of the dynamics that have been identified as being responsible for the
expected under-provision of public goods. Even if provision remains sub-optimal, with
trade, public goods will be provided more efficiently than would be the case without
specialization and trade. This means that initiatives/proposals to force countries to
increase/equalize their contributions on a particular contribution dimension may be
counter-productive to the efficient production of international collective goods such as

In the German case, the coalition government of the Social Democratic and the Green party did finally

break with Germany's fifty year long non-intervention doctrine, sending modest consignments of German
troops in support of the NATO led actions in Kosovo and Afghanistan.