This essay argues that the global refugee regime is undergoing a fundamental transformation. While the 1951 Refugee Convention and its legal framework remain formally intact, their practical application has shifted toward a model of flexible containment. Rather than offering protection within their own borders, states increasingly manage displacement through externalization, legal ambiguity, and informal cooperation. Drawing on the concepts of institutional drift and legal substitution, the essay shows how states recalibrate their obligations without renouncing them, preserving the appearance of compliance while limiting access to asylum. These practices form a broader architecture of containment, characterized by border externalization, procedural delays, and institutional delegation. What emerges is not the collapse of the refugee regime but its reconfiguration around a postliberal logic that prioritizes sovereignty, discretion, and risk management over multilateralism and rights enforcement. By tracing this shift across legal frameworks and policy instruments, the essay contributes to debates on norm erosion, soft law, and the future of international cooperation. It concludes by calling for a rethinking of solidarity and responsibility in global governance, recognizing that the challenge is not simply to restore past commitments but to confront the evolving politics of mobility and protection in a fragmented international order.

The German Democratic Republic (GDR) treated the Berlin Wall as an official state border, but the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) did not recognize it as an official state border and thus did not impose entry controls. This asymmetric recognition opened up a gap in the regime of border policing and turned divided Berlin into one of the most significant sources of unauthorized migration into the FRG, creating tensions in Berlin, West Germany, and western Europe more broadly. Countries including France, Denmark, and the Netherlands all pressured the FRG to shut the open border in Berlin. This article examines how West German authorities sought to respond to their demands without recognizing the Berlin Wall as a state border. West German authorities pursued two broad strategies. The first involved internalizing the border through institutionalized racial profiling in West Berlin. The second entailed externalizing the border by asking the GDR to enforce FRG visa and passport requirements. Although both forms of border policing have often been associated with the end of the Cold War, this article shows that they were adopted earlier, and in response to Cold War imperatives.