The arrangements were not universal — they did little or nothing for the victims of interwar fascism, or for non-European refugees such as Ethiopians who suffered at the hands of Italy’s occupation in 1935 — but they did represent a new departure. In interwar Europe, nearly two million Russian and Armenian refugees were provided with travel documents and an organization to which they could appeal for recognition and protection of their basic rights.The aftermath of World War II prompted another institutional innovation, mainly to support the victims of Nazism who had been forcibly recruited from occupied Eastern Europe during the war. When in 1946 significant numbers — including numerous Ukrainians, Poles and Balts — refused to return to their original homes now firmly under Communist control, the United States, Britain and France created an International Refugee Organization to protect and assist individuals who claimed a “well-founded fear of persecution.” Five years later it was replaced by the U.N.H.C.R. Together with the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention, which obliges signatory states not to return refugees to their country of origin against their will, this remains the cornerstone of international refugee protection.It’s far from perfect, of course. For one thing, the convention applies only to people who have crossed an international frontier, effectively barring the internally displaced or those who can’t leave their homes from international legal protection. What’s more, the emphasis on persecution has led to a prohibitively narrow interpretation of who constitutes a refugee, especially when compared to the broader provisions of the convention adopted by the Organization of African Unity in 1969.In recent years, the architecture of refugee protection has been found severely wanting. The nearly seven million Syrians fleeing the country’s civil war, together with close to three million Afghan refugees — not to mention Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, refugees in Yemen, South Sudan and elsewhere — face enormous hardship and threats to life. Not only are these people cast adrift from any substantive institutional help but they also often disappear from the world’s media, as if they are irredeemably remote.This time the response has been different. Europe has been overwhelmingly hospitable to the Ukrainians escaping the war. European Union member states have agreed to provide them with the right to live and work within the bloc, as well as access to social welfare and education. This instant recognition is, of course, deeply welcome. But it’s strikingly more generous protection than is available to Syrian and other asylum seekers incarcerated in squalid camps in Greece. Likewise, the warmth extended to Ukrainian refugees contrasts starkly with the racist hostility experienced at Ukraine’s western borders by Africans and Asians trying to escape violence.Yet it’s possible to spy in the outpouring of sympathy for Ukrainians an opportunity to push for better treatment for all refugees. Can Europe’s leaders, so long at odds over the question of migration, be persuaded to enlarge their responsibility to safeguard the lives of people who flee violence, no matter where they come from? Could the current crisis in Ukraine actually be a catalyst for substantially improving the rights of refugees around the world?These might seem like utopian, even naïve, questions. But the history of Europe suggests otherwise. In dire circumstances, bold and creative thinking has produced a better, more humane world. It can happen again. Will anyone rise to the challenge?