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ABSTRACT
Research on twentieth-century voluntary organizations and their contribution to the reconstruction of states, communities and humanitarian assistance to civilian populations following conflicts, epidemics and disasters has tended to focus on non-Western European countries. Scholarly works from the history discipline over the past decades indicate that it is mostly in Africa, the Middle East, the West Indies, Eastern Europe and Asia where natural or man-made disasters have occurred, and it is these places that have been the focus of humanitarian assistance. Although the literature acknowledges that Western Europe was at times the beneficiary of such assistance, the broad history of humanitarian reconstruction and assistance generally considers Western Europe as a key provider rather than a recipient of humanitarian assistance. This two-part Special Issue proposes to do the opposite, to add complexity and nuance to the historiography of humanitarian aid and reconstruction assistance in Western Europe. It explores the ways in which voluntary organizations have contributed to the reconstruction and the care of populations in Western European countries including but not limited to Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom after both the First and Second World War. It seeks to investigate how the Red Cross movement – individual National Societies, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the League of Red Cross Societies – alongside other voluntary organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and a range of other international and local non-government bodies, have contributed to reconstruction in Western Europe at both national and local levels following times of crisis.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the Centre d’Histoire de Sciences Po for hosting the symposium “Voluntary Organisations, the Red Cross, and the Features of Humanitarian Reconstruction in Western Europe after the World Wars,” as well as for the support of its previous director, Professor Marc Lazar. We are also grateful to Professor Guillaume Piketty, who worked alongside us to organize and deliver the symposium. Finally, we wish to sincerely thank each and every contributor to this special issue for their dedication and collegiality.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. There is now significant literature on humanitarianisms across a range of disciplines. An example that speaks directly to this point is Salvatore, “Globalization, Growth, Poverty, Governance, and Humanitarian Assistance.” Other recent studies in history include Rodogno’s, Night on Earth; Götz, Brewis, and Werther, Humanitarianism in the Modern World; Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924; Paulman, Dilemmas of Humanitarian Aid in the Twentieth Century; Klose, The Emergence of Humanitarian Intervention; Watenpaugh, Bread From Stones; Farré, Fayet, and Taithe, L’Humanitaire s’exhibe (1867–2016); Wilson and Brown, Humanitarianism and Suffering; O’Sullivan, Hilton, and Fiori, “Humanitarianisms in Context,” 1–5; Desgrandchamps et al., “Biafra, Humanitarian Intervention and History”; Lie, “The Humanitarian-Development Nexus: Humanitarian Principles, Practice and Pragmatics”; and Gatrell, Free World?
2. Aloudat and Smith, “Changing Contexts in Humanitarianism,” 35.
3. Mazower, “Reconstruction,” 17.
4. In the context of the First World War, see, for example, a review by Hitchcock, “World War I and the Humanitarian Impulse,” 145–63; in the context of the Second World War, see the humanitarian landscape painted by Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity, 97–131.
5. We use the example of the League of Red Cross Societies, a humanitarian organization established in 1919 in the wake of the First World War. One specific example is the League’s Bureau of Nursing and its international postgraduate nursing programme at Bedford College, which expanded and projected training, skills and experience for the nursing profession that reached far beyond Western Europe in the aftermath of the First World War; in the aftermath of the Second World War, the LRCS’s blood programme experienced a similar trajectory. See Oppenheimer, “Nurses of the League,” 628–44; Oppenheimer, “Gender, Personalities and the Politics of Humanitarianism,” 241–63; and Reid and Gilbo, Beyond Conflict, 192. For an overview of the origins of the League, see Oppenheimer, “A Golden Moment?” 8–27; for an early history of the League of Red Cross Societies, see Buckingham, For Humanity’s Sake.
6. Sherif Gemie, Humbert, and Reid, Outcast Europe, 235.
7. Barakat, After the Conflict, 11.
8. Audoin-Rouzeau et al., La violence de guerre, 1914–1945, Loez, Mondes en Guerre, volume III Guerres mondiales et impériales. 1870–1845; and Le Gac and Patin, Guerres mondiales. These are examples, of which there are more, of works that show how war studies have produced rich histories that combine the study of both conflicts. See also the AHRC project “Colonial and Transnational Intimacies: Medical Humanitarianism in the French External Resistance, 1940–1945” and the “Researching the Impact of Attacks on Healthcare” (RIAH) project, which focuses on the long Second World War (1931–53) from the perspectives of those who delivered and received medical and humanitarian care in various sites across the world.
9. See, for example, Wylie, Oppenheimer, and Crossland, The Red Cross Movement; and Oppenheimer et al., “Resilient Humanitarianism?”
10. Rossini, “Voluntary Organisations, the Red Cross, and the Features of Humanitarian Reconstruction in Western Europe after the World Wars.”
11. See Oppenheimer, “Nurses of the League,” Table 2, 639.
12. See Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism 1918–1924.
13. Doyle, “Voluntary Organisations and the Provision of Health Services in England and France, 1917–29.”
14. On the notion of sorties de guerre, please refer to Flateau, “Les sorties de guerre,” 5–14. On the intensity of the health issue after the Second World War and the difficulties in handling it, see Reinisch, The Perils of Peace.
15. Weinreb, “For the Hungry Have No Past nor Do They Belong to a Political Party,” 50–1.
16. See, for example, Grossmann, “Grams, Calories, and Food”; Salvatici, “Not Enough Food to Feed the People”; and Simmons, “Wages and the Politics of Life in Postwar France.”
17. From December 1945 and through 1946, Australian newspapers appealed for funds for the Food for Britain Appeal run through the Lord Mayor’s Food for Britain Fund (The West Australian, December 29, 1945; The Advertiser, February 21, 1946; The Argus, March 18, 1946). On 12 July 1946, a Food for Britain Appeal Day was held by the Australian Red Cross, with buttons sold and money collected to send to Britain; see Oppenheimer, Red Cross VAs: A History of the VAD Movement in NSW, 113 and 121.
18. Bernini, “Mothers and Children in Post-War Europe”; Faron, Les enfants du deuil; and Venken and Röger, “Growing up in the Shadow of the Second World War.”
19. Studies of European children in wartime through Save the Children have been explored most recently by Baughan, Saving the Children; see also Droux, “Life during Wartime,” 185–206; Mahood, Feminism and Voluntary Action; Zahra, The Lost Children; Dodd, “Wartime Rupture and Reconfiguration in French Family Life”; Torrie, ‘For Their Own Good’; and Downs, “Au Revoir les Enfants.” For an Australian perspective, see Damousi, The Humanitarians. For a Hungarian perspective, see Kind-Kovács, Budapest’s Children.
20. For a broad overview of the development of public health and voluntary organizations post-First World War, see Weindling, International Health Organizations and Movements, 1918–1939; and Borowy, Coming to Terms with World Health.
21. The role played by the League remains to be fully investigated. One study is Oppenheimer, “Realignment in the Aftermath of War,” 130–47.
22. For UNRRA, see Reinisch, “Internationalism in Relief,” 258–9; for UNICEF, see Morris, The Origins of UNICEF, 1946–1953.
23. Möller, Paulmann, and Stornig, Gendering Global Humanitarianism in the Twentieth Century. See also Martin-Moruno, Edgar, and Leyder, “Feminist Perspectives on the History of Humanitarian Relief (1870–1945),” 2–18; and Oppenheimer, “Gender, Personalities and the Politics of Humanitarianism,” 241–63. For national cases, see Alano, “Armed with a Yellow Mimosa”; Diebolt, Les Femmes dans l’action sanitaire, sociale et culturelle, 1901–2001; Zappi, Les visages de l’État social; and Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls.
24. Humbert, Reinventing French Aid, 197–324.
25. Bradley, “Making Peace as a Project of Moral Reconstruction.”
26. Piller, “Despondence, Dependence and Dignity,” 13.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 2.
29. For a broader study on DPs and humanitarian organizations in post-Second World War Europe, please refer to Chapter 3, “Care and Maintenance: The New Face of International Humanitarianism,” in Cohen, In War’s Wake, 58–78.
30. Salvatici, “Fighters without Guns,” 956–76.
31. Irwin, Making the World Safe, 143–51.
32. See Gerwarth, The Vanquished.
33. Cabanes, The Great War, 195, 213, 240.
34. Herrmann quoted in “L’humanitaire, c’est de la solidarité qui divise.” Irène Herrmann has explained how feeding Belgian and French occupied areas through voluntary organizations enabled the United States to support its wheat industry during and after the First World War. Such links between humanitarianism and economics have also been observed in the context of the Second World War, see Farré, “De l’économie de guerre au secours philanthropique,” 25–41. On the ideological diversity and potential instrumentation of humanitarianism, see Kevonian, Réfugiés et diplomatie humanitaire; Brodiez-Dolino, Le Secours populaire français 1945–2000; and Brodiez-Dolino and Dumons, “Faire l’histoire de l’humanitaire.”
35. Lowcock, “What’s Wrong with the Humanitarian Aid System and How to Fix it.” Such tensions remain a major issue in the field. In 2021, Mark Lowcock, the Under-Secretary-General of the UN declared: “I have reached the view that one of the biggest failings of the humanitarian system is that agencies do not pay enough attention to what people caught up in crises say they want, and then trying to give that to them.”
36. This is a large historiographical field, but perhaps the best place to start is with Finlayson’s, Citizen, State and Social Welfare in Britain, 1830–1990; Beveridge’s Voluntary Action is useful too. Barry Doyle’s article is also helpful and relevant for this special issue; see Doyle, “Healthcare before Welfare States,” 174–204. For a national study of wartime philanthropic initiatives and the changing nature of governments and the voluntary sector, see Oppenheimer, All Work. No Pay.
37. This characteristic has been noted elsewhere; see Cohen, “Between Relief and Politics,” 439.
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Notes on contributors
Romain Fathi
Romain Fathi is a Senior Lecturer in History at Flinders University and an affiliated researcher at the Centre d’Histoire de Sciences Po. His latest book, Our Corner of the Somme, was published with Cambridge University Press. He is a co-Chief Investigator for ‘Resilient Humanitarianism: the League of Red Cross Societies, 1919–1991’ (DP190101171). Dr Fathi has also published on the National-Patriotic humanitarianism of the French Red Cross in the interwar period (2021).
Melanie Oppenheimer
Melanie Oppenheimer is Honorary Professor in the School of History, ANU, and Emeritus Professor at Flinders University. She is the Lead Chief Investigator on the four-year ARC-funded project ‘Resilient Humanitarianism: A History of the League of Red Cross Societies, 1919–91’ (DP190101171). She has been writing on Red Cross Red Crescent histories for over 30 years, including researching the centenary history, The Power of Humanity: 100 Years of Australian Red Cross (2014) and the edited collection with Neville Wylie and James Crossland, The Red Cross Movement: Myths, Practices and Turning Points (2020).
Paul-André Rosental
Paul-André Rosental is a Professor in Modern History at Sciences Po in Paris, where he leads the Centre d’Histoire. He studies the making and implementation of social, demographic and health policies in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, as well as leads the research team ESOPP on those fields. His latest books include A Human Garden: French Policy and the Transatlantic Legacies of Eugenic Experimentation (Berghahn Books, 2020); Population, the State, and National Grandeur: Demography as a Political Science in Modern France (Peter Lang, 2018); and Silicosis: A World History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017).