The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924 by Bruno Cabanes (review)

The Great War of 1914 to 1918 was not only the largest episode of mass killing in world history to that date but also the greatest humanitarian disaster. The war was responsible for the deaths of 10 million soldiers as well as the incapacitation, physical and mental, of a similar number. Its immediate sequelae—including the ethnic re-engineering of central and southeastern Europe, the reciprocal ethnic cleansing of Greece and Turkey, and the Russian civil war—generated an unprecedented flow of refugees and stateless persons. Our view of the Russian famine of 1921 is occluded by the greater tragedy of the Holodomor during the 1930s, but—with a death toll of at least 1.5 million—it was the worst episode of mass starvation in mainland Europe for a century.

Cabanes sets out to fill a gap in this postwar story, in which humane impulses were channeled into ambitious, creative, and ad hoc forms of humanitarian action. The scale and diversity of these responses was such that the humanitarian effort is difficult to categorize. It was a quantum leap from pre-war transnational charity, in both scope and coordination, but it lacked the universal organizing framework of human rights that was to follow in the next war. Cabanes recounts those experiments in their own terms, not just as a prolegomena to the more solid instruments and norms that followed twenty-five years later. He chooses five different individuals and institutions with which to illuminate the diversity, tensions, and paradoxes of the humanitarian initiatives.

Cabanes’ case study of René Cassin and the Confèrence Internationale des Mutilés et Anciens Combattants in the first chapter highlights the tensions inherent in the humanitarianism of the era. The postwar nationalism of veterans’ mobilization, which had its roots in the agitation for disabled soldiers’ rights during the war, sat uneasily alongside Cassin’s efforts to create a transnational organization, often contradicting and undermining his cosmopolitanism.

Cabanes devotes his second chapter to the International Labour Office, headed by Albert Thomas, who sought to link social justice with international peace. He then turns to Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer and national hero, who became the world’s first High Commissioner for Refugees. His fourth chapter focuses on the professionalization of famine relief and the birth of emergency population nutrition with the American Relief Administration, led by Herbert Hoover. Finally, Cabanes retells the story of Eglantyne Jebb, who established the Save the Children Fund.

The biographical focus of the five cases provides a helpful context for highlighting the complexities and contradictions of the humanitarian effort—for example, Hoover’s belief that humanitarian relief to Russia would hasten the collapse of Communism rather than consolidate it.

Cabanes’ is a fascinating story, well told. Too often, the story of inter-war humanitarianism is told as a prolegomena to post–World War II institutions and principles. By bringing Cassin’s story to the fore, Cabanes avoids this trap. Notably, the salience of the issue of disabled veterans never again reached the heights of the 1920s. The shadow of the second world iteration of norms and mechanisms that followed World War II does not hang over the account.