World War I and the humanitarian impulse

The Great War is quite rightly associated with the tragedies of the battlefield, with combat deaths of nearly ten million soldiers, with the construction of the vast network of cemeteries all across northern Europe that Kipling called “cities of the dead,” and with the emotional and psychic scarring of a generation of European peoples. Knowing the political and military history of post-1918 Europe, we think of the Great War as but the first act in a century of horrors. Yet when we consider the legacies of the Great War, it is worth recalling that one less melancholy outcome was the creation of a new conception of humanitarian action on behalf of wounded soldiers and distressed civilians. The humanitarian impulse that surged in 1914 has, no less than the ideologies of genocide and barbarism, been one of the hallmarks of the past century, though it has been far less scrutinized by scholars. Lately, historians and social scientists who are interested in the rise of civil society and the place of non-state actors in international relations have turned to the early twentieth century to chart the emergence of the humanitarian idea. This essay reviews some of that scholarship and tries to assess its enduring meaning for our times.

I

The First World War did not invent humanitarianism. The impulse to respond to the suffering of others had mobilized communities of people into action since the Enlightenment. Such networks responded to a variety of stimuli. Slavery; war and its associated human tragedies; ethnic and religious conflict and atrocities; famine and natural disasters; health emergencies and epidemics—all these calamities triggered humane responses in North America and Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.¹ In some cases humanitarianism could be politically radical: the abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century was animated by more than a desire to offer succor. Its aim was nothing less than the destruction of the practice of slavery, with all the dramatic political implications such an agenda contained. Humanitarianism was also stimulated by the growth and formal expansion of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, during which time the concept of improving newly conquered peoples, and developing them into an “imperial race,” served to legitimate the practice of conquest.² Missionary groups too often used the premise of an imperial mandate to call for the cleaning up of abusive labor practices in the colonized world.³ And humanitarianism was spurred when religious and liberal political agendas overlapped in certain nineteenth-century social improvement campaigns.⁴

Yet the rise of the modern humanitarian community is really the product of war. The mid-nineteenth century nationalist conflicts in Europe coincided with a growing sentimental view that civilized societies ought to respond to suffering with care and human kindness rather than indifference.⁵ This moral imperative met the nationalist fury on the battlefields of Europe, and it was the suffering of wounded soldiers during one such conflict (the Franco-Austrian tangle triggered by the Italian wars of independence) that prompted Henri Dunant, a Swiss evangelical Christian and businessman, to take action. In June 1859, Dunant came across the blood-soaked battleground of Solférino, where thousands of French, Italian and Austrian soldiers lay dying. Shocked by the absence of medical care, Dunant mobilized local civilians to provide ambulances and medical aid for the men. Upon his return to Geneva, he wrote a best-selling exposé, and then convened a group of like-minded citizens to form an international relief society to treat war victims. Dunant’s appeal to his friends came at a time when Europeans had been sensitized to the issue of wartime casualties through the work of Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War (1853-56), when she had campaigned for military health reforms. Dunant’s efforts struck a chord and his group formed an organization in 1864 that would soon call itself the International Committee of the Red Cross. The humanitarian impulse now had an institutional home.⁶

The founding document of the humanitarian movement was the Geneva Convention of August 22, 1864, whose brief articles laid out simple rules...