Shaping the Humanitarian World

Peter Walker, Daniel Maxwell, Daniel G Maxwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781135977429
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Providing a critical introduction to the notion of humanitarianism in global politics, tracing the concept from its origins to the twenty-first century, this book examines how the so called international community works in response to humanitarian crises and the systems that bind and divide them.

By tracing the history on international humanitarian action from its early roots through the birth of the Red Cross to the beginning of the UN, Peter Walker and Daniel G. Maxwell examine the challenges humanitarian agencies face, from working alongside armies and terrorists to witnessing genocide. They argue that humanitarianism has a vital future, but only if those practicing it choose to make it so. Topics covered include:

• the rise in humanitarian action as a political tool
• the growing call for accountability of agencies
• the switch of NGOs from bit players to major trans-national actors
• the conflict between political action and humanitarian action when it comes to addressing causes as well as symptoms of crisis.

This book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in international human rights law, disaster management and international relations.

1 Origins of the international humanitarian system

There is no simple history of humanitarianism, or the construction of a system to make that notion a reality. There are many strands to be followed, strands now woven together to form the system we recognize. Understanding the history of humanitarian action helps understand why it is the way it is today, and helps identify how it can, and maybe should, change in the future. All too often, we simply accept that the way things are is the way they have to be. History allows us to challenge this notion. It demonstrates that original founding ideals can become distorted as organizations develop. It shows us that apparently inseparable alliances are in reality temporary conveniences, and it shows us, particularly when we look at humanitarianism, that individuals can make a difference.

In this chapter, we will look at the early history of humanitarianism and some of its precursors in the form of charitable imperatives and actions in the major religions and cultures that have helped shape today’s humanitarian system. In some ways the chapter tracks two separate histories. The history of humanitarian action for war victims, and the history of disaster response for victims of natural disaster. We track both because today, so many communities are afflicted by both, and the causal nature of today’s crises, often labeled complex emergencies, makes the distinction between man-made and natural crises distinctly dubious. To the victim and the responder, it is the crisis and its effects, not the classification of its cause, that matters.

Historical and religious precursors

One of the earliest recordings we have of what might be, if not humanitarian, at least charitable action comes from the tomb inscriptions of Harkhuf, the governor of Upper Egypt in the twenty-third century BCE. The inscriptions on his tomb, which read like an over-zealous curriculum vitae, document his many trading ventures south into what we now know as Sudan ensuring the reader knows how well respected Harkhuf was by his rulers and peers. At the very beginning of his self-aggrandizement, he proclaims: “I gave bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, I ferried him who had no boat.”¹ Harkhuf is making it clear not only that he did these things, but by including them right at the beginning of his tomb inscription, we might deduce that in ancient Egyptian society such acts were meritorious.

On the other side of the world, and nearly two thousand years later, the Li Ki (usually known in English as the Book of Rites)—a collection of Chinese cultural and religious practices from the eighth to the fifth century BCE—records state support for widows and orphans.²

Now travel west and a little forward in time. Food scarcity, sometimes verging on famine, was a regular feature of urban life in the ancient Greek and Roman world. Between 330 and 320 BCE Cyrene, a Greek colony in present-day Libya, sent grain supplies to 41 communities in Greece to alleviate famine. In AD 6 during the reign of Emperor Augustus, and again in AD 12 and AD 32 during the reign of Tiberius, Rome was threatened with famine. The crisis of AD 6 was by far the most serious. Augustus reacted with a series of measures that would not seem unfamiliar today. He expelled “extraneous” personnel from Rome, including most foreigners and the retinues of most officials. He introduced grain rationing and appointed a senior senator to oversee the supply of grain and bread across the city. He doubled the grain handouts to the destitute. Unlike his successors, Tiberius and Nero, he did not resort to grain price-fixing.³ Was this charitable action or self-interested defense of the state?

As we progress from archeology to history, the philosophy of charitable action becomes intimately tied up with the evolution of religious ideals and institutions. It is the monotheist religions of Judaism, Islam and Christianity that have most directly contributed to today’s humanitarian system.

Notions of charity and support for those less well-off are central to the Christian faith. Prior to AD 325, when the Roman emperor Constantine effectively co-opted Christianity as a state religion, acts of charity were the business of the individual or the ruling elite. Constantine shifted this burden to the church, saving the Roman state tax money and paving the way for over a thousand years (till the Protestant Reformation) of Catholic Church domination of organized charity in Europe.

In the 1340s, the Black Death (the bubonic plague) killed between one- and two-thirds of Europe’s population and irrevocably changed European societies. Major changes in demographics led to changes in land tenure and the relationship between the landed elite and the working farmer. The pre-eminence of the church as spiritual guide and charitable giver, as provider of cure, treatment, and explanation, faded.⁴

These social upheavals laid the foundation of discontent that gave birth to the reformation. In 1517, Martin Luther, in Germany, crystallized discontent across the old world order and paved the way for the creation of Protestant denominations. Under Protestantism, charity and social order were more firmly linked. For the burghers of the newly-formed Protestant states, poverty was not the enemy, but rather the unacceptable social face of destitution. Their object was not to wage war on poverty, which remained a fact of life, but to attack its distorted forms and disreputable causes—begging, vagrancy, and willful idleness. They strove to establish a stable, disciplined, and laborious society in which all people would work as much as they were able and find whatever care they needed from within their communities.⁵ Many of the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) active today in humanitarian relief trace their origins to this Protestant ethic of charity.

Islam, founded in the early fifth century by the Prophet Muhammad in what is now Saudi Arabia, like Judaism, embodied a notion of charity as a duty. The notion of zakat, dutiful charitable giving—one of the five Pillars of Islam—is derived from a direct interpretation of the Quran. In contemporary Muslim societies zakat ranges across a spectrum from individual acts of charity to institutions fully incorporated into the state and tantamount to a national tax welfare system.⁶ Some Islamic scholars have held that zakat is fundamentally different from the Christian concept of charity, being based on the premise that both individual need and class distinctions run counter to Islam and the good of society. They assert that the doctrine of zakat, where it was incorporated into state institutions, represented the first formal social security system.⁷ The other Islamic tradition which is of importance to us here is waqf, the Islamic equivalent of a charitable foundation dating back to pre-Islamic days. It is often used to set up an endowment to fund the purchase of land for the construction of a building which will be used for charitable purposes—such as a mosque, school, hospital, or orphanage. At the start of the nineteenth century, at least half of the lands of the sprawling Ottoman empire were administered under waqf⁸ and between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries a vast system of public soup kitchens was established across the empire to hand out free food to the needy.⁹

What we should take away from this brief religious overview is that ideals of charity, the alleviation of the suffering of others, and the forming of organized bodies to carry out these acts, are not the prerogative of any one religious or philosophical tradition. Our present humanitarian system, historically dominated as it is by the patronage of the powerful states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reflects the predominantly Christian, and particularly Protestant, philosophical heritage which has shaped the powerful states of Europe and North America. This is fundamentally important, as we look to the future of humanitarianism, we must acknowledge that the rationale and philosophy that underlies humanitarianism has its roots in universal altruistic human behavior. It is expressed and practiced in all major, and one might imagine most minor, world religions and philosophies. Humanitarianism does not have to be shackled by its past.

The beginnings of a system: refugees, earthquakes, and famine

The term “refugee,” so closely associated today with humanitarian work, was first coined in seventeenth-century Europe to describe the wave of French and Walloon Protestants fleeing Catholic Europe to seek refuge in Protestant England. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First at the end of the sixteenth century, some 50,000 refugees fled to England. This was the first recorded instance of a major movement of people fleeing religious persecution—rather than economic deprivation—and being formally received and offered refuge by a state. Andrea Paras draws parallels between this period of history and today’s complex emergencies.¹⁰ The Protestants were being persecuted and killed in droves in Catholic Europe. England saw itself as a bastion of Protestantism and had the military power to intervene directly in support of the persecuted—while also furthering its own territorial ambitions. The state, the church, and individuals all assisted in helping those who fled from Europe to settle in England, a country with a long history of deep suspicions towards all foreigners.

We should not get too carried away with the analogy between modern refugee action and that of Elizabethan England. Good Queen Bess (who at the time was profiting handsomely from the early slave trade to the Americas) did not choose to assist the equally persecuted Jews, or, indeed, other less popular Protestant sects. England’s actions were essentially political and its treatment of the arriving refugees, although better than the past norm for foreigners (hostility and marginalization), was self-serving.

If the support for Huguenot refugees marks the first stirrings of humanitarian action in the face of conflict, the first recorded instance in modern history of a comprehensive disaster response strategy and post-disaster international relief operation was triggered by the earthquake which destroyed the Portuguese capital, Lisbon in 1755. Portugal’s First Minister, the Marquês de Pombal, is credited with ordering the burial of the dead the day after the quake, the prompt distribution of food and freezing of grain prices, dispatch of peacekeeping troops and proclamation of a city rebuilding plan within a week of the quake—a response plan and operation which puts that of many modern cities to shame.¹¹ Both the Spanish Crown and the British Parliament, upon hearing of the disaster, sent aid. Writing three years after the event, Emmerich de Vattel notes that “the calamities of Portugal have given England an opportunity of fulfilling the duties of humanity.” Drawing on this experience, de Vattel goes on to lay down what he sees as one of the precepts of good nationhood: “if a nation is afflicted with famine, all those who have provisions to spare aught to relieve her distress without, however, exposing themselves to want.”¹² Humanitarian action, thought de Vattel, was an intrinsic property of sovereignty.

Even in these early stirrings we can see that the history of humanitarianism is effectively shaped by two of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: war and famine. The modern story of war and humanitarian action starts in 1859 in northern Italy, but the story of famine and humanitarian action starts in India and Ireland.

The beginnings of a global system

What is clear with hindsight is that something changed around the middle of the nineteenth century which galvanized humanitarian action, by states and private individuals, from a handful of disconnected instances to a more organized series of thought-through policies and activities with global connections.

It can surely be no coincidence that this period in history also marks the first true period of globalization. Under the European and Ottoman empires the globe was connected like never before and would not be so connected again from the end of World War I to the 1990s. The revolution of railways and telegraph had connected trading routes and travel across the world. Those from the imperial heartlands could travel with relative ease to every continent and, from their living rooms in the metropolitan centers of London, Paris or Istanbul, could summon goods from across the world.¹³ For the first time, the enlightened, the philanthropic, and the politically ambitious had a global stage to play on and the wealth and tools to make a difference.

As the nineteenth century progressed, security concerns and suffering on the other side of the world were no longer “out there,” remote and reported many weeks after the event. It was close to home, through the telegraph and mass circulation newspapers and growing familiarity with the names of countries supplying tea, coffee, and the raw materials of empire. It was this transformation of the world into its first manifestation of a global village that provided the fertile ground upon which notions of international humanitarian action could take seed.

The response to the famine of 1837–38 in India organized by the East India Company, the quintessential empire-machine, marked the first time that modern principles of relief emerge in the history of humanitarian action. Organized public works providing food or cash in return for work, coupled with free food distribution for the most destitute, were first experimented with in northern India—despite formal British adherence to the values of an unfettered free market economy. Historians have argued that a fear of public disorder, a sense of humanitarian responsibility, and simple pragmatic concerns over maintaining a governable nation, pushed the administration to act.

The language used to describe those seeking relief at the time is instructive. They were referred to as destitute, paupers, vagrants, and the “laboring poor”—terminology which essentially depicted them as a threat to law and order until they could be returned to their assigned role in agricultural and industrial workforces. Relief works not only sought to put the laboring poor back to work, but were seen as opportunities to encourage discipline and obedience to authority within the confines of the controlled relief camps.¹⁴

The colonial statistics gathered at the time not only document the scarcity of food and the growing numbers of laboring poor, but also the rise in crime, particularly collective crime. Attacks by groups of people, not always solely the destitute, on granaries, carts transporting grain, and other sources of food rose dramatically. At the time the colonial administrators saw this as simple criminality, reinforcing the image of the famine sufferers not as victims but as threats. A more objective analysis would highlight the moral economy of these acts. Collective attacks are about acquiring relief but are also protesting and challenging the system that is causing the suffering in the first place.¹⁵ The colonial rulers sought to maintain the status quo and ensure famine did not lead to revolution. The famished peasantry sought to survive and challenge a system which slotted them into preordained subservience.

This experiment, with relief following strict economic principles and steeped in the political dogma of the day, carried over from India to Ireland a short seven years later.

1845 to 1849 saw Western Europe’s last great famine. Although the proximate cause of the Irish famine was the potato blight Phytophthora—which virtually destroyed the Irish people’s central subsistence crop—the subsequent death by starvation of one and a half million people and the flight of a further two million as economic migrants was the result of the political and economic relationship between Ireland, the conquered state, and Britain, the conqueror.¹⁶ From the twelfth century onward, a series of invasions had gradually brought Ireland under British control. Initial British attempts to assimilate with the Irish gave way in the mid-fourteenth century to a series of laws to enforce the separate development of the native Irish from the ruling British. By the mid-seventeenth century Catholics were legally barred from the army, the professions, commerce, land ownership, participation in elections, and other avenues of public life in order to consolidate control by a newly-installed Protestant elite. Although repealed in 1829, these Penal Laws, as they were known, effectively set up an apartheid system. In war-ravaged Ireland, potatoes became the crop of choice because they could be grown on poor land and withstand the trampling of marauding armies. When the potato crop rotted in 1845, 1846, and 1847, a politically marginalized and impoverished population were robbed of the one crop they could grow in their gardens that would provide enough food to survive.

The state reaction at the time was initially to open up public works modeled on the Indian example, funded by the wealthy of the districts where relief works were to take place and in theory providing a subsistence wage to anyone willing to work on the construction of public goods such as roads, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Acronym and weblink guide
• Introduction
• 1 Origins of the international humanitarian system
• 2 Mercy and manipulation in the Cold War
• 3 The globalization of humanitarianism: from the end of the Cold War to the Global War on Terror
• 4 States as responders and donors
• 5 International organizations
• 6 NGOs and private action
• 7 A brave new world, a better future?
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index