Relief and Rehabilitation for a Postwar World: Humanitarian Intervention and the UNRRA
Millions of people were on the move by the end of the Second World War. Many were forcibly displaced from their homes by war and military occupation, while others were deported to concentration camps or taken as forced labourers to fuel the Axis war machine. During this period of mass upheaval, planning for peace was already an important consideration for the Allied governments. Heeding lessons from the end of the First World War, the Allies realised that vast displacement would cause serious problems for restoring peace in the aftermath of war. In 1943, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was signed into existence. It consisted of forty-four member states who each pledged one per cent of their GDP to the organisation. UNRRA was mandated to provide relief and rehabilitation to those affected by war, and the international breadth and reach of its operations were truly staggering. But while relief was concretely defined by Article 1A in the UNRRA Constitution – to provide food, clothing, shelter, and transport to those in need— rehabilitation was not afforded the same clear parameters.
What did ‘rehabilitation’ mean in the aftermath of the Second World War? Was it specific to the newly created, but short-lived, UNRRA? Who was being ‘rehabilitated’, and why? These are some of the questions that our edited volume Relief and Rehabilitation for a Postwar World, the first comprehensive study on UNRRA, attempts to address while also considering the organisation’s long-term impact on multilateral and humanitarian practices and policies in the world today.
As the first truly state-driven international humanitarian organisation, UNRRA was slated to herald a new era: one of international cooperation reinforced by a mixture of scientific rationality and American-driven social welfare models. That the organisation was government-led and funded by a series of international partners had profound impact on the postwar world, in that it fostered a collaborative, intergovernmental effort to address profound humanitarian crises and paved the way for successor agencies who would resume its work once it shuttered its doors in 1947. By ‘helping the people to help themselves’, UNRRA became a model for other international humanitarian organisations such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the World Health Organisation, and UNICEF that were founded soon afterwards and continue to operate today.
Yet, the varied interpretations of ‘rehabilitation’ by individual welfare workers often influenced the kind of ‘rehabilitation’ that was carried out. While this often meant emotional, physical, mental, or spiritual rehabilitation at an individual level, UNRRA planners saw the mantra of ‘helping the people to help themselves’ as a means of informing the new administrations and institutions that would help rebuild the postwar world.
At the online launch of Relief and Rehabilitation for a Postwar World, three distinguished commentators were invited to present their thoughts on UNRRA as an organisation, its place within the history of humanitarianism, and future avenues of UNRRA research. Professor Jessica Reinisch (Birkbeck, London) is a leading UNRRA scholar whose work is foundational to current understandings of the organisation’s place within broader histories of postwar reconstruction. Professor Bertrand Taithe, the founder of the University of Manchester’s Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, has extensive experience in historicizing humanitarianism and showing its real-world application. Professor Kerstin von Lingen (University of Vienna) leads the ambitious GLORE project to fuse postwar histories of Europe and Asia.
Jessica Reinisch: UNRRA histories are beginning to explode across the historiography. What was once a footnote in postwar histories is now gradually being brought to the fore. UNRRA had three main strands of rehabilitation initiatives which emerged from a longer history of reforming the individual: medical rehabilitation; the penal system and reeducation; and stabilisation and reconstruction of war-battered economies. While each of these strands shaped UNRRA’s mandate, UNRRA was an international exercise informed by experts who worked within the vast organisation. As such, these workers brought different notions of ‘healing’ with them that, in turn, shaped UNRRA’s medicalised discourse that permeated every level of the organisation’s structure. All three of these possible interpretations of rehabilitation require sufficient time to be successful, and UNRRA simply did not have the luxury of time to fully realize its mandate. UNRRA’s memory was effectively institutionalised when it merged into wider political and social processes, revealing that UNRRA’s own tone and rhetoric played a part in how the organisation was later cast aside and forgotten.
Bertrand Taithe: When we study UNRRA, the move from relief to rehabilitation should be understood as a differentiation between needs and wants. Rehabilitation was sometimes viewed as the rehabilitation of the ‘status quo’ – some saw it as a return to something better, others saw it as a chance to create something new. What did those who ran UNRRA want from the second ‘R’? Although UNRRA was a well-resourced organisation, the UNRRA that operated in Italy or Poland was very different from the one that worked in Germany or Greece. One way to understand UNRRA’s development and legacy is through the prosopographical history of welfare work from the mid-twentieth century onwards. Many humanitarians are keenly aware of the humanitarian practices which preceded them. The notion that UNRRA’s second ‘R’ was poorly defined due to lack of knowledge exchange between individual relief agencies, such as those run by the Red Cross or Quakers, is inherently false. Instead, competing ideas about rehabilitation were coupled with the desire to start anew and take part in the great reconstructive efforts after the horrors of the Second World War.
Kerstin von Lingen: The prosopographical approach is indeed a useful way to navigate the varied iterations of UNRRA’s mission. Although the organisation’s primary aim was to help the people help themselves, UNRRA workers tried to ensure that they responded to different situations appropriately, even though there were certainly key issues and circumstances worth questioning. Historians have thus far paid attention to the questions of timing and physical space of the displaced. Another interesting issue to explore would be methods of travel and their implications for refugee life stories. It would be illuminating to trace groups throughout longer timespans to contextualize these histories within broader narratives. This is especially relevant for UNRRA once the organisation closed its doors and was succeeded by the International Refugee Organisation (IRO), where many UNRRA personnel would take up work: its new mandate shifted away from repatriation and toward resettlement.
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The history of UNRRA connects with many other histories of the twentieth century and therefore serves as a point of departure for avenues of future research. These might include exploring links between postwar humanitarianism and the Vatican, unearthing histories of Queer refugees post-1945, and documenting experiences of marginalised refugees and those with disabilities under UNRRA’s care. More broadly, the organization can be studied through myriad contexts, from early Cold War dynamics, to the emergence of contemporary international organizations, to the rise of new international aid and development patterns during the latter half of the twentieth century. Despite each historiographical development, however, one basic tenet remains: ‘rehabilitation’, in all its possible forms, remained central to each of these narratives and experiences and must therefore remain a central area of focus for all scholars of postwar humanitarian history.
