The historical connections of search and rescue at sea
Europe has recently witnessed an explosion of humanitarian efforts to assist stranded migrants in the Mediterranean and Aegean. These efforts began most famously in 2014 with the Italian operation ‘Mare Nostrum’ and culminated – after this project was terminated the following year – in the establishment of numerous search-and-rescue NGOs, including the Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS), Sea-Watch, Sea-Eye, SOS Méditerranée, Jugend Rettet, Salvamento Marítimo Humanitario and Proactiva Open Arms.
The work of these search-and-rescue organisations – which focused on rescuing individuals stranded at sea before providing them with medical treatment and transporting them to safety in Southern Europe – was quickly propelled into the political limelight. Maritime rescue was splashed across newspaper headlines and, in particular, was referenced in intense debates surrounding immigration and border control, where it was presented as a ‘pull factor’ encouraging migrant journeys.
In the process, rescue at sea has been swept up into a highly politicised crisis narrative – one dominated by present-day anxieties surrounding ‘uncontrolled’ or ‘illegal’ migration. This crisis narrative perpetuates an erroneous assumption: that search-and-rescue projects are recent, risky ventures that represent an ‘unprecedented’ response to ‘unprecedented’ migratory flows, rather than projects with a long and established (if often controversial) history.
Aid workers at sea, however, frequently contest such an extraction of history by comparing their work to the past, in particular referencing histories of migration and relief. This use of history provides maritime rescuers with a vital means of dialling down political rhetoric and legitimising their work, allowing them to contextualise the act of rescue and to distance it from contemporary controversies by framing it as an act of established routine. The historical experiences of seeking safety and of offering shelter have, as a result, become a central reference point for maritime rescuers.
To cite a particularly striking example of this move towards the historicisation of rescue, one search-and-rescue NGO – SOS Méditerranée – decided in 2017 to draw upon the past as a way of defending itself against a particularly fierce wave of political and legal criticism. The NGO, two years into its operations at sea, became a target of European states’ efforts to delegitimise and criminalise humanitarian search-and-rescue. EU member states actively prosecuted NGOs like SOS Méditerranée, seizing and impounding their vessels and accusing volunteers of colluding with human smugglers. Because they helped vulnerable migrants to reach an international border – impacting states’ control over the entrance and exit of non-citizens in the process – the founders of SOS Méditerranée were accused of facilitating ‘illegal’ immigration, unleashing a tidal wave of highly politicised commentary.
To disentangle the act of humanitarian rescue from narratives of illegality and misconduct, SOS Méditerranée decided to turn to history, drawing parallels between its own maritime rescue projects and those initiated in the 1800s by European governments’ own lifesaving associations. In 2017, at the beginning of the legal crackdown on maritime rescue, SOS Méditerranée’s co-founder Klaus Vogel published a book on search-and-rescue which he opened with a historical vignette: the mass emigration of Europeans to America and Africa at the turn of the nineteenth century, in search of new lands and livelihoods. This wave of maritime emigration, Vogel wrote, resulted in a high number of shipwrecks and a considerable loss of life, prompting European states to create their own lifesaving societies – including the British Royal National Lifeboat Institution, the Swedish Society for the Saving of Shipwrecked Persons and the Norwegian Society for Sea Rescue.
Klaus Vogel used the history of one of these societies – the German Maritime Search and Rescue Service (DGzRS) – to his advantage. The DGzRS was formed in 1865 after locals in Bremen came to the aid of 216 migrants who were shipwrecked on their voyage from Germany to America. As a national lifesaving association, it was particularly revered by German citizens who held it up as an example of national humanitarian accomplishment. Turning this congratulatory history on its head, Vogel used it to ask a particularly thorny question: Why was it that the DGzRS’ work (rescuing white Europeans leaving Europe) had been enthusiastically celebrated whilst SOS Méditerranée’s contemporary projects (rescuing non-white, non-European emigrants travelling to Europe) were subjected to intense condemnation and even legal prosecution? Invoking the past to highlight the hypocrisy of European states and to assert the value of saving life regardless of race or citizenship status, Vogel wrote: ‘You do not need to study history for a long time to know that during the two previous centuries, it has been us, the Europeans […] out in the open sea, in little boats’.
Boxed in by criticism, SOS Méditerranée’s tactical use of historical comparison offered the organisation a much-needed escape route, attempting to re-legitimise search-and-rescue by explicitly relating it to famous state-supported projects. SOS Méditerranée used this earlier history of maritime rescue as a valuable defence against criminalisation, drawing upon the past to legitimise and normalise their work and to defuse the dynamite of maritime migration politics. Although the organisation remains embroiled in legal battles over maritime rescue (suggesting that its use of history legitimises rescue discursively but not practically) it has seen a notable increase in numbers of volunteers and donors who began to support maritime rescue after noticing its connection to longer histories of protest and assistance at sea. Hence, the invocation of the past has allowed SOS Méditerranée to continue its operations and widen its support base which in turn facilitates its contestation of state hostility.
As this story reveals, history matters to, and is a vital resource for, maritime rescuers. Beyond the history of state lifeguarding associations, SOS Méditerranée’s co-founder has strategically used more recent examples to defend rescue at sea, referencing for example the work of German and French NGOs who assisted Vietnamese ‘boat people’ in the South China Sea in the late 1970s and who similarly pressurised national governments into taking responsibility for rescuees.
SOS Méditerranée’s strategic uses of the past help to debunk the popular stereotype of the aid worker as an individual who inhabits a ‘perpetual present’ and who sees history as irrelevant to the concerns of contemporary crises. The image of humanitarians as individuals who are, as one historian puts it, ‘commanded to forecast’ and who accordingly ‘project themselves into the future’ draws attention away from the many aid workers who project themselves backwards into the past, using what they find there to influence policy, change the focus of contemporary debates and distance themselves from criticism.
The banner image, an engraving, depicts a beach rescue in the 1860s, the time when the DGzRS was founded in Germany. A cluster of worried men, women, and children look out over a storm-tossed sea under dark clouds. Beyond them, a lifeboat rowed by six hunched figures, with another man standing in the stern, struggles through huge waves towards a stricken sailing vessel.
