From the Disaster of War to a War on Disasters: The First World War and the Origins of an International Natural Disaster Assistance Régime

The First World War era is often remembered as a period defined by violence, brutality, and unprecedented human suffering. Yet the years from 1914 through the early 1920s also gave rise to a seemingly more constructive historical legacy: the development and application of new approaches to humanitarian relief. Most of these novel forms of humanitarianism, unsurprisingly, aimed to mitigate miseries brought on by war. Others, however, focused beyond the conflict zone to the field of peacetime catastrophes.

The Great War era, as this paper will argue, represented a critical turning point in the history of international natural disaster assistance. The war stimulated the formation of two new institutions, each designed to respond to the effects of earthquakes, tropical storms, and other natural hazards. With the 1919 creation of the League of Red Cross Societies (LRCS)—a new federation of national Red Cross societies, focused on peacetime activities—natural disaster relief first became an official activity of the International Red Cross movement. In the postwar period, the President of the Italian Red Cross simultaneously led a campaign to establish an organization devoted solely to natural disasters—to scientifically studying them and to coordinating relief for their civilian victims. Established in 1927, this International Relief Union (IRU) was closely associated with the League of Nations and promised to represent an important auxiliary to that body.

This paper will first analyze how the Great War and wartime relief influenced the origins of this international peacetime disaster assistance régime. It will then trace the postwar development of the LRCS and IRU. Throughout, it will interrogate the relationship between wartime and peacetime humanitarianism. Moreover, it will analyze how the postwar concern with global natural disaster relief reflected prevailing ideologies and concerns of the interwar West.