[This is the first of a three-part installment found at History is Human: A Journal of American Intellectual History. Read this entire article and many more by becoming a free or supporting subscriber here. The History is Human Journal seeks to tell compelling history in a way that is neither cynical nor utopian. Please consider supporting our project to bring nonpartisan history to all. Help us make history!!!]
The United States sought to implement a unique foreign policy during the events that were unfolding across the globe after the Second World War. The Soviet Union conveyed a distinct sense of ambiguity and belligerence towards the United States and the Western world about its true actions and plans. Questions about the possession of the Dardanelle Straits a part of Turkey and in the Mediterranean loomed, topped by Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin’s rejection of the Acheson-Lilienthal Plan that aimed to limit international nuclear power all comprised challenges faced by U.S leadership. A Greek civil war, supported by Yugoslavian anti-British Communists, further increased concerns over an impending spread of communism and the emergence of the Cold War, pitting the U.S. and other western nations against the communist Soviet Union by 1947.
Yet these fears and concerns instigated a policy of containment of that communism and protection of free democracies, expressed by President Harry S. Truman in his March 1947 Truman Doctrine speech to Congress, along with financial support of Greece and Turkey to maintain the freedom from communism. Additionally, the Marshall Plan was implemented in Europe that same year by the United States to both provide continued postwar recovery and support, while at the same time aiming to establish a thriving economic base and system. This Plan and U.S. foreign policy, and other connected factors, substantiated not only the support of liberty and democracy, but the spread and implementation of capitalism in Europe and elsewhere in the postwar world of the Cold War.
Four historians, Bruno Cabanes, David Ekbladh, Michael E. Latham, and Nick Cullather all provide certain perspectives and arguments on how this spread of capitalism during the Cold War originated and the describe aspects effects, both short-term and long term, of that dissemination. Roots of foreign aid, based largely on humanitarianism in earlier twentieth century, are considered, alongside of comparison of the methods and results that western capitalistic aims and influences have had on cultures, economies, and views of the United States by those it sought to overshadow often through the same intentions of western assistance. The deliberations of these historians are also presented in the midst of the early twenty-first century, rather than a progressive chronology of arguments from earlier decades and into the most contemporary perspective. Consequently, these simultaneous contentions provide strong arguments demonstrating the movement of capitalism as a foreign policy perspective during the early Cold War.
Bruno Cabanes in The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918-1924, offers a detailed account and narrative about an earlier form of economic stabilization through methods of humanitarianism during the early twentieth century. But Cabanes also asserts that it was not only humanitarianism itself that affected changes after the First World War, but the realization of human rights and freedoms that emerged from the event of that widespread global conflict. He indicates that 1915 saw a major shift in increased violence against civilian populations during the war, initially in acts of genocide in Armenia. The violence produced a “deep and long-term pacifist feeling” within the affected population that created the need to protect those civilian victims and returning soldiers, also prompting the initiative of activists and supporters to provide relief from the war’s consequences.
Cabanes expands on the emergence of war victim’s rights through this awareness urged by activists. Rights, as recognized by survivors of the First World War in all nations, were aimed at gaining justice and dignity rather than accepting charity. Going further, Cabanes points out that those rights were based on both claims for war damage compensation and surmounting this, the avoidance of future poverty, after recovery from the violence. Many veterans, during the 1920s, sensed that they actually had been neglected, and possessed feelings of powerlessness and loss of social reintegration into postwar society, exemplified in defeated nations of Germany and Austria by the prominence of one-time soldiers now begging in the streets.
In further examining veteran’s right, Cabanes contends that pacifism “as an ideology” when used to pursue peace social changes or “cultural demobilization” essentially was slow and not organized, and created attitudes towards former enemies differentiated than those towards each other, requiring pacifism, but blurring the definition of peace. At the same time, and despite veteran’s difficulties, millions of Europeans, for the first time in history shared a mutual aspiration that the terrors of warfare that emerged during the Great War should never reappear.
However, veteran’s rights and related pacifism does not constitute the entirety of Cabanes’s argument. He asserts that the ideology of citizenship for some, like Jews in Germany, opponents to the Fascist regime in Italy, or those who disagreed with the Russian Bolshevik regime, fundamentally lost their conventional national and social identities as found in these political changes in Europe. The idea of “statelessness” was on the rise, Cabanes argues, as a result of the war that also greatly contributed to the increase in emigration and displaced refugees, and consequently forcing Western countries to turn inward and support a non-interventionist stance. Yet, as Cabanes indicates, this materializing refugee issue had become a humanitarian problem rather than only a “legal one.” Several humanitarian activists and social leaders of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) or relief organizations had transpired as a result of the needs of the war, such as René Cassin, Fridtjof Nansen, Eglantyne Jebb, and Hebert Hoover. At the same time, Cabanes points out that the material necessities of refugees, particularly for women and children, were of a great concern for Western civilization already at the conclusion of the First World War. Moreover, the refugees also represented the potential of further social unrest to the Western European nations who faced the postwar challenges and rebuilding, and in the long-term global unrest.
Appealed to by the League of Nations for both diplomatic and leadership in the refugee management, Nansen developed a system labeled the “Nansen Passport” which aimed to allow stateless people to move about and settle in non-native areas of origin. The passport enabled refugees to obtain international, humanitarian assistance, while embodying the necessary and reasonable workforce checks, and the inherent management of foreign refugees by and in the new countries. As Cabanes also infers, Russian refugees became central to this narrative from the period between the Russian Revolution through the end of the Russian Civil War.
As a famine crisis emerged from the result of the revolutions and mismanagement from the Bolshevik regime, Nansen’s International Committee for Russian Relief (ICRR), financed largely through private funding, not having the monetary and political support of the West, greatly fueled by anti-Communist postwar public opinion. But Cabanes also describes a larger humanitarian focus for the effected Russian population taken by Hoover, separate from international politics. Indeed, Cabanes points out, Hoover was an adamant anti-Communist and was open about his hope, alongside other Western leaders who viewed Bolshevism as “a disease bred by poverty, for the fall of Soviet rule.” Hoover essentially aimed to bring food and other supplies through the American Relief Administration (ARA), largely in the name of genuine charity that he concurrently advocated despite the political differences, into areas most directly affected by the Revolution’s consequent famine to show the neglect of communist leaders and simultaneously demonstrate the “generosity of American capitalists,” while at the same time, Cabanes points out, forming future markets for American products.
Though, as Cabanes indicates, Hoover’s aims were confusing and sometimes hazy, as he supported charity through humanitarian efforts, while providing the opportunity to become involved in Russia while also trying to undermine that government. Cabanes elaborates, contending that despite his conservative reputation and personality, Hoover also did not suppress his wants to utilize food supply as a form of “weapon” against communism and the Soviet government. Still, as Hoover, Jebb, Fridtjof, and Nansen all helped to define transitional rights of war victims and veterans, the humanitarian and focused social justice efforts illustrate the changes that were taking place during the twentieth century, through humanitarian efforts and intervention of the Western societies into the situations of other nations. In Hoover’s case, Cabanes argues, capitalism was a distinct part of the plan motivation, well before the advent of the Cold War period.
[End of Part One.]
Bibliography
Cabanes, Bruno. The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918-1924. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Brian D. Reese is a historian and postsecondary history instructor, with a research emphasis on Herbert Hoover and other U.S. presidents. He earned a BA in History at Western Oregon University and an MA in History at Portland State University, and currently lives in Salem, Oregon.
[This is the first of a three-part installment found at History is Human: A Journal of American Intellectual History. Read this entire article and many more by becoming a free or supporting subscriber here. The History is Human Journal seeks to tell compelling history in a way that is neither cynical nor utopian. Please consider supporting our project to bring nonpartisan history to all. Help us make history!!!]
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