ABSTRACT
At the Malta Commonwealth Heads of Governments Meeting (CHOGM) in November 2005, Commonwealth member states tasked the Secretary-General with developing a mechanism for ‘establishing and operationalising’ the proposed ‘Commonwealth Programme for Natural Disaster Management’, with the aim of fostering cooperation between member states for ‘capacity building for disaster risk reduction and disaster
response management’.1 What motivated this decision was a concern with ‘the devastating and increasing impact of natural and man-made disaster on human lives, infrastructures and economies’.2 Member states also pledged to ‘support efforts to further strengthen the international humanitarian response system, including the proposed extension of the UN Central Emergency Revolving Fund and the strengthening of the UN humanitarian coordination’.3 A few months earlier, the United Nations had launched an ambitious plan to reorganise the global humanitarian system, the Humanitarian Reform process, following a study commissioned by the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator (USG-ERC), the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) (Adinolfi et al., 2005). Considering the Commonwealth’s usually narrow focus on specific development
issues and on democracy and human rights promotion on the one hand, and its limited resources in comparison with larger international organisations on the other, its involvement in humanitarian assistance may appear as a historical oddity. Yet, recently declassified Commonwealth Secretariat records show that discussions within the Secretariat and among member states regarding the potential objectives and scope of Commonwealth humanitarian assistance programmes took place as early as the 1960s, and continued throughout the following decades. This development followed the establishment of the Commonwealth Secretariat in 1965, an event commonly viewed as reflecting the modernisation of the organisation. As actors of international relations on the post-Second World War world scene,
international organisations have played a significant role in the standardisation of global policy concepts during the 20th century, and humanitarian assistance has been no exception.4 In the last decade, studies have investigated the role of the League of Nations, the United Nations, and, more recently, of regional organisations such as the European Union, in shaping a dominant model of humanitarian aid.5 However, few historians have focused on different, less successful models and on interpretations developed by other international organisations. Coincidentally, this question has been largely neglected by Commonwealth studies and Commonwealth historiography. It is this double gap in the literature that this paper seeks to address through a case study of Commonwealth approaches to humanitarian aid. The examination of the organisation’s humanitarian programmes reveals that the
actual scale of Commonwealth humanitarian assistance has been modest, to the point of appearing somewhat tokenistic. However, the Commonwealth’s apparent compliance with humanitarian agendas set by larger players since the 1990s, such as the European Union, conceals a more nuanced historical evolution. The objective of this article is therefore primarily to document this hitherto little known aspect of Commonwealth assistance policies, and, based on an exploratory survey of the literature and archives on the subject, to contribute to the identification of further research on this aspect of Commonwealth history. Although they are very different in nature and scope, the Commonwealth and the European Union share at least one common feature in so far as humanitarian assistance is concerned, namely their difficulty in trying to reach a consensual definition of it. By exploring the links and discrepancies between, as well as within, each organisation’s approach to humanitarian assistance, and by examining the initiatives of some of their member states, this paper seeks to highlight the plasticity of the definition of humanitarian assistance.
