2011/01/01 by Jessica Reinisch · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Global Peace and Security Dynamics #Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics
paper · doi:10.1093/pastj/gtq050
openalex publication_date 2011/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Susan Pettiss, an American relief worker, remembered that UNRRA—the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration—‘caused quite a stir when it was established’. Its creation was ‘a magnificent unprecedented feat’, she thought: ‘There was no background, tradition, system, common language or currency for UNRRA’; yet it brought together ‘men and women of different nationalities, backgrounds and skills’, all united in the ambition to build ‘a true world community with new social systems and international relations’. 2 Other relief workers thought much the same. Francesca Wilson, a British relief worker with decades of experience, described how en route to begin her duties in continental Europe it suddenly dawned on her ‘what a great experiment UNRRA was—the first international body to do something concrete and constructive, an attempt at an international civil service’. 3 Nor was this sense of UNRRA's unprecedented internationalist tasks and character confined to the organization's foot soldiers. An editorial in The Observer enthused that the UNRRA agreement, ‘one of the most important and pregnant events of the war’, provided a forum for ‘world-management’, ‘as bold, big and exciting a venture as any in the history of social organization’. 4 Jan Masaryk, Foreign Minister of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, argued in March 1944 that the successes of UNRRA as ‘the first great agency of the United Nations’ would have ‘great repercussions on the new forms of international organisation’ at the end of the war. 5 In more measured tones, Philip C. Jessup, an American lawyer and diplomat who served in the State Department's foreign relief office, agreed that UNRRA was ‘an international organisation of a unique character’, none like it having existed before on a comparable scale. 6 Others welcomed UNRRA as a great ‘cooperative enterprise’ of entirely new dimensions. 7 Even UNRRA's critics tended to agree about its uniquely internationalist ambitions (usually before going on to demonstrate how they had fallen far short from the ideal). One outspoken critic, the American Marvin Klemme, declared that UNRRA was populated with ‘fanatical internationalists [who] felt sure that UNRRA was the vanguard of some sort of world order’. The body had been conceived by American ‘super-idealists’ and ‘super-internationalists’ who aimed ‘for nothing less than complete world government’, he proclaimed, but their idealism was then quickly exploited by ‘a great many Europeans and Asiatics who thought that they saw the opportunity of getting a whole lot of something for very little or nothing’. 8 UNRRA's international fantasies were bankrolled by the American taxpayer, who got little benefit in return.