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 THE EUROPEAN UNION IN
INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
Series Editors: Sebastian Oberthür, Knud Erik Jørgensen,
Philomena B. Murray and Sandra Lavenex

EU EMERGENCY
RESPONSE
POLICIES
AND NGOS
Trends and Innovations

Daniela Irrera
 The European Union in International Affairs

Series editors
Sebastian Oberthür
Institute for European Studies
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Brussels, Belgium

Knud Erik Jørgensen

Aarhus University
Aarhus, Denmark

Philomena B. Murray
University of Melbourne
Parkville, Victoria, Australia

Sandra Lavenex
University of Geneva
Geneva, Switzerland

“In this timely book, Daniela Irrera sheds light on the connection between NGOs
and humanitarian strategies, right when the global environment seems threatened
by risks which traditional state policy cannot fully cope with. The book is required
reading for anybody who wants to understand EU external relations and helps to
appreciate the true impact of Europe in the world, going beyond the simple
account of formal institutions.”
—Filippo Andreatta, Full Professor of Political Science at the
University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
This Book Series aims to be a central resource for the growing community
of scholars and policy-makers who engage with the evolving interface
between the EU and international affairs. Its provides in-depth, cutting
edge and original contributions of world-class research on the EU in inter-
national affairs by highlighting new developments, insights, challenges
and opportunities. It encompasses analyses of the EU's international role,
as mediated by its own Member States, in international institutions and in
its strategic bilateral and regional partnerships. Books in the Series exam-
ine evolving EU internal policies that have external implications and the
ways in which these are both driven by, and feed back into, international
developments. Grounded in Political Science, International Relations,
International Political Economy, Law, Sociology and History, the Series
reflects a commitment to inter-disciplinary scholarship. We welcome book
proposals relating to the changing role of the EU in international affairs
across policies and the Union’s relations with different parts of the world,
as well as relations with states and multilateral institutions. We are inter-
ested in research on values and norms, interests and global governance
and welcome both theory-informed studies and studies comparing the EU
with other major global actors. To submit a proposal, please contact
Commissioning Editor Ambra Finotello ambra.finotello@palgrave.com.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/series/14438
 Daniela Irrera

EU Emergency
Response Policies and
NGOs
Trends and Innovations
Daniela Irrera
Department of Political and Social Studies
University of Catania
Catania, Italy

The European Union in International Affairs

ISBN 978-3-319-69726-0    ISBN 978-3-319-69727-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69727-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017956112

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-
tional affiliations.

Cover pattern © Melisa Hasan

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To Fulvio Attinà, Professor of International Relations,
my Mentor
 Acknowledgements

The ideas which are the basis of this book came about by chance, as a
result of my continuous and enduring interest in NGOs and humanitarian
and security policies, and within various research activities I have been
involved with.
I started to be interested in NGO activities within the EU humanitarian
aid policies while working as a member of the scientific committee of
ReSHAPE, a Jean Monnet ad hoc Chair designed to promote high perfor-
mance and innovation in the study, teaching and research on EU action in
Reconstruction, Security, Humanitarian Action and Protection in
Emergencies, directed by Fulvio Attinà at the University of Catania. The
various actions and opportunities offered by the Chair allowed me to
reflect on the potentialities of applying my expertise on NGOs to a still
unexplored research field.
The occasion during which my interest fully developed was an interna-
tional conference “Old and New Forms of Dependency—Attempts at
Forecasting”, hosted by the Faculty of Political Science and Journalism of
Adam Mickiewicz University, in Poznań, 2014. I am grateful to the organ-
isers Rafał Wiśniewski, Agnieszka Filipiak, Eliza Kania, Jeroen Van den
Bosch and Aleksandra Galus for inviting and involving me in a structured
project, based on the academic journal R/evolutions: Global Trends &
Regional Issues in partnership with Santander Group European Universities.
Since then, ideas have continued to develop thanks to two big projects
which provided institutional and financial support, as well as constituting
the ideal framework for reflecting on and confronting data, understanding
assumptions and polishing the methodology.

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The first of these was the PRIN Programme Italy and the new global
challenges. Relief, aid and reconstruction in natural and man-made disas-
ter events, funded by the Italian Ministry for Education, University and
Research (MIUR), contract no. E61J12000200001. I am grateful to the
principal investigator, Pierangelo Isernia, for allowing me to conduct the
empirical part of the investigation. The research has been improved by the
second project, the Transcrisis project, funded by the EU Commission’s
Horizon 2020 programme, which I had the chance to join in 2015.
Transcrisis aims at advancing knowledge on the capacities and limits affect-
ing crisis management and leadership in the EU and developing high-­
impact policy recommendations. Through periodical workshops, blog
posts and research meetings, I have entered a more advanced phase of the
research on these topics.
I also owe all my thanks to the European Peace Research Association
(EuPRA), which I have the honour to lead as elected president. The
Association has become an ideal place in which my interest in peace and
security has grown and developed. The executive board comprising Unto
Vesa, Enika Abazi, Metin Ersoy, Hendrik Bullens, Itir Toksoz, Nils Vidar
Vambhein, Stephanie Thiel and Olga Vorkunova always supports my ideas
and initiatives and allows me to grow as a scholar.
I started to write some parts of this book during a visiting professorship
at the EU Centre of Excellence of the University of Alberta, Canada.
Intense conversations with the director, Lori Thorlakson, and other
faculty members offered insightful comments and suggestions. The last
part was written in Barcelona, where I spent one month as a visiting
professor at the Erasmus Mundus Masters Program in Public Policies,
MUNDUSMAPP. I am grateful to Pablo Pareja and Jacint Jordana for
inviting me to join a vivid intellectual environment. Also, teaching a course
on Global Civil Society at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals
(IBEI) gave me the chance to meet a wonderful international class of stu-
dents, with whom I have shared and discussed findings and case studies.
I have done the same, over the last four years, in Catania, where I teach
Global Civil Society, within the Masters program on Global Politics and
Euro-Mediterranean Relations. My students have always been a powerful
source of inspiration and my most useful and objective discussants. As
with previous works, I have also discussed and debated the contents of this
book with them.
I have also presented portions of this book at several conferences, and
am very grateful to those people who read and discussed conference papers
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
   ix

and those who, directly or indirectly, contributed to enhancing the ratio-

nale of this book. In particular, I thank Joseph Grieco, Madeleine Hosli,
Heidi Maurer, Raffaele Marchetti, Clifford Bob, Claudia Morsut, Klaus
Gerd-Giesen, Helen Helena Flam, Alexandra Bousiou, Esther Barbé,
Paula Lopes, Maria Raquel Freire, Licínia Simão, Daniela Nascimento and
Oana Mocanu.
The responsibility for what is expressed in the book is entirely mine.
I would also like to acknowledge the group of scholars that surrounds
me in the same department: Francesca Longo, Stefania Panebianco and
Rosa Rossi. Even though we have different research interests, we always
share projects and discussions.
Last but not least, there are no words to express what I owe to Fulvio
Attinà, my mentor since 2001. He has taught me how to become a scholar
and always supports my research and writing with his invaluable advice.
This book is dedicated to him.
Finally, and most importantly, I am grateful for the constant support of
my family.
 Contents

1 Introduction: EU Emergency Response Policies

and NGOs—Why It Matters  1

2 The Humanitarian System, the EU, and NGOs:

The State of the Art  7

3 The EU Humanitarian Aid Policy and NGOs:

A Theoretical Overview 27

4 NGOs, ECHO, and Member States:

An Empirical Analysis 45

5 Conclusions: The EU Humanitarian Aid

Policy in the Age of Change 61

Appendix 67

Index 71

xi
 List of Abbreviations

CBO Community-based Organisation

CFSP Common Foreign and Security Policy
CSDP Common Security and Defence Policy
DDR Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration
DG Directorate General
DG RELEX Directorate General for External Relations
EC European Community
ECHO Directorate General for European Civil Protection and
Humanitarian Aid Operations
EP European Parliament
EPLO European Peace Building Liaison Office
ESDP European Security and Defence Policy
EU European Union
ICRC International Committee of the Red Cross
IDP Internally Displaced Person
IGO International Governmental Organisation
NGO Non-Governmental Organisation
OCHA Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
OECD Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
OJEC Official Journal of the European Community
OSCE Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe
TFEU Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union
UK United Kingdom
UN United Nations
UNHCHR United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

xiii
xiv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

UNICEF United Nations Children’s Fund
WFP World Food Programme
WHO World Health Organization
 List of Figures and Tables

Fig. 4.1 Member State funding to projects implemented

by NGOs (2005–2016) 49
Fig. 4.2 ECHO funding to projects implemented
by NGOs (2005–2016) 50
Fig. 4.3 Member State and ECHO funding to projects
implemented by NGOs (2005–2016) 51
Fig. 4.4 Member State funding to projects implemented
by NGOs (2005–2016) 52
Fig. 4.5 The Big Donors (2005–2016) 53
Fig. 4.6 Big Donors funding to projects implemented
by NGOs per region (2005–2016) 54
Fig. 4.7 ECHO and Big Donors funding to projects implemented
by NGOs per region (2005–2016) 57
Table 4.1 Big Donors funding to projects implemented
by NGOs per region (2005–2016) 55

xv
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: EU Emergency Response

Policies and NGOs—Why It Matters

Abstract The scholarship on the EU humanitarian aid has already made

many significant contributions. The relations among EU institutions,
member states, and other competent non-state actors have, however, devel-
oped and increased in complexity; this is not always well explained and
deserves further research. This book aims at shedding new light on the
topic, by focusing on the influence exerted by NGOs as implementing
actors of programmes and projects taken up by the EU Commission and
member states in shaping and executing their humanitarian agenda. The
empirical analysis is based on a comparison of funding provided to NGOs
by member states and the Directorate General for European Civil Protection
and Humanitarian Aid Operations (DG ECHO) in the period 2005–2016.

Keywords NGOs • EU humanitarian aid • States • Funding •

Implementing actor

Scholars have intensively investigated the global policies for relief and
reconstruction in the last few decades, producing a wide and rich variety
of analyses. The setting up of global emergency action involves different
types of actors, institutions and agencies, procedures, norms, decisions,
and practices. Among non-state actors, NGOs are the most controversial
and visible players of emergency policy-making and implementation, not

© The Author(s) 2018 1

D. Irrera, EU Emergency Response Policies and NGOs,
The European Union in International Affairs,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69727-7_1
2 D. IRRERA

only for the quantity of materials and scale of logistics they are able to
deploy, but also because they possess specific competencies and capabilities
which have proven their practical utility in peace-building and reconstruc-
tion activities. NGOs have their own approach to providing services to
people affected by natural disasters and conflicts. In principle, this approach
is complementary to the states’ and International Governmental
Organisations’ (IGOs) alternative approach. In practice, however, it can
differ considerably. Therefore, NGOs’ activities sometimes clash with the
programmes the states and IGOs develop at sites of humanitarian inter-
vention, but most of the time, they coordinate with the states and IGOs
and contribute, directly or indirectly, to shaping the whole humanitarian
system.
With respect to such development, the EU humanitarian aid policy is a
particularly interesting and exemplary case and, even though scholars have
investigated many aspects of such policy, the topic is still under-evaluated
and deserves further research. On the one hand, the relations with inter-
national aid institutions and NGOs have been strongly developed over the
years through aid programmes and within the Directorate General for
European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (DG
ECHO) activities. On the other, NGOs have developed and strengthened
direct relations with the member states, performing executive tasks and
playing the role of implementing actors. The result is a multi-layered pol-
icy process in which national interests, common values, universal princi-
ples, and global duties clash and interact.
Based on an assumption that in the current phase of world politics,
global institutions and the relations among civil society and institutions in
public policy-making are undergoing a process of change, this book aims
at deepening trends and changes in the EU humanitarian aid policy by
focusing on the relations between governmental and non-governmental
dimensions.
In particular, NGOs’ performances and their relationship with member
states and EU institutions are analysed theoretically and empirically.
This research can obviously not be exhaustive or conclusive; it rather
aims at shedding new light on a policy which is still undervalued and it also
contributes to a debate which will grow in the near future, given the
increasing complexity of internal and external crises the EU is facing and
the effect of some structural phenomena like Brexit, which have just
started to make an impact.
 INTRODUCTION: EU EMERGENCY RESPONSE POLICIES AND NGOS—WHY IT… 3

The framework fits into International Relations theories and combines

the literature on the role of NGOs in the humanitarian system with con-
tributions on the EU aid policy and the management of transboundary
crises.
The research aims at replying to some specific questions:

1. What is the propensity of member states to support NGOs in

fulfilling their humanitarian agendas?
2. Is there a difference between member states and ECHO in the
allocation of funds to projects implemented by NGOs?
3. Are member states pursuing a humanitarian agenda which is
coherent with the EU strategy?

1.1   Rationale of the Book

What is the purpose of studying NGOs today and why is an investigation
into their funding relevant? The topic definitely constitutes a challenge for
scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers. Currently, all these categories
of actors are more and more concerned with the increasing ‘interference’
of civil society organisations in many political issues and in contemporary
crises, like migrants and refugee flows. NGOs, as the most organised and
visible part of civil society, have clearly demonstrated their controversial
nature; however, they are strongly connected to the humanitarian system,
and provide functional help that states and IGOs need and request.
The EU humanitarian aid policy is an excellent example of how this is
happening. The policy has slowly progressed over the years, marked by
member states’ prerogatives and the Commission’s attempts to promote
more common activities. Additionally, the policy was designed to effica-
ciously address the complexity of new crises and to develop proper capaci-
ties to tackle transboundary events occurring outside the EU.
Initially created with the task of ensuring and coordinating the delivery
of EU aid to third countries, the DG ECHO was upgraded in 2010, with
expansion of its competencies to manage crises even within the EU. By
bringing together humanitarian aid and civil protection, the Commission
aimed at creating a robust and comprehensive set of mechanisms of
response and distribution of aid. Thus, the role of ECHO expanded in
quantitative and financial terms but, more importantly, it was entrusted
with the task of showcasing the humanitarian face of the EU to the world.
Technical aspects of delivery, selection of partners, identification of
4 D. IRRERA

­ riorities, and funding are all parts of the same sensitive process. The core
p
of ECHO activities remains the funding of various humanitarian actors,
which is essential for implementing projects and executing the EU goals
and priorities. It provides funding to more than 200 partner organisations,
including international organisations, UN agencies, and NGOs.
At the same time, aid interventions should be complemented and rein-
forced by those of the member states, according to humanitarian princi-
ples, international law, and the common EU objectives. Member states
can finance bilateral and collective assistance in parallel, by making direct
donations to a foreign country as well as indirect donations via the EU’s
budget allocation to assistance programmes. NGOs have learned to adapt
to such procedures. The activities NGOs have carried out over the last few
decades fit smoothly into the overall policy framework developed by EU
institutions and the member states, starting with development policy.
Member states have made extensive use of the expertise of NGOs—both
national and international—and delegated a variety of functions and exec-
utive tasks to them as the NGOs are the implementing actors in the field.
Even though ECHO represents the privileged channel through which
their activities can be funded and sustained, NGOs continue to maintain
bilateral relations with member states, as a result of established traditions
and, in most cases, legally disciplined frameworks. The investigation into
the performances of such actors within the framework of the EU humani-
tarian policy may be useful in understanding actual trends and attempting
to reflect on potential future expectations.

1.2   Structure of the Book

The book consists of three main parts. The first one introduces the argu-
ment and explains what is currently happening in the scholarly debate on
the topic. Chapter 2 assesses the current scenario and explains why the
policy is still relevant and deserves additional research. In particular, the
EU humanitarian aid policy emerges as a big platform, dominated by both
governmental and non-governmental dimensions in which member states,
ECHO, and NGOs interact in parallel ways according to the same princi-
ples, but play different roles and prioritise diverse approaches.
Therefore, the EU humanitarian aid policy constitutes a paradigmatic
example of how both governmental and non-governmental dimensions
interact directly and indirectly.
 INTRODUCTION: EU EMERGENCY RESPONSE POLICIES AND NGOS—WHY IT… 5

In the second part, a theoretical introduction to the main arguments is

presented, based on International Relations theories, as well as the main
interdisciplinary debate. Chapter 3 introduces literature on the tasks and
relevance of NGOs in humanitarian actions, before exploring their innova-
tive contributions during complex emergencies and transboundary crises,
and then finally combining diverse literatures for postulating a more com-
prehensive framework which can be used to analyse empirical data and
offering some preliminary conclusions.
The last part provides the most innovative features of this research, that
is, an empirical analysis to fulfil the expectations built up through the the-
oretical discussion. In chapter, the analysis is made on aggregate data and
focuses on the funding (in euros) of projects implemented by NGOs in
third countries, by ECHO and EU member states, in the period
2005–2016 when the reformed funding mechanisms came into force.
Data are taken from the European Disaster Response Information System
(EDRIS) dataset, which contains real-time information on contributions
to humanitarian aid by ECHO and the EU member states. EDRIS offers
a comprehensive set of data and information related to aid provided by
EU member states and ECHO, to a wide range of crises and countries.
The reliability of these data is assured as all information contained in
EDRIS is electronically transmitted to the Financial Tracking System
(FTS) managed by the United Nations Office for Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Geneva.
The comparison of allocation of funds by ECHO and member states to
projects implemented by NGOs is used to understand, firstly, whether
there is a difference between the support provided by ECHO and that
given by the states; secondly, the propensity of member states to support
NGOs in fulfilling their humanitarian agendas; and, thirdly, whether mem-
ber states are pursuing a humanitarian agenda which is coherent with the
EU strategy, particularly in the area of selection of recipients of aid.
Some general conclusions and reflections on the EU humanitarian pol-
icy are offered. Firstly, there is a growing tendency to cooperate with
NGOs and to delegate executive functions to them. Humanitarian aid
should involve a set of tools, mechanisms, and competencies which go
well beyond the traditional ones. Despite their problems, NGOs are quite
functional and, more importantly, fulfil the need for more legitimate feed-
back from local communities and recipients of aid, and can make the inter-
vention itself more acceptable.
6 D. IRRERA

Secondly, a substantial convergence among member states and EU

institutions can be ensured, via support to NGOs. Thirdly, member
states—at least the Big Donors, which are quite representative of the new
face of the EU—tend to consistently follow the principles and priorities of
EU humanitarian aid.
The debate on the EU humanitarian policy and its double channels and
components is destined to grow.
 CHAPTER 2

The Humanitarian System, the EU,

and NGOs: The State of the Art

Abstract The humanitarian system is made up of several components—

actors, norms, and practices—that collectively contribute to shaping poli-
cies and interventions for people in need. The chapter assesses the current
scenario and explains the reasons the policy is still relevant and deserves
additional research. In particular, the EU humanitarian aid policy emerges
as a big platform, permeated by governmental and non-governmental
dimensions, in which member states, ECHO, and NGOs interact in paral-
lel ways, according to the same principles but playing different roles and
prioritising diverse approaches.

Keywords NGOs • EU • ECHO • Crises • Implementing actor

2.1   The Purpose of Studying the Role of NGOs

in Humanitarian Action

The investigations into the policies for aid and reconstruction, devel-
oped on a global and regional level, have produced a wide and rich vari-
ety of contributions. The environment of global emergency actions
consists of different actors, institutions and agencies, norms, decisions,
and practices. State, regional, and international organisations play piv-
otal roles in emergency policy-making and implementation; NGOs are,

© The Author(s) 2018 7

D. Irrera, EU Emergency Response Policies and NGOs,
The European Union in International Affairs,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69727-7_2
8 D. IRRERA

however, also part of the system. Not only are they functional in peace-
building and reconstruction activities, but they deploy materials and
logistics and specific capabilities. NGOs have also developed their own
approach to services provided to people affected by natural disasters and
conflict, which has influenced, over the decades, the intergovernmental
dimension. In principle, these approaches are diverse but complemen-
tary. They can significantly differ and overlap or clash. Overall, the ways
through which NGOs’ actions conflict with the programmes, states, and
IGOs develop in the sites of humanitarian intervention, but also interact
with them to contribute, directly or indirectly, to shaping the whole
humanitarian system.
Regarding this, the EU humanitarian aid policies are an interesting and
exemplary case. On one hand, the relations with international aid institu-
tions and NGOs have been strongly developed over the years through the
aid programme and within ECHO activities. On the other, NGOs have
developed and strengthened direct relations with member states, received
executive tasks, and played the role of implementing actors. Some have
developed an established and deep tradition of cooperation with civil soci-
ety; others have done it in recent time, while some performances are
marked by other priorities and approaches. The result is a multi-layered
policy process in which national interests, common values, universal prin-
ciples and actions, and global duties interact.
While there is extensive literature on NGOs’ influence in humanitarian
aid policies, the interest in interactions with ECHO is limited and deserves
further analysis. This book aims to contribute to such debate and to chal-
lenge the current scenario by offering some innovative empirical reflec-
tions. In particular, assuming that, in the current phase of world politics,
the global institutions are undergoing a process of change, the contribu-
tion of NGOs to the EU emergencies policies, through direct partnership
with ECHO activities and in relation to the member states, is discussed,
through an analysis of fund allocation to NGOs through ECHO and
member states.
The theoretical framework fits into International Relations theories and
combines the literature on the roles of NGOs in the humanitarian system
with contributions on the EU humanitarian aid policy and the manage-
ment of transboundary crisis.
Even though the topic is unpredictable and subject to change, the
research tries to provide timely assumptions through theoretical reflec-
tions and data, driven by specific research questions:
 THE HUMANITARIAN SYSTEM, THE EU, AND NGOS: THE STATE OF THE ART 9

1. What is the propensity of member states to support NGOs in fulfill-

ing their humanitarian agendas?
2. Is there a difference between member states and ECHO in alloca-
tion of funds to projects implemented by NGOs?
3. Are member states pursuing a humanitarian agenda coherent with
the EU strategy?

Considerations on this allow for reflection on broader aspects of the

topics, specifically the reasons why NGOs are considered as reliable part-
ners within the EU humanitarian aid policy and requested by member
states as implementing actors in fulfilling humanitarian needs.
One may ask why another work on NGOs is needed and what is the
purpose of investigating their funding by different actors. Even though
civil society organisations have manifested their controversial nature and
their distressing effect on intergovernmental preferences, they are strongly
connected to the humanitarian system and states cannot manage without
their help. In times marked by change and transformation, in which even
the most traditional policy issues—such as aid humanitarian policies—are
challenged by the need to develop more sophisticated and multifaceted
tools and competencies, the book aims to understand why NGOs are so
contested, yet so requested. Before going deeper into the discussion, a
preliminary overview on what is happening in the field and what is emerg-
ing in the scholarly debates is necessary.

2.2   NGOs and the Humanitarian System

The scholarship on humanitarian aid policies has comprehensively debated
the tools and competencies developed by the world governmental system,
mainly stressing that they are far from being ultimate. Theoretical and
empirical investigations have underlined the contrast between the respon-
sibility to cope with human suffering and the need to safeguard state inter-
ests and priorities. Two main features have emerged through these debates
and continue to attract significant attention: on the one hand, the ways
through which different actors interact and contribute to shaping humani-
tarian policies, that is, the networking environment; on the other, the spe-
cific (and sometimes controversial) influence of the non-state community
and their persistence in the policy-making structure.
The former pertains to definitional efforts. The end of World War II
and the beginning of the Cold War era contributed to an enormous
10 D. IRRERA

proliferation of actors in the humanitarian movement. The more diffuse

definitions stress the nature of the environment, namely, the framework of
competences and rules that govern relief activities. In this respect, scholars
use the concept of humanitarian space, as a place in which actors carry out
their activities following the principles of neutrality, impartiality, and
humanity (Spearin 2001). Other works stress that this space is marked by
the nature of its actors and by the interactions they can produce. Such
interactions, in their turn, are similar to a network, particularly a network
of actors, characterised by different channels and forms of communication
that reinforce and shape various informal relations (Kent 1987).
Practitioners have significantly contributed to the debates, using the label
‘humanitarian enterprise’ to describe a multifaceted machine in which
states and intergovernmental organisations are forced to cope with current
challenges and non-state actors try to work by adhering to their ideals
(Minear 2002; Donini 2012). The debate on the nature and definition of
the environment is continuous and requires more attention by scholars. A
collective consensus is nowhere in sight. However, considering the envi-
ronment is more than its technical set of competencies and is rather shaped
by its own actors, and the level of relationship between them cannot be
generically summarised through the network structure, more effective and
comprehensive labels are needed. In this work, the term humanitarian
system is used to indicate the set of principles, actors, policies, practices,
rules, and procedures shaping aid policies to foster recent global crises
(Irrera 2013).
The term system continues to raise criticism, since it assumes a homoge-
neity in the actions and in principles and a commonality in the priorities
that is not always present. The notion of system recalls the idea of compre-
hensiveness and better describes the variety of components (principles,
actors, policies) that, right or wrong, combine to produce consensus and
fragmentation (Irrera 2013).
As for the second feature, the nature of actors and the specific relevance
of non-state actors, the scholarship has debated the contentious persis-
tence, within the humanitarian system, of two dimensions, the govern-
mental and the non-governmental. Even though humanitarian policies
should be based on universal principles and driven by well-recognised
practices, each dimension relies on different priorities, behaviours, and
constraints.
The first definitions of humanitarian interventions have been shaped by
state-centric realist doctrine. States are the most important actors, since
 THE HUMANITARIAN SYSTEM, THE EU, AND NGOS: THE STATE OF THE ART 11

intervention is the threat of force across state borders by a state (or a

group of states) aimed at preventing or ending individuals’ fundamental
rights and grave violations, without asking for the permission of the state
within whose territory force is applied (Holzgrefe and Keohane 2003).
Other approaches introduce additional actors and engage new debates on
the roles that different organisations can play within the humanitarian sys-
tem. The relevance of IGOs is at the core of literature on the UN as the
formal peace provider, as officially stated in the Charter, but the interest in
regional organisations and their ability to promote stabilisation is increas-
ing (Attinà 2012). Henri Dunant’s call “to form relief societies for the
purpose of having care given to the wounded in wartime by zealous,
devoted and thoroughly qualified volunteers” is at the basis of the ‘special
identity’ of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), as an
actor which is not an IGO or a non-state actor, but whose legitimacy
rather stems from international law. Even humanitarian NGOs have shown
that they occupy a specific place within the system, thanks to their organ-
isational capacities.
At least six international categories of actors can be recognised as part
of the humanitarian system, as follows:

• The group of UN agencies, including the United Nations High

Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), OCHA, the World Food
Program (WFP), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the
UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF);
• Regional organisations (EU, African Union; Organization for
Security and Co-operation in Europe);
• The governments of states, including those affected by the
emergencies;
• International Red Cross actors, national Red Cross and Red Crescent
societies;
• International NGOs;
• Local NGOs and civil society organisations acting in the countries
affected by the emergencies, and working in cooperation with the
UN or international NGOs (Irrera 2013).

Within the UN system, humanitarian NGOs have historically found the

most significant laboratory to strengthen their expertise and test their
roles towards states and institutional bodies by using formal accreditation
and successive relations with the United Nations Economic and Social
12 D. IRRERA

Council to shape practices and norms, being the universally recognised

realm in which the notion of collective security and humanitarian inter-
ventions—and their developments—has been conceived and structured.
As part of this process, humanitarian NGOs started to fulfil specific
functions, such as providing assistance, promoting peace-building activi-
ties, and supporting development, in parallel to UN bodies. Practical
assignments are widespread between non-state actors and the UN, par-
ticularly in operational programmes managed by those agencies (WFP,
UNHCR) which have a more established tradition of cooperation with
the private sector (Seybolt 2009). This process is a mixture of those top-­
down general reforms promoted by the UN and the bottom-up attempts
made by NGOs to exert a stronger influence in humanitarian action. The
main objective was to be able to cope with permanent challenges deriv-
ing from complex situations in which humanitarian actors have to work,
that is, the insufficient capabilities to address the needs of the population
and the difficulty of completing long-term processes of institutional
development (Donini 2012; Irrera 2013). However, coordinating mech-
anisms are not easy to manage. In principle, policy instruments need to
be organised to deliver humanitarian assistance in a cohesive and effec-
tive manner, avoiding duplications and guaranteeing efficiency. In prac-
tice, they are affected by many barriers, represented by the different
mandates, sectoral interests, and operating principles the various actors
are provided with.
NGOs are involved in such top-down dimensions of coordination,
interacting with many agencies. The Brahimi Report, promoted by
Secretary General Kofi Annan to make an overall reform of the humanitar-
ian mechanisms and issued in 2000 by the Panel on United Nations Peace
Operations, seeks to identify practical solutions and launches the need to
reform the humanitarian process. It stresses, in particular, the need to
promote and sustain integrated and multi-functional interventions, pro-
vided with different competencies, without underestimating the civilian
dimension and the NGO influence. The aim is clearly not only to involve
non-state actors, but also to amalgamate the various parts of the system.
Among them, two main agencies need to be emphasised to understand
how NGOs have slowly developed their roles. Firstly, OCHA, established
in 1998 as part of Annan’s reform, started with the Agenda for Peace with
the aim of managing policy development, and coordinating advocacy of
humanitarian issues as well as the complexity of humanitarian agencies’
response (Chandler 2001). OCHA is expected to bring various actors into
 THE HUMANITARIAN SYSTEM, THE EU, AND NGOS: THE STATE OF THE ART 13

common structures to strengthen the UN’s capacity to develop prepared-

ness, assistance, and rescue.
Secondly, the clusters mechanism is another interesting outcome of the
UN humanitarian realm. In December 2005, the Inter-Agency Standing
Committee launched this tool to solve the problem of emergency short-
ages and enhance coordination among humanitarian actors. Clusters are
groups of humanitarian organisations (UN and non-UN) working in the
main sectors of humanitarian action, namely, logistics, emergency tele-
communications, camp coordination and management of emergency shel-
ter, health, nutrition, water, sanitation and hygiene, and early recovery
protection. Within the single cluster, the leadership is exerted by an
agency, like UNHCR, OCHA, UNICEF, and WFP, which should act as a
guarantee of efficiency and transparency. This mechanism is thus expected
to rearrange the relationship among humanitarian actors by focusing on
preparedness over operative deployment (Jury and De Maio 2007). The
goal is to skip politicised influence and to promote information sharing.
Nevertheless, according to some NGOs reports, clusters are far from
being effective and ensuring accountability. The proliferation of parallel
structures and sub-clusters has altered the coordination environment by
confusing roles and competences. The multiplication of procedures and
bureaucracy has also produced some unforeseen effects, like uncertainty
about fund allocation and specific tasks to be accomplished by NGOs on
the ground (Stobbaerts et al. 2007).
Therefore, the innovations that have shaped the humanitarian system
started in the realm of the UN, and then gradually influenced several other
contexts, including the EU, as will be explained in the next paragraph.
The relationship between the UN and NGOs has been described and
labelled as a marriage of convenience (Natsios 1995), settled by global
events and balance of power. Humanitarian agencies, governments, and
NGOs have different speeds and are dominated by diverse interests.
However, room for joint actions, initiatives, and practices has been found.
Scholars have consistently investigated how international NGOs have
exerted their contentious roles in this system, stressing the fact that they
have used the expertise established in the field of relief assistance and
human rights protection to develop and professionalise their tasks, as well
as to expand their areas of expertise and their impact (Rucht 2006).
However, there are various nuances through which NGOs interact with
the humanitarian system, from mobilising human, financial, and material
resources, to carrying out projects and programmes, to advising states to
14 D. IRRERA

seek wider public support for operations, and promoting fund-raising

(Willetts 2001).
According to Stoddard (2003), different types of NGOs interact with
other actors, on the basis of their specific nature and their definitions of
humanitarian actions, which provide diverse meanings for their crisis man-
agement interventions. Therefore, while all NGOs know the humanitarian
laws and principles and react accordingly, they demonstrate different ways
of being humanitarians. This impacts their relations with governmental
actors.
Different NGOs’ attributes translate into a richness of roles that mark
the humanitarian process, before, during, and after the crisis. Preventive
action and mediation, traditional relief and assistance, and the increasing
long-term peace-building capacity are exerted in different phases of the
crisis, producing many outcomes. Studies on NGOs in civil conflicts have
enlightened their ability to obtain the confidence of the local population
and how this impacts relations with states and IGOs, by promoting and
sharing principles and practice, contributing to the innovations of crises
management, and strengthening the civilian dimension of intergovern-
mental intervention.
However, the roles of NGOs in the humanitarian system are also
marked by ambiguity. Rubenstein labels them Samaritans, describing a
condition in which they have to face several ethical and legal predicaments
and deal with state affairs (Rubenstein 2015). Even though their place in
the system is not under question, it is not always (and not everywhere)
clear and, in reality, the provision of aid continues to be a top-down and
rigid matter (Donini et al. 2008).
So far, the topic may appear obvious: within the humanitarian system,
international NGOs have increased and developed their influence and
professionalised their tasks in parallel with other governmental actors,
which are the relevant ones. Their performances should be analysed in
the broader framework of the set of relations with international and
regional organisations and states. The continuous changes in the
humanitarian field, in the nature of crises, and in their political and
social implications require not only more efficient tools but also more
legitimate and responsive ones. The world is marked by recurrent crises
and order needs to be restored. What emerges from current scholarly
debates is a complicated analysis of how states, international organisa-
tions, and NGOs need one another to enrich responses with more com-
petences and expertise to legitimise actions and to sustain multifaceted
 THE HUMANITARIAN SYSTEM, THE EU, AND NGOS: THE STATE OF THE ART 15

programmes and interventions. In this respect, the nature of funding

exerts an important influence.
Therefore, the topic is far from being obvious and requires more
research. This work starts from here, to add to the current scenario more
reflections based on a specific case. Given its intergovernmental nature and
the ambition of its humanitarian agenda, the EU framework constitutes a
significant example and can help shed new light on how governmental and
non-governmental dimensions interact in this field.

2.3   The Need for a Comprehensive Humanitarian

Aid Policy: The Role of ECHO
The EU is one of the world’s largest providers of humanitarian aid and
can count on a long and established tradition of assistance and relief
delivery. It is not only one of its main policies: tackling the needs of
people hit by natural and man-made disasters constitutes a leading part
of the EU’s international actorness, strengthening its mission and its
civilian power.
Therefore, any reflection on the EU humanitarian aid policy implies a
more comprehensive analysis of its tools, mechanisms, and agencies, which
feature the development of its security agenda.
Over recent decades, EU actions in the security field have involved a
growing number of actors and have been operating at many levels with
several instruments. The literature has produced a rich and wide list of
contributions assessing the performances of traditional tools and the inno-
vative practices and policies shaped on the present phase of instability and
insecurity arising in many areas of vital concern to Europe. A strand of
literature focused on the general strategy under which mechanisms should
be viewed, and analysed the degree to which a European strategic culture
has been built as a precondition for the EU to become a civilian and mili-
tary actor (Jørgensen and Laatikainen 2013). In this respect, the literature
on the EU’s cooperation with third parties has played a relevant role,
studying how the EU brings its different capabilities in the field (i.e.,
deployment of civilian and military missions), to provide financial support
from EU and member state sources, and to coordinate its internal decision-­
making processes in accordance with the global security agenda. The first
point has generated several quantitative and qualitative analyses on peace
missions, the push factors that influence member states’ propensity to
intervene and the impact on crises (Attinà and Irrera 2010; Attinà 2013).
16 D. IRRERA

The Lisbon Treaty has inevitably introduced more issues into the debate,
calling for more openness to the multi-lateral security agenda and more coor-
dination among actors involved at all levels (Van Elsuwege and Orbie 2014).
As will be clarified in the Chap. 3, this is a consequence of the fact that
the EU’s emergency policies and mechanisms are part of an overall human-
itarian framework, which is subject to different preferences but common
problems and needs (Attinà 2012). It also deals with the increasing com-
plexity of the crises to which the EU is expected to contribute. Terrorist
attacks, financial crises, and natural disasters add their effects and pressure
to cooperate across geographical and functional boundaries. Since the cri-
sis concept is more broadly defined, the more recent debate has been
enriched with contributions from different backgrounds and expertise,
involving practitioners and experts (Attinà et al. 2014; Boin et al. 2013).
More recent reflections have focused on the innovations introduced by
the Lisbon Treaty and on their implications. Article 214 of the Treaty on
the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) clearly states: “ad hoc
assistance and relief and protection for people in third countries who are
victims of natural and man-made disasters” is an EU external policy in its
own right. This new legal basis complements Council Regulation 1257/96
concerning humanitarian aid and the European Consensus on
Humanitarian Aid, which was adopted in December 2007 as a Joint
Statement of the Council, the European Commission, the European
Parliament, and the member states (Council 1996).
Some investigations have stressed the technical aspects of this policy,
the areas of intervention, the categories of crises to be tackled, and its limi-
tations (Van Elsuwege et al. 2016). On the one hand, this policy is very
broad, including both natural and man-made disasters, such as floods,
earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, civil wars, and ethnic cleansing.
On the other, Van Elsuwege et al. point out that Article 214 TFEU can-
not overlap with other relevant policies or affect the actions exerted by
other actors and agencies.
The first concern of EU humanitarian aid should be emergencies in
third countries. This matches the long tradition the EU has advanced in
the promotion of political stability and sustainable development in
regions like Central and South Africa, the Western Balkans, the EU
Neighbourhood, and the Middle East. Empirical data analysed in Chap.
3 explain the factors that push these trends. However, support given by
the EU in an emergency event should be provided ad hoc and cannot
interfere with other policies, like development cooperation
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 MRS. GASKELL

I
WE think of her habitually—do we not?—by her married title of “Mrs.
Gaskell.” Who Mr. Gaskell was this generation does not, in an
ordinary way, pause to enquire: a neglect which does injustice to a
gentleman of fine presence, noble manners and high culture. She
was a beautiful woman: they married in 1832, and had children, and
lived most happily.
So it is as “Mrs. Gaskell” that we think of her: and I dare to wager
that most of you think of her as Mrs. Gaskell, authoress of Cranford.
Now heaven forbid that anything I say this morning should daunt
your affection for Cranford, as heaven knows how long and sincerely
I have adored it. I have adored it at least long enough and well
enough to understand its devotees—for Cranford has not only
become popular in the sense, more or less, that Omar Khayyam has
become popular—by which I mean that, at this season or
thereabouts, numbers of people buy a copy in limp suède, with Hugh
Thomson’s illustrations, and only hesitate over sending it to the So-
and-So’s with best wishes on a chilling doubt that they sent it last
year, with the identical good wishes—if indeed they are not returning
the identical volume they received! Well, let us be merry and
careless!—in the course of a week or two these soft bricks will be
dropping on every hearth.
But seriously, one finds devotees of Cranford everywhere; and
especially, in my experience, among scholarly old men. They have
Cranford written on their hearts, sometimes hardly covering a
cherished solution of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Cranford and the
novels of Jane Austen—you never know how many delightful
persons cherish them, have them by heart, pore over their text as
over an Ode of Pindar’s. And they are fierce, these devotees, as the
noble new edition of Jane Austen by Mr. Chapman of the Oxford
Press has recently been teaching us. Here are five volumes edited
with all the care that study and affection can lavish on the task. Yet
from here, there and everywhere lovers start up from firesides—
scattered widowers of this dear maiden—challenging over variae
lectiones, feeling for the hilt on the old hip to champion (we’ll say)
“screen” as the right word against “scene” as printed—

“Swerve to the left, Son Roger,” he said,

“When you catch his eyes through the helmet-slit.”

It is as serious, almost, as all that: and so it is with Cranford, and

Miss Jenkyns and Captain Brown and adorable Miss Matty.
Yet, let us admit there are certain works which conquer some of
us, we cannot tell why. To go a very long way from Cranford, take
Tristram Shandy. No one can really criticise Tristram Shandy, and all
pretence to do so is mere humbug. Either you like Tristram Shandy
(as I do, for one) or you don’t, and there’s an end to it. My sole
complaint against the devotees of Cranford is that, admiring it,
revelling in it, they imagine themselves to have the secret of Mrs.
Gaskell, stop there, and do not go on to explore her other works of
which one at any rate I shall presently dare to proclaim to you as the
most perfect small idyll ever written in English prose.

II
The sin is the worse because every one acknowledges the Life
of Charlotte Brontë to be—after Boswell’s Life of Johnson, admittedly
beyond competition—among the two or three best biographies in our
language. Conceive the Brontës—not Charlotte alone, but the whole
family—the whole of that terrible family in that terrible parsonage at
Haworth—as this staid lady, wife of a Unitarian minister, faithfully
depicts them—the wastrel son, Branwell: through long nights tearing
his own heart out, with his stern old father’s, in the bedroom they
had, for safety, to occupy together: in the end pulling himself up to
die standing: the shuddering sisters listening on the stairs; Emily,
doomed and fierce, she too in her turn standing up to die. Consider
—I will not say Wuthering Heights, or Charlotte’s well-known
magnificent description, in Villette, of Rachel and her tortured acting
—but consider if only by illustration of contrast this most maddened
poem by Emily—and there are others as tragic—
The Prisoner

Still let my tyrants know, I am not doom’d to wear

Year after year in gloom and desolate despair;
A messenger of Hope comes every night to me,
And offers for short life, eternal liberty.

He comes with Western winds, with evening’s wandering airs,

With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars:
Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire,
And visions rise, and change, that kill me with desire.

Desire for nothing known in my maturer years,

When Joy grew made with awe, at counting future tears:
When, if my spirit’s sky was full of flashes warm,
I knew not whence they came, from sun or thunder-storm.

But first, a hush of peace—a soundless calm descends;

The struggle of distress and fierce impatience ends.
Mute music soothes my breast—unutter’d harmony
That I could never dream, till Earth was lost to me.

Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals;

My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels;
Its wings are almost free—its home, its harbour found;
Measuring the gulf, it stoops, and dares the final bound.
 O dreadful is the check—intense the agony—
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb—the brain to think again—
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.

Yet I would lose no sting, would wish no torture less;

The more that anguish racks, the earlier it will bless;
And robed in fires of hell, or bright with heavenly shine,
If it but herald Death, the vision is divine.

Consider, I say, that the authoress of Cranford not only lived with
these fierce women and comforted them as their benign friend, with
a comfort that no soul can give to another without understanding, but
portrayed them (their struggles ended) in a book that combines the
English (even the Victorian English) with the Greek, a fidelity to awful
fact with a serene judgment, a tender mercy—the two so discovering
and covering all, that—whether it be in charity or in justice—its core
of truth has never been challenged: that it stands yet among the
noblest few of English biographies. I put it to you that, if you but set
together those two books—Cranford and the Life of Charlotte Brontë
—at once you must recognise the operating hand—the quietly
operating hand—of genius. But this, even when Mrs. Gaskell’s
longer novels are thrown into the scale, has avoided, I think—
because she herself is so equable, so temperate—its right
recognition. Yes, her very portrait has a Hellenic look, so beautiful it
is, so penetrating its calm gaze.

III
Yet maybe you think it strange that I find so much of high
Hellenic quality in this quiet lady—born a Stevenson, to be sure—but
christened Elizabeth Cleghorn, names not to us reminiscential of
Hybla or the Ilissus. Her father was a Unitarian minister, who
preached in that capacity, in Dob Lane Chapel, Manchester—which
again does not suggest the Acropolis. In 1832 she married a
Unitarian minister, son of a prosperous manufacturer, minister to a
Chapel in Cross Street, Manchester, and prominent on the Home
Missionary Board. For these and some particulars that follow I go to
4
the best sources known to me.

4
Sir Adolphus Ward’s various Introductions to
the Knutsford Edition (8 volumes, published by
John Murray) and the article on her in the
Dictionary of National Biography, by the same
writer, whose scholarship, when devoted to this
dead lady, reaches to a religious note of chivalry.

Her married life was one of unbroken happiness. Her husband

had literary leanings, and in 1838 she writes to Mrs. Howitt, “We
once thought of trying to write sketches among the poor, rather in the
manner of Crabbe (now don’t think this presumptuous), but in a more
beauty-seeing spirit: and one—the only one—was published in
5
Blackwood, January, 1837. But I suppose we spoke our plan near a
dog-rose, for it never went any further.”

5
The curious may read it in Blackwood’s
Magazine, Vol. XLI, No. CCIV, or in Sir Adolphus
Ward’s Biographical Introduction.

So you see that she had already made Manchester her home,
and was already interested in the poor.
Also one may interpose here that (without evidence of her
portrait) she was acknowledged by all who met her to be a person of
quite remarkable beauty, and as little conscious of it as any beautiful
woman has any right to be: since as Jaques noted:
 if ladies be but young and fair,
They have the gift to know it.

Above all, she had the ineffable charm of being the least
assertive, the most concerned with others, in any company. I think
that of her rather than of any other writing-woman one may quote
Mrs. Browning’s lines on her Kate—

I doubt if she said to you much that could act

As a thought or suggestion: she did not attract
In the sense of the brilliant or wise: I infer
’Twas her thinking for others made you think of her.

She never found fault with you, never implied

Your wrong by her right: and yet men at her side
Grew nobler, girls purer, as through the whole town
The children were gladder that pulled at her gown....

The weak and the gentle, the ribald and rude,

She took as she found them, and did them all good:
It always was so with her—see what you have!
She has made the grass greener even here ... with her grave.

Such a woman, as I trace her portrait, was Mrs. Gaskell, and I think
the end of the story will confirm my reading of her. She made no
show: without interfering she saw beauty in the lives of the poor: she
lived with the misery of Manchester and pitied it; and across a
personal bereavement—or (shall we say?) out of the very anguish of
her own breast—she relieved her heart in her first long book in pity
for that place.
In 1844 Mr. and Mrs. Gaskell revisited Festiniog, in North Wales,
a halt of their wedding tour. They took their children with them; and
at the inn there the eldest daughter caught the scarlet fever. Mrs.
Gaskell removed her with her infant brother to Portmadoc, where he
sickened of the fever and died. It was in search of an anodyne for
sorrow that the mother began to write Mary Barton. Read that book
with just these two or three facts in your mind, and you will find an
illustration—though it almost shames me to give you one so poignant
—of the way in which the sincerest art is begotten and brought forth:
that is, by lifting one’s own experience up to a Universal, and then
bringing it back to reclothe it in imaginary, particular, men and
women.

IV
In two previous lectures, Gentlemen, I have given you—it may
well be ad nauseam—the conditions of life among the industrial poor
of that period as they can be gathered from Blue Books and out of
Hansard. In my last lecture I tried to indicate how they affected the
ambitious (and to that extent selfish) but yet chivalrous mind of
Disraeli. I shall be shorter with Mrs. Gaskell, who invents no political
novel, but just tells the tale and passes on. But she tells it, and I
select here to read to you a passage to illustrate rather how gently
and charitably she tells it than to make out the worst of the case,
which yet may be found in her pages.

At all times it is a bewildering thing to the poor weaver to see

his employer removing from house to house, each one grander
than the last, till he ends in building one more magnificent than
all, or withdraws his money from the concern, or sells his mill, to
buy an estate in the country, while all the time the weaver, who
thinks he and his fellows are the real makers of this wealth, is
struggling on for bread for his children, through the vicissitudes
of lowered wages, short hours, fewer hands employed, etc. And
when he knows trade is bad, and could understand (at least
partially) that there are not buyers enough in the market to
purchase the goods already made, and consequently that there
is no demand for more; when he would bear and endure much
without complaining, could he also see that his employers were
bearing their share; he is, I say, bewildered and (to use his own
word) “aggravated” to see that all goes on just as usual with the
mill-owners. Large houses are still occupied, while spinners’ and
weavers’ cottages stand empty, because the families that once
filled them are obliged to live in rooms or cellars. Carriages still
roll along the streets, concerts are still crowded by subscribers,
the shops for expensive luxuries still find daily customers while
the workman loiters away his unemployed time in watching
these things, and thinking of the pale, uncomplaining wife at
home, and the wailing children asking in vain for enough of food,
—of the sinking health, of the dying life, of those near and dear
to him. The contrast is too great. Why should he alone suffer
from bad times?
I know that this is not really the case; and I know what is the
truth in such matters: but what I wish to impress is what the
workman feels and thinks.
But there are earnest men among these people, men who
have endured wrongs without complaining, but without ever
forgetting or forgiving those whom (they believe) have caused all
this woe.
Among these was John Barton. His parents had suffered; his
mother had died from absolute want of the necessaries of life.
He himself was a good, steady workman, and, as such, pretty
certain of steady employment. But he spent all he got with the
confidence (you may also call it improvidence) of one who was
willing, and believed himself able, to supply all his wants by his
own exertions. And when his master suddenly failed, and all
hands in the mill were turned back, one Tuesday morning, with
the news that Mr. Hunter had stopped, Barton had only a few
shillings to rely on; but he had good heart of being employed at
some other mill, and accordingly, before returning home, he
spent some hours in going from factory to factory, asking for
work. But at every mill was some sign of depression of trade!
Some were working short hours, some were turning off hands,
and for weeks Barton was out of work, living on credit. It was
 during this time that his little son, the apple of his eye, the
cynosure of all his strong power of love, fell ill of the scarlet
fever. They dragged him through the crisis, but his life hung on a
gossamer thread. Everything, the doctor said, depended on
good nourishment, on generous living, to keep up the little
fellow’s strength, in the prostration in which the fever had left
him. Mocking words! when the commonest food in the house
would not furnish one little meal. Barton tried credit; but it was
worn out at the little provision shops, which were now suffering
in their turn. He thought it would be no sin to steal, and would
have stolen; but he could not get the opportunity in the few days
the child lingered. Hungry himself, almost to an animal pitch of
ravenousness, but with bodily pain swallowed up in anxiety for
his little sinking lad, he stood at one of the shop windows, where
all edible luxuries are displayed; haunches of venison, Stilton
cheeses, moulds of jelly—all appetising sights to the common
passer by. And out of this shop came Mrs. Hunter, his late
employer’s wife! She crossed to her carriage, followed by the
shopman loaded with purchases for a party. The door was
quickly slammed to, and she drove way; and Barton returned
home with a bitter spirit of wrath in his heart, to see his only boy
a corpse!
You can fancy, now, the hoards of vengeance in his heart
against the employers. For there are never wanting those who,
either in speech or in print, find it their interest to cherish such
feelings in the working classes; who know how and when to
rouse the dangerous power at their command; and who use their
knowledge with unrelenting purpose to either party.

Now you know from actual evidence given you in my two

previous lectures that this account is not overstrained. You see how
the writer makes allowances; and how, all allowances made, her
thrust is as deadly as any in Disraeli’s Sybil.
 V
But now comes in the difference. Mrs. Gaskell knew these
people as Disraeli did not. She had lived among them, and to all the
angry protests evoked by Mary Barton she returned, of her
knowledge, gentle, but gently firm answers which could not be
6
refuted. The story, at any rate, exercised at once a “commanding
effect,” and the width of that effect was attested by translations into
many foreign languages—French, German, Spanish, Hungarian and
Finnish.

6
I should mention here, by the way, on Sir
Adolphus Ward’s authority, the virtual certainty
that before writing her own novel she “had
remained quite unacquainted with both
Coningsby and Sybil.”

She did not go on to exploit that success, that effect. She had
said what she had to say; and having found, in the saying of it, her
gift as a writer, she passed on to other things. A very beautiful
necklace of novels was the result. But this serene indifference to
what might with others have meant a very strong “literary” temptation
implied no failing devotion to the poor whose woes the book had,
once for all, championed. Some eighteen years later, in 1862–3, a
time of trouble came over Manchester and South-west Lancashire in
general, which

called forth one of the most notable, and certainly one of the
best-organized efforts of goodwill and charity which this country
has ever seen. In the long struggle between masters and men,
the times of the Lancashire Cotton Famine, due to the outbreak
and continuance of the American Civil War, brought about a
protracted truce, in which the kindly feelings inspired by the self-
 sacrificing efforts of many leading employers of manufacturing
labour cannot but have counted for much.

I am quoting from Sir Adolphus Ward:

Mrs. Gaskell, whose name had so good a sound among the

Lancashire working classes that we hear of an Oldham man
regularly bringing his children to gaze upon the house in
Plymouth Grove where dwelt the authoress of Mary Barton, gave
many proofs in these times of trouble of her readiness to help
suffering in every way in her power.

The relief problem, in short, claimed her almost entirely during

that long tribulation of her people. “We were really glad,” she writes
to a friend, “to check one another in talking of the one absorbing
topic, which was literally haunting us in our sleep, as well as being
our first thoughts in wakening and the last at night.” In organising,
superintending, working sewing-rooms, providing dinners, she would
work for six or seven hours of her day.
The shadow of these and other industrial troubles recurs,
indeed, in some of the later novels, particularly in North and South:
but always you see that with her there is no political axe to grind, nor
scarce a consciousness of there being any such thing: and this
disinterested charitableness leads her, as it were, imperceptibly into
regions of which Disraeli, with all his genius, never won ken. The first
incentive, I have tried to show, operated on both. But whereas he
went off into a life of action—great and powerful action, let all admit
—to return in his old age to revisit with Endymion the glimpses of the
moon and his boyish dreams, this unambitious Victorian lady, having
found her literary talent, went on to employ it with a serenity
unmoved to worship any idols of the market. Glad of course she was
to enjoy and use her gift: very modestly glad (as what true woman or
man is not?) of the recognition it brought, but following the path to
the end to bequeath to the world several noble novels and three
shining masterpieces. Of these, of course, the Life of Charlotte
Brontë is one and Cranford the second: and for the moment I leave
you to guess at the third. For the moment I wish you to picture this
woman. In her writing, as in her daily life, she had no mannerisms.
She copied neither Disraeli, nor Dickens, who also championed the
poor and was moreover her encourager and editor; nor the Brontës,
for all the spell of their genius; nor Trollope, nor George Eliot; though
all were great and flattered her with their admiration. Past them all
we see her quietly keeping the tenor of her way. Now and again she
seems to falter and ask herself—herself, mind you—Is this trouble to
speak the simple truth as best I can, without heat, really worth its
reward as set against the heat and acrimony it provokes? The
strictures passed on her Life of Charlotte Brontë gave her, for a time,
a distaste for it all. But she wrote on, after a little, and on Sunday,
November 12, 1865, killed of a sudden by a pang of the heart—
carried away, as her epitaph at Knutsford (which is “Cranford”) says,
“Without a moment’s warning”—she left her writings all just as clean
and bright as the bunch of her household keys.

Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws,

Makes that, and the action, fine.

VI
I shall pass the catalogue of these writings very quickly in review.
The authoress of Mary Barton was hailed at that time, when novels
were yet few and even poetry but beginning to recover its strength,
by great men and by Dickens especially, who engaged her pen for
the first number of his serial adventure, Household Words. In 1853
appeared her second important novel, Ruth (which possibly
influenced Dickens’ own Hard Times, published a year later). Then in
June, 1853, came Cranford, made into a book from papers
contributed to Household Words between December, 1851, and
May, 1853. North and South ran in Household Words from
September, 1854, to January, 1855, and appeared as a book, with
some slight alterations, in that year. In that year also (on March 31st)
Charlotte Brontë died and Mrs. Gaskell consented, at the old father’s
urgent request, to write the Biography. She gave herself up to the
work and finished it in the spring of 1857. The strictures on it—truth,
as Milton says, never comes into the world but as a bastard—broke
her spirit for a while for all but occasional writing: and then came the
cotton famine, of which I have spoken, to tax all her energies. But
after the stress of this they revived. In 1863 appeared Sylvia’s
Lovers, in 1863–4 Cousin Phillis in the pages of the Cornhill
Magazine. In this magazine (August, 1864–January, 1866) followed
her last story, Wives and Daughters, published soon after in that
year as an unfinished work. So you see the whole tale of it lies within
the central years of the last century, beginning with Mary Barton in
1848 and ending sharply just eighteen years after.

VII
I do not propose to discuss the toll of her work this morning. I
wish that those of you who aspire to write, and are here learning to
write, would study it—for two reasons. For the first, while I admit
many flaws, it seems to me elementally of the best literary breeding,
so urbane it is, so disposedly truthful; so much of the world, quizzing
it; so well aware, all the while, of another. For my second, that here
you have, refuting, an exception to all hasty generalisations about
the nineteenth century, the Victorian Age, horsehair sofas, the
Evangelicals, the Prince Consort, the Great Exhibition of 1851 and
all that bagful of cheap rubbish. In 1851 this lady was writing
Cranford: in 1863 she was writing Cousin Phillis: and considering
that most lovely idyll, I am moved to ask, “Do you, at any rate, know
it, this Sicilian yet most English thing of the mid-nineteenth century?”
I am moved to say, “Yes, Keats is lovely, and was lovely to me alas!
before ever you were born: but quit your gushing and your talk about
‘romantic revivals’—which are but figments invented by fellows who
walk round and round a Grecian urn, appraising it scholastically. Quit
it, and try to make a Grecian urn. The horses on the frieze of the
Parthenon are good horses: but you have as good to study to-day or
to-morrow if you will but take a short journey out to Newmarket and
study them. Which is better?—to watch a gallop between two colts
on a heath, or to bend a congested nose over Ferrex and Porrex?”
To be classical is not to copy the classics: to be classical is to
learn the intelligence of the classics and apply just that to this
present world and particularly to this island of ours so familiar and
yet so romantic.

VIII
I spoke, a while back, of three masterpieces of Mrs. Gaskell,
naming two, leaving you to guess the third. Lay by your Cranford,
and take up and study Cousin Phillis.
I suppose its underlying sadness has kept it out of popular
esteem—this tale of scarcely more than a hundred pages—a pale
and shadowy sister of Cranford. It has none, or little of Cranford’s
pawky fun: it has not Cranford’s factitious happy ending. But it beats
me to guess how any true critic can pass it over and neglect a thing
with all that is best in Theocritus moving in rustic English hearts. And
it is not invented. It has in all its movements the suggestion of things
actually seen—of small things that could not have occurred to any
mind save that of an eye-witness—of small recognitions, each in its
turn a little flash of light upon the steady background of rural
England. It is England and yet pure Virgil—as purely Virgilian as the
vignette, in the Fourth Georgic, of the old man of Corycus tilling his
scanty acres:

nec fertilis ilia juvencis

Nec pecori opportuna seges nec commoda Baccho—

who yet brought home his own-grown vegetables at night and cast
them on the table, in his mind equal to the wealth of kings. I shall
read you two passages—the first of young Paul’s introduction, by his
cousin Phillis, to her father the ex-minister and Virgilian scholar
turned farmer and labouring with his hinds—

“There is father!” she exclaimed, pointing out to me a man in

his shirt-sleeves, taller by the head than the other two with whom
he was working. We only saw him through the leaves of the ash-
trees growing in the hedge, and I thought I must be confusing
the figures, or mistaken: that man still looked like a very powerful
labourer, and had none of the precise demureness of
appearance which I had always imagined was the characteristic
of a minister. It was the Reverend Ebenezer Holman, however.
He gave us a nod as we entered the stubble-field; and I think he
would have come to meet us, but that he was in the middle of
giving some directions to his men. I could see that Phillis was
built more after his type than her mother’s. He, like his daughter,
was largely made, and of a fair, ruddy complexion, whereas hers
was brilliant and delicate. His hair had been yellow or sandy, but
now was grizzled. Yet his grey hairs betokened no failure in
strength. I never saw a more powerful man—deep chest, lean
flanks, well-planted head. By this time we were nearly up to him;
and he interrupted himself and stepped forwards, holding out his
hand to me, but addressing Phillis.
“Well, my lass, this is cousin Manning, I suppose. Wait a
minute, young man, and I’ll put on my coat, and give you a
decorous and formal welcome. But—Ned Hall, there ought to be
a water-furrow across this land: it’s a nasty, stiff, clayey, dauby
bit of ground, and thou and I must fall to, come next Monday—I
beg your pardon, cousin Manning—and there’s old Jem’s
cottage wants a bit of thatch; you can do that job to-morrow,
while I am busy.” Then, suddenly changing the tone of his deep
bass voice to an odd suggestion of chapels and preachers, he
added, “Now I will give out the psalm: ‘Come all harmonious
tongues,’ to be sung to ‘Mount Ephraim’ tune.”
He lifted his spade in his hand, and began to beat time with
it; the two labourers seemed to know both words and music,
 though I did not; and so did Phillis: her rich voice followed her
father’s, as he set the tune; and the men came in with more
uncertainty, but still harmoniously. Phillis looked at me once or
twice, with a little surprise at my silence; but I did not know the
words. There we five stood, bareheaded, excepting Phillis, in the
tawny stubble-field, from which all the shocks of corn had not yet
been carried—a dark wood on one side, where the wood-
pigeons were cooing; blue distance, seen through the ash-trees,
on the other. Somehow, I think that, if I had known the words,
and could have sung, my throat would have been choked up by
the feeling of the unaccustomed scene.
The hymn was ended, and the men had drawn off, before I
could stir. I saw the minister beginning to put on his coat, and
looking at me with friendly inspection in his gaze, before I could
rouse myself.

And now let me read you this exquisite passage—there are many
almost as lovely—of Phillis in love, walking with her cousin Paul—
alas! not her beloved.

We talked about the different broods of chickens, and she

showed me the hens that were good mothers, and told me the
characters of all the poultry with the utmost good-faith; and in all
good-faith I listened, for I believe there was a great deal of truth
in all she said. And then we strolled on into the wood beyond the
ash-meadow, and both of us sought for early primroses and the
fresh green crinkled leaves. She was not afraid of being alone
with me after the first day. I never saw her so lovely, or so happy.
I think she hardly knew why she was so happy all the time. I can
see her now, standing under the budding branches of the grey
trees, over which a tinge of green seemed to be deepening day
after day, her sun-bonnet fallen back on her neck, her hands full
of delicate wood-flowers, quite unconscious of my gaze, but
intent on sweet mockery of some bird in neighbouring bush or
tree. She had the art of warbling, and replying to the notes of
different birds, and knew their song, their habits and ways, more
 accurately than any one else I ever knew. She had often done it
at my request the spring before; but this year she really gurgled,
and whistled, and warbled, just as they did, out of the very
fulness and joy of her heart. She was more than ever the very
apple of her father’s eye; her mother gave her both her own
share of love and that of the dead child who had died in infancy.
I have heard cousin Holman murmur, after a long dreamy look at
Phillis, and tell herself how like she was growing to Johnnie, and
soothe herself with plaintive inarticulate sounds, and many
gentle shakes of the head, for the aching sense of loss she
would never get over in this world.

My eyes, to be sure, are not what they were: but to them the
prose of this shimmers with beauty. In Mrs. Gaskell, as with many
another ageing writer, one can detect towards the close a certain
sunset softness—a haze, we may call it—in which many hard
experiences are reconciled. To take the highest, we agree that it so
happened to Shakespeare. To step down to the man with whom for a
study in the differences of literary genius starting from a like
incentive—the woes of the poor, and operating in the same literary
form, the novel—I have been—I hope, Gentlemen, not whimsically—
contrasting this very noble lady, we know that in his later days, in
Endymion, Disraeli saw his youth so, casting back to it. And you,
maybe, will say that these sunset softening colours are all a mirage.
Well, a great deal of it all is that. I believe that, as you grow older,
you will find yourselves more and more tending to make less, and
still less, account of definitions, of sharp outlines and judgments
based on them; of anybody’s positive assertions, be he never so
young.

IX
I have been speaking, however, to-day of one whose measure in
any light has never to my thinking been accurately taken. The crew
of Odysseus were Greeks. They beached their ship (says Homer) on
the isle of the Laestrygonians: and there came down to them the
Queen of the Laestrygonians, “a woman as tall as a mountain,” and
they hated her. The Victorian Age lent itself to excess; and its
excessive figures are our statues for some to deface or bedaub. But
I, who have purposely compared Elizabeth Gaskell with her most
ornate contemporary, dare to prophesy that when criticism has sifted
all out, she will come to her own, as a woman of genius, sweetly
proportioned as a statue, yet breathing; one of these writers we call
by that vain word—so vain, so pathetic even when used of the
greatest poet—“immortal.”
 ANTHONY TROLLOPE
THE BARSETSHIRE NOVELS

I
A few months ago I asked a publisher if he had ever thought of
venturing on a complete edition of Trollope, and was answered that
he had thought of it often, but doubted it would not pay. A few weeks
ago I referred this answer to an eminent bookseller, and he praised
the publisher’s judgment. I retain my belief that the pair of them are
mistaken: for let the name of Trollope be mentioned in any company
of novel-lovers, almost to a certainty one or two will kindle, avow a
passion for him, and start a chorus of lament that there exists no
complete worthy edition of him.
“All Balzac’s novels occupy one shelf”—and all Trollope’s would
occupy a plaguey long one. Some of them, too, are hasty, baddish
novels. None the less, I see that shelf as one of trusted and familiar
resort for such a number of my fellows as would fill a respectable
subscription-list: and, anyhow, it remains a scandal that certain good
works of his—The Eustace Diamonds, for instance—are
unprocurable save by advertising for second-hand copies. Mr.
Humphrey Milford, of the Oxford University Press, has recently
printed The Claverings and The Belton Estate in the World’s
Classics, with the Autobiography, which did, as it happened, about
as much harm as a perfectly honest book could do to an honest
man’s fame. Messrs. Chatto & Windus—whom, as Cicero would say,
“I name for the sake of honour,” as publishers who respect their
moral contract to keep an author’s books alive while they can—have
kept on sale some eight or nine, including The American Senator,
The Way We Live Now, and The Golden Lion of Grandpré; and the
famous Barsetshire six, of which Messrs. George Bell now offer us a
 7
cheap and pleasant reprint, have always been (as they say in
Barset) “come-at-able” in some form or another. But while three full
editions of Stevenson have been subscribed for since his death in
1894 (the first of them fetching far more than the original price), and
his sale in cheaper editions has been high and constant, Trollope,
who died in 1882, has, in these forty-odd years, received no
gratitude of public recognition at all answerable to his deserts.

7
Trollope’s Barsetshire Novels: (1) The
Warden, (2) Barchester Towers, (3) Dr. Thorne,
(4) Framley Parsonage, (5) The Small House at
Allington (2 vols.), (6) The Last Chronicle of
Barset (2 vols.) 8 vols. 25s. the set. (Bell &
Sons.)

It is a curious business in two ways. For the first, the rebirth of

Trollope’s fame, with the growing readiness of an admirer to cast
away apology and hail a fellow-admirer as a friend “by adoption
tried,” has nothing esoteric about it. A passion for Peacock, or for
Landor—as a passion for Pindar—you may share with a friend as a
half-masonic, half-amorous secret. But there can be no such
freemasonry over Trollope, who is as English as a cut off the joint or
a volume of Punch. For the second curiosity, I suppose that no man
ever wrote himself down at a more delicately ill-chosen time than did
Trollope by the publication (posthumous) of his Autobiography in
1883. It was a brave—if unconsciously brave—and candid book. But
it fell on a generation of young men fired in literature by Flaubert, in
painting (say) by Whistler; on a generation just beginning to be
flamboyant over “art for art’s sake,” the mot juste, and the rest. It all
seems vain enough at this distance, and the bigots of each
successive iron time will always be arraigning their fathers’ harmless
art, no doubt to the ultimate advancement of letters. But by young
men quite honestly and frenetically devoted to chiselling out English
as though (God rest them!) in obedience to a Higher Power, it may