International adoption and Anglo-American internationalism, c. 1918-1925

The plight of children became symbolic of the disintegration of European society during the First World War and the conflagrations that bookended it: the Armenian Genocide and the Russian Civil War. Breaking free from the laws of war presumed to undergird conflict in ‘civilised’ European societies, the violence of the early twentieth century directly targeted civilians. In this context, children’s suffering took on a broader symbolic meaning, and ‘rescued’ children became a powerful metaphor for European reconstruction and hopes for a peaceful, prosperous future. Children – the workers and citizens of tomorrow – were deemed essential for the future prosperity of their own nations, and, by extension, for the international order. This article examines the centrality of children to the ‘new internationalism’ of the years following the First World War, as expressed by a host of prominent British and American humanitarian organisations. While international adoption and child sponsorship programmes seem, on the surface, to exemplify the spirit of progressive internationalism, the ‘new world order’ that internationalist humanitarians sought to create was not new at all. Helping children was, most often, an attempt on the part of aid organizations to reinscribe ethnic and class-based hierarchies in a chaotic post-war world. Yet, positing the sponsorship and adoption of children as the prime means to alleviate their suffering, interwar humanitarians created the orphans they described. In the aftermath of the First World War child relief fundamentally disrupted the very communities and families that humanitarians sought to save.