THE principal feature of the history of workcamping in the fifteen years following the Second World War was the adoption and adaptation of voluntary manual service by a plethora of organizations of differing ideologies. No matter how slight these differences sometimes were, by 1955 it was still hardly possible to speak of a 'workcamp movement', even referring only to the idealistic stream and using the word 'movement' in the broad sense.
Service Civil International no longer occupied its pre-war position as the main current in the multiple stream of idealistic workcamping. It was but one among many movements using workcamping to further the ends of their own ideologies. To cater for the numerous young people who wanted to render social service but not to forward a given ideology, non-ideological sponsors did hold workcamps without having an ideology. But that was precisely because workcamping was no longer wedded or even closely related to the single civilist ideology. It had become an activity that any youth movement could organize. In the idealistic stream of its development, as in the economic, workcamping was no longer a movement. It was a method.
Idealistic workcamping was also very much an international phenomenon and the need for an international structure for co-operation among organizations soon became evident. In 1947 a group of like-minded bodies (SCI, the 'peace churches' and Scandinavian workcamp bodies, later joined by two German organizations) created an association of International Workcamps for Peace. Hampered by what Wolfgang Sonntag calls 'a tragicomic lack of means',(1) the Association found it difficult to maintain a uniformly high level of performance.
To remedy the situation, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) convened, in April 1948. the First Conference of Organizers of International Voluntary Workcamps. Although held at Unesco's temporary Headquarters --- the imposing Majestic Hotel in Paris --- the meeting was no paper-laden gathering of diplomats. 'Was this a typical conference in the grand manner?' rhetorically asked a Unesco reporter. 'Not at all. There was no great hall filled with stuffy furniture, no formally dressed delegates, no guards to keep the public out. There were even a few hobnailed boots to bring everything down to earth.'(2) Eighteen organizations sent delegates from Eastern and Western Europe and the United States. Observers (including a Belgian baron) represented several European and the American governments as well as international youth movements.
The Conference created the Co-ordination Committee of International Voluntary Workcamps (known as CoCo) and requested Unesco's help in setting up a permanent Committee secretariat. After careful study, this request was granted. Unesco's budget was trifling, its priorities many, and only a tiny percentage could be spared for workcamping. But the small cash grant was supplemented by aid in kind: Unesco found a small corner in its overcrowded Headquarters for the Co-ordination Committee to set up shop. The conditions were makeshift, but workcamping had an international centre, staffed by Willy Begert and his wife, Dora, who received only subsistence salaries. Willy and Dora, remembers a later Co-ordination Committee secretary, 'worked in the cellar of Unesco, sitting on wooden boxes, working on an old table and a discarded typewriter.'(3)
Youth association organizers' meetings can at best be little more than necessary periodic evils. Still, the Co-ordination Committee's conferences and training projects, permeated by a business-like atmosphere, have marked the stages of voluntary service's --- and its own --- evolution.
After a European training seminar in 1951, the Committee held in 1956 a regional course for workcamp leaders at Unesco's Arab States Fundamental Education Centre in the UAR. A series of similar projects for the Asian Region were initiated in India the same year with the help of its President, Rajendra Prasad, who had visited Pierre Ceresole's intercontinental team twenty-two years before. In 1958 the Committee's 11th World Conference was held in New Delhi --- the first outside Europe --- both to stimulate workcamping in the developing countries and to promote special workcamps on the theme of Unesco's Major Project for mutual appreciation between Orient and Occident.(4)
Also in 1958, when most of sub-Saharan Africa was still under colonial domination, the Committee held its first regional workcamp leader training project in newly independent Ghana. Trainees from governmental and private, Catholic and Protestant, student and farmer agencies in English- and French-speaking countries learnt in the most effective way possible how to organize a workcamp --- by organizing one. Trainees later launched workcamp programmes in Cameroun, Togo and Nigeria. During the Christmas holiday (summer in South America) of 1960 the first Latin American course was organized in a Paraguay Bruderhof.
Meanwhile, reflecting the expanding and diversifying use of workcamping, Co-ordination Committee Conference in Europe alternated with those in the developing countries. Held in Niska Banja, Yugoslavia, the 12th Conference was attended by Spaniards and Portuguese as well as Russians and a Pole, Indians and a Pakistani as well as a Ghanaian and a Togolese. It opened a path to volunteers exchanges between Eastern and Western Europe.
The 1962 Conference---with typewriters, mimeograph machine and even simultaneous translation paraphernalia---trekked to the bush village of N'Kpwang, Cameroun. After the meeting, the principal result of which was to strengthen African workcamping, members of the conference helped N'Kpwang farmers and the host Action Paysanne (Peasant Action) association to build a model village. They were also drubbed in a football match against a local team by the ignominious score of 21 : 1.
In 1964, the 14th Conference was the scene-of perhaps the only recorded official meeting between representatives of the US Peace Corps and the Committee of Soviet Youth Organizations, as well as of a rare presence at the same conference table of the Western-oriented World Assembly of Youth and its rival Communist World Federation of Democratic Youth, and workcamp sponsors from East and West Germany.(5) These historic encounters caused the Mayor of Linz, Austria (the host city), to hope out loud that the meeting would be 'a bridge between Moscow and Washington'.(6) The Conference did not linger long over political differences. It had more urgent business to attend to: re-vamping the Co-ordination Committee to bring it in line with recent developments of voluntary youth service.
The most phenomenal recent development was the creation of a multitude of schemes for sending young people from industrialized nations to work in developing countries on a long-term basis. Clearly many long-term volunteers were imbued with the 'workcamp spirit'. But, just as clearly, there were basic differences between workcamping and long-term service. Noting both similarities and differences. the Conference broadened the Committee's mandate and changed its name to 'Co-ordinating Committee for International Voluntary Service'.
By definition, CoCo has been a collective effort. Yet it is not difficult to single out an individual as the chief artisan of its progress. When, before the war, Hans-Peter Muller left his native Switzerland at the age of nineteen to manage a fashionable New Delhi hotel his ideas were passably conventional, and he was interested in quite the opposite of voluntary service. The stupidity of colonial racial segregation set him thinking and by the time the International Red Cross Committee hired him to help supervise post-war prisoner of war repatriation, he was ripe for workcamping. 'In Poland, in 1948, I first saw the young pioneers at work [rebuilding] Warsaw,' he remembers.
It impressed me so much I wrote a report about this and how the same method of voluntary constructive service should be publicised and encouraged in the West. I sent it to Unesco. Unesco told me about SCI. I became a member of SCI ...(7)
Hans-Peter replaced Willy Begert as Co-ordinating Committee secretary and travelled several times around the world. With no expense account, and often living on less than a dollar a day, he led the Committee --- and helped to nurse workcamping --- through the crises in the next chapter. Until recently he headed UNA's International Service department.
The Co-ordinating Committee for International Voluntary Service enjoys specially favoured status with Unesco.(8) It counts one hundred and eighteen affiliates in forty-five countries --- many members are international and have branches in still other nations --- on all continents and representing a broad spectrum of political convictions, religious faiths and programme types and sizes. These range from the Thai Young Buddhists Association and tiny Lagos Voluntary Workcamps Association and Madras Student Social Service League, to the British Volunteer Programme, World Union of Jewish Students, Committee of Soviet Youth Organizations, World Council of Churches, International Builder Companions and Indian Bharat Sevak Samaj.
Nevertheless, the Committee's progress has been far from smooth, its present situation is problematic and its pattern of future growth anything but certain. In fact, its evolution epitomizes the unsteady advance of voluntary service itself.
An early and continuing problem has been CoCo's nongovernmental character. In some countries, its affiliates are outspoken opponents of certain of their governments' policies --- the Southern Africa Workcamps Association was finally shut down for this reason. Elsewhere (e.g. in Spain and Eastern Europe) their views tend to agree with those of their governments. But everywhere its members are entities distinct from the State. Much of the Committee's strength lies in this nongovernmental character, for it is more flexible and more universal than would otherwise be the case. If, for example, East-West workcamping had waited for governmental initiative, it is unlikely that any volunteers would yet have been exchanged in a crucial scheme now in its twelfth year.
Being a non-governmental body is also a great weakness. A weakness from the financial point of view firstly, for private agencies are notorious paupers, with few exceptions even among State-aided voluntary service organizations. A weakness, secondly, as regards representation. judging from the numbers of young people mobilized, governments are the chief sponsors both of national civic service corps in the developing countries and of bilateral international long-term volunteer schemes such as the Peace Corps. Although benefiting from the Co-ordinating Committee's services, such governments cannot join a nongovernmental body. On the other hand. the creation of a joint governmental-non-governmental agency, both fish and fowl, would be problematic to say the least.
Some structure for co-operation among government-sponsored programmes, particularly in the field of long-term bilateral service, proved necessary after the birth of the U S Peace Corps. In 1962, the United States called an inter-governmental conference at San Juan, Puerto Rico, which led to the creation of an International Peace Corps Secretariat., later renamed International Secretariat for Volunteer Service (ISVS). Financed and staffed by several --- and principally the American, Dutch and West German governments(9) --- ISVS has organized a series of seminars and conferences and published a number of technical documents, all concerned primarily with government-sponsored voluntary service schemes. There is an unfortunate duplication of effort between CoCo and ISVS, yet for juridical among other reasons it is improbable that one will absorb the other. or that both will form a joint body, in the near future.
A second problem facing CoCo has arisen from a fundamental difference of concept. Already in the 1930s there were two separate types of youth service, which we have called the economic and the idealistic streams. In the decade following the Second World War this division reappeared, the economic stream in Eastern Europe and the idealistic in the West. The difference between the two was less clear cut than earlier, however. They even overlapped.
In the Eastern countries, great numbers of young men and women were mobilized, but these were not jobless workers looking for a place 'to get a start', and the mass brigades were voluntary. In contrast to many pre-war labour camps, there were large numbers, though these appeared symbolic by comparison with volunteer totals, of international participants, and lectures and discussions were an integral part of their programmes. In brief, although emphasis still lay on the short-term economic goal of reconstruction, education --- and particularly international education --- was also an important goal.
In the West, the minuscule pre-war workcamp movement had widened into generalized use of the workcamp method and significant numbers, not to say masses, of young people were mobilized. Although every effort was made to ensure continued international participation and proper organization of intellectual activities, the overriding concern was often to get ahead with the reconstruction task at hand. In short, although the idealistic stream of workcamping still stressed the long-term objective of internationalism, it recognized the importance of going beyond symbolism and making a discernible short-term economic impact not on a single village or county, but on a nation or a continent.
It is not unrealistic to think that through the Co-ordinating Committee, which leading post-war exponents of both streams of workcamping helped found, a synthesis could have been achieved. A new kind of voluntary youth service could have resulted in increased exchange of ideas and volunteers between East and West, a service mobilizing many thousands of local and foreign young people in each country every year, and stressing equally short-term economic and long-term idealistic objectives. This synthesis was approached by the international brigades of the Yugoslav work drives. But in these, young people from abroad were generally grouped in one camp and had little contact with the thousands of Yugoslav volunteers working in national teams.
The synthesis did not take place, partly because CoCo's meagre resources barely enabled it to keep pace with the day-today tasks of maintaining minimum liaison among members and turning out publicity to attract other organizations and prospective volunteers. The main reason, however, was that with the exception of Yugoslavia Eastern organizations left the Committee with the onset of the cold war. In 1950, Jeunesse et Reconstruction's delegate to the 3rd Organizers' Conference recalled that 'workcamps' aim is to develop international understanding', expressed his 'astonishment that all workcamp organizations present at this Conference belong to the same geographical area', and found it 'abnormal not to know how work is done in the camps not represented.'(10) The Korean war began two months after these remarks were made and the 'abnormal' situation lasted for ten years, until the Niska Banja Conference, since which more Eastern organizations have joined the Co-ordinating Committee than were present in it before 1950.
Once again, as we shall see below, some industrialized and numerous developing countries are embarking on mass youth mobilization schemes on a national scale and with short-term goals. In the same countries, small, sometimes minuscule workcamp organizations with long-range, internationalist aims struggle to organize a few camps each year. The synthesis between the two main streams of voluntary youth service can yet be achieved, and the Co-ordinating Committee for International Voluntary Service could play a vital role in achieving it.
At least one European workcamp organization is still repairing the damage of the Second World War. Created in 1958 by a pastor, Dr Lothar Kreyssig, the German Aktion Sühnezeichen (AS---Atonement Action) aims to aid countries that suffered under Nazi rule. Teams of young German Christians from this group have built, among other projects, a children's home in the Netherlands, an irrigation system in Greece and, in a Lyons (France) suburb, a synagogue that an American reporter termed 'the pride of the town'.(11)
But AS is an exception. By the mid 1950s European reconstruction was terminated. Where could volunteers with little more than two hands. strong backs and good will turn? Jeunesse et Reconstruction found that 'little by little the tasks of reconstruction lost their topical character and became the province of professional workers. Any attempt to have youth participate in them only met with scepticism.'(12) SCI's European projects fell from a peak of 52 camps mobilizing 2,022 volunteers in 11 countries in 1948 to 33 camps, and 1,360 participants in 10 countries in 1953.(13)
In the Eastern countries, the pause was still more perceptible. Yugoslavia's 'leaders wisely decided not to prolong the climate of collective enthusiasm, exalting for the visiting friend but trying for the citizen',(14) and the voluntary work drives halted temporarily in 1953. After the events of 1956, Service to Poland was thoroughly rethought. Following the streamlining of Polish youth organizations, a new service body was created in 1958, Ochotnitcze Hufce Pracy (OHP---Volunteer Labour Squadrons). In 1963. 25,676 volunteers worked in OHP's national camps which have become a widely popular summer youth activity.(15)
The evolution from post-war to present-day mass voluntary labour in the Eastern countries is comparable to the transition that took place among elite Soviet workers in the 1930s from the udarnik labour movement to Stakhanovitism. In each instance, the first period stressed brawn and quantitative output, the second stimulated, trained and applied intelligence to achieve qualitative improvement of production.
By the mid fifties workcamp organizers everywhere in the economically advanced countries were in a questioning mood. From his vantage point in the Co-ordinating Committee secretariat, Hans-Peter Muller called it 'the agonizing re-appraisal period'.(16) The central dilemma was one of finding appropriate jobs for volunteers. Physical labour was the keystone of workcamping but, with the end of reconstruction, there was a sudden dearth of manual projects. A recent article published by Concordia France sums up the problem: 'After the war, it was the existence of work to be done that created the workcamp formula; nowadays, it is the will to carry on the workcamp formula that obliges us to seek out work.'(17)
The search for manual work led to the expanded use of agricultural camps. These often proved disappointing, however, for volunteers felt they were looked on as cheap labour and saw little social significance in the projects. Physical labour may be the keystone of workcamping, they thought, but just any physical labour will not do. Socially useful projects had to be found, the hunt for them had to be systematized.
In 1959, French workcamp organizations once again banded together --- this time for good --- in Cotravaux, a government-assisted clearing house whose main function is project prospection. Through its links with national ministries and local authorities, Cotravaux annually harvests a crop of projects that surpasses the possibilities of all French workcamp organizations together. Thus the situation evolved from a lack of work to an overabundance of jobs to be done. This is because in France, as elsewhere, the nature of projects has changed. The workcamp method was and is still in the process of being re-defined.
'Manual work, by the physical effort it requires and the healthy fatigue it produces,' says Concordia France, 'holds for each volunteer the value of a sometimes unique personal experience. But a work party only becomes a community when the common task is able to bind the effort of each one to the collective effort. . . . '(18) The search for common tasks of compelling social importance has revealed a new dimension in voluntary workcamping, a dimension as complex and delicate as post-war reconstruction was simple and straightforward, the human dimension.
'What happens to a project or to the potential participant when the willing worker is not enough?' asks a knowledgeable American organizer. 'When a strong back will not help? When a project deals with subtle community relationships, the participant with a kitchen knowledge of the language is not adequate.'(19)
It will be useful to give a description, with examples, of typical main variations on the theme of voluntary service which inventive organizers have produced since the mid 1950s.(20) These span the range of needs insufficiently or not at all attended to by governments and private welfare agencies, from catastrophe relief projects (where social work is of secondary importance) to volunteer social service (in which physical labour is incidental) and East-West camps (whose work projects are not always urgent tasks). Roughly --- very roughly, for there are many nuances --- present-day youth service in the industrialized countries may be divided into two categories: projects helping primarily people with and for whom volunteers work, and projects whose benefit accrues mainly to participants.