This is a CTP of initiative: RIPESS/ Groupe Terre (Belgium)
Terre asbl was officially created in 1963, even though many of its members had begun their work well before through an Emmaus community, as mentioned in the “related events” part. The main objective of both associations (ie. Emmaus and Terre) was to collect materials and sell them in order to finance solidarity projects. However, what made Terre distinct from the Emmaus community was its willingness to strengthen existing processes by 1) rationalizing the collections (parking a great number of trucks at a same location strategically chosen one Saturday a month), 2) attracting a great number of volunteers by implementing a strategy of recruitment, which ultimately allowed more than 1000 people to volunteer on Saturdays at the end of the 1960s. As our interviewee explains, the volunteers not only helped with the collections but also with the organization: “There were committees which took place once a week to organize collections 3 or 4 months ahead; there were people who took their cars to find volunteers in small villages; there were youth movements which dispensed bags to neighbourhoods and came back the week after to collect their donations”. As we can see, the work of the association relied heavily on volunteers at the beginnings.
During the 1960s, the benefits of those collections were exclusively used to finance industrial projects in developing countries. At first, the approach consisted in providing financial support to existing projects in countries such as Guatemala, without any follow-up or monitoring. However, they realized soon enough that the money was not used efficiently: in response, they decided as from the mid-1960s to take a more pro-active stance. It was decided that volunteers would also be sent to those countries in order to ensure, monitor and coordinate the implementation of projects, especially in Algeria and India where the major projects took place during the 1960s. In Algeria, Terre asbl helped the creation of a plaster manufacture. In India, it was a brush factory at first, which rapidly switched to ship building activities to respond to the local needs: As the interviewee explains, the idea was to “give the opportunity to fishermen to be able to build or improve themselves their boats by putting an engine, in order to uplift their livehoods. We thought that, if they were able to fish in high seas, they would suffer less from the competition with industrial boats”.
During the 1970s, the “collections here financing projects there” principle kept on but on other projects. The connections between the volunteers here and there developed as well, as our interviewee explains: “The people who did the collections one Saturday a month often ended up the day by listening to the tapes sent by the volunteers abroad. There was a regular dialogue between volunteers here and there”. However, it became more difficult to find volunteers from the end of the 1970s.
The idea to develop projects in the South responded to several socio-economic or socio-technique evolutions which happened in the 1960s. Among them, two were crucial: the sustained economic growth as well as the breakthrough of television in the West, including in Europe.
Terre asbl was created in the middle of the “golden 1960s”, a period of dramatic changes characterized by rising living standards, allowed by sustained economic growth. In fact, the “golden 1960s” were part of the “Trente glorieuses”, a term which usually refers to the prosperous thirty years following WWII in countries like France or Belgium. These “Trente glorieuses” benefited to Belgian people through job creation, increase in salaries, working time reduction, extension of social security etc. At the same time, governments and municipalities developed public services (ie. education, healthcare system, telecommunications etc.) and came to provide efficient assistance to the most vulnerable people. Consequently, the founders of Terre perceived less value in developing social projects in Wallonia in comparison with the previous decade. They decided to orientate their actions towards the “third world”, following an expression firstly coined in 1952 by Alfred Sauvy (a French demographer) to designate what we could call today “less developed countries”. The actions of Terre would be essentially aimed at helping economic development in such countries throughout the 1960s and the 1970s.
Another dramatic evolution which took place at the time and which helps understanding the willingness to develop projects in the South is the breakthrough of television. During the 1950s, individual household televisions were still uncommon, as our interviewee recalls: “At that time, only few people had TV at their house. I remember, I was a kid, and there was only one TV for the whole building (and there were more than 10 flats), so we had to go to the neighbours to watch TV”. In 1960, the first newscast was launched in Belgium, followed by the transformation of TV into a mass market during the 1960s, allowed, among others, by the increasing purchasing power. This socio-technique evolution had tremendous consequences on the perception of foreign countries by Belgian people. It allowed them to develop or further their knowledge about what was going on in the world, as well as associate images to that. As our interviewee summarizes, “TV became a fantastic window on the world, including misery and poverty in the South. This helps explaining why they decided to use their know-how to develop projects in the South”. As a consequence, the founders of Terre decided to use the skills they had developed in order to support third-world countries.
If Terre asbl was officially created in 1963, its genesis goes back to the post-World War II (WWII) period. Indeed, in 1949, a group of about 60 local volunteers from a small village (Vivegnis) in the region of Liège (Belgium) started gathering in order to collect several items, including papers and paperboards, textile or non-ferrous metal so as to support people who had suffered material losses from WWII. The benefits of the collections would be used to provide financial and material support to those populations, such as helping them to repair or find housing, providing them with heating etc. This small group of volunteers, heavily influenced by the philosophy and actions of Abbé Pierre, formalized their activities by creating one of the first Emmaüs working communities. Abbé Pierre came himself at the beginning of the 1950s to visit the association and provide his support.
However, in 1962, a group of people within the Emmaus community felt the need to change the name of the association, given its explicit Catholic reference in a very socialist region. A more practical reason was the willingness to receive financial or material support from the municipalities around (by seeking volunteers or lending trucks), which would require more neutrality. Finally, it was decided that the working community of Vivegnis would remain, whereas another association, Terre asbl, would be created in 1963, notably at the initiative of William Wauters, father of the actual President of Groupe Terre.
What is striking is that debates were not just about the name, but also about the objectives of both associations. The working community of Vivegnis would keep on developing projects in order to provide support to Belgian people, while Terre asbl would carry out its activities in order to support people in the third world. In this way, they would undertake complementary activities, aimed at providing support to vulnerable people in Belgium and elsewhere.
Terre has developed its activities in the Southern world as a counterweight to the politics of cooperation led by western countries in the 1960s, on the grounds that these politics were interest-driven and dependent on the “emotional charity” of Westerners. In a book published in 1991 (“Par-delà le règne des illusions. La vérité est en plein dans la rue”), William Wauters, one of the founders of Terre, was very critical of the politics of cooperation, qualified as complicit in the economic balance of western countries, highly based on the underdevelopment of other countries. In his opinion, temporary cooperation measures (consisting in bringing to countries like Algeria, India or Bolivia temporary help in the form of drugs, clinics or educational missions) were ineffective, and did not help to resolve any of the fundamental problems of underdevelopment, leaving southern countries even more underdeveloped and debt-distressed. They were short-sighted and aimed at fostering the dependence of underdeveloped countries on developed countries.
As he clearly explained in his book, the group wanted to distance itself from this vision of cooperation and bring something different, based on empowerment: “the group didn’t want to be one of the many movements that served as a safety valve regarding the consequences of the emerging neo-colonialism. Indeed, if most of the actions towards the third world were linked to political and religious interests of the western world, they tended to mitigate the adverse effects of neo-colonialism. However, the war and the post-war period had shown that people’s situations were fundamentally linked to their economic realities” (Wauters, 1991, p.40-41). Consequently, for Terre members, development was understood as a series of actions allowing populations to enhance their own natural resources. This is why Terre decided to implement exclusively industrial projects in the South: these only could change the socio-economic realities of populations, by allowing them to ensure themselves their development, without being forced to lend a helping hand to Western countries.
The stance was anti-colonialist for sure, in a period when “a vast movement for independence was beginning to shake this world which Alfred Sauvy had called, as from 1952, the third World. [...] For the third world, this consisted in getting rid of the settlers and becoming again the masters of their own destiny and wealth. For the western countries, the convulsions of independence were seen as a way to preserve the gains of the colonies” (Wauters, 1991, p.36). At the time, bilateral assistance was left in the hands of the Belgian ministries of Foreign Affairs but also of External trade, showing, in the eyes of William Wauters, the purity of Belgian institutions intentions.
Terre anticipated the high potential of volunteerism in the post-war world period. Having suffered from the atrocities and the poverty alleviation of WWII, many people from the working class were eager to give some time in order to help others. Indeed, volunteerism is a modern form of solidarity which emerged with the industrial revolution and which would become more and more distinct from charity. Isabelle Durand, a French sociologist explained in an article (“Le bénévolat, un temps social au service de la solidarité”) that “the volunteer makes a free contribution; he/she gives time to others without obligation, selflessly. [...] The diversity of the theoretical foundations of volunteerism makes it a complex social phenomenon. It associates individual action, organized action and collective action in a same organization, the association” (Durand, 2006). In that sense, volunteerism can be seen as a way to “make society”, by diffusing a new economic message in opposition with utilitarianism where the maximization of each individual utility represents the only collective ideal possible. Through that way, Terre spread an alternative political message questioning the fundamental role of economy. From a more pragmatic point of view, its development would have never happened without volunteers, who, until the launch of Project Wallonia in 1980 (see other CTP on that point), were at the heart of the association. Indeed, the group showed a capacity to adapt its objectives to the social-economic situation of the moment: in that sense, it was able to capture at the right time societal interests and consequently to increase its capacity of mobilization.
Regarding the projects in the South, Terre was driven by a strong vision of what support to third world countries should be about, as we have seen in the “contestation” part. Even though some adjustments were required (see “learning” category), the development of economic projects in the South, aiming at fostering empowerment and autonomy would allow competence development, which would be then used again in the framework of projects at the Belgian level. In other words, the skills acquired in the South would benefit to projects in the North later-on. It would also push Terre to become a pioneer of the renewal of the social economy movement in the end of the 1970s, given its 20 year expertise in this field. Even though it is not quite sure if such large-scale repercussion was anticipated by its pioneers, it revealed over time large benefits, at least in terms of legitimacy.
The first lesson is that Terre could never have existed without a solidarity movement translated into people’s involvement in fighting poverty: « it has always been a popular adventure since the beginning. This adventure has gathered together men and women with low status and most often without money. But they had intelligence and harms; they could, though a common effort, provide the means for actions”. (William Wauters, 1991, p.38). This historical weight of civil society in solidarity projects led to a vision according to which social innovation would come from the citizens, and not the State. As Salvatore Vetro explains, “the problem of the State is that it is not innovative. However, we deal with fields where you have to be innovative and, for that, I have much more confidence in citizenship and the innovation capacity of citizens. The State is able to pick something up and institutionalize and organize it. The State can also foster the emergence of an innovative civil society”.
Regarding more specifically the development of projects of the South, an early lesson was the necessity to develop end-to-end projects, which meant sending volunteers on the ground. In order to exemplify this, we will take the example of a sawmill project in Guatemala in the 1960s, narrated by William Wauters: “In 1963, Terre organized a big day of collections within the city territory of Liège in order to finance a sawmill project in Guatemala That day, around 1500 volunteers, using 45 trucks, collected 300 tonnes of papers, 67 tonnes of textiles, 50 tonnes of non-ferrous metals and 350 tonnes of ferrous metals. The whole thing was worth 700 000 francs. A volunteer had been trained to install and operate the sawmill. [...] After few months, the first pieces of information were far from satisfactory and uncertainty began [...] The results were very clear and very surprising. In the region of Guatemala where the sawmill was supposed to be, there were no trees, and there still isn’t. There will never be a sawmill there ”(William Wauters, 1991, p.39-40). The same kind of observation applied to other projects, which were financed but not implemented by Terre. As a response, Terre decided to take its responsibilities by developing and monitoring projects in the South itself, by sending volunteers on the ground.
This was the case with the plaster manufacture project in Djemila (Algeria), the first end-to-end project launched by Terre. Before the manufacture, the village was embedded in a damaged area with only men, women, goats and donkeys. Commenting on the positive impact of the installation of the manufacture (e.g. opening of a small hospital with a maternity as well as a school, a bakery, a grocery store, a restaurant and even an hotel), William Wauters pointed out that “the desired results were achieved: an economic reality has been created and it has significantly changed the features of the region” (Wauter, 1991, p.43).
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