Twists,Turns and Dead Alleys: The League of Nations and Intellectual Cooperation in Times of War

Abstract

Twists, Turns and Dead Alleys: The League of Nations and Intellectual Cooperation in Times of War

In recent years, historians of international organisations have asserted a strong continuity between pre- and post-war organisations. This article examines the wartime transitions in the field of intellectual cooperation and traces the fate of the League's International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation (CICI) and its executive arm, the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IICI) in Paris. Even though both the CICI and the IICIC were officially dormant after 1940, representatives of intellectual cooperation such as Henri Bonnet, James T. Shotwell and Gilbert Murray sought ways to continue their work. During the war, such initiatives seemed most promising in the Western hemisphere, where Latin American and US American protagonists planned to continue the League's work in Havana. Paradoxically, the increased importance of intellectual cooperation and cultural exchange and especially the engagement of the US and the British governments towards 1945 led to a break with the League's institutions, which were perceived as too weak. The postwar organisation UNESCO was in fact built on a different, more strictly inter-governmental basis than the League's ICO and also pursued different aims that reflected the shifts in global alliances.