In August 1926, the Geneva Institute of International Relations organized the first in a series of high-profile meetings on ‘The problems of peace’. Addressing an audience that included League of Nations staff, scholars, and politicians, the British academic Alfred Zimmern opened the event with a lecture on ‘The development of the international mind’. This process, Zimmern suggested, was driven by attitudes that resembled life ‘in a room with windows open on a wide prospect over the world’.Footnote ¹ He himself was involved in promoting such an outlook: as deputy director of the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, IICI), he played a key role in an organization that, under the auspices of the League of Nations, sought to foster ‘a general mentality among the peoples of the world more appropriate to co-operation than the nationalistic mentality of the past’.Footnote ² Only a few months before Zimmern’s speech, the IICI had opened in Paris, financially supported by the French government and led by the former French official Julien Luchaire.

The IICI operated alongside an International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (Commission Internationale de la Coopération Intellectuelle, CICI) which the League of Nations had established in 1922. The CICI initially included twelve members of significant stature in intellectual life. As one observer put it in the 1930s, ‘when scientific qualifications are so high as to include around the same table a Bergson and an Einstein their coming together reminds one of a meeting of Mont Blanc and Mount Everest’.Footnote ³ Alongside Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson (the Committee’s first chairman), prominent members included Marie Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, Gilbert Murray, and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. A report adopted by the League of Nations Council in 1923 asserted that CICI members were ‘appointed in consideration of their personal ability and their reputation in learned circles, and without any discrimination as to nationality’.Footnote ⁴ This arrangement meant that the interwar institutions for intellectual cooperation remained open to scholars whose countries were not part of the League of Nations – although national considerations evidently affected the selection of CICI members and IICI staff.Footnote ⁵

In recent years, historians have reassessed the League’s role in the international politics of the interwar years, exploring aspects and activities that have previously been overlooked or underestimated.Footnote ⁶ Renewed scholarly interest in the League has extended to the field of intellectual cooperation: Jean-Jacques Renoliet has offered a detailed account of the Organisation of Intellectual Cooperation, a body that comprised the IICI, the CICI, National Committees of Intellectual Cooperation, specialized bodies, and advisory committees.Footnote ⁷ His description of this organization as the ‘forgotten UNESCO’ seems apt, with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization beginning its operations from within the former IICI premises. Launched in 2005, the ‘UNESCO History Project’ has acknowledged the role of its pre-1945 precursor.Footnote ⁸ Akira Iriye has adopted a broader chronological perspective, interpreting intellectual cooperation in the interwar years as one manifestation of ‘cultural internationalism’, a term that describes efforts ‘to link countries and peoples through the exchange of ideas and persons, through scholarly cooperation, or through efforts at facilitating cross-national understanding’.Footnote ⁹

Renoliet’s monograph and earlier studies by Northedge and Kolasa have shed light on the institutional histories of the IICI and the CICI and on the rapport of these bodies with the League of Nations system. Additional research has examined specific aspects of intellectual cooperation, from the policies of individual countries to activities such as the International Studies Conferences.Footnote ¹⁰ One particular aspect, however, requires further examination: the IICI and the CICI were supposed to engage with an amorphous and sometimes ill-defined constituency, namely intellectuals. These League bodies were hence more than diplomatic entities; they involved individuals who combined scholarly or artistic activity with a commitment to public intervention.Footnote ¹¹ Instead of covering institutional developments, my article therefore focuses on the intellectual genealogies and trajectories of the IICI and the CICI. This approach resonates with efforts to capture the intellectual history of the United Nations,Footnote ¹² and with research that considers the interaction between international organizations and non-state actors as a topic of ‘transnational history’.Footnote ¹³ Significantly, transnational history, intellectual history, and the history of intellectuals all aim beyond an institutional focus; they are concerned with transmission processes, flows, and networks that are often fragile or temporary in nature.Footnote ¹⁴

A contextual examination of the League’s work for intellectual cooperation reveals a concern for order at every level. As Akira Iriye has shown, ideas about global order were an inherent feature of cultural internationalism.Footnote ¹⁵ The relationship between internationalism and order has also been stressed in connection with the ‘historical turn’ in the study of international relations.Footnote ¹⁶ Intellectual cooperation was viewed as a tool for transforming the international order, yet its wide-ranging ambitions were subject to intrinsic boundaries. After considering the global dimensions of intellectual cooperation, this article therefore investigates other levels where the quest for order became evident: within a regional context (Europe’s post-war order), within one particular strand of intellectual cooperation (education), and in the attempt to define the social and international position of one particular group (intellectual workers). This multi-layered approach can help us trace an ‘intellectual order’ in the making – defined here as a systematic structure that encompassed international relations, the classification of ideas, and an assigned role for intellectuals. As a whole, the article tackles a key problem in the intellectual history of the IICI and the CICI: while these bodies were vessels for efforts to create order, they depended on existing hierarchies. In other words, intellectual cooperation relied on the very structures that it sought to transform.

Intellectual cooperation and a new international order

The League of Nations was part of the attempt to create a new international order after four years of conflict. This new order did not depend on political structures alone: it also required efforts in the intellectual sphere. A contributor to L’Esprit International, the publication of the European Centre of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, stressed the impetus that the Great War had provided for intellectual cooperation:

Initially, this drive towards intellectual cooperation found little resonance among the League’s architects, since the Covenant of the League of Nations had not included stipulations for intellectual cooperation. However, removed from diplomatic constraints, intellectuals launched manifold initiatives for transnational exchange. In 1918, the French author Romain Rolland began to promote ‘L’Internationale de l’Esprit’; in the same year, his compatriot Henri Barbusse established Clarté as both a periodical and an international movement of intellectuals.Footnote ¹⁸ In Germany, the author Heinrich Mann spoke of an ‘alliance of intellectuals of all nations’, while the ‘Council of Intellectual Workers’ – founded by the pacifist and expressionist literary critic Kurt Hiller – presented its views on the future international order. In 1922, the Austrian aristocrat Karl Anton Rohan founded the Fédération Internationale des Unions Intellectuelles (or Europäischer Kulturbund), which has been described as the ‘most important intellectual network on the continent’.Footnote ¹⁹

The idea that intellectual cooperation should be part of the League’s remit was exemplified by a Belgian proposal for an ‘intellectual League of Nations’.Footnote ²⁰ During the belle époque, the scheme’s authors – the Nobel Peace laureate Henri La Fontaine and the bibliographer Paul Otlet – had founded the International Institute of Bibliography and the Union of International Associations. After the war, they established the Palais Mondial in Brussels, conceiving this ‘world palace’ as the nucleus of the new League body.Footnote ²¹ Although their hopes were ultimately frustrated, the two Belgians triggered the first League discussions on intellectual cooperation and are therefore acknowledged as important figures in the CICI’s pre-history.Footnote ²² The pre-war origins of their efforts suggest underlying continuities of cultural and scientific internationalism: the decades before 1914 had seen an ever-growing number of scientific congresses, as well as the foundation of international journals and other vehicles for intellectual exchange.Footnote ²³ A report that prepared the CICI’s establishment – written by Léon Bourgeois, the French representative on the League Council – recognized the developments before 1919: ‘if an international intellectual life had not been long existent our League would never have been formed’.Footnote ²⁴

Despite such continuities, cultural internationalism underwent significant changes after the First World War: as Akira Iriye has stressed, ‘International was … more globally construed than before the war.’Footnote ²⁵ Writing in 1931, Alfred Zimmern seemed to describe these developments:

The shift in the scope and nature of internationalism manifested itself in several ways. For instance, in examining the campaigns of anti-colonial nationalists from India, Egypt, China, and Korea, Erez Manela has observed the ‘expansion of international society’.Footnote ²⁷ The League of Nations’ global reach was exemplified by the work of its Mandates section, which has recently attracted fresh scholarly interest.Footnote ²⁸ At a different level, international women’s organizations sought to broaden their membership base beyond Europe and North America in this period.Footnote ²⁹

Given the alleged universalism of science and the arts, intellectual cooperation seemed well equipped to reflect the expansion of internationalism. One of the main supporters of the IICI within the League of Nations Secretariat was its most senior non-Western official, Under Secretary-General Inazō Nitobe.Footnote ³⁰ In his memoirs, Jules Luchaire praised Nitobe for providing more encouragement than Eric Drummond and Drummond’s successor, Joseph Avenol.Footnote ³¹ Moreover, the CICI’s composition suggests a gradual broadening beyond the West. The committee’s initial membership of twelve intellectuals included the Indian political economist D. N. Banerjee and the Brazilian medic Aloysio de Castro. By 1939, the number of non-Western members had risen to six out of eighteen. Despite Japan’s withdrawal from the League, the literary scholar Masaharu Anesaki, who had joined the CICI in 1933, remained involved for six more years,Footnote ³² and the Japanese Commission for Intellectual Cooperation continued operations.Footnote ³³ In the case of China, the influential thinker Hu Shi served as a corresponding CICI member from 1925, gaining full membership in 1930. A Chinese Committee for Intellectual Cooperation was set up in 1933; its chairman also inaugurated a Sino-International Library in Geneva, conceived as a meeting point for Chinese and European culture.Footnote ³⁴ The Japanese and Chinese examples underline a comparative advantage of the League mechanisms for intellectual cooperation: namely the openness to non-League members. This flexibility also facilitated US involvement in the CICI and the IICI, starting with the membership of George E. Hale, director of the Mount Wilson Observatory. The United States had its own National Committee for Intellectual Cooperation, and American foundations helped to fund the IICI’s International Studies Conferences.Footnote ³⁵

US protagonists of transnational intellectual cooperation maintained links with Latin American intellectuals who had developed their own patterns of intellectual cooperation, both through the League and through the Pan-American Union. Inter-American Conferences on Intellectual Cooperation took place in Santiago (1939) and in Havana (1941).Footnote ³⁶ After the first event, the secretary-general of the Chilean Committee for Intellectual Cooperation was invited to Paris to present the results of the event; a similar procedure was proposed for the Havana conference.Footnote ³⁷ Despite the war, the conference in Cuba took place in November 1941, creating a ‘committee of seven’ that included such notable figures as the Brazilian CICI member and scientist Miguel Ozorio de Almeida, the Mexican author and diplomat Alfonso Reyes, and the US historian and former CICI member James T. Shotwell.Footnote ³⁸ In light of the German occupation of Paris, the conference offered to relocate the IICI to Latin America or to establish an International Provisional Centre in the Americas. However, it was not until October 1944 that a meeting of the ‘committee of seven’ took place, assisted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. By the time plans for a Provisional Centre were advanced, the Institute in Paris had resumed its activities.

Global order as a dialogue between civilizations

Despite its potential role as a global instrument, intellectual cooperation was subject to inherent limitations, exemplified by an attachment to categories such as civilization, race, empire, and nationhood. Many protagonists of intellectual cooperation viewed global order as a dialogue between ‘civilizations’. The cultural and political thought of Gilbert Murray and Alfred Zimmern is a case in point: both were leading figures in the League’s work for intellectual cooperation, and both were classicists whose research on Greek and Roman civilization influenced their views on the international order.Footnote ³⁹ Other protagonists of intellectual cooperation also stressed the significance of a shared heritage. The Swiss conservative Gonzague de Reynold – a CICI member throughout the committee’s existence – wrote an eight-volume work on La formation de l’Europe, tracing the emergence of a shared European culture.Footnote ⁴⁰ Outside the League framework, the 1927 congress of the Fédération Internationale des Unions Intellectuelles placed much emphasis on the significance of the European past: Oskar Halecki examined history as the ‘raison d’être of nations’, and Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy, director of the Hamburg Institute for Foreign Policy (Institut für Auswärtige Politik) considered the role of history in European consciousness.Footnote ⁴¹ Although such discussions did not preclude a consideration of global cooperation, they expressed regional allegiances that were often defined in cultural terms.

The focus on a common past was not an issue for European intellectuals alone. This is illustrated by the writings of the Peruvian intellectual Francisco García Caldéron, who sat on the CICI from 1936 to 1939. His early work Latin America: its rise and progress discussed the ‘Latin spirit’, whose defence he portrayed as a ‘duty of primordial importance’.Footnote ⁴² García Caldéron argued that Latin Americans had to be alert to a ‘Teutonic invasion’ of Latin America, ‘Yankee imperialism’, and the ‘imperialistic designs’ of Japan ‘in the mysterious Orient’.Footnote ⁴³ Stressing that ‘No other continent offers so many reasons for union’, he proposed to organize the Latin American states into several regional confederations.Footnote ⁴⁴ Underlining his concern with the notion of a shared Latin American culture, García Caldéron was involved in the CICI’s publication of a Collection ibéro-américaine, which comprised translations of several ‘classic’ Latin American texts. Gabriela Mistral, who had worked for the IICI and been actively involved in this venture, did not think that such undertakings showed a genuine League commitment to Latin America. Apart from the publication project, she did not believe that ‘these organizations have done anything for Latin America. … Those monies have only served European culture.’Footnote ⁴⁵

In pursuing a global dialogue, the IICI required partners that could be viewed as representatives of civilization. For instance, the prominent role of Latin American states in the IICI drove on an underlying continuity of cultural internationalism, namely their portrayal as members of ‘the “civilized” community of nations’.Footnote ⁴⁶ When Julien Luchaire visited Cairo prior to Egypt’s affiliation to the Institute, he sought to stress the country’s civilizational achievements, noting that ‘this soil contains the remnants of the most ancient civilization that the world has known and that has continued over the centuries with a constancy that no other civilisation has known’.Footnote ⁴⁷ These views were reiterated when Luchaire’s successor, Henri Bonnet, returned to Cairo in 1931: a Francophone Egyptian periodical suggested that Egypt could serve as a ‘spokesman of the great civilization that it protects’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Even when aiming for a ‘decentralization of the system of intellectual cooperation’ during its re-launch preparations in 1945, the IICI expressed notions of a civilizational dialogue, seeking ‘ambassadors of culture in different countries or groups of countries with different cultures’.Footnote ⁴⁹

Such ‘thinking in civilizations’ was exemplified by several publications in the 1930s: the IICI series on Civilisations sought to demonstrate the global dimension of intellectual cooperation. The most prominent volume was East and West, based on a correspondence between Gilbert Murray and the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore.Footnote ⁵⁰ Over a decade earlier, Tagore had affirmed the benefits of such dialogue:

It is perhaps fitting that Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s membership of the CICI (1931–38) covered the period in which Civilisations was published. A contemporary observer described him as a ‘liaison officer between two civilizations’; this became obvious with his Hibbert Lectures at University College London, which ‘constituted an event even in the crowded life of London’.Footnote ⁵² A book that collected Radhakrishnan’s lectures as Professor of Eastern Religion and Ethics at the University of Oxford was entitled Eastern religions and Western thought. The themes of this collection ranged from ‘the Greek spirit’, through ‘mysticism and ethics in Hindu thought’, to ‘the meeting of religions’.Footnote ⁵³ The way in which Radhakrishnan framed his discussion mirrored the discourse adopted by other cultural internationalists:

With civilization viewed as a building block of global order, it is evident why the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ – often understood as an embrace of diversity and difference – does not capture the nature of cultural internationalism in the interwar years.Footnote ⁵⁵ Its inherent boundaries were underlined by the ambiguous role of race in intellectual cooperation. In 1911, the Universal Races Congress had shown that internationalism and cosmopolitanism could intersect.Footnote ⁵⁶ Held in London, the event brought together over a thousand participants to discuss various aspects of ‘culture’ and ‘race’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Robert John Holton has interpreted the meeting as a shift away from a ‘biological theory of race’ and paternalistic attitudes vis-à-vis non-Westerners.Footnote ⁵⁸ W. E. B. Du Bois, who had recently become the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, celebrated the congress as a challenge to older convictions on ‘race’ and hence a rebuttal of essentialist notions: he claimed that ‘Of the two thousand international meetings that have taken place in the last seventy-five years there have been few that have so touched the imagination as the Universal Races Congress’.Footnote ⁵⁹ In 1928, a committee of ‘people interested in the problem of the rapprochement of races’ launched plans for a follow-up congress.Footnote ⁶⁰ The IICI, however, remained wary of this project. The head of the Institute’s Section for Scientific Relations, for instance, stressed the need to establish the committee’s scientific credentials. He suggested that the Dutch member of this new committee, the anthropologist Herman Bernelot Moens, was not well known in scholarly circles.Footnote ⁶¹ Moens had previously attracted controversy for his view that interethnic marriage would result in the ‘perfection of man’; he had also founded an association for ‘Universal Brotherhood’ (Universeele Broederschap).Footnote ⁶² Alongside Moens, the committee involved well-connected individuals such as the art critic Jules Rais and Ivan Efremov, a Russian IICI official whose earlier involvement in internationalist ventures had ranged from the Interparliamentary Union to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. With the committee planning an ‘Interracial Union’ or a ‘Union for the Rapprochement of Races’,Footnote ⁶³ Luchaire concluded that ‘the project of a congress of races seems to be full of dangers’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Thus, despite its professed universalism, intellectual cooperation implied clear hierarchies. As Sunil Amrith and Glenda Sluga have pointed out, a change in the treatment of ‘race’ within the context of intellectual cooperation only emerged after the Second World War.Footnote ⁶⁵

Racial preconceptions coincided with another boundary of cultural internationalism: empire. The reluctance to challenge imperial power relations became evident when the internationalists La Fontaine and Otlet established relations with W. E. B. Du Bois, who described the two Belgians as ‘personal friends’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Du Bois, La Fontaine, and Otlet worked together to prepare the Pan-African Congress of 1921. After the congress opening in London, its delegates travelled to Brussels and then onwards to Paris. The meeting in the Belgian capital, taking place at La Fontaine and Otlet’s Palais Mondial, has been described as ‘the most important of the three sessions’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Yet it ended acrimoniously, owing to its different sub-texts: Marcus Garvey’s ‘Back to Africa’ movement, Bolshevik anti-imperialism, and Belgian colonialism in the Congo.Footnote ⁶⁸ La Fontaine and Otlet subsequently shied away from activities that would seem to challenge colonial boundaries. Nonetheless, the French ambassador warned against official backing for the Belgians’ internationalist ventures and referred to their apparent support for anti-colonial movements in this context.Footnote ⁶⁹ Such examples indicate one of the problems of intellectual cooperation: it sought to address issues of global order in its references to ‘civilizations’ but – at least in semi-official settings – rarely tackled the more delicate issues of race and empire. Significantly, as Bruce Mazlish has emphasized, race and empire could themselves inform and shape understandings of ‘civilization’.Footnote ⁷⁰

Intellectual cooperation and post-war order

If the global scope of intellectual cooperation was curtailed by its underlying civilizational categories, what about constructing order on a more limited scale? Could intellectual cooperation help to overcome the wartime divisions in Europe? From one angle, this seemed possible: after all, science appeared to have intrinsic transnational features, with cooperation constituting an underlying feature of scholarly endeavour.Footnote ⁷¹ Expressing this view, Jules Payot, educator and rector of the University of Aix-Marseille, claimed that ‘any object of study, even the most humble one … includes the universal law that alone has made society and progress possible: the law of reciprocal help, of occupation, of work in solidarity’.Footnote ⁷² However, even before 1914, in ‘the golden age of [scientific] internationalism’,Footnote ⁷³ science and the arts were subject to constant tensions between national and transnational forces.Footnote ⁷⁴ The power of national allegiances became evident in 1914, as many intellectuals supported their governments’ war policies.Footnote ⁷⁵ Illustrating the deep animosities caused by the Great War, Jules Payot claimed that the German people ‘in their entirety’ had been ‘poisoned by an education of superciliousness’, whereas French writers had not been blinded by nationalism.Footnote ⁷⁶ This portrayal contrasted with the analysis of the German scholar Ernst R. Curtius, who suggested that German intellectuals had re-oriented themselves towards Europe after the war, whereas their French counterparts had stuck to notions of cultural superiority.Footnote ⁷⁷

Germany’s role in the international order soon emerged as a key challenge for intellectual cooperation. Some cultural internationalists viewed such cooperation as a disinterested medium that could facilitate German involvement in League activities. In 1926, Alfred Zimmern portrayed this policy as successful, claiming that the ‘academic Locarno’ had become an ‘accomplished fact before the political Locarno’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Yet Zimmern’s comments ignored Germany’s exclusion from the International Research Council and the International Union of the Academies, and a ‘counter-boycott’ by German institutions.Footnote ⁷⁹ Contrary to Zimmern’s optimistic assessment, Elisabeth Crawford has stressed that a ‘relative normalisation’ of scientific relations only became possible after Locarno.Footnote ⁸⁰ Albert Einstein’s membership of the CICI illustrates these ambiguities: although he had joined the committee four years before Germany’s accession to the League, his involvement was marked by disagreements regarding the policy towards Germany and by criticism from German scholars who did not regard the pacifist physicist as a sufficiently ‘national’ figure.Footnote ⁸¹

The ambivalent stance vis-à-vis Germany became evident at many stages in the League’s work for intellectual cooperation. In February 1924, for instance, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson – pacifist, historian, and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge – attacked a CICI funding appeal for universities in financial need, objecting to the ‘scandalous omission’ of Germany.Footnote ⁸² Gilbert Murray echoed this criticism in The Times.Footnote ⁸³ In response, the Swiss CICI member Gonzague de Reynold drafted a memorandum that detailed his efforts ‘to re-establish relations that had been severed by the war’.Footnote ⁸⁴ However, as chair of the CICI, Henri Bergson strongly opposed the publication of Reynold’s response. The French philosopher claimed that the document gave the misleading impression ‘that we desire and consider possible the immediate re-establishment of normal relations with German science’.Footnote ⁸⁵

Renoliet’s monograph briefly discusses this episode, with a focus on Bergson’s views.Footnote ⁸⁶ Yet the responses of League personnel are just as instructive. Acting as the CICI’s secretary in Geneva, the Polish historian Oskar Halecki played a key role: he corresponded with Lowes Dickinson, stressing that the CICI had not singled out any specific country in its appeal. He feared that the English scholar’s letter might ‘do serious harm not only to the Committee as a whole, but more particularly to its relief action’.Footnote ⁸⁷ But Halecki was also critical of Bergson’s opposition to Reynold’s memorandum. Writing to his Swiss colleague, he stressed that ‘In my opinion, and I believe that it is shared by the Secretariat in general, it would be a pity if your response was not published’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Eric Drummond also became involved in the internal discussions; he recalled that, at the CICI’s foundation, opinions had been divided over whether its activities should extend to non-League members such as Germany.Footnote ⁸⁹ While criticizing Lowes Dickinson and Murray, his letter nevertheless seemed to question Bergson’s attitude. Consequently, Bergson expressed his surprise at the secretary-general’s reaction.Footnote ⁹⁰

Despite professions regarding the transnational scope of science and the arts, intellectual cooperation was subject to power-political considerations and the limitations of the post-war order. Renoliet and Scholz have traced the changing nature of French policy in this respect, from an initial reluctance to support schemes for an ‘intellectual’ branch of the League of Nations to their subsequent embrace in the context of wider policy ends.Footnote ⁹¹ Furthermore, the inherent malleability of cultural internationalism meant that it was also at the disposal of states that challenged the existing order. Funding from Fascist Italy, for instance, helped establish the International Institute of Educational Cinematography in Rome as part of the League of Nations system.Footnote ⁹² After Nazi Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations, the Deutsche Kongresszentrale coordinated the country’s involvement in scientific congresses.Footnote ⁹³ German officials considered the participation in international congresses as a way of pre-empting criticism of the Third Reich at such events.Footnote ⁹⁴ They claimed that, during the war, German scholars had been victims of a French strategy to use scientific internationalism for propaganda purposes; their presence at international congresses was hence interpreted as a weapon in prospective propaganda wars. At a different level, the Europäische Revue of Rohan’s Fédération Internationale des Union Intellectuelles/Europäischer Kulturbund turned into a ‘useful means of international propaganda and international contacts for the Third Reich’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Similar to Italy and Germany, Japan also bundled its efforts for intellectual cooperation: in April 1934, not long after its withdrawal from the League of Nations, it established Kokusai Bunka Shinkōkai (the Society for International Cultural Relations), which subsequently corresponded with the IICI.Footnote ⁹⁶

These examples illustrate that intellectual cooperation was not a neutral, disinterested phenomenon. While it was seen as key to making the new international order work, transnational intellectual relations had been one of the war’s casualties. The potential responses to this conundrum were not very satisfying: one option was to work within the logic of the post-war order, meaning the exclusion of scholars and organizations from former enemy states and thus running counter to the principles that intellectual cooperation frequently evoked. The alternative was to be as inclusive as possible – but this implied the accommodation of views that questioned the existing order.

Education as a tool for a peaceful order

In light of the challenges for intellectual cooperation, many scholars concluded that a peaceful world order depended on a fundamental change in attitudes. This accounts for the energy with which they pursued schemes for international education during the interwar years. Ideas about education as a tool for peace had circulated long before the Great War and existed in a variety of contexts, cultures, and civilizations.Footnote ⁹⁷ Influenced by the rise of the modern peace movement, specific ‘peace education’ programmes for schools were discussed from the nineteenth century onwards.Footnote ⁹⁸ Peace congresses and associations such as the School Peace League in Britain promoted educational reform as an element of peace-building. Exemplifying the lively debates on this issue, the Quaker Arthur Rowntree – Headmaster of Botham School in York – outlined his views on Education in relation to internationalism in 1911 and argued that schoolmasters could play a key role in fostering a spirit of cooperation, as they were ‘leaders and guides, striving to rear up a more enlightened generation’.Footnote ⁹⁹ After the First World War, educators continued to stress the linkages between peace and education.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In a lecture in 1919, Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy and creator of the ‘Waldorf school’ movement, picked up internationalist tropes when asserting that a global economy would have to be sustained by a ‘global law’ and a ‘global spirit’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ An ‘Internationale of the Spirit’, Steiner argued, was required to create understanding and love for other nationalities.Footnote ¹⁰² He also maintained that internationalism had already been achieved in some fields, in particular the natural sciences.Footnote ¹⁰³

Another example of educators linking their own work to cultural internationalism was the international quarterly (Education for) The New Era. The publication was closely connected to the New Education Fellowship of the theosophical educator Beatrice Ensor and covered the pedagogic theories of Maria Montessori and Emile Jacques-Dalcroze.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In October 1921, the journal’s German correspondent, Elizabeth Rotten, claimed that it was becoming increasingly ‘apparent that the Reconstruction of the World cannot be brought about by believers in the old spirit’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Rotten acknowledged views that ‘the fighting instinct is a part of human nature’ but expressed a belief in ‘the victory of the spirit, in the possibility of spiritualizing these instincts through educating to self-education’. One of several events to drive such efforts was a conference held at Lankwitz near Berlin in October 1921, supported by the German Peace Society, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the German peace organization Bund Neues Vaterland, the educational section of the German League of Nations Society, the German National Society for International Education, and the Radical School Reformers Union. Rotten herself embodied the overlap between these different initiatives: having been a co-founder of the New Education Fellowship, she also helped to set up the International Bureau of Education in 1925, which was transformed into an intergovernmental organization in 1929.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

This wider movement explains why the League of Nations could hardly ignore educational questions. Appropriately, before becoming director of the IICI, Julien Luchaire had been Inspector-General of Public Education in France. The CICI discussed mechanisms for textbook reform, but also sought to promote exchanges of professors and students.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Furthermore, organizations such as the English Association of Headmistresses increasingly saw the League of Nations as a focal point for their efforts.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In turn, for many League of Nations supporters, education – including education about the League – became a central concern.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The IICI addressed these questions by founding a Comité d’Entente des Grandes Associations Internationales, aiming to further the cause of peace education.Footnote ¹¹⁰

However, the League’s work in the realm of education was subject to clear limitations: education systems fell into the domain of the nation-state and bodies such as the CICI and the IICI could only count on voluntary cooperation in cases such as textbook disputes. Léon Bourgeois, for instance, was conscious of ‘the risk of the reproach of interference’: ‘Systems of education, scientific or philosophical research may lead to great international results, but they would never be initiated or would never prosper if they were not bound up with the deepest national sensibilities’.Footnote ¹¹¹ The League bodies for intellectual cooperation had to strike a balance between two rather different impulses: seemingly pragmatic work for the exchange of knowledge, as often desired by governments; and engagement with more ambitious schemes, as promoted by some intellectuals and associations. In its relations with China, the former aspect seemed dominant. China sought League assistance in addressing problems in its education system; it also hoped for League help in finding European professors for chairs in English literature, geography, and geology at Nanjing University.Footnote ¹¹² In 1931, a Chinese request led to the formation of an Educational Mission under the auspices of the CICI.Footnote ¹¹³ It brought together experts from primary to higher education; during their stay, the members of the Mission were to examine different features of China’s educational life without participating in domestic debates. The work of the Educational Mission revealed some of the preconceptions that delimited intellectual cooperation: its head, Carl Heinrich Becker, for instance, was highly critical of American educational methods, emphasizing cultural and civilizational differences between the USA and China.Footnote ¹¹⁴

While educational missions and exchanges focused on cooperation and the transmission of ideas, there were also efforts to establish more permanent fora for educational exchange. In 1920, the Union of International Associations launched the project of an ‘Université internationale’ at the Palais Mondial in Brussels: through an interdisciplinary study programme, this international summer school for students was meant to lay the basis for a peaceful future.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Although the League initially supported this venture, Stephen Duggan, president of the Institute of International Education and professor at the College of the City of New York, remained sceptical:

In one respect, Duggan’s comments were certainly correct: the Brussels scheme was merely one of many proposals for an international university. Based on earlier educational efforts in Santiniketan, Tagore established Visva-Bharati in 1921. This institution was explicitly conceived as a place for intellectual encounters between the East and West. From a different angle, and with a focus on the arts, the Italian municipality of Capri offered to turn its Charterhouse into an international intellectual centre:

Another approach was represented by the Austrian scientist Robert Bárány, recipient of the 1914 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. In 1925, while working as Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Uppsala, he proposed an international university for politics. This, he suggested, would help to foster a spirit of understanding between statesmen, diplomats, politicians, journalists, and professors.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Five years later, the Belgian socialist and sociologist Hendrik De Man sought to launch a similar institution but for a different constituency: his plan for an International Labour University initially targeted labour representatives and was to begin with a summer school.Footnote ¹¹⁹ While his plan did not obtain financial backing, it was supported by Hermann Seelbach, a leading figure in the adult-education activities of German trade unions, and was met with interest from International Labour Organization (ILO) staff. These different examples illustrate how international education was viewed as a potential solution to a range of social, political, and intellectual problems.

As early as 1923, the Spanish government raised ‘international university’ matters at the General Assembly of the League of Nations. Its intervention had two dimensions: on the one hand, it sought to advance the equivalence of diplomas in secondary and higher education; on the other, it addressed the creation of an international university.Footnote ¹²⁰ The CICI was charged with examining these ideas. The resulting report described the issue of an international university as ‘one of the most litigious and most contested questions in the field of intellectual cooperation’.Footnote ¹²¹ In this context, it referred to the earlier efforts of the Union of International Associations.Footnote ¹²² The CICI’s enquiry met with a sceptical response. The University of Queensland in Australia noted the idea of ‘the establishment at one of the four great Universities of Christendom – Paris, Salamanca, Oxford, or Bologna of a self-governing International University possessing full academic rights and privileges with power to confer degrees and give diplomas which will be recognised in all the States Members of the League of Nations’. However, it estimated that improved inter-university relations might render such an international university obsolete.Footnote ¹²³ Similar comments were received from the government of Latvia, which ‘agreed with the opinion of the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation that, in the present conditions, the realization of such a project would meet with insurmountable obstacles’.Footnote ¹²⁴ At the same time, Latvia reasserted its approval of plans to strengthen the exchanges of students and professors.

These responses suggest that the scope for the CICI and the IICI remained limited. Nonetheless, the idea of an international university continued to exercise considerable appeal. In 1931, H. R. G. Greaves – later Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science – saw such a university as ‘the best instrument’ for the development of an ‘international outlook’:Footnote ¹²⁵

During and after the Second World War, Greaves promoted the idea of a United Nations University Institute in London.Footnote ¹²⁷ While such an institution did not come about in Britain, the UN ultimately created such a body in Tokyo in 1973; and in 1980 the United Nations General Assembly approved the establishment of the University for Peace (UPEACE) in Costa Rica. Such example suggests that we should not simply write off ideas on international education as impractical; at the same time, the transformative power of such efforts remains open to debate.

Order and intellectual labour: workers of the mind, unite?

Although education and other tools of intellectual cooperation had limited scope to transform the interwar order, cultural internationalism could also address the problem of order at another level: the IICI and the CICI formed part of the drive to define the role of intellectuals within society, including their position within the international order at large. Christophe Charle has emphasized that the quest for recognition was a central issue in the history of intellectuals,Footnote ¹²⁸ the social dimension of this concern being captured in terms such as ‘intellectual workers’ or ‘intellectual labour’. These labels connoted a loosely defined constituency: in nineteenth-century Germany, they covered workers whose role in the production process was not linked to manual labour; in Italy they included civil servants and white-collar workers.Footnote ¹²⁹ The ILO acknowledged that it was ‘difficult in some instances to define intellectual workers exactly and to ascertain where they differ from employees or even manual workers’.Footnote ¹³⁰ ILO publications subsumed, for instance, university graduates, journalists, and people working in the ‘public services’ under this heading. One way of addressing these uncertainties was for the joining together of intellectual workers. As noted by the ILO director, Albert Thomas, the ‘movement towards the organization of intellectuals’ was ‘certainly one of the social phenomena most characteristic of our time’. He likened this movement to nineteenth-century labour activism and asserted that the ‘perilous’ situation of intellectual workers lay at the heart of the ‘legitimate defence of their interests’.Footnote ¹³¹

Efforts for the international representation of intellectual workers preceded the foundation of the IICI and the CICI. For instance, when the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Wilhelm Ostwald founded his association Die Brücke in 1911, he portrayed it as an ‘international institute for the organization of intellectual labour’ (Internationales Institut zur Organisation geistiger Arbeit) and as a tool for the division of labour between intellectual workers from different countries.Footnote ¹³² La Fontaine and Otlet pursued similar aims through their International Institute of Bibliography, which, from its inception in 1894, offered a bibliographic information service. The Belgians’ Union of International Associations, launched in 1910, was connected to these efforts and has been interpreted as a protagonist of ‘intellectual trade unionism’.Footnote ¹³³ Significantly, when proposing the creation of a League organization for intellectual cooperation, Otlet likened its mission to that of the ILO.Footnote ¹³⁴

The efforts to address intellectuals’ social position gathered momentum after 1918: the social, economic, and material devastation caused by the war had left many intellectual workers in a vulnerable position. At an international level, the foundation of the International PEN in 1921 was the most well-known example of efforts to represent the interests of intellectual workers. Meanwhile, the work of French associations culminated in the foundation of the Confédération Internationale de Travailleurs Intellectuels (CITI) in 1923. This organization also provided a definition of ‘intellectual workers’ that the ILO subsequently adopted.Footnote ¹³⁵ In addition to PEN and CITI, there were international organizations with a more limited lifespan: one example was the Fédération Internationale des Arts, des Lettres et des Sciences, founded by Banville d’Hostel in 1918. It linked the defence of the material interests of intellectual workers to ‘the rapprochement of fraternal spirits of all countries with the aim of peace and reciprocal help’.Footnote ¹³⁶ Having planned to organize a ‘first estates-general of the intellectual world’, the venture failed to obtain support from the IICI.

Neither the CICI nor the IICI were campaigning bodies; their role within the League of Nations system was not fully compatible with an ‘intellectual trade unionism’. Léon Bourgeois’s initial report to the League of Nations Council – despite being entitled Organisation of Intellectual Labour – declined to discuss ‘the defence of the interests, and the improvement of the position, of intellectual workers’: the French internationalist believed ‘that this special question falls more directly … within the competence of the International Labour Office’.Footnote ¹³⁷ Alfred Zimmern described the League’s work for intellectual cooperation as the pursuit of two aims:

In practice, this approach meant that the League of Nations could indeed take measures for the benefit of intellectual workers. The expansion of international copyright law was one example, with the League building upon earlier agreements such as the international conventions on patent rights (1883) and the protection of literary works (1886).Footnote ¹³⁹ The IICI and the CICI dealt with the revision of the Berne Convention of 1886, and sought to coordinate these measures with the intellectual property regime adopted by the Pan-American Union.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ This, it has been argued, laid the foundations for the Universal Copyright Convention that was adopted in 1952 under the auspices of UNESCO.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The CICI also gathered material on the conditions of intellectual work in various contexts. Venturing into the field of cultural statistics, it published information on the exchange of documents as well as country-specific surveys ranging from Brazil to Greece.Footnote ¹⁴² The CICI’s enquiries regarding the status of intellectual workers were also significant, as they helped to build up the committee’s transnational network and in some instances resulted in the creation of National Committees of Intellectual Cooperation.

Zimmern’s summary of the League’s aims acknowledged that intellectual cooperation went beyond the material concerns of intellectual workers: the IICI was supposed to provide intellectuals with ‘new or better means of work’.Footnote ¹⁴³ This task was entwined with order in a conceptual sense: the remit to help intellectual workers cope with an apparent abundance of information. As in other respects, such efforts were marked by underlying continuities. La Fontaine and Otlet’s transnational work for bibliography was an evident precursor, with bibliographical classification serving as a tool for intellectual enquiry and collaboration. Their promotion of the Universal Decimal Classification as a bibliographical standard was meant to assist with the task of ordering knowledge, forming the basis of a universal card index, the so-called ‘Répertoire Bibliographique Universel’. Bibliography as a tool for intellectual cooperation was a durable concern: the League bodies studied bibliographic questions, published bibliographical guides, and supported plans for a network of documentation offices.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

The quest to create order through the collection and classification of information reveals the encyclopaedic streak that underpinned intellectual cooperation. Such ambitions were embodied by the International Institute of Bibliography, but also informed Ostwald’s Die Brücke and interwar projects such as Otto Neurath’s Encyclopedia of united sciences or H.G. Wells’ notion of a ‘world brain’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ An organization such as the Schweizerischer Bund Geistig Schaffender / Fédération Suisse des Travailleurs Intellectuels – primarily concerned with more pragmatic issues – nonetheless expressed an interest in the idea of a ‘World Depot of Books’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Even when such schemes did not bear fruit, they shed light on the wider context in which the IICI and the CICI operated. League bodies corresponded widely with a great variety of associations, for instance through the IICI’s Section for Scientific Relations, engaging with ventures that expressed intellectuals’ concern for order. As a former vice-president of the French Société des Gens de Lettres pointed out in 1924, order was ‘the most precious, the most essential condition’ for intellectual activity.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ After all, the latter meant ‘knowing to classify one’s ideas, to classify them logically and methodologically’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

One scheme that typified the concern for ‘intellectual order’ was a proposal by Joseph Pijoan, a Catalan art historian who taught at the University of Chicago. In October 1930, he suggested that the League of Nations create an Annuaire des progrès de la science for both specialists and laypeople, summarizing scientific progress in different disciplines and published in five languages.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ That year, Pijoan operated from the League headquarters thanks to a lettre de mission and, one year later, managed to arrange a meeting with Albert Einstein. In a letter to the director of the IICI, Pijoan expressed his overarching aims:

Neither the IICI nor the Comité des Conseilleurs Scientifiques displayed much enthusiasm for this project.Footnote ¹⁵¹ The IICI nonetheless tested its viability, consulting with the historian Henri Berr’s Institut International de Synthèse to this end.Footnote ¹⁵² Through his Revue de synthèse historique, his institute, and his ‘Semaines internationales de synthèse’, Berr sought to transcend disciplinary boundaries and promote a more unified science. In this respect, the Institut International de Synthèse illustrated the encyclopaedic ambitions in schemes for intellectual cooperation.Footnote ¹⁵³ As it exemplified concerns that cut across institutional boundaries, the IICI was prepared to offer its own premises for Berr’s organization.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

The ambiguous responses to such efforts indicate that the schemes for intellectual order and synthesis were interpreted as part of the IICI and CICI’s remit to improve the conditions for intellectual work – even in instances where their realization seemed unlikely. This points at a tension that was inherent in the effort to address the concerns of intellectuals: the aim to remain open to a variety of projects and to define one’s constituency as broadly as possible ran counter to a key precondition of order, namely the acceptance of hierarchies of knowledge.

Conclusion

The League of Nations was an outcome of, and an instrument for, the post-war order. Through its mechanisms for intellectual cooperation, it involved groups and bodies that have been interpreted as the nucleus of a ‘global civil society’, ‘global community’, or ‘world culture’.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ By considering the IICI and the CICI in their wider context, we can see how seemingly ‘utopian’ ideas were connected to more ‘respectable’ ventures, and how arbitrary such categories could be. Even when ostensibly targeting scholarly matters, intellectuals often promoted schemes that implied visions of an international community. In this respect, plans that aimed at intellectual order were intrinsically connected to the social and political order. As a result, efforts for intellectual cooperation were hampered by the power-politics of governments, an attachment to concepts such as civilization, a certain regionalism, and, ultimately, too many hopes invested in the League of Nations’ institutional frameworks.

The efforts for intellectual cooperation also performed another role: they helped groups or individuals to define their status as ‘intellectuals’ or ‘intellectual workers’. This was more than an abstract pursuit, given the precarious material position in which many people found themselves after the war. In itself, interaction with the IICI and CICI was a manifestation of being an intellectual. After all, to be such a person means ‘actively intervening in public discourse, involvement in the media, and engagement with the workings of power’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Yet the League of Nations could not solve the intellectuals’ problem, namely that to effect meaningful political change you had to be able to ‘speak to power’. Moreover, many efforts suffered from an underlying tension: the impulse to be inclusive – with regard to individuals, groups, or different types of knowledge – stood at odds with the way in which exclusion and selection are intrinsic to many intellectual activities.

Why should one examine the interwar schemes for intellectual cooperation, given their somewhat limited degrees of success? This article has argued that such efforts shed light on much wider issues in the history of the interwar years: they show us how many concepts – from the organization of international relations to the role of intellectuals within society – remained in flux after the First World War. Intellectual work could be a form of contestation, but also of fixing and fixating the order.