In 1995 David Long and Peter Wilson wrote that the early history of International Relations (IR) had been deliberately and grossly misrepresented by Edward H. Carr in his famous book The Twenty Years’ Crisis.Footnote 1 Their work Thinkers of the Twenty Years’ Crisis: Inter-War Idealism Reassessed triggered a rising interest in the disciplinary history of IR – especially in its formative years.Footnote 2 Long and Wilson criticised the way early IR authors had been forced into the Procrustes beds of idealism and realism; this stark dichotomy, they claimed, grossly simplified and distorted the early debates. It particularly misrepresented the ‘idealists’, portraying them as naïve in their assumptions and simplistic in their analysis and making them far more uniform in their outlook than they actually were. An idealist paradigm had, perhaps, never really existed.
In 1998, Wilson went further.Footnote 3 He argued that not only had an idealist paradigm, in the sense of a cohesive and self-conscious school of thought, never existed; it was also highly questionable whether any First Great Debate between the rival paradigms of idealism and realism had actually occurred. It was a myth.
Brian C. Schmidt largely agreed.Footnote 4 Having investigated the writings and conversations among early IR scholars, Schmidt concluded that the interwar period was not dominated by the hegemony of an idealist paradigm; rather, it was characterised by a wide range of discourses that, each in their own way, attempted to understand the central realities of the age.
Over the last decades a number of similar contributions have drawn the outlines of a revisionist history of early IR scholarship.Footnote 5 That history is not yet fully formed. I argue in this article that such a revisionist history cannot be written simply by re-examining authors and reconstructing their conversations. I agree with David Long who argues that it is also necessary to reconstruct the institutional setting within which these authors worked and their conversations took place.Footnote 6 In 2006 Long wrote an article on the International Studies Conference (ISC) – the first institution of international academic cooperation on international relations. My article is also devoted to the ISC.
I agree with Long that a reconstruction of the real history of IR scholarship cannot be fashioned on the re-reading of scholarly books and articles alone. The disciplinary history of IR must also pay attention to the institutional setting, especially academic institutions. This article will include discussions on early disciplinary conversations; however, its main focus is on their institutional setting – on departments, chairs, schools and so on, without which a discipline can barely be said to exist. But it will pay particular attention to the institutional setting provided by the ISC. Whereas Long paid most attention to the declining years of the ISC after the Second World War, I will focus my attention on its rise: I will show how the ISC emerged in the 1920s and was nursed along by the League of Nations.
The first part of the article focuses on the creation of specialised institutes and centres for scientific research, discussion and information on international questions after the First World War. The second part analyses the origins and development of the International Studies Conference. The third discusses the university teaching of IR in the US, Great Britain and on the European continent in the interwar period and looks at some of the institutional settings that were available. For that, among others, an international questionnaire of the League of Nations from the early 1930s is used. The fourth part outlines the history of the ISC in the years 1939–1946, after which a conclusion follows. The article is based on considerable archival research in the League of Nations archives, Library of the UN Office, Geneva, Switzerland and the archives of the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, UNESCO, Paris, France.
Birth of IR
The systematic study of IR received great impetus from the First World War. During the Great War, scientists and intellectuals were for the first time involved in government sponsored propaganda on a wide scale. Propaganda was used as a psychological weapon against the enemy and to bolster morale at home. In the later part of the war governments even recruited specialists from the academic world to prepare the post-war settlement in a scientific way. Some of the members of the Political Intelligence Department of the British Foreign Office and the American Inquiry, for instance, were even taken to Paris as technical advisers, where they served on the various committees established by the Peace Conference.Footnote 7 To name only a few of those academic specialists who were involved on the British side: John Maynard Keynes, Edward Hallett Carr, Lionel Curtis, Charles Webster, Allen Leeper, Alfred Zimmern, Philip Noel Baker, and Arnold Toynbee. Their American counterparts included George Louis Beer, James Brown Scott, Stanley K. Hornbeck, James T. Shotwell, Isaiah Bowman, and Archibald Cary Coolidge.
In the past it has sometimes been suggested to date the birth of the IR discipline to 30 May 1919.Footnote 8 On the evening of that day, twenty-eight experts and technicians who were involved in the British delegation met nine of their American colleagues for an informal meeting in Hotel Majestic in Paris. The delegation members were very disturbed because the first draft of the peace treaty with Germany had just been made public. It was Curtis, one of the founders of the journal The Round Table, who first suggested that the informal cooperation between the two delegations should be continued and formalised after the conference. His idea was that the experts would establish an institute for research in international affairs, one branch in the UK and one in the US, where prominent scientists, politicians, bankers, industrialists, opinion leaders and officials would meet in person to discuss contemporary affairs in an objective and scientific way. After they had received the good and disinterested advice of the experts, the politicians, opinion leaders and publicists should inform the public at large. He also suggested that the institute should produce monographs and a yearbook or ‘Register’ for international affairs.Footnote 9 The proposals met with the approval of the other delegates. Lord Robert Cecil, who had played an important role in the drafting of the Covenant of the League of Nations, expressed his disappointment in American President Woodrow Wilson, who seemed to have betrayed his lofty ideals, in the following words: ‘There is no single person in this room who is not disappointed with the terms we have drafted. Yet England and America have got all that they want, and more: far more. Our disappointment is an excellent symptom: let us perpetuate it.’Footnote 10
The members of the two delegations met again on 9 and 17 June 1919, where the first proposals for ‘The Institute of International Affairs founded at Paris 1919’ were discussed.Footnote 11 Membership should be confined to those qualified to make original contributions either to knowledge or thought about foreign affairs. It was decided that the first research project was to write an account of the Paris Peace Conference by some of the delegation members.
The British Institute of International Affairs or Chatham House, after its home, was inaugurated on 5 July 1920. It was established in order to ‘advance the sciences of international politics, economics and jurisprudence, and the study, classification and development of the literature in these subjects, to encourage and facilitate the scientific study of international questions and to promote the exchange of information and ideas on international affairs, and the understanding of the circumstances, conditions and points of view of nations and peoples.’Footnote 12 The famous A History of the Peace Conference of Paris which appeared in six volumes over the years 1920–1924 was a first result of this impulse for a scientific approach towards international politics.Footnote 13 Many monographs of high quality followed. Director of Studies Toynbee published an annual worldwide overview called Survey of International Affairs, which had a wide appeal. So did the bimonthly Journal of the British Institute of International Affairs (later called International Affairs), which first appeared in January 1922.
The American Institute of International Affairs, which was also established in 1920, got off to a bad start. Within a year after its inauguration it merged with the New York City based Council on Foreign Relations, which aimed ‘to develop, by scientific and impartial study, a better understanding of international problems, and an intelligent American foreign policy.’Footnote 14 The first issue of its quarterly review Foreign Affairs appeared in the autumn of 1922, dated 15 September.Footnote 15 Other Council publications were the Annual Survey of American Foreign Relations and (also annual) A Political Handbook of the World. Since 1918, the Foreign Policy Association also had its seat in New York City. It was not elitist but tried to reach the masses. In contrast to Toynbee's global perspective, in terms of time as well as space, the American organisations tended to concentrate upon the foreign policy of the US. Finally in 1925, the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), which would slowly develop into a regional think tank, was founded in Honolulu. I am going to expand on the IPR further on in this text.
The same development can be seen in Europe. In Hamburg, the Archiv der Friedensverträge was founded in February 1921. Like Chatham House it originated from discord with the outcome of the Paris Peace Conference. Director Albrecht Mendelssohn-Bartholdy involved his Institute in the publication of the series Die Grosse Politik der Europäischen Kabinette, 1871–1914: Sammlung der Diplomatischen Akten des Auswärtigen Amtes. Between 1922 and 1927 40 volumes appeared. This publication was (partly) financed with money from the Auswärtige Amt. The German Foreign Office wanted to refute article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, the famous ‘war guilt clause’.Footnote 16 From 1923 onwards, the Archiv was called the Institut für Auswärtige Politik. Like Chatham House it had a library and its own cutting service. It organised public meetings, published monographs and its monthly journal Europäische Gespräche, which first appeared in 1923, was widely read.Footnote 17
In Paris similar efforts proved abortive. In Geneva the Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales (IHEI) was set up in 1927. The IHEI was an independent school for the study of current international questions. It also organised instruction on university lines, primarily intended for graduate students. Directors Paul Mantoux and William E. Rappard organised with the aid of international civil servants from the League of Nations and the International Labour Office, series of weekly lectures on questions connected with their particular branch of work. In this way, the practitioners trained the international leaders of the future.
Making no claim to be exhaustive, institutions for the scientific study of IR were created in Bucharest (Institutul Social Român, 1921); Warsaw (Towarzystwo Badania Zagadnien Miedzynarodowych, 1926); Copenhagen (Institutet for Historie og Samfundsökonomi, 1927); Prague (Svobodna Skola Politickych Nauk V Praze, 1928); Bergen (Christian Michelsen Institute, 1930); Milan (Instituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale, 1933); Paris (Centre d'Etudes de Politique Etrangère, 1935) and Stockholm (Utrikespolitiske Institutet, 1937). Outside Europe one can mention Montreal (Canadian Institute of International Affairs, 1927); Sydney (Australian Institute of International Affairs, 1933); Cape Town (Die Suid-Afrikaanse Instituut van Internasionale Sake, 1934); New Delhi (Indian Institute of International Affairs, 1936) and Wellington (New Zealand Institute of International Affairs, 1939). Some of these institutions were university-based, others were not. The overwhelming majority of institutions that studied and gave information on international affairs, worked, with various methods, and from different angles, towards the same end. In most of the cases, the Royal Institute of International Affairs was used as a model.
The International Studies Conference
In the previous section we have seen that in the 1920s and 1930s specialised centres and institutes for scientific research, discussion and information on international questions were created in various countries. Peace and international affairs had clearly become a public matter. In this part I want to discuss the origin and development of the Permanent International Studies Conference, the annual gathering, in various countries, of professors and other academic specialists of international relations and international politics, and its importance for the development of IR as an academic discipline.
The immediate origins of the ISC were rooted in a search for suitable methods of organising training in international politics, which engaged the League of Nations’ International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC) for several years after its establishment in 1922.Footnote 18 After the Fifth Assembly had accepted a famous resolution (‘The Assembly, being convinced of the fundamental importance of familiarising young people throughout the world with the principles and work of the League of Nations, and of training the younger generation to regard international cooperation as the normal method of conducting world affairs […]’Footnote 19), the ICIC's examination of the problem led it, in July 1926, to instruct the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC) in Paris, to enquire into the possibility of bringing about the coordination of existing national and international organisations concerned with the teaching of international affairs. The following year, the Paris Institute was able to report that first measures of coordination had been adopted in France and were being contemplated in several other countries. The ICIC then accepted a resolution in which she recommended that ‘similar coordination should be carried out in all capitals and important university centres, and that programmes should be published so that a student may be able to complete his international studies in a different country from the country where he began them’.Footnote 20 The Committee authorised the Paris Institute to convene an international committee of experts for the purpose of considering means of effecting a similar coordination on an international scale.
In March 1928, the IIIC convened an international Meeting of Experts for the Coordination of Higher International Studies in Berlin at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, which was attended by representatives of national institutions in six countries and representatives of a few ‘international’ organisations.Footnote 21 The Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations, which eventually became the International Studies Conference, developed from this initiative from the IIIC, which provided its Secretariat ever since.Footnote 22 Before 1928, there was no international platform for the exchange of ideas between institutions for research in, or teaching of, IR. Physicists, international lawyers, economists and other scientists had all benefited from the maintenance of regular contacts via congresses, international institutes, organisations etc., but no such machinery was available for the new branch of the Social or Political Sciences which came to be known as IR. The Conference was intended to fill this gap by providing a forum where representatives of institutions could meet from time to time to discuss their problems. During the first years of its existence, the items that were discussed were mostly of an administrative nature, although closely linked with the participants’ scientific activities. These included, among others, the exchange of information, exchanges of views concerning the methods of research, plans for publications like a proposed lexicon of political terms, the interchange of lists of surplus publications and bibliographies, and the exchange of lecturers and researchers.
A meeting of the Conference's Executive Committee held in January 1931 marked a definite turning point in the evolution of the ISC. There it was suggested that the Conference of so many experts from so many different countries could be used to discuss current international problems, carefully prepared from the written observations of scholars and study groups. This proposal was inspired by the example of the before mentioned Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) in Honolulu. Limited to the countries having interests in the Pacific area, the IPR had developed a system of scientific collaboration and discussion among scientists, politicians, diplomats, businessmen and others, which had produced extremely interesting results.Footnote 23 It was suggested that the ISC could perform a somewhat analogous function on a world-wide scale, by choosing from time to time a subject of topical research to be examined simultaneously by its members, first in written form, and then jointly at round-table and plenary study meetings. This new experiment in international scientific collaboration did not mean that the Conference's simpler machinery of administrative cooperation was abandoned. In the course of the next few years, the ISC developed its special technique of joint cooperative research into contemporary problems of international relations. The Conference thus tried to foresee the trend of events and prepare an analysis of a problem before it had come into the light of the world's stage. Amongst the questions it dealt with in two-year study cycles were ‘The State and Economic Life’ (1931–1933),Footnote 24 ‘Collective Security’ (1933–1935),Footnote 25 ‘Peaceful Change’ (1935–1937)Footnote 26 and ‘Economic Policies in Relation to World Peace’ (1937–1939).Footnote 27 When the ISC met in Bergen for its Twelfth Session in August 1939, just before Nazi Germany invaded Poland, ‘International Organisation’ was chosen as the next subject of study for 1940–1941.Footnote 28
As soon as a subject of study was chosen, a Programme Committee prepared a detailed outline for the institutions and committees taking part. They were not required to cover the whole subject from a universal standpoint. On the contrary, the Conference was especially interested in national attitudes towards the problem. For that reason it encouraged study group work rather than individual research. According to the Executive Committee of the ISC, scholars and men of action who took an active part in its work were not so much interested in an individual statement on, for instance, collective security or peaceful change, but they wanted to hear or read a statement that reflected the views of a number of thinking people in a particular country, from which it was possible to gauge the probable attitude of a nation to this particular problem. Participants in the study meetings took part in the discussions not as representatives of institutions or committees but in their personal capacity. The General Rapporteur, or the Chairman of the study meetings, had to indicate the various trends which manifested themselves in the course of the preparatory work and in the discussions, and to sum up the differences and points of agreement.
Jealous of its scientific and non-partisan character, the Conference did not aim at political action, or even at influencing such action directly. This, by the way, it learned the hard way when, a few days after in London the Sixth Conference on The State and Economic Life had ended, a statement on the subjects that had been discussed at the ISC meeting was communicated to the Monetary and Economic Conference of the League of Nations, that was about to start in the same city. The pamphlet The State and Economic Life that the delegations received contained even an introductory letter of the Director of the IIIC, Henri Bonnet. The Canadian Prime Minister Richard B. Bennett was furious. He wrote a stiff letter to the Secretary-General of the League of Nations Joseph Avenol, in which he strongly objected to certain passages in the pamphlet that criticised the trade agreements of Ottawa, 1932.Footnote 29 Insofar as the ISC did exercise an influence on the formulation of policies, its means were indirect: the formation of public opinion by the publication of the results of joint research and discussion, the proceedings of the Conference and special monographs. Other indirect influence occurred because some of the experts who attended the study meetings occupied key positions in their own countries. The Conference provided an elitist meeting-place where scientists, experts, organisers and statesmen could familiarise themselves with the views of their colleagues from other countries. On the eve of the Second World War, the ISC had published 47 publications, 23 in French, 22 in English and 2 in German.Footnote 30
Membership of the ISC was confined to institutions for scientific research, discussion and information on international affairs. In countries which possessed more than one such scientific body there was usually a national coordinating committee created, which then became a direct member of the Conference, while the component institutions were affiliated as indirect members. In the case of countries where no institutions for the scientific study of IR existed, the Conference could admit to direct membership national groups of individual specialists in international affairs. On occasion, individual experts could also be invited to attend a Study Meeting.Footnote 31 However, individual governments, government organs, political parties as well as institutions that were engaged in any form of propaganda were not allowed to join. Together, this formed a flexible system of cooperation and consultation. Before the Second World War the ISC included among its members international institutions, national committees coordinating the work of several institutions, ad-hoc groups and individual scholars and experts (some were university-based, others never held a university position) from 37 countries from all continents. The list of countries in alphabetical order: Argentina, Australia, Austria,Footnote 32 Belgium, Brazil, British India, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany,Footnote 33 Greece, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Rumania, South Africa, Soviet Union, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the UK,Footnote 34 the United States of AmericaFootnote 35 and Yugoslavia.Footnote 36 The names of all specialists who were involved reads like a Who's Who in IR at the time. To name only a few: Alfred E. Zimmern, Arnold J. Toynbee, Charles K. Webster, Edward H. Carr, Stanley H. Bailey, Charles A.W. Manning, David Davies, Hugh Dalton, David Mitrany, Philip J. Noel-Baker, Hersch Lauterpacht, Hans Kelsen, Georg Schwarzenberger, Ludwik Ehrlich, Paul Mantoux, William E. Rappard, John F. Dulles, Nicholas J. Spykman, Pitman B. Potter, James T. Shotwell, Quincy Wright, Charles A. Beard, Christian L. Lange, Wilhelm Haas, Ernst Jäckh, and Arnold Wolfers.
Several of the above mentioned scholars have in the past been labelled utopians/idealists and realists. Traces of the First Great Debate can be seen at the ISC meetings in Paris 1934 and London 1935 on collective security. The two Italian participants, Professor Francesco Coppola and Senator Roberto Forges-Davanzati, both representing the Centro Italiano di Alti Studi Internazionali from Rome, called the theories and ideals of their colleagues unhistoric and going against human nature. They rejected the idea of collective security, conceived as a universal and abstract system of rules and procedures, and advocated the primacy of national interest. In his report General Rapporteur Maurice Bourquin and in his address ICIC President Professor Gilbert Murray both discussed and rejected the ideas of the two Italian fascists that can be associated with realism.Footnote 37 Interestingly, in his report on the university teaching of IR (see next paragraph) prepared for the Ninth ISC Conference in Madrid 1936, General Rapporteur Alfred Zimmern, who had been the first chair holder in International Politics at Aberystwyth College and later became Montague Burton Professor of International Relations in Oxford, used the terms idealists and realists himself to distinguish between ‘the men of study on the one hand, whether international lawyers, historians, economists or sociologists, and those engaged in the practice of international affairs on the other’. According to him, the cleavage that existed between them had been injurious to both parties.Footnote 38 Zimmern's report was from May 1936, so three years before Carr's Twenty Years’ Crisis. This example shows that the terms were part of the regular discourse.Footnote 39
At the Seventeenth Session of the ICIC, Henri Bonnet drew the attention of the Committee to the fact that ‘thanks to the [ISC] the League possessed an independent scientific department, consisting entirely of professors and persons highly qualified in questions connected with international relations’. The Director of the Paris Institute called it ‘an organ able to render service both to the League and to the International Labour Office’.Footnote 40 An echo of Bonnet's optimism could later be heard in the speech of ICIC President Gilbert Murray at the Twenty-First Session of the Committee. He called the ISC ‘one of the most important developments sponsored by the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation’ and ‘proof of a radical change in the policy of nations’. Previously each country had, in his mind, ‘thought that it was entitled to pursue its own policy without regard to other nations, but today scholars from all countries were meeting for an objective study of those general questions and great problems which divided the nations. Consequently, if it were possible, not perhaps to reach a conclusion, but at any rate to enable the international organisations to work satisfactorily, international relations would inevitably be improved thereby.’ The date was 17 July 1939.Footnote 41
University teaching of IR
In the previous part I described the origin and establishment of the ISC. The Conference answered a primary need and performed functions which until then never existed for national institutions engaged in the scientific study of international affairs. I also discussed the special technique of joint cooperative research into contemporary problems of IR that the ISC developed. Using the results of an international inquiry by the League of Nations, I want to focus in this section on the academic teaching of IR in America, Great Britain and on the European continent in the inter war period and look at some of the institutional settings that were available at the time.
In June 1931, at the Fourth Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations in Copenhagen, a committee of the Conference met a delegation of the so-called Sub-Committee of Experts for the Instruction of Youth in the Aims of the League of Nations. The six members accepted a resolution which recommended ‘that the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation instructs the Educational Information Centre to undertake an inquiry into the various activities, both direct and indirect, of the said Institutes, insofar as they tend to impart a knowledge of the League and develop the spirit of international cooperation, with special reference to the scope, nature, methods, and results of such activities […]’.Footnote 42 The terms of the resolution were endorsed by the ICIC and approved finally by the Council and the Twelfth Session of the Assembly of the League of Nations. However, the Educational Information Centre, that formed part of the Secretariat of the League, had not enough manpower, nor enough money, to conduct this international research. It therefore drew up a questionnaire and invited the various national Committees on Intellectual Cooperation to prepare a rapport on the situation in the countries in question.Footnote 43
One of the first to respond was the British Coordinating Committee.Footnote 44 Within a few months S. H. Bailey, who was a staff member of the Department of International Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), published an extensive survey. It covered the study of IR in higher education; in training colleges and departments; in schools; in adult education; and even mechanical aids. Bailey showed that in Britain at the time there were two special independent departments of IR: the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth College in the University of Wales and the Department of International Studies at the LSE, in the University of London. The Departments were composed round the privately funded Woodrow Wilson Chair of International Politics and the Sir Ernest Cassel Chair of IR. In each case close cooperation existed between the separate department and the departments of Economics, Law, History, and Political Science. The existence of these other departments made a coordinated study of subjects possible. At other universities special chairs or lectureships had been established (for instance the Montague Burton Chair of IR in Oxford, the Merttens Lectureship in International History in Birmingham or the Lectureship in IR in the University College of South-West England, Exeter), but these had not yet led to the formation of independent departments of IR. In Cambridge, Manchester, Bristol and Glasgow instruction on certain aspects of IR was given as incidental to historical, economic, commercial or philosophic subjects.
According to Bailey this was not enough for the synthetic or coordinated approach that the proponents of this new field advocated. Ideally the scientific study of IR should consist of the following subdivisions: ‘(i) International History – based on Modern World History and with special emphasis upon diplomatic relations. (ii) Economics and the Theory of International Trade, including Currency and Banking. (iii) The Structure of International Relations, or of the Great Society – a composite study of geographical, economic, social, psychological, ethnical, political, and other factors influencing international conduct. (iv) The History, Philosophy, and Principles of Public International Law, with some reference to so-called Private International Law. (v) The Growth, Structure, and Practice of National and International Institutions for the conduct of international relations – in short, a study of what has been called ‘the technique of peace’.Footnote 45
But that was in theory. In practice, however, this extensive scheme could not be adopted. Only a few universities in Great Britain were in a position to provide for the study of History, Economics and International Law without considerable change. This was especially so where the study of Social Sciences had a stronghold. In most of the universities separate departments for the teaching of these three subjects did not coexist. A complicating factor was also that International Law, which was an important element of the science of IR, was not required for the examinations of the Law Society. It was not regarded as essential for the qualifying examinations of future practitioners. Finally there was a time-factor for IR students who already had to cope with an already overloaded undergraduate schedule.
The Secretariat of the League of Nations immediately knew that Bailey's systematic survey was of great importance.Footnote 46 It sent copies to all national committees and institutes that were involved as an illustration of how they could work. In the following months and years, the Secretariat received other reports like for instance a survey of the World Peace Foundation which showed that before 1914 there had hardly been any courses on (aspects of) international affairs in American colleges. Paradoxically, while the US did not become a member of the League of Nations and remained isolationist after the war, American colleges flexibly adapted their existing curricula. The very elastic university organisation in America permitted a rapid adjustment to the new needs. International questions were treated by the universities as a normal extension of domestic and national interests. So, in 1931 students could follow more than 1600 courses on European history, the British Empire and the external relations of the US. In 480 courses public international law was combined with international affairs. Only 75 were devoted to the League of Nations and other international organisations such as the ILO. Another report by the American National Committee on Intellectual Cooperation showed how IR had developed as a subfield from American Political Science.Footnote 47
In London 1935, Madrid 1936 and Prague 1938 it came to important discussions within the bosom of the International Studies Conference on subjects such as the nature, scope and methodology of the systematic study of IR; the relationship between the old, traditional discipline of international law and the new academic discipline of international relations; and the academic teaching of IR, especially the question of how to organise instruction more effectively within a compartmentalised academic setting.
In the preparatory phase of the Conference of Prague, for instance, General Rapporteur Alfred Zimmern suggested a discussion on what IR should encompass. In his mind the ‘independent nucleus of the subject’ was contained in ‘Political Science, Political Economy, International Law, Geography, History, Sociology and Political and Moral Philosophy’. But that was not enough for the eclectic Zimmern. Perhaps other subjects should be included as well, such as Psychology, general aspects of Law, Biology, Geology and Demography. Zimmern favoured a synthetic approach. He suggested that ideally the study of IR should be the study of world affairs.Footnote 48 As a result of the discussions in Prague the General Rapporteur concluded that the study of international relations was much more systematically developed in the universities of the US than in any other part of the world, and that it had progressed there extremely rapidly since the Great War.Footnote 49
In Prague, the participants of the Eleventh Study Conference all received a copy of a new book by Bailey called International Studies in Modern Education, in which he showed that IR was far greater developed in the US and Great Britain than on the European continent.Footnote 50 According to him, the difference was due to the far greater development in the Anglo-Saxon world of the academic study of the social sciences. American and British universities and institutions of university standing were characterised by a far more flexible departmental or faculty organisation, which encouraged original research into subjects that were on the borders of several branches of the social sciences. On the European continent the academic study of the social sciences were far less developed. Universities of the French type, as he called them, were generally more conservative and their faculty organisation would seem less adaptable for such studies. Economic studies, for instance, were in America and England provided for by a separate department or even an independent faculty, whereas most of the time on the continent, they were associated and often subordinated with the Faculty of Law. Similarly, in the US and Great Britain the study of political science and government was firmly established in the academic tradition of numerous universities. However, Bailey showed how universities on the continent were slowly starting to respond, within their existing faculties, to the growing interest in international affairs and the need for its systematic study.
Among the material that Bailey had used, was the international inquiry of the League of Nations of 1932–1933. Interestingly, concerning the possibilities for IR research Bailey distinguished between four groups of countries. The first group consisted of the US and Great Britain, countries where, in his view, opportunities for the objective study of international affairs were considerable. Scholars had access to well-stocked libraries, collections of documentary materials, original research was stimulated by academic and other institutions, and financial support was available. There existed IR chairs, independent IR institutes and IR departments. The research opportunities had grown largely from practical considerations: there existed a strong demand for the objective study of (aspects of) international affairs from financial, commercial, industrial and governmental circles. In the second group of countries, the opportunities and the degree of organised encouragement were more limited but in the process of growth. Important collections of original documents and monographic literature were in existence, but not as big as in the countries of the first group. Also there existed an influential institute or a small group of institutions which tried to organise research in the field. Among the countries that in his opinion belonged to this group were Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands (apart from the international centre at The Hague), Norway, Poland and Sweden. The third group consisted of countries where some facilities existed, but no systematic encouragement was given for original research. Important collections and institutes might exist, but no provision was made for scholars. That was the situation in countries like Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Switzerland (without the international centre in Geneva), India, New Zealand and South Africa. The great majority of countries belonged to the fourth group, where neither a collection nor organised facilities existed.Footnote 51
The ISC during the Second World War
In the previous section I focused on the study and teaching of IR and referred to a number of academic institutions, departments and chairs. Now, I want to return to the events after the Twelfth International Studies Conference at Bergen on 29 August 1939, adopted the study subject ‘International Organisation’ for 1940–1941. Three days later, the Second World War began when Nazi Germany attacked Poland. During the September month, the IIIC searched feverishly for a new General Rapporteur. The American Coordinating Committee for International Studies favoured the appointment of Professor Pitman Benjamin Potter, who was regarded as the expert on international organisation. The other candidate was the Swiss Carl J. Burckhardt, the High Commissioner for Danzig, who had made quite an impression on contemporaries when he tried to oppose the Nazi leaders in the Free City and even Hitler himself. In the end, the IIIC thought that an American national would enjoy a greater liberty in discharging his function as General Rapporteur than the national of a small country. In the beginning of October, Potter accepted.Footnote 52
On December 21st and 22nd, 1939, the Programe Committee of the International Studies Conference met with its Executive Committee at the Peace Palace in The Hague, where a detailed programme of work prepared by Potter on the subject of International Organisation was discussed and finally adopted. It was decided that the general subject was going to be approached in phases and under five headings: aims; bases; organisation and procedure; experience of 1919–1939; proposals for reform.Footnote 53 At the end of the meeting a Bureau was appointed and endowed with the necessary authority to take budgetary and other administrative decisions.Footnote 54
In the following months, the IIIC received a few proposals and preliminary studies of the French, British, Mexican and Swiss national committees. Potter wrote a number of letters to scientists and experts, inviting them to participate in the new study cycle. Everything changed after the French capitulation. In June 1940, the work of the Paris Institute ceased and with it the functioning of the Secretariat of the ISC. Of the three Secretaries, one volunteered in the Royal Air Force, one volunteered in the Czechoslovak army and one took refuge in the US. The Conference followed in the last one's wake.
At the end of 1940 there were vague plans to organise a study conference in America, but they never materialised. Potter sent out a letter of inquiry in March 1941, concerning the desirability and practicability of continuing work on the study programme. He received eight responses, six from Europe and two from North America; six indicated a disposition and ability to continue work, while two (one from Europe, one from North America) were in the negative. The limited number of replies seemed to constitute in itself significant evidence that the work should be continued. There was one meeting of the Bureau, on 10 October 1941, in New York, where it was decided that the General Rapporteur would hold himself available to the Bureau and the Conference for any exchanges of information, ideas or proposals relating to the study programme.Footnote 55
In the war years, many coordinating committees and institutions stopped functioning or led a sleeping existence. On this side of the Atlantic, only Chatham House, the Swedish Institute of International Affairs and the Geneva IHEI continued their activities, only on a lesser scale. In occupied Europe the New Order was not very keen on internationalists. Many scientists were murdered or died of other reasons. Some managed to escape to Great Britain, the US or Canada. The Royal Institute of International Affairs and IR scholars like Toynbee, Webster, Zimmern, Mitrany, Brierly and others were employed by the British government to prepare the post-war settlement in a scientific way. From 1944 onwards, several institutions in North-America, South-Africa, India and Australia started functioning again.Footnote 56
In March 1945 the IIIC resumed its activities. The new Director Jean Mayoux immediately contacted the members of the International Studies Conference and informed whether they desired to continue the collaboration. The Frenchman received some responses after which it was decided that it was better to wait until more was know from the national committees. It also seemed prudent to wait for the outcome of the San Francisco Conference.Footnote 57
The first post-war meeting of the ISC was held on 18 November 1945 at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. It was an informal meeting of the Executive Committee and members of the Conference, where it was decided that the work of the Conference would be resumed as soon as possible. They also recommended that the research in International Organisation, the subject of Bergen 1939, would not be pursued. Instead a new subject of study was recommended: ‘Security Council of the UN – Its functions and its problems: including the whole problem of majority rule in the world of unequal states’.Footnote 58 When Potter heard about that, he tendered his resignation.
At the end of 1946 the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation merged into the newly created UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, to which it transferred its assets and archives. As the Paris Institute ceased to exist, the ISC had no other choice than to start negotiations with UNESCO about a possible working relationship. A new chapter in its history started. It would ultimately lead to its demise in the 1950s, as David Long showed in his before mentioned article.Footnote 59
Conclusion
In the preceding pages I've tried to extend the actual disciplinary conversations with the dimension of institutional setting instead of focusing on authors, books and articles. I fully agree with Long that disciplinary history must pay attention to the institutions, especially academic institutions: chairs, departments, etc. Without them, a discipline can barely be said to exist.
The history of the International Studies Conference and the discussions therein on the development and character of the academic teaching in IR allow us to take stock of where IR came from and why it is as it is. Before 1928 there existed no international platform for the exchange of ideas between institutions for research in, or teaching of, IR, which were created almost without exception only after the First World War. The ISC, as it was later called, provided a meeting-place where scientists, experts, organisers and statesmen could familiarise themselves with the views of their colleagues from other countries. As such, it created a new kind of ‘international sociability’ between IR scholars. Its immediate origins were rooted in a search for suitable methods of organising training in international politics by the ICIC. The material on the academic teaching of IR shows that IR was much more systematically developed in the universities of the US than in any other part of the world, and that it had progressed there extremely rapidly since 1918. On the European continent, universities in the 1930s were slowly becoming responsive within their existing faculties to the growing interest in world affairs and the need for its systematic study.
Seen from the angle of disciplinary history, I think that it would be an interesting idea in the future to delve into the academic institutionalisation of International Law, Political Economy, History, Geography, Sociology etc., so that we can learn more about the similarities and differences between IR and those sciences.
