League of Nations Secretariat

"Great Scott! Must we coordinate all these? I am sorry for Dr. Nitobe!", wrote a member of the Section on September 10, 1919, on a note attached to the list of all existing international bureaux drawn up by the Union of International Associations before the war (LON Archives 13/299/1039). Indeed, the work of the section was based on surveys conducted before the First World War. And the first task of the Japanese Under-Secretary General Inazo Nitobe, Director of the Section, was to ensure that the list was up to date before departing on pilgrimage and trying to visit them or at least contact them. But the situation had significantly changed, and the lists were very heterogeneous and full of outdated information. Following a visit to fifteen Parisian offices in July 1920 with his secretary Miss Katherine Stafford, Nitobe decided to publish a Handbook of International Offices. The preparation of this document, the first volume of which was published in 1921 and was reissued and updated several times since, was to be the focus of a great deal of the Section's activity. Many of these bureaux had a more sustained relationship with the League, with some even planning a formal affiliation and a move of their headquarters to Geneva. But this coordination momentum clashed with the logic of these bureaux, created to gather delegates to regular congresses around very specific technical issues. These communities already existed and, for those that survived the war, were already sufficiently institutionalized not to wish to be taken over by this new multilateral political actor. The Section therefore only compiled lists of these organizations to facilitate the exchange of information but never really coordinated their activities.

Martin Grandjean 2023

Organisation chart of Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations in 1926-1930 (picture from Grandjean 2022). The Section is at the top, with the Committee on the left (ICIC) and the Paris Institute on the right (IIIC).

The concept of "intellectual cooperation" was not precisely defined by the Assembly of the League of Nations. On the contrary, it was a term used to describe various concerns that arose as early as 1920 around scientific, educational and cultural issues. Some delegates first proposed the creation of an organization of intellectual work, on the model of the International Labor Office, but the Assembly voted a Léon Bourgeois resolution in 1921 to create a temporary and advisory committee tasked with clarifying needs around scientific and cultural collaboration (educational issues were too political and were left aside). The International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC) met for the first time in August 1922. It quickly became the focal point of the activity of the Section: as its sessions only brought its 12 to 18 experts together once or twice a year, the Secretariat had to ensure the continuity. The Committee's work covered a variety of topics, such as inter-university relations, conditions of intellectual work, student and professor exchanges, international bibliographic coordination, intellectual property, and artistic and literary issues. In 1924, the French government made it known that it wanted the work of the ICIC to benefit from a more efficient secretariat. The Committee therefore became a permanent organ of the Section, and an Institute was created with the financial support of France. The International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC) is founded in Paris in 1926. It quickly became an important administration whose size exceeded that of the Section in Geneva. Soon, it was no longer simply a secretariat but a real executive center for intellectual cooperation, which made the link between the Committee (and the Section) and the National Committees for Intellectual Cooperation that were created in many countries. Under its first director, Julien Luchaire, the IIIC became so independent that the League feared that it would make decisions in total autonomy - and strongly influenced by the French government. For this reason, the Institute was reorganized in 1931 and entrusted to a new director, Henri Bonnet, who, while also French, was closer to the League of Nations. The Second World War, and the German invasion of France, interrupted the activities of the Institute in 1940, also putting an end to a final reform that would have consecrated the IIIC as a full-fledged international organization. In 1946, UNESCO was created by taking over some of the missions of the Institute and inheriting its archives.