Abstract
The World Federation of Scientific Workers (WFScW) and UNESCO share roots in the Social Relations of Science (SRS) movements and in the Franco-British scientific relations which developed in the 1930s. In this historical context (the Great Depression, the rise of Fascism and the Nazi use of science, the social and intellectual fascination for the USSR), a new model of scientific internationalism emerged, where science and politics mixed. Many progressive scientists were involved in the war efforts against Nazism, and tried to prolong their international commitments into peacetime. They contributed to the establishment of the WFScW and of UNESCO in 1945–1946. Neither the WFScW nor UNESCO succeeded in achieving their initial aims. Another world emerged from the immediate post-war years, but it was not the world fancied by the progressive scientists from the mould of scientific internationalism. The aim of this article is to follow the path from the Franco-British networks towards the establishment of the WFScW and UNESCO; from an ideological scientific internationalism towards practical projects. It is to understand how these two bodies came to embody two different scientific internationalisms during the Cold War.
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Notes
Werskey (2007) has recently revisited the “visible college” and its replications in a tribute to Bob Young.
The Allied countries established an International Research Council (IRC) in 1919. The boycott ended in 1926, and the IRC was renamed ICSU in 1931. In 1939, 8 international scientific unions and 41 national bodies were ICSU members.
Dutch scientists pursued a line of social responsibility in science, which continued their efforts to bring reconciliation between scientists after the first World War, and met the onslaught of Nazism in the 1930s (Rip and Boeker 1975, pp. 457–484).
See also, about Central Asia, Bernal (1945a, pp. 557–558).
Werskey (2007, pp. 11–12), has recently revisited Bernal’s identification between Marxism and socialism with science.
According to the words used by Rose and Rose (1981, p. 267).
See Schroeder Gudehus (1978) for an analysis of Needham’s orientation under the prism of functionalism.
See also his memos of 1944 and 1945, his proposals for UNESCO programme (UNESCO/Prep.Com/Nat. Sci. Com./12 July 1946, Tasks and Functions of the Secretariat’s Division of Natural Sciences), his arguments in favor of the establishment of international scientific laboratories (UNESCO/Nat.Sci./24/1947).
Quoted by Werskey (2007, p. 15).
Needham shared many views with Lucien Febvre. See hereafter the Scientific and Cultural History of Mankind.
UNESCO (12 July 1946, p. 7).
In his welcoming speech, Sir Robert Robinson (President of the Royal Society) said: “Our organizations restrict their activity to what Dr. Needham lately called the ‘bright zone’ (Western Europe, North America, South Africa, etc., the scientifically well-equipped countries) and they are of smaller use to the countries of the ‘dark zone’. One could say: we form a scientific church, not a mission. We beg UNESCO to leave us the former domain, and take the latter itself, for we are not prepared to do that” (Stratton 1946, p. 6). This reflected a conservative, Eurocentric, notion of a division of labor between Unesco and ICSU.
See Werskey (2007, pp. 20–21), on Needham, Bernal, Robert Young, and the Radical Science Movement.
This movement disappeared well before the war, but in some ways the French AScW is its reconstruction after the war.
The AScW was the main professional organization for British scientists. It was founded in 1918, under the name of National Union of Scientific Workers. Ten years later, it underwent a major crisis, changed its name to AScW, and de-registered as a trade union. In the mid–1930s, Bernal and his Cambridge friends took the lead in the AScW, which developed rapidly, fighting for the organization and the funding of science in the UK. The AScW joined the Trade Union Congress during the War, and claimed for 16,000 members in 1945. See Werskey (2007).
“I recall particularly one such meeting when some British scientists, from Cambridge and London, went urgently to Paris to meet Langevin, Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie and other French scientists to discuss these matters. In these discussions, the idea germinated of an international organization of scientists to press for the proper organization of science to constructive ends and against obscurantist and Fascist trends”. Burhop presided over the WFScW after Joliot (Burhop 1964, p. 34).
Dozens of French scientists worked in British laboratories and administrations to catch up on the time lost during the Nazi occupation.
See Elzinga (1996a, pp. 3–20). Elzinga stands for a more rigid typology for the forms of scientific co-operation.
UNESCO (12 July 1946, p. 6).
Needham to Joliot, 19 May 1945 (Needham Archives, D25).
Auger succeeded Needham in May 1948, as head of the UNESCO Science Department.
Huxley would become the first Director General of UNESCO.
Cannon was a Harvard physiologist and Chairman of the Research Council Division of Foreign Relations. Field was a Princeton geologist and active member of the ICSU, also participating in its Committee for Science and its Social Relations. Both were members of the National Academy of Science.
A previous agreement had been signed between the IIIC and the ICSU in 1937. It was less ambitious, and had no time to become operational before the war.
All quotations are from the booklet published in 1947 by the WFScW to present its first meeting and its constitution.
See Huxley’s, Crowther’s, and Bernal’s quotations in Horner (1996, pp. 143–144).
The ICSU was also very reluctant towards the risk of UNESCO willing to control the Unions.
The AScW Council proposed (12 November 1950) Lord Boyd Orr for the presidency. It also proposed to remove Bernal and Crowther from their functions, keeping only Biquard as the representative of the Western European scientists.
After Needham, some initiatives continued in the 1950s, such as the committees to develop scientific research on Arid Zones or Humid Tropics, the Advisory Committee with the directors of the National Bodies for Scientific Research, dedicated to support the organization of science in non-European countries, etc.
Impact no. 1 included a critical bibliography of the books dedicated to the effects of science upon society. The reviews were supposed to answer six questions about this subject, one being “Which are the social or individual factors that definitely shape scientific progress?” Among the 101 books reviewed, many of which were by left-leaning authors, Bernal’s Social Function of Science was credited as “the most complete study” of the subject. This bibliography is anonymous, but is frequently attributed to Samuel Lilley.
Armando Cortesao had to leave Portugal in October 1933, facing threats from the military regime. He was exiled in London from 1935 to 1946, where he had grants from the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning. He worked with Charles Singer. He occasionally participated in the International Academy before the war, but he was elected as a member only in 1947, together with Joseph Needham. They both shared the privilege of having escaped from the preliminary stage of “correspondent”. He followed Needham in imposing on the “fossilized” Academy a more democratic function, and “fresh blood” such as Samuel Lilley and Leon Rosenfeld. But he did seem to have shared Needham’s Marxist ideas.
Cortesao (1948 pp. 25–35).
Jean Pelseneer was a physicist-turned-historian who led the Belgian group of historians of science for many years since the 1930s. He was a front-row Academy member from the mid-1930s. He is not known to have been left-leaning. In 1950 he left UNESCO for a University Professorship in “History of Thought”. In the 1950s, he shared the dominant anti-Marxist ideology of most historians of science.
Bernal, Farrington, Childe and Crowther were also members of this commission. Rosenfeld, a physicist, had already published some articles on history of science before the war, including in Archeion. He was elected an Academy correspondent after the war. Samuel Lilley was Needham’s assistant in Cambridge, developing a history of science program at the Museum of Natural Science Instruments. When Needham was in China, the conservative historians seized power in the Cambridge History of Science Committee, and Lilley was denied any position in Cambridge. He had responsibilities in the British Society for History of Science, but he was unsuccessful in being elected to the International Academy. See Mayer (2004, pp. 41–72).
The report was published: Lilley (1949, pp. 376–443).
See Anna-K. Mayer (2004). In this article, Lilley defended a more balanced position than the one Steven Shapin attributed to him when reviewing the emergence of the term “externalism”. Shapin (1992, pp. 333–369). Obviously, UNESCO has boosted the Marxist line in the history of science for some years, but it ended with the conservative backlash.
See the verbatim of the drafting committee, with Needham and Febvre (UNESCO/PHS/DC1/SR1–10, December 1949) and the final report (UNESCO/PHS/Conf.6/1, 24 January 1950) in UNESCO Archives (SCHM23, 2.633(1)).
This orientation encountered strong opposition from many traditional historians of science and right-leaning governments. When the fifth UNESCO General Conference (Florence, Italy, June1950) finally decided to undertake the publication of this History, an International Commission was established with a new group of scholars. They completely transformed the project into a more traditional history. The volumes were published only in the 1960s.
While in Beirut, Needham delivered one of his most influential conferences: Needham (1949b, pp. 563–582).
This conference was a turning point for US control over UNESCO.
Fadeyev’s speech was endorsed by Bernal. See Bernal (1948–1949, pp. 5–27).
In that, I disagree with Horner when he wrote that the Federation provided “the only international forum for the discussion of political and professional issues between the scientists of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, China and those of Western Europe”. (Horner 1996, p. 146)
Point IV of Truman’s inaugural speech in January 1949.
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Petitjean, P. The Joint Establishment of the World Federation of Scientific Workers and of UNESCO After World War II. Minerva 46, 247–270 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-008-9092-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-008-9092-0