[Book] Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations: Shaping Cultural and Political Relations

New book released!

I am very pleased to announce the publication of a book that I had the privilege of editing with Daniel Laqua on the history of intellectual cooperation at the League of Nations, published in the United Nations Historical Series.

CITATION

Grandjean Martin and Laqua Daniel, eds. Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations: Shaping Cultural and Political Relations. UN Historical Series. Geneva: United Nations, 2025, 233 pages. ISBN: 9789211072808 DOI: 10.18356/9789211072808

The book is available online

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Read online	Download PDF	Print (available soon)
Provided by the UN-iLibrary website	Provided by the UN Digital Library	Ordering the print version will soon be available through the UN Publications website

Presentation

The construction of a new global order after the First World War required not only political and economic efforts, but also the coordination of scientific and cultural relations on an international scale. To this end, the League of Nations launched a range of initiatives, including the creation of its International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (1922), the foundation of the Paris-based International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (1925–26) as well as the formation of various auxiliary bodies. These ventures aimed to develop a collaborative dynamic around issues as diverse as scientific cooperation, educational means for peace as well as artistic and literary relations. Attracting some of the era’s most eminent intellectuals, these initiatives did not lead to the creation of a “League of Minds”, as some of the architects of the League of Nations had so eagerly hoped. However, as this volume demonstrates, these efforts did play a key role in the development of cultural diplomacy and in the evolution of transnational fields of action during the interwar period. Moreover, the history of transnational intellectual cooperation in this period illuminates wider issues surrounding international relations and the development of international organizations.

Edited by Martin Grandjean and Daniel Laqua, this book brings together the research of 17 scholars, highlighting the breadth of the League’s work in the field of intellectual cooperation and detailing a range of transnational connections across a variety of cultural fields.

Chapters

Blandine Blukacz-Louisfert and Adama Aly Pam	Preface	xv-xvi
Martin Grandjean and Daniel Laqua	Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations and its Histories	1-16
Annamaria Ducci	The League of Nations and the Notion of Cultural Heritage: Legacies and New Departures	19-30
Elisabet Carbó-Catalan	The Language and Translation Policies of Intellectual Cooperation: Practical Needs and Symbolic Battles	31-45
Gabriel Galvez-Behar	Fruitful Failure: Intellectual Cooperation and the Institutionalization of Scientific Research	47-58
Xavier Riondet	The Production of Consensus and Legitimacy on Educational Questions: An Emerging Field of Action in the League’s Intellectual Cooperation Organization	59-72
Jonathan Voges	In the Engine Room of Intellectual Cooperation: A Prosopographical Approach to the Civil Servants of the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation in Paris	75-83
Diana Roig-Sanz and Rubén Rodríguez-Casañ	A Gender Perspective on the History of Intellectual Cooperation: Women at the League of Nations and the Paris Institute	85-102
Monika Šipelytė	Gabrielle Radziwill: The Story of an Eastern European Princess at the Service of Intellectual Cooperation	103-113
Pelle an Dijk	Shaping Future Elites: The Information Section Supporting Intellectual Cooperation	115-125
Thomas Davies	Transnational Associations and Intellectual Cooperation: Anticipating, Lobbying, Serving and Complementing the League of Nations Institutions	127-137
Johannes Feichtinger	The Trauma of Imperial Decline versus the Triumph of National Rebirth: Austria’s and Poland’s Contrasting Concepts of International Intellectual Cooperation after the First World War	141-158
Anastassiya Schacht	Searching for a New Yardstick: The League of Nations, Intellectual Cooperation and the Soviet Challenge	159-171
Benjamin G. Martin	Modelling a Fascist Internationalism: Italy’s National Committee for Intellectual Cooperation, 1924–1937	173-186
Jennifer Y. Chang	Beyond Representation: The Bibliothèque Sino-Internationale and the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, 1933–39	187-202
Leandro Lacquaniti	The Entretien of Buenos Aires in 1936: Debates on Intellectual Cooperation and Western Culture in a World on Edge	203-215
	Select Bibliography	217-225

Learn more

I recommend the website intellectualcooperation.org, which was created for the international conference celebrating the centenary of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation at the United Nations in Geneva in 2022. It contains the conference Book of Abstracts, which complements this book well in showing the diversity of approaches and the renewal of research on intellectual cooperation, as well as a bibliography of over 400 titles on the subject!

Picture: “Palais des Nations: Assembly Hall and Court of Honor” (Charles-Edouard Boesch), UN Archives P119_01_038, view online.