10 J.-A. PEMBERTON
The ISC was an organisation which had its origins in a meeting of
savants interested in the study of international affairs in Berlin in
March 1928. The inspiration for this meeting largely came from Alfred
E. Zimmern, the deputy director of the International Institute of
Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC) in Paris from 1926 to 1930. A creature
of French law, the IIIC was an institution that had been placed at the
disposition of the LON by the French government in 1925 in order that
it might serve as the executive arm of the ICIC. The French govern-
ment’s gesture in respect to the IIIC had been made in view of the fact
that since its establishment by the council in 1922, the ICIC had been
starved of finances not least because certain members of the LON, most
notably those members who also happened to be members of the British
Empire, were sceptical of the idea that the LON should interest itself in
intellectual and cultural policy. The IIIC, which was largely funded by
the French government, would also serve as the secretariat of an associ-
ation created under its auspices: the ISC. Against a background of con-
cern about the role played by the Paris-based institute in the direction of
the ISC’s work and about the political implications of the ISC’s associ-
ation with the LON by virtue of its association with the IIIC, the IIIC
had declared in 1934 that the ISC was an autonomous and independent
organisation. Nonetheless, the ISC remained institutionally linked to the
IIIC and thus the LON until 1946, the year in which the existence of
the LON and the IIIC was terminated. Zimmern, in his capacity as dep-
uty director of the IIIC, was keen to promote the study of international
relations in educational contexts. More particularly, he was keen to pro-
mote instruction in the aims and activities of the LON. Zimmern was
assisted in the task of organising the conference in Berlin by Toynbee
whose father-in-law, Gilbert Murray, the Regius Professor of Greek at
the University of Oxford who had been appointed vice-president of the
ICIC in 1922. Following Bergson’s retirement from the role president of
the ICIC on the ground of ill-health in December 1925, Murray became
president of the ICIC. Like Murray, Zimmern and others involved in
preparations for the Berlin meeting, Toynbee would have been conscious
of the symbolic significance of holding it in Berlin: it could only serve
to heighten the developing atmosphere of political and intellectual rap-
prochement with Germany.
Elaborating on the remark he had made concerning the ISC’s adop-
tion of the dual task of promoting the maintenance of a system of collec-
tive security and of working out methods of peaceful change, Toynbee