Story of International Relations

3 CONFERENCES AT PRAGUE AND BERGEN AND THE LOOMING WAR 245

I would place the whole responsibility for preparing the conference in the

hands of the Rapporteur-Général and his staff and leave them to work

directly with research institutions and individuals. I would place the staff in

the I.I.C. [IIIC] and insist that all the conference preparation go through

the Rapporteur-Général to the Executive Committee....The Rapporteur-

Général would...need a senior assistant of good linguistic qualifications,

high educational attainments and a capacity to negotiate with research

workers and groups. This assistant would need to travel a good deal and

arrange for the execution of the research preparation. In addition, since

the subject of the next conference is mainly economic, there should be

an economic technician. The Rapporteur-Général could also take general

direction of any study groups that are continued. He would obviously

need a Secretary and I would strongly urge the official up till now a mem-

ber of the I.I.C. staff, responsible for actual conference preparation, be

placed under the Rapporteur-Général also.^14

Condliffe, who had recently left the Financial Section in order to take up
the position of professor of commerce at the University of London, had
attended the conference Paris in 1937 as an observer on behalf of the
LON Secretariat. At the request of the ISC’s International Study Group
on Markets and Raw Materials, he had prepared a memorandum for the
conference, his memorandum being among a number of memoranda
requested from ‘international experts during the preparatory period to
supplement on special points the work done by Institutions participat-
ing in the Conference.’^15 During its session in Paris in 1937, the ISC
had appointed an editorial board ‘to approve a plan of publication of the
results of the Conference on peaceful change’.^16
The members of this board were Davis, Bourquin and Dennery and
in their capacity as members they had decided that because of the top-
icality of the subject of peaceful change, the board would ‘publish as
full a record of the discussions [in Paris] as soon as possible’ and that it
would ‘publish at once four of the monographs prepared by individual
experts’.^17 Appearing in English under the heading of Markets and the

(^14) Ibid.
(^15) J. B. Condliffe, Markets and the Problem of Peaceful Change (Paris: International
Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1938), 3–4.
(^16) International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw
Materials, Colonies, 12.
(^17) Ibid., 12–13.