4 INTELLECTUAL COOPERATION IN WAR-TIME AND PLANS ... 371He declared that those present at the conference wanted to ‘solemnly
affirm before...[their]...Continent, that culture has a universal value’
and that as such it is the ‘common patrimony of humanity’ and is to be
enjoyed without restrictions of any kind. Human thought, he stated,
should not have imposed on it pre-determined forms, much less should
it ‘serve as an instrument of doctrines based in material force’ or be ‘con-
verted into the monopoly of a dominant race.’ For Walker Linares, con-
siderations such as these were well encapsulated by Valéry’s notion of a
sociedad de los espiritus, a notion which, Walker Linares insisted, must be
kept in view if an ‘authentic fraternity’ amongst minds is to be realised.^77
In accordance with Walker Linares’s comments, the second plenary
session of the conference approved, by acclamation, a recommendation
that ‘all the governments of the American nations study the possibility
of establishing in one of them, for the duration of the war...[the IIIC]
or its Secretariat,’ the functionaries of which, the resolution noted, had
been ‘obliged to disperse themselves throughout the world’ due to the
German Occupation.^78 In a further resolution it was proposed that an
inter-American committee comprised of seven persons experienced in the
field of intellectual cooperation should be established under the chairman-
ship of Almeida, with a view to examining the possibility establishing in
one of the American nations an institution devoted to intellectual cooper-
ation and the practical form it might take. This committee was duly estab-
lished and with the assistance of one of the IIIC’s dispersed functionaries,
namely, Bonnet, who had been present at the Havana meeting.^79
In the event, this committee met only once: in October 1943 in
Washington where it held sessions at the buildings of the Pan-American
Union and the Carnegie Endowment. At these sessions, the commit-
tee outlined projects for an inquiry into the current state of intellectual
cooperation, the duties and rights of intellectual in the political and social
struggle, education as a means of ensuring peace, post-war intellectual
and cultural exchange, the protection of works of art and monuments
in times of war as well as a range of other projects.^80 Irrespective of the
(^77) Ibid., 20–1.
(^78) Ibid., 30.
(^79) Ibid. See also Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 159.
(^80) Malcolm W. Davis, ‘The League of Minds,’ in Harriet Eager Davis, ed., Pioneers
in World Order: An American Appraisal of the Leauge of Nations (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1944), 248. The inter-American committee endorsed a proposal by the
Cuban government to set up a committee secretariat in Havana.