4 INTELLECTUAL COOPERATION IN WAR-TIME AND PLANS ... 407which had been a key preoccupation of the ICO throughout the interwar
period, soon came to be a feature of CAME discussions.^240
As the projects planned under the auspices of CAME increased in num-
ber and scope, it became apparent that a larger organisation with a clearer
mandate was needed. At the ninth CAME meeting in London on April 5,
1944, plans for a United Nations Organisation for Educational and Cultural
Reconstruction were discussed. This meeting issued in a draft constitution
which was very quickly subject to revision, not least because it was felt that
what was needed in the fields of education and culture was a permanent
body: a body whose life extended beyond the period of reconstruction.^241
The need for a United Nations’ organisation in the field of education
and culture was subsequently urged at the commencement of the San
Francisco Conference by the Chinese delegation and in urging this the
Chinese delegation enjoyed the support of the delegations of Ecuador,
Haiti, Norway, the Philippines, Lebanon and Uruguay. Bonnet, who had
been appointed French ambassador to the United States in December
1944, following some months spent as Information Officer of the
French Committee of National Liberation in Algiers and then as a mem-
ber of the Provisional Government of the French Republic, attended the
San Francisco conference. In the midst of the conference, he called upon
the United Nations to convoke within some months a ‘general con-
ference charged with establishing the statutes of an organisation inter-
national de coopération intellectuelle’ with a view to fostering ‘mutual
comprehension and understanding among peoples’ and ‘assuring the
access of all citizens to culture.’^242 However, Bonnet was careful to point
(^240) Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, 40.
(^241) Johnson, ‘The Origin of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization,’ 443. By the time of the ninth CAME meeting on April 5, 1944, those states
which had previously sent observers to CAME had been invited to become full members.
See also Laves and Thomson, UNESCO: Purpose, Progress, Prospects, 20–21. China was also
a proponent of a permanent institution for educational and cultural co-operation.
(^242) ‘Les questions éducatives et culturelles dans les récentes conferences internationales
numéro spécial,’ Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale (octobre–novembre 1945): 27–9.
The Inter-American Conference at Chapultepec in Mexico City in February and March
1945 saw twenty states resolve in favour of ‘an international agency especially charged with
encouraging intellectual and moral cooperation between nations.’ See also Sewell, UNESCO
and World Politics, 68, and Laves and Thomson, UNESCO: Purpose, Progress, Prospects, 23.
It was ‘under the inspiration’ of Bonnet, Dennery and Louis Joxe that the Comité d’études
des problèmes du Pacifique of the Centre d’études de politique étrangère was reconstituted in
Algiers. ‘L’Activité du Centre,’ Politique Étrangère 10, no. 3 (1945): 296–301, 300.