Story of International Relations

4 INTELLECTUAL COOPERATION IN WAR-TIME AND PLANS ... 419

the man at the factory workbench, the woman in her home. One big part

of the task ahead is to equalize the flow of scientific benefits, so that peo-

ple may enjoy the broadest possible advantages everywhere, even in those

regions that we look upon as the most backward today. There must be no

backward areas, for human misery is indivisible. There can be no end to

wars so long as the map of the world shows areas of high living standards

and areas of want, sickness and despair....Everyone will grow richer as sci-

ence expands to cover the earth.^287

tHe ico: etHereAl universAlism?

One of the reasons why the ICO’s gained a reputation for conjuring cas-
tles in the air was that its means were so limited that it was unable to
make the various aspects of its work known among the vast majority of
people. Where there was any wider awareness of its work, this awareness
usually concerned the celebrated names who served on the ICIC or par-
ticipated in the ‘Entretiens’ (‘Converations’) and the ‘Correspondance’
(the ‘International Series of Open Letters’): according to the depictions
of some, the work of the ICO largely took the form of clusters of high-
minded savants meditating on high-brow themes beside the calm waters
of Lake Geneva or amidst the elegant interior of the IIIC’s grand salon
in the rue de Montepensier wing of the Palais Royal.^288
The observation of an American commentator in a 1949 essay con-
cerning UNESCO reflects well this understanding of the work of the
ICO: as ‘[n]ice and even significant though it might be for Paul Valéry,
French poet, and Thomas Mann, German novelist, to encounter each
other through the good offices’ of the IIIC in Paris, the ‘influence of
such a meeting counted for less than nothing in the political and eco-
nomic struggle between France Germany.’^289 It was precisely because he
was a staunch defender of the ICO’s reputation, that Mayoux lamented
the fact that the whole of the work of the ICO had come to be viewed
through the prism of the ‘Entretiens’ and ‘Open Letters’, activities which

(^287) Joseph Needham, 1946, quoted in Vitray, ‘UNESCO: Adventure in Understanding,’ 27.
(^288) Pham-Thi-Tu, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations (Paris: Librairie
Minard, 1962), 2.
(^289) James L. Henderson, UNESCO in Focus (New York: Anti-Defamation League of
B’nai B’rith, 1949), 19.