422 J.-A. PEMBERTON
activities associated with it.^295 In addition, the reputation of the LON’s
international intellectual cooperation organisation had been tainted
because of its accommodation of representatives of states which pursued
policies in outright defiance of the covenant and the very humanism
which the ICO sought to promote, this being a consequence of the pre-
tence that it was purely intellectual in character and above the political
fray.^296
Fascist Italy was represented on the executive of the ICIC until its
resignation from the League at the end of 1937 and a militaristic Japan,
although announcing its withdrawal from the League in March 1933, con-
tinued to be represented at the ICIC until discontinuing its cooperation
with its technical organs in early November 1938. As for Nazi Germany,
as we saw, it withdrew from all the League’s organs in October 1933.
However, as we also saw, the ICO’s governing body determined shortly
after that the ICO would remain open to German participation. This
openness to German participation took the form of Reich-approved
German involvement in the ISC and through this, Reich-approved
German collaboration with the IIIC. In relation to these matters,
Aant Elzinga notes that the ICO’s ‘[o]fficial ostrich-like neutrality was
(^295) Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 2. Henderson, UNESCO
in Focus, 19. James L. Henderson’s essay reflected the tendency to view the ICO through
he spectrum of the League’s putative failure. See also Charles S. Ascher, ‘The Development
of UNESCO’s Program,’ International Organisation 4, no. 1 (1950): 12–26.
(^296) Jan Kolasa observes the following: ‘League intellectuals tried to separate the activities
of the League of Nations from those of its agency for intellectual cooperation. They main-
tained that the League of Nations approached the subject from a political point of view,
whereas the intellectual cooperation agency looked at it from the “pure intellectual point
of view.” Undoubtedly, the strong emphasis on the “pure intellectual character” of the
League international intellectual cooperation in the late 1930s reflected the difficulties of
contemporary political circumstances. The pretended apolitical attitude excused, for exam-
ple, the collaboration of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation with
countries which withdrew their participation from the League of Nations. It resulted in a
scandalous toleration of and collaboration with the Nazi-regime which was the very nega-
tion of culture and humanism. But the apolitical aspiration of the International Committee
on Intellectual Cooperation was not only the direct result of the existing political situation
in the second half of the 1930s, From the very beginning, the organization was opened to
every country, irrespective of its political regime, of the role it played in the war, of the atti-
tude to the League itself.’ Kolasa, International Intellectual Cooperation, 61.