4 INTELLECTUAL COOPERATION IN WAR-TIME AND PLANS ... 423exploited by aggressor nations to groom a false of image of their still
being civilised and cultured’.^297
While such criticisms of the ICO had been aired before the war they
became, as one would expect, especially current after its outbreak or
rather, when it became a matter of a war involving all the Axis powers.
Li gave three reasons for the ICO’s apparent lack of success. Two of the
reasons he gave were, firstly, the fact that LON member states ‘were no
more inclined to let this activity [of intellectual cooperation] become
a powerful instrument than they were to favor collective security’ and,
secondly, the acceptance of the theory that ‘intellectual preoccupations
must stand aloof from political facts, from collective security, and from
ideological problems.’ In order to illustrate the second reason he gave
for the ICO’s apparent lack of success, Li recalled the occasion of a
meeting of the Fifth Committee of the League Assembly in 1939. At the
time, he stated, he was struck by
how surprised most of the members... were ...when as a representative of
China he protested against the abandonment of Czechoslovakia to Hitler’s
Germany. Most of his colleagues seemed to indicate that they did not think
it was within the competence of a commission dealing with intellectual
problems to touch upon such a “political matter” as the abandonment of a
member of the League of Nations to a powerful aggressor.^298The third reason Li gave for the apparent lack of success of the ICO was
its ‘attempt at universalism’ as it was this that had seen it admit all coun-
tries, ‘even fascist countries to the councils of international intellectual
cooperation.’ As Li pointed out, it was the ICO’s mutually informing
(^297) Elzinga, ‘UNESCO and the Politics of International Cooperation in the Realm of
Science,’ 165. For Italian and Japanese membership of the ICIC, see Renoliet, L’Unesco
oubliée, 184–85, 281–82, The Japanese National Committee on Intellectual Cooperation
submitted a submitted a substantial report on Japanese culture and on its activities in
the field of intellectual cooperation on the invitation of the IIIC for consideration at the
Second General Conference of the National Committees of Intellectual Co-operation in
- The chair of the Japanese Committee, Count Ayské Kabayama, stated in the intro-
duction to the report that Japan felt ‘most keenly’ the need to submit a report because
of its geographical isolation from Europe and America. National Committee of Japan on
Intellectual Cooperation, Intellectual Cooperation and the Mutual Knowledge of National
Cultural Genius (Tokyo: National Committee of Japan on Intellectual Cooperation, 1937).
(^298) Li, ‘International Intellectual Cooperation,’ 299–300.