5 THE POST-WAR DECLINE OF THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIES CONFERENCE 433All the national committees mentioned above as well as Iran in the
form of the University of Tehran expressed in telegrams of support
their fidelity to the IIIC. Most of these telegrams urged the members of
Intellectual Cooperation present at San Francisco to ‘seize every favour-
able occasion in order to support the idea of International Intellectual
Cooperation within the framework of the United Nations.’ In contrast
to the situation of the South American committees and the committees
in the so-called countries of the English language, the situation of the
national committees in Europe remained uncertain. Noting that there
was not any country on the continent which had not been ‘upset by
the terrible events which had recently covered the world in blood,’ the
IIIC’s bulletin pointed out that tragically a great number of the mem-
bers of the European committees had lost their lives ‘in the torment, in
Belgium, Czechoslovakia, in France, in Holland, in Norway, in Poland
etc.’^21
Post-wAr reconstruction: tHe feAr of fAilure
The IIIC’s bulletin of October–November 1945 paid homage to
Huizinga as it did to a number of others associated with the ICO who
were now deceased. In the obituary dedicated to Huizinga, it drew atten-
tion to a passage taken from one of his interventions during the course
of a conversation held at the Palais Royal between 16 and 18 of October,
1933, on the subject of the future of the European mind.^22 In the con-
text of this conversation, which Bonnet claimed presaged the debate
on appeasement, the German philosopher Count Hermann Keyserling
declared that recent events in Germany were a manifestation of a grow-
ing revolt against the forces of mind and spirit by ‘earthly forces’ (les forces
telluriques). According to Bonnet, even though Keyserling was not a total-
itarian, in advancing this line of argument he was attempting to excuse in
(^21) Ibid., 62–5. ‘The Institute [of Intellectual Coooperation] has received a letter from
Professor Carlo Antoni from the “Institut Nazionale per la relazioni culturali con l’estero”
(alias I.R.C.E.) which confirms some conversations with the Italian government about
proceeding with the nomination, on the proposal of the I.R.C.E., with a new committee
[on intellectual cooperation]’ (ibid., 69).
(^22) Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale [e] (octobre–novembre 1945), 12.