5 THE POST-WAR DECLINE OF THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIES CONFERENCE 465sentiments, Cassin maintained that scientists who spurned the opportu-
nity that was being offered to them by UNESCO to disseminate their
work, would be ‘guilty towards the people of the world’: they would
have failed in their duty to educate the public and have left the field open
to ‘charlatans’.^126
British delegates to the Paris meeting were the principal opponents of
the ISC coming under the administrative tutelage of UNESCO. They
argued that instead of entering a relationship with the UNESCO, the
ISC should find the means necessary to secure a completely independ-
ent existence.^127 This attitude was based on a different conception of the
conference to that promoted by the French delegates: the British con-
ception of the conference was that it should be a strictly scholarly forum
in which studies by individual specialists were undertaken and discussed.
As indicated above, this view was articulated by Webster who, in addition
to attending the San Francisco conference and the constitutive assem-
bly of UNESCO in London in 1945, was a member of the Legal and
Administrative Committee of UNESCO’s first general conference: he
was a member of the committee which drew up the provisions governing
its relations with non-government international organisations.^128
Webster objected to Scelle’s suggestion that the ISC might serve as
a conduit for public opinion on the ground that this not in the inter-
est of scholarship. He warned that financial dependence on UNESCO
would result in one or the other of the following two outcomes: either it
would give ‘great power to...[UNESCCO]...officials’ in terms of direct-
ing the ISC’s research, or it would mean that the ISC would be forced
to compromise its work because it would be exposed to ‘pressure from
government quarters’. Despite being highly sceptical of the notion that
UNESCO could serve the conference in the same way as the IIIC had
served it given UNESCO’s inter-governmental nature, Webster did not
rule out the possibility that some form association might be established
between UNESCO and the ISC. However, he insisted that any associ-
ation between the two bodies must be subject to the condition that the
(^126) Ibid., 52–54.
(^127) Politique Étrangère 12, no. 2 (1947), 242–43.
(^128) International Studies Conference, Verbatim Report of the XIIIth Administrative ses-
sion, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris,
IICI-K-XIV-12, UA, 55–6.