5 THE POST-WAR DECLINE OF THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIES CONFERENCE 491whether within the framework of a department of international politics
or within that of a department of political science.^216
Morgenthau’s dismissal of the work of the ISC would not have
helped its cause in the context of a struggle concerning the ownership
of the study of international relation, especially when its opponent in
this struggle, namely IPSA, was a larger and more well-connected body
within the framework of UNESCO. It would have mattered to those
deciding the fate of the ISC that IPSA was a creature of UNESCO
and the ISC was not. This last point aside, Morgenthau’s depiction of
the work ISC as amorphous and eclectic would have been particularly
unhelpful in regard to the ISC’s relationship with UNESCO because
the kind of organisations with which UNESCO preferred to collaborate
were organisations based in a particular specialisation.
Arvid explained in a report published in the International Social
Science Bulletin on the occasion of UNESCO’s tenth anniversary, that
support had been given initially to the ISC in order that it might recon-
struct itself and collaborate with UNESCO in areas of common con-
cern. However, he added, it soon became clear that an organisation
comprising a ‘rather loosely co-ordinated task-force’ whose members
came from ‘variety of disciplines according to the requirements of cur-
rent projects’ was not a suitable partner for such collaboration. The kind
of organisations with which UNESCO preferred to collaborate were
‘single-discipline bodies’: ‘separate international associations for each pro-
fessional specialization,’ be it economics, political science or sociology.^217
Although Morgenthau himself appeared agnostic on the issue, his
charges in relation to the ISC could only have reinforced the view enter-
tained by certain figures at UNESCO that for intellectual reasons, and
not just for reasons of better professional coordination, international
relations should come within the scope of political science. With obvi-
ous disdain, Manning reported that a UNESCO rapporteur had declared
that ‘[a] study of International Relations which is not based on a solid
foundation of political science can scarcely be said to have a firm basis of
any kind’ and had concluded, therefore, that the teaching international
(^216) Ibid., 655.
(^217) Arvid Brodersen, ‘Unesco’s Tenth Anniversary: A Retrospective Sketch,’
International Social Science Bulletin 8, no. 3 (1957): 403–09, 405.