Story of International Relations

3 CONFERENCES AT PRAGUE AND BERGEN AND THE LOOMING WAR 257

in response to reports that Germany was concentrating military forces
along its border with Czechoslovakia. An evening reception was held
for conference participants by the foreign minister Kamil Kroft, who
also closed the conference. Edvard Beneš, the Czechoslovakian presi-
dent and the former head of the Czechoslovakian delegation to the
LON, held a reception in honour of the president of the conference,
Antonin Bohac, vice-president of the Czechoslovakian State Office of
Statistics, and the conference’s two general rapporteurs and two secre-
tary-rapporteurs. Despite this element of ceremony, relative to the con-
ference of the previous year, the 1938 session of the ISC, which was
mostly conducted at the SIA Building, was a low-key affair, both in
terms of its organisation and in terms of the nature of the discussions to
which it gave rise.^60
That it was a low-key affairs was only to be expected: the Prague
conference was not associated with a grand exposition and nor was the
subject matter under discussion as politically charged as was the subject
matter of the 1937 conference. Indeed, aside from the preparatory meet-
ings on the topic of economic policies in relation to world peace, most
of the meetings at the conference were devoted to the discussion of the
university teaching of international relations.^61
Zimmern was the general rapporteur of the meetings on university
teaching of international relations. In the preface to the conference’s
proceedings on this subject, he reflected on the maturation of interna-
tional studies, observing that a conference on the teaching of interna-
tional relations could not have been held before 1914. He stated that
this was because there had been, ‘at least in the Old World, no teach-
ing of the subject as such, and very little conscious study.’ Certainly, he
added, it would have been impossible before then to hold a gathering

(^60) Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, L’Institut International de
Coopération Intellectuelle: 1925–1946 (Paris: Institut International de Coopération
Intellectuelle, 1946), 285, and Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 89–90 (1938): 199–235,
199-200, 219, See also XIth Session, Prague, 1938, Note on the Organisation of the
Conference, AG IICI- K-XI-16 UA. On the partial mobilisation see Igor Lukes, ‘The
Czechoslovak Partial Mobilization in May 1938: A Mystery (Almost) Solved,’ Journal of
Contemporary History 31, no. 4 (1996): 699–701.
(^61) Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, Institut International de la
Coopération Intellectuelle, 1925–1946, 283.