3 CONFERENCES AT PRAGUE AND BERGEN AND THE LOOMING WAR 269tHe itAliAn witHdrAwAl
The Austrian group was not the only founding member of the ISC
noticeably absent from Prague. The Italian group had sent notification
of its withdrawal from the ISC in light of Italy’s announcement of its
withdrawal from the LON on December 11. In another blow to the
ICO, Italy’s withdrawal from the LON also saw the dissolution of the
IIEC. Giuliano, as president of the IIEC, communicated to Avenol on
December 18, that the IIEC was going into liquidation as of December
31, 1937. All the Italian staff, Giuliano informed Avenol, had resigned.^98
The notification concerning the dissolution of the IIEC, Charles André
reported at the time, was sent at the instigation of the ‘Hitlerian’
government.^99
On November 6, 1937, Italy joined Germany and Japan in adher-
ing to the Anti-Comintern Pact.^100 The Danish classical scholar Hartvig
Frisch, author of Pest Over Europa: Bolschevisme, Fascisme, Nazisme
(1933), observed in a 1938 report to the ICO, that the Berlin-Rome-
Tokyo Axis functioned like a ‘new genre of internationalism’: it had
established a network of relations across the world in order to spread its
doctrine of ‘supernationalism’. The Axis, Frisch stated, had shown itself
to be ‘very effective and active in what concerns war and aggression,’ but
also in the domain of ‘peaceful exchanges such as radio, cinema, sport-
ing competitions and international expositions’. Frisch added that in ‘all
these manifestations, we see appear the same axis’ and can observe its
efforts to draw into its circle states of a secondary importance and pro-
mote a new ideology of which the formula of ‘democracy, Geneva, com-
munism and disorder’ featured as its ‘leitmotiv.’^101(^98) For the letter of Balbino Giuliano and for two letters by the Italian minister of for-
eign affairs Count Galeazzo Ciano concerning the fate of the International Institute of
Educational Cinematography see Journal des Nations, janvier 14, 1938, Institut inter-
national du cinématographe éducatif, Rome, 1938–1940, AG 1-B-IX-17, UA. Note that
Ciano was Mussolini’s son-in-law. See also Charles André, L’Organisation de la Intellectuelle
(Rennes: Imprimerie Provinçale de l’Ouest, 1938), 148, and Hila Wehberg, ‘Fate of an
International Film Institute,’ Public Opinion Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1938): 483–85, 485.
(^99) André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 148.
(^100) Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy, 4–3. See also Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini (London:
Phoenix, 1994), 217.
(^101) La Coopération internationale et la radiodiffusion educative, étude de Mr. Hartvig
Frisch, March 23, 1938, Radiodiffusion dans l’intérêt de la paix, 1938, AG I IICI-E.X.3, UA.