270 J.-A. PEMBERTON
The manifestations promoting the above formula were for members
of the ICO sad to observe given the prodigious efforts of that organisa-
tion over many years to reinforce the Geneva spirit. It should be noted
that this spirit was now widely derided and not only in the camp of the
dictators and their satellites. One effort in which the ICO had been
engaged since the late 1920s that had recently come to fruition con-
cerned radio: on April 2, 1938, the Convention on the Use of Radio
in the Interest of Peace entered into force. It was telling of the times,
however, that the convention’s entry en vigeur was not greeted with any
sense of triumph. In a letter to Bonnet, William Beveridge, the noted
British economist and former chair of the BCCIS, lamented that irre-
spective of the radio convention, broadcasting had become ‘an additional
armament in international hostility and national propaganda,’ adding
that he did not ‘see how the Institute of Intellectual Co-operation can
do anything effective to remedy this’.^102
Consistent with the ICO’s policy of intellectually and culturally
engaging with states which were not members of or which had with-
drawn from the LON, the IIIC issued an invitation to the Italian Centre
for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries to send representatives
to the next session of ISC which was scheduled to take place in August
- (The invitation was issued to the Centre for Cultural Relations
in view of the fact that the Centro Italiano di alti studi internazionale
along with its host organisation, namely, the Commissione nazionale ital-
iana per la Cooperazione Intelletuale had been dissolved.) The response
to this invitation, as Gross told Condliffe, was negative. Gross told
Condliffe that was now very difficult ‘to approach any Italian directly.’^103
(^102) William Beveridge to Henri Bonnet, 11 January 1938, AG 1-E-X-3. The Convention
on the Use of Radio in the Interest of Peace was opened for signature on September 23,
- See Société des Nations, ‘Entrée en vigeur de la convention internationale sur l’emploi
de la radiodiffusion dans l’intérêt de paix,’ Coopération Intellectuelle, nos. 85–86 (1938): 37.
In regard to the Sino-Japanese war, Alec T. Rixon noted that the Japanese ‘swamp the whole
world with their broadcasting publicity’ while at the same time demolishing Chinese radio
communications through aerial bombing and then drowning what remained of it by means
of their interference station in Southern Manchuria. Alec T. Rixon, ‘Telecommunications of
China with Foreign Countries,’ Public Opinion Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1938): 478–83, 483. On
the Italian use of radio for propaganda purposes, see Taylor Cole, ‘The Italian Ministry of
Popular Culture,’ Public Opinion Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1938): 424–34, 431–42.
(^103) Leo Gross to John Bell Condliffe, 16 August 1939, Organisation materielle des
Sessions de la Conférence, du 1er juin 1939 au 1er permanente septembre 1939, AG
1-IICI-K-I-25.b, UA.