4 INTELLECTUAL COOPERATION IN WAR-TIME AND PLANS ... 353has given to institutions. It makes no distinction between the different
regimes or between the different races.’^8
The first article of the International Act Concerning Intellectual
Cooperation affirmed that the ‘work of intellectual co-operation is inde-
pendent of politics and based entirely on the principle of universality,’
an affirmation that was seen as one of the most important features of
the act at the time.^9 However, by the time this act came into force on
January 31, 1940, a development which Renoliet notes was not greeted
by any sense of ‘triumphalism’ given the circumstances, the commitment
to ‘apoliticism and universalism’ that it enshrined had been effectively
abandoned: the ICO had ‘joined the camp of the democracies’ and it
had ‘thus made a political choice.’^10
Although deciding that it was to too logistically difficult to convoke
entretiens as long as the war endured in Europe, the ICIC’s executive com-
mittee encouraged the IIIC to undertake the more manageable task of
publishing new instalments in the Open Letters series in addition to pub-
lishing other works.^11 The IIIC thus proceeded to insert in its monthly
bulletin extracts from letters it had elicited from correspondents residing in
what were at that stage neutral countrie. These letters addressed the feel-
ings their authors had about the war and the problems it posed for intel-
lectual life. The extracts of these letters were published between December
1939 and April 1940. The letters in question were authored by such well-
known savants as Brazil’s Miguel Ozorio de Almeida, the Dutch historian
Johan Huizinga and the Chilean writer Gabriela Mistral among others.
In their letters, some of the respondents touched on the distinction
that President Roosevelt had made between the neutrality of the state,
to which the citizens must adhere, and the neutrality of the individual
conscience which is a matter of moral choice. However, irrespective of
whether or not they remarked on Roosevelt’s distinction, all the corre-
spondents were of the view that it would be unconscionable to adopt a
position of ethical neutrality in relation to the European war then taking
place. The various correspondents observed that ideologically, the war
took the form of a struggle to reaffirm the ideal of humanity and the
(^8) Ibid., 14.
(^9) Ibid., 10, and International Act Concerning Intellectual Cooperation, 1938, quoted ibid., 11.
(^10) Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 149–50.
(^11) Ibid., 149, and ‘Correspondance: Extraits de la lettre de M. Ozorio de Almeida,’
Informations sur la Coopération Intellectuelle (b), nos. 1–2 (1939): 3–6, 3.