438 J.-A. PEMBERTON
‘esprit under all its forms can accomplish its immediate functions’. What
was required, Mayoux further declared, was the ‘systematic coordina-
tion...[of]...all the efforts of thought, all its works, all its techniques and
its plans’ and it was this rather than ‘brilliant manifestations,’ Mayoux
stated in an allusion to the ‘Entretiens’ and the ‘Open Letters,’ that
should ‘dominate in the future’.^36
By the time the IIIC’s next bulletin was published in early 1946,
the fate of the IIIC was sealed. This was implicitly acknowledged on
its cover: below the bulletin’s title, namely, Coopération Intellectuelle
Internationale, was printed the name of the successor organisation to the
ICO and in the following format: U.N.E.S.C.O. In an editorial appearing
in this bulletin, Mayoux, after having given an account of the history of
intellectual cooperation in the context of the LON and of the origins of
UNESCO, turned his attention to the challenges that the new organisa-
tion would face. He advised that among these challenges was that of the
‘eternal problem of the unity and diversity of men’.^37 Similarly to lead-
ing figures in the field of intellectual cooperation, Mayoux envisaged that
the resolution of this problem would require a policy that affirmed diver-
sity at the outset and then encouraged ‘the free orientation of diversity
towards unity’.^38 Yet Mayoux, like many others, knew that the problem
of establishing a ‘fruitful diversity of cultures’ (a phrase contained within
UNESCO’s constitution and coined by a French member of its drafting
committee, namely, the philosopher and historian Étienne Gilson), would
prove more challenging for UNESCO than it had for its predecessor.^39
An important reason why UNESCO would find establishing a fruit-
ful diversity more challenging than had its predecessor was because it
was simply no longer possible to pretend that European civilisation
had any claim to universality. It should be noted that the rejection of
this claim had been presaged in the context of the ICO on a number of
occasions. A particularly powerful example of this rejection in the con-
text of the ICO concerns an exchange of letters between Gilbert Murray
and Rabindranath Tagore which was sponsored by the Permanent
Committee of Letters and Arts and which appeared under the heading
(^36) Ibid., iii.
(^37) Mayoux, ‘La Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale: UNESCO,’ xxii–xxiii.
(^38) Mayoux, ‘Éditorial,’ iv.
(^39) Cowell, ‘Planning the Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946: A Personal Record,’ 12.