International Organisations
League of Nations
The League of Nations, headquartered through the 1920s and early 1930s in a former Geneva hotel known as the Palais Wilson, relocated to the Palais des Nations in 1936. The Palais des Nations, 12 years in the making, was the second largest building in the world, after Versailles, and provided ample space for the League’s Assembly, Council and Secretariat, the technical organisations on economics, transport, and health and the advisory commissions on military questions, disarmament, mandates, women’s rights, refugees, slavery, human trafficking, the drug trade and intellectual cooperation. This photograph shows the League’s Commission on Opium and Other Narcotic Drugs in session at the Palais des Nations in 1939.
Further information:
The archives of the League of Nations are a rich and still under-used resource. This website provides access to a wide range of information about the League, including digitalised materials recently uploaded as part of a major five-year (2017-2022) project to digitize the entire archive which will create c. 160TB of online data: https://libraryresources.unog.ch/leagueofnationsarchives
Institute of Pacific Relations
The Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) was an international ‘think-tank’ established in 1925, initially in Honolulu, to promote economic, political and intellectual co-operation between the nations of the Pacific Rim. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the IPR undertook research projects, organised conferences and published a journal, Pacific Affairs, edited by Owen Lattimore, an authority on China and central Asia. The IPR and other US-backed international organisations sought to preserve the spirit of Wilsonian internationalism after 1918 in defiance of American isolationism, though it was viewed with growing suspicion after 1945 and was eventually dissolved following a campaign by anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Further information:
The IPR’s voluminous archives are held in Columbia University Library in New York. See: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/archival/collections/ldpd_4079192/
For a recent blog, by Sean Phillips, on the IPR and the origins of Asia-Pacific Studies from Asia Dialogue, the online magazine of the University of Nottingham Asia Research Institute, see: http://theasiadialogue.com/2018/06/27/a-pacific-precedent-the-institute-of-pacific-relations-in-the-emergence-of-asia-pacific-studies/
International Centre, Brussels
By organising the world’s knowledge, international organisations sought to offer an independent alternative to national archives, libraries and classification systems. Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine’s International Centre (or ‘Mundaneum’) in the Palais Mondial in Brussels was a key coordinating centre, encompassing the International Institute of Bibliography (famed for pioneering the Universal Decimal Classification system) and the International Museum. The former contained more than 12 million index cards systematically arranged into all branches of knowledge, and the museum consisted of dozens of rooms dedicated to new international technologies (e.g. the telegraph and aviation), international sciences (e.g. economics, geography and geology), and various countries and world regions.
Further information:
Website of the Mundaneum, since 1993 housed in Mons, Belgium: http://www.mundaneum.org/en
Missing International Archives
Historians of interwar internationalism can draw on archives of international organisations established in countries that remained neutral during World War Two, including the Geneva archives of the League of Nations, and on records of American philanthropic foundations established after 1918 to promote international reconciliation. The archives of international agencies based in cities that were occupied by German forces during World War Two, including those of the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC) in Paris, are less complete. This page from an inventory of IIIC archives marks a typical absence by noting: ‘Durant l’occupation allemande à Paris (1940-1944) certains dossiers ont disparus, notamment ceux concernant les questions scientifiques’ (‘During the German Occupation in Paris (1940-1944), some files disappeared, especially those concerning scientific issues’). These documents were often seized by Nazi officials or local police forces seeking information on the activities of internationalists and pacifists during the 1920s and 1930s.
Further information:
For the archive inventory that this page is from, see http://www.unesco.org/archives/files/ag01fa00001f.pdf